Vienna

Vienna occupies a strange double position in Lale Sokolov's life: it is the city he once dreamed of visiting in his playboy days, a word that sounded romantic, full of style and possibility, and it is also the place where he is held as a prisoner in the Saurer-Werke subcamp of Mauthausen. The city's glamour and its horror are never reconciled in his mind; when he arrives there as a prisoner, he reflects that he does not doubt it will now fail to live up to his earlier perception. Vienna thus becomes a measure of how far his life has fallen, a once-coveted destination transformed into another cage in the chain of camps that shunts him from place to place. Yet the city also holds the promise of escape, for it is through Vienna that Lale and Gita will eventually slip out of Europe altogether, making the city the hinge between his captivity and his freedom.

From Dream Destination to Prison

Lale's association with Vienna begins long before the war, in the years when he was a young man of style and ambition. The very word Vienna sounded romantic to him, evoking a city of elegance and possibility that he longed to visit. This dream was part of his broader self-image as a man who dressed to impress, who wore a pressed suit, clean white shirt, and tie even when being transported in a cattle train, believing that one should always dress to impress. Vienna represented the sophisticated European life he aspired to, a world of cafés and culture that seemed infinitely distant from the filthy, crowded wagon in which he was carried toward Auschwitz in April 1942. The contrast between this romanticized Vienna and the reality he would later encounter there is one of the quiet ironies of his story: the city he had imagined as the height of style becomes the site of his imprisonment.

The Saurer-Werke Subcamp

After the evacuation of Birkenau and his separation from Gita, Lale finds himself in a camp where prisoners sit around doing virtually nothing for several weeks. He spends his time watching the SS guards, trying to work out who can be approached and who must be avoided. He begins to talk occasionally to one of the guards, who is impressed that Lale speaks fluent German. The guard has heard about Auschwitz and Birkenau but has not been there, and wants to hear about it. Lale paints a picture removed from reality, telling him what he did there and how he much preferred to work than to sit around, because nothing can be gained by telling this German the true nature of the treatment of prisoners there. A few days later, the guard asks him if he would like to move to a subcamp of Mauthausen, at Saurer-Werke in Vienna. Thinking it cannot be any worse than where he is, and with assurances from the guard that conditions are slightly better and the commandant is too old to care, Lale accepts the offer. The guard points out that this camp does not take Jews, so he should keep quiet about his religion. The next day the guard tells him to gather his things, that he is out of here.

When Lale arrives in Vienna, the guards are indifferent to him and the others. They find a block and are told where and when to get their meals. Lale's thoughts are dominated by Gita and by how he can get to her; being shunted from camp to camp to camp, he cannot bear it much longer. For several days he observes his surroundings, watching the camp commandant doddering about and wondering how he is still breathing. He chats to amenable guards and tries to understand the dynamic among the prisoners. Once he discovers that he is probably the only Slovak prisoner here, he decides to keep to himself. Poles, Russians, and a few Italians sit around all day talking with their countrymen, leaving Lale largely isolated. The city of his dreams has become a place of loneliness and concealment, where he must hide his Jewish identity and where his only purpose is to find a way back to Gita.

The Escape Through Vienna

Vienna's final role in Lale's story comes after the war, when he and Gita have been reunited in Bratislava and are forced to flee Czechoslovakia. Lale has been arrested and sentenced, and after being driven to the apartment where he and Gita lived, he is told he will be picked up in two days to complete his sentence. That night, with the help of friends, they slip out the back of their apartment building with a suitcase each of possessions and a painting that Gita refuses to leave behind, a painting of a Romany woman. They also take a large amount of money to give to a contact in Vienna who is destined for Israel. Then they hide behind a false wall in a truck taking produce from Bratislava into Austria.

At a given time on a given day, they walk along a platform at the Vienna train station looking for a contact they have never met. Lale describes it as like something out of a le Carré novel. They mutter a password to several single gentlemen until finally one gives the appropriate response. Lale slips a small briefcase of money to him, and then he disappears. From Vienna they travel to Paris, where they rent an apartment and for several months enjoy the cafés and bars of the city returning to its prewar self. Seeing Josephine Baker, the brilliant black American singer and dancer, perform at a cabaret is a memory Lale would always carry with him; he described her as having "legs up to here," indicating his waist. With no work available for non-French citizens, Lale and Gita decide to leave France, wanting to go as far away from Europe as possible. They buy fraudulent passports and set sail for Sydney, where they land on July 29, 1949.

The City as Threshold

Vienna thus functions in Lale's narrative as a threshold between two worlds. In his imagination it was the gateway to a sophisticated European life; in reality it became the site of his imprisonment in the Saurer-Werke subcamp, where he was isolated and forced to conceal his religion. And finally it became the passage through which he and Gita escaped the continent altogether, a place of passwords and briefcases and unseen contacts, the last European city they would pass through before beginning their new life in Australia. The city that once represented style and possibility ends up representing the end of one life and the beginning of another, a place where Lale's old identity as a carefree playboy is finally and irrevocably replaced by his new identity as a survivor, a husband, and a man heading as far from Europe as he can possibly go.