A Chosen Sparrow Read online

  A CHOSEN SPARROW

  Vera Caspary

  Dell Books

  Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  750 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

  Copyright © 1964 by Vera Caspary

  Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Reprinted by arrangement with

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N.Y.

  DEDICATION: For Feli

  First Dell printing—February, 1965

  Printed in U.S.A.

  I

  There is a theory held by good people that evil should be forgotten and only pleasant memories retained. Those who made me feel guilty for remembering evil were truly good, but they shamed me into believing it wicked to talk or even think about the degradation I had known in early childhood. I could speak freely about the prison, exhibit myself as a victim, even profit from the sympathy offered by penitent elders, but there were things I could not mention, and by my silence joined the ranks of the ignorant, the indifferent and those dedicated to blindness. Later and in very odd circumstances I let myself be provoked to recollection and learned through evil what virtue had not taught. The past was to come back with such clarity that the very act of memory became consummation, and there was exultance as well as pain in recalling the scenes of torture that were my earliest entertainments.

  Among the things remembered of the prison years were songs and words in different languages, folk tales, the caresses of lost women, my mother’s endlessly repeated lessons; names, dates, German grammar; and facts about our lives at home: I had been a fat baby with a large appetite; in my mother’s dining room in Vienna the finest food had been served upon Augarten porcelain; on holidays and birthdays there had been Gugelhupf with the breakfast coffee and Sachertorte for dinner. “Tell me about the cakes,” I would beg. “Please, Mutti, name the flowers in the window pots.” Like fairy tales to educated children these magic names evoked for me a world as colorful as the clouds I watched through barred windows. Cyclamen, cakes, castle…

  I cannot say what month or day it was when we were brought to the prison, but I think it was in 1940 and in the autumn. My mother told me I had been born free in the sanitarium of the famous Professor Weintraub and brought home from there in a taxicab to our flat on the Rotenturmstrasse in the Inner City. She said our home had been old-fashioned but comfortable with excellent furniture (in the salon a set of Biedermeyer given her by an aunt who went to America) and silver knives and forks from my father’s family. At every window grew flowers in pots. “The loveliest,” my mother told me, “was the cyclamen.”

  On the day she brought me home from Professor Weintraub’s sanitarium my father gave her a cyclamen of delicate lavender. He was a gallant young man, and very handsome with wide-set blue eyes and curling hair which he wore quite long because he wanted everyone to know he was a musician. He earned his living with the violin, but was ambitious and hoped to compose melodies like Franz Schubert. I can still sing two of his songs which Mutti taught me. Her voice was sweet and true but small; or perhaps I think of it as small because it would have been dangerous for her to attract the attention of prison guards by singing freely.

  On the evening of the 31st of January, 1937, my dear father dressed in his black tailcoat, a white shirt beautifully ironed by our maid, a white vest and tie and went to his job. It was a gala night at the Opera; they were playing Fidelio. My father was in the last row of violinists, the youngest in the orchestra, only twenty-seven years old. The musicians had finished tuning their instruments and the lights were fading when a stranger in a muffler and rough overcoat appeared in the orchestra pit. He went straight to my father and whispered the news that my mother had been taken to Dr. Weintraub’s sanitarium. My poor father thought of all the stories about women dying in childbirth and trembled so that he could hardly hold the bow. When the stranger wrapped the muffler about his neck and strode out, Vati was tempted to follow. But a musician is like a soldier; he cannot desert his post. The conductor entered, bowed to the audience, raised his baton.

  At the interval my father hurried out to telephone the sanitarium. A nurse named the precise hour and minute of his daughter’s birth. It was during the Overture. This is why I am named Leonora.

  The winter after this was not pleasant. Insults to Jews were shouted aloud and people on the streets made very rude remarks. In the spring when the Anschluss came those who had refused to believe it would happen in our country knew it would be as bad as in Germany. If a man was a Jew or a Communist or had spoken against the supporters of Hitler there was only one way for him to save himself. Within two days my mother and father, the maid and I were on our way to Prague. My father carried his violin and two heavy cases with music manuscripts, his black broadcloth evening clothes, white shirts, white ties and vests. Anni, the maid, struggled with bags filled with our clothes and the silver knives and forks. My mother carried me.

  Our flat in Prague was small and badly furnished, nothing like our home in Vienna, but my father soon found friends among the musicians there, joined an unpaid quintette and was hired to teach music in a private school. Mother always brought flowers from the market so that our home was not drab. On Sundays we rode in the trolleybus to the country, picked wildflowers, and ate lunch out of a basket. I crawled on the grass so happily that my little dresses were full of green stains. My mother had to wash them herself for the maid had fallen in love and married a Czech policeman.

  When the Nazis marched in we Jews were doomed, and not Jews alone for many Czech people had not been afraid to say what they felt about Hitler. Almost the entire symphony orchestra fled. My father’s friends suggested that we travel with them. Again the music manuscripts, the silver knives and forks, the black broadcloth and white shirts were packed, again we prepared for flight. Early on the morning of departure my father went out to buy bread and sausage and apples for the train. It was dangerous for us on the streets so he told my mother to wait behind the closed shutters until he came back.

