Blame it on Rio

It is March of 2015 and my wife and I are in Budapest.

It is a cloudy, windy day and there is a distinct chill in the air. I am used to this weather as I have spent my whole life in the northeastern part of the United States including a four-year sentence in Syracuse, New York where they measure snow fall in feet. However, my wife is Brazilian, which in addition to providing her with inner and outer beauty and a sensational accent has also given her no tolerance for the cold. So we hurry down Szenchyi Street which borders the Danube and turn right just after the Four Seasons Hotel to get away from the steady breeze that seems to be funneling its way down the Danube that morning.

Had it been a milder day, I would have walked along the Danube to our destination: the Hungarian Parliament. Not even Johann Strauss was more enraptured of the river than I am at that point. This is partially due to the fact that I have been hearing about this river all of my life from my father, both in stories and in memories, and have never seen it except from an airplane or from a great distance. And, considering that I had now been in Vienna four times (soon to be 5) it seemed long overdue.

Another reason for my enchantment was my introduction to the river two days previously. I had been on a business trip to Berlin and had decided that since I was in the general neighborhood I would go to Budapest to see what I could see about the Crown of St. Stephens, which since my father’s death in July of 2012 and the mystery surrounding his involvement in its recovery, had been a constant companion in thought. My wife agreed to join me on this adventure, as a kindness to me. At this time of year she would have preferred sitting on a warm beach somewhere. As a reward for her tolerance of my obsession I had tried to make the trip as romantic as humanely possible.

The first part of my master plan of romanticizing this trip had been an overnight train ride from Berlin to Budapest.  In my head, clearly of little functional use except for as a hat rack, I had envisioned a modern-day version of the Orient Express. I thought the sleeper compartment I had booked would be roomy enough for our beds and have a seating area suitable for casual sloth, and that a porter would be at our beck and call to handle all of our personal needs.

Needless to say, we should have flown.

Our romantic trip had begun with a full scale anti-immigration protest with massive amounts of police in full riot gear, in the Berlin Train station which had scared the living crap out of both us. When the train did arrive and we were directed to our compartment it turned out to be the size of a small walk in closet with barely enough room between the bunks and the wall for an adult to walk through. The bathroom was more of a toilet with a sprayer similar to what we have on our sinks in the United States. The beds were thin pads over metal which helped you feel every bump in the track and help awaken us when the train was halted for several hours in the middle of the night. The porter’s only attention to us was to show us our cabin and bring us a cold muffin and undrinkable coffee for breakfast.

The delay caused by our unscheduled stop meant that our train would not be going on to its ultimate destination the Munich Hauptbanhhof but stopping at another station and we would have to cab it from there.  This was made more problematic as it had snowed overnight and we had to schlog our luggage through it to get the hack stand. We,  of course missed our Munich connection, and had to wait for a slower train in a cold terminal with a pay bathroom.

 

Thankfully the train ride to Budapest from Munich, even though quite slow, was pleasant and modern. It  allowed us to gaze out at beautiful vistas when we were not trying to make up from our lack of sleep the night before.

Needless to say I was not impressing my wife with my ability to plan a romantic getaway in Europe. We arrived in Budapest just as the sun was setting and the city alight in the gloaming.

This is where phase two of my “romantic plan” was to take place. I had realized, proving that the neurons in brain worked occasionally, that at the end of a long trip a 5 star hotel would be a balm to any bumps and bruises caused by our train journey. As a consequence, I had booked a room at the Intercontinental Hotel (specifying a river view)  which was directly adjacent to the Danube and according to the reviews I read,  had wonderful service.

The hotel did not disappoint me. It had a modern interior with a large central core with rooms surrounding it on each floor. The service was impeccable and after a painless check-in we were led to our room by the bellman who had taken the burden of our luggage away from us. The room was dark as we entered, the only light coming from the large wall to wall, ceiling to floor window at the far end of the room.  It was the view that allowed me to crawl out from the doghouse of our trip and wipe away all of the frustrations and annoyances of our train trip.

Directly in front of us, on the far side of the Danube, in the last light of the day, illuminated by flood lights, was the Buda Castle. Home to the Hungarian Royalty since the 13^th century it was not only breathtakingly beautiful but I thought that its visage boded well for a visit that was predicated by a search for information about the Hungarian Crowd.

In the foreground, the Chain Bridge, its towers flood lit and its suspension cables strung with lights making them resemble a string of pearls than chain. I did not learn until later that the bridge is an UNESCO world heritage site.  Built in 1849 it was the first permanent bridge to span the Danube in Hungary. But that evening it didn’t matter as it seemed placed there only for our viewing pleasure.

And between the two, the Danube, black and serpentine, seemingly alive and sentient, flowed. On the river two freighters were passing each other. One heading north towards Vienna and beyond, the other following the current and heading south towards the Black Sea. Their wakes catching the light from the bridge and the Castle creating golden butterflies dancing across the surface.

It was an awesome view. It felt as if I was looking into the annals of history. Yet it was timeless… as if it was always going to be here. An oddly, despite that dichotomy, and being a stranger in a strange land,  I felt completely at home.

Our dodge down side streets to avoid the wind coming off the river was largely successful. While there was still a bite to the late winter wind at least it was not exacerbated by funneled gusts. That changed when we emerged from Akademia Street onto to the broad plaza where the Hungarian Parliament is located. With nothing to block the breeze you actually had to lean into it to make any progress at all while walking. Needless to say we made our way quickly across the square to the south side of the huge Gothic Revival parliament building where the visitor center was located. This is a shame because the building is worth looking at.

 

At the visitor center, we sign up for an English language tour of the Parliament. I usually have very little patience for this type of tour. I know that tours of this type provide you with nothing but cotton candy information.  Material that looks attractive but has no substance. Sound bites as opposed to full thoughts. But while additional information about the Crown and its recovery would be an added bonus the only reason I am here is to see the Crown I have been obsessing over for close to three years.

We buried my father on a sunny and hot July morning several days after his death. The cemetery, Woodlawn, was created during the gilded age, at a time when cemeteries were more than just repositories for the dead but parks where they living could spend time with their departed and is the final resting place for Herman Melville, Nellie Bly, Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington to name just the few. The plot had been purchased by mother’s mother and her sister shortly after the death of their parent. Located in a small knoll surrounded by trees, it defined the word pastoral. There, my father would be joining my grandparents, Fred and Madeline Zeman, my great aunt Marguerite Cohen and her husband Louis, Great Aunt Dorothy Zeman and the original occupants Siegfried and Marie Arnold and was as pleasant a place as any to say our final good bye to Dad.

We had not hired a rabbi to run a religious service for my father’s burial. While he may not have minded it, it would have been an anathema to mother. Instead I was the de facto master of ceremonies. It was strictly a family affair. No friends or colleagues had been notified. Surrounding the small grave in which we were to place my father’s cremated remains were my mother, my brother David and his two adult daughters Joanna and Laura, my sister Marissa and her husband Mark. I had written out some remarks and  printed copies of the mourners Kaddish for everyone. To be honest, I don’t remember much of what I said that morning. I know it was heartfelt because I recall crying  throughout my remarks, unable to finish a sentence without some type of blubbering

I behaved terribly on the limousine ride back to my parents’ home. My brother had lashed out at me regarding the Facebook post I had written the morning of Pop’s death. He was upset because my nieces had found out through social media about Dad’s passing as opposed from learning it from him as would have been appropriate. He was correct in his criticism except that he had left out when informed that Dad’s departure was imminent and that he should make his way to Summit for a final good bye, he had chosen not to alter his schedule and promise to arrive the following day.   He had said some terrible things to me and I had not left to imagination of what I thought of his invisibility during Dad’s illness and his death. He, as his nature, had tried to dictate the terms of what and how we should be doing things during the funeral and my grief and anger at him proved to be a bad combination and I spent a good part of the ride home exploding form that toxic mix.  It embarrassed me and after apologizing to my mother I told herI needed a few minutes alone and retreated to my father’s study.

His office was on the second floor of their split level home. It wasn’t his original office in this house. While the kids were still in the home it was a smaller place on the first floor. But when the kids had left the home my father had moved to a room that had originally been my mother’s study and my mother had moved to what had been my sisters bedroom. This office was bigger with lots of room for bookshelves and a Stressless recliner and far better suited for his office. But it had his desk, the same one that I used to search surreptitiously as a kid, and familiar books on the shelves, and pictures on the wall. Most importantly it still smelled of him.

I thought I had come to my father’s office to be alone and perhaps distract myself from the pain I was feeling by distracting myself by doing my emails. But on subliminal level I had gravitated to this room to be with my Dad. Be surrounded by his things and perhaps, if I was very lucky, his presence.

I sat at the desk and opened my laptop and let it go through its warm up routine. While I waited I stared out the window into the sunny July afternoon and the deck my father had spent his last great day on and thought he would have urged me to go outside and enjoy the day. But I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy anything just then.

I tried to write a few emails but  realized that I didn’t have any patience for them. They didn’t seem important and when I tried to read them, the words fell in a jumble and didn’t make any sense. I tried Facebook but everything seemed so very trivial. I considered posting something about my father’s burial and then decided against it. Not only did it seem to trivialize my father’s death but after the things my brother had said to me I was more than a little gun shy about posting anything about my father’s death on social media.

For a long time I just sat there at my father’s desk, computer open and doing nothing but staring out the window. I saw the Colorado Blue Spruce we had bought him one father’s day that had been small enough to fit into a shower and now stood 30 feet tall. I saw where he used to place his hammock between two trees so he could nap outside on sunny afternoons. I thought more about that final afternoon we had spent in that yard  and how joyful he had been about spending time with his grandchildren. I can remember how pleased I had been for his joy but how I was also a little  frustrated because I had wanted to ask him more questions about the Crown of St. Stephens and why it was so important that he felt it would help him get a delay in his draft date and eventually cause him to go to Europe on some mission I assumed to find it.

Ego can be a terrible enemy to understanding. In this case, since I didn’t know anything about the Crown of St. Stephens, I couldn’t imagine why it would be so important in the world. I was after all a fairly well educated person who enjoyed reading history books especially about the 2^nd World War.   But death, especially a death of a parent, has the ability to wear away at your ego and make you feel small and inconsequential…that you know no little if not nothing about how the universe works. So I humbled myself and turned to my computer to see if I could understand why this hunk of gold was seemed to be so important.

My first click of the mouse took me to the same Wikipedia entry I had viewed when my old man had first told me about The Crown of St. Stephens. It read

The Holy Crown of Hungary (Hungarian: Szent Korona,^[1] also known as the Crown of Saint Stephen) was the coronation crown used by the Kingdom of Hungary for most of its existence; kings have been crowned with it since the twelfth century. The Crown was bound to the Lands of the Hungarian Crown (sometimes the Sacra Corona meant the Land, the Carpathian Basin, but it also meant the coronation body, too). No king of Hungary was regarded as having been truly legitimate without being crowned with it. In the history of Hungary, more than fifty kings were crowned with it, up to the last, Charles IV, in 1916 (the two kings who were not so crowned were John II Sigismund and Joseph II).

Similar to most encyclopedia entries, this was long fact and short on understanding. I grasped that it had been the crown had been used to crown Kings in Hungary for the past 50 generations and that a King was not considered legitimate unless so coronated. But why should the United States Army care enough to send someone after it. After all, Hungary was not a very large or important country and the crown had been without an owner, as Hungary had had not King, since 1916.

My curiosity unabated I decided that I needed to dive a little deeper and did a google search for “The Crown of St. Stephens.” It was an impressive enough result, over 2,500,000, that it made me wonder how it compared to other royal crowns and discovered, much to my surprise the Crown of St. Edward, the crown used to coronate British Kings, had 500,000 hits or fully 1/5 of the number of Hungarian Crown. Clearly, I was far more ignorant than I thought.

My toe clearly in the water, I stepped in a little deeper and read the first listing on the Google search which was an entry on the US’s Hungarian Embassy website. It recounted that the US Army had taken the crown into “protective custody” at the end of the war to prevent it from falling into the hands of Nazi’s or Russians. That President Jimmy Carter had controversially returned it to the Hungarian people in 1978 as a symbol of warming relations between the two countries. Clearly it was a press release version of the truth, few facts and a lot of spin, but even that sanitized view of provided a bit of insight. That is the Crown was important enough to the people of Hungary that people were still fighting over whether it should be returned to Hungary 30 years after the US had taken possession. In another words, the Crown had become a symbol of the cold war.

One entry would lead to another. Some would provide information that helped me understand a little more about the Holy Crown others would merely re-count what I had already uncovered and some were, as is the norm in Google searches, completely worthless. I got so lost in the research that what had started out as a whimsy to distract me had evolved into a full blown curiosity.

There was a knock at the door and my mother walked into the study and asked in a subdued voice  “You okay? You have been up here for a while. “

“Fine. Best under the circumstances I guess.”

“Come on down and have some lunch.”

“I will be done in a second. Let me shut down my computer.”

As I shut down the computer I realized that I been in my father’s office for nearly two hours. The time had slipped away while trying to find out about a part of my father’s life he had tried to keep secret for nearly 70 years. I also realized that until I uncovered the story of my father and The Crown of St. Stephen’s that it would be like a pebble in my shoe.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that finding out about my father’s secret life in the army would be a way for me to mourn him. That discovering these secrets would keep my way of keeping my father alive help me understand him in ways that I hadn’t before his death.

We had a 20 minutes to wait for the tour and since the Hungarian government had graciously supplied us with a gift shop to wait in, we felt it our responsibility as good guests to peruse the merchandise. It didn’t take us long to realize that while there have been other there may have been other supporting characters in this nationalist emporium of all things Hungarian the clear star was the Crown. You could buy calendars, spoons, playing cards, towels, sweaters, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, special coins, paperweights, you name it with the Holy Crown imprinted on it. I wanted to buy much of it as research material but my wife being far more sensible than me, kept my purchases to just a few calendars and commemorative coins.

It didn’t surprise me at all when I paid for all of the objects in Hungarian Forints notes that had images of the Crown on it and that some of the coins returned to me also had images of it as well. The first book I read on the Crown “The Holy Crown of Hungary” by Anthony Endrey introduction read “The story of the Holy Crown is inseparable from the history of Hungary itself. Proper understanding of its importance of the Holy Crown to Hungarians and its focal position in the historic Hungarian constitution therefore requires that the reader be familiar with the general course of Hungarian history over the last 1000 years.”

Or as a 1934 article in the New York Times  titled “A Crown Rules The Kingdom of Hungary” stated “The fact is that Hungary has never been ruled by a king, but by a crown. The crown is not merely a symbol of power—it is the synthesis of constitutional rule…(It) “living power figuring in everyday life” so much so that instead of verdicts in courts being in the name of the state they announced “in the name of the Holy Crown.”

I had struggled for a long time to find an analog in the United States. Something that a fleeing government might want to keep out of the hands of the enemy at all cost. An object that would help whomever the new government might be rule the people of our own country with unquestioned legitimacy.

I couldn’t find one for many reasons for a number of reasons.

Foremost among them is that we are a democracy. I know that as someone who has never known anything but a democracy it is hard to understand how a king or a crown can represent the state. To us, our Presidents come and go. The  legitimacy of our government is based on elections and adherence to our core documents such as the constitution. We believe in ideas not objects. Even if our enemies captured our Constitution or any other of the symbols of our Union they could not rule because they had them because ideas cannot be captured.

But the Crown could be. Power could be obtained its capture and as I had learned, the Hungarian Government was well aware of its power and willing to go through great lengths to keep it out of the wrong hands.

Our tour guide is a tall, conservatively dressed woman in her early twenties. She speaks English with very little accent and seems delighted to be our host. After we have secured our belongings in the check in area, as we aren’t allowed to carry bags into the building, our tour begins by going up a labyrinth of back stair cases. Eventually, we make it into a grand hallway of marble, gilt and high vaulted ceilings. Here we pause and our tour guide begins he learned by rote speech about the Parliament almost verbatim from the Wikipedia entry about the building.

“ The Parliament Building is in the Gothic Revival style; it has a symmetrical façade and a central dome. The dome is Renaissance Revival architecture.^[4] Also from inside the parliament is symmetrical and thus has two absolutely identical parliament halls out of which one is used for the politics, the other one is used for guided tours. It is 268 m (879 ft) long and 123 m (404 ft) wide. Its interior includes 10 courtyards, 13 passenger and freight elevators, 27 gates, 29 staircases and 691 rooms (including more than 200 offices). With its height of 96 m (315 ft), it is one of the two tallest buildings in Budapest, along with Saint Stephen’s Basilica. The number 96 refers to the nation’s millennium, 1896, and the conquest of the later Kingdom of Hungary in 896.”

As we are led through the building, up elegant and broad  staircases and into beautiful halls lined with statuary you can’t help but be impressed with the building. Its finishes, the stained glass, the plush rugs, and the immaculate upkeep remind me more a church than it does a parliament. We are told of how the building survived the war. Our guide goes into great detail about everything that she shows us. It seems to me that she is going into great detail about things that don’t matter to most. (E.g the rugs are all made from the wool of sheep that whose ancestors once gave wool to the Hapsburg ) But then again I am not big on tours and more importantly I am anxious to see the crown.

From my research I knew that by the fall of 1944, Hungary was in serious trouble. From the east, the Soviet army was advancing across the Hungarian plain. In the west, The US 5^th and 7^th Armys  were advancing from the south. The 1^st and 3^rd Armies were steadily advancing across France and the low lands. Allied bombers were inflicting heavy damage on Budapest, other major cities and industrial centers. Through diplomatic channels the Allies were asking the Hungarians to lay down their arms and accept an armistice that would spare their country.

The Hungarians were ripe for this type of peace offer. They had never been incorporated into the Reich and had maintained their own government under the Regent Mikal Horothy. Despite pressure on them to commit troops to the Eastern Front they had been successful in maintaining their troops in support roles. On the final solution and the genocide of the Jews they had maintained an independent course despite the Regent’s and anti semitic sentiments. They had claimed that the Jews were necessary for the country but when German troops entered the country in early 1944,  they capitulated and in the end 450,000 Jews, 70% of the total Jewish population had been murdered. Only two countries, the Ukraine and Poland massacred more Jews.

By October 1944, The Hungarian government was faced with a Siberian dilemma. Declare an armistice with the allies, hoping that the declaration would spare the country and its people the wrath of the Red Army, which had developed a reputation for pillaging and rape,  and also perhaps more favorable terms at the wars conclusion.. But  it would also certainly mean the hostile takeover of the government by the Arrow Cross Party (facist)  as a puppet for the Nazis.

The other option was to commit to fighting an all-out war against the allies. While this would satisfy the Nazi’s and allow the Horothy  government to maintain nominal control of the country, it would also mean a huge loss of life by Hungarian civilians and troops by the Red Army, and total destruction of the nation’s infrastructure by Allied Bombing. There would be no mercy at the peace table.

On October 15 the Hungarian government made its decision. It declared an armistice. Immediately, the German’s took action. Their troops captured Regent Horothy, blackmailed him into resigning his post and then spirited him away to Bavaria where he would be imprisoned for the rest of the war. The government was turned over to the Arrow Cross under the direction of Ferenc Szalasi and the war continued for Hungary.

The tour had now stopped in elegantly decorated hallway. Our guide tells us that we are about to enter the central hall of the Parliament where the Crown is kept. We are informed that taking pictures is prohibited.  We are warned not to get to close to the regalia. That it is protected by soldiers armed with sabres whose only mission is to protect the Crown of St. Stephens and that they will not ask any questions if you get too close.

I smile to myself. Had my father been with me, I likely would have told him that this was to be the Crown Jewel of my trip to Hungary. I know he would have laughed or more likely groaned but for my sense of humor the two are on equivalent reaction. Instead I lean over and whisper the same witticism to my wife. She has no reaction which could be because English is not her native language or because she doesn’t want to encourage this type of behavior.

 

I was still in a fog of confusion when my mother emerged from the cell in which she was emptying my father’s lock box. When I saw her standing next to me I sputtered “Are you ready to go?” She told me she was so I gathered the papers I was looking at and placed them back in the manila envelope and escorted my mother from the bank.

 

The minute we were buckled into the car, I asked my mother “Was your impression that Dad was a lieutenant for most of his career in the Army?”

 

She replied simply “Yes.”

 

“So your understanding was basic training, OCS, deployed to Italy to the Blue Devils. Right.”

 

She cocked her head as if what I said was a little curious a bit and said “Yes.”

 

I said “Well, that is not what is not what his army papers say. It says that he was an enlisted man for almost a  year.”

 

“Can’t be. Has to be a mistake.”

 

“It’s there in black and white.”

 

“That doesn’t make any sense. I am sure that your father can explain it. Why don’t you ask him when we get home.”

