Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
The Burdens of Liberation
During the first few months that followed the arrival in Wien of the Soviet army, it seemed that she couldn’t move a metre without coming across foreign soldiers. Even though contrary to orders, they were constantly around in the streets. Gangs of them plundered and looted everything they could lay their hands on. There wasn’t an intact frontage along all of Ringstrasse, and in the adjoining blocks, the shop windows were broken, and shelves and storerooms emptied. Some shop owners had attempted to protect their property by boarding up the windows and putting iron grilles or bars over the doors but their defences were usually forced, the padlocks cut and the boards shot through or chopped down with axes. Their food rations may well have been sparse, but the soldiers seemed to have unlimited supplies of alcohol. Even in the middle of the day, they were seen drifting along the streets in noisy, boisterous groups with their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, making the most of what they obviously felt was their unassailable right to molest every woman they met. Katschenka always crossed the street when she saw them coming. Soldiers who against expectation managed to stay sober were mainly employed in repair work. Along Ringstrasse, trees were felled and the tramlines restored. One morning, the entire street had been closed off level with the Volksgarten and, on both sides of the cordon, people were waiting to be allowed to cross the street. Suddenly, two of the Russians supervising the work shouted commands and tried to grab people in the
waiting crowds. The lucky ones got away but an older man in hat and overcoat, encumbered by a large briefcase, either wasn’t quick enough or thought he wouldn’t be picked in view of the superior position he no doubt held. He pulled handfuls of documents out of his briefcase and then pointed several times with an insistent expression in the direction of Ballhausplatz, where the Chancellor’s office was. All that only served to annoy the soldiers. A fight broke out and the man got a blow from a fist in his face. Katschenka watched as his hat rolled helplessly across the dirty tarmac. Bare-headed, he was led to the edge of the street while the soldiers laughed at him. He was made to work, carrying branches to a chainsaw where they were logged and stacked in a waiting lorry. The last time she had seen anything like this was in March 1938, just after the Nazi takeover. The horrible Jew-chasing had started almost at once. It was different then, because the Austrians themselves did the persecuting and were the most enthusiastic plunderers, too. Now, the slightest incident made the ground swallow up her countrymen. Generally, the liberators lived in one city and the liberated in another. The other Allied armies arrived in June and the city was divided into zones of occupation. Law and order improved quite a bit, although Otto still claimed that the police were forced to recruit ‘communists’ who spent most of the time searching out former political opponents for punishment. She thanked her lucky star that she lived in Margareten, which had become part of the British zone, and because Hietzing as well as Margareten were under British administration, she managed to get out to the Rosenhügel hospital. She had no illusions about finding Jekelius there but hoped that friends and colleagues from the days before the war would back her up and help her find a post somewhere. There was really nothing she could be blamed for. She had never joined the Nazi party or supported their rule in any other way.
The air raids had left Rosenhügel in a dreadful state. One wing was almost razed to the ground. Scaffolding surrounded most of the rest where work on restoring the façade was underway. But quite a few wards must be open, judging by the traffic of doctors and patients. In the corridor leading to the personnel office, she ran into Hedwig Blei. The two of them had never got on. Blei treated her with a kind of suspicious guardedness, always stepped back away from her, and never really listened despite pretending to (after all, Katschenka was her superior). Now, something contracted in Blei’s broad face and her pale blue eyes narrowed.
Katschenka
…
fancy you daring to show your face here
…
!
was all she said.
Blei had made an effort to speak in a light tone, almost as if joking. But her words were sharp and precise, and she stood still, without holding out her hand. Katschenka felt that an invisible line had been drawn across the floor between them, a line drawn to demarcate where shame and complicity began. Blei, so visibly proud and self-righteous, must have seen herself as safely on the other side of that line. Once the moment had passed, they began to talk, presumably because they both reckoned they couldn’t walk past each other unless they at least pretended to be on speaking terms. It turned out that Blei, like everybody else, believed that Katschenka had locked herself into the nurses’ office with some dark purpose in mind. That the children could have got hold of the key was something Hedwig Blei hadn’t even considered. She had never left the hospital, Blei explained, and slept in the ward office for several nights. Most of the staff had absconded by then. Nurse Marta and a couple of other nurses and I, Blei went on, were the only ones there when the Russians arrived. What do you think would’ve happened to the children if the Russians had been given free hands? What did they do to you?
