Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Page 12

  And there will always be Christian men—dolts, whose families have been in this country for generations—who will tell me, once they know the barest minimum about my parents, how “taken” they are, or were, with Hitler, the cautious ones merely with the “idea” of him, with “certain aspects”; men who presume to please me by delivering themselves of such information, assuming they are fashioning a common bond. (“It’s a fact, after all. If the business with the Jews hadn’t happened, he’d now be hailed as Germany’s greatest leader.”) While there may yet be another Jewish man whose interest in me translates into “fascination” with my “background.” (“Was he a member of the Gestapo? Did he let you hold his gun? Did you like his boots? Would you like me to wear boots like that?”)

  The temptation, whenever I’ve moved from one job or place to another, to pronounce myself Swiss, or Swedish (“Ingeborg, that’s Scandinavian, isn’t it?”) or Danish or Dutch—how many Americans would know the difference? Or to say, when the conversation comes around to it, that my father was a member of the Austrian underground, spent time in Nazi prisons, months in hiding . . . the last wouldn’t even be a lie.

  If I felt about Jews as I do about Norwegians—a complex and interesting people—then I could do it. And then there would be no need to do it. As it is, though, and having my flesh crawl at the sound of Yiddish, while my father was an SS man. . . .

  Chapter 53

  To say, “My father was a Nazi,” is bad enough. To say, “He belonged to the SS,” and to say it in Manhattan, today, means that every listener assumes my father pushed bodies into gas chambers, spent quiet evenings stretching skin into lampshades.

  Never mind that in 1938, as part of the Anschluss, all Austrian police officers were subsumed under the German police. Never mind that the head of the German police was Heinrich Himmler, whose title was Leader of the Police and SS of the Greater German Reich. Never mind that every single officer of the (former) Austrian police force automatically became a member of the SS, that the legion of cops, elevated to the ranks of the SS overnight, were not asked if such a rank was agreeable to them, or that they were not required to go to so much as a single indoctrination meeting.

  No matter. In this country, now, SS stands for Death’s-Head Battalion, means Extermination Camp Guard. One day my father was a cop—albeit a cop who fervently believed in Hitler and the Anschluss—playing in the Graz police band. Next day he was an SS man, playing in the Graz police band.

  Had the idea appealed to him, there is no question that he would have joined that group years before. They would have been happy to have him. He was Aryan a certifiable five generations back, possessed of a head shape flawlessly conforming to Aryan ideals, had joined an underground activist cell as a very young man, and had been a member of the party for all the years it was illegal and dangerous in Austria to be a National Socialist. The SS would have considered him a perfect specimen for their “elite corps.” Even their code, “My honor is loyalty,” could have been invented by him.

  But he had joined neither the SA nor the SS. Instead, the SS joined him.

  Chapter 54

  Some months after Austria had become part of the Greater German Reich, my father was sent to Munich. His new superiors valued his long-standing party credentials, but he was still only a grammar school graduate and needed the equivalent of my Matura to qualify for advancement into police administration. “Police Administration” was a big step up for a street cop playing in a band.

  My father was thrilled, at both the idea of advancement and the thought of being given a high school education. He started at thirty-three, a prudent age for a Gymnasium pupil. He was not surprised when he was pronounced good with numbers, and pleased to be told that he would end up not only a graduate but also an accountant, the furthest anyone in his family had progressed in terms of education and occupation.

  Chapter 55

  A “Police Accountant”—can this be yet another specter? I write to a friend, a lawyer for the Austrian Ministry of Interior in Vienna, and ask: In what way could my father have been professionally involved with Jews? Could he have kept track of possessions taken from those who were being carted off, could he have noted in his ledgers who profited from such possessions? Could he have profited himself?

  Throughout our Gymnasium career, my friend and I had the same history teacher, a slovenly, gentle woman who told us about the Stone Age and the Phoenicians and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and right up to where Princip murders our Crown Prince. Then we went back to the Stone Age again, in more detail.