 

By the time I got home, the feeling of betrayal and confusion that I first felt at the bank had grown exponentially. I was beyond indignant no doubt fueled by not only the surprise I found in my fathers lock box but all of the emotions I was feeling about my father’s decision to end his treatment. So when we arrived home I bounded out of the car and took the three flights of stairs two steps at a time to my to my Dad’s room and found him sitting exactly where I had left him only now he was pecking away at his computer as opposed to devouring the newspaper. A little breathless from exertion and emotion I announce to him “Mission accomplished!”

 

“Great”

 

“Dad.”

 

“Yeah” he said half paying attention and half his focus remaining on the email he was writing.

 

“I may done something that will piss you off.”

 

Now I had his full attention he looked at me and said “What’s that.”

 

“I looked at your Army papers.”

 

“What the fuck did you do that for?” he growled at me, clearly angry.

 

“Mom, asked me” I said sounding a little like I was 10 “to review the documents in the box and I did.” I paused and added. “They say you were an enlisted man for 11 months. I always thought you went directly from basic to OCS. What is that all about?”

 

“The Army made a mistake.”

“Come on Pops. The Army does not make mistakes like that.”

 

“Sure they do all the time. “ he replied looking at me like I was the most naïve person ever.

 

“You are right they do. But if they had made this big a mistake. Why didn’t you have them correct it.” I countered.  He doesn’t have an answer for that so he remains silent. “So?”

 

“It’s hard to explain.” He paused “Sometimes you can belong to two organizations at once. You can be one thing in one and another thing in another.”

 

I am now confused so I respond “I am not sure I understand what that means. Do you mean like being in the Navy and the Army at the same time?”

 

“No like being in two units of the same branch of the service at the same time.”

 

“I still don’t get it.”

 

He looks down and for a moment he says nothing as if contemplating what he wants to say and replies. “It has to do with the Crown of St. Stephens.”

 

I interrupt “You mean like the religious medal you gave us all Christmas?” He nods his assent. That past Holiday he given all of us…my brother, sister and mother a gold religious medal with the Crown of St. Stephens engraved on it. I was baffled at the time not only because we are Jewish but my father is not a religious person. At the time I had asked why he given it to us. His response at the time was simply “For luck” and would say nothing more. Through the magic of the holidays the conversation was soon forgotten and I had not thought of it since although the small medal was still in my wallet. “What about it?”

 

Again a pause with a sigh added. He was clearly reluctant to discuss the subject and was weighing what to say. Eventually he said “When I turned 18 (December 1943)  I was required to appear before the draft board in Danbury. I really wanted to finish my sophomore year so I told them a story that I had heard about the Crown of St. Stephens in the hopes that it might grease the skids a little bit.”

 

“What was the story you told them?”

 

“I can’t tell you. ”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because it is classified.”

 

I lost my cool at this point and said, in what was certainly a too loud and too strident voice,  “What the fuck do you mean you can’t tell me because its classified. It has been” doing the math in my head” 69 years since you told that story to your draft board. How can it still be classified?”

 

“Because it is.”

 

“I can’t believe that. I don’t even know what the fucking Crown of St. Stephens is and a story about it still classified.”

 

My father said nothing instead gave me a look that made  me feel ignorant for not knowing anything about what this stupid crown thing was all about. Being a college professor and my father he was good at it so I took a deep breath to calm myself and said “What can you tell me about the story?”

 

He paused again, as if weighing carefully what he could say to me and replied “Your grandmother used to make ties for Winters department store and I would deliver them for her since I could no longer go to school.  One night a man who worked at the store by the name of Skoda gave me a ride home. Maybe he felt compassion for me because I was wearing shorts (my father didn’t own long pants until he came to this country shortly before his 14^th birthday) and it was cold out or perhaps he just felt protective of me because he knew I had money on me from the ties and Jews were getting beat up a lot back then. Whatever the reason he did give me a lift and on the ride home we were listening Radio Salzburg and something came on and he told me something about the Crown and that is what I told the draft board.”

 

I love stories. I love mysteries.  I really wanted to know more about the story but I also knew my father was not going to budge in telling me. At least not yet. So I asked “What happened when you told the draft board.”

 

He replied “I got a deferment until the end of my Sophomore year.”

 

“So until June of 1944?”

 

“No in December of 1943 I had just finished my freshman year.”

 

“Huh”

 

“My first semester of Syracuse was summer of 1943. I finished my freshman year in December. I didn’t finish my sophomore year until the end of summer 1944.”

 

Well at least that explained some of the mystery of my father’s service record. I said “Did anything else happen with the Crown.”

 

Again a long pause to weigh the correct response. “ Well eventually some folks from Army counterintelligence came to speak to me about the story.”

 

“And”

 

“And then they went away.”

 

“Nothing else?”

 

“Well eventually I had to do some work with them.”

 

“What kind of work?”

 

“I can’t tell you.”

 

I hadn’t felt this frustrated since I was a teenager so I said somewhat bitterly “You mean you won’t tell me.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Knowing I wasn’t going to get anything out of him this way I made him a proposition. I said “Listen, if I can guess at some of this will you tell me if I am on the correct track.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

I sighed out of utter frustration and said “You’re a pain in the ass.”

 

He just smiled and I went down stairs to see if I could dig up some information using my mother’s computer.  The first thing I did was a Google search on the Crown of St. Stephens. I clicked on the Wikipedia and much to my surprise found a very lengthy entry. I would learn much more about it later but what caught my eye that day was this part of the entry.

 

“At the end of the Second World War the crown jewels were recovered in Mattsee, Austria, on 4 May 1945 by the U.S. 86th Infantry Division.^[12] The crown jewels were transported to Western Europe and eventually given to the United States Army by the Hungarian Crown Guard for safekeeping from the Soviet Union.^[13] For much of the Cold War the crown was held at the United States Bullion Depository (Fort Knox, Kentucky) alongside the bulk of America’s gold reserves and other priceless historical items. After undergoing extensive historical research to verify the crown as genuine, it was returned to the people of Hungary by order of U.S. President Jimmy Carter on 6 January 1978. Most current academic knowledge about Hungarian royal garments originates from this modern research. Following substantial U.S. political debate, the agreement to return the jewels contained many conditions to ensure the people of Hungary, rather than its Communist government, took possession of the jewels.^[14]”

 

I didn’t know where Matsee Austria was so I clicked on the hyperlink in the story and it revealed that it was in the Salzburg district of Austria. That fit the story so I ran back up the stairs and sat in the same chair I had been sitting moments before and asked “Did this have to do with the recovery of the Crown of St. Stephens?”

 

“Of course…”

 

“Okay stupid question. But were in Europe or did you have to get to Europe.”

 

“I had to go. “

 

“How did you go”

 

“We flew the Southern Route.”

 

“What is this that”

 

“Planes flew south from Florida through the Caribbean to Brazil to that island I was talking about with your girlfriend.”

 

“Fernando De Naronha?”

 

“Yes. That one. We stopped there. And then on to Dakar and North Africa.”

 

“And from there on to Europe.” He just nodded his head.

 

I should have asked him a lot of questions at that point. Things like was this trip the first time on airplane or more to the point why did you go the Southern Route as opposed to the Northern route. But I was so caught up in the moment and the emotion of finding out a secret part of my father’s life that asking those questions didn’t even occur to me to much later. And besides at that point we were interrupted by the nurse aid,  who was helping take care of my Dad,  bringing him his lunch.

 

Leaving him to eat in peace I returned to my mother’s computer and began to ask it questions about the name Skoda. Despite throwing in variables like Hungary and WW2 along with Skoda all I was getting  were listing having to do with Skoda automobile and their manufacturing of armaments for the Nazi’s during the war. So I went back up the stairs, where my father was in the middle of his lunch, and said “What do the Skoda works have to do with your story?”

 

He finished chewing the bite that he had just taken from his Headcheese on Pumpernickel sandwich and said “Nothing.”

 

I replied “Come on you got to give me something. A hint. Anything that helps.”

 

He considered it for a moment, clearly weighing how much he could say without breaking the bogus, in my eyes, classified protocol. Finally, after two more bites of his sandwich he said “The driver’s first name was Paul” clearly thinking that wouldn’t help me much. I thanked him and dashed down the stairs the computer and entered “Paul Skoda.” The number one search result was for a Wikipedia biography for a man by the name of Paul Badura-Skoda. A gleaning of the entry showed that this Skoda had been born in  Vienna in 1928 which at that time I thought was a pretty big finding so back up the stairs I went.

 

My father at this point had finished his lunch and his nurse was helping him get ready for a nap. I said “Have you ever heard of a man by the name of Paul Badura-Skoda?” He shook his head and replied “No.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“He grew up in Vienna. He was just about your age. Perhaps you went to school with him.”

 

“No. It doesn’t ring a bell.”

 

Now I shook my head. A possible lead dead ended. But I couldn’t ask my father anymore questions. He was going to take a nap and I needed to return to the city and my job. So I gave him a shoulder hug and a kiss on the head and said “Have a great nap Pops. I will see you tomorrow.”

 

On my drive back to the city I thought about the mystery that had been presented to me today. How my view of my father had been altered. I knew that I wanted answers to my questions. Why had he told us one story for so long that was not even close to being true? Why was he so reluctant to talk about whatever his involvement was with this Crown of St. Stephens. I mean for Christ sakes the man was in the process of ending his life. Didn’t that give him a break from the fucking official secrets act. And why had he not told me about any of this…we had spent 10 days in Europe trying to put together his service history and talking about these things and never once did the Holy Fucking Crown of Hungary come up. That hurt. It felt like a betrayal.

 

I calmed myself by saying I would have some more time with my Dad. That he had not called me the nudgiator for nothing.  I figured if I pestered him enough I could get the answers I now so desperately wanted. That he would tell me the secrets of his involvement with the crown.

 

The next day was another glorious June day. The temperature was more mild than the day before but the sun no less brilliant. When I arrived at my parents’ home my mother told me that my sister, her husband, and their two children, Cate and Oliver, were coming over to cheer up my Dad and to give the kids perhaps a last chance they had to spend time with their “Opa.” It turned out to be a glorious day for my Dad. We got him down from his third floor digs and had him sit in the sun on his beloved deck soaking in the outdoors he so loved. My sister pampered him with food that she had made and by massaging his hands with cream that smelled of lilacs. Oliver and Cate drew pictures for him and he told them stories. Late in the day we all watched British Premier League soccer a sport he loved.

 

The next day he went into coma from uremic poisoning.

 

Three weeks later died having never fully recovering consciousness having never revealed the secrets of the Crown nor his involvement with it.

It was one of those days in June that remind you of the summer that is just around the corner: glaring sun, humidity and temperature in the 90’s. The type of day best remembered in Kodachrome and not in person.  I don’t relish summer weather as my northern European stock prefers a more alpine climate and, as a result, hot and humid weather often leave me cranky. But that was not the major contributor to my unhappiness that morning.

 

Nor was it my mother who was sitting next to me in my Jeep as we drove down Springfield Avenue to New Providence from Summit. My mother is among other things, a scholar, an accomplished author and editor. She is also thoughtful and the type of woman who would never leave the house without looking ready to meet the Queen.  To be sure, she was tense,  and had been particular in the way to that of a nearly 83-year-old woman who is challenged by late onset OCD. Or perhaps it was not late onset, just exacerbated with age, but I figured her niggling that morning…the garbage cans needed to be precisely in the right spot, the toaster was centimeters off its preferred mark, etc had more to do with the chore we were conducting that morning than any underlying neurosis.

 

That chore was not the source of my anger. It was merely a symptom. My anger lay in the decision my bull headed, I know what is best for me,  father  had made in his Dr’s office several days before. He had told his Dr. that his diagnosis of kidney failure was premature. That the prescribed course of 3x a week dialysis was, as a result of the faulty diagnosis, not necessary,  and that he was stopping the treatments immediately. Dr. Gelber has patiently explained that there was no misdiagnosis. That the blood work, done before and after his treatments, confirmed that dialysis was the correct treatment. . That if he did not continue the treatments the toxins in his blood would build up causing disorientation followed by coma, followed by death.

 

Dad did not listen, his mind was made up long before he walked into that office.  He insisted that his point of view was the correct one and it was the course he was planning on following. I had been down this path with Pops many times before in  which  he had taken an intransient position and would not budge even when he knew he was incorrect. To be fair, my father was a brilliant man and as many times that I knew he was wrong, he was right. It also meant that when I was correct the bragging rights were that much sweeter.  The rub in this situation was if I was right and he wrong, I wouldn’t get an opportunity to gloat because he would be dead.

 

What I didn’t understand at the time,  was that only part of my crankiness came from my father’s perceived stubbornness. The other part of my anger, the sub conscious part, came from the fact that I knew that my father knew exactly what he was doing. He was just telling us that he didn’t believe the Dr’s even though he knew it to be true. He had had enough. He was tired of living the life that he was living…unable to walk, confined to a third floor bedroom, diapered, catharized, carried out three times a week for dialysis, and all the other indignities not being able to take care of yourself entails. He, like the courageous man I knew him to be, chose a way to end his life with dignity without getting a lot of argument from those he loved and who loved him. An Irish exit for Jewish man.  A brilliant plan. Except it would leave me without my Dad,  the thought of which left every one of Kubler Ross stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) subconsciously competing to be number one in my emotional hit parade. It was really no wonder that I was cranky.

 

My mother’s and my chore that morning put my father’s decision not to continue with his treatment into sharp focus. We were going to the bank he kept a safety deposit box, to remove its contents, so when Dad died, would have access to its contents. A prudent action for sure but one that left no doubt in either one of our minds that Pop’s time left with us was measured in days. Knowing that the end is coming is no solace to those who are left behind.

 

The bank we were visiting had been my father’s bank since we had moved to New Jersey in 1959.  He had chosen it because it was close to his work at Bell Telephone Laboratories back in the time when there was no such thing as direct deposit and being close to your bank meant you could deposit your check in person easily. The building itself was a non-descript mid-century brick building that was tucked between two strip malls which made parking there quite difficult. We got lucky, and there was a metered space directly in front of the building which made our walk through the sun and the heat blessedly short.

 

Inside, the bank they had done what they could to modernize the interior with modern fabric partitioning, track lighting and computer monitors at every desk top but it looked like they had maintained the same furniture since the bank opened in the 1950’s. It was bulky and brown and made of oak. It looked as if  had been designed to survive a near hit of a nuclear bomb. It was clearly capable of surviving a half century. One of the modern conveniences this bank offered, personalized service, greeted us at the door and inquired how they could be of help. When told of our need to visit the safety deposit boxes she directed us to a very nice bank officer that for the sake of this recounting I will call Ms. Clue Less. She was pretty in a pinched banker sort of way and when we explained our mission she seemed quite eager help us accomplish our task. We provided her with the requisite information…my father’s name and the number of his safety deposit box.

 

She smiled at us and then began tickling her keyboard as if she were debuting at Carnegie Hall. She leaned forward and stared into monitor as if the secrets of the Kabala were going to be revealed momentarily. Then she leaned back and resumed her attack on her keyboard and then leaned forward into what I was now calling downward facing banker. This went on for about 5 minutes before she excused herself saying that she needed to consult with her superior.

 

While we waited for her return, I busied myself with answering emails on my iPhone and my mother did her best imitation of a tea kettle set on simmer. There was little steam but you could sense that if the banker did not allow us access to my father’s safety deposit box soon that the pot would soon boil over. Her frustration had less to do with the banks’ service than the situation. Her husband of nearly 60 years, the only man she had ever known, was pulling the plug and she was here to collect a lifetime of important documents and objects.  As for me, I was doing my best not to think about things too much. My task of the day was much simpler than hers, I was here to take care of her.

 

Our banker returned. She apologized for the delay. The problem was that my father had acquired his safety deposit box in a time when computers were room sized and required their own air conditioning systems and bankers conducted business using personal recognition, ledgers, and index cards. This bank had not fully converted their “old” files to a digital format and so while they knew my father had a lock box they did not have his signature on file nor who else was allowed to open it. Additionally, the only person who could unlock the old file card system was out of the branch at the moment and wouldn’t return until later that morning but if we wanted to expedite things we could always have my father fill out one of their power attorney forms. After delivering this wonderful news she smiled as if seeing the sunrise for the first time.

 

My mother was not smiling and the simmer setting on the tea pot went to full boil. We’ve been doing business with this band for over 50 years. This is a dreadful way to treat customers and so on.  I don’t think the banker had ever been spoken to that way by an eighty some odd old person. She was clearly upset at the invective and I could also sense there was nothing she could do about the situation so I thanked the banker and told her that we would come back later when the banker who could help us would be present and with their signed power of attorney. And then led my mother sputtering out of the Bank.

 

We drove home to my parents’ house. And while my mother cooled off in the kitchen I went upstairs to the third floor master bedroom suite my father now lived in to let him know what was going. He was seated in his wheel chair dressed in the grey and red LuLemon warm up suit my mother had given him for his birthday that year and was seated at his desk. Or what he called his desk. It was actually a cork topped foldable card table that he kept his computer, papers and personal items on. It is also where he ate his meals.

 

He was, as usual, reading the ink off the New York Times and despite his yoga wear attire looking very professorial with his glasses low on his nose and his closely cropped beard. If you didn’t know how sick he was it would be very difficult to spot his illness.

 

I kissed him on the top of his head, a habit of mine since I first noticed his hair thinning on top of his head many years before. It had started out as a tease but had turned into a gesture of tenderness and love. “Hey Pops. Hows it going.”

 

He looked over his newspaper at me and gave me his standard response “Paul, growing old is not for the faint of heart.” I gave him a hug and sat down in the chair opposite him and told him of our adventures in banking and ask him if he would mind signing the power of attorney that the bank had asked us to have him sign. His hand shook as it took it to read. This was a new symptom and for the millionth time I was reminded how frail he was. It was a concept hard for me to grasp because this man had always been so strong, a protector, a person with whom I always felt safe and even though those roles had been reversed now,  whenever I looked at him it was hard to see the frail elderly gentleman he was and far easier to see the superhero he always was to me.

 

How does that  expression go? “You can take the superhero out of the Dad but you can’t take the Dad out of the superhero for the son.” Okay I made that up but it is how I felt that morning.

 

My father looked over the document and finally asked me for a pen to sign it. When I gave him the pen he signed in a unsteady hand, not the flourish of his youth. I told him we would see him later and headed downstairs to collect my mother and return to the bank.

 

When we returned to the bank we were greeted Ms. Less. She again apologized for having to make us come back to the bank for the second time. She told us that the bank manager had returned, a Ms. Condi Scending (not her real name) , and that if we could just wait a few minutes more she would be with us. True to her word, the manager came to meet and ushered us in to her office/cubicle and explained that her associate had only been doing her job and that we of course nodded our head if only for the sake of politeness. She then asked to see the document that my father had signed and after reviewing led us to the corner of the bank in which the card files (in 2012? Really not kidding.) were kept. She opened up a drawer and after a minute of sorting pulled an ancient artifact of a card and examined the signature it held. She looked down our glasses at us and said “ The signatures do not match.”

 

My mother, with equal amounts of saccharine and condescension, replied to her “My husband signed that document over 50 years ago. He is old. He is ill. His signature has changed. And if you don’t allow us access to his safety deposit box right now my first step will be to close my account of over 50 years, my second  call my will be to my attorney and initiate a lawsuit against this bank. Are we clear?”

 

Whether it was the threats or the fact that our voices were quite loud in a quiet bank and her hope to avoid a scene, Ms. Scending, backtracked, said she hadn’t meant to imply that we could not access the safe deposit box and of course signatures change of overtime and please to follow her. So we did and she led us to the vault and after she inserted her key and my mother mine and the box removed and placed on a small shelf adjacent to the box. My mother looked in the box and pulled out a manila envelope and said “Take a look at these” and then asked Condi is she could have a private room to review the other contents. I knew what my mother was doing. She needed a private place to take some valuable items out of the lockbox and place them in her bags and was leaving the paperwork to me.

 

The contents of the envelope turned out to be the types of things any average person might have placed in a bank for safe keeping. There was the deed to my parents’ home, birth certificates and various other important papers. However, what drew my attention were several documents that related to my father’s service in the army.

 

The first to catch my eye was my father’s petition for Naturalization which was issued by US District Court for Northern Texas in Fort Worth Texas. This made me smile because one of our fathers “jokes” had been that he was Texan as that was where he was naturalized. I didn’t learn until our trip to his Grandmother’s village of Farafheld how much playing cowboys and Indians had played in his life and how this joke must have pleased the child who been sent up the mountain with the goatherder to live out his wild west boyhood fantasies. . In reviewing the documents there were some things that did seem a little odd to me. First, it listed his middle name as Israel. My father’s middle name was Zacharias. The second was the date of the petition, the 20^th of January 1945. By the timeline of my father’s service that I had created for myself, with his guidance while we were in Vienna,  he should have been in Italy suffering through a very cold winter.

