“Nothing’s changed. I still know what I’m doing and I would be distraught if anything happened to your fingers. I’d love it if you came, but I don’t need you to do so.”
“Victoria Iphigenia, you jump off cliffs not knowing if you packed a parachute. I’m coming to Vienna so I can play a dirge if someone drops your body into the Danube.”
And so there were four of us in coach, five if you counted Jake’s bass, which required its own seat. We arrived in Vienna late in the afternoon. While Max pampered Lotty in the Imperial Hotel, the rest of us stayed more modestly in a pension Jake knew from his professional trips here.
We were only a few miles from the Novaragasse, and could have gone by tram, or even on foot. However, Max—concerned about how well Lotty would weather her return to the old ghetto—hired a car, which picked us up after breakfast the morning after our arrival.
We drove around the Ring, so-called because it circled the city where the fortifications used to stand. We passed streets where the gray buildings stood wedged so tightly together that we couldn’t make out the sun. It was depressing to see the same gang graffiti that cover Chicago bridges and walls on apartments and bridges here.
Once we crossed the Danube Canal, which was a sullen gray, not the oompah-pah blue of the tired old waltz, we were in the Leopoldstadt, the section of Vienna that Hitler had turned into a ghetto. The car dropped us on a side street, near a memorial to the deportees from the Leopoldstadt. Lotty wanted to see if her family’s names were included among the victims.
“They called it the ‘Mazzesinsel,’” Max said, “the ‘Matzo Island,’ because so many Jews lived here. Freud grew up here and so did Billy Wilder, the physicist Lise Meitner, oh, many famous people.”
When Lotty found her family—Herr Doktor Felix Herschel (1884–1942) und Frau Doktor Charlotte Herschel (1887–1942); Mordecai Radbuka (1908–1942); Sofie Herschel Radbuka (1907–1941); Ariadne Radbuka (1940–1940)—she called to Martin, who’d been standing apart from the rest of us, as if he didn’t feel he belonged.
“Here is your grandmother’s grandmother—the woman who raised Kitty, just as she raised you.”
We all crowded respectfully closer to look at the inscription: Liesl Saginor (1885–1942).
“Her husband had died of tuberculosis, I think it was, soon after Kitty and I were born; that’s why they’re not on this wall. They were so young,” Lotty said. “Even my grandparents, and Kitty’s grandmother, were younger than I am now.”
She took a map from her handbag. “I don’t remember these streets, though I walked them every day for more than a year. Of course, then the shops were empty. All this food, these stores filled with electronics—our shops were our grandparents, bartering a book or a coat for a loaf of bread.”
Martin hesitantly held out a hand. She let him take her arm and the two of them studied the map. Novaragasse was only a few short streets away. When we got to 38A, Herr Lautmann was there with a couple of workmen carrying picks and shovels.
“It looks familiar but not the same,” Lotty said.
“Bomb damage,” Herr Lautmann said. “This street was bombed badly; these apartment buildings, some could be—what is the word—gerettet?”
“Salvaged,” Max supplied.
“Yes, some could be salvaged, but some were new-built.”
We went up four flights of stairs, Lotty shutting her eyes, letting memory guide her feet to the right door. A Turkish family lived in her family’s old apartment now. The woman who answered the door, a toddler in her arms, was at first alarmed at the sight of so many Europeans, but after Lotty spoke to her in German for a few minutes, she nodded, said something to Lotty, who turned to us.
“The women can come in, but the men must stay in the hall; there is no man home right now, and the neighbors will talk. Max, you and Martin and Herr Lautmann can go below and I will throw something, see where it lands.”
The Turkish woman stepped aside and spoke again to Lotty; I made out the word “coffee,” but Lotty declined.
Alison and I followed her inside. The apartment was filled with furniture and bright hangings. A large TV stood in one corner, with a map of Turkey framed above it. Two children were watching German cartoons.
“Very different from when I was here,” Lotty said. “My six Radbuka cousins, Hugo, my parents, my grandparents, we were crowded onto four mattresses. We had a few chairs, no drapes, nothing to hang on the walls.”
She spoke again to the woman in German, and we were allowed to go to a back room that overlooked the courtyard. The yard was a small irregular circle, with bicycles, baby buggies and a few outdoor grills covering the cobblestones. Lotty emptied her handbag, handing the contents to me. She opened the window and tossed the bag down.