  If questioned about certain other chunks of history, our professor explained, “Your teachers and parents all lived through recent events. Recent events cannot be taught dispassionately. Therefore we do not teach recent events. We teach history. History does not allow for partisan views.”

  This professor held us captive with tales of numerous and obscure illnesses besetting her aunts. It was our version of soap opera, and we were more interested in the saga of these ailments than in either the Phoenicians or the pursuit of what was obviously a closed topic.

  So my dear friend shares with me an appalling lack of “recent” historical knowledge, at least in terms of what had been handed down to us by the Austrian school system. However, her superior at the Ministry is better informed. He reviews my father’s case and “considers it unlikely that there was any overlap whatsoever between your father’s accounting responsibilities and the official, and top-secret, Judenpolitik.”

  A different Austrian friend says, “What? When did you say he made inspector? Forty-four? How many Jews do you think were around for him to get rich off?”

  Viewed as hard-core research it’s not much; still, I let it go.

  Chapter 56

  I have shown what I have written so far to a close friend. He says there are things he wants to talk about but he is exceptionally busy and why don’t we have coffee in the morning before he goes to work. He lives nearby and we decide to meet at my house.

  My friend can be blunt, one of the qualities I admire about him, and he is a Jew. He tells me he dislikes the “anti-Semitism segments.”

  When I had first told him I was to embark on this project I had also quoted a couple of my Christian friends to him. “Look, everybody feels like that, but you sure as hell don’t talk or write about it.” “You really want the Jewish Defense League demonstrating in front of your building?,” “You’ve forgotten that ninety-nine percent of all New York publishers are Jews.”

  Back then this friend had said, “Just do it. If you ever want my opinion, I’ll let you know when you’re getting obnoxious.”

  Now he says, “Anti-Semitism is a strong word.” And, “You are not an anti-Semite.”

  I try to recall pertinent passages, specific words. Hadn’t I said, “ . . . the taste in your mouth just before you throw up”? Hadn’t I said, “seething,” “revulsion”? Weren’t there specific examples?

  But my examples do not hold up for my friend. “Yiddish, you can’t really count that, that’s more of a purist reaction,” he says. And, “The Hasids in the photograph, well, I might feel like that myself, and I’d call that a specifically American kind of uneasiness. We’re all wary of an obvious unwillingness to assimilate.” There is a pause. “Don’t you see? You are overstating the case against yourself. You are not showing sufficient cause.” And, one more time, “Anti-Semitism is a strong word. It may all be just a matter of language. Look, maybe you’re not completely aware of what connotation that word has, in America.”

  I feel as dense as if I had just awakened from fourteen hours of drugged sleep. I ask a question, he reexplains his reservation, I ask the same question a second time, he patiently begins anew. Only gradually do I hear my questions become less feeble, more pointed. “Who is an anti-Semite?” “Where is the dividing line?” My friend continues to answer articulately and at length. And then at last his patience eludes him and he bursts out, as if driven against a wall, aloud, “But I
ngeborg, don’t you understand, an anti-Semite is a terrible person!”

  He is fixed in my memory, hunched forward over empty coffee cups, Harvard-polished eloquence pared down to how he, Gerry Weinstein, feels. I think: He got up at seven to be here at eight; to have one piece of toast and to do his best to convince me, for the duration of three hours, that I am not what I am.

  Can he be right? “With your particular background, someone who looks obviously Jewish is bound to arouse, say, conflicting feelings in you.” Makes sense. And he’s a Jew! If he doesn’t think I’m an anti-Semite, who am I to quarrel with him? Maybe it is all “just a matter of language.” Don’t mention anti-Semitism then, don’t say prejudice, just leave out those . . . words; follow the advice of this thoroughly decent person and declare yourself a woman who, because of her background, simply happens to have conflicting feelings about hats pushed off white foreheads.

