The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [109]
Viktor missed the flat matches that you could buy in Vienna that fitted his waistcoat pocket. He missed his small cigars. He had his black tea in a glass, Russian-style. He poured sugar into it. Once he poured in the family’s ration for the week and stirred it round, as everyone sat open-mouthed.
In February 1944, to everyone’s delight, Iggie turns up in Tun-bridge Wells in his American uniform, an Intelligence Officer with the 7th Corps Headquarters. A childhood switching between English, French and German has made him valuable. Both of the brothers have taken American citizenship to enlist in the army, Rudolf in Virginia in July 1941 and Iggie in California in January 1941, a month after Pearl Harbor.
Iggie during the Normandy campaign, 1944
The next they know of Iggie is a photograph on the front of The Times on 27th June 1944, three weeks after the Allied landings in France. It shows the surrender of a German admiral and a German general at Cherbourg. They stand in sodden greatcoats across from a now-slightly-balding Captain I. L. Ephrussi and the dapper American Major General J. Lawton Collins. There are maps of Normandy pinned to the walls, a tidy desk. And everyone is canted slightly forward to catch Iggie’s interpretation of General Collins’s terms.
Viktor died on 12th March 1945, a month before Vienna was liberated by the Russians and two months before the unconditional surrender of the German High Command. He was eighty-four. ‘Born Odessa, Died Tunbridge Wells’ reads his death certificate. Lived, I add as I read it, in Vienna, the centre of Europe. His grave in the municipal cemetery in Charing is far away from his mother in Vichy. And far away from his father and grandfather in the Doric-pillared mausoleum in Vienna, built with all that self-confidence to house the dynastic Ephrussi clan for ever in their new imperial Austrian-Hungarian homeland. It is furthest from Kövesces.
Soon after the war ended Elisabeth received a long letter from uncle Tibor, typed in German. It was sent on from Pips in Switzerland in October. It was on paper that was nearly transparent and it contained dreadful news.
I do not want to repeat everything, but have to write about Jenö and Eva once more. It is terrible to think about the distress under which they died. Jenö already had the certificate in his hand before they were deported from Komarom into the Reich, since he was allowed to go home. He did not want to leave Eva since he believed that they would still be allowed to remain together, but they were immediately separated at the German border and all the better clothes they wore were taken from them too. Both died in January.
Eva, Jewish, had been taken on to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where she died of typhus; and Jenö, Gentile, was sent to a labour camp. He died of exhaustion.
Tibor goes on to tell news of neighbours at Kövesces, listing the names of family friends and of cousins of whom I know nothing: Samu, Herr Siebert, the whole Erwin Strasser family, the widow of János Thuróczy, ‘a second son who is missing since this time’ deported during the war or disappeared into the camps. He writes of the devastation around him, the burnt-out villages, the starvation, the inflation. There are no deer left in the countryside. The estate next to Kövesces, Tavarnok, ‘is empty and has burned. Everyone has left, only the old lady is in Tapolcány. I only possess what I am wearing.’
Tibor had been to Vienna to the Palais Ephrussi: ‘In Vienna a few things were saved . . . The picture of Anna Herz (Makart) is still there, a portrait of Emmy (Angeli) and the picture of Tascha’s mother (I think also Angeli’s), a few pieces of furniture, vases etc. Almost all of your father