The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [107]
It is only four months since they walked onto the Ring in Vienna to make their way to the station to escape. And now there are German soldiers on every border.
Emmy dies on 12th October.
Neither Elisabeth nor Iggie used the word ‘suicide’ to me, but they both said she could not go on, that she did not want to go any further. She died in the night. Emmy took too many of her heart pills, the ones she kept in the porcelain box of robin’s-egg blue.
In the file of documents is her death certificate, folded into four. A maroon Republic of Czechoslovakia five-krone stamp with a rampant lion is fixed and stamped, though today, the day on which it is filled in, Czechoslovakia no longer exists. On 12th October 1938, it says in Slovak, Emmy Ephrussi von Schey, wife of Viktor Ephrussi, daughter of Paul Schey and Evelina Landauer, died aged fifty-nine. The cause of death was a fault with her heart. It is signed ‘Frederik Skipsa, matrikar’. And there is a handwritten note in the bottom left-hand corner. The deceased was a citizen of the Reich and these records are according to the laws of the Reich.
I think of her suicide. I think that she did not want to be a citizen of the Reich and to live in the Reich. I wonder whether it was too much for Emmy – that beautiful and funny and angry woman – that the one place in her life in which she had been completely free had become another trap.
Elisabeth heard the news in a telegram two days later. Iggie and Rudolf three days after that in America. Emmy was buried in the churchyard of the hamlet near Kövesces. And my great-grandfather Viktor was alone.
I lay out my thin trail of blue letters from 1938 on the long table in my studio. There are eighteen or so, a scant trail across the winter. They are mostly between Elisabeth, her uncle Pips and cousins in Paris, attempting to track where everyone is, how to gain permission for people to leave, suggestions of how to raise money as surety. How could they get Viktor out of Slovakia? All his property had been sequestered and he was stranded in the middle of the countryside, with an Austrian passport that should have been valid until 1940, but now has negligible value as Austria no longer exists as a separate country. As Viktor had been expelled he could not apply at a German consulate for a German passport. He had started to apply for Czech citizenship, but then that country too disappeared. All he has is a document showing him to be a citizen of Vienna and another document concerning his renunciation of Russian citizenship and acquisition of Austrian citizenship in 1911. But that was in the Hapsburg era.
On 7th November a young Jew walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a German diplomat, Ernst von Rath. On the 8th collective punishments against the Jews were announced: Jewish children were no longer to attend Aryan schools, Jewish newspapers were banned. On the evening of the 9th von Rath died in Paris. Hitler decided that the spontaneous demonstrations should be unchecked, that the police should be withdrawn.
Kristallnacht is a night of terror: 680 Jews commit suicide in Vienna: twenty-seven are murdered. Synagogues are burnt across Austria and Germany, shops are looted, Jews are beaten and rounded up for prison and the camps.
The letters, flimsy airmail letters, are increasingly desperate. Pips writes from Switzerland, ‘My correspondence has become a kind of clearing-house for friends and relatives who can’t write to one another . . . I am terribly worried about them as I hear from reliable sources that sooner or later all Jewish men are to be sent to the so-called “preserve” in Poland.’ He begs friends to intercede for Viktor’s admission to England. And Elisabeth writes to the British authorities:
As a result of the radical political changes in Cechoslavaquia, and quite especially in Slovaquia in which his present residence is situated, his situation can no