  But it is, after all, not true. What is true is merely that I do not tell “kike” jokes, do not live in an apartment building where Jews are less than welcome, do not join clubs that discourage memberships of certain ethnic groups. I do not voice what I feel. It would not occur to me to indulge in a habit comparable to that of one of my Jewish friends who, when a colleague of German parentage leaves the room, has been heard to hiss, “Germans, Germans, how I hate Germans!”

  Yet though I haven’t been to a church in years, I clearly remember the priest who prepared us for First Communion. “Evil thoughts are sinful, just as evil deeds are.” Both were to be confessed. “I got really mad at my brother this week and kept thinking how I want him to go far away, Monsignor. Monsignor, I had envious thoughts about Gertrude next door, she always gets to stay outside even when it starts getting dark. This week I wanted to steal a jar of jam my mother made, to keep it just for me, Monsignor. . . .”

  I do not voice what I feel—about whom? If there is no Jewish person toward whom I bear ill will, who or what else is there?

  A colleague comes to my desk. “I’m collecting money for the Jewish . . .” She is talking rapidly and amiably, looking down at me in my chair. I look up at her equally amiably. She does not know that I have blanked out at the word “Jewish.” I have become a mannequin in the position of a woman seated in an office swivel chair, face uplifted in an attitude of pleasing attentiveness. Inside me there is no thought, there is only a pulse that courses through me and says: No.

  Within the mannequin, a registering process must have continued to function, it notes that the woman has stopped speaking. As if I were to say, “Oh, come to think of it, I don’t have any manila ones either, I’ll get an extra batch for you later,” just like that, then, I say, “I’m sorry, you’ve caught me at a bad time, you’re talking to the grand owner of one token and sixty-five cents. But I’m going to the bank in half an hour, why don’t you stop by later.”

  “Great,” she says and goes away.

  I want to crawl under my desk. Instead, I snatch up my purse, smile at the woman at the desk next to mine, go to the washroom, and lock myself into a cubicle.

  Slowly, methodically, I attempt to think. What did she ask me? To contribute money to a cause. What cause was it? I go over her words, but the words to go over are few. “I’m collecting money for the Jewish . . .” The Jewish what? Clearly, I did not want to know. Clearly, I also did not want to contribute. Aware of the odd sensation of sitting on a toilet while all my clothes are zipped and buttoned up, I count forty-seven dollars and change. It is an idle exercise since I knew all along, at least approximately, how much money I have in my wallet. I do not intend to go to the bank, the forty-seven dollars will last me until payday.

  Why didn’t I say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t care to contribute to this . . . whatever”? Unthinkable. I cannot face what wells up in me at the idea of giving a dollar to a Jewish anything, I cannot face what causes me to undergo a sensation so powerful that I must, at all costs, erase it.

  Eventually I go back to my desk, and eventually my colleague returns, and I smilingly hand her the dollar I have sitting ready, folded in half, next to my appointment book. She smiles back briefly, she’s in a hurry, and checks me off her list and is on to the next desk. I find I have indeed run out of manila envelopes and walk to the supply closet only to stand before it, holding on to its opened metal doors, surveying the rows of pencils and erasers and boxes of paper clips, unable to remember what I have come to retrieve.

  And that’s it. I am out of examples.

  Chapter 57

  While my Christian friends speak of feelings similar to mine—never, of course, in “mixed company”—most of them, too, misunderstand. They consider our conflicting feelings natural, “background” or no “background.” “It’s a bonding principle.” “They’re different, that’s all, and sometimes it gets on your nerves.” “You want to hear my father’s definition of an anti-Semite? Somebody who hates Jews more than absolutely necessary.” “It’s that whole alien thing and old hat and boring as hell, but they’re the ones who insist on it.” “That bunch sticks together like glue, look around, one hand’s always washing another.” “But God forbid we stick together, then it’s no bonding principle anymore, hell no, then it’s prejudice.”

