The Chosen Ones (3 page)

March 1938
   The wireless was always on in the Haidinger household. It was silent only if the battery had run down and then Adrian had to take it to an electrician in Schwechat to be charged. The batteries were heavy and there was always at least one to carry each way, the discharged one that he brought to Schwechat and the fully recharged one that was needed back home. The Haidinger and Pawlitschek families called a ceasefire when it was time to gather around the radio. Together, they listened to speeches by Mr Schuschnigg, the Federal Chancellor, and to the debates about the betrayal of Austria, and were excited to hear the news from Steiermark about the Heimwehrverbande, the local Territorial Army unit that refused to take sides against their German brothers. The day Hitler came marching in, a group of them went off to Heldenplatz: Mr Haidinger, Mr Christian, who was a neighbour and a member of the Patriotic Front,
and
old
Mr Pawlitschek, the father of the man with the missing arm. Pawlitschek senior was a large man with a stiff, bristly moustache. He was a
convinced
Nazi, Mrs Haidinger said, as if, even among the NSDP members, some were less than
wholly
convinced. Adrian was allowed to come along on the outing because they needed someone to carry the provisions. They took the tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and walked up Ringstrasse, past the Imperial Hotel where old Mr Pawlitschek insisted that Hitler and his entourage were quartered. When they passed the Opera House, he also pointed out that jumped-up Jews were the only ones parading around in there. The pavements of the wide avenue were crowded with people waving banners and handkerchiefs, shouting
Heil Heil Heil!
all the time. By the time the group got close to Heldenplatz, the crowd was too dense and they had to cross to the museum side and finally, after re-crossing the tram rails, they once more ended up so far back that all they could see of Hitler was a small, grey blob on the distant balcony. But I did see him, Adrian would say afterwards. Well, sort of. He had been overwhelmed by hearing the Führer’s voice booming through the loudspeakers high above everyone’s heads, even though the words of the great man’s speech were almost impossible to make out because the sound bounced all over the place and was anyway drowned in the wild noise made by the tens of thousands of voices shouting and screaming while people waved their swastika-emblazoned banners and stretched their arms straight up in the air to return his salute; but, Adrian said, all he could think of was how to place his feet so that he could quickly bend down and then get out from under if he risked being trampled on. A few weeks later, his form teacher in the school at Münnichplatz was replaced. The new one, a Mr Bergen, had the title ‘Magister’ and was probably a
convinced
Nazi, perhaps even a party member. He started to pick on Adrian straightaway.
There was a poem by Ottokar Kernstock that should be read with a special kind of solemn emphasis at the end of each sentence and Mr Bergen would read it aloud, standing by the teacher’s desk, and then all the pupils had to repeat after him:

Over and over again, Adrian was told to stand in front of the class and recite the poem by heart and, every time, he lost track. Besides, the way he pronounced some of the lines made his reading unintentionally come across as a comic turn, perhaps especially when he got to ‘
um dieses Zeichen schart
’. By then, everyone was in fits of laughter and Mr Bergen’s face had flushed as red as the Nazi banner. It didn’t take long for the form teacher to make a personal call to Mr and Mrs Haidinger. He told them that innate stupidity clearly made the bastard boy they had adopted unteachable. Mr Bergen added that they had actually been wrong to take him on. The teacher seemed to know how it had happened and had presumably heard it from someone else. The foster parents weren’t likely to go unpunished for their bad judgement. Mr Haidinger took it out on Adrian afterwards. He went for the most straightforward approach, ordered the boy to strip
to the waist and come along to the tool shed where the spare rabbit hutches were kept and where, just as he would when flaying a dead rabbit, he hung Adrian on a hook on the wall using the rope tying his wrists, then took his belt off and whipped the half-naked child until not only Adrian, but Haidinger too, was screaming insanely. Light seeped into the shed and Adrian saw Helmut watching them, eating one of Mrs Haidinger’s titbits and smiling in exactly the same nervously submissive way as their father when he was scared.

