Homecoming in Vienna.

This is mainly about two very important oranges that I bought at an outdoor fruit-stand in Vienna on January 20, 1973. The oranges were important, of course, only to me, for reasons that I may or may not be able to explain on the next couple of pages. Bear with me.

We did not go to Vienna, my wife and I, to buy oranges, which are in plentiful supply in Washington and only slightly more expensive. We went because of a perverse impulse to absent ourselves from the United States on Richard Milhous Nixon's second inaugural day; because we happened to be in a state of unaccustomed solvency, which we were eager to dispel as rapidly as possible; because a set of grandparents was fortuitously on hand to keep an eye on our children. We chose Vienna because I was born there forty-one years ago, and left the city, unceremoniously, at the age of eight, and had not seen it since. It was time, we felt, to heed the advice of people who have kindly suggested from time to time that I ought to go back to where I came from.

I ought to state, right at the outset, that what they say about Vienna--what they have always said about Vienna--is true. The old charm is still there, and the gemutlichkeit. The wine is very good, and the food is superb. You can hear magnificent music, and see splendid gothic churches and baroque palaces. As conscientious American tourists, we savored and heard and saw as much of all this as we could in a week, and enjoyed it immensely. I can understand why people have fallen in love with Vienna for centuries, and why they still do.

My father, who left Vienna, furtively, in 1939 and has never been back, is not in love with Vienna. He wonders why I would want to spend a week and a lot of money there. "My own attitude toward Vienna," he wrote to me from New York, "is that of a man who has been happily divorced for thirty-three years." I can understand that, too.

Reversing the usual procedure, I took a souvenir with me to Vienna. It is a brown passport with a swastika on the cover (and five more inside). A large, red "J" is stamped on the first page, and my name is entered as Erwin Israel Knoll. It was a Nazi nicety to bestow the middle name "Israel" on all male Jews, and "Sarah" on all females.

The passport was issued to me on April 19, 1939, at the Rothschild Palais, which had been converted into Nazi offices and later was to serve as Adolf Eichmann's headquarters. My mother and I, along with thousands of others, spent many days waiting in lines at the Rothschild Palais, and I remember it well. It had marble staircases, which were hard on the feet.

I went rummaging through my files just before we left Washington to find the old passport, and carried it with me all the time we were in Vienna, expecting, I suppose, that I might want to show it to someone--someone, perhaps, who would bellow in an Erich von Stroheim accent, "Vere are your papers?" But I showed it to no one and it is back in my files.

Hitler's army marched into Austria on March 11, 1938. Austrians now refer to the Anschluss as an "occupation" of their country (when they refer to it at all), but it was treated then more as a liberation. More than 400,000 Viennese--the largest crowd ever assembled in the city--cheered the Fuhrer for leading them "home into the Reich."

One Austrian in ten was enrolled in the Nazi Party--a ratio higher than in Germany. According to Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, "Although the Austrians accounted for only eight per cent of the population of the Third Reich, about one third of all people working for the SS extermination machinery were Austrians. Almost half of the six million Jewish victims of the Hitler regime were killed by Austrians."

A public opinion survey conducted in Austria a few years ago found strong and persistent bias against foreign migrant workers, long-haired youths, blacks, Arabs, and Jews. The researchers concluded that Austrians were "the most prejudiced people in Europe," and Die Presse, Vienna's leading newspaper, editorialized that Austrians are "a people of xenophobes who see foreigners as intruders and often reject what is strange or unaccustomed."

This is not our experience in the week we spent in Vienna. We found the Viennese amiable, hospitable, and helpful. The few with whom I talked about my Viennese past seemed concerned and sympathetic--sometimes to an embarrassing degree. One young woman pressed back tears and said she hoped I would find it possible to enjoy the city. I assured her we were enjoying it, and she seemed much relieved.

Overt manifestations of anti-Semitism are a rarity in today's Austria, and are sternly dealt with by the government. The political success of the Socialist Chancellor, Dr. Brouno Kreisky, is offered as evidence that the bad old days are over. Dr. Kreisky--doctorates are as ubiquitous in Vienna as apfelstrudel--is of Jewish descent, though he does not consider himself to be a Jew. He was arrested by the Gestapo after the Anschluss, but managed to make his way to Sweden. His politics, like those of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, have been heavily influenced by his contacts with Scandinavian socialism during the war years.

Dr. Kreisky's ancestry is mentioned infrequently in public, often in private conversation. When the government makes a controversial move, the newspapers receive anti-Semitic letters, which are not printed. Some former Nazis serve in Dr. Kreisky's government. He has said that every citizen must have the right to reappraise his political views, including those held during the Hitler years, in the light of "subsequent experience and knowledge." Dr. Kreisky suggests he is particularly well qualified to make that judgment, since twenty-one members of his own family were killed by the Nazis.

The Simmeringer Hauptstrasse has been called Vienna's saddest street; it has a hospital and barracks at one end, and a cemetery at the other. The Zentralfriedhof, the main cemetery, is where the remains of Beethoven, Brahms, Gluck, Mozart, and Schubert are buried. At Gate Four, through which one enters the Jewish section, there is an office and a new chapel dedicated to the victims of the Third Reich. The record-keeping is impressive; it took only moments to locate my grandfather's gravesite and my uncle's.

My grandfather, who died peacefully in his bed in 1935, was one of "the lucky ones." The term is my wife's, who observed, as we walked along the row of graves, that she couldn't help thinking those who died before 1938 were the lucky ones.

My Uncle Joseph was unlucky. His grave is among many bearing the same date of death--November 9, 1938. That was Kristallnacht, the night when every synagogue in Germany and Austria was put to the torch, when Jