Danzig Passage Read online

  “What is it?” she asked quietly, imploring him to speak the truth.

  “Anna . . .” He drew a deep breath and then stepped back into the study, pulling her after him and locking the door. “Where is Theo?” he asked bluntly.

  Anna looked at the floor and then up into Murphy’s eyes. “How much do you know?”

  “Anna, is Theo in Geneva?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head slowly. So, the warning was true. They had sent Theo to Berlin to present the economic trade plan in hopes of securing the release of Jewish assets in Germany.

  He answered his own question. “So. They asked him to go.”

  “How do you know this?” Anna pleaded. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Has something happened to him? What news have you heard?”

  “There are riots in Germany. Retaliation against the murder of vom Rath. We expected as much.”

  “But what of Theo? How could you know about this? I only knew because I guessed. We decided Elisa must not know. He left under a false name and a British diplomatic passport. Top secret, they said. How can you know this?”

  Murphy did not take the note from his pocket. His fingers closed around it as he considered what he should say. “Somebody recognized him in Berlin,” he replied, trying to sound calm, although his insides were churning. “You know, the newsmen always hear rumors. I wanted to check this one out with the boss.”

  Anna sat down heavily in the chair before the fire. She looked terribly weary, much older than even a few minutes ago. “And what rumor have you heard? You must tell me. Is my Theo dead, John?”

  He laughed—a short, incredulous burst. “Anna! I told you all I know. Someone recognized him in Berlin. I heard about it.”

  “And there are riots in Berlin. Against the Jewish people. Ah. Güring never intended to negotiate with Theo for the release of even one, did he?” She looked up, suddenly angry. “I am going home with our sons. My little sister is in Berlin with her family. I sent her our phone number with Theo. Perhaps there will be a phone call.” She stood. “I must go home.” She trembled as Murphy took her by the shoulders.

  “I did not mean to worry you.” He was mentally kicking himself for the tactless way he had handled the matter.

  Anna patted his cheek affectionately. “Say nothing to Elsa. I am . . . I have learned that Theo and my sister are in God’s hands. I know it here.” She tapped her temple. “It has not yet sunk in here, however.” She pointed to her heart.

  She drew herself erect, and with a smile she made her way through the crowd to hug Elisa good night. Murphy watched her with admiration and then instructed Freddie to escort her safely home.

  Murphy tried to smile as Elisa slipped her hand in his. “You sure do know how to pick a band, Mr. Murphy!” She tucked her arm through his and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “You didn’t realize I knew so much about music.” He attempted to sound light, relaxed. It worked; she did not seem to notice that he was searching every face, looking for some unseen threat.

  “Even Horace Bently, the publicity man at the Opera House, is impressed. He says that the Fat Lady could have been the finest contralto in the world with such a voice!”

  “She would have added an interesting aspect to Wagner’s operas. Dress her up in a Viking helmet and . . .” He was babbling, noticing all the faces he did not recognize.

  “Well the success of the party is due to you. Charles and Louis are going to remember this night forever. Tap dancing with D’ Fat Lady—much more exciting than an evening of Bach!”

  Murphy wanted the party to end. He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty! This could go on indefinitely. Who were all these people, anyway?

  The piano player began a slow jazz piece. Sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres disappeared at an astonishing rate. The offices of American News Agencies on Fleet Street were abandoned for the most part. This party could, indeed, last until morning.

  But it did not. Murphy glanced up as someone began shouting from the arched doorway. The music died down.

  “They’ve done it! The Nazis have. . . .” The voice rose and fell, struggling to be heard against the din. “All hell is breaking loose! I just got it over the wire! Where is Ted Richter? Richter? INS! Come on! I tell you, the Nazis are tearing up the place over there!”

  Murphy never got a clear view of the face of the man who was calling for Richter. Drunk and sober, the members of the press suddenly stampeded for the exit, pocketing sandwiches, grabbing coats in a mad scramble. Within moments the room had emptied by half.

  Murphy watched the mass exodus with a sense of relief. He did not move from Elisa’s side. He would not.