 

At that moment, the anomalies in what I thought of as facts and what his naturalization papers said didn’t bother me too much. Perhaps my father screwed up on the dates he told me. Maybe he arrived in Italy February. Not a big deal but I would have to ask him about this and perhaps his middle name.

 

The next document I looked at was “Army of the United States” certificate of service. It stated that Ernst Rothkopf has served as a first lieutenant in the 913^th Field Artillery Battalion 88^th Infantry Division. All of which I knew from the time I began reading as a child “The Blue Devil in Italy.” However, what was odd there was a term of service listed on the documents. It said he served from the 4 August 1945 to 23 January 1947. If this was true my father did not begin his service in Europe until well after the war had ended there and almost the end of the war itself. While unsettling in that it did not follow the timeline of my father’s service that I knew I rationalized at the moment by seizing onto the word 1^st Lieutenant as you enter service as an officer as a 2^nd, so perhaps this only referred his time at the higher pay grade.

 

However my trip down the river in Egypt came to an abrupt close when I saw a reverse ink (black background/white type) certificate titled Enlisted Record Of Rothkopf, Ernst. While it was no surprise that my father was an enlisted man,  this document said he had served that way for 11 months and 3 days. This shocked me out of denial for two reasons. First, in my discussions about with my father about his service it was always assumed that he went directly from basic to OCS. No delay was ever mentioned by him and I never thought to ask because I knew the Army’s policy during WW2 was officers were not promoted from the ranks excepts as battlefield commissions. Second, it confirmed what the previous document had referred to before. My father hadn’t been in Italy during the War. In fact, he had served only 4 weeks as officer while the US was officially at war and then only with Japan as Germany had capitulated in early May.

 

All that had been reading was confirmed by the last document in the stack. In addition to everything else, it said my father had not left for Europe until December 11, 1945 and had returned one year later December 10, 1946.

 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

 

I was stunned. I had a lifetime of family myth invested in his service record. His service, his story were a part of my identity. So much so we had spent 10 days in Europe exploring it so I could understand deeply what it meant to him. I guess I could have been angry at what clearly was deception on my father’s part. I guess I could have felt hurt that he did not share his “real” story with me but I really was neither of those things or maybe there were just minor element in what I felt.  The overwhelming feeling I had was confusion. I had total faith that my father would not have deceived us without a good reason but I couldn’t understand why 65 years after his service had ended it still mattered and the deception continued.

 

I was still in a fog of confusion when my mother emerged from the cell in which she was emptying my father’s lock box. When I saw her standing next to me I sputtered “Are you ready to go?” She told me she was so I gathered the papers I was looking at and placed them back in the manila envelope and escorted my mother from the bank.

 

The minute we were buckled into the car, I asked my mother “Was your impression that Dad was a lieutenant for most of his career in the Army?”

 

She replied simply “Yes.”

 

“So your understanding was basic training, OCS, deployed to Italy to the Blue Devils. Right.”

 

She cocked her head as if what I said was a little curious a bit and said “Yes.”

 

I said “Well, that is not what is not what his army papers say. It says that he was an enlisted man for almost a  year.”

 

“Can’t be. Has to be a mistake.”

 

“It’s there in black and white.”

 

“That doesn’t make any sense. I am sure that your father can explain it. Why don’t you ask him when we get home.”

Vienna has two monuments to the Holocaust and unsurprisingly they are both controversial.

The memorial that was built first was erected in 1991 on a plaza behind the opera house.  It is called
“The Memorial Against War and Fascism” and was created by Alfred Hrdlicka. It consist of four pieces spaced around the square. There are the split white pillars called “The Gates of Violence” which depicts contorted figures emerging from the rock who are supposed to represent all the victims of war especially those who were suffered during the Nazi’s regime.  Directly in front of the pillars is a prostrate bearded jew who supposedly represents the degrading treatment that Jews suffered under the Nazis but when neo Nazi’s began vandalizing the statue an overlay of faux barbed wire was added. Behind it is a statue made from the stone from The Mauthausen concentration camps that depicts a man with his head the sand portraying the consequences of what happens when people fail to keep their government on track.

I first saw this statue on the day we left for Sopron. My father had been trying to sleep with the hope that the added rest would make the symptoms of his illness abate. I had decided to do a walk about while he slept. I had come across the memorial in the course of my wanderings and quite by accident. It was only after I had looked it up in my DK Guide that I knew it was supposed to be some type of Holocaust memorial. I knew nothing about the statue. I am not an art scholar.  Butt I knew that I did not like this memorial at all. I found imagery both grotesque and offensive especially the image of the Jew on the ground wrapped in barbed wire. I thought of the dignified, and simple memorials I had seen in places like Yad Vashem, Boston, Budapest, Washington and even one I hated in Berlin were better memorials than this one. I thought this was insulting to my relatives who had lived and were murdered here.

In fact the statue had pissed me off.

When I returned to the hotel I found my father in the breakfast room sipping tea, eating some dry toast and reading the International Herald Tribune. I told him about my walkabout and my chance encounter with the memorial and how angry the imagery of the monument had made me.

He had, of course, known all about it. He explained that the Jews of Vienna under the leadership of his friend and my namesake Paul Grosz had pressed the Austrian government for a permanent memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The government had resisted for decades primarily because the Austrians were prime deniers that they had any responsibility for the rise of Nazism despite the fact that greeted the Anschluss with parades and cheering; despite the fact that Krystalnacht had been a neighborhood sport in Vienna; despite the fact that Hitler was Austrian. That is why, my father explained, that it had taken nearly 50 years to build a memorial at all and even then, refuse to call it a Holocaust Memorial but a monument against war and fascism. While there were references to the Holocaust the imagery of the Jew was degrading and for many including me offensive. Even the site, my father added, was controversial. Instead of placing the memorial at a site of a burned temple or incarceration they chose to place over a basement where 100s had died during an Allied bombing of the city.

He reminded me that the Germans were amateurs  when it came to anti-Semitism and the real pros were Austrians.

He told me the Jewish community was so outraged over the non-memorial memorial to the Holocaust that they had decided to build their own and he would take me to see it when we returned to Vienna. Which is why we were here at the “Nameless Library” at the Judenplatz early in the afternoon of our last full day of our trip.

It is not surprising that this memorial is everything that the Memorial Against War and Fascism is not.

The monument is a concrete cube which is decorated a representation book shelves,  their spines turned to the inside. The only access to the structure is permanently locked door. The imagery represents all the culture and learning that was lost forever due to the murder of the Jews of Austria. The empty space within the structure represents the 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed and the names of the concentration camps where they were murdered is etched at the base of cube so we don’t forget those factories of death.

As my father is explaining this to me and why the site was chosen, it was an ancient Jewish ghetto where 300 jews committed suicide during a pogrom in 1421, I find myself focusing on my 81 year old pops. Not because I enjoy him when he is in full professorial mode, although I do. Not because, despite his age, he is still a very handsome man —the women I dated flirted with him to annoyance. Not because the information he is providing  is new to me because it isn’t; I have read about the memorial the night before during a Google session. I am looking at him because I am wondering what it must be like to see this memorial and not have it be an abstract concept. To have voices, scents, hugs, kisses, laughter and clasps of friendships from some of the people this memorial is supposed to honor.

Someone once said that the death of millions is a statistic, the death of one is a tragedy. I am wondering how many tragedies my father is suffering today. I also wonder not for the first time what it must have been  like to be a baby faced 21 year 2^nd Lt returning to this city trying to find those you had loved only to discover that most were dead, murdered, and to suffer the knowledge of that loss by yourself, alone. It was a question that I didn’t have the courage to ask him as I was afraid of the emotional pain it would cause him to answer. It wasn’t until years that I would even get a glimpse of the depth of those emotions.

In 2011 I was on my way to Poland for a business meeting in conference. Yad Vashem had just “Googled” the data base of Shoah victims and my father had sent us all a note telling us where many of our relatives had been murdered. The number one factory of death for my family had been Auschwitz with eight family members murdered there  and I had told my father of my intent to go to the camp to say Kaddish. His response, was not what I expected.  He said “Why would you want to do that?”  Eventually, he wrote me an email:

 

 Paul: 

 

You are a beautiful person and I am proud to have you as a  son. I am very touched by your gesture because I understand you are doing this to pay tribute to the memory of Tante Pepi, and Tante  Minna, and all the others of the family who were murdered there as  well as the thousands of others.  It is a kind of symbolic Kaddish.   It will break your heart.

In my thinking, however, I would advise against going.  It does not seem to have the same air as a consecrated place (such as Yad  Vashem) despite its material monuments. Its function is more to  remind Jews and the rest of the world about what happened there.  Neither you nor I need such a reminder. We carry it in our heart  and we carry the grim material details of the holocaust in our  heads. Thats the tribute we are obliged to pay (and thats why I  wont go to the Holocaust museum in DC although I’ve donated to them  from the beginning.) We can testify to our sorrow and grief by  doing the best we can with our lives.

Of couse, as the old saw has it, you are the captain of your soul,  and you will do as you will. You could spend the $1000 it will cost  you on something that would please you and bring a little giggle  into your day.

 Love, abba

 

He could have just let me go. He could have said nothing. But he thought the trip would be painful, not only because he knew how it would affect me, but because he knew how it would affect him. And in those words, he told me how he suffered looking at that memorial back in Vienna 5 years before.

 

We spent a few minutes in silence circling the cube, neither one of us talking, both of us content to leave each other to our thoughts. Eventually, my father says to me “Have you had enough,” which I interpret to mean that he has finished with his remembrances and to say much longer will hurt more than it will heal and say “Yeah, I am done.”

 

As we walk away from the Nameless Library my father asks me what I want to do next. He reminds me this is our last day of our trip I requested so the decisions on what to do next are up to me. I reply “Why don’t we walk around a little bit, take me on the Ernst Z. Rothkopf tour of central Vienna.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep, as long as I can ask you questions along the way.”

 

He groans a little bit in a way that while he doesn’t particularly like to answer question he is pleased that I am asking them. He is after all a professor who never wants to stop teaching. When we get to the end of Judenplatz we make a left and I ask him “When you were in the states, after you left here, did you know what was going on here. Did you know that they were murdering people?”

 

“We had pretty good idea.” He smiles and wry smile and says “We were here. We knew what they were capable of….and for a while we got letters” and he paused a few seconds and says “And there were rumors and some newspaper reports but we didn’t have any idea on the scope of the Holocaust.”

 

I think for a few seconds if I should ask the next question but eventually my curiosity out wills my reluctance and I say “Didn’t it make you want to join the Army when you graduated High School. To avenge what was being done.”

 

He smiles at me in the way a professor might smile at a favored student who has asked a profoundly stupid question and says. “You have been watching to many movies…. You have to remember Paul that when I graduated High School I was only 17 years old and I couldn’t have joined the Army even if I wanted to. And when I turned 18 and was going to be drafted I didn’t ask for a student deferment I just ask to finish the year.”

 

I reflect on this for a few moments thinking about my Dad’s improbable journey. At almost 14 years of age arriving in this country speaking very little English, if any, and 3 years later being accepted at University. My father’s boyhood friend who had been Kindertransported to England once described my father’s musings about America as Fairyland. And it indeed it had been for my father and why should he have been in hurry to scurry off to the army perhaps to get his ass shot off.”

 

By this point we had reached a place called Judengasse. It is an old part of the city, where the Jews of Vienna had shopped from the 17^th century until the beginning of 2^nd World War. My father has walked me here to share some of the history of Vienesse Jewry but as he is describing the area something catches my eye and I can’t contain my laughter. Confused, and likely a little annoyed, he asks “What so funny.”

 

Instead of saying anything I point to a pub behind him and when he sees the object of my humor he laughs too. It is a pub called the Vulcania, the same name as the ship that transported him to the United States.  I ask him if wants to get a beer but he declines and we continue our walk.

 

Not far from there, past Ruprechtskirche we come to come to a broad plaza that overlooks the Ringstrasse and the Danube Canal. My father points off to the left and says “That is where the Hotel Metropole used to be…Gestapo Hq. “  I look and don’t see anything but some relatively modern buildings and ask “Did it get flattened by the Allied Bombing Raids?” He just nod’s his head no doubt lost in thoughts viewing a feared place, now destroyed, must bring.

 

There are so many questions I could ask him now about the Gestapo and how he must have feared them or what it was like having to dodge storm troopers but I decide to go another way and ask “What was this place like when you returned after the war?”

 

“What?”

 

“What was this place like when you returned after the war?”

 

He paused before answering, searching for the correct description and asked me “Have you ever seen a movie called “The Third Man” with Orson Wells.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Well it was like that.”

 

“You mean it was in black and white?”

 

“You think your are being a smart ass but the truth is it kind of was in black and white. The city was in ruins and there wasn’t a lot of color. Civilians had no food and had to scramble to just get by…people would do anything for a few cigarettes and a Hershey bar. And then of course there was the fact that Vienna was on the front lines of the cold war. The Russians and US constantly playing games with each other.”

 

And then he stopped talking, almost as if he had said too much and is silent for a while. I sense that I have pressed into unpleasant memories a little too hard and say “Is that the Danube down there.”

 

“No, that is the Danube canal. The Danube is some way beyond that.”

 

“Didn’t your family go to some sort of club down there.”

 

“It wasn’t really a club. It was just a place where poor people would gather on the mud flats and swim and enjoy whatever leisure time they had. The club name was really more an irony….but your Grandfather liked it.”

 

“Not Grandma”

 

“She went sometimes but your grandfather had a girlfriend there.”

 

Finding out that my Grandfather had girlfriends was not exactly a surprise to me. He was a complicated man and I had realized how complicated until I was much older because as I child I was actually frightened of him. My earliest recollection of him was walking around a parking lot in Danbury CT with a stick with nail stuck in its end picking up the trash people had left behind. He spoke very little English and always talked to us kids in German which was a bit terrifying and he had furtive nature to him that made you feel unsafe. My last memory of him was in a hospital tied to the bed because of his many attempts to leave the hospital on his own. He was a scary childhood memory only compounded when I found out that he used to terrify my father and rail at him for studying and trying to make a better life for himself.

 

This had all changed just a few years before. I had been reading John Keegan’s “The First World War.” The book had horrified me. I knew the basic story of the war; I knew about the carnage but until I had read that book I had not known the extent of the horror. One day at the battle of the Somme had caused nearly 60,000 British casualties. It wiped out nearly 25% all men in France. One afternoon had found me discussing the book with my father, and repeating an old saw about my Grandfather that he had been bayonetted in the ass early and then I asked “Did he get captured.”

 

“Yes. By the Russian’s and then he was sent to Siberia and was in a camp there for nearly 7 years until the Austrian Government could negotiate a release from the new Soviet government.”

 

“What year was Grandpa born?

 

“1888”

 

“So he was 26 when the war broke out and 33 when he was released….Did he ever talk about the camps to you?”

 

“No not really. The only thing is that he ever mentioned was his hatred of onions. He couldn’t stand them in anything that he ate because that was they lived on mostly. “

 

That one conversation changed my perception of my Grandfather completely. Instead of the strange old man cleaning up garbage in the parking lot he became the ultimate survivor. He had after all survived the war to end all wars, 7 years in a Siberian Gulag, Krystalnacht and the Nazi’s, worked shit jobs all his life to put food on the table only to have to start it all over again coming to America at the age of 51.”

 

So, there overlooking the Danube Canal I say to my father “He was a survivor.”

 

He looked at me with a faraway look in his eye and a quarter smile and said “Yes, he was.”

 

We go silent again. Him no doubt thinking about his complicated father and me thinking of mine. Us both thinking about survivors.

 

A little while later we find ourselves seated at L. Heiner Wollzeile, not as famous as Café Sacher of Demels, it is nonetheless  a Viennese Patisserie of particular deliciousness with the added convenience of being just around the corner of our hotel. I am staring at 5 perfectly created petite fors, (white, pink, mocha, chocolate and yellow) that seem a shame to eat because they are so pretty. My father is about to dig into palatschinken, a crepe stuffed with warm apricot jam sprinkled with sugar and a dab of whipped cream. We are both drinking espressos.

 

I say “So you leave Ft. Sill and you get on a boat in Hoboken. What happens next.”

 

“You don’t give up.”

 

I shoot him a look that suggests he should no better, I am the nudgigator after all and say “And…”

 

Sighing he replies “ I get off the ship at Leghorn and go to the repo depot.”

 

“Repo Depot?”

 

“A sort of clearing house for incoming personnel. You reported in and depending on what the in theatre needs were they assign you to a unit and you report to it.”

 

“So that is where the assigned you to the 913^th Field Artillery.”

 

“Uh -huh.”

 

“Do you remember when that was. What time of year?”

 

“I don’t really remember. I think it was cold.”

 

“So you likely arrived late winter early spring of 1945.”

 

“I guess so.”

 

“And eventually you ended up in Gorizia on the Yugoslav/Italian border?”

 

“Yes…”

 

“What was going on there.”

 

“The Italians wanted Trieste and the surrounding areas and so did the Yugoslavs. The allies came in and separated the two parties and occasionally had to split the two up. It was a real horror show not only because the region was split between Italians, Slovenes and Croats but because it was the beginning of the cold war. The Yugoslavs were communists and lines were being drawn across Europe.”

 

“Okay. There you are a few hundred miles from Vienna in a port that used to be part of the empire yet it takes you more than a year to get there. Why the fuck did it take so long. I mean I know I have asked the question before but I just don’t get the why?”

 

“It was not as simple as just in a car and going. I had to get leave to do it and my commander was a real pain the ass. I am not sure that he liked Jews too much and maybe he couldn’t understand why I wanted to go back there. In any case I was not getting anywhere with him and one day I was HQ and ran into the general and I made my case to him. And he approved on the spot.”

 

“I am sure that didn’t make your commander too happy.”

 

“No it didn’t but he couldn’t do anything about it. But even with the general’s endorsement it took time to get all the approvals. I was passing to the European theatre from the Mediterranean. From one Armys’ command to another. This took time. No emails back then.”

 

“And how long did you spend in Vienna?”

 

“Two weeks I think?”

 

“And were you tempted to stay? To become an intelligence agent?”

 

“At the time, I was flattered but I wanted to get back and finish my education. I had no desire to stay in the Army. I wanted a normal life. I guess I had too much excitement in my life so far and was looking forward to quieter times.”

 

“Okay. What happened next?”

“When I earned enough points to come home, I was sent back to Leghorn and to the Repot Depot and got roped into taking some prisoner home.”

 

“Why did they choose you.”

 

“Couldn’t tell you but perhaps it was because I had little experience with these things.”

 

“What does that mean.”

 

“I had done some of this before.”

 

I stared at my father wordlessly asking for more information. He just shrugged is shoulders communicating it was all the information he was willing to provide and to move on so I asked. “When was this….”

 

“Probably December ’46.”

 

“7 years after arriving in America you were arriving back home a citizen and officer in her Army. Pretty wild.”

 

My father said nothing and  Isaid “And then what did you do?”

 

“I went to Fort Dix. They put me on terminal leave and I went back to Syracuse.”

 

“You didn’t even take time to visit your parents?”

 

“Maybe for a day or two…but not long. I wanted to go back to school.”

 

“I guess.”

 

“Are you finished?”

 

I begin to think about the other questions I have for my Dad and realize that he doesn’t mean whether have more questions for him, he is referring to whether or not I have finished my pastries. When I look down I amazed to find that they have disappeared and I have no recollection of eating them. I tempted to order more but say instead “Lets go.”

 

The next morning finds us at the Airport. There are no lounges here so my father and I are sitting in a bar drinking coffee and munching on Paprika flavored Pringles that we both found too amusing to pass up. We are both lost in our own thoughts having managed to temporarily talked ourselves out.

 

I am thinking about the original mission of this adventure. I wanted to understand what if had been like for a young second lieutenant to return to the city he was born and lived until he and his family had been chased out at age 14 as a member of the conquering army. I had wanted to connect to the powerful emotions that story held. I wanted to understand how that story helped create the Pops that I loved.  And if I was only evaluating the trip on the basis of those goals I would have to say the trip was not a  huge success. I learned that he had been recruited to be a spy and turned it down. I learned about his experience with his land lady. But I learned very little about the soldier as my father seemed to hide that part of his life behind a veil.

 

But one of my favorite expressions is “Man plans and god laughs.” My brother likes to call it the law of unintended consequences. I had set out to find out my father the soldier but had instead found out about my father,  the man. From our experience with Paul Grosz and the salute of old comrades to his illness to the remarkable transformation in the fields of Frarahfeld to our last walk in Vienna I saw glimpses of the man I called Pops I had never seen before. I knew him better now and that knowledge added, like salt on a steak, a different dimension to the love I felt for him.