Mr Pawlitschek’s Money
   Rudolf Pawlitschek had this habit of boasting about his prowess as a huntsman, never mind that he had only one arm. Once, Mr Pawlitschek invited Adrian into his room next to the hallway and told him that he would be allowed to watch how one went about greasing a hunting rifle. The rifle hung on a hook above Mr Pawlitschek’s bed. While he outlined some of his sporting feats, he took it down, laid it across his parted thighs and extracted a tin of gun grease and a cloth from the drawer in his bedside table. The cleaning started with Mr Pawlitschek ramming the muzzle into his left armpit and then rotating the gun by alternately tightening and relaxing his grip with what was left of the stump on his shoulder as he wiped it down using strong, even strokes with the cloth. It looked funny. His armpit kept releasing and catching the gun while his right hand rubbed and rubbed on the same spot. The effort made Mr Pawlitschek sweat copiously and, all the while, the sweat seemed to soften his sour, twisted face until a grimace almost like a smile was spreading across it. When Mr Pawlitschek had finished and put the cloth and the tin of grease back in the drawer, Adrian caught sight of a bundle of bank notes squashed in at the back. It became instantly fixed in his mind. Every morning, as he dragged himself to the school on Münnichplatz, his thoughts circled
around the money and the image stayed with him all the hours he spent sitting on the seat Mr Bergen had exiled him to, right at the back of the classroom, where he was left to his own devices because Bergen persistently, patiently ignored Adrian and directed his questions to the other children. Adrian thought that he would count the money one day when Mr Pawlitschek wasn’t at home. He wouldn’t do anything else, only count the notes to find out how much the stash was worth. The right moment arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. When he came home from school one afternoon, the Haidingers and the Pawlitscheks (senior and junior) were out and the rifle had gone from its hook on the wall, so Adrian opened the drawer, removed the tin of gun grease and the cloth, then the notes, pulled off the rubber band and started counting with trembling fingers. Sixty Reichsmarks. In that moment a decision was made, but not by Adrian; as he explained later, instead his mind had been made up
for
him. Actually, it was more like an incontrovertible fact rather than any kind of choice because what to do next
must
be done for the simple reason that the money was in that drawer and this was the day when no one was in, except the cows and the rabbits. It took him only minutes to put the notes in his pocket, pack some clothes in his satchel and catch the tram towards Schwarzenbergplatz. Far fewer people were out strolling along the Inner Ring than on the afternoon when Adolf Hitler’s cavalcade ploughed through the huge crowds, and soon Adrian was stopped by a policeman on his beat. In the thirties, school-age children were not usually drifting about on their own in central Wien. Besides, guardian or no guardian, this boy with his dark tinker’s face and grass-stained pants, the only trousers Mrs Haidinger let him wear when he was at home and made to clean the rabbit hutches, didn’t come across as a believable schoolchild. The officer, pretty certain that he had caught an experienced pick-pocket
whose school satchel was nothing but camouflage, felt vindicated when he found the bundle of bank notes. Adrian was taken to the police station, the money was properly counted and he had to confess all. He was Adrian Dobrosch (not yet Ziegler!) and, yes, he had taken Mr Pawlitschek’s savings, intending to keep half for himself to pay for food and somewhere to live, and give the rest to his mother for the rent. Tell me, who’s your mother? the policeman asked with a cunning smirk, as if he reckoned he was about to catch an entire gang of thieves, but Adrian fell silent at that point.

The Tinker’s Lad
   But they already knew all they needed to know. Mrs Haidinger wouldn’t have him in the house and, once he had got his money back, Mr Pawlitschek requested that he should be allowed not to bring a charge. The thing was, who would be responsible? On paper, which was what mattered, the Haidingers were Adrian’s parents. The boy was dispatched to the institution for abandoned children on Lustkandlgasse in Alsergrund, the Kinderübernahmestelle or ‘KüST’ as it was known for short. This time there was no chance that he would be stood on a bench like some circus animal and ogled and, with any luck, chosen by a lady in a red dress who bought you chocolates in Konsum afterwards. He was there for two weeks, presumably the time it took for the documentation about him to be shuffled by officials from one department to another until his adoption papers were cancelled, and then he was transferred to the old orphanage in Mödling. It was known as the Hyrtl’sche Waisenhaus and looked like a medieval fortress, a large brick building with high flat-fronted towers and a chapel in an inner courtyard. Very soon after the Nazis had taken over the government, the Waisenhaus was turned into a reform school for undisciplined children. Adrian was to be sent to Mödling twice. The worst tour was the second one,
in early spring 1943. He does not remember much from his stay in the autumn of 1939, just large, draughty rooms and apparently endless corridors and stairwells, where they were never to be seen alone but always in a troop, singly or in pairs, in
Einzel
- or
Zweierreihen
, always on their way to somewhere, to the dining hall or the gym, with one of the older boys in the lead shouting out orders over the sound of angrily tramping feet that echoed down the deep shafts of the stairwells. During the first weeks, he was tormented by guilt. He had not deserved the care offered to him by the Haidingers, or by anybody else for that matter. He had no idea what Mrs Haidinger would decide to do with Helmut. Keep him or make him suffer an even worse fate, which would be Adrian’s fault? He didn’t know anything and the uncertainty pained him more than being pestered by the other boys, who remarked on his looks, his dark skin and oddly shaped ears. They used to ask what kind of glue he used to stick his ears so close to his head. One day, his group leader told him that he had to go to the office. The director, Mr Heckermann, seemed short where he sat ensconced behind his big desk. His moustache was kept narrow, probably not to outdo his lips, which were even narrower, and together the twin lines of lips and moustache made a shape like a small beak. Heckermann’s slightly frail, bird-like body could look threatening, as it did now, when he raised his shoulders and asked Adrian to state his surname. Scared, Adrian shrugged in instinctive mimicry as he replied in the firm, military style that everyone in the school was to use:

Dobrosch!

That ugly, insubordinate name had never sounded more repulsive. Like when one opens an old tin can and some rotting, stinking sludge pours out. For a moment Mr Heckermann looked disgusted, but then his moustache-beak opened again:

You’re wrong there!

What are you supposed to do when a person in authority asks your name and then says you’re wrong? Adrian closed his eyes, convinced that this was it, he was finished.
You’re wrong because from now on, your name is Ziegler!

When he said that, Adrian dared to open his eyes again, saw Mr Heckermann standing behind his desk, and in the next moment, as already mentioned, the grinning Eugen Ziegler emerged from a cupboard and stepped forward to hug his prodigal son.

Uncle Florian’s Warm Hands
   It was a little like a baptism. At least, that’s how Adrian saw it. He had stepped out of his mother’s ineffective shadow into the radiance of his father’s name. Eugen Ziegler had abused Leonie Dobrosch constantly for ten long years; he had abandoned her and their children countless times, just as no one could have kept track of all the times he had come back home, drunk or broke and, hence, repentant. But when father and son left Mödling together, Eugen put his arm around his son’s shoulders and explained to him that nobody could separate them because, by now, his father and mother were
married for real
. This was his happy message and he had wanted to tell Adrian face to face, he said, but the paternal arm around the boy’s shoulders, meant to seem strong and protective, was actually no more than one long plea for support. Naturally, it was all because of the war. What else? Unless Eugen Ziegler could prove that he had responsibility for the upkeep of a family, he risked being picked up in the street and driven to the front line, or maybe even some worse place. As it was, the authorities had found him a job on the assembly line in the Floridsdorf locomotive factory. They worked round the clock out there, building locos for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The job had strings attached, though:
Ziegler had had to promise to take his wage packet home to his wife, hand over all the money and then she had to sign for it. Also, the factory foreman had apparently said that once is enough, Ziegler, if I hear you’re coming to work pissed or not taking all the money home you’ll be out on your ear. And even though his sobriety might have slipped some evenings and weekends, officialdom had the whip-hand and, throughout the war years, Eugen Ziegler dragged himself along to Floridsdorf every day and did his bit on the production line that was to build more than 1,000 engines of the type DRB Class 52. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk at the time, in a modern flat with a bathtub and a toilet, and had the authorities to thank for that as well. Ferenc still stayed in Kaisermühlen even though he had got a job in St Pölten, driving coal trucks for a haulage company delivering to businesses that weren’t too pernickety about paperwork like orders and receipts. The job was dangerous because they had to drive at night with the headlamps off and might at any moment get caught by the police. Adrian’s mother was beside herself with worry, but she worried even more about Uncle Florian. He had never been a problem for as long as he was with them. True, he could be confused at times and it could be confusing to talk to him because his speech was so slurred and rambling that it was hard to understand him. But he was a kind man, and if only he had some way to use his hands he was as precise and diligent as you could wish (but you always had to
place
whatever it was in his hands). For instance, it happened that Mr Gabel, the greengrocer, allowed him to come along on trips to the wholesaler out in Kagran. When they returned, Adrian remembers, Florian would be wearing tough gloves and an apron that made him look like a real stevedore. In the spring, he would help Ferenc with cleaning and waxing the boats in the marina at Alte Donau. Seated on a small stool, he would sit in the white sunlight holding the brush
as delicately as if he were painting on a costly linen canvas. His sister, Adrian’s mother, always used to say that Uncle Florian had such warm and sensitive hands. But after the eviction, all this came to an end. No work could be found for Florian. He stayed for a while in a hostel for single men in Brigittenau but could never settle down among strangers, and then his mindset and behaviour changed, he became restless and wandered in the streets,
playing the fool