Katschenka wanted to ask but didn’t have to. Blei answered the question anyway. I managed all right, she said. Nurse Marta wasn’t so lucky. Later, she found out that she was pregnant. Katschenka felt a chill spreading inside her. Even though she had seen what it had been like, this was something she had somehow been unable to imagine. How has she …? Katschenka began. Blei shrugged. Some people have useful friends since way back, midwives for instance, who might help. Or doctors who will prescribe Salvarsan against syphilis, or carry out the actual intervention if necessary. More wasn’t said on that subject or any other. Hedwig Blei stood her ground and Anna Katschenka didn’t continue past her down the corridor, only nodded goodbye and left. But she remembered what had been said and, a couple of days later, steeled herself, looked up Nurse Marta’s number and called her. Marta’s younger sister answered. She was apparently Marta’s confidante. Anna Katschenka lied, claiming that she was in the same predicament as Marta, and the sister told her of an address in Leopoldstadt.
*
Death Certificate
Stephansplatz looked worse than what people had told her; much worse, in fact. The cathedral itself had been saved or, at least, the huge spire was intact and pointed towards the sky like a giant’s accusatory finger. One of the transepts had burnt and parts of the roof caved in. She had been told that the damage wasn’t due to bombs that had missed their targets but to the activities of local arsonists and looters who had been carrying out acts of revenge around the time when the Red Army arrived. Nazi insurgents and saboteurs, the new Soviet authority had proclaimed. Katschenka distrusted everything about the Russian propaganda machine but was still uncertain. There could be no doubt that the fighting had caused the destruction she saw all the way along Rotenturmstrasse
up to Franz Josefs Kai by the river. The city blocks had been turned back to nature, in a sense: now, they were fields of ash and stone, edged on both sides by hollow, burnt-out buildings. Here and there, an isolated gable would still stand and stare at nothing through sootrimmed window openings. The canal bridges, including Schwedenbrücke and Marienbrücke, had been blown up by the Germans as they retreated westwards, and stones that had fallen from the broken-down spans and abutments were scattered in the water. People crossed on provisional pedestrian bridges resting on top of the ruined piers. There were crossing places where the bridge was almost level with the water surface and those who managed to get down to them had to climb up the bank or ask the soldiers on guard for help to get back up to the quayside. Russian army patrols were everywhere. The soldiers stopped passers-by for no reason, but Anna Katschenka didn’t worry. She carried her identity papers and her nurse’s certificate and also official permission to visit one of her mother’s relatives, an elderly lady who lived out at Marchfeld, where it was still possible to lay hands on things to eat if you were prepared to pay cash. She knew that lots of inner-city inhabitants did exactly the same thing – made a case for going to see relatives in the country and then, by the way, acquired a little butter or cheese or fatty bacon or at least fresh vegetables. The flow of all sorts of people – soldiers, black marketers, even the odd secretary or civil servant in hat and overcoat, who stubbornly went to work in bombed-out offices – was simply too large for anyone to control properly. Predictably, she was stopped by a patrol, but the young soldier who demanded to see her papers was apparently much more interested in swapping witticisms and black tobacco with his mates than finding out who she was. In the old days, before the war, a lone beggar used to stand playing the violin somewhere on the Marienbrücke. She remembered his
emaciated figure, deep-set eyes and pale face. He had looked like the angel of the poor, and his bow flew over the strings on a violin whose body had hardly any resonance left. If he had stood here today – his sad countenance was far from unthinkable in this busy, ruined landscape – he would have been a guard at the entrance to another world, for Leopoldstadt was no longer recognisable. What she remembered from her youth was a messy, noisy, somewhat chaotic place, very different from the equally poor but still very orderly working-class part of town where she had grown up. The crowds on Taborstrasse and the streets of the blocks around Karmeliterplatz were like nothing else she had known. Most of the people were Jews but the most diverse sorts also seemed to have holed up here since the imperial era: Polish and Ruthenian workers, Gypsies, Bosnians wearing fezzes or headcloths. The local Christians must have had any amount of trouble to keep their end up. She remembered one morning, when her father was taking her and Otto for a day at the Wurstelprater amusement park. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, and the schools were closed. They were barely halfway there when they were held up by the crowd around a procession that had just emerged from the Carmelite church. She caught glimpses of a priest carrying the monstrance and of colourful standards swaying like the masts of ships in a storm. But the closer they got, the more obvious it became that the crowd was not all made up of the faithful. On the contrary, they had been swallowed in the mass of people already there. Despite the support of choirboys singing and bells ringing out thunderously in the tower of the Carmelite church, the procession route was blocked by indifferent passers-by. Others who also wanted to be on their way were stuck, too: bicycle messenger boys ringing their bells impatiently, market traders pulling carts loaded with goods. The Chassidic Jews in their kaftans and strange fur hats seemed complacently
unmoved by everything except whatever was a subject of discussion between them. After that experience, their father had taken them to Hotel Stefanie for a little peace and quiet. It was the first time she had been taken anywhere quite so famous. There were businessmen at the tables near them and fathers having breakfast or tea with their families. Everyone was wealthy, that much was obvious, and one couldn’t but notice that everyone was also keen to show off. The men addressed the waiter in unnecessarily loud voices and rarely looked at the people they were with, preferring to catch sight of themselves in the mirrors or scrutinise other guests, as if confirmation by others was what they lacked to complete their image of what contentment should be. Also, you never heard a single word in German. Instead, these people were speaking Hungarian or Slovakian or some other incomprehensible language that often reminded her of what some of the Jews were using, which her father had said wasn’t really a language but a dialect, a
Mundart
or something ‘from the mouth’, which made her think that their speech wasn’t made up of real words but of half-digested stuff they held inside their mouths and then spat out. But this was not to say that they ever spoke badly of Jews in their family, only that it was agreed from time to time that Jews were
different
. Anna’s brother knew lots of Jewish words, like
die Schmier
, which was what they called the police. It sounded like a German word but wasn’t. It was something else and that was somehow typical of everything the Jews said and did. Still, on the football field, they were tough and showed real stamina. Otto’s team had played one of theirs from Leopoldstadt, and Otto’s side lost. Afterwards, they all shook hands like good sportsmen. Her father used to say that Jews were hard-working and clever people and many of them were just as good Social Democrats as he was himself. That was probably why he trusted them. He had trusted Hauslich from the start, even to the
point of lending Hauslich money from her dowry and believing every single one of the lies he was told. He even believed that there was an uncle ready to hand over a flat in Leopoldstadt to the newly marrieds. The flat never materialised and, as likely as not, there had been no uncle either. Strange, that her father should have been so blind when she had seen through that awful con man almost from their first encounter. What was it about the Jews that always made them assume borrowed identities, always pretend to be something that they were not and to own things that weren’t theirs and never would be? As Hauslich had. And now they were back, wearing uniforms and greatcoats given to them by the Red Army. Her father said that there had always been a disproportionate number of Jews among the communists and that was surely the case also in the Soviet army. Anyway, now they were returning to claim all that they had borrowed but come to regard as their own and to live in
their
Leopoldstadt. After a while, she found that orienting herself was really difficult. She had just passed the entrance to Hotel Stefanie. Two Russian army lorries had been parked outside. Nearby was Tabor-Kino, where she had gone to watch films when she was studying at nursing college. Judging by the colourful, new-looking posters, they showed only Soviet movies now. Propaganda films, presumably. Overall, there was something foreign, outlandish or distorted about the appearance of the place. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what, but it worried, even scared her. It had nothing to do with the destruction, with all the heaps of shattered masonry at every street corner. Nor was it to do with the strange Cyrillic characters on the over-bright film posters. Or even with the fact that everything was so dark. At first, she had thought that the electricity supply was down, but there were lights on in some windows, though dimly, behind drawn curtains. The streets, which at first glance had looked nearly
