Tomahawk and Crown

By Paul D. Rothkopf

"Tomahawk and Crown" revolves around Hugi Flossel and Tad Saegerer, two boys plotting to escape Nazi occupied Vienna. They plan to build a boat and float down the Danube to safety, until their plans are interrupted by the Gestapo. Hugi manages to escape to the United States only to return to Vienna six years later as an officer in the US Army on a secret mission to recover the Crown of St. Stephen and crown jewels of Hungary. His only chance of success: finding his boyhood friend… if he's still alive.

Hugi Flossel and Tad Saegerer are inseparable, even though Tad is Aryan, and Hugi is Jewish. It's not a great mix, because this is Vienna on the eve of World War II, where being Jewish can get you kicked off the trolley, out of school, sent to a political camp, or even cleaning sidewalks with a toothbrush. This does little to dampen their childhood imagination though, and they roam their riverside prairie, playing Wild West, and building a submarine to escape down the Danube. For the confident and fun-loving Tad, Tomahawk is just a big adventure. For Hugi, it represents a true escape from a world where his mother is called a whore, food is scarce, and you can't become bar mitzvah because the synagogue was destroyed. As his family's situation becomes more tenuous, they resolve to take the transport to a labor camp in Poland, leaving Hugi with a dreadful choice to stay on with his friend and finish Tomahawk, or stick with his family. However, the choice is suddenly made for him when American visas arrive for the land of fairytales. As they rush around saying goodbyes, the Gestapo find Tomahawk and search for those responsible. Hugi tries to warn Tad but leaves on a ship bound for New York without seeing him again. Six years later, Hugi, now Sam, is a sophomore pursuing his dream of an education in the United States. While still wracked with remorse at leaving his friend behind, he knows there is little he can do as Tad committed suicide soon after he left. The nineteen-year-old enlists to serve the country that gave him shelter and his dreams, and perhaps take revenge on the Nazis. To defer this for six months, he tries to gain leverage with the draft board by telling them he once heard the Holy Crown of Hungary was to be smuggled out if the Nazis should try to seize it. This crown has been revered for over 1000 years since the Pope first gave it to King Stephen and has crowned the kings ever since. In the chessboard of players now operating in Europe, it's also become a means of controlling not only the country which could determine influence in the region for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667817835

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Tomahawk and Crown

©2021, Paul D. Rothkopf

186 Riveredge Drive

Chatham, NJ 07928

646.526.7063 [e-mail]

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66781-782-8

ISBN eBook: 978-1-66781-783-5

Dedication

To: Dad whose story this is in more ways than one.

Mom who taught me how to dig.

Rich and Patrick, who are ever present and not forgotten.

Elaine who is everything.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

PART TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

Chapter 1

We learned in school that millions of years ago, the Vienna Woods was the shore of a vast ocean. The scene must have been fantastic, with monster waves crashing into the hills, and huge fish cruising the depths where I am standing now. On the shore, dinosaurs hunted and grazed in jungles of gigantic conifers, ferns, and palms. But a new ice age made the ocean levels drop, and the shores moved towards the east, leaving only fossils from all the weird animals that had been swimming in it. The Danube, a byproduct of the glacial age, ate a hole in the hills that used to be the shore and started flowing eastward, as if searching for the ancient mother sea that had given it life. Eventually, the time of the great wanderings came and the place where the river spilled out into the great plain became a crossroads of cultures and civilization. Celtic salt traders stopped here. The Tenth Roman Legion and the Gemini marched through. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius died in Vindobona of malaria. The Amber Road passed through the plain with long blonde haired Germanic Theones peddling the fossilized remnant of the ancient jungle to the Romans. The high-cheek boned, fur clad Asiatic warriors came next. Bow legged and reeking from a diet rich in mare’s milk, the Alans, Penchenegs, and Hun camped in the delta, their ponies drinking from the Danube. Dr. Braunschweiger said they were bow-legged and constantly stank of fermented mare’s milk. Norman knights came through here on the way to the Holy Land, pillaging, and killing, and maybe raping.

My history teacher in the Realgymnasium said little about that, but he was a very devout Catholic. You probably know about all this, anyway, and of course you know about the centuries when Christian and Turkish armies were chasing each other around here, killing and bleeding. It must have been terrific with all the silk tents, horsehair standards, and battle trumpets. Then, I guess the Habsburgs must have run out of steam. They started building a lot of palaces. The Viennese got fat, and although they listened to operas a lot, told jokes, and were crazy for waltzing, they were also getting nastier to each other. They built those long concrete walls below here to tame the old river. But even back then the river didn’t care. It kept right on going past those filthy stone tenements, left them far behind, and rushed out, free and happy, into the great, open plain. Mrs. Leitameck, the coal woman, said that the Danube hums at night about the fate of all the people who ever lived along the river, and that the waves carry the songs of all those lives with them to the dark waters of the Black Sea.