 

I think about sharing these thoughts with my father, but no doubt sensing my imminent fade to goo, he asks “Pringle?” and shakes the can for me to make understand he has not eaten them all.

 

I smile at him and say “Sure” and I leave it at that because I know I don’t have to tell him a thing. He knows.

The boy, finished with surveying his realm,  walks over to the rail and scoops up a handful of small rocks that lay nearby and begins to toss them one by one into the rushing stream below. I stare at the boy not quite sure of what to make of this transformation. He is wearing a dark blue polo shirt with khaki shorts and brown ankle height shoes that laced all the way up. It is similar to what Dad was wearing this morning but dated, similar to what you would see in a black and white photograph whose edges were curled and worn.

I walk up to him and lean across the rail. Below the water is running rapidly over smooth rocks and the babble of the water is loud but soothing. I am hesitant to speak, as if by saying something aloud will make this apparition disappear. For a while the boy and I just stand, our faces warm in the spring sun, and watch the water disappear under the bridge. Finally, the desire to talk to this boy who will be my father is greater than my fear of his disappearance and I ask “What is the name of this river.”

He replies “It called the Triesting” and then points and says “Look over there by the rock in the center of the stream. Do you see the trout?” I look to where he is pointing and I see what appear to be two golden trout, nearly camouflaged by their background and the glint of the sun off the water. We watch as they make their way upstream and out of sight. Eventually I ask him “Do you ever go fishing here?”

He replies, in the torrent of words that 10 years old speak when they are particularly excited about something, “I don’t have a fishing pole and neither do my friends so we can’t really fish here but” he says pointing to place just beyond a field of tall grass and dandelions “over there is another smaller stream. My buddies and I sometimes go over there where the water doesn’t move so fast and you can straddle the brook, and we make a noose out of wire. We wait until we see a fish and then we dip the lasso in the water and just at the right moment we pull on the noose and we catch ourselves a fish.” He looks up at me his chin sticking in the air and proudly adds “You don’t think it can be done, but it can.”

I have no doubt that it can be done because if this little boy says it can, it can. Instead I think about how tempting those fish must of have been to him and his friends. I imagine the serious conversations and the plotting he and his buddies must have had to devise a plan to catch the fish and the arguments and eureka moments that must of occurred while they perfected their device and how to use it. I can only imagine how proud they must have been when they caught their first fish and I wonder who they showed first and what they said to them.

And then I too am struck by a memory. I am very young and my father, brother and I are going for a walk through the woods together. It is very green and the forest so lush that it blocks out most of the sunlight but the path is clear and we eventually make our way to a wide but very narrow stream. My father helps my brother and I take our shoes and socks off and we wade into the cold water. Picking up some stones my father begins to make a small U shaped structure with the open end in the direction of the oncoming water. He tells my brother and I that these are minnow traps. He tells us that the fish come with the flow of water and can’t make it back out due to the current.

I am broken out of my reverie by the ten year old asking “Do you want to go for a walk?” I nod and we begin down to walk a dirt path that I would have sworn was paved just a few minutes ago. He points ahead of us and says “That’s the canal.” And sure enough just a head of is a slow moving span of water that I don’t recall seeing on our drive into town. Nonetheless we walk along it for a short while until we reach a wooden dock. The boy takes off his shoes and unwraps a piece of cloth that is wrapped around his foot like a bandage and dips his feet into the water.

I ask, pointing to what was wrapped around his feet, “What are those?” He replies unabashedly that his Aunt Pepi made them for him. He didn’t have any socks, so this is what he put around his feet to protect them from rubbing against the leather of his shoes. I nod not quite comprehending what it must have been like to grow up without socks. When I was a kid they always seem to dissapear into my shoes.

I take my off my sneakers and we both dangle our feet in the cold water of the canal, and we bask in the sun like two turtles on a log. Accoss the canal the breeze slowly moves the grass in the meadow. I ask him “What do you all day?”

He tells me that sometimes he helps the local shepherd take the animals from the village up to the meadow. I must of looked confused because he explains that “Aunt Pepi has an arrangement with the  shepherd to take him along when he would take the animals of the town up to the high pasture  . In the morning the shepherd,  picks him up along with each the livestock from other famileis  and takes them up to a place where the cows and goats could graze and he could play. Then sometime in the late afternoon they would walk back into town with the animals and drop them off one by one at people’s houses.

What a practical solution this was for everyone. How folks around here are not farmers but they had livestock to supply the with basic necessities such as milk, meat and fabric but none of them had enough to warrant having a shepherd of they pooled their resources and hired one for the village. How practical too for my father’s aunt. She must of have been in her 60’s back then and having a 10 year old running around and underfoot must have been quite a challenge. Being resourceful she invented a day camp for him…very different from my day camp experience…but camp none the less.

Thinking about my own favorite experiences at camp I ask “What did you do for lunch.” He tells me that his Aunt would put together whatever she had in her larder for him. Perhaps a hunk of cheese, maybe a piece of salami and some bread and if he was really lucky a piece of hard candy. She would wrap it all in a handkerchief for him to carry. The idea of lunch wrapped in a handkerchief seems so foreign to me, back in my day it had brown paper bags. It makes me think about the mountain of little conveniences that separate the past from the present.

I ask him what he does when they get to the pasture and the little boy tells me proudly that a lot of the time he helps the shepherd take care of the animals. I imagine this little boy herding cows, sheep, and goats….running after them, keeping them from wandering off  and from harm, watching for predators, making friends with the animals. I think about how different that this must have been from his life in a fourth floor walk up in Vienna, where he slept in the kitchen, and the bathroom was down the hall. How different it must have been walking the peaceful paths of Fahrafeld from the streets of Vienna ever more dangerous with burgeoning anti-Semitism. I  know longer wondered why my father, the city kid, ever considered becoming a Zoologist, or is so kind to animals or when he is a jovial mood says in his retirement he would to raise goats.

I remark that even with all the things that he  helps the shepherd with that there must be a lot time that there is nothing for him to do. What does he do then?  He tells me that he goes off exploring in the woods. That he goes and finds new paths and new places to see in the forest. He goes looking for birds and animals and that sometimes if his friends had come with them, they play the cowboys and Indian, that he has read about in Karl May’s books about Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. I smile at him and ask “Do you ever get lost?” He replies with the confidence of every ten year old “Never!”

I think about the countless hours I have spent with my father in the woods. The hikes we have taken…the animals, birds and plants that he has pointed out for me. I remembered when I was ten and my father, brother and I were hiking in Humboldt National Forest. We had gone far from camp and I told my Dad that I thought we were lost and he had told me in absolute confidence not to worry. I believed him then but now know where that confidence has come from.

The boy says “You want to walk over to the train station.” I nod in agreement and walk down the dusty path our shoes dangling from our hands. I ask “ Do you come here by train.”

“Yes. When it gets warm in the city my mother brings me out. We sit in the back of the train, in third class and it is not so bad unless its really hot and gets really stuffy back there.”

“Can’t you open a window?”

“Muti won’t let me. She is frightened that the sparks from coal fire in the engine will light her hair on fire.”

I smile at him and say “Does she stay here all summer with you?”

He shakes his head and says “No. She has to work so she just comes sometimes for a few days. And you want to know a secret?” He pauses and his voice moves to a whisper and leaning forward says “ I think I may have some psychic abilities! Sometimes when I hear the train whistle blowing in the distance I try to concentrate really hard on whether or not she is on the train and if I think that she is I will run down to the station to greet her and I almost never wrong!”

I think about the first summer I spent at sleep away camp and how I missed my mother and have no trouble imagining how tender and sweet those reunions must have been. How it must have been pretty lonely for both mother and child to be without each other without phone or perhaps even mail to comfort them. I also wonder about this boy’s talk of psychic ability. My father, the scientist, has never talked this way yet I find it very believable.

It is February 1979 and I am in Syracuse, New York.  I have just awoken from a dream and that has disturbed me. My grandmother has visited me in my sleep and has told me that the art deco garnet ring that was my grandfather’s and was given to me my dad  and subsequently lost, is underneath the front seat of my car. In a stupor, still in my pajamas, I walk through the snow drifts to where my orange VW bug is parked and proceed to look where my grandmother has told me to. And, despite the fact that I have looked there before, the ring is exactly where she said it would be. I put it on and walk back into the house. As I enter the apartment, my phone is ringing. It is my brother. He tells me that sometime during the night my grandmother has passed away.

We stop just shy of the train station. It is a simple structure consisting of a platform of dark hewn wood with a small home next to it. I have no troubles imagining a steam engine pulling into the station nor the warm embraces of a mother and son.

We turn around and walk back the way we came and I ask the little boy what he does at night. He tells me that because of the mountains in the west it gets dark pretty early around here so that he usually just goes home and has a simple meal with Aunt Pepi and goes to sleep on a horsehair mattress that she has set up for him. Knowing the curiosity of the boy and of his love of books, I ask him if he reads before he goes to sleep. He says he sometimes does but it is hard because his Aunt’s house is without electricity and is lit by oil lamps.

In the distance, I hear the sound of bicycle bell ringing. “Tring Tring Tring Tring”. The ten year old looks up at me and says “It is the ice cream man! Aunt Pepi gave me a some money in case he came today. Would you hold these for me” and with that he hands me his shoes and goes tearing down the path and over the bridge to main road. I watch as a man riding a rickety bicycle with a brown wood case hanging in front of the handle bars comes to stop in front of the boy. They talk for a little bit and then the man opens up the case and after a few seconds his hand emerges with an ice cream cone that he hands to the boy. The boy walks slowly back constantly licking at the cone so by the time he reaches me it is almost gone. He offers me a bite and when I decline he pops the rest of the cone into his mouth and I hand him back his shoes.

We walk slowly towards the bridge. Along the way I stop and turn around. I want to take a photograph of the train station, as the light is hitting it well. I frame the picture in my lens when I hear from behind me “Bastards!” I spin and look and the ten-year-old is nowhere to be found. Instead my 81 year old  father has returned. He points to a telephone poll and shuffles away. I approach where Dad was pointing, and see scrawled on the side of the pole a freshly drawn swastika.

We are back in the car and our way to Baden. We have not talked much in the 45 minutes since we left Fahrafeld, both of us lost in our thoughts and reflections. There are questions that I want to ask but when I go to vocalize them no words come out because I am pretty sure I know the answers but  I want to know for sure.  I finally manage to stammer out “What happened to Pepi?

He replies “By the time we left in 1939, Pepi was too old to take care of herself anymore so she moved to an old age home in Vienna” his voice trails off a little bit and finishes with “We had to leave her there. We went to see her before we left. Saying good bye to her was very hard.” His voice trails off and I can see from the corner of my eye he has turned his head away from me.  I say nothing more. I know what the Nazi’s did to old and infirm Jews. I They were the first to go into the ovens.  I know that has search countless databases trying to find out what happened to her to no avail.

As the car speeds to Baden, I imagine what it would have been like for him to say goodbye to his grandmother at age 13. He knew he would never see her again. He could probably imagine at the time what her ultimate fate would be as the Nazi’s had already begun their elimination of the Jews. I cannot even imagine what it meant for him to come back at the end of the war and understand the horror his beloved Grandmother must have experienced and still have the courage and hope to look for her.

At that moment I wish that I could ask him about those feelings…the frustration, anger and horror he must have felt but I can’t bring myself to ask those questions. I fear they will open wounds that are better left sutured. Instead I hide behind my sunglasses hoping he does not see the tears streaming down my face. .

The Oompah band has taken a break and the park is quiet except for the occasional peel of laughter from children playing along the paths. The fountains and flowers are backlit by the setting sun and seem to glow in the early dusk. I am about to go and search for my father when he appears as if psychically called. He looks relaxed and at peace after his massage and says lets go to dinner. We agree to go to the Baden Casino which is just across the park from our hotel and from the outside looks like European buildings that have undergone a modern renovation. In this case the main body of the hotel looks like it was designed for a Hapsburg Prince and the dining area, a semi-circle jutting out from the casino, with floor to ceiling glass as a façade.

The restaurant itself is strictly white table cloth, elegant stem ware and place settings. The service is formal and the food a “modern take” on classic Austrian dishes. When our waiter comes I ask him for a Vodka Martini and my father for a scotch. When our drinks arrive I make a conscious decision to move away from the conversations we were having earlier in the day about dead relatives and ask him more about his Army service. It is, after all, the inspiration for this trip. I say to him “Can I ask you more about your military service.”

He looks at me in way that suggests that this is not the most exciting topic for him but graciously replies “Sure.”

“So you turned 18 in December of 1943. Is that when you were drafted.”

“No, I ask them for a deferment so I could finish my year at Syracuse.”

“Was that hard. Getting the deferment I mean.”

Pause. “Not that hard. It was for only a few month.”

“Okay. So that means that you entered the Army in like June of 1944.”

“I guess. I know it was sometime in the summer.”

“Okay. So where did you go to basic….”

“Ft. Wolter’s, Texas. Just outside of Ft. Worth. “

“And basic lasted 8 weeks?’

“Something like that.”

“So by the end of summer 1944 you had finished basic training. How did you get to OCS.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did they select you because you were a college kid? Or did they have other criteria or did you have to apply.”

“You had to apply.” He replied and my father said something that surprised me “I was pretty content being an enlisted guy. I wasn’t going to apply.”

“Then why did you?”

“A couple of guys from my unit convinced me. They thought it would be a good way for me to go.” Not earth shattering news but a bit of shock to me as in my naïve view of the army I always considered being an officer better than and enlisted man. Wasn’t one of the reasons that my maternal grandfather had considered my father suitable for my mother was because he was an officer. And wasn’t my mother inordinately proud that my father had been the youngest 2^nd Lt. in his division.

The waiter came and took our order and I continued my interrogation of my dad. I asked “Is Fort Sill where you went to OCS?”

“Uh huh.”

I took a sip of my drink, paused and then said “You know trying to get information out of you is like pulling teeth.”

“Well I don’t know what you want to know.”

“Yeah but it would be a lot easier if perhaps you expanded on what I asked.”

“How about we change the subject?”

“At least get me to Italy.”

“Okay.”

“So after Ft. Sill you went…”

“Ft. Bragg”

“You know you are real pain the ass. How long were you there.”

He was smiling now. Clearly enjoying torturing me “I can’t remember. Maybe a couple of months.”

“And what do you think of it.”

“Muddy and hot.”

“Great. Thanks for the detail. And after Bragg”

“We went to Italy.”

“Oy. Where did you sail from?”

“Hoboken…where you used to live…Now can we change the subject.”

So we did.

Later, I am in bed trying to read myself to sleep. Pops is in the twin bed next to me, the light above his bed already out He is on his side not yet snoring. Outside our hotel windows we hear the sounds of a group of people walking along the street. They are a little drunk and speaking too loudly and although I cannot understand a word they are saying I can tell that they have had a good time this evening. I roll over and turn off the light and for a while just lay back and listen to revelers recede into the distance and stillness.

I turn out my light and try to fall asleep. It is difficult. Farafeld has left a mark. But it is also Dad’s reluctance to talk about his military service. Why is it so hard to pull facts from him. I am just about sleep when the silence is broken.  I hear tossing and turning from the other bed and Pops says as much to the darkness as to me ““You know, it really got to me today at Fahrafeld. It is gone for good….never to come back.” I can think of nothing to say to comfort him or the ten year old boy I had met early that day so I just rub his back until we both fall asleep.

Late that night, I was awakened to the sounds of my father being ill in the bathroom. I walked to the door and asked him if there was anything that I could do to help. He told me no, and then asked that I leave him be. There are few things that make you feel more inadequate than hearing someone you love being sick and not being able to help them.  Listening to your elderly father be sick is even worse.  In addition to feeling helpless, you feel the world has gone bottom up. You are now the caretaker when the reverse has always been true.  I retreated to my bed and slunk under my goose down comforter. When he returned to his bed quite a while later I asked him if there was anything that I could do for him.  A disembodied voice from the dark replied “ no.” Thankfully it was not too long before the sounds of his snores vibrated through the room.

Once awakened from a sleep I find it difficult to find my way back to the land of nod.  Add to that the worry of sick father and sleep was out of the question. The memories Pops had shared with me, our visit with Paul, being in Vienna, the scene of the crime if you will,  and all t that had been shared with me that day became a whirlpool of thoughts and emotions that kept pulling me down to the dark place of what ifs and how comes.

Staring into the dark I was particularly struck by the story of my father and the confrontation he had with his former land lady. After being terrorized and frightened by her for years had terrified her. My father had not sought revenge but karma had prevailed and the joy he felt from it was a feeling that anyone who has ever watched a movie or read a story where the hero prevails can understand. The fact that he was embarrassed by those feeling was an insight into my father as a person. Like all of us he was capable of moments of joy for moments of personal triumph and schadenfreude. However, my father’s embarrassment over his emotion reminded me of the depth of his heart and his true kindness.  It reminded me of the values he tried to teach me and how he was the model of the man  I always will aspire to me but so often fail at.

Even at the grand old age 50 my father continued to be my hero

As happens when you are searching for sleep my mind drifted. Why had my father chosen not to be a spy? It seemed so romantic to me. Would I have made the same choice he had? Put University on hold and become a spy? I likely would have lived in the moment, not thought of the long term ramifications. Pops and I not only look like but what ever DNA that makes people think in similar ways we share and I was trained, by the master, to think like him. It made his reasoning, or at least what he claimed to be his reasoning to simple for me to believe. It was similar to the explanation he provided me when I had asked him why he had chosen Psychology as a major at Syracuse and his response was “The line was shorter than Zoology.” While there may have been an element of truth in his statements there was something he was not saying and probably something he did not want to or was incapable of sharing.  His explanation lacked the depth of the truth. It made me wonder what parts he was leaving out What was he not telling me? What was I missing? It would take another 6 years and a death bed confession before I would begin to understand what he had left out.

As moments of our day continued to swirl into my awareness the image of Paul Grosz’s standing at attention to greet my father paused. It remained there much the way colors drifted across your vision after an old-time camera flash. As much as I had heard of my father’s childhood, as much as I thought I had known about it,  I knew not nearly enough. Had he been reluctant to tell those stories or had I not been listening? Had I taken his childhood for granted and been satisfied with the stories I had heard. For example,  I had had no idea until that afternoon what an operative my father had been. How running the streets in Vienna after Anschluss had been no game for my father and his friends. It had been a battle of survival with a timer constantly ticking in the background not knowing when it would go off and your piece cleared off the board. It provided Dad with an instinct to survive and belief that he could out think and survive any situation presented.  itself there was no doubt. It had infused  him with a  sense of optimism that never ceased to amaze me.

My last thoughts before drifting off were of the feelings of gratefulness I felt on having been able to spend the day with Pops and learning things about him that I had always wanted to know but never knew I needed to know. I wondered what questions I had failed to ask because the biggest learning I had that day was that my father, whether by training or life experience, my father did not give up the secrets of his past easily. I had to learn to ask better questions.

 

Three days later I found myself in Baden, Austria sitting outdoors at Café in the Hotel Herzoghof. It was a beautiful sunny late spring afternoon with the park directly adjacent to where I was sitting  vibrant with color, sound, and life. The color came from an amazing array of plantings in the park. Yellow, red, and white tulips surrounded flourished in flower beds surrounding the central fountains and paths. Carpets of purple white, yellow and red pansies lay in many of the lawns as if placed there by Persephone preparing for a nap. Hydrangea’s and Lilacs abounded and filled the air with the scent of spring.

The sounds come from children at play enjoying the warm afternoon and sudden freedom from their parent’s hands. The soundtrack of their fun was provided by an Oompah Band playing in a bandstand. 100 meters from where I sat.

I was alone. My father had arranged a massage. It was after all a spa town and after his illness for last several days well needed. For me, it was a good time in a  peaceful place to reflect on the last few days.

We had left Sopron, my grandmothers, this morning. It was a perfect day for a drive with soft sunlight, a feint breeze and mild temperatures. I knew the Austrian countryside would be beautiful alive with the beauty of late spring. But it was more than that.  My father has been very sick in Sopron. Whatever the gastrointestinal illness that first manifested itself in Vienna really took root here. He spent most of his time there asleep or in the bathroom. Our  room despites its open windows has taken on the smell of a sick room and the bathroom lacking any ventilation whatsoever has a fetid evil smell somewhere between third world slit trench and an unclean litter box. I am convinced that the nausea and uncomfortable feeling that I had are from these conditions. For that reason I was happy to have this place in my rear view mirror.

 

After I loaded our Opel Astra with our luggage I go in search of my father. I find him in the most unlikely of places doing the most unlikely of things. He is in the dining room of our hotel eating breakfast.  I am not eager to eat this morning and for some reason I decide to watch him, as opposed to joining him.  He makes his way through the breakfast buffet. He is wearing his typical uniform wearing of a light blue shirt of which he has so many and that he has worn for so many years that I secretly call it Ernie blue, twill pants that he has in a variety of khaki colors including the brown that he is wearing today, and dark brown half boots that he has had in some variety for as long as I can remember. It is an outfit that is neither in style nor out of style, practical and I decide that is as good a metaphor for my father as I can think of.

