In a nutshelclass="underline" The ascent of Nazi Germany, with its thunderous marching columns and wheat-blond maidens, concerned us infinitely less than the abdication of the recently crowned King of England in order to marry Mrs. Simpson. And in this act no one could have recognized that not merely was it symbolic of the decay of venerable traditions and values but it signaled the final decline of the Occident as we had known it, a decline that was eventually sealed by another marital bond: to wit, the one between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in the air-raid shelter of the Reich chancellery in a dying Berlin.
Almost without anyone noticing, the years of illusory peace between 1919 and 1939 were suddenly gone; they turned out to have been but a truce between two phases of the European suicide. When the Second World War started, Romania at first remained neutral, but it was only a question of time before it too was drawn into the conflict: as a reward for the Russo-German nonaggression pact, the northern parts of the Bukovina and Bessarabia were ceded to Russia, but the Romanians harbored hopes of regaining these two rich provinces — paradoxically, by fighting on the side of the covenant-breaking Germans to whom they owed their loss in the first place. In great times the paradoxical becomes the usual.
I learned of the occupation of the Bukovina when I was in a moviehouse in Vienna, where a latecomer in the row behind me whispered the news to her neighbor, accompanied by the cynical giggles reserved in those days for imparting reports of dire catastrophes. I did not yet know that it had been agreed to have the German-speaking populations in the ceded territories, the so-called ethnic Germans, repatriated to the German “homeland.” Nor did I see any reason why the Russians in 1940 would comport themselves differently toward the burshchuj, the bourgeois, than the Bolsheviks of 1917. I knew my father was safe. He had smelled a rat and had relocated himself in Transylvania three years before. But my mother was in Czernowitz. Only later did it become known that former Austrians (now also “ethnic Germans,” for the shrunken Austria in 1938 had become the Ostmark of the Third Reich) were also to be “repatriated.” For my mother that meant that — just as in 1914—she had to leave her house and her adopted homeland, this time forever.
I tried to imagine her leave-taking, for she must have realized that it was the farewell to her entire past life, and though she considered it misspent, it had at least been comfortable. Henceforth it would be an existence in uncertainty and deprivation among strangers, a refugee life much worse than during the First World War. I could not feel what she must have felt, but an image took hold in my fantasy as if in a dream: she stands in front of one of the “house horrors” that my sister and I, during our teenage infatuation with anything novel, considered the worst kind of kitsch: a foot-high reproduction in white marble of the Nike of Samothrace on a tall column of red marble; in this version, my mother looks at it with the same stunned expression of past happiness lost with which she had once gazed at the picture of my dead sister. This idle fantasy seemed to me to have pertinent symbolic connotations: it was as if the mutely thunderous wing-beat of the Louvre’s goddess of victory epitomized all the dreams and aspirations of her youth, which now she had to give up forever.
The relocation brought her first to a camp in Upper Silesia. Being of “high-grade race,” she was scheduled to become a “defense farmer in the German east,” specifically in the province of Warta, as the southeast part of Poland had been renamed. (Her Polish housekeeper Valerka, who suddenly discovered her German origins but was nevertheless racially of somewhat lower grade, was sent to Nuremberg, where she died shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, nothing could be done for Cassandra, for the ethnic mishmash of her component parts was as variegated as her language; it allowed neither racial classification nor, as its consequence, relocation.) In the camp, my mother shared a tiny cubbyhole with Philip. They never spoke to each other and she left Philip for good when I succeeded in freeing her from the camp and sparing her the fate of becoming a defense farmer. But this was possible only on condition that she contribute in some other capacity to Germany’s ultimate victory. In an air force office in Vienna she managed to advance to the rank of civil disbursement officer. She saw Philip once more, by sheer coincidence, at a post office. With a satisfied mien — a mingled expression of both her resentment and her guilty feeling of inadequacy — she told me that while standing in line at a stamp window, she suddenly felt that someone was staring at her; the sensation was so strong that she turned around and there was Philip, transfixed in shy veneration. I told her I hoped she had taken him in her arms, to wipe out once and for all the bitterness between them, but she vehemently shook her head. It did not matter that by then the Odaya, the bone of contention between them, was as far out of reach as the moon. He had been her enemy and he still was. She turned away from him.
Nor did she forgive her relatives for the fact that her return to the lap of the family did not lead to the permanent bliss that during her years of separation and unhappy marriage she had dreamed of as the outcome of such a reunion, however improbable it seemed. Two of her sisters were still living with her widowed mother — one also widowed, the other a spinster. They were all too dissimilar in character and similar in irascible temperament to get along for any length of time, but soon this was all obliterated by the rush of historical events. Vienna was bombed — much against the expectations of those Austrians who (after the event) considered the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich a blunder that the Western powers not only had tolerated but had even encouraged and for which Austria was therefore in no way ever to be held responsible. The office in which my mother labored for the ultimate victory was relocated to Bohemia; as a conscript employee, she had to go along. Soon backward-fleeing elements of the defeated German armies in the East swept over her. The Czechs rebelled. Her office was plundered, and she herself was almost shot. She fled to the West. A former receptionist at the Hotel Pupp in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), who knew her as a young girl when she had stayed there with her parents, picked her up in the street and gave her shelter for a few days. When he and his family were also driven out, she set out on foot. During the night, she was overtaken by an American army vehicle full of black soldiers. One of them lifted her up by her backpack—“like a puppy being lifted by the skin of its back,” as she later told the story. “Come on, old girl,” he said, “we’re all the same underdog.” Thus she too, although to the Germans racially more valuable than Valerka, landed in Nuremberg — or more accurately, in the expanse of rubble that remained of that city.