  “It will not be long. Wait patiently.”

  When she talked about the farewell, my mother always touched her right cheek where the final kiss had fallen.

  We waited in hats and coats for it was a raw day and there was no wood or coal or even paper for the stove. At ten o’clock there was a knock on the door. “Willy?” asked my mother softly. It was the musician who had hired a sympathetic taxi driver to take us and our goods to the station. His wife and three children were waiting in the cab. Mother would not leave without my father. The other musician (she could not remember what instrument he played) begged her to come, saying that my father would wish her to catch the train. No argument would move her. She would wait as he had instructed and if they had to hurry out and ride in a bus to the station she would leave the silver knives and forks and most of our clothes.

  For thirty hours we stayed in the silent flat. The next evening there was another knock on the door. I was awakened and started to cry. Mother tried to quiet me for she did not know who our visitor could be. “Is it you, Willy?” A woman’s voice answered through the keyhole, our dear Anni who had married the Czech policeman. “Thank the dear Lord Jesus,” she cried and embraced us both. “You must come with me at once,” she whispered. “They are looking for you.” She could not tell us what had happened to my father, but only that there had been a new wave of arrests and many Jews had disappeared.

  “No, no, he has not been taken. He is hiding, waiting. He will come back to us.” Mother was very stubborn. She wanted to stay and starve in the cold flat.

  “Please, gnädige Frau,” said Anni who could not forget she had worked as my mother’s maid. Her husband had suspected that we had not gone off as we had planned
, and sent her to fetch us. Anni had worked for us long enough to know my father’s way of thinking and was sure he would come to look for us at her house. “And he will never find you at all if you are arrested and sent away on the sealed train.”

  They must have been very good people, Anni and her policeman, to risk their safety to protect us. For a time he kept his job so that he could warn and hide people and lead them out of the city by secret ways to villages where other brave men and women would try to smuggle them out of the country. My mother would not leave. She believed that her beloved husband was alive and would come for us at the first moment of safety. We stayed with Anni until her husband became suspect and could not remain in the service of the police. He and Anni moved to a village close by, but it would not have been safe for us to remain with them. They knew others who hated the Germans and tried to protect their victims. We lived in many houses, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for only a single night. One of our hosts terrified my poor mother as he growled and grumbled that we were a burden, that we ate food which his own people needed; but when mother offered him our silver knives and forks, he asked angrily if she thought he was sheltering us in order to get rich. Mutti would cry when she told me about this man who died in our prison.

  Of the many things my mother told me I allowed myself to remember the pleasantest facts. Certain words have the magic of distant impressions. When I hear the name of Prague I recall the feeling of Mutti holding me tightly against some damp wall or pushing me into an alcove, looking in all directions before she would pick me up and carry me across the street. Sometimes at night I would be carried by a man I had never seen and would never meet again. Shadows cast by iron lanterns, the shape of a church, tall saints in two rows on the Karlsbrüeke, the high castle of Hradshin, remained in the unlocked sections of my mind. Probably they are not memories at all, but ideas gathered later from pictures of the city.

  I do not know the exact nature of that prison. Perhaps our captors were not sure either. Why certain people were kept here instead of being sent directly to the concentration camps no one could say. Prisoners lived on short rations of hope, seldom fulfilled. I think now of my mother waiting, wondering, while some thickheaded clerk misfiled her papers. This, no doubt, was the miracle that saved my life. Not many lives were preserved as mine was by official blunders and the fear of punishment. Had it not been for such mistakes and the unwillingness of petty officers to admit errors, more people would have died in the gas ovens.

  My mother died in the spring of 1945 just before the war ended. When she was carried to the infirmary she cried and struggled because she did not want to leave me, but other prisoners begged her not to make a scene lest my presence attract the attention of the administration and the officers send me away. I was eight years old and well aware of the changes in our little world. When the bombers thundered overhead I trembled at the noise and wondered why there was so much rejoicing among the prisoners. Conditions had grown worse, more and more of our friends had been taken off in the night trains, discipline was stricter although more erratic. Many said these were good signs, that they signified the end. Good for whom? End of what? We did not know the date, the month.

  Time had become a lost treasure. Those who tried to count days were never sure and there were many fights about the calendar.

  My mother never returned from the infirmary. An epidemic of scarletina, complicated by tuberculosis, killed her quickly. We were not told until she had been cremated. I do not remember which of the women cradled me in her arms that night because there were many mothers among the prisoners. Women who had lost their children fought for the privilege of comforting the orphan. Their love and coddling gave me, in spite of squalor and deprivations, the sense that I was a very special, beloved girl. No doubt their coddling consoled me for the loss of my real mother, their caresses made me feel that a solid wall of mothers would protect me if an official came with deportation orders. None ever did; probably in the confusion of those last days no one bothered to consider the existence of the little Jew.

