A Death in Vienna

“On March 14, the Gestapo broke down the door of this very apartment and stole our most prized possessions: our rugs, our silver, our paintings, even our Shabbat candlesticks. My father and I were taken briefly into custody and forced to scrub sidewalks with boiling water and a toothbrush. The rabbi from our synagogue was hurled into the street and his beard torn from his face while a crowd of Austrians looked on and jeered. I tried to stop them, and I was nearly beaten to death. I couldn’t be taken to a hospital, of course. That was forbidden by the new anti-Jewish laws.”

In less than a week, the Jewish community of Austria, one of the most vital and influential in all of Europe, was in tatters: community centers and Jewish societies shut down, leaders in jail, synagogues closed, prayer books burned on bonfires. On April 1, a hundred prominent public figures and businessmen were deported to Dachau. Within a month, five hundred Jews had chosen to kill themselves rather than face another day of torment, including a family of four who lived next door to the Kleins. “They shot themselves, one at a time,” Klein said. “I lay in my bed and listened to the whole thing. A shot, followed by sobs. Another shot, more sobs. After the fourth shot, there was no one left to cry, no one but me.”

More than half the community decided to leave Austria and emigrate to other lands. Max Klein was among them. He obtained a visa to Holland and traveled there in 1939. In less than a year, he would find himself under the Nazi jackboot once more. “My father decided to remain in Vienna,” Klein said. “He believed in the law, you see. He thought that if he just adhered to the law, things would be fine, and the storm would eventually pass. It got worse, of course, and when he finally decided to leave, it was too late.”

Klein tried to pour himself another cup of tea, but his hand was shaking violently. Gabriel poured it for him and gently asked what had become of his parents and two sisters.

“In the autumn of 1941, they were deported to Poland and confined in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. In January 1942, they were deported one final time, to the Chelmno extermination camp.”

“And you?”

Klein’s head fell to one side-And me? Same fate, different ending. Arrested in Amsterdam in June 1942, detained in the Westerbork transit camp, then sent east, to Auschwitz. On the rail platform, half-dead from thirst and hunger, a voice. A man in prison clothing is asking whether there are any musicians on the arriving train. Klein latches onto the voice, a drowning man seizing a lifeline. I’m a violinist, he tells the man in stripes. Do you have an instrument? He holds up a battered case, the only thing he had brought from Westerbork. Come with me. This is your lucky day.

“My lucky day,” Klein repeated absently. “For the next two and a half years, while more than a million go up in smoke, my colleagues and I play music. We play on the selection ramp to help the Nazis create the illusion that the new arrivals have come to a pleasant place. We play as the walking dead file into the disrobing chambers. We play in the yard during the endless roll calls. In the morning, we play as the slaves file out to work, and in the afternoon, when they stagger back to their barracks with death in their eyes, we are playing. We even play before executions. On Sundays, we play for the Kommandant and his staff. Suicide continuously thins our ranks. Soon I’m the one working the crowd on the ramp, looking for musicians to fill the empty chairs.”

One Sunday afternoon-It is sometime in the summer of 1942, but I’m sorry, Mr. Argov, I cannot recall the exact date-Klein is walking back to his barracks after a Sunday concert. An SS officer comes up from behind and knocks him to the ground. Klein gets to his feet and stands at attention, avoiding the SS man’s gaze. Still, he sees enough of the face to realize that he has met the man once before. It was in Vienna, at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, but on that day he’d been wearing a fine gray suit and standing at the side of none other than Adolf Eichmann.

“The Sturmbannführer told me that he would like to conduct an experiment,” Klein said. “He orders me to play Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major. I take my violin from its case and begin to play. An inmate walks past. The Sturmbannführer asks him to please name the piece I am playing. The inmate says he does not know. The Sturmbannführer draws his sidearm and shoots the inmate through the head. He finds another inmate and poses the same question. What piece is this fine violinist playing? And on it goes for the next hour. Those who can answer the question correctly are spared. Those who can’t, he shoots through the head. By the time he’s finished, fifteen bodies are lying at my feet. When his thirst for Jewish blood is quenched, the man in black smiles and walks away. I lay down with the dead and said mourner’s Kaddish for them.”

KLEIN LAPSED INTO a long silence. A car hissed past in the street. Klein lifted his head and began to speak again. He was not quite ready to make the connection between the atrocity at Auschwitz and the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries, though by now Gabriel had a clear sense of where the story was headed. He continued chronologically, one china plate at a time, as Lavon would have said. Survival at Auschwitz. Liberation. His return to Vienna…

The community had numbered 185,000 before the war, he said. Sixty-five thousand had perished in the Holocaust. Seventeen hundred broken souls stumbled back into Vienna in 1945, only to be greeted by open hostility and a new wave of anti-Semitism. Those who’d emigrated at the point of a German gun were discouraged from returning. Demands for financial restitution were met by silence or were sneeringly referred to Berlin. Klein, returning to his home in the Second District, found an Austrian family living in the flat. When he asked them to leave, they refused. It took a decade to finally pry them loose. As for his father’s textile business, it was gone for good, and no restitution ever made. Friends encouraged him to go to Israel or America. Klein refused. He vowed to stay on in Vienna, a living, breathing, walking memorial to those who had been driven out or murdered in the death camps. He left his violin behind at Auschwitz and never played again. He earned his living as a clerk in a dry-goods store, and later as an insurance salesman. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, the government agreed to pay surviving Austrian Jews approximately six thousand dollars each. Klein showed Gabriel the check. It had never been cashed.

“I didn’t want their money,” he said. “Six thousand dollars? For what? My mother and father? My two sisters? My home? My possessions?”

He tossed the check onto the table. Gabriel sneaked a glance at his wristwatch and saw it was two-thirty in the morning. Klein was closing in, circling his target. Gabriel resisted the impulse to give him a nudge, fearing that the old man, in his precarious state, might stumble and never regain his footing.

“Two months ago, I stop for coffee at the Café Central. I’m given a lovely table next to a pillar. I order a Pharisäer.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Do you know a Pharisäer, Mr. Argov? Coffee with whipped cream, served with a small glass of rum.” He apologized for the liquor. “It was the late afternoon, you see, and cold.”

A man enters the café, tall, well-dressed, a few years older than Klein. An Austrian of the old school, if you know what I mean, Mr. Argov. There’s an arrogance in his walk that causes Klein to lower his newspaper. The waiter rushes across the floor to greet him. The waiter is wringing his hands, hopping from foot to foot like a schoolboy who needs to piss.Good evening, Herr Vogel. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t see you today. Your usual table? Let me guess: an Einspänner? And how about a sweet? I’m told the Sachertorte is lovely today, Herr Vogel…