Night Angels by Weina Dai Randel

Author:Weina Dai Randel [Randel, Weina Dai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

He stayed for hours while the chaotic clamor of crashing and screaming continued outside, a rising frenzy that didn’t seem to end. Sometime around midnight, Mr. Rosenburg finally returned home, the top buttons of his shirt missing, his face pale.

“Thank God you’re home. But you’ve missed the train,” Fengshan said. “When will you leave now?”

“Tomorrow, I hope, Dr. Ho. I shall call you when I have the new train tickets. The ocean liner is set to depart from Italy in four days. We can still make it.”

Fengshan was relieved, and he promised to see them off at the train station tomorrow, ensuring their safe departure.

“You have done enough for me, Dr. Ho. For your safety, you must go. This is going to be a long night,” Mr. Rosenburg said.

A long night, he agreed. For his friend and his family, for Miss Schnitzler and her family, and for many others in Vienna.

Fengshan gave his friend a pat and left. Outside, the streets were ablaze with flames, torches, and glaring lights from the apartments’ broken windows and doors. The neighborhood was deafening with ambulances and police cars screaming past, looters shouting and carrying bags and paintings, and Brownshirts hollering and brandishing torches. Rudolf seemed to have trouble discerning directions, swerving, stopping, and inching forward. A few times, Fengshan lurched forward as the car went over something lumpy, nearly unseating him.

Finally, Rudolf turned onto a broad avenue lined with shops, and there, the car stopped abruptly. Fengshan was about to ask why they had stopped, when the sound of glass crashing burst ahead of him. He looked up.

In his car’s headlights, in stark whiteness, men holding clubs were walking from shop to shop, smashing the windows, hollering and cheering as the glass crashed. Near them, a mob holding torches was striking two elderly men with thick clubs; another Brownshirt was hammering a youth trying to flee. And Fengshan saw a man, hatless, lying motionless near a pile of shattered glass, his face smashed beyond recognition.

Fengshan closed his eyes, shaken. Memories of another mob welled in his mind. But this was Vienna, not China. He was alive, and he was not twenty years old.

He opened his eyes, forcing himself to be the witness to the evil of the night, to remember the heinous crimes, to etch in his brain the faces of the mob that belonged to the human race.

People. So many people. Their faces twisted with menace, their legs spread wide, their arms flung high, their mouths dark caverns of depravity. They were shrieking with delight, their laughter roaring above the exploding windows, above the sound of clothes ripping, above the heart-wrenching pleading and screaming, and God help him—he was inside the safety of his car, but he could smell the choking fumes mixed with the acrid odor of burnt fur and leather and the sickening scents of torched hair and flesh.

“They set the shul on fire! The shul!” A woman’s voice, shrill, unbearable.

And he saw it. Amid the darkness, the sickening smoke,

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