Lola gripped my arm, swerving us into an alley. “Theo said the Gestapo arrested all the men in the block yesterday and sent them to Mauthausen.”
“How did he know?”
The icy wind blew over me. I shivered. It was so cold that I felt my lips were frozen and my nose was hard like ice. In front of me was the canal, a vast strip of ice with white rocky mounds and frosty bushes. In the distance, the roller coasters were frozen; beneath them hung long, sharp icicles, and the great Ferris wheel was laden with snow, a white wreath like a diaphanous portal.
“Theo works for an organization that smuggles people out to Switzerland. They use false papers to help them escape—writers, composers, artists, and university professors who are branded subversive for their ‘degenerate works’ or for spreading subversive messages that endanger society, all dissidents wanted by the government.”
That sounded dangerous. If they were caught smuggling, they would be shot. “I bought you tickets, Lola! A boat ticket and a train ticket. You’re all set. Now you can leave.”
She spun around so fast that she almost tripped over the thick ice. “You have a boat ticket? How did you get it?”
“Fengshan’s secretary helped me.” I dug into my handbag and handed her the tickets.
Lola stared at them, her breath swelling in the chilly air, an island in a mirage. She looked like she was going to cry, but, as she always did, she pushed her tears back. “Thank you, Grace.”
“Leave Vienna and go to Shanghai, Lola. Here’s my Dickinson.” I gave her my poetry book that I had brought. “It’s a long and tedious journey to Shanghai. You’ll have something to read.”
“Your favorite poet.” She remembered.
“I never thought to part with it. Perhaps one day you’ll give it back to me.” This book was a light in my childhood, a token of Mother’s love after her repeated slaps. Mother had received it from her friend Mrs. Maher, a maid of the Dickinson family.
Lola held it with two hands—she knew what the book meant to me; what she meant to me.
“I’ll see you off, Lola. Remember, the train departs in three days. I’ll pick you up and take you to the train station. And from Italy, you’ll sail to Shanghai.”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t come here so frequently, Grace. You’re a diplomat’s wife. This slum is not safe for you. You can meet me at the train station, what do you say?”
And I didn’t argue—I could never argue with my friend. “See you at the train station, Lola.”
On the day of Lola’s departure, I went to the train station and waited. But the train came and left, and she never showed up.
Rudolf, at my insistence, took me to the slum. Lola was not outside the building. I knocked on the door; no one answered.
I peered through the window. The building was empty. All the families with suitcases, the hallucinating Kafka man with a beard like a winter bush, and Lola had disappeared.
CHAPTER 44
FENGSHAN
“She’s not arrested; I don’t believe she was arrested.” Grace was pacing his office, biting her lips. “Do you think she was arrested by the Gestapo officers?”
“Well—” He was jotting down the visa number on a form. He wished there were something he could say to comfort Grace. Disappearances, in today’s Vienna, only meant one thing. He had heard too many stories from the visa applicants and Captain Heine.
“There were many people inside the building, hundreds of them, and they all disappeared, including Lola. How could they all disappear?”
He frowned.
“In a few days, she’ll show up. Right, my love?”
Where? In the slum? In the consulate? “Yes.”
“Do you think she’ll show up?” Grace took off her gloves and then put them back. She wasn’t wearing her hat, looking distraught.
“She will.”
“Still! All the people inside the building! How could they all disappear?”
One thing he was sure of: if hundreds of people in a building managed to escape together, with guards nearby, it was a fairy tale.
“I don’t know what’s going on . . . She’s alive. I can feel her. Do you think she’s alive?”
He had written the number wrong. “She’s alive.”
Poor Grace. He didn’t have the heart to puncture the bubble of her dream—there was a good chance that she’d never see her friend again.
The vice consul reported to him that a few Chinese peddlers, who had heeded his warning to stay at home last year, had been beaten on the street. Fengshan went to visit them, and the small Chinese community gathered around him. They said they had not needed to apply for new passports for months since the police officers didn’t seem to care about their business, but they were concerned about the violence in Vienna and planning to go to Italy to be safe. The students indicated they’d graduate soon and were preparing for their departure.
Fengshan wished them well, but his heart was heavy. Once his people departed Vienna, his consulate could offer them little help.
Captain Heine called, asking him to turn on the radio.
A man’s voice, full of excitement, blathered that after months of anticipation, the Führer had fulfilled his promise to protect the ethnic German people in Prague and the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia: “No longer will the German people be forced to take lessons from the corrupt Jewish teachers! No longer will the German children be brainwashed in Jewish theology and fabricated social justice stories, and forced to sit with Jews!” In the background rumbled the noises of tanks, cars, and soldiers marching. The German Wehrmacht had poured into Prague, and Czechoslovakia was declared a protectorate of Germany.
After months of coercion by Hitler, months of speculation and rumor, the unthinkable absorption of Czechoslovakia by Germany had finally happened. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
“You won’t hear it on the radio, but Eichmann was among the parade that entered Bohemia and Moravia,” Captain Heine said.
Wherever that man went, a disaster for the Jews followed. Fengshan hoped with all his heart that he would never see Eichmann again. And he hoped that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would serve as a warning to his superior and the leaders of the world. Hitler had rescinded the promise he made at the Munich Conference; the Third Reich had revealed its dangerous ambition and who they really were—an army of insatiable invaders, just like his country’s enemy, the Japanese.
Had Ambassador Chen analyzed the situation with rationality and logic, he would have understood it was futile to pursue the friendship that had long ceased to exist.
One day, Fengshan was on his way to church when he came across Mr. Lord dressed in his casual double-breasted gray suit. In a serious tone, he said that the American consulate was planning on suspending the visa process for the Jews in Greater Germany in April. They had reached their immigration quota for the year 1939.
Fengshan was devastated. Czechoslovakia was dissolving, and borders to other countries such as Poland and Switzerland were closed. More and more Jews were driven to the brink of destruction, and yet countries such as the United States, which had provided one of the most coveted visas, were officially shutting their doors to the Jews. And only a few days ago, he had read in an English newspaper that the British government had issued a white paper to limit the number of immigrants to Palestine to five thousand a year. Five thousand would be permitted to live while millions were left homeless!