 

He is not moving well this morning. His shoulders are stooped and he is bending forward at the hips. Instead of lifting his feet he is shuffling them a little bit more than normal. He is walking old today and I don’t like it. My pops shouldn’t be walking old. He should be standing straight up and walking tall like he is in my memories. These are things that we can fix through better exercise and stretching that he finds boring. I vow silently when we get back to the states that I will work with him on core exercises that should help him to regain his posture.  I know that the likelihood of my father doing these exercises is slim.  I also know that I have to try. I don’t want my Pops looking or feeling old. It implies too many things that I would prefer not to think about.

 

When I finally make it to the table I find my father fully engaged in breakfast. Not only has he picked up some picked some yogurt, cheese and breads from the buffet but he has ordered some scrambled eggs from the waiter. I am impressed but not surprised.  Impressed that my father’s recovery from this bug that had laid him low just a couple of days ago had progressed to the point where he would eat a substantial breakfast before getting into a car. Surprised because my father has always been a big eater. In fact, the thing that made him seek out medical help when he developed lymphoma was that he could not eat an entire sausage so I am happy that he is eating.

 

The waiter comes and asks Hungarian what I would like for breakfast. At least that is what I think that he said as I don’t understand a word he is saying. I reply in the only words in Hungarian that I can speak with any sort of confidence “Coca Cola.” My father looks at me and asks “Don’t you feel well?” knowing that drinking soda, let alone Coke,  is not something that I regularly engage in.

 

“No, no I am fine. I am just not that hungry and my stomach is a little queasy so I don’t want to push it. I don’t want to tell him that this morning that I was forced to take two Immodium and had nearly thrown up for the first time in nearly 20 years. I don’t want to tell him, given my druthers,  I would be in bed asleep.  I don’t want our trip together to be about me being sick. I don’t want my father to feel like he has to take care of me. This is our chance to explore together and I don’t want to be the one who, excuse the expression, shits the bed.

 

We leave Sopron on a route that takes us directly past the house in which my grandmother was born.  As we pass it I am filled with memories of her. She always made me feel loved and complete. Her hugs a comfort and provided safe haven.  I think about how she smelled. I picture her smiling at me and shaking her head in the way that she did sometimes. This is where it began for her and as a consequence for both my Dad and me. So as I drive by I wave and say “Good-bye Grandma.” I looked over and see my father staring at the red house as we drive by and I wonder what he is thinking. My memories of her are and when she was older and life had taken its toll. When she was a stranger in a strange land.  His memories of her are from this place and from a time where life had not extracted so much. And even though my grandmother has been dead almost 30 years I miss her and I wonder what it must be like for him to be without his mother for so long. Her funeral is the only time in my life I have ever heard him sob.

 

Our mission before we leave town is to find the cemetery where my father’s Uncle Ede is buried. Until this trip I was not aware of my father having an Uncle who survived the war. My understanding had been of the 13 children by three wives of my great grandfather, only my grandmother and her sister, Sidi in Brazil, had survived the war. But that is how this trip had been so far. Uncovering the veil of the past. Part of that process had been visits to many graveyards in the “five town” region in Hungary looking for my father’s long-lost relatives, the Hacklers, Hess’s and Tischlers. In many cases, these graveyards are locked and I needed to jump the fences to see if there is anything worth seeing. At some point I ask my father what he hopes to accomplish by visiting these places and after a pause, and in moment of transparent emotions replies “So they are not forgotten.”

 

After many wrong turns, several stops to ask passerby’s for directions, a few false sitings and almost having given up hope we finally find the cemetery we are seeking. It is clear that the Jewish Community in Sopron has diminished to the point that they no longer take good care of their burial places. It is overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. Trees are not trimmed, tombstones akimbo and walkways between graves have become barely discernable paths. We are trying to figure out how to find my father’s Uncle’s grave when a man with a purple wife beater t shirt, shaved head and bad teeth along with a woman dressed in goth sheik approach us. Somehow, they were able to communicate they were squatters in the cemetery’s only building and that they are also took care of the place. When we told them whom we were looking for, they helped us search and within a short period of time the young man shouts out  that he has  found Ede’s grave..

 

His grave was one of the few that have the appearance of being well maintained. We stand there for a few minutes and silence and then I ask “What do you remember about Ede?”

 

He smiled and in a bit of a far away voice said “He was your grandmother’s baby brother and the ultimate survivor….He escaped from Russian POW camp in World War 1. I am not sure how he survived the Nazis…perhaps he had protected job or was hidden by the Communist underground. His wife Helene, I remember as being very kind to me and a very good cook, was not as lucky. She was caught and transported to Poland where she was murdered by the Nazi’s.” His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a few seconds.

 

“Did they have any kids?”

 

“My father smiled at the thought. “Yes, two boys. Karl and Bela. When I would visit Sopron we sometimes would go off into the woods with the local Zionist organization who were trying to teach us how to avoid being captured and escaping.”

 

“What happened to them?”

 

“I am not really sure. I know at some time, (my guess is that was during the early days of the war when Hungary was not yet full of German troops), in some unknown manner, made their way to Israel.  They may still live there.  Bela wrote to my parents during the fifties.  He was married then and had one daughter.  We lost track of them.”

 

“Those are the ones you ask me to look up every time I go to Israel business?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“So what happened to Ede after the War.”

 

“He came back to Sopron. Got a job as a bus driver. Remarried and was eventually pensioned and died of natural causes.”

Mission accomplished, we place stones on Ede’s tombstone and make our way through the overgrowth, weeds, and akimbo gravestones to our car. I know better than to ask him about his thoughts. He will only crack wise or make a joke. Instead I concentrate on driving and leave him to his thoughts. For a long while we drive  in silence.

 

We cross the Hungarian/Austrian border with barely an acknowledgement from the Guards of either country. Apparently, we do not look worthy of them wasting their time on and just like I do when I clear customs or enter a country anywhere, I feel like I have gotten away with something. It is a nice feeling and soon the car is speeding down A2 at 140km hours.

 

As on the trip to Sopron, my father is the navigator. He is blessed with a great sense of direction and the map reading skills the army teaches its officers. He has also been to this part of the world many times. So I have faith that he will get us to our destination of Fahrafeld. I believe that our passage on B and C roads has more to do with happenstance than design

 

It is sunny and warm and our windows are open and the smell of flowers and freshly cultivated fields fill the compartment of the car. Whether it is because of our stomach problems or the fact that my father and I have spoken more in the last three days than we have in years we are not talking very much. We pass the time looking beyond our windows. We pass through vineyards with their meticulously kept vines greening and in bloom. . There are small farms that look dainty by American standards, with freshly cultivated tracks and farmers atop green tractors often wearing brightly covered overalls.  There are fields densely packed with yellow bright yellow flowers.  We pass through small towns that look like they belong more in n gauge train set than in real life.

 

At one point I comment to my father that everything looks familiar enough to be comforting but just different enough that we could be in an episode of the Outer Limits. But he is lost in some thoughts beyond the reaches of the car and does not respond. I drive on.

 

We are in the hills now and the scenery has changed from farms and fields to meadows and trees. Not to far from Pottenstein which is the nearest town of any size close to Fahrafeld my father yells at  me “Turn right, turn right here” in the same tone he used to use when he was teaching me to drive. I do my best not to let his tone of  voice get the better of me but for a few minutes I am one pissed off 17 year old whose father is doing him no favor by teaching him how to drive. I slam on the breaks and still manage to make the turn a little faster than I probably should have.

 

Dad realizes that the tone of voice that he used is not appropriate and as he has done so often in the past when this is the case, changes the subject. He says “ I know where we are now. You see that building up there on the hill, that is horticultural research station for the University of Vienna. I remember it from the last time we were here.”

 

He says this with satisfaction and there is also an element of excitement that I have not heard in his voice on this trip. So I ask him “Are you excited about going to Fahrafeld and he replies in a manner that is typical of him “I don’t know if you would exactly call it excited….”

 

I can tell that what is to follow is a discourse on the appropriate word for how he feels and I turn down the volume. I realize that this discussion is just a way for my father to mask his feelings. For whatever reason traveling to this place has brought more emotion to the surface than all of the other things we have done on this trip. More than seeing his best friend in the hospital; more than visiting the graveyards of his relatives; more than visiting the house his mother was born in. As he talks in the background I wonder why he feels so emotionally connected to this place. All I can remember him telling me about Fahrafeld  is that he used to go there to visit his Aunt in summer and it is the place he learned to love buttermilk a beverage that to this day he claims is the best drink in the world to relieve the heat of a summer day.

 

So after he has finished talking I say in my best smart ass way “You know I didn’t listen a lot to you as a kid, tell me about you and this place.”

 

He reminds me that when my grandmother was very young her father died.  Her mother had to figure out a way to manage a household with 13 children with no husband.  Some of the younger kids who could not contribute to the livelihood of the family were parceled out to other relatives. Little Jeni, age 4, was sent to Fahrafeld to live with her Aunt Pepi her mother’s sister. She lived there until she was 14 when she sent away to a technical school to be a seamstress. My grandmother always thought of her Aunt as her mother. It was natural for her to farm her only son to her during the summer season. Dad tell me that he would arrive by train in the early summer and not leave again until school was about to begin. He tells me that his Aunt Pepi was the only grandmother he ever knew and says so in  such a wistful voice and I know that I cannot press further.

 

We come to a T-intersection and my father tells me to take a right. I look at the sign and it says Rt 212. When I suggest the irony of the Rt, 212 being the NYC area code, to my father and he just nods his full attention on the road ahead and trying to find Pepi’s house. The road is of the type that German performance cars were made for. It is narrow, winding, and well maintained. It is also quite picturesque. Along the driver’s side of the road is a fast-moving stream about 5 meters wide that you can see the occasional fly fisherman and fields full of wildflowers and what appear to be Dandelions. On the right side are small cottages, the Austrian version of a cape, in brightly colored hues and a mountain dense with trees.

 

After about 5 minutes we pass a white rectangular sign with the word Fahrafeld written on it.  Almost immediately upon passing into the town the road becomes canopied by trees on either side. The houses become more frequent and my father, who is normally calm to the point of stoic, is visibly agitated and keeps telling me to slow down. I look in my rear-view mirror and see that a long line of traffic has built up behind us and tell my father that I really can’t slow down much more. This news is greeted with a harrumph and visible annoyance. The town itself is beautiful with small cottages and what can only be described as chalet’s in various bright colors densely populating the right hand side of the road. On the stream side, it appears that they have created a small park with paved paths and flower beds. The town does not last long. A couple of minutes at most and before too long we see the same white rectangular sign with Fahrafeld written on it only this time there is a red slash going through it.

 

My father who was agitated before is now quite upset and I can tell by the way he tells me to “turn the car around” that he is royally pissed off. I see a picnic area on the right-hand side of the road and I pull into it hoping to use it as a jug handle to turn around. I don’t want to drive with my father this annoyed. I don’t want to have an argument with him and I know that in his current state the 17 year old in me could come out at any moment so I pull the car over and park. He barks “What are you doing?” and I respond that the scene in front of us…. a grassy meadow dotted with dandelions, a farmhouse with a red roof surrounded by trees, framed by a mountain in the background…is lovely and I want to take a photograph. I take my time and probably more photographs than I should but the result is what I had hoped for as my father is visibly calmer when I re-enter the car.

 

I try to go slower as we go back through town but the road is a very busy one and before too long there is once again a long line of traffic behind us. When I see in the middle of this village a place to pull over I seize the opportunity.  My father is looking around and tells me in a very disappointed tone that he thinks that we may have come all this way for nothing as he can’t spot his Grandmother/Great Aunt’s house and that he is afraid that it might have been torn down. I can tell that he’s upset and wish that I could find the words to comfort him but I can’t so I remain silent.

 

He says you see that over there. I nod. He says that is a war memorial and lists the names of the dead from this town. One of the kids I use to play with as a kids name is listed there. As I pull back onto the road, I think about how bizarre a world we live in. How two childhood friends could end up on either side of a war and one makes it and the other does not. It reminds me of how random life is and as always I am disturbed by this.

 

I am broken out of my thoughts by my father yelling at me to pull over. Luckily, just beyond a small bridge passing over the stream,  I spot a place to pull the car off the road and park.. My father points at a light blue house with a red tile roof and only windows facing the street and says “That is your Aunt Pepi’s house….they have clearly renovated it but that is clearly her house.” His tone of voice which just minutes earlier had been harsh and upset is now that of relief and delight and I can tell that seeing this house has transformed him in a way that I can’t imagine.

 

We both get out of the car and study the house from the distance. My father is wearing his signature Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses so it is hard to figure out what is going on inside of him but there is a whisper of a smile on his face so whatever is going on I suspect is a good thing.  As I pull my camera from the backseat so that I can take photographs of the house my father turns and walks towards the bridge. My fathers steps are small and deliberate, probably  the result of the long drive, and it upsets me to realize that he is walking just like the octogenarian he is.  I snap a few photos and when I finish my father  is turning the corner onto the bridge and disappears from sight.

 

I hurry to catch up with him but when I turn the corner my father is nowhere to be found. Instead I see a 10 year old boy standing in the middle of the bridge, surveying the scenery, as if he were a Prince and this was his own private kingdom.

 

The following afternoon found us in another cab. We had spent the morning doing errands among them going to the National Bank of Austria where my father banked a small pension given to those who had been forced to flee the Nazi’s and a quick stop for espresso and cake at Demels.  Our destination on this sun drenched but alpine cool afternoon was to visit my father’s boyhood friend Paul Grosz. For the last several years he had been suffering with Parkinson’s disease.  Recently, his symptoms of body tremors and stiffness, confusion, and an inability to communicate clearly had forced a hospitalization. As a consequence our first stop was to pick up Paul’s wife Henni at their home.

Despite being named for him, and being my father’s oldest if not best friend, I had only Paul twice in my life. The first time was on my only previous trip to Vienna when I was 7. My memories of that trip are few  but I have a vivid memory of visiting the Furrier shop Paul owned. He gave me a mouse that was made out of mink that I adored. That is until I lost him. The other memory I had of him was when he had visited the United States shortly after I had become a Bar Mitzvah. In honor of becoming a man, he had given me a beautiful Seiko chronograph with an orange face that I wore for years and still cherish. Other than those two meetings, that he had been the leader of the Jewish Community in Vienna for decades, and the rare stories from my father’s childhood, I knew very little.

As the cab maneuvered in traffic I asked “When you returned to Vienna did you look for Paul?”

“Of course.”

“How did you find him.”

“I went to the furrier shop his father owned. But he wasn’t there so I went to the apartment they used to live in and was told they had moved but the folks there had a forwarding address. I made my way over there and I found his mother. Paul was not there but she, in the best Viennese tradition and despite the shortages the war, invited me in for coffee and cake.  While we were  having coffee with her Paul  arrived. ”

“That must have been one hell of a reunion? I mean you had done it. Survived. And then to just show up on his doorstep wearing the uniform of an officer in the  American Army? That is a whole new definition of the term shock in awe!”

He paused and replied. “He just acted, as did I, like we had just seen other the week before. Hi Paul. Hi Ernst” He grinned, a self-satisfied smile  and said “We didn’t need to anything more. We knew what it meant.”

“What did it mean?”

“We survived.”

I nodded,  knowing that while I understood the words,  I had no idea what it really meant. I don’t think anyone who is not a survivor can understand the jumbled emotions that go along with that status.  I asked “Why didn’t they leave?”

“It wasn’t that easy. You had to get permission to leave. You had to get permission to go somewhere else. We had your Uncle Max who managed to get us a visa to the US and I had gotten permission to immigrate to Palestine. There were limited spots and many were not that lucky. Some thought they could wait it out…survive the Nazi’s. I suspect because Paul’s Mom was a Christian  and I  Paul’s mother they thought they could wait it out. ”

“How did they manage to make it through? ”

“Paul’s mother’s family hid them and I think they spent some time living in the sewers. U-boaters.”

We fell into silence. I knew from a life of living with my father and how he told stories of those years during and surrounding the war that what happened was lmore complicated than the responses my father was giving me . I knew, for example,  that at the beginning of the war nearly 200,000 jews were living in Vienna and that many, up to 130,000 had managed to find other places to live including places like Singapore. But those who left, left almost all their wealth and belongings. Where ever they went they had to begin their new life with little but the sentimental items like photographs and other family ephemera they managed to carry with them.

Of the 60,000 Jews left in Vienna when they closed the border only 2,000 survived the war. Paul had managed to win one of the most horrific lotteries of all time.

When we pull up in front of Paul’s home I am hit with another wave of Déjà vu. I had been here before when I was six. I remembered they had a back yard where my brother and I were delighted to be able to play after weeks of travel. I seemed to recall an airplane with a rubber band motor. As we walk up the front steps, we are met by Henni. She greets my father with hugs and kisses and then me with the same. She then steps back and taking us both in while commenting on how much we looked alike. We were ushered into her parlor because in proper Viennese fashion as she has prepared us a little cake and coffee so we would not go to the hospital with any hunger.

Over the coffee and cake she explains that Paul had been admitted to the hospital because his Parkinson’s had progressed to the point where he was no longer able to take care of himself, that his ability to speak had become limited and that the Dr’s had thought that a change in medication would help him with his tremors and communication. This had been going on for the past two weeks. She was, in the gentlest of ways, trying to prepare my father to see his oldest friend now altered by this horrible disease.

Vienna’s General Hospital is different than any hospital I had ever visited. It is a high rise. 22 stories tall with a motor lobby for cabs and cars drop offs and a mini mall that contains everything from flower shops to McDonalds. It was more like visiting an apartment complex in Miami Beach than a hospital that had originally been established in 17^th century.

A high-speed elevator takes us to the 21^st floor where Paul’s room is located. Hennie leads the way to Paul’s room with my father and me in her wake. He is not there. She suggests that my father go to the nurse’s station and see if they have seen Paul. Apparently,  despite his currently being confined to a  wheelchair and troubles speaking, he liked to socialize. While Henny and I remained guard outside Paul’s room my father made his way down the hall. There, in wheelchair, sat his old friend. My father walked up to him and when Paul recognized him,  he pushed himself up slowly out of his wheelchair and despite  tremors stood at attention for my father who returned the gesture. No words were spoken. Two old soldiers who had fought many battles together saluting each other without a word. 70 years of friendship encapsulated without a word. The silence a part of their code. Why speak of things that are not capable of being understood or where words are inadequate.

Their silent tribute to seven decades of friendship continues to be one of the most moving moments I have ever witnessed.  The thought of it still brings me to tears.

It was decided that all of us trying to sit in Paul’s hospital room would be uncomfortable and an inconvenience to his roommate. Instead, after straightening Paul up a little bit and gathering up his caregiver, we all head downstairs to the Hospitals coffee house. I expected a little cafeteria space such as we have in our hospitals at home with too much Formica decorated in colors out some industrial design handbook with bad food that would increase a cardiologist’s bank account.

I should have known that in this city that invented the coffee house, where patisseries and pastries were part of their birthright, a hospital coffee shop would be far superior to what is found in the US.  It was decorated in browns and brasses, the tables of real wood, with no Formica. The menu had everything from Schnitzel to Sachertorte. And apparently smoking was on the menu as well  because everyone in the restaurant seemed to be smoking and a blue haze hung just below the ceiling.

We arranged ourselves around a square table. My father and Henny on side. Paul and I on the other with the caretaker sitting on the end closest to Paul. My father was an innately polite person. He had the ability to take awkward social situations and somehow ease them into the normal. For example, once when my brother and I were quite young, perhaps 6 and 7, we were having dinner one summer’s evening at mother’s mother home. She decided to serve as a starter cantaloupe soup. Not the normal cuisine for us  kids who thought tomato soup and grilled American Cheese sandwiches were high billafare.  We declined to eat the soup with ewws  and grosses that might have made our grandmother feel badly. My father, in an effort to disguise the bad behavior of his children, told her how much he loved the cantaloupe soup and proceeded to eat both my brother’s and my portion. Family myth is that he was sick for days afterward.

Dad could tell that this was a very difficult situation for Paul. His verbal skills had deteriorated to the point where getting a word out was painfully labored. This was made even more tortuous by the fact he wanted to speak English so that I would feel a part of the conversation. As a consequence a pattern emerged pretty quickly at our table. I would ask a question and Paul would try to answer. If he got hung up or frustrated in finding the words my father would help him complete his thoughts.  Paul would react and try to expand a little a to me.