  “Well, now we know who all the guests were,” Elisa said. “Your friends, darling.”

  “My competition,” he said.

  “You’re not going to the office?”

  “I sent Harvey back. The staff will manage without me.”

  “What is it?” Her brow puckered with concern.

  “Riots in Germany. Nazi retribution.”

  “Jews?” she asked.

  He nodded a reply. He would not give her more details. She had been through enough. Unless she asked, he would not tell her. And even then, he would not tell her everything he knew.

  6

  A Tour of Hell

  Peter Wallich found himself among a crowd of thousands in Vienna. He did not recognize the faces of those who ran past him. He peered back toward Herr Ruger’s apartment, where his mother waited.

  The smoke stung his eyes. A shout sounded from above, and he turned his face upward as two Nazis gleefully tossed a small dog out of a fourth-story window. The creature landed with a yelp and managed to drag itself a few feet before it collapsed. Furniture rained down from the apartments above the shops on the north side of the street. Clothing floated like tormented spirits in the turbulent air.

  Peter forced himself to keep walking. He tried not to look up as a crowd gathered on the sidewalk below an apartment.

  “Throw him down!” jeered the mob. “We’ll catch him!”

  There was nothing left to throw out of the window except an old Jew and his wife. Screams and pleas for mercy blended with Nazi curses and laughter.

  “Tell us where it is, old man!” shouted two big Storm Troopers as they dangled the old man over the pavement by his bare feet, four floors above the sidewalk.

  “There is nothing more! Nothing I tell you!”

  “Tell us where you’ve hidden your gold, or—”

  Peter looked up for a fraction of an instant. His breathing grew shallow with fear as he recognized the old watchmaker’s wife tearing at the men who held her husband.

  Peter looked away. He jogged toward the corner; a few more steps and he was safely out of sight. But he heard the final agonizing cry as the man hurtled to his death.

  After a moment of total silence, a mighty cheer rose up. Peter felt suddenly ill. Leaning against a lamppost, he fought for breath as the crowd surged around him. His sense of adventure vanished as the scream echoed in his mind. Now he was afraid! Fear made him want to run. And if he ran, they would recognize him for what he was and chase him down as certainly as hounds chase a rabbit.

  He had forgotten his purpose. For a moment he could not think why he had come out or where he was going. He saw the flames of Turnergasse Synagogue. Another explosion sounded, far away. Peter shook himself away from the terror that rooted him to the sidewalk. He pushed himself away from the streetlamp and staggered numbly toward his own neighborhood. Remembering the Fischer family, he quickened his pace and moved in and out of the throngs who had come out for the show. The street widened and the crowd thinned. Peter hoped they had not reached his apartment building. Perhaps there was still time to lead the Fischers back to the safety of Herr Ruger’s apartment.

  He jammed his hands down in his pockets and leaned forward as he walked, as if struggling to move against a great wind. He no longer looked to the right or left. Shopwindows were broken everywhere. Me
n and women, even small children, reached through the showcase windows to gather what they could.

  On the corner, two policemen watched the looting. They talked with each other as if nothing unusual was happening. Peter pressed past them. They did not challenge him.

  He felt the crunch of glass beneath his feet as he turned onto his own street. He stopped and gasped. The scene was the same. The destruction was complete.

  A large open truck was parked outside his apartment building. Uniformed Nazi troopers and Gestapo men in trenchcoats supervised the loading of Jewish prisoners into the back.

  Peter stepped back into a shadow to watch. He looked up at the window of the Fischers’ apartment. The window was open; lace curtains wafted out.

  He followed the façade of the building to the window of his own apartment. The light was on; shadows of men moved inside, searching, tearing the place apart.

  Peter clenched his fists. His nails dug into his palms as he battled the urge to run screaming at the Nazis who now shoved Herr Fischer out the door of her building. The man was hatless. His overcoat was open, revealing his nightshirt tucked into his trousers.