I tell you this because now that the war has started, there is little music in Vienna. A new army has come to ravage the Danube, although this one came by invitation and since then there has been little music left in this city of music. Really! On the first of December, less than a week ago, they closed up all the ballrooms. They said it was mainly to conserve coal and promised to reopen them in the spring. I could not care less. First, because dancing doesn’t interest me very much. Second, because even if I were old enough to dance, they don’t let Jews into ballrooms. And most importantly, with some luck, I will be leaving Vienna before long.

Anyhow, who cares about ballrooms when your toes are freezing? My friend Tad Saegerer and I were standing at the end of the bridge that crossed the Danube in the trolley stand, waiting for the next tram. It was not doing a great job protecting us from the wind and to keep warm we kept stamping our feet and burying our hands under our arms. But the cold was the least of my worries at that moment. I was worrying about how to explain being so late home. What would I say to Papa? I wished desperately that the trolley would come.

The blackout was still on, but a big, pale moon was racing through the sludgy clouds. It revealed a deserted bridge. Not another human figure was in sight from where Tad and I were standing. This was not unusual for this time of year. The inundation plain behind us was an immensely popular bathing place in the summer, but the wintry cold had emptied it of all life. Outlined in the moonlight, way in the distance across the bridge, were the bulky dark masses of crowded workers’ tenements. Except for Tad and me, no one was crazy enough to be on this side of the river at night at this season of the year. Nothing moved, except maybe the icy gray waters of the river way below the gray steel of the bridge. It was flowing to Slovakia to the new Tiso Slovak state.

Holy crap, Tad exclaimed and pointed towards the sky.

I had heard a faint drone in the distance, but now, outlined by the moon, we could see a bomber formation cutting across the moonlit sky.

Luftwaffe, he said, bending his tall, skinny frame backward for a better look. Heinkels! Must be coming home from Poland to get their laurels. Make the Austrian girls happy! Tad followed the planes with his eyes as the dark wedge floated away from us toward the south. "Setzen sie sich and fich it, whispered Tad. He knew the expression had amused me ever since he first used it in a Latin class last year when he was having trouble with conjugations. Suppose those had been British planes. That would wake this town up. Can you just imagine it? Sirens wailing, big lights searching the sky, flak, everything! What a circus? Agreed? Hugi? Agreed?"

Tad had a way of being persistent when he was enthusiastic about something, which was pretty often. This got me thinking about the British bombers and perhaps how they could help us out of this mess. That cheered me up a bit, but it didn’t last long. My immediate problem was not how to end the war, it was what to say to Papa when I got home. It was nearly 8:30 p.m. now. By the time the tram got us across Vienna, it would be nearly ten o’clock. What could I say about being so late? I obviously could not tell him about Tomahawk. That would only get me in more trouble. It would be dangerous to my backside and surely wreck Tad’s and my fabulous plan.

I could imagine my old man pacing through the small apartment like a tiger in a cage. Not a well-cared for and fancy circus cat, but a pale, worn out local carnival beast in a small cage worn out by too many shows. He would mutter something about a worthless son, then he’d say, My God, thirteen years old and a bum already. Then the questions would come. Hurled at me like spears. Where have you been? What trouble have you stirred up now? After every third sentence, just to twist the blade a little, he would add, And in times like these!

He would not understand about the Tomahawk. Papa does not have the stomach for real adventure. He would panic. That is what he would do. For sure, he would panic and do something stupid that would wreck all of our work. I needed an exceptionally good story! The ones I had thought of so far were much too complicated, and Papa would never believe them. If only Tad Saegerer would stop sounding off about those damn airplanes and think up something for me to say. Tad, when he focused, had an outrageous imagination. It was better than anyone’s. He had a well-earned reputation for the best lies, fabrications, and excuses of anyone in the third form of Realgymnasium XVII. But he gets very wild sometimes. Most of the time! I must be more desperate about this than I thought.

Leave it to me, said Tad, as we were settling back on the wooden seats in the dimly lit, blacked-out trolley. He ran his hands, one after the other, through his lanky black hair. He always did this to let people know he was about to think very hard.

Before he could say a word, I said, No lame fairy stories, Tad.

He replied, primly, as a professor would an ill-prepared student. "We must recognize that Tomahawk is at stake. Only my best will do. He looked confidently down at me. I am nearly a head shorter than him, but I am catching up. I know! Some Nazi storm troopers grabbed you. They made you polish their boots. That’s why your hands are so dirty."