After we had ordered coffee and some Austrian pastries my father told Paul that the reason we had come to visit was because I was interested in writing a story about what it must have been like for him, to return to the Vienna at the end of the War… a jewish boy forced to flee his homeland only to return a few later, a man and an officer in the conquering army.

This embarrassed me a bit. I am not a professional writer and I didn’t know if I could even write something worth reading.  As I tried to conceal my discomfiture I asked Paul “What was your reaction, when you saw your old friend in your mother’s living room, wearing an US Army officer’s uniform?”

Paul glanced over at my father, and then back at me, his large eyes gleaming with a sense mischief and said in his halting tone. “It was good to see him.”

“Were you surprised?”

“No. I was pretty sure that he would turn up sometime.”

I could tell that he was going to be every bit as difficult to get information out as my father so I decided to change tack a bit. I had heard stories for years of how my father had a group of friends who roamed the streets of Vienna after the I said to Paul “Who was the leader of the gang you two were in.” I knew that as close as my father and Paul were that part of what defined their relationship was a fierce competitiveness and I was not above tossing a grenade to see if I could some details beyond single sentences from them.

They held each other’s gaze for a few seconds and then my father replied “He was.” but in such a way to make sure the listener knew he was just being gracious. And Paul smiled back and said in a halting way but with the same inflection as my father, “He was.” And then they both laughed knowing that had both outsmarted me.

Frustrated, but somewhat undaunted I persisted. I asked Paul “What was the name of you “gang.” He smiled and responded stuttering a little bit “The Wolf…wolf pack”and smiled eyes gleaming as if the thought of this band of miscreants brought back every good childhood memories from schools.

“How many people were in this gang.”

Paul held up his hand and said “Four.”

“Who were the other two?”

Paul began “Walter…” and seemed to get hung up and my father added “Eduard…Eddie.”

There was a pause as if the thoughts of these childhood gang blocked out the present for these old friends. As if their friends were now seated at the table with us. Enjoying a smoke and a coffee with their old comrades. I knew how special this gang was to my father. He had been telling us about them since we were small children asking for bed time stories. He would tell of the adventures of Ted and Hugi and their desire to escape Vienna in a makeshift submarine they were creating in a fishing shack on the flood plain of the Danube and the adventures they had along the way.

Wondering whether these bedtime stories were based in fact I asked “What this gang of your do?”

Again, my father exchanged a look with Paul and said “Mostly, we tried to find a way to get out of Vienna. There was always some rumor of Singpore, Palestine or some other country opening up for visas’s or a kindertransport to England or anywhere safe.  We tracked these down and let our friends know.  Or when people needed someone for an odd job. We needed the money. It cost money to leave and we…..” Here my father paused I think because he was trying to determine whether or not to tell the story “or get protection. I bought a bb gun for protection but when my family found out they made me give it back.”

Paul nudged my elbow and signaled that he wanted to have something to write with him. My father obliged him by handing him the pen that was perennially in his pocket. Paul then took a napkin on it drew what appeared to be a stick with five branches growing out of its top. He said “The wolfs paw.” He then drew a line through the second branch sticking up from the stick and said “Me.”

My father jumped in and said “That is how we used to leave messages to each other. If we had been some place and wanted to tell the other we had been there we would draw the wolf’s paw and depending on what digit was crossed we could tell who it was. I was the first, Paul was the second and so on. “

“But what kind of messages would you leave each other.”

“Well when we found that abandoned row boat and had a scheme to get it to work again…we needed to leave each other messages on what was needed without giving away who was working on the boat because if the authorities found out we surely would have been arrested.”

“So the Hugi and Ted stories were true?”

“Well lets just say there was some fact in the fiction.”

“What happened to the boat.”

“It disappeared. We went to work on it one day and it was gone. Whether someone else saw it and stole it or the Nazi’s found it and towed it away we never knew. But it scared the shit out of us.”

I paused before asking the next question because I think I knew the answers but wanted to make sure that I had the facts straight.

“If we found something that we thought would be valuable a job or coffee or some such or if there was trouble we had symbols for them all.”

I asked, reluctantly “What happened to them…the other members of the Wolfpack?”

Paul replied “Walter I used to see around for a while and then he disappeared one day. One day he was there and the next gone and no record as to what happens I thought he had managed to escape. After the war I found out he died at Malthausen.”

“And Eddie”

My father replied “Eddie….” and sighed and then said “He got out before all of us. A kindertransport to England where he lived with in Lancastshire with two school teachers. When he turned 18 he enlisted in the RAF and on the very last day of the war his plane crashed and he was killed. Poor bastard.” A silence fell over the table.  I didn’t realize it at the time but my Dad had been in touch with Eddie from the time he left Europe until shortly before he was drafted. After my father’s death we discovered he had saved the letters for over 70 years and had even written a short story about being in England and searching for some trace of his old friend and Wolfpack member.

There was a pause in the conversation. The memory of Edi and Walter of the memory of the adventures of the Wolfpack hovering over the table like the cigarette smoke at the tables adjacent to us. It made me realize that the salute Paul had given my father by getting out of his wheelchair and standing like a soldier at parade rest  was more than courtesy afforded to any old friend. It was a salute to their old comrades and friends. Paul’s and my Dad’s survival and a tribute to Edi and Walter there fallen comrades.

The conversation proved exhausting to Paul. His nurse signaled that it was time to leave and our coffee klatch broke up. We said our goodbyes n the lobby.  Hennie, the aide and Paul returned to his room. Pops and I to the motor lobby to catch a cab. As the taxi pulled away from the hospital my father said to me, “I need a drink.” I understood. I needed one as well.

 

 

 

The next morning was another beautiful mild spring day and after a hearty breakfast at the hotel we went for another stroll. This time we headed out towards the Opraring and the Ringstrasse as our initial destination was the Kunsthistoriches Museum which contains the amazing art collection of the Hapsburg’s.  I remember being struck by the beautiful gardens we passed with lilacs in full bloom and gardens full of newly bloomed and brightly colored tulips.

When we arrived at the museum Pops chose to sit on a bench opposite the statue of Empress Marie Theresa while I gave the museum the once over. It was not that he did not like the museum but the standing and the stairs would be a challenge for him. And moreover, despite the sophisticate he was, he had a low tolerance for museums. 30 minutes to an hour and he was done.  Add to that the fact he had been there before, sitting in a garden, soaking in the Viennese spring seemed ideal choice for Dad..

The collection of paintings and antiques were amazing in their depth and scope. But what struck me most of all was the realization that this had been an Empire, for five centuries a leading power in Europe and Vienna its capital. And for a time, it was the center of the Universe. And then, after World War 1 they were suddenly an insignificant capital, in an insignificant country. It helped me understand the Anschluss and why most Austrians accepted annexation by Germany and becoming part of the Reich. They wanted their empire back.

Gaining an understanding of Austria’s vainglory did not diminish my contempt and anger at what they had done in their misguided attempt to reclaim empire. It was said while Germans were successful anti Semites, Austrian’s were pro’s.  Worse, the Austrians had never fully accepted their role in the Holocaust.

My tour did not take long as, like my old man, I have a imited tolerance for museums. I love the art. I love the history but if I take any longer than an hour in a museum I get cranky. I found my father sitting on his bench, enjoying the spring sunshine and  it looked as if he might have even managed to slip a quick nap in while he waited for me.  I asked him if he was tired and told him if he wanted we go back to the hotel we could.  He needed to be up for what was next and did not want to push him too hard. What was to come next would require a huge reservoir of emotional energy that would be a challenge even for me.   He told me he was ready in a way that suggested that he thought I was coddling him. To prove himself ready, he set off at a brisk pace  to the Karlsplatz, a light rail station, a few blocks away. When we arrived my father without seeking guidance from anyone  picked the #44 trolley and jumped on board.

I asked my father “We’re Jews allowed to take the trolley after Krystalnacht?”

He pursed his lips into a pucker, as if he was sucking on a sour memory,  and said “No.” I wanted to ask him how he got around but I could tell he was far away and no doubt my questions would annoy him so I got lost in my own thoughts instead.

Our destination that morning was  #48 Ottakringer Strasse, the apartment where my father was born and lived his entire life until he left Vienna in 1939. It was a central part of our family mythology about my father’s childhood. My grandparents were very poor. My grandfather worked in abattoir, cleaning hides and getting them ready to be tanned. A job that was brutal on the body and crushed the soul for very little money. My grandmother worked as a seamstress making handmade ties at home. All they could afford was a two-room apartment that had a kitchen, where my father slept, and a living room where my grandparents slept. The bathrooms were shared privy’s at the end of the hallway and the refrigerator was, weather permitting, the ledge outside their window. It is this apartment that the Nazi’s invaded on Krystalnacht and arrested my grandfather and terrified my father.

My father, who never talked to us about that night, wrote to us what he called a “minor memorandum” on the 50^th Anniversary of that awful night.

A MINOR MEMORANDUM TO MY CHILDREN

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF KRYSTALLNACHT,

        NOVEMBER 9 AND 10, 1938

I don’t intend to make this a big deal literary effort or a weepy emotional debauch.  I simply want to tell you what I remember about Krystallnacht. So you should remember as well. And if there are to be others like us, so you can tell them. Nothing big! Just a small and portable lesson about the planet we live on and the hazards of being a little different.

 

Krystallnacht did not start for me until November 10, 1938. I knew that von Rath had been shot by Gruenspan but I knew nothing about what was happening all over Germany during the night of the ninth.  I was 12 years (12 10/12 ths )old and I was asleep.

I was still lying in my bed, at about seven on the morning of November 10, when there was loud knocking on our door. I heard my father and mother (your grandparents ) talking to some people. Several stormtroopers (SA) had come to arrest Jewish men.  The entrance to our apartment was through the kitchen and all this was taking place in the kitchen.  After a few minutes I heard one of the Brownshirts ask whether there were any other male Jews in the apartment. Grandma said only my little boy.  I dont think they believed her because they came into our mainroom, where my bed was.  I closed my eyes and pretended I was asleep.  They came to my bed and they looked at me and they must have decided either that I was too young, or that I looked too fierce to mess around with since there were only six of them. So they took just grandpa with them and they left. 

As we later found out, they took grandpa to the local police station.  From there they marched him and others to the Rossauer Kaserne, a military barracks.  He was lucky because he had a roof over his head.  Many other Jewish men were taken to a large soccer stadium and did not have a roof over their head.

Grandpa had been fired from his regular job as a bristle processor a couple months before.  He was earning some money by helping a carter hauling the furniture of Jews that had been kicked out of their apartments. The cart was pulled by one brown horse.  Grandpa had a job scheduled for that morning. 

Grandma sent me to help the carter in grandpa’s place. May- be grandma was a tough Hungarian cookie who did not want the Rothkopf’s reputation as men of their word sullied, or maybe we needed the money, or perhaps she wanted me out of her hair so that she and Aunt Mitzi ( who lived in the next apartment and whose son Walter and friend Albert were already on the way to Dachau) could weep in peace.   

I don’t remember exactly where I met the carter but it was  at his client’s apartment near the Jewish section of Vienna. We loaded the wagon with furniture.   I sat next to the driver on the high bench behind the horse.  Then the brown horse slowly pulled us through the streets towards the place where we had to make our delivery.

Groups of people were standing in front of the broken windows of Jewish stores, gawking while Brownshirts were putting their owners through their paces — handing over business papers, washing the sidewalk with lye, licking Aryan employees shoes clean. Anything that would keep the cultured Viennese crowds amused.  We passed a narrow street that led to one of Vienna’s larger synagogue.  The alley was jammed with jeering onlookers.  Stormtroopers were throwing furniture and Torah scrolls through the big main door into the street.  One side of the roof (I couldnt see the other and you know what a sceptic I am ) was afire.  I remember very vividly the twists of whitish-yellow smoke that were curling up the slope of blue tiles.

Farther on we passed another synagogue that was fully ablaze.  The police had made people stand back from it.  I suppose they feared for their safety.  A fire truck was parked down the street. The firemen were leaning against their equipment, talking and smoking cigarettes. Everywhere there were clusters of people, in a holiday mood, gathering around smashed Jewish stores. Little groups of Jews, both men and women, were being led along the sidewalk flanked by squads of SA men.  The Jews were made to do all sorts of menial chores.  Someone told me later, that one elderly Jew asked to go to the toilet.  They made him go in a bucket and then forced him to eat his feces.

By now I was beginning to figure out what was going on. I sat high on my horsey throne (just like the Duke of Edinburgh when he drives his high-stepping pair, except that I didn’t wear an apron ).  Whenever we passed a sidewalk event or other happening, I pulled down the wings of my nostrils (I thought I looked more Christian that way), staring straight ahead, but watching the Nazi street theatre out of the corners of my eyes. The driver, who was also Jewish, was a hard old soul.  I dont remember him saying a single word to me, all day, about what was going on.  Maybe he thought I was too young to hear about such things.

I dont remember much more detail.  I got paid.  The trolley I went home on was crowded.  I kept staring out the window so that people wouldn’t notice the handsome Jewishness of my face.  Beyond the rattling trolley panes, the peculiar happenings of November 10, 1938 were still in progress here and there, even as the day’s light was fading.

When I got home, grandma and Mitzi were still weeping.  They had just come back from the police station but grandpa and the other Jews were no longer there.

Grandpa came home ten days later.  He had spent that time in a room with 500 other people and one water faucet.  They did a lot of military drill ( was this the beginning of the Hagganah ?) and exercises — push-ups, deep kneebends, and the like.  Some who didn’t do so well got beaten up. He never told me whether they did anything to him.  But then I wouldn’t tell you either.  Grandpa was lucky.  A lot of the Jewish men who were arrested on the 9th and 10th of November were sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.

Not one single synagogue was left intact in all of Vienna.  That really screwed me up because I was nearly thirteen. You need to have a Torah to become a Bar Mitzwah and you need to have a table on which to lay the scroll while you read. And how was I to get a fountain pen now?

The dead, of course, are dead.  They are mourned by those who remember. Tears dry. Bruises heal. Razed synagogues become  parking lots.  Injured dignity heals although slowly.  What hurts most to this day is impotent compassion for those who were swept away. 

In order to have faith in our quality as human beings, we need to remember! And thats why I am writing you this note. 

As the trolley made its way I recalled the words my father had written nearly 20 years before and I tried to imagine what it must have been like as a 12 year old boy to have to have your house broken into the middle of the night, have your father taken from you, perhaps never to return and then being forced to go and do your fathers job, while atrocities were happening all around you, because you needed the money so badly that you didn’t have a choice. What must have it been like to see your neighbors making your co-religionists lick their boots and clean their sidewalks with toothbrushes. To see your synagogue burn to the ground just days before you were to become a bar mitzvah after studying for years to achieve this milestone right of passage.

I couldn’t imagine what he had gone through.

My father jostled my arm to get my attention and said “We’re here.”

There, astride the corner of OttakringerStrasse and Bergsteggasse was a 4 story,  L shaped Belle Epoque building, the color of ripe hay,  with a mansard roof.  The main entrance to the building was a beveled corner at the intersection above which a blue and white sign with “48” printed on it. Embracing the outside of the building was a small café with a blue awning that looked as if it was the place where the neighborhood drank its coffee and beer.

Pops pointed at the building and said “See the third floor, 2^nd window over, that was our apartment.” A feeling of déjà vu rippled through me as I realized my father and I had this very same conversation over 40 years previously on my first and only trip to Vienna. It was so long ago that fragments of the trip are all that remain in my consciousness. My parents cutting me off after my third hot chocolate. Seeing a Tom and Jerry cartoon in German.

I had, when I thought about this moment in preparation for the trip, realized that coming back to his childhood must evoke powerful memories and emotions for my father. More than just the Holocaust and all it wrought. But of motherly hugs, and family gatherings. Of fatherly love and the complicated man Marcus had been both loving and angry and the occasional beatings these unexorcised emotions would generate. A childhood of happiness and deprivation that would help create the man that would one day be the father that his children adored.

Now we were here at the site of those sweet and sour memories and for a moment was so overcome with the emotion of the moment I needed to turn my back on Dad so he would not see my tears. Eventually, the light changed, and I followed him across the street.

We walked up the front steps and into the dark foyer of the building. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the lighting and when they did I saw a set of broad stairs that led up into the building. I turned to my father and asked “What are you thinking about? ”

He paused, reluctant to share his thoughts and replied “ I was thinking about the wife of the superintendent of the building. She was a nasty piece of work. She hated having Jews in the building and would scream at us kids every chance she could get. She would say vile things and scared the shit out of us.”

“Didn’t your mother say anything to her.”

“What could she say without getting us thrown out of the building or worse.”

I decided to change the subject. “Really, no bathrooms in your apartments.”

He smiled and said “Yes. If you had to go the bathroom you had go down the hall. Except when I small and we kept a honey pot in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go outside…. The Super’s wife always yelled that we were fouling the bathrooms and making her life miserable.” He paused and said “You should go up and look.”

I replied “No. I have seen enough and I don’t want to have explain myself to the current tenants. Lets go outside and get a beer.”

Once seated, and beer ordered. I asked “When you got to Vienna at the end of the War how did you find a place to stay.”

“You have to remember that Vienna, at the time was an occupied city. I went to Army HQ and asked them to assign me visiting officer’s quarters. I can remember they had a hard time finding me space as the city had a lack of housing due to the war and eventually assigned me a room that I had to share with another officer.”

“Did you two get along.”

“Yeah he loved that I was a native and I knew where everything was and could of course speak the language.” There he hesitated as if contemplating whether he should share something with me and then said “He even tried to recruit me. “

“Recruit you how.”

“He wanted me to stay in Vienna and help them with intelligence work. He thought that I might be an asset.”

“Really!” I said honestly surprised. “What unit was he in?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Come on”

“I remember that his arm patch had a horse’s head, like a chess piece on it.” (Years later I would surmise from checking out arm patches on Wikipedia that this was the insignia of the 650^th Military Intelligence Group.)

“Why didn’t you do it?”

He smiled at me, into a benevolent way that suggested that there was no way that I would understand what he would say, and replied “I wanted to get back to school.”

He was probably right to think that I wouldn’t understand because to me it sounded like he could have been James Bond if he wanted. Even at 50 I couldn’t understand giving that up. But thinking about this years later, knowing what I know now, I realize that my father had already lived too exciting a life. That what he craved was a less interesting, not more interesting, life. All things considered I could appreciate that.

I said “I didn’t mean to go down the side track. What I wanted to get to is what was required of visiting officers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what did you wear. You didn’t wear fatigues or civilian clothes. You wore your class A’s right?”

“Yes.”

“So did you come here when you came back looking for your relatives.”

“Yes.”

“And did you see your landlady.”
“Yes.”

“And did she recognize you despite the fact you were 4 years older and had grown a foot since last you seen her and were now an officer in the US Army?”

“Yes.”

“How did she react?”

He looked away from me and I could see on his face that he was retrieving a very specific moment,  likely in full 1040p resolution and Dolby sound and said “ She was scared.”

I smiled at his simple response and asked “How did that make you feel?”

He paused,  as if a little ashamed of his emotion,  and said “Great. ” I was not ashamed of the smile I had my face at the thought of a tormentor of my father scared of my father. The thought of it made my day.

We were quiet for a few moments and he said “Lets go for a walk. “

Crossing the street we headed down Weyprechtstrasse and after a block or so we paused and he said “This used to be a park where me and my friends would play football.”

I asked “Was it grass?”

“No, gravel. It used to cut it us pretty good.”

“I can imagine.”

We resumed our walk after a very short walk my father paused and pointed to a plaque on the side of a building. It read “Hier stand eine um 1885/86 nach planen des archiiteten Ludwig Tischler Erbautes Synaggoge. Zerstort in der Reichskristallnacht am 10.November 1938” (Translation: Here was a synagogue building built around 1885/86 after the plan of the architect Ludwig Tischler. Destroyed in the Reichskristallnacht on 10 November 1938.)

My father says, in a voice that is supposed to convey nonchalance but sends the exact opposite message “This is where my synagogue was before the bastards burned it down.” He paused and said something to me that he had said many times before “I didn’t even get a fountain pen” referring to a once traditional present for a young Jewish boy when he became Bar Mitzvah.  This time, though, it struck me full force how hard he must have studied to become a bar mitzvah, how heartbroken, horrified, disappointed and devastated to see his temple be burn to the ground by a mob just weeks before fulfilling that dream. How that night changed his life forever. That every time he mentioned not getting that fountain pen, it meant more than not getting a gift, it meant the death of a dream and the end of whole period in his life.

It broke me and I started to weep and noticed my father was doing the same. I swore to myself there and then that I would get him his fountain pen and kept that promise later that year as a present for his 81^st birthday. It must have meant something to him because after his death I found the card and the pen in his top desk drawer. The card read: “To Zaki ben Mordecai: Abba…a little late, but better late than never…Love Daniel Ben Zaki.”

