MEMORY has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love. In doing so you are not only recalling the event, you’re also experiencing the atmosphere in which it occurred – the sights, the social setting, the time of day, the emotional tone. Remembering the past is a form of mental time travel.
Mental time travel allows me to leave the writing of this sentence in my study at home overlooking the Hudson river and project myself backward 67 years and eastward across the Atlantic Ocean to Vienna, Austria, where I was born and where my parents owned a small toy store. It is 7 November 1938, my 9th birthday. My parents have just given me a birthday gift that I have craved: a remote-controlled model car. It is shiny and blue and has a long cable that connects its motor to a steering wheel with which I can control its destiny. For the next two days, I drive it everywhere in our small apartment.
My pleasure is short-lived. Two days later, in the early evening, we are startled by heavy banging on our apartment door. I remember that banging even today. My father has not yet returned from the store. My mother opens the door. Two men enter, identify themselves as Nazi policemen and order us to pack. They give us an address and tell us we are to be lodged there until further notice.
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We walk several blocks to the home of an elderly, more affluent Jewish couple whom we have never seen before. Even though we have invaded their privacy, our appointed hosts are thoughtful and decent. I am bewildered and frightened during the days we live in this couple’s carefully arranged apartment. But the greatest source of anxiety is my father – he disappeared abruptly and we have no idea where he is.
After several days we are allowed home. The apartment we now find is not the one we left. It has been ransacked and everything of value taken – my mother’s fur coat, our silver tableware, some of my father’s suits and all of my birthday gifts, including my beautiful blue car. To our very great relief, however, on 19 November my father comes back. He tells us he had been rounded up, together with hundreds of other Jewish men, and incarcerated in an army barracks. He won his release because he was able to prove he had been a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the side of Germany during the first world war.
The memories of those days are the most powerful of my early life. Later, I would come to understand that these events coincided with Kristallnacht, the calamitous night that shattered not just the windows of our synagogues and my parents’ store in Vienna, but also the lives of countless Jews all over the German-speaking world.
