His mother had always worked as a dressmaker. She went into the houses of well-off people to mend and patch, to raise or lower the hems of skirts. She earned enough to supplement her husband’s meagre salary. They had closed their eyes and noses to the rising stink. A stink of racist intolerance, of cultural hatred, of persecution. In their hearts they nurtured a sacrosanct conviction that no one, for any reason whatever, would ever be able to deprive them of the right to identify themselves as Austrians, living in their own country and their own city.
But one morning a dozen SA men arrived and took over their apartment, forcing them to leave with a few personal effects in a couple of suitcases. They were forced to leave behind the expensive linen sheets with embroidered monograms that had been a wedding present to Frau Magdalena, the damask curtains inherited from grandmother Bernstein, the gold-rimmed plates, by now discoloured and chipped, given at their marriage by the Levi uncles of Linz, and the fine silver cutlery from their Vogel cousins who had emigrated to Paris in the last century.
With those two pathetic suitcases they had been loaded onto a train that took them to Poland. They were not downhearted. They were on their way to work camps, the Nazis told them, and in this belief they climbed into the wagons, almost comforted by the prospect of leaving a life that had no longer been a life since the restrictions started: confined to the house by a curfew from eight in the evening, and with no access to Aryan shops, no school, and no cinema. They were sure they would be put to work: clearing snow, digging trenches, looking after tramway crossings. They would get by.
Theodor Orenstein, meanwhile, had managed to escape before his family were deported. Being an agile and slender boy, he had hidden in a lorry full of coal that, in return for a large sum of money (the last of the family funds) had taken him far from Vienna.
He had wandered the Austrian countryside, avoiding mopping-up operations and suspicious peasants, until he came to the Polish border. There he evaded the frontier guards and, still walking, reached Darłowo on the Baltic coast. A ship was ready to take him to Sweden, but it sank and threw him up instead on the Danish island of Bornholm, which was occupied by the Germans.
‘I was lucky,’ he says again and again, ‘I was incredibly lucky.’
In the little village of Rønne he found work mending fishing nets, and lived secretly like this till the end of the war. No one realised he was a Jew, or if they did suspect it, they kept quiet. His main worry had been the fate of his parents and little brothers: what had happened to them? Were they alive? How could he find them?
Amara watches him closely, hoping to find something of Emanuele in that shadowed face with its ingenuous eyes, that slightly emaciated body.
‘Would you like some bread and cheese? I have some excellent Camembert.’
Without waiting for an answer, Theodor Orenstein goes confidently into his tiny kitchen, opens a cupboard and takes out a round loaf wrapped in a coloured cloth. He cuts it into slices and places three cubes of strong-smelling Camembert on a clean plate with a leaf of fresh mint. ‘More beer?’ he asks anxiously, but forgets to fetch the bottle. A little more Camembert? Amara says no, thank you, she isn’t hungry. And maybe they should be on their way back to the Pension Blumental, it’s getting late. But the painter Orenstein has more to say.
Don’t they want to hear the story of his parents? Don’t they want to hear how that ended? He can’t possibly let them go so easily. It’s as if he hasn’t spoken for years. He is so delighted they’ve come that he seems to have forgotten the large painting he was working on with its angels over the roofs.
His mother and his father and the younger children, God preserve them in glory, vanished completely. Aren’t they curious? Didn’t they come because they wanted to know about Orensteins living in Austria? When he managed to get back to Vienna, he found their house had been bombed. The stub ends of flats were still there as if to remind the world that people had once lived in them. Shreds of greasy stained wallpaper still hung from surviving fragments of wall, with broken windows still miraculously attached to their hinges, uprooted doors and the remains of ceilings that had collapsed in a sea of rubble.
He can still remember how he sat down in the midst of those ruins, trying to remember the exact location of the house he had shared with his mother and father. ‘My mother was a strong woman, able to devote herself to a hundred initiatives, but she did not understand the Nazis at all. She thought they were just trying to create a bit of order. She thought their hatred for the Jews was only a passing whim, and that they would come to have second thoughts about it. Were they not all Austrians, the SS no less than the Jews? Had they not been taught together in the same schools, Jews and non-Jews alike, and when the Kara Mustafà and his Turks had been expelled from Austria in 1683, had they not all partied and drunk together for nine days on end? Where on earth can this volcanic hatred have come from? They had forced Andrea, a neighbour who owned a shop selling exercise books and toys for children, to put a notice in her window reading: JEWS, TRAITORS! What had they betrayed and how? Those armed guards were surely only hotheads spreading terror from sheer youthful high spirits and love of power. Did they not speak of a superman with the right to distinguish the purebred from those of inferior status? But there were only a few of these people, wild and fanatical. Most of the Viennese she knew were quiet folk who asked no more than to be allowed to live and let live, to work and start families, and to look forward to a respectable old age once they had saved enough money to buy themselves a house and a small garden. That was how most people in the city thought.
‘How could these good Viennese citizens, local people she knew and had always greeted, suddenly change? What had happened to make them turn away when they saw her approaching? How could they pretend they didn’t know what was happening to people arrested in the street for no apparent reason? Thrown out of their shops and homes, robbed, beaten and stripped of everything they possessed?
‘Many believed and repeated among themselves that this treatment was not meant for Jews in general but only for dangerous communists who wanted to abolish private property: everything you have, house and garden, a ring, a car, a book, away with it, away with the lot, give it to the working class, that’s what they said, but what did everyone else have to do with the communists? People had always been on the side of law and order. Had they not conscientiously voted for Dollfuss and his Christian Social Party in 1932? Yet it had been this same trusted Dollfuss who in ’33 outlawed every political party except the Patriotic Front. How could this have happened? Even so, surely someone would sort these hotheads out. They said Hitler believed in order, and that when he came to power he would deal with these fanatics and restore harmony. Why not trust him?
The mother of the painter Theodor Orenstein had believed with many other Austrian Jews that all the buffoonery would come to an end in the firm grip of a collective conscience. Someone would awake from this sleep of reason, and giving a great guffaw of laughter would shake off the stupid fanatics who were trying to ruin a country that had lived for so long at peace with itself and others.
Theodor Orenstein had devoured his piece of Camembert and went into the kitchen to find more while he continued to tell them about the reasoning of his mother, Frau Magdalena Ruthmann. Had she been an optimist? Let’s just say she had been incredulous, despite what she saw happening in her beloved city where shops belonging to Jews were being systematically stoned and set on fire, where synagogues were being destroyed and the homes of the better-off were being plundered and expropriated, where employees like her husband, who had nearly reached pensionable age and never missed a day’s work, were peremptorily dismissed from their jobs; despite all this she believed the storm would soon pass and normality would return. But the situation got worse day by day. Naturally the subject of pensions could not even be mentioned. Could a Jew have any right to a state pension? Of course not, who knows how much money he had stolen and stuffed under his mattress during his lifetime! So screamed the papers; let’s just get hold of that money and stop wasting everyone’s time! But what Frau Magdalena von Orenstein could not accept was that her two best friends, Mitzi and Petra, had begun pretending they didn’t know her. It seemed harder to put up with this than anything else. This was the really sinister aspect of the new regime which otherwise, she thought, would rapidly pass like a cyclone which, precisely because of its enormous capacity for destruction, was bound to collapse once it had swept away the city and its trees. A few people, the oldest, would be lost, but the rest would stay in place and like surviving trees would put out new leaves next spring. This was not optimism, explained the painter Theodor Orenstein as he talked of his mother, throwing into his mouth another piece of cheese, crust and all; no, this was patriotism.