One Eye Laughing, the Other Weeping (19 page)

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1938

Aunt Clara had Mrs. Parrish serve lunch in the sunroom so we wouldn’t have to stop rehearsing.

I don’t know what came over me. I wasn’t planning to say anything. I didn’t even realize I had been thinking about it, although I must have. It was out of my mouth before I knew it.

I asked Aunt Clara why she and Mother didn’t speak.

Aunt Clara can look any way she wants, so I knew the way she was looking at me was no accident.

“Do you really want to know?” she was saying. “Yes,” I said out loud.

“I see you’re not only a good actress but a good audience,” Aunt Clara said. “All right, then, I’ll tell you.”

It was Daddy.

Aunt Clara had met him first, before Mother. He saw her in a play in Vienna, came backstage, and they fell in love. At least Aunt Clara thought they had fallen in love.

She introduced Daddy to her family and was pleased that everyone liked him.

Unfortunately she was busy with the play and wasn’t able to spend as much time with him as she would have liked.

Then, about a month after they first met, her friends told her they had seen her sister with Daddy almost every night for the past two weeks.

Aunt Clara confronted her with this, and she denied everything. But the next day Mother and Daddy eloped.

When the newlyweds returned to Vienna, Aunt Clara tried to reconcile herself with the situation, but she was unable to. She said that if it hadn’t been for Uncle Martin, she wouldn’t have survived. It was he who suggested they move to America.

I think right then my whole world changed, yet again. In an instant, I didn’t even feel like myself. I felt like someone else, and I felt like
being
someone else. I wanted to return to Emily, to the scene we were working on.

It was the scene in the final act. The one in the cemetery. Emily is allowed to relive one day of her life, and she chooses her twelfth birthday. My last birthday with my family.

Emily’s sentiments are so true, so simple, and so sweet — I wish I could grab them and hold them to me so I could have them for all time.

She sees herself and her family back then and realizes how little they all appreciated the preciousness of living each day.

She is saddened to see how little time we take to appreciate the simple joy of being alive. How we lose each moment in our concern for the next moment.

Anguished, she breaks down sobbing, and says:

. . . I can’t look at everything hard enough. . . .

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.

I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. . . .

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute? . . .

EPILOGUE

There is, regrettably, no documentary evidence available on the fate of Julie Weiss’s uncle Daniel, or her friend Sophy’s parents.

Mr. and Mrs. Heller are known to have been among the thousands of Viennese Jews transported to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, in early November 1938 during or after what became known as the Night of Broken Glass. They both perished there.

Martin and Clara Singer, along with Julie Weiss, moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939. Clara made one film with Mr. Garfinkel, and although it was a critical and commercial success, she returned to the stage and never appeared in a film again.

Martin Singer died of lung cancer in 1941, the same year Susie Cooper married Mr. Smalls (“Black Mike”) and Julie learned of her father’s death.

Dr. Benjamin Weiss was attending a patient in the hospital two weeks after his daughter had arrived

safely in America. Nazi soldiers, for reasons that are not known, ordered him to leave and, when he refused, shot him where he was standing.

This information was conveyed to Julie by Ruth Sachs, her former English teacher. Miss Sachs, who came to America in October 1938, happened to see Julie in the Los Angeles production of
Our Town.
She went backstage to speak to her, and they remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

With Ruth Sachs’s help, Julie was able to find Sophy Marcus, who was still living in England, and Julie’s brother, Max, who was in Palestine.

Max had been given a precious permit to emigrate to Palestine by a man unwilling to leave his critically ill older sister who had raised him.

Contact between Max and Julie was established in 1947, and in 1954, Max, accompanied by his wife and eight-year-old son, visited Julie in Los Angeles.

Although Julie never married, in 1946 she had a child, Liesl. She also had a long and successful acting career. Like her aunt, who adopted her, she, too, chose to appear only on the stage.