, as his sister said. By the autumn of 1937, she had managed to find him a bed in the mental asylum in Gugging. The relief lasted only a few months, until the Anschluss. The old hospital board was replaced only weeks later and Florian was transferred to Steinhof, where he shared a ward with forty deranged men who sat or lay on their beds, sometimes tied down and screaming because there was no one who came to look after them. Leonie would visit her brother at least once a month, always on a Sunday. Adrian has a clear memory of how she would get dressed before the visit, standing in front of the mirror, something she normally did not do. She’d put on a grey, woollen cardigan and a beret. Her face always looked blurred with crying when she came back from Steinhof. She complained that the staff treated Florian worse than they would a dog and that her brother was
fading away
in front of her eyes, more and more at every visit. (The abyss that separated how they lived then, during that last, unreal year of freedom, from the insanity that was to take over, was so deep that it would take many years before Adrian managed to join up the two periods of time: the one that came
before
he was sent to Spiegelgrund and the other that began
after
he had become a registered inmate. He realised only then that the gravelled paths between the pavilions that he had to take to the school building every morning were the very same that his mother had taken on her Sunday visits to uncle Florian just a few years earlier. It was not only that it was the same place, but also
that the Spiegelgrund staff
recognised
her when she delivered him, because almost all of them had been working at Steinhof as asylum nurses. In their eyes, his mother was one of those
crazy women
who would turn up at every which time and make nuisances of themselves by asking about husbands or brothers or children, even after it should have been clear to them that there were no more Steinhof patients left to ask about. It must have been how they looked at her when she came to visit him, Adrian, the only time she did. For one thing, she was dressed exactly as when she visited Uncle Florian, the same skirt and woolly, grey cardigan and worn coat and beret, so she had presumably stood in front of the mirror and prepared herself in the same old way, her eyes anxiously fixed on her reflection while she applied shiny red lipstick to her thin, pale lips.) In October or November 1940, Uncle Florian and forty-or-so other males had been herded onto buses run by the charity GeKraT (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport) and driven to Hartheim. Leonie Ziegler had not been informed of this. The official letter arrived several weeks later and announced that Mr Florian
Dobrocz
– some ill-educated clerk had either misheard or simply couldn’t spell – had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia and, despite every effort by the staff, his life could not be saved. Adrian remembers when the letter arrived. The family was seated at the table. So far, one Sunday night after another, his father had sat down, calm and sober, at the carefully laid supper table and, every week, put up in silence with his wife’s tearful face and endless wailing about dear Florian with the warm hands who was simply fading and receding away from her, but this Sunday he could take no more. Enraged, he stood up with such force that the table rocked and sent plates and glasses flying, then crashing onto the floor. He had had it with all the miserable moaning and groaning, he shouted, then he left and slammed the door after him. At first
Leonie sat very still, then she hid her face in her hands and wept so wildly her shoulders shook. But it might be that none of this had happened by then. In March 1938, Helga was already born and, just over a year later, Leonie had become pregnant again with Hannelore, who arrived in February 1940. Adrian was a pupil in the school on Erdbergstrasse. Just as in the Münnichplatz school, it was understood that he was an
imbecile
and, as such, placed at the back of the classroom. By then, the other children in the class wore uniforms with a Hitlerjugend pin on the jacket lapel and, once a week, went off to a
Heimabend
at someone’s home after school. When his classmates asked him why he and his sister never came to someone’s house for these evening get-togethers, which after all were compulsory, he didn’t know what to say. When Eugen Ziegler had received a document stating that he was
wehrunwürdig
, he probably felt a certain sense of relief, but for his children the fact that Ziegler was classed as unfit for military service meant exclusion from the Deutsches Jungvolk and presumably all other organisations with a link to NSDAP. Adrian was dead keen to wear the same uniform as the others. It wasn’t because he was crazy about uniforms or the stupid Home Evening singalongs but because the uniform was the one thing that could stop his father from beating him up. All children in an HJ uniform were under the personal protection of the Führer, and no one could punish them except, of course, the Führer himself. At Spiegelgrund it grew quite boring, the way they kept insisting that the Führer was the greatest friend and protector of children. Adrian Ziegler had realised that long ago, and nothing that was to happen later would make him doubt that it was true.