Then, before I had time to even consider the storm trooper story, he said, No. No. We were walking to Klosterneuburg to visit my mother’s cousin, you know, the baker at the monastery. That is a long, long hike! Crazy in December! Why? To get some extra flour. What did we do with it? I took it home. No, that won’t do . . . I have it . . . We were forced to use it to bribe a policeman who recognized you were Jewish and hassled you. Agreed, Hugi?

"Are you crazy! No never! My parents will go berserk! They will never let me out of the apartment again for fear I will do some crazy stunt and not even end with the flour. Come on. Think! We have to have a good story before I get home or that is the end of the Tomahawk."

The soft ping of the dripping communal faucet was the only sound in the hall. I stood in the narrow landing outside the apartment and stared at the cracked tile floor, trying to build up courage to open the door. This place had depressed me lately. Age and neglect gaped at me from every tile. The dim yellow light of the hallway made me feel sick and poor, and I had a constant fear the caretaker’s wife would emerge from her apartment and yell things like, Jewish swine. I can’t wait until they come and take you all away . . . filthy beasts. Standing outside the door, I took a deep breath and finally made up my mind. I would tell them I had heard they were giving out waiting numbers for visa applications at the Liberian consulate they were issuing next week. And that just before they got to me, they gave out the last one and I had to walk home as I didn’t have any money for the tram.

As I unlocked the hall door, I had just about convinced myself they might believe that story. But I knew enough from experience to enter cautiously. I was entering the tiger’s cage. Slowly, I turned the knob and entered our apartment, a miserable worker’s district stained greasy flat. And there was Papa’s hobbled feline face, staring at me from the circle of light around the table. The sight was enough to make my empty stomach twist and turn. I have had a lot of experience with old Papa. I realized in an instant that I ought to hold on to my Liberia story until the last possible moment. It was not that good a story, and Papa’s face was dark red. I walked into the room carefully, keeping my back towards the wall. Then I stopped, my behind close against the wardrobe door, and looked down at the floor, waiting for the inevitable. My knees stuck out from under my short pants. They were blue with the cold of the street.

Sound precautions. There was a moment of silence, and then Papa’s chair clattered over backward as he charged across the room at me. In a second, he stood speechless with rage over me. His face was now chalky white. When Papa worried about me or about anyone else he loved, he grew angry easily. Knowing this did not help much now, as his anger often meant violence was not far away, and I tensed for his callused hand whizzing down at me.

Mama rose to my rescue just in time. Look how tired the boy looks, she said quickly, and pushed herself between Papa and me. Please, Benno! she pleaded, it’s ten o’clock, and he hasn’t eaten. She waited for Papa to retreat a little, and then pulled me to the table, keeping herself in front of me like a shield until I was able to sit down.

Saved for the moment! Mama brought a small pot of stew from the stove and ladled it onto my plate. She fluttered around me nervously like a hen, cutting a thin slice from the small remnant of a loaf of bread, bringing me salt, discovering my hands were dirty, and wiping them with a washrag. It was reassuring to have her large, shapeless warmth near me. I kept my face over the magically secure bright disk of the plate. Papa paced in the shadows beyond the table and waited. I think Mama had intimidated him a little. He did not speak until I had finished chewing on my last bite and had swallowed my last drop of water. You can bet I took my time about it. Finally, it came.

I suppose you have been chasing around the streets with your unclean crony. Hugi, you are thirteen years old and you play Indians until ten o’clock at night in a blacked-out city. Your mother and I were dying of worry. A Jewish boy, running around the streets, playing stupid games and at times like these. You idiot, you bum!

Papa was not good with words. When he ran out of things, the frustration of not being able to say what he wanted brought on the only way he knew how to be articulate—his muscles. I ducked just in time. His hard, work-worn hand swept over the top of my head.

Benno Flossel, said Mama, I beg of you, please calm yourself. What are the Roelichs going to think about you shouting again at this time of night?

The Roelichs occupied the apartment on one side of us. The walls were thin. This was bad news for Frau Roelichs. She was a crabby woman who was an anti-Semite to boot. They were Gentiles of the right! Herr Roelich had been one of the few workers at the Municipal Gasworks who was not a Social Democrat. He had never been very cordial, even before Hitler’s arrival. Mama did not worry about the Querbaums who lived in the adjacent apartment on the other side because Rosa Querbaum knew all about Mama’s troubles. They often talked to each other about them. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they talked about anything else. Papa lost his temper easily with his only child, me. Fortunately, he calmed down quickly. I once heard Mrs. Querbaum say to Mama, You will have your hands full, Hannah; the worse things will get, the less patience Benno will have with his son. She had been right. The worse the Nazi troubles got for the Jews, the more often Papa lost his temper with me. The afternoon the storm troopers forced Papa to scrub the sidewalk in front of a tavern with lye, he beat me so hard with a carpet beater that my thighs and arms were covered with deep blue welts. And just because I had left my shoes on the floor in the middle of the room.

