The Landauers flee Europe

The Landauers flee Europe in a sequence of departures that converts temporary refuge into an uncertain escape. From a hotel on Lake Geneva, Liesel, Viktor, their children, and Katalin travel by crowded train across France toward Bilbao and an ocean passage; behind them are their seized home and the life they knew, while ahead lies an improvised future. The journey’s decisive emotional fact is not simply that the family gets away, but that Liesel leaves while unable to reach Hana, carrying a postcard whose delivery she fears will never happen.

From Zurich to the road west

The departure begins after a period of stasis in Zurich. In a letter to Hana, Liesel reports receiving Hana’s number eighteen just before the family leaves their house there; only number fifteen appears to have gone missing. She asks Hana to note the family’s new address, but admits that even she cannot imagine where they will be a week later. The uncertainty is practical as well as emotional: mail must be forwarded, and the family’s whereabouts are about to change again.

Their next stop is Le Grand Hôtel Vevey, a grand Biedermeier hotel rather than another home. Liesel again has a view of a lake, but this one is larger and darker, with the French shore visible beyond it. The hotel’s terrace, where Swiss families gather for lunch, offers a scene of comfortable neutrality that contrasts with the refugees’ unsettled position. They are moving west, but neither the view nor the hotel promises permanence.

The route is shaped by bureaucratic delay and borders. Liesel writes that the family expects to leave by train via Lyon in five days, and that she can see France from her room. Viktor says Vevey is better because he wants to shake off the past and what he calls Germanic nonsense. His wish to put the past behind him sits uneasily beside the practical fact that escape requires papers, transit permissions, and an itinerary through several countries.

A family in motion

Liesel describes life with Katalin as a strange continuing dance: the two women can share things they cannot discuss, and Liesel does not feel anger toward her. Instead, she feels affection and recognizes that both may be victims of circumstance. This closeness accompanies the family’s displacement rather than resolving its complications. The children are flourishing but miss their friends; Martin is bossed around by the girls, while Ottilie sends Hana kisses and tells her to be good, without quite understanding what she means.

The family’s departure also unfolds alongside news from Hana. In a letter, Hana tells Liesel that she had believed herself unable to have children, but now wants the baby she is carrying. Liesel reads the letter repeatedly, recalling her own pregnancy, Hana’s attentions, and the moment they used a pendulum to divine that Liesel was carrying Ottilie. The memory makes Hana’s news intimate and startling: Liesel is leaving just as the friend who once shared the wonder of her pregnancy faces a future of her own.

Liesel replies that she wants to be with Hana but cannot. With only time to write, she urges Hana to go ahead with what she wants and promises to write again, perhaps from Bilbao. The family is already assembling to leave. Two Citroëns stand outside, piled high with people and luggage; Katalin and two children are in the rear car, Ottilie in the front, and Viktor waits impatiently by the door. Liesel has been writing a card. Viktor tells her to get in, and she says she must leave it at the desk; he insists they can post it at the station. The private message is forced to compete with the immediate demand to escape.

The train and its documents

Geneva station is crowded and noisy, its trains venting steam as passengers argue with officials and struggle over places. Papers are scrutinized, tickets examined, and passports and visas waved in the crush. Viktor leads the way through the crowd, with a porter pushing a trolley piled with suitcases. Liesel remembers the station in Město, where she and Viktor once met Rainer from the Vienna train as he arrived to survey the site for their house. Now the house is no longer theirs, Rainer is in America, Europe is under the burden of war, and Hana is pregnant. The old station memory measures how much has changed between one journey and the next.

Their compartment has six folded-down bunks and, mercifully, is empty when they reach it. Other passengers fill corridors and compartments; elsewhere, people fight over the same small sleeping space in German and French. The attendant takes the family’s tickets, passports, transit visas for l’État Français, and entry visas for el Estado Español. There is no restaurant car and no sleeping-car comfort. Viktor acknowledges that this is not what they are used to, but war and exile have already overturned the standards by which their former life was measured. When Ottilie asks whether they will all be together, she is assured that they will share the compartment.

The crossing begins under inspection. Officials stand at the open carriage door, examine the documents, and move on only after returning them. Outside, Swiss houses and fields pass, followed by a glimpse of the Rhône. Liesel is in tears: the train will go through Lyon, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bayonne, and Biarritz, then onward to Spain and Bilbao, where the family will board a ship. Her words and the route give the departure its full scale. This is not another move to a safer house, but a journey away from the familiar and, as she understands it, away for ever.

The message left behind

As the train carries the family away, Liesel holds the postcard and worries about its reaching Hana. A question about the Swiss stamps seems to trouble her; she is told that stamps can be obtained in Bayonne or Spain. Yet the practical answer cannot quiet the deeper fear. Město is already slipping far behind them, the ocean lies ahead, and America beyond it. Weeping, Liesel says that the postcard will never reach Hana and that Hana will never know.

The broken connection gives the escape a cost distinct from the loss of property and place. In her letter, Liesel had asked Hana to use a new address and promised further contact; in the station, she can only hope that a card will travel through a chain of uncertain destinations. Their correspondence becomes vulnerable to the same borders and disruptions that dictate the family’s route. The train does not merely carry Liesel west: it separates her from a friend whose news has made the departure more painful.

The passage to the future

Later, outside a villa, a car waits to take the family to the port and a flying boat. Viktor calls the photograph just taken the last souvenir of their tropical paradise. The next movement is explicitly toward a promised land and a future, but the phrase does not erase the instability of their passage. The family has moved through Swiss refuge, French rail stations, and the Spanish route to the ocean; now it is preparing to leave Europe by air and sea.

The departure is set against the abandoned house. Without its people, the building is an enclosed box exposed to wind, rain, snow, and the slow damage of water: paint and concrete flake, tiles loosen, and steel rusts. People walking along Blackfield Road speculate that the owners have gone to Switzerland, Britain, or the United States, but their attention is absorbed by the ordinary problems of survival and the question of when the war will end. The contrast is stark: the family’s escape continues toward an unknown future while the house remains behind, losing its human dimensions and weathering the absence of those who made it a home.