  Yes, it is because of my “background” that I am more aware of how I feel about this particular—what; topic?—than any third-generation American-born Methodist friend of mine. My background, or my reaction to my background, does do that: makes me aware of “it.” But “it,” however unvoiced, however not-acted-upon, however unacknowledged, is anti-Semitism. The core of it. The germ of it. The kernel, the possibility, the essence of it. The necessary seed from which, in the proper environment, under the proper encouragement, with the proper nourishment, grows the thing that even officially cannot but be called by its true name. Whether it is the club that does not admit Jews—a little seedling there; or a university that limits the number of Jewish students it will accept—the seedling grows; or that same university refusing teaching positions to Jews—a sturdy little tree now; or a decree prohibiting Jews from using all public facilities—deep woods stretching into the distance; progroms and a Kristallnacht and full-scale evacuation—unchecked growth in all directions at once, and no horizon in sight; until it’s here, the jungle, dense and all consuming, devouring a continent, its vines entangling a world.

  I am sorry to disappoint you, Gerry, and any Jews who assume that all their Christian friends (none of whom, possibly, voice what they feel) are untainted by aspects of what you call, unfairly backed against the wall and with my very best interests at heart, being a terrible person.

  Chapter 58

  So he studied to become a high school graduate and an accountant at the same time. And if the chief of police in this longed-for Greater Germany happened to also be chief of the SS, that’s how it was. My father’s new title had little bearing on what he now concentrated on with verve: Math and German Literature, with a special emphasis on Friedrich Schiller.

  When all that was over, my father’s cram course, his three-year career as Police Accountant culminating in the title of Inspektor on November 1, 1944, and ending in early May of 1945 with a stolen Jeep, a stolen horse, followed by months of hiding in haylofts; when all that was over, and he started out again in a basement, making keys—that’s when the telling of boyhood stories ended, that’s when Friedrich Schiller invaded my life.

  From the autumn of 1945 until the autumn of 1946, my father taught me Das Lied von der Glocke, “The Song of the Bell.”

  He would come home at night to his still-healthy wife, to his recuperating infant son, to his five-year-old daughter. He came home black with grease. Every time I’ve had a key made in this country, I have looked closely at the man who did the job for me, in a couple of minutes—in a shop, for instance, along an underground arcade at Grand Central. The man always wears jeans and some sort of shirt, clean, and his fingernails are no cleaner and no dirtier than those of a mailman, a bus driver, a teacher’s aide; and I wonder wh
at could have been so different about the work of a locksmith as performed by my father in 1945 and 1946 and 1947, from that of an American locksmith today.

  My mother traded a blouse for a special cleaning solution and tried to invent solutions of her own, combining the granules labeled “laundry soap,” available in exchange for coupons at grocery stores, with her mother’s recipe for homemade soap, suitable for washing up after a day’s work in the fields. But my father’s hands no longer came clean. Even the lines on his forehead and around his nose and mouth remained for those years etched in dark, as if retouched by an inept photographer. For me, the perpetual grime under his fingernails and tracing every crevice of the hands folded in his lap, is ingrained in each stanza of Schiller’s poem.

  My very own father, green eyes vying with shiny, white teeth for splendor, his uniform taut across the back, tapering to a narrow waist; glittery, pretty things on chest and shoulders; a cap with its black visor, smooth, so that your fingers slipped across it as on ice, its band of leather lining matching in odor and touch the boots that reached above my waist . . . this man, my father, had been replaced by someone who walked with a stoop, who came home black. The area surrounding the pupils of his eyes glowed pink.

  Every night he spent half an hour cleaning himself as best he could, changed his clothes, and wolfed down whatever his wife had managed to concoct. Then he set me down in front of him, on the low kitchen stool, and taught me a few lines from memory, teacher and student driven by the same adrenaline. The grim stranger’s urgency sped through me, inspiring a compliance so total that it informed a blazing urgency of my own.