When I had entered the apartment, I had been ravenous. After all, we had been down in the inundation area all day with no chance to eat. Now that I had some food in my stomach, I felt a little more secure. My father’s swing at me had also riled me up. Listen, Papa, I tried my best to do something that will get us out of this rotten country. My words rose like hot phlegm in my throat. And what do I get? You slap me around. I was feeling very self-righteous, and I noted with some satisfaction that tears were welling up in my eyes. Just indignation! I spent the whole day standing in line at the Liberian consulate.

What the hell did you do that for?

They were passing out waiting numbers, I said almost as primly as if it had been true. Next week they are going to hand out 200 visa applications. With a visa to Liberia we could get out of here. Although it suddenly occurred to me I had nothing to show for my visit to the consulate, I stared at my father without blinking.

Papa raised his huge, calloused paw again. Then he changed his mind and turned to Mama. Hannah, have we raised a complete idiot? he asked bitterly. I am a poor worker. I tear my fingers to shreds to make brushes that are too expensive for me to buy. He stared at his hand as if it were suddenly turning gangrenous. That hard hand, much too large for Papa’s slight body, stared back at Papa. They want 10,000 in American dollars for a visa to Liberia. I don’t know how we are going to eat next week, and my demented son is already packing his bags. Hannah, what have we done to deserve this?

My father walked over to the small coal stove and lit a cigarette, while I followed his movements warily with my eyes. For some reason, his little speech about the money made me angry enough to shout, Every time I give you an idea about how to get out of this place, you call me an idiot. I’m only thirteen years old, but I know better. I am not so dumb I can’t see we have to leave. You just don’t have the gumption it takes to get us out of here. As soon as I said it, I wish I hadn’t. Now I wouldn’t be able to keep from crying.

Papa looked at me silently for a long moment. He wasn’t one to impress us with stories about how clever he had been and how he had neatly done this or that. Instead, he was proud of being honest, of being a man of his word. Tad had once said contemptuously that the poor think clean conscience and dignity are the same thing. The silence worried me, and I drew closer to Mama for protection, just in case he came at me again. But looking up, I was surprised to see a glimmer of moisture in my father’s eyes.

Papa spoke softly, turning to mother and me. You know I tried every way I could think of, but I had no luck. We have Uncle Max in the United States, but with so few slots we cannot count on him. One hardly knows where to turn next. Other people have many close relatives who live abroad. We have no one else. I always made my living with my hands. Who wants a simple worker? One needs money or relatives to get out. Shanghai wants money. Liberia wants money. Bolivia wants money. All I’ve got is these! He lowered his hands to his knees and stared at them as if he were ashamed of their nakedness.

A small brightness suddenly passed over Papa’s face. Listen, there may be something for us yet. I talked to Ignaz Querbaum today. He says they are making jobs for Jews, so they can support themselves with honest work.

Mother looked up quickly. What kind of work is this, Benno?

Reconstruction! Poland is all in ruins, as you can imagine, and they need to clean up the mess. From what Querbaum says, they are giving the work to Jews because the Germans are all in the army. They need the help. The pay is fair, and people will be allowed to send for their families as soon as living accommodations become available. They owe me for the years I suffered for them in Siberia.

Mama’s face softened. She got up from the sagging sofa, walked to Papa, and put her hand on his shoulder. You take good care of us. We know how hard you are trying. Perhaps Poland will work out. I hope this is good news at last, Benno, she whispered.

My father slowly looked up at her. It moved me. Mama’s worn face glowed with gentle love.

Hannah, I would not be honest if I told you it was clean, easy work. But from what Ignaz has heard, the pay will be decent, they will leave us alone, and we will get along. Some of those coffee house cavaliers may not be able to. But I have been used to hard work all my life. Cleaning up rubble in Poland won’t bother me.

As I lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, I had visions of Poland. Endless steppes, dark forest, the tall reeds of marshes combed by a silver wind. Packs of wolves howling in the night. Horses. I always felt powerfully attracted to strange and new places. Maybe that was because we had always been so poor and we could never go anywhere and were always stuck in bedbug-infested, crowded apartment houses that smelled of stale cooking. I had hardly been out of Vienna, except for a few excursions into the Vienna woods and the few weeks each summer I lived with my grandmother (my mother’s oldest half-sister who had raised Mama) when she was in Fahrafeld. Oh yes, there was also the ten-day visit to Uncle Heinrich in the Burgenland near the Hungarian border. But that was five years ago, and I had been pretty young then.