empty, turned out to be full of people seemingly having emerged from somewhere without her noticing. Outside what looked like a bombed-out bakery, a queue had formed. People stood patiently in line, back to chest, even though the queue did not move and there seemed to be nothing to queue for. And the begging children, they were running around everywhere, groping for her hands or touching her coat sleeves but fleetingly, as if they didn’t dare to stay in the same place for long. Everyone she saw moved in the same way, stealthily and nervously. She never got to look into anyone’s face. She kept walking through this strange, shadowy half-world without knowing exactly where she was or whom to ask. The address she had been given was on Grosse Sperlgasse, and she knew that it ran somewhere just below Karmelitermarkt. When she got there, the street was as dark as a sack and blocked off at one end by something that, in the dark, she thought at first was a wooden board but on closer inspection turned out to be yet another pile of stones and bricks, this time mixed with the remains of what must have been an entire home: pieces of a kitchen workbench, wardrobe shelving, a bathtub, an intact toilet seat, its enamel shining white in the darkness. The yard opposite was used as a coal store. It looked isolated behind the rusty iron fence that closed off the space between the houses, but then she spotted a fire lit somewhere at the back. Exactly what was burning she couldn’t make out but the firelight allowed glimpses of someone who clearly was tending the fire. The face was in shadow but the light reflected off a glistening forehead, strong upper arms and a pair of broad, bare shoulders outlined by a dirty vest. The man (if it was a man) was observing her unflinchingly from within deep eye sockets but didn’t move towards her or say anything. The address was the building next door, if it had ever been there. It was practically gone, with only a basement left intact under the ruins. She would never
have spotted it but for two women who came up the steps leading down to it, as if ascending from the underworld. At the bottom of the steps, a door opened into a long, unplastered corridor. On one of the raw brick walls, a long red banner had been hung. It had political slogans in Russian written rather carelessly on it. The Cyrillic letters had become almost undecipherable in places where the cloth was giving way. The line of words ended with two energetic exclamation marks, the hammer and sickle insignia of the revolution, and a picture of a smiling Stalin. Above and below the banner, someone had pinned up children’s drawings of things like little dogs on leads and square, clumsily coloured-in houses with smoke curling out of the block-like chimneys. The nursery seemed to be open even though there was no house above the basement. Perhaps it had been here before the bombs fell and the children had nowhere better to go afterwards. The only door she could see in the semi-darkness was at the far end of the corridor. She opened it and stepped straight into a room that must have been used as a shelter once. A handful of women were seated on the long benches fixed to the walls. Their eyes stared dully ahead. Two of them had brought small children. Nobody spoke, but when she stepped inside, a few of them shuffled sideways to make a place for her. The room wasn’t large, just an ordinary cellar space with pipes running just under the ceiling and coarse, flaking plaster on the walls. Nothing else, apart from the seating, a naked bulb in the ceiling and another door at the far end. Then that door opened and a woman in a nurse’s uniform stuck her head out. Their eyes met and some kind of intuition (perhaps because of the glimmer of recognition on Katschenka’s face when she saw the uniform) must have told the nurse immediately that Anna Katschenka was not another patient. Katschenka made up her mind at once, without thinking. She rose from her seat and walked to the door. The nurse
tried to close it but Katschenka got her foot in. Beyond the door, in a smaller room, she had caught sight of Doctor Jekelius. The woman he had just treated was lying, naked below the waist, on a narrow table in front of him. A dark red mass floated in bloody liquid in the basin under the table. Jekelius slowly pulled off his gloves and met her eyes without saying a word. Her first impression was that his face looked grim, his features forbidding and sharp with tiredness. Later, when she tried to recall his face, she felt that he had looked worn-out rather than tired and that his expression had been more anxious than forbidding. For how long they stood like that, she couldn’t be sure afterwards. She remembered it as an eternity but it probably wasn’t long before Jekelius said
shut the door
and the nurse said
you have to wait your turn
, then pushed her back outside and closed the door in her face. She didn’t stay long enough to see whether the door would open again or if it was ever opened.