  The butt of a rifle urged him, stumbling, toward the back of the truck. In the dim light, Peter could see blood on his face. His nightshirt was splattered with blood. He wore a bewildered, frightened expression. His captors looked confident and righteous, amused by their own cruelty.

  Peter was too late. With horror, he recognized the faces of a dozen boys his own age peering out from the back of the truck. Adam Siebenson was only fourteen, and yet, there he was, jammed against the wooden slats of the vehicle.

  Peter could do nothing. Blood drumming in his ears, he turned away to walk back to Herr Ruger’s apartment. He tucked his head down in the collar of his coat, fearing that he might be recognized as a Jew by someone in the district. It would only take one hostile neighbor, and Peter would find himself in the back of a prison truck headed for a concentration camp!

  He stared at his shoes and the shards of glass beneath his feet. He no longer raised his eyes to gape when men shouted and women cried out. In the center of the street a pile of furniture, doused with kerosene and set ablaze, illuminated the area like daylight. The carnage and looting proceeded with ease by the light.

  Peter fearfully tugged the brim of his cap down low over his eyes. He grimaced as the fumes of kerosene and smoke stung his throat. Such bitter smells did not seem to bother the rioters. They laughed and jeered at their victims as if the air were untainted. Only Jews seemed to cough. Only the tormented wiped their eyes and covered their noses against the smoke of Vienna. Trying not to cough, Peter plunged on through the crowds. He did not think of the Fischers any longer, only of himself. Of Herr Ruger’s apartment. He wished his mother had not awakened him tonight. His nightmares had been much less frightening than reality.

  He glanced ahead toward Frau Singer’s shop window, nearly picked clean. The mob moved away from him, farther up the block where new targets were being hit.

  Only half a block to safety! Peter looked up toward the window of Ruger’s apartment. Still dark; a good sign. They had not come there. The hounds had not sniffed them out!

  Against his own will, Peter quickened his pace to a jog. The glass cracked beneath his feet. People darted in and out of the demolished shops at the far end of the block. For them, the night was a celebration.

  The flames of the Turnergasse flared and then dimmed, leaving the after-image of terror etched on Peter’s mind. He lunged toward the door and tumbled, panting, into the dark foyer of the apartment building. Kicking the door shut, he groped toward the stairway and clambered up on his hands and knees. Too weak from fear to stand, he clutched at the banister and pulled himself up step by step. The howling of the mob penetrated the heart of the building. Visions of darkness pursued him and seemed to pull him back.

  Until now Peter had not noticed that his face was wet with tears. Had he wept openly in the street? The thought brought a new wave of fear over him. They beat anyone who wept, Peter knew. And then they arrested them.

  He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. On the landing, he pulled himself upright and managed to climb the remaining stairs. Leaning heavily against the doorjamb of the apartment, he knocked softly, fearful that a neighbor might hear and peer out at him.

  “Who is there?” His mother’s voice trembled.

  “Mother?”

  The door swung wide, and he fell into her arms.

  She closed the door and locked it, then guided him to the sofa. “You are safe! Safe!”

  “They took Herr Fischer, Mother! And some of the boys in my class! I am too late! Too late!” He was filled with remorse. Why had he not brought someone else along to Herr Ruger’s apartment tonight? Why had he not known what would happen?

  His mother cradled him but said nothing. She stroked his back and stared through the window at the dying glow of the Turnergasse Synagogue.

  ***

  The murky waters of the Danube slid silently beneath Stephanie Bridge. The fires around the city reflected orange against the moving blackness of the river.

  Lucy Strasburg leaned heavily against the stone railing of the bridge and stared into the current. Beyond her, on either side of the banks, Vienna was rocked by violence and torment. She did not think of those she saw being beaten in the streets on her long walk here. It simply seemed a suitable backdrop to the chaos of her own life.

  On the Stubenring she watched an old Jew leap to his death as Storm Troopers broke into his apartment. Vienna was filled with the presence of death tonight.

  This was the important demonstration Wolf had told her about, the Reich business that made him late to see her! This was a reflection of the glory of the Reich he served! For the fulfillment of fire and destruction Lucy carried the child of Wolfgang von Fritschauer.