Poland is not a place where tropical winds whisper in the Banyan trees. Equatorial winds would be nice. But even Poland whispered of romance. Of horses’ hoofs pounding over vast steppes that stretched from Poland to Samarkand and the high Himalayas. I definitely felt a small tug of temptation. Then I saw Tomahawk before me. I was half-asleep, but the thought woke me completely. Tomahawk was the real door to adventure. The transport to the world Tad and I dreamed about. Tomahawk would take Tad and me away from the Nazis, and out of this grubby grayness. It would carry us, the boy adventurer, Hugi Flossel, and his faithful friend, Tad Saegerer, down the green waters of the Danube to the high reed jungles of the delta, and beyond to the glistening waves of the Black Sea. I fell asleep dreaming of glistening waves.

Chapter 2

I liked the smell of locksmith shops. That was how I picked my course at the Jewish Apprentice Institute. That may seem crazy to most people, but that is another story. Now at seven in the morning, dark and freezing cold at the tram stop, I was not so excited about locksmith school. I seemed to spend a lot of time suffering at tram stops. But today was Wednesday, and I had to get across town to go to school. I was supposed to be learning how to make keys and how to open locks.

You see, I was not at the Realgymnasium anymore. Jews were not allowed to go to school beyond the compulsory age. So, I was in the Jewish Relief Agencies’ vocational school, at the old Riegelhaupt warehouse in Simmering, three days of the week. Tad was jealous as can be. Because he was a Gentile, a pure Aryan, he still had to struggle with Latin declensions under the pure Aryan gaze of Professor Braunschweig, the arch Nazi. Brown Shirt Braunschweig, not me! I was learning to make keys and to open locks. Papa thought this was a skill that would get me a job once we emigrated, but with father, the chance of ever leaving this place was pretty damn small. So perhaps I could make my fortune being a world class cat burglar.

What I couldn’t tell Tad, because he would tease me too much, and wouldn’t tell Papa because he thought education was worthless and the only work worth doing was with your hands, is I wished I was back in school. To me, the world was a great puzzle and school helped me unlock that puzzle. Which might be the other reason I picked locksmith school: at least with the skills I learned here, I could unlock things.

Taking the tram to school was always a little dicey. Jews were not supposed to ride the trolley. The secret was to get on the rear platform of the last car so if someone you knew got on, you could get off right away. I could get into a lot of trouble if somebody reported me. They thought all this up in Nuremberg, or maybe it was Berlin. I mean the trolley stuff was shit, along with how they decided Jewish children were not fit to learn in the same schools as Gentile children.

Today, the car was crowded with laborers and store clerks with gray, pinched faces. They looked crabby and mean. Were they all looking at me for my handsome Jewish features or because the elegant brown briefcase my cousin Walter lent to me was clearly out of place in my hands? They carried their lunches mostly in rumpled paper packages. My cheese sandwich lay in the huge leather bag secured by buckled straps. I carried the briefcase because I needed it for the caper Tad and I had planned. We needed a blowtorch to solder the tube connections on the Tomahawk. Walter’s briefcase was the place to stash the blowtorch. We had drawn the plan up yesterday. No one would ever look for a stolen blowtorch in a briefcase, Tad had said. In Vienna, only students and wheels carried a briefcase. That was how Tad convinced me to borrow Walter’s briefcase. A student carrying a briefcase would not be noticed, and it was big enough to hold the blowtorch. Now, I just needed the courage to execute the plan.

I wished that Mama had given me more for breakfast. My stomach felt decidedly funny. The same worms were in my stomach the day they reopened school after the Germans took over Austria. That day, it felt like every worm that ever lived in the Vienna Woods had taken up residence in my gut. In the weeks leading up to the reopening of the school, I became convinced that as the only Jewish kid in my class someone was sure to mock, spit on me, or try to beat me up. But nothing much happened! The Latin teacher did give a sleazy speech. Dr. Braunschweig showed up that day with the Nazi party button in his lapel and proudly revealed he had been an underground Nazi all along. Illegal though it may have been, he had been loyal to the German ideals. He gave a long pompous lecture about the coming glories of the national socialist state, dedication, duty, German hearts, and the strength of the brown battalions. Soon the school would cleanse itself of those who wander through the world engaged in sleazy trade. Who? Me? I felt every eye in the classroom focused on me. I had wanted to shrink into a crack in the floor, but I sat straight and kept my head pointed in front of me. But, I had a better breakfast on that day. I remembered it clearly—hot cocoa and a fresh, crunchy roll.

The tram rumbled down a hill and screeched to a halt in the little church square at the school stop. The clock hands in the tower stood at ten minutes before eight. It was only a short walk down narrow, cobbled streets. Overcrowded apartment houses with mouse-gray facades and peeling window frames lined these streets. They were just like the streets around my old school, the Realgymnasium on the Kalvarienberggasse.