LIFE IN EUROPE AND AMERICA IN 1938

Vienna was a cosmopolitan metropolis at the onset of World War II. It was also the home of almost all of the Jews in Austria. The Jewish people had considerable influence on Vienna’s political, cultural, and economic life. In fact, a good deal of Austrian industry was owned by Jews, as were most of Vienna’s liberal newspapers. The social composition of the Jewish community ranged from powerful bankers and industrialists to impoverished peddlers who had moved to town in large numbers before World War I. Most Jews were more liberal than the rest of the population, which intensified the already strong anti-Semitism in the country. Other Jews, however, adopted conservative political values, and even rejected their Judaism in order to assimilate themselves into the Austrian mainstream.

While anti-Semitism was always prevalent in Austria, it was not until Hitler annexed Austria into his

Reich that it became a truly unbearable place for the Jews. Indeed, Hitler rose to power in Germany with the intention of expanding his power throughout Europe. While he had economic and industrial plans for Europe (and, ultimately, for the world), his first, and most obscene, priority was to preserve what he deemed the perfect race of people — the “Aryan” race. To do this, he had to “weed out” those people who did not fit his picture of perfection. Many people were targeted, but it was the Jewish people who became Hitler’s greatest enemy. He blamed the Jews for Germany’s weakened economy, and for all of Europe’s woes. He would stop at nothing to rid Europe of Jews once and for all.

Prior to his rise to power, in fact, Hitler mapped out what would become the bible of the Nazi movement,
Mein Kampf
, or
My Struggle.
In this text, Hitler expresses his dedication to the purity of the German race along with an irrational hatred for the Jews, who he claimed undermined German purity. And while many ignored or gave only a passing glance to these ranting words, they would become the blueprint for Hitler’s domination of Europe and the destruction of European Jewry.

Since Hitler saw the Jews as nonhuman, they were segregated under his rule. The Nazis described the Jews as parasites and viruses, even as rats, in order to rally the so-called Aryan people against them. The Nazis sought to convince people that Jews would cor-rode their society and culture. Hitler’s theory was that human survival depended on the eradication of the Jewish people. To this end, the phrase
Sieg Heil
came to be the salute of the Nazi movement. It means “Hail to Victory” — victory of light over dark, good over evil, Aryan over Jew.

When Hitler decided to create an
Anschluss
(union) with Austria, the Austrian government and its people were in a panic. The
Anschluss
threatened Austrian independence after all. When the vote that might have kept Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg in control was forgone, Hitler’s invasion of this civilized country was imminent. On March 13, 1938, Hitler and his troops marched into Austria. By a combination of threats and propaganda, the Nazis annexed Austria.

The most striking and disturbing outcome of Hitler’s sudden and somewhat unopposed takeover of Austria was the way in which friends and neighbors turned so fiercely on one another. Where Jews and Gentiles once

lived in peace as business partners and classmates, din-ing companions and playmates, overnight an angry rift divided them. Because the people of Austria took so quickly to Hitler’s propaganda, what had taken years to accomplish in Germany took only the course of a few months to achieve in Austria. Persecution of the Jews began almost immediately. The Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, barring the Jews from their professions, from attending government schools and universities, and from marrying Gentiles, were very rapidly introduced. Most Jewish communal organizations were shut down. There was also considerable anti-Jewish violence as many Austrians reacted strangely enthusi-astically to the Nazi takeover and the persecution of the Jews.

The degradation in Austria was miserable — Jewish shops were robbed, the shopkeepers beaten, and arbi-trary arrests began. Jewish men and women were forced to clean the pavement on their knees with a strong solution of water and boric acid while crowds stood by and cheered. Now, the anti-Jewish attacks were even more extreme in Austria than they were in Germany.

Then, on the night of November 9, 1938, a massive,

coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Reich proved just how far the hatred had already gone. That night has come to be known as
Kristallnacht
, or the Night of Broken Glass. The attack came after Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jew living in Paris, shot and killed a member of the German Embassy staff there. He was angry at the treatment he and his family received from the Nazis when they, along with 15,000 other Jews, were expelled from Germany and transported by train to the Polish border. For Adolf Hitler, the shooting provided an opportunity to incite Germans to “rise in bloody vengeance against the Jews.”