We turned the corner and after a few more blocks came across another belle epoque building but this one had a huge gold coat of arms, a shield boarded by angels on its sides and a bust of Hermes above, on its façade. He pointed and said “That is where Litzi, Aunt Leni and Uncle Benno lived.”

“Litzi emigrated (alone) to Belgium, how or why I don’t remember,  where a family named Weening became her foster parents.  When the Germans invaded she fled with them to unoccupied France.  They then made their way (on foot) across the Pyrenees, and then somehow  Mrs. Weening, Lizzi, and her foster sister got themselves to Jamaica, where they were interned.  Mr. Weening was badly wounded while serving with Dutch Forces in the Normandy Invasion.

“Walked?”

“Yes. In fact Litzi says the woman who was taking care of things walked over the Pyranees wearing high heels”

“What about Benno and Lenni?”

“He was arrested in 1938 and sent first to Dachau and then transferred to Weimar-Buchenwald.  Sometime in mid-1939 he was released on the condition that he leave Germany within 72 hours.  He got a visa to Italy (Milan) where we saw him as we passed through in November 1939.  Because his visa was no longer valid, he managed our meeting by leaping on our train while it was in the switching yard and then rode into the Milan station with us, where he managed to disappear immediately on the platform.  The Italians finally interned him in a camp in  Southern Italy (Alberobello and Ferramonte in Bari)  .  The British liberated the camp and he attached himself to the Jewish Brigade, whom he served as a laundry worker and later worked for American troops in Naples.

“Wow. The guy always scared me a little but he must have been some tough son of a bitch to survive all that. And Linni?”

“She stayed in Vienna, living underground what they called a u-boater.” One of her life savers was her gentile sister’s baptismal certificate.  She never left. She hid with people all over the city. I think a good part of it in the red light district. “

“Unbelievable story. I can’t even imagine what they must have gone through” I replied and then mentally chastised myself because for years I had remembered them as the horrible couple who had babysat my brother and I whom hadn’t  allowed me to have potato chips when I wanted them.

We walked a little farther down the road until we came across a white multiple story building with Schule Der Stadt Wien or School of the City of Vienna in red letters across the front of the building. He said “this is where I went to primary school.”

Deciding that we had been too serious for too long, I tried a little humor on him. I said “Is there a plaque somewhere.”

He smiled and replied “Smart ass.” And we walked on until we reached a very imposing, very federal looking building that said “Bundesfaschule fur wirschatliche Frauberlufe” which I in my very bad German roughly translated as “Federal School for Women.” Pops said “This is where I would have gone to High School.”

“But it says that it’s a woman school.”

“It wasn’t then.”

Then something occurred to me. “What do you mean would have gone to high school. I thought you started high school here.”

“No. I was about to but after Krystalnacht Jews weren’t allowed to attend secondary school.”

“Krystalnacht was in November of 1938 and you didn’t immigrate until a year later….What did you do with your days.”

His reply, slow coming as if he didn’t want to open up a can of worms said “I hung out with my friends. Lets get a cab.” I could tell he was tired and even though I wanted to know about what he had done during his year out of school I was quiet. I figured we would get there eventually and for now I was content to let my father have the peace of his own memories and for me to process all that I had learned that day.

But you know that when the truth is told…
That you can get what you want or you can just get old
You’re gonna kick off before you even
Get halfway through
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?

Billy Joel “Vienna”

 

European Airports always remind me Richard Scarry’s childrens books. Perhaps this is because I had just learned to read when I first went to Europe or the illustrations had a very European look that I couldn’t place until I went there. Or perhaps it was the color palette. I don’t really know but I do know that when I arrive at a European airport I am always disappointed that the ground crews are not humanized foxes, pigs, cats, or rabbits. And so it was when my Father and I landed at Vienna International Airport in May of 2006.

In the end, it had not been difficult to convince my father to go to Austria with me. While I am sure that my desire to understand his war experience and write a story about it was a part of the decision-making process I am pretty sure that it not take a lot unction to get him to go. One factor was no doubt to see his oldest friend in the world, my namesake, Paul Grosz. He had been suffering from Parkinson disease for many years and the chances were if my father didn’t visit him soon he would miss the chance to have one last talk with him.

Another reason it had been relatively easy to convince to embark on this trip with me was that despite all the pain and suffering he had experienced in Vienna as a child,  and the heartbreak he discovered on his return as a young man, he still loved the city. It contained the memories of his childhood. Those memories most of us hold most fondly. And knowing my father’s optimistic attitude and perhaps sharing some of the same brain chemistry, I know that the tough times had faded to the background while the memories of families, of his friends, and the good times had been burnished over time and visiting the city added to the polish the remembrances of a long ago childhood.

What made this trip even remotely possible is that he and I were good travel companions. Over the course of my adult life we had been on a number of adventures together. In 1988 he and I spent 10 days in Israel exploring the country and both living out childhood dreams of visiting the Jewish homeland. In 2001 we had gone to Alaska, another bucket list trip for both of us, in celebration of my father’s recovery from Lymphoma. We knew how to be together. When to chat and when to be silent and when to give each other room to be by ourselves. We saw humor in many of the same things, and could point out things to each other that we would relish. He knew, as did I, that no matter what happened on our journey, it would be enjoyable because we would be together.

When we had made the decision to go,  we agreed that I would “cover” the airfare by using the mileage. My work had me on the road constantly and I had collected enough miles on American Airline’s to procure us two business class tickets to Vienna.  He would be responsible for the hotels and meals. Using mileage meant that instead of flying nonstop to Vienna we would have to change planes at Heathrow and go to the British Airways terminal from Terminal 5 where American Airlines planes operated. At the time, I didn’t think this was a big deal because I had nearly 2M airmiles under my belt and changing terminals was just what one did.

What I had not thought of at the time I booked the ticket was that my father was 81 and due neuropathy, a lack of sensation in his feet, he had difficulty walking. I never thought of him having difficulty doing anything. There were times where I saw him frail. When he was suffering from Lymphoma and going through chemo. Or, once when we were in Alaska, I saw him stumble getting into the water and had wondered about him growing old but I never thought of him having difficult walking. For a large part of my life he had walked two miles to work each day even though we lived in the suburbs. The man who always wanted to go on hikes. His hair may have been grey in places but even at 81 there was still a hint of color. He still worked every day and several times a week he would drive himself to Columbia University to teach, with students or supervise experiments. He went to the gym three times a week. But old and have trouble walking? Not my Pops. I never thought of him that way. That is until we got to Heathrow.

Heathrow, in addition to be one of the busiest airports in the world, is an endless warren of terminals and walkways. You literally have to walk kilometers to get to your aircraft. It was apparent from the start that Dad’s neuropathy and perhaps a long flight made it difficult for him to walk.  My father had for years been suffering from a gradually increasing neuropathy of his feet. It meant that for the most part he could not feel the bottom of his feet which, of course, made walking quite difficult. As a consequence it was a challenge to him walking the long corridors of Heathrow’s terminals which was observable by his style of walking. He had to set himself in motion by throwing his arms forward and then conduct a march on a short stride on the balls of his feet, arms moving in sync with his feet. At the time, and perhaps a bit too romantically, I thought of it as the march of an old soldier.

As we walked along, I wanted to help him. Perhaps stop and call for a wheel chair or some other form of transport that would make the navigation of the corridors of Heathrow less of a challenge to my Dad. Or maybe I should offer to take his carryon bag or slow the pace or even take frequent breaks. But I knew from long experience that this type of offer would be denied. It would offend his sense of independence and strength. It would be an impeachment of his role as father and protector. It would deny him his manliness.

Walking with him, watching him suffer silently, made me feel dreadful. Had I been more thoughtful I would have arranged for some type of transport acceptable to him that would allowed him to walk less. I had been insensitive and less than thoughtful and the result was an impossible situation where because of my father’s manly code I could not interfere.  I could only watch him suffer. I swore an oath that I would try to be more cognizant of my father’s age and challenges. I would try to be a better son.

Many long corridor, a customs check , a security check and two bus rides later we finally arrived at the British Airways terminal. Like many international terminals this one resembled more an upscale mall than it did a transportation hub. Neither my father or I are shoppers so we sought refuge in the British Airways club. While not exactly posh, it was terribly British with understated elegance of faux antique furniture. It’s breakfast buffet included baked beans and grilled tomatoes which personified along with marmalade and toast British breakfast cuisine to me. In short, it was a lovely place for us to rest before we made our way to our connecting aircraft. When we left to go to our gate I grabbed Dad’s bag before he could object.

The flight to Vienna is short but long enough for a nap which I happily took. I fell asleep before take of and only woke on landing. As we taxied to the gate, I smiled. It still looked like a Richard Scarry illustration.

Outside the airport we picked up a Mercedes cab and headed into Vienna. It was a beautiful May day with blue skies, puffy white clouds and mild temperatures.  The cab was warm, so I cracked the window and gazed out, mesmerized. Not because the scenery was spectacular, mainly open fields intermingled with a few industrial parks that had a far neater, more elegant look than their American counterparts. But because that is what I always did when taking a cab from the airport into a new city. It was a city’s overture I wanted to hear it.

I looked over at my father. He was wearing an outfit so common for him it probably should have been trademarked. He wore khaki pants with a light blue shirt, safari jacket and Ray-Ban Outdoorsman aviator style sunglasses. He was lost in thought and I wondered if he was remembering what this part of Vienna looked like before and when he had returned at the beginning of the occupation.

I asked “When you returned to Vienna at the end of the War what time of year was it?”

He looked thoughtful, like he was thinking about what he should say, and replied “I really can’t remember.”

“What do you mean you can’t remember? You remember everything!”

“I just don’t remember.”

“Well, can you remember what the weather was like.”

“No, not really except it was not too cold nor hot.”

“So it was likely Spring or Fall?”

“I guess.”

At this point I was getting pretty frustrated with my father’s non-response responses. So I asked, no doubt in an irritated tone “Can you remember what year it was?”

“I think it was 1946.”

“But you were in Europe since early 1945. Why did it take you so long to go the 300 miles from where you were stationed in Italy to here.”

“It was not that simple.”

“Why”

“Because I was stationed in the Mediterranean theatre of war and Vienna was in the European theatre. And that made it harder to get permission because you had to deal with two commands.”

“But, weren’t they even a bit sensitive to your special circumstances?”

“No. Not really. My commander was a real son of a bitch and kept turning down my requests.”

“So what did you do.”

“I went above his head.”

“How?”

“At some point I had to take some papers over to the commanding general and I took the opportunity to plead my case. And I think it go my Captain’s ass in hot water because I got permission to go pretty soon after that.”

“But you can’t remember when that was.”

“No. Now will shut up so I can enjoy the ride into the city?”

I shut up. I didn’t think it strange for him to ask me to shut up. I tend to chat and ask questions when I am in new situations. I think his asking me to pipe down had more to do with the fact that we were on the outskirts of the city proper and the “real Vienna” was revealing itself.  No doubt he was caught up in the thoughts we all get when we return to a place that is full of memories.  What I did think strange is my father’s elusiveness on the details of his return to Vienna. How could he not remember the time of year? Not only had he had the months in which we had planned the trip to contemplate that but I didn’t think it was a detail that I was likely to forget and his memory was every bit as good, if not better, than mine. But instead of questioning this further I too got lost in the sights and sounds of Vienna.

After checking in to our hotel, The Schlosshotel Romischer Kaiser we decided that going to sleep, despite the fatigue and jet lag of travel, would be the wrong thing to do. Not only would a nap do more harm than good to our sleeping patterns but we were both anxious to get about. For my father, to rekindle old memories and for me to get a sense of city that the last time I had last visited when I was 7. After dumping our bags in our room, a large one bedroom with full size bed for my dad and a sleeping nook with single for me, we walked a block to the Kartner Strasse, a pedestrian street that runs from the Opera to St. Stephens cathedral. My father wanted to walk the few blocks to the cathedral and as we walked I saw him morph into the Viennese he was. Instead of walking with hands by his side, his hands were clasped behind his back. His chin was tilted just a little higher. We strolled rather than walked.

At the time, I didn’t question the reason my father wanted to walk to St. Stephens. It is the city’s landmark and seemed a natural destination. It was one of the few clear memories I had from my only trip to the city nearly 50 years before. But years later I would wonder whether these first steps in Vienna were really a pilgrimage, of a sort, for him. Eventually, we found our way to a café and ordered a lmid afternoon pick me up which in Vienna is an exquisite pastry accompanied by an espresso. As my father ordered for us I remember thinking how easily he slipped into Viennese German with all the “ahso’s.” This was the language he learned to think in. I wondered how speaking the language of his childhood along how being here must effect him.

That evening my father decided that we should go to the Drei Husaren an ultra-traditional Viennese Restaurant.  Located near our hotel, it had been open since the early ‘30s. As we walked in the door we were welcomed by golden yellow décor, a tuxedoed matre di and a pianist playing a classical piece. The tables were immaculately dressed with white linen table cloths.  peaked napkins and more glassware I had in my first apartment.  It was as if you had entered a time portal and time stood still.  I wondered whether this comforted my father in remembering the halcyon days before the war or was it triumph or sorts for him. Being able to afford this restaurant, which was beyond comprehension for his family when they lived her,  a symbol of all that he had accomplished since.

I was probably over thinking this. Knowing my father, and his lusty relationship with food,  he came for the cuisine and it did not disappoint. The Leberknoweelsuppe ( liver filled dumpling in a chicken broth ) was outstanding. The Wiener Schnitzel the best  I had ever eaten outside my grandmother kitchen, and their dessert cart that would make grown men weep. The two excellent bourbons I had enjoyed with my meal aided my digestion wonderfully and made my tongue loose enough to push my father a bit on his history. The whole reason for this trip after all was for me to get a better understanding of what it must have been like for him, fleeing for his life only to return as an officer in the conquering army.

When the coffee arrived I asked “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your Army career. I want to make sure that I have the timeline correct.”

“Sure. If you must.”

“Well if I am going to write this story I would love to get the facts straight.”

“Go ahead.”

“You entered the army in the summer of 1944.”

“Yes, my draft board had issued me a deferment so that I could complete my sophomore year.”

“How long was basic training.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Two months, 3 months?”

“Probably closer to 3 months.”

“So if you entered the Army in the Summer of 1944 you probably finished basic training in September or October.”

“I guess so.”

“And you went to basic in Texas.”

“Yes. Fort Wolters.”

“So, did you go to OCS immediately after you finished basic”

“Pretty much”

“Did you have to take a test to be any officer or did they have some other way of selecting you?”

“No, you had to submit a request and then the Army decided whether you were selected. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to become an officer or not.”

“Didn’t you want to become an officer?.”

“I don’t know. I had a friend in basic and he thought it was a good deal. So I applied and was accepted.”

“Is that why you became a citizen in Texas…so you could go to OCS?”

“Yes.”

“Where was OCS?”

“Fort Sill, Oklahoma.”

“When did get there….I mean what month.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was it right after basic?”

“Pretty much.”

“So, if you finished basic in October. Then November would have been the earliest you entered OCS.”

“I guess so.”

“And OCS took 8 weeks right? That is why 2^nd Lieutenants were called 8 week wonders.”

“I think the Artillery school took a little longer. Probably 12 weeks or so but I really can’t remember.”

“Well if it took 12 weeks the earliest you could have been shipped overseas would have been February. Right.”

“Then if you were in theatre before the end of the War then you probably got there sometime in late February or early March of 1945 right?”

“I guess. To be honest Paul the dates I really don’t remember. I just remember thinking it was cold. But can we end for this right now and head back to the hotel.”

 

 

I grew up at a time when World War 2 was a recent memory. It was a part of the collective Zeitgeist

Children played war games, and everyone wanted to be a GI. No one wanted to be a “kraut” or a “nip.” We though being a soldier was considered your patriotic duty and an honor, untarnished by Vietnam and the politics of the post war era.  It was a time when buying a car from Germany and Japan were considered un-patriotic; when goods from Japan were considered second rate, if not junk, and all things Germans, were viewed suspiciously.

The war was real to me. Not in a history book sort of way. I did not know then that 60 million people had died in the war. That even though I knew that Jews had been murdered in camps I had no idea that it was 9 million. And if I had known those figures as a child those numbers would not have meant anything to me.)

It was real because I could walk into my friends home and see souvenirs that their fathers and family proudly showed off. I recall a friend proudly showing me a German helmet with a bullet hole in the temple. Another buddy proudly showed the deactivated pineapple grenade t his father used as a paperweight. Or the German luger that another’s father had liberated from a dead “kraut” and now kept in a locked trophy case. As a very young child I remember telling my father, with great excitement about an American helmet a friend had shown me.  After describing it to him he proudly showed off his firsthand experience by telling me that the helmet was missing its inner liner which was key to keeping it from falling off and then reminding me that GI’s never buckled their helmets else an explosion would blow their heads off.

My father’s mother proudly carried around a fragment from a hand grenade in her change purse that my father had sent her claiming that it had just missed him.

The War was a tangible part of my childhood in other ways. When we went to Europe with my parents in the early 60’s we saw first-hand evidence of the war. The elevator operator at the old Excelsior Hotel on Piccadilly had a stool to rest the part of his leg that remained after a land mine had taken the other part.  The rubble in vacant lots in Rome. The roof of St. Stephens cathedral in Vienna still bearing the damage from allied bombing raids. Even the comic books we bought bore the imprint of the as they were printed in black and white due to shortages.

It was real when relatives told of their escape from the Nazi’s. They told tales of hiding, degradation and deprivation that were scary but so captivating I hung on every word.  Relatives, including my grandparents would tell tales of lost parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and cousins who were never heard from after the war.  Their sadness and sense of loss was conveyed through spirit more than words for they rarely gave details of their experiences or showed their grief other than a sense of sadness even a child could perceive.

The 2^nd World War was the social currency for kids and adults alike.  Either you served or you didn’t. If you didn’t you better have a good excuse like being too young or having a heart condition.  Even then, it would not provide an antidote for the shame of not being a part of the generation that tackled fascism and made the world safe for democracy. It mattered on the playground and at cocktail parties.

Without question during my childhood the US was giddy with the glow of “we did” and the imagination factories of the entertainment industry were turning out epics to remind us of our glory.  “The Longest Day,” “The Guns of Navaronne,” “The Great Escape,” “Kelly’s Heros”, to name just a few, headlined in theatres. At home we could watch, on our 5 channels of programming classic movies such as “Casablanca,” “Stalag 17,” “Run Silent Run Deep.” “Sands of Iwo Jima,” “From Here To Eternity” and so many others that I can see say with  confidence that not a week of my childhood went by without a snip of it World War 2 deposited itself within my consciousness.

Television was equally adept at keeping the coals of our success in the war glowing. My brother and I loved the television show Combat! (the exclamation point being a bayonet)  an episodic television how that recounted the adventures of a platoon of American soldiers fighting Germans in France shortly after D-day. We loved that show so much we would often play “Combat!” with our friends in the neighborhood fighting who would play “The Sarge” or The Lieutenant. Behind a friend’s home there was a dirt “mountain”,  in which we would  stage elaborate battles based on imagination and of course what we learned from television and movies.

These games were often augmented by the toys we had been given to us by our parents like Tommy Guns  (like the Sarges).  Children’s combat uniforms including helmets and other accessories.
There were bazookas that “really fired”. Cap hand grenades. Legions of toy soldiers and models by Revel where you could make submarines, tanks and all sort of aircraft.  Our camping gear mimicked what GI’s had been given during the war. The tin mess that folded onto itself that was a pan and plate, the tin cup that wrapped around it, the l shaped flashlight that could be clipped to your belt and often came with a red filter as not to be spotted by the enemy.

Even in the early morning hours, the time between when we got out of bed and when our parents awoke we found our way to World War 2. It was not uncommon for Sunrise Semester or Modern Farmer to lose our attentional, though we did get quite an education on the importance of nitrogen to the soil and Robert Frost’s poetry, and turn to my parents bookshelves. One book we returned  to often was called “Up Front”, a collection of cartoons drawn by Bill Mauldin for Stars and Stripes. It depicted two grizzled GI’s, Willie and Joe, citizen soldiers, as they made their way from Normandy to Germany and their experiences with battle, Army bureaucracy, and life in a war zone. We didn’t understand much of it on a deeper level than a puddle but it made us laugh. One such cartoon, that is indelible to this day,  depicted a US Calvary soldier next to his jeep whose axel is broken pointing his pistol at the Jeeps hood and covering his eyes as if he was putting down a horse. We earned that GI’s spent a lot of time in mud, didn’t shave often, and the beverage of choice was something called Cognac.