  She disobeyed him. She had not eaten as he instructed her, and yet now she vomited into the Danube. She had not taken a cab to her apartment, but had wandered aimlessly through the streets for hours, hoping that somehow a stray bullet might find her, or a trooper might mistake her for a Jewess and kill her.

  Foolish hope. She was so Aryan that the club-wielding Nazi patriots nodded in respect as they passed her. One policeman asked her why she was out tonight. Was it to see the Jews get what they had coming? he asked.

  And so Lucy had come here, where others had come to end their lives. She longed for the cold water to silence her problems. She watched it move away and imagined it carrying her into a long, untroubled sleep.

  Her eyes were dry. She was past crying. She had been a fool. She had thought that Wolf loved her as she loved him. Married! She had interpreted everything he said through her own twisted idea of imagined love. She had left the church, her home, her job in Munich for the sake of being near him when he asked.

  Dying would be easy compared to facing her family with the truth. It was bad enough that she was forced to admit the truth to herself.

  She looked across the rooftops toward the Seventh District, where the men of Vienna took their pleasures at the brothels and cabarets of the city. She had scorned the women who lived and worked in such places. But was she any different? Lucy let her eyes move from one fire to another on the horizon where synagogues and Jewish businesses were being destroyed by a man-made hell. She was consumed by a hell of her own making. The smoke made her eyes burn as she turned her gaze again toward the water and wondered. . . .

  As a child she had heard that there was another hell that burned beyond this world. What if the waters of the Danube did not carry her to a peaceful sleep but into that raging inferno beyond life?

  Lucy feared the possibility, and fear alone kept her from throwing herself over the rail and into the water. She feared God and feared hell and feared her own terrible sin. She might escape Wolf and this unwanted baby, but what if the frescos of Judgment Day in the church were true? Even the Danube could not let her escape all that! Perhaps death was only a door to somethin
g worse than this.

  An open truck rumbled across the bridge. Haunted-looking men peered out at her from between the slats. Where were they being taken? What sort of hell awaited them at the end of the Nazi road?

  Lucy stared down at her own hands. Her nails were perfectly manicured, painted red, as Wolf liked them. The watch on her wrist reminded her that even her soul now belonged to him. She had sold herself, and there was no way to buy back what she had lost.

  “I am a whore,” she said aloud. “I belong to SS Major Wolfgang von Fritschauer, and I am his whore.”

  Lucy did not need to jump off Stephanie Bridge to die that night. The hopelessness of this terrible truth killed something in her heart as certainly as the dark currents of the Danube could have stolen her breath forever.

  Lucy stepped away from the cold stone and wiped mist and ashes from her cheek. Hell had come to earth tonight. Lucy could not think about any torment more terrible than her own.

  She walked slowly back toward Franz Josef’s Kai, where elegant hotels and shops lay untouched by the violence of the demonstrations. People milled around everywhere, enjoying the spectacle. She moved among them, not noticing or caring that tonight was a night unlike any other in the history of the world.

  ***

  Something horrible had happened downstairs. Charles could tell because the music stopped and people were shouting. The party was over.

  Louis rubbed the sleep from his eyes and joined Charles at the window. Members of the press corps and their ladies piled into a long line of taxis, and still there were not enough taxis for everyone.

  “Ten bucks! Come on, Phipps! I’ll pay the fare and give you ten bucks! Lemme sit on your lap!”

  It was strange to see grown men fighting over how many bodies could be crammed into one vehicle. Charles would have laughed at them—except he knew down deep that something bad had happened.

  “What do you think?” Louis frowned, pressing his forehead against the cool pane.

  Charles shrugged. He did not know. Maybe they should call Elisa. There were still some guests at the party. The members of the orchestra were not pushing and shoving on the curb. Either they had gone out the back way or whatever was happening did not affect them. He could hear the low murmur of voices through the floor. The voices did not sound happy anymore. Nobody was laughing.