I remembered the street in which it finally happened; the moment I had worried about that week before schools reopened. Walking home from school on that first Nazi school day, two guys blocked the sidewalk. I did not know who they were. They were probably from the secondary school down the block. They both had pieces of black rubber hose in their fists. One waved it under my nose and asked for my money, which was pretty funny considering I never had any. I tried to fast talk my way out of t. It embarrassed me to remember how I turned my pockets inside out so they could see how empty they were, all the while calculating my chance for breaking away to the park across the street where they could not hem me in.

Then Tad appeared. He was in top form that day. He stood toe to toe with them, but that was not a big deal. In a tough workers’ district in Vienna, like where I lived, we did that all the time or got run off the street. But he was very cool. He growled at them that he was a Christian, like they were. Funny! We didn’t know the word Aryan in those early days. Go, he said. Go pick on one of the rich kids in one of the fancy districts! If you want to pick on him, you’ll have to take me too!

The two thugs with their rubber hoses backed off real quick. That surprised me. Tad wasn’t that big or that tough looking, but they went with just a few goddamns. I was lucky most bullies those days, especially around Jews, didn’t back down so quickly. Further down the street, one of them had turned and hollered that they’d get us later. Tad did his victorious turkey war dance and then walked home with me. It still made me smile when I remembered Tad, raising his right hand like a wooden Indian chief, saying, I am a Christian. You are Jewish. The color of our mother’s wigwams does not matter. You and me, we are war trail companions. Then he did another thing with his hand as if he were giving a midget a haircut. I don’t know what book he got that wigwam speech from, but he and I were both big fans of Karl May, a German who wrote wonderful stories about the old West in the United States. The stories featured two unlikely friends: a cowboy, Old Shatterhand, and an Indian named Winnetou.

So, even though the speech was a little annoying, his act of bravery and kindness in stepping up to those bullies cemented our friendship. We were friends before, but that afternoon made it more special.

There was not a soul in sight when I walked through the old warehouse gate. The class bell must have rung already. I hurried to the locker room and put the briefcase away. I didn’t want to drag that monster into class and draw attention to it.

Herr Birnbaum had already taken attendance and was lecturing on the properties of soft iron as a key-making material when I got to my seat. Poor stodgy Birnbaum! He had been a physics professor at a fancy garden suburb, Realgymnasium. Now he was teaching apprentice plumbers and locksmiths like me.

Birnbaum was droning on about measures of hardness. I’d thought I was supposed to be learning to open locks, not to be a physicist. As usual, I flashed him my every one of your words is like a pearl to me devotional stare. The trick was to try to bore a hole in the middle of their forehead with your eyes. That kept them happy, and that usually brought on a nice drowsiness that covered you like a tent. It did not come today, no matter how hard I tried. Hansl Lichtblau whispered something about hardness, and his neighbors began to titter. Somewhere out on the street a car horn blared, and a dog yelped. The church bell rang twice. And I kept worrying about whether that blowtorch would make a big bulge in that stupid brown briefcase when I carried it down the hall. That probably did not matter anyhow. This adventure—Tad called it Operation Blowtorch—could go wrong in so many ways. I touched the Turkish coin Mr. Novotny had given me before the Latin test a couple of years ago for luck. Maybe it would still work if I rubbed it really hard? This caper was important. Tomahawk was beginning to assume the shape we had wanted it to be. For three months it had grown, hidden under the skirts of the fisherman’s hut in the inundation area. Now we needed a blowtorch to get on with our work down there.

Birnbaum was fading out. The oil-smeared benches of the warehouse receded a little. I could afford the luxury of thinking about warmer, happier days: about the day when we first found the hut. Tad and I had been roaming through the Ueberschwemmungsgebiet, the inundation area. This was a largish flat field where the Danube water was supposed to go when there was too much water in the river. Any encyclopedia will tell you that it’s a broad floodplain on the left bank of the Danube that was established in the nineteenth century to regulate the river. This was the place where Viennese who little money went in their thousands during the summer to enjoy themselves. On weekends, workers and small shopkeepers packed into the street cars like Norwegian sardines. The smell of garlic sausage and cucumber salad was heavenly. My stomach ached as I thought of it. What a scene it was down there. By the side of the broad, glistening river, everyone peeled off their clothes and stretched every which way on the sparse summer grass or on the gravelly stream bank to expose their pale bodies to the sun. It was probably a way of forgetting the stale air of their small, overcrowded apartments. Some had wooden club houses built on stilts, and others pitched small tents in clusters around them. On a July or August evening, the laughter and the singing in the flood plain carried all the way across the broad whispering river to the hot cobblestoned streets of the city. They say that in the good old days before Austria lost the war and turned from a big empire into a puny little country—before the Central Bank crashed and everybody lost their job—that the inundation area wasn’t so popular then. But now it was the paradise of the Viennese poor. Smelling the river on a summer night filled everyone’s heart with yearning.