There was another book that attracted our attention. It had an army green cover with an image of a Blue Devil holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. Titled “The Blue Devils In Italy: A History of The 88^th Infantry Division in Italy. We knew this was Dad’s “outfit” and while we either couldn’t or didn’t want to read the book, we looked at the cool photographs and imagined what it must have been for pop. Had we shown more curiosity at the time (I am not really blaming myself as I was child whose reading skills were still with Dick and Jane) we might have noticed that the rosters in the book that listed the men who served in each unit in the division. Had we paid attention to those rosters it might have saved a lot of questions later on.

The war even managed to find itself into our night time story. We knew my father’s story. It was part of our family lore. An immigrant, who escaped Nazi Austria just in the nick of time, was inducted into the Army at the age of 18, fought his way up the boot of Italy with the 88^th Infantry Division as a 2^nd Lieutenant in the artillery. We were told he was the youngest Lieutenant in his division and that the only reason my mother’s father had accepted my father as a suitor was because he had been an officer in the army.

We would ask Dad about his exploits during the war. He, like many of that greatest of generations, was reluctant to discuss his service. However, at bedtime when he asked what story we wanted him to tell us, he would, from time to time,  share little blurbs of his life in the service. He would tell us about Cookie the pilot of the piper cub observation aircraft that was assigned to his artillery unit. Or was Cookie his driver? Time has a way of eroding childhood stories. In any case Cookie was always doing something interesting like placing sandbags underneath his seat in case they ran over a mine  so it would blow his nuts off. (The word nuts would always make my brother and I giggle.) Or the story of my he told of crossing a bridge in a jeep to see if it could support the weight of 105 mm howitzers when the span collapsed and being saved from drowning when his trench coat, inflated with air due to the fall, had served as a life preserver.

The bedtime story I loved and asked for most often, I didn’t even realize was a war story until much late. The story was of two boys who were walking along the banks of the Danube one afternoon when they happen upon a broken-down old rowboat. They are desperate to leave Vienna because of the Nazi’s, so they scheme to convert the rowboat into a submarine. They could then float past the Nazi’s patrols to the Black Sea and escape to Israel. The stories were episodic, recounting the adventures the boys had trying to get the materials they needed for their ship and avoiding detection by the Germans and those who wished them harm.  Similar to old time movie serials they often left us hanging just before we would go to sleep.

Once,  when I brother and were both in single digits,  we were playing on the street with a bunch of friends, a kid threw a piece of wood that had an nail sticking out it. The stick hit my brother in the back of the head. I still remember the wound, a bloody whole surrounded by scalp. I am sure at the time that I thought it penetrated my brother’s skull but in retrospect I don’t think so as I saw no bone or gray matter. I am not sure why it fell to my father to treat the wound nor why I was included in that triage.  To comfort my brother he told him how he used to be bullied on his way to school. How they would call him vile names and try to beat him and how he too had a spear hit him in the head.

Or when visiting Vienna in the early 60’s with my parents we visited with my father’s boyhood best friend Paul.  They delighted in telling my brother and I stories of their gang and the trouble they got into while growing up on the streets of Vienna. We especially loved the story of how my father and Paul had gone into the sewers to go beyond police lines to see the fire that was burning at the site of the old World’s Fair.

Although I did not know it then many of the stories were from the time when they Nazi’s denied Jewish boys the ability to go to school.

As we grew older, more of my father’s life, the World War and his life in the service became known to us and incorporated in our family’s mythology.

My grandparents, through the intercession of my grandfather’s brother Max, has managed to get visas to enter the United States three months after the war began and a year after Kristallnacht. A night in which my grandfather was arrested, and jailed for a week. The night the synagogue my father and his parents belonged was burned to the ground denying my father the opportunity to become a bar mitzvah. A sadness he carried with him for the rest of his life.

Part of the story of his arrival here was his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty and how it made him feel like he was finally safe and how the darkness of the past years had been shed.  He bestowed on her the honorific “ladily”, perhaps a bastardization of the little English he knew at the time, which he would call out to her whenever he saw her. Even 70 years later he could tell you the make and model of the car his Uncle had picked them up (Buick)  in and how on that first meal on American soil he ate a pound of butter because he was hungry and he thought it cheese.  America was a land of plenty.

When I first heard this story as a child I had no concept of hunger. What real deprivation was all about… We were not a rich family but I had never missed a meal or lacked anything I needed so I had no real understanding of what it meant to escape and find safety; to know deprivation and hunger and suddenly have your fill. But what I did know was when my father told these stories I knew what it meant to him. Not because he was melodramatic or overtly sentimental about it but because of the joy in which he told this story. It was a hallmark of the optimistic spirit that was a part of him until the very end.

We were told that we he entered the Danbury Ct school system at the age of 14 they initially placed him elementary school because of his lack of English skills. He found this humiliating so he focused on learning English. He claimed he learned much of his English by going to Ronald Coleman movies and reading a dictionary,  facts borne out by a slight English accent when he spoke and the fact that he often used words so obscure that most native speakers would never  have uttered them. And once the English hurdle was overcome he moved through the grades quickly because of his intelligence and excellent Viennese schooling. (This is even more impressive when you consider that he had not attended school since shortly after Kristallnacht as the Nazi’s were denying Jews access to a secondary education.) Remarkably, perhaps incredibly, he graduated at 17 and entered Syracuse University as a Freshman just three and half years after his first glimpse of “ladily.”

We were told that my father was desperate for an education and to get a college degree. As a consequence, instead of waiting until the fall semester and enter with the majority of the class of 1947 he matriculated that summer. So by the time he appeared before his draft board in December of 1943 he had already completed his Freshman year of college. Drafted into the US Army. He served basic at Ft. Wolters Texas where he was naturalized and went on to Ft. Sill Oklahoma for OCS and Artillery school. On completion of his training he was shipped to Italy where he became a member of the 88^th Infantry Division, The Blue Devils, who fighting their way up the boot of and ultimately being stationed in Gorizia, north of Trieste, a little less than 300 miles from Vienna where his adventure began.

One of the stories my father used to tell us about his service was his struggle to get to Vienna at the war’s conclusion. It was no secret that the Nazi’s had been carrying out atrocities against the Jews, although the extent of it was still not fully known, and my father was desperate to go to his native city to see his family and those few friends he had left behind. He was stymied in his attempt by his commanding officer who my father often described as a “son of bitch,” no doubt an expression he had picked up in the army. Eventually, after many repeated requests being denied, my father had an opportunity to speak with the commanding general who overruled my father’s superior officer and granted my father leave in Vienna.

The route my father took to Vienna is unclear or is just not remembered by me. But it was by rail and there were many stops and several places where he need to switch trains. At one of these stops, he had decided to walk around the town to stretch is legs and perhaps scare up a little breakfast when he came across a British Army office bent over examining something in a store window. My father called out “Walter!” and the man turned around and was in fact my father’s cousin Walter and to my father’s last breath he claimed that he recognized him completely by the outline of his derriere.

It was usually there that my father would cut off his stories about his return to Vienna. Or if he were to discuss he would just tell us that he found no one. But details about those days he spent in Vienna were harder to come by than a fact at a Donald Trump press conference. And for the most part I was willing to let it go at that.

February of 2006 found me at Byrd Library on the campus of Syracuse University. I had to come to the campus, as I had most winters since my graduation in 1979, to see a basketball game with a group of guys with whom I had gone to Syracuse. It was our annual trip into the way back machine where we could relive much of our college behavior such as eating slices of pizza at the Varsity or late night donut runs to satisfy the munchies brought about by other behavior we had enjoyed in college or going to crowded bars and pretending that we were still a part of the mating dances that occurs in speak easies near college campuses. These weekend’s always left me nostalgic about the very good times I had a college…I had a hard time remembering the bad…and often a little sad as my life didn’t seem as well planned or lived as my friends who were by and large happily married, raising kids, and doing well in their respective careers. And while I had a good job, was in a steady albeit stale relationship, I still had the niggling feeling that I was not living the life I was meant to live. I knew I was not living the life that I wanted to live.

Shortly before I left for my trip, my father and fellow SU alum, had asked me to see whether I could find for him a poem he had published in the campus literary magazine….The Tabard shortly after he had returned to Syracuse 60 years previously. So while “the boys” had taken off on a self-guided tour of the new buildings on campus and to smoke a joint on the quad I took a walk to the Library to see if I could find a copy of this lost poems of my father: Bar Adriatic. The woman at the research desk was very helpful. Yes, they did have copies of the Tabard from 1947. Yes, I could look at them. And was there something in particular that I was looking for so I told her. She told me to wait and within a few minutes I was handed an actual, not digital, copy of the The Tabard’s Summer 1947 issue. Calling a magazine would be generous as what it was a collection of verse mimeographed on colored paper and stapled together but it clearly meant much to my father.

I had copies made and went to a carrel to read.

Bar Adriatica by Ernst Rothkopf

Their Streets are narrow, dark, and full of people.

Strange people,

Saying what I cannot understand.

Their Virgin Prostitutes, their children dirty,

Full of strange deals, crying to me:

HEY JOE, CIGARETTES TO SELL, JOE?

 

And in the shadows of their great cathedrals,

On the sidestreets , in the parks,

Their misery bears fruit for me.

In a night’s entertainment,

ME MOLTO GOOD JOE, SLEEP WITH ME.

The day is coming to a close.

The sentry watches

As soldiers streaming to the city

Pass by his lonely post,

The chilly, windswept road is endless.

And lined with strange facades.

NOT AT ALL LIKE AMERICA

 

Where are going, Al?

The passing soldier hails me,

And, not knowing the reply, I answered “The Bar Adriatica”

And so we joined in our Journey…

TO FORGET.

 

On the outskirts of the town is a tavern,

Full of lights and a band blaring.

The Cognac good

The women pretty

Not a bad place to forget,

Here on the Border.

 

Now out I look from the Tavern’s window

And see,

That the streets are filled with howling angry people,

Crying for what might bring

What they have not,

And hating all which is not them.

 

You, crowd, jamming the Main Street,

Serb and Croats,

You have tilled your poor, ungrateful soil.

Education is the privilege of your rich,

The burden of your Poor.

HOCEMO TITO!

 

Your hunger and your cry for self-respect

Need Something,

And across the border they will say:

Comrade, let us be your guide.

All others hate you, dwell under our star and cry:

ZIVEL TITO!

 

Plato and Aristotle lived on more fertile plains.

Ignorance is a horrible disease

And yet without pain.

And through the ruins of the world are shivering

with memories and balcomies,

Your own soil soaked with blood.

You cry:

WE WANT TITO! WE WANT JUGOSLAVIA

 

Italian Youth in the Side Street,

Laugh not,

Your hunger weaves a different, equally horrid pattern

You have a marble God that does no wrong,

A marble God, a State

VIVA ITALIA

 

Glorious regiments, Queens of Battle,

Colors bright and waving

The mutilated dead are but monuments,

The ruined villages, crossed swords on History-maps

DEATH TO BOLSHEVISM!

 

That extra wrinkle in your mothers face

Is called Tunisia

Long ago, rouge has covered the sorrow on

Your brothers window’s face.

And the rattle of the guns is remembered only

In the need that their destruction has created,

And yet you shout,

VIVA ITALIA! DEATH TO BOLSHEVISM

 

They meet on the corner,

Insult each other,

Lie, then shout, then stones hurl through the air,

Clubs, Tear-gars, Pain and Screams

The scene, familiar as a summer-storm approaching

Brings all the long forgotten sorrows to my ear.

And behind THIS window the band plays,

A WALTZ.

 

No longer could I stand the noise around me.

Their cries of hate,

The laughter of their women,

I drained my glass and flow into the street.

Cringing.

For I knew my friend would say

WHERE ARE YOU GOING, AL?

 

Reading the poem I knew It described the part of his military experience that had to do with the occupation of the Trieste region of Italy and the post war arguments that the Italian’s were having with Yugoslavs over the border. I knew he was trying to describe what it felt like to be a member of an occupying army and trying to keep the peace. I knew that like many soldiers he was trying to describe experiences and emotions that civilians can’t really appreciate. I knew that he wrote well and that at the time his poem must have resonated with those who read it.

And the poem resonated with me as well. Just in a different way that the author had intended.

When my father had written this poem, he was barely 21 years old. Yet by that time he had survived a childhood of poverty and depravation in Vienna; He had survived Kyrstalnacht and the fear hatred and persecution of the Nazis since the Anschluss, He had immigrated to a new country mastered the language and the schooling well enough to attend a prestigious University. He had fought a war and survived and returned to a quiet campus in upstate NY where the war was fought in factories and students main concern was how to remove salt stains from their shoes and pants. I wondered if he could share his experience with other returning GI’s or was his experience so unique that it could only be expressed through poetry or was it part of a code returning soldiers adhered to do where silence about your experience was part of the experience. We did what we needed to do so let us move on. The stoicism of the greatest generation personified. Maybe this is why he had been quiet about his experience all these years.

What I didn’t notice at the time was a clue about his service which had I noticed would have prompted me to ask him many questions that perhaps  there would not be such a big mystery after his death. But for now I was happy to find the poem for him, I knew he would be delighted to have unearthed it from its tomb in Byrd Library.

The drive home from Syracuse the following morning was rough. The “boys” and I had spent the evening practicing college drinking habits on nearly 50 year old livers and the result for the following day included the need for massive quantities of coffee and Gatorade, and an intolerance for food and noise of any kind.  This was exacerbated by the fact that Central New York was producing one of its most famous products, snow, causing the highway to become two black tracks where car tires had cleared the snow and produced a deliberately slow driving experience despite my Black Grand Cherokee’s four wheel drive. A focus on the road, a cerebral cortex recovering from alcohol, the quiet of being alone in a car without radio or passengers, was as good as place as any to be reflective and the uncovering of my father’s poem the day before provided fodder for thinking of his life and mine.

What must have been like for my father to return to Syracuse at the beginning of his junior year? I had no doubt it was different from mine.  During the summer previous to my junior year  my beloved father had read me the riot act about my grades. While I was not in any danger of flunking out I was struggling academically. Mostly C’s with an occasional B and D to keep things interesting. My father’s message was that there were far less expensive institutions in which I could have an average academic performance and that if I didn’t get my act together that is where I was going to end up. I had returned to campus with a focus I had not had before. I set up a routine. Morning classes. Then working at an on campus restaurant, The Rathskeller, from lunch through dinner and then on to the library where I studied from early evening until 9 or 10PM. It worked. C’s turned to B’s, no more D’s and the occasional A.

When my “pops” had returned to campus before his junior year for the winter term in 1947 had he gone directly from the Army to school? Had he taken time off to decompress or had he plunged back in? How had he coped from the regulations of the army to somewhat more free spirited academic life. Had he just considered himself just another GI returning to the states from Army service or had he felt like he had done something special. What must of it felt like coming back to a college campus untouched, except the building of Quonset huts, after spending the better part of the past two years in a place ravaged by war…after seeing the city he was born in rubble, its populace used to confections and pastries, reduced to begging GI’s for chocolate.

Wasn’t my father’s true year junior year spent fighting in Italy and experiencing a continent pull itself back from the brink of Armageddon. And it shamed me to realize while I had blithely navigated the stacks at the Byrd Library hoping my father would not pull my ticket on school he was navigating Army bureaucracy and a destroyed Europe trying to find his way back to Vienna to find out whether his family and friends had managed to survive the Nazi’s and the war.

By now dawns first light had turned the black and white of driving in the snow into a uniform grey. Snow had begun to fall a little harder and a difficult drive became harder.

Perhaps one of the hardest thing for anyone to do is to recognize one’s shortcomings. I am no different. Most of the time I move through my life without as if I were devoid of faults or foibles. It takes triggers for me to realize my shallowness and lack of introspections. For example, on 9-11 I was living in NYC, had heard the first plane fly overhead and seen the second plane crash into the second tower with my own eyes. I had seen both buildings collapse and had to walk home while fighter jets had circled overhead. That night as I lay in bed and watch CNN play the collapse of the towers over and over I fell into a fitful sleep marked by dreams of people unable to tell those they loved their final thoughts, apologies for unintended slights, or express their gratitude for the love and kindness people had shown them.

When I woke I called my Dad. I told him that I had never really thought much about the sacrifices that he and my mother had made to raise me and to put me through school and how grateful I was for the life they had given me. He had initially tried to downplay my gratitude telling me that they were happy to have been able to give me what they could. But I persisted and when eventually he told me “your welcome” which made me feel as if, at least in a small way, had become a better person for showing gratitude where only acceptance had been shown before.

I realized on that snowy, hungover, painfully slow drive home that one of the things I had never done enough of with my father is ask him enough questions about his time in the army. The 2^nd World War had been a central theme of my childhood. My father’s service and his history had been a source of pride and even wonder all my life yet other than a story or two I knew nothing deeper than a very few times, and places. I had no idea of his feelings and his emotions. For reasons I can’t explain except for perhaps the sense of storytelling that I possess I fixated on the return of my father to Vienna. I wondered what it must have been like for a boy of 14 who had fled his home fleeing from religious persecution, personal violence and war, to return a foot taller and officer in the conquering army. It was beyond anything that I could comprehend and it was a story that I not only wanted to know but one that I would love to share.

It was a week before I could make it out to my parents’ home to give my father the poem he had written 60 years before.  As it was a Saturday, and I wanted to grease the skids for a favor I was going to ask my Dad I stopped at Barney Greengrass, “The Sturgeon King” on my way out of the city to buy some of my father’s favorite foods: Smoked salmon, sable, Natches Herring, chopped liver and bagels. My father love to eat, perhaps because of a childhood of deprivation, perhaps because he could support it with his 6’2” frame but it seemed a good idea to ensure good favor with good flavor.

My father was a a contradiction in many ways. He was a slim man who liked to eat. He was optimist even though he had every reason to be a pragmatist… to name just a few of the contradictions that defined him. One of his incongruities was that he was both guarded with his feelings and capable of expressing great emotional simply but powerfully. For example, when I came back from visiting Auschwitz, a place where many of our relatives had been murdered including my grandfather’s sisters, I  brought him a stone from one of the camps crematoria. I didn’t say anything and just handed him the stone. He looked at it and his face became tight with an understanding of where that stone had been and as he placed the rock in his pocket he said, in a choked voice, “thank you” and with that simple expression and phase I knew all that it meant to him. Years later this was confirmed when after his death, I discovered it in his bedside table.

Sitting in his office I watched as he re-read his opus magnus from his return to academic life, a poem he liked enough to send me looking for and whose publication quite probably stirred the fire of the writer he always wanted to become. I watched as the emotion streamed across his face like a creeper on at the bottom of all news channel. I could see pleasure on his face akin to finding a five-dollar bill in a pair of pants you have not worn in a while. I saw reflection in the way an 82 year old man looks back on 60 years…the roads taken and the paths not followed.  The opportunities lost and memories found. I wanted to tell him what the poem had meant to me but sensed that the timing was not right. The moment belonged to him so I said nothing.

Eventually we made our way to the kitchen where my mother had laid out all the goodies I had brought from Barney Greengrass. My parents have always been the people I enjoy talking to the most. Both are highly intelligent, engaged with the world and read the ink off the NY Times on a daily basis. So, while I cannot remember what we discussed that day I have no doubt the conversation was lively and engaged but eventually the conversation turned to my upcoming 50^th birthday and how I would like to celebrate it.

I told them that I didn’t want a big huhu over my birthday. Turning 50 was not necessarily a milestone that I wished to dwell on. However, there was something that I did wish for.  I looked at my Dad and told him that I wanted to go to Vienna with him. He said “Why the fuck would you want to do that? “

I told him that his poem had made think about a lot of things. How despite what I knew of his army service I really knew very little because he didn’t talk about it very much. That while I knew about his arrival in this country I knew very little of his departure from Vienna nor his return 6 years later.  That the poem had inspired in me the desire to understand what it was like to flee a city as a boy, a refugee from hate and terror,  and then return a young man, and officer of the conquering army and that I didn’t think it was something that I could understand by just talking about it at the kitchen table or his office.

For me to truly understand what that experience must have been like I needed to go there with him.

His response, was pretty typical for him. “So what? A lot of people experienced the same sort of thing. What I did was not that special.”

I said “We can agree to disagree on whether your experience is unique. No matter what it is unique to you and to our family. But are you asking what is the point?”

“Yes. What’s the purpose? What are you going to do with it other than have some kind voyeuristic understanding of what I went through.”

He was being difficult but I knew what he was driving at. My father always wanted me to write. He thought that I had a gift and he thought I was wasting it by trying to earn a living in the advertising business. I replied “I want to write a story about it. I want to understand what it must have been like because I think it is more universal than just your experience. I think that what you went through and how it ended up for you is something that people not only can relate to and I do think it is special  but I also think that is a story that is fading fast with time and deserves at least the chance to be told. “

He shook his head, a Mona Lisa like half smile on his face, untranslatable but I took as him feeling complimented by my desire and a wish to make my desire a reality but a reluctance to relive those experiences again. For a few moments he was silent and said “Let me think about it.”