THE GREEN KING (part 35)

THE GREEN KING (part 35)

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The Photographer from Salzburg

Vienna in 1945 was no longer the Vienna of Johann Strauss, of the pleasure gardens of Grinzing; the famous Viennese golden heart no longer bit to the rhythm of a waltz. The town was half-dead, half ruined, and even under the June sun, gloomy. The Prater park was in the Russian zone, and the destroyed tanks there were just beginning to rust, slowly digested by the grass. Only a few blackened shells of buildings remained on Kartnerstrasse, which had been the equivalent of the Rue de la Paix or Fifth Avenue, and where efforts to rebuild the upper floors were barely starting. Few people were where they had been; they were scattered throughout Europe, prisoners when they weren’t dead, wounded, or on their slow way home.

Returning to the Klimrod house, finding it still standing but requisitioned by a British general, Reb Klimrod had not found any of the former servants. As a boy not yet thirteen, the age he was when he left for Lvov in 1941, he knew of most of them only that they lived on the top floor, knew of them what a child his age would know of his parents employees.

He didn’t go to Austrian police, and certainly not to the occupying authorties. He had no identification papers, though that wouldn’t had been a major obstacle, even though he had committed a theft by stealing some of British general’s civilian clothing. Perhaps he thought that among the police he might find other Wagners.

David Sttiniaz is convinced thet Reb Klimrod knew right away that his father was dead and knew intuitively of the role played by Erich Steyr in his death. In June of 1945, Steyr was probably in Vienna, like so many war was officially over, simply went home; some, such as the notorious Mengele, reopened their medical offices from before the war. For Settiniaz, Reb’s visit to Wagner was a revelation; the fact that the boy had chosen Wagner, and no one else, because of an old association he knew of between Steyr and Wagner. The result confirmed Reb’s conviction; he saw in the appearance of the three thugs at the bookshop an attempt on Steyr’s part to capture him and make him disappear.

But his main objective was to find a trace of Johann Klimrod. Reb spent two or three days in Vienna, hiding somewhere, in his former house or in a ruined building. On June 23, he found the woman from Reichenau… who led him to the photographer from Salzburg….

…. and to the horror.

TO BE CONTINUED

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