Tad and I roamed around the flood plain, even during the school year. That’s how we discovered the fisherman’s hut two years ago. We were playing Wild West. Tad has always been strong on Indians. Usually his inspiration came from Karl May. Roaming around in our riverside prairie, we imagined we were anything we wanted and that we could do anything. If you lived in a musty room without even a corner that was really all yours, and if you had to climb four stories of sooty tenement brick to get to it, it was great to feel the prairie wind in your face. When you were kind of hungry, playing that you were roasting bear’s paws over a campfire made us salivate.

The day we found the hut two years ago, I was Winnetou, the noble and cunning Indian chief. Tad was Old Shatterhand, his clean-cut, invincible Teutonic friend. At least that is how I remember it. We always argued about who would be Winnetou. It was a late Sunday in October when I was Winnetou, tracking a rogue party of Sioux along the sloping stone bank of the river. Old Shatterhand spotted a half-submerged log and instantly recognized it as a skillfully hidden war canoe of the Sioux. There were no German soldiers then. In the fall of 1937, we thought up enemies out of the debris the summer had left behind.

Stalking the raiders who had hidden the canoe, we found the hut. It stood on stilts, almost completely hidden between a weedy knoll and a clump of barren willows. Rush mats had been hung around the stilts, completely enclosing the space beneath the hut and forming a kind of room. This dark space, which you could enter by pushing a mat aside, was a perfect hiding place from which to spy on the fierce Sioux. It protected us from the brisk October winds, and we could watch the river through the narrow slits between the mats.

Birnbaum talked about clogged files, or maybe it was about filing soft metal. I thought about how, during our first visit to the hut, we discovered the trapdoor that opened into the hut from the space underneath. Tad stood on a wooden soda box and boosted me through the hinged door. I got a snootful of dust. The shack had not been used for a long time. Dead flies littered the floor. There was thick dust and cobwebs everywhere. The small room had a window on all four sides and a door towards the river. Outside the door was a narrow porch. An A-frame, rigged to hold a net pole, was mounted on the railing. The pole was gone and the ladder that once led from the steep riverbank to the porch had lost most of its rungs. The only furnishings were a tiny cast-iron stove with a broken leg, and a kitchen table covered with a peeling piece of blue oil cloth. Tad said to me it was perfect!

It took a while before I really thought of the shack as our own. True, we played at the shack often and Tad said a gypsy woman who visited his mother at the shop had told him that a secret place would be given to him—a nexus to strength she had called it. Each time we rode the trolley to the inundation area, I sweated that someone had come during our absence and had reclaimed our secret hideaway. After a while, I began to believe Tad. I mean, not really, but I was encouraged. Each time we went there, we found the hidden hut just as we had left it.

Tad said that the nexus to strength was going to be our Danube outpost. That meant we had to clean the hut. We also dragged in an old mattress and a chair we found along the river. Tad stole some candles from his mother’s grocery store and we stocked it with some bottles of drinking water. Our outpost was useful in our battles with the unruly Sioux and with other sworn enemies and a fine place to play.

A few weeks ago, I had argued with Tad about how things had changed during the two years since we had found our hut. We were playing Old Shatterhand and Winnetou roaming the Sioux-infested plains, but there seemed to be new enemies now. The police had changed their uniforms from Austrian pine green to the pale green of the German Schutzpolizei. Wehrmacht troops were practicing infantry tactics on the Danube bank. I told Tad the posters on the city walls, the newspapers, and the crowds laughing at Jews scrubbing the sidewalks were telling me he and I were not of the same tribe. For me, my fantasies about enemies were getting fleshed out. Imagined dangers were now getting pretty close to real. Tad, stubborn as ever, pretended nothing had really changed at all. He never seemed to pay attention when I talked to him about the stormtroopers or the trouble my father had with them. It was all another big Wild West show to him, and it kindled his imagination for a Wild West scene. The Indians, or, depending on what we did that day, the cowboys, had just changed into brown uniforms. What really fired up our argument that day was when he said, Me, Old Shatterhand; you, Winnetou; me, Aryan; and you, Jew. We make many coups! Idiot!

There were so many wonderful things going on in Tad’s mind. But he never listened when his imagination switched into top gear. His head was full of ringing bells.

That woke me up. Real bells were ringing outside the classroom window. The tower clock at the little church down the street chimed eleven times. One more hour. We will strike at noon, Tad had said, exactly at noon! Agreed?