  One morning the guards ran in all directions. Some dropped their guns, others shot without aim. Those who did not escape were lined up like prisoners, disarmed, marched off with their arms raised and their heads hanging. Men in strange uniforms shouted commands. I kept out of sight as I had been told to do since my mother had been carried off. One of the women called to me to come with her on the bus, but I did not know what she meant and kept myself hidden until she quit looking for me. These days and hours were the most terrifying of my prison years. There had been cruelty, filth and fear, but there had been order. Meager though it had been our food had come at regular hours. Now there was nothing; no marches, no drills, no friends, no meals.

  An aroma guided me to the kitchen. Slabs of bloody meat looked like butchered bodies. Too empty to vomit I retched violently. When I found a pile of potatoes I stole several, began to eat one raw, skin and all. A soldier caught me. He spoke words I could not understand. A stranger in uniform was to me another kind of guard who would surely beat me. He tried to make me come with him, held out an inviting hand. I clung to the table leg. He wrenched me away, picked me up and slung me over his shoulder, speaking gently in his incomprehensible language.

  In the office, the purgatory where people had been interviewed by Nazis in search of secrets, I was set down in an important chair behind a desk. Other uniformed men stared at me. One of them put a package in my hand. I looked at the object suspiciously. The soldier took it again, removed the glossy paper, held the object to his mouth to show that it could be eaten, then handed it back. I broke off a sliver and returned it. The soldier shook his head in amazement at a child who could not recognize a gift of chocolate.

  Another man came in. He wore a uniform without brass and was probably one of the refugees used as interpreters by the American Army. “What were you doing in the kitchen?” he asked in German. I was afraid to answer. “Hungry?” he said.

  The first soldier gave me back the chocolate. It tasted better than the raw potato. I ate greedily. Almost at once I vomited. That night and for several days I was very sick and could eat nothing but some sort of cereal moistened with small amounts of dehydrated milk. The Army doctor and the orderlies treated me tenderly, laughing because I was the only female patient. Although I had difficulty in understanding their accent I showed them that I could also speak a bit of English. They laughed, praised my cleverness, asked many questions about my mother and wrote down everything I told them (from my mother’s stories) about my birth and family. An investigation was started. Meanwhile there was the question of what to do with an eight-year-old girl whose existence was not recorded in prison files. I did not care. There is no accomplishment so easily learned as the practice of luxurious living. I delighted in every moment, increased my English vocabulary, enjoyed the teasing and jokes of the soldiers. Unhappily the American Army did not consider this the right life for me. One day I was put into a bus with many soldiers. Against the doctor’s orders they gave me sweets and cakes which I ate as freely as I liked. My system had grown accustomed to food so that I digested pleasant things readily. The soldiers asked me where I had got those big blue eyes. “From Vati.” I had been told this by my mother.

  On the long bus journey I kept my face glued to the window. “What’s this? What’s that?” I learned the English names of many things before I could identify them in German.

  It was summer. Meadows were green. Poppies, daisies and cornflowers grew in the fields. All the colors were firm, sure of themselves. A puppy ran beside the bus. It carried its tail high, its barking was young and merry. This free dog was not at all like the fierce Alsations held on short leash by prison guards. During that bus ride I fell in love and have been in love ever since with meadows and free animals and the colors of the earth.

  II

  That long bus ride with the American soldiers was my introduction to the natural world. On every street I saw wonders, in every village a community o
f the enchanted. People were poor then, shabby, humble, but I saw them walk without guards on streets and lanes. I saw farmhouses, postboxes, haystacks, a thin sow with her piglets, I saw with eyes cured of blindness. I saw a city, Vienna; saw windows without bars, flowers in pots, cats and shops and children.

  In Vienna I was taken in a jeep to a convent where homeless children were lodged. I had heard about nuns and was prepared for piety, but the long black habits frightened me. The nuns were always busy, running at top speed in their full skirts, getting their chores done. The home was so crowded that children slept almost on top of each other. The nuns were pleased with me because the American Army had let me take hot baths in the officers’ quarters and I was quite clean.

  On the fourth day I was removed to a children’s refuge operated by an international organization. It was in Hietzing, a pleasant part of Vienna near the Schoenbrunn Palace. “Is this a castle?” I asked when I was led up the broad staircase. The house had been the residence of a banker. Twenty-six girls slept in a dormitory that had once been a grand salon. Baroque cherubs looked down upon us from the ceiling. Chubby plaster hands reached endlessly toward rich cornets of bloated fruit that hung from the four corners. In the dining hall elaborate chandeliers of Bohemian glass held a few small bulbs that shed feeble light upon long tables at which little skeletons greedily slopped up thin soup and gobbled potatoes flavored with too little salt. We were always hungry but none had known what it was to be any other way. The Germans had killed all the cows for their armies and there was not enough dung to fertilize the vegetables.

  To me it was a period of rich living. I had a world to discover, the outdoors, trees, rivers, tiny flowers dotting the grass in the park, bridges, shops, people walking on streets. Until then I had never played with children, never romped, never looked at a picture, never read words in a book. I heard the piano, listened to old scratched records on a phonograph. “Is that an orchestra? Which is the violin?” School began.