The Last Days (Laurent Seksik) by Laurent Seksik

Author:Laurent Seksik
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Psychological, Biographical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781782270652
Publisher: PUSHKIN PRESS
Published: 2013-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

He hadn’t been able to close his mother’s eyes when she’d died. He hadn’t recited the Kaddish. He hadn’t fulfilled the most important commandment that all Jewish children were bound by. By the time Ida Zweig breathed her last in August 1938, he had long since fled Austria and had been denied permission to return and be by his mother’s bedside. German troops had entered Vienna on 13th March 1938. It had taken only six months for barbarism to be unleashed on the Jews. His mother, an eighty-four-year-old invalid who was hard of hearing, had suffered the worst humiliations. During the early days of the Anschluss, she had witnessed her son’s books burning on the pyres that had been erected on Viennese squares. If that old lady had been able to muster the requisite strengths to stroll through the Prater’s gardens, she would have been forbidden, under penalty of death, to sit on one of the park benches. It hadn’t taken long for her to fall ill. Cousin Egon was granted permission to visit her, but only once a day. Despite costing an arm and a leg, an Aryan nurse had been engaged and given the adjacent room to sleep in. Yet since an Aryan couldn’t sleep under the same roof as a Jew, Egon had been forbidden to remain by Ida’s side during those final nights, when her end had loomed in sight.

Ida Zweig had died alone on a summer night in 1938. Stefan had felt almost relieved when he’d heard the news. The Nazis had managed to ensure a son would feel relieved by his own mother’s death. At least she had been spared from suffering further abuses and unspeakable cruelties. A few months later, they had forced all the Jews in Vienna to vacate their flats, relocating them outside the Ring, cramming entire families into dilapidated houses. In the space of a year, Vienna had been cleansed of all its Jews.

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