Most of the students at the Jewish Relief Agency school ate lunch in the downstairs hall. It served as a common room where we could talk, play chess, or swap rumors about emigration. The caretaker’s wife sold rolls, soup, and cheap candy if it was available. The muffled chatter of the lunch eaters drifted up the corridor that led to the plumbing shop. There was not a sound from the other side of the closed door. No shadows moved behind the flashed glass windows. The shop was empty, just as we calculated. Cool and swift, Tad had said. Four quick steps to the first long shop table and the shiniest, most effective looking blowtorch was out of sight under my smock. Stop! Listen! Still no one! It was a big coup for Winnetou in the greasy apprentice’s coat. Two rolls of soldering wire and a can of flux followed the blowtorch swiftly and then I was back on my way to the door. Count the steps, Tad had said. It will keep you calm. It was eighty-six steps downstairs to the locker room. All clear! At my locker, I quickly wrapped the loot in a dirty towel and stuck it in the briefcase. At the last moment, I remembered the cheese sandwich and fumbled to get it out. Now came the critical part. Another sixty-one steps down the hall to the landing where the window was, the bulging briefcase in my left hand. The Turkish coin must have worked. There was no one in the hall. I reached up to open the window and, without looking, dropped the briefcase to the ground two flights below. A soft thud! I hoped Tad was there, waiting and ready.

My heart was beating fast when I entered the common room, clutching my cheese sandwich. Stealing was not exactly new for me. I had been slipping small tools in my pockets for weeks. But this was important. We needed that blowtorch badly. I hoped Tad was on the way to the hut with it right now.

The cheese sandwich tasted dry. I leaned back against the cold wall and chewed very slowly. It was a good thing it had not snowed this morning. The danger of leaving tracks behind on the path to the hut was clear to any old Indian fighter. Snow would have killed our plan for getting the blowtorch today. The work on Tomahawk had to proceed at full speed. Then it hit me like a small locomotive. It would not work for me to skip out right after lunch. I could not get down to the hut today. I was stuck. Swiping those other tools would surely be noticed. Tools for Jews in wartime were in short supply—a serious matter. No doubt the school authorities were on alert and in wait, ready to pounce if there was another theft. There could be personal searches if the blowtorch was missed right away. I was trapped! I had to listen to Birnbaum the rest of the day.

The school closed at three and I left with the quickly dispersing crowd. Students did not hang around the gates of the Jew school. It tempted fate to linger too long. Knobby-kneed would-be plumbers, locksmiths, and carpenters disappeared into the gray city streets like water cast on hot stones.

It was annoying. If I had used my head, I would not be in this stampede but down at the Danube working on Tomahawk. Stupid! If I left school early, I would be the prime suspect in the theft of the blowtorch! I should have seen it right away. Tad had arranged the blowtorch caper along the lines of a Cagney-Raft prison plot. Bust out of the big house. Then, smuggle the shiv out of the prison shop! And I had listened like a damn fool and that had left me high and dry. A Viennese worker’s child should have figured this out right away. Tad had said to skip out of school at one o’clock and meet at our nexus to strength. But they had noticed right after lunch that a blowtorch was missing.

The plumbing teacher and the principal, with serious expressions on their faces, had gone from room to room. It was obvious that they were looking for the torch. I had been right. This was no afternoon for leaving school early. They would have become suspicious of me right away. So, I had to stay until the bitter end of the school day, first listening some more to Birnbaum, and then filing keys. Of course, this never would have occurred to Tad. In his world, you didn’t get caught. His mother owned a grocery store, so he was a shopkeeper’s child, and lived in the more genteel world where shopkeepers lived. Tad just didn’t have the instincts that one developed in a workers’ district like Hernals. And so, like an ass, I was stuck at school till the last bell. Now it was too late to join Tad in the fisherman’s hut. Soon it would be dark.

As I left school, Dita Rosenman tried to start a conversation with me. She was very cute and had quite the figure for a fourteen-year-old and we had been flirting with each other for months. She must have been very puzzled why I told her to get lost, but I was in no mood to hear about her forthcoming trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Shanghai. All that mattered was whether Tad had got the torch.

Chapter 3

In the evening, Cousin Walter came to our apartment to pick up his briefcase. He was Aunt Tina’s youngest, twenty-two years old, and fat. His mother, Mama’s sister, was held in high regard in our family because she had married a court clerk. Being the wife of a government official was pretty important. Of course, Uncle Sigi didn’t have his job now because they’d dismissed all Jews from government service right after the Anschluss. Walter had been a university student until the Nazis came along and banned all Jews from university. Because he was educated he was sort of stuck-up in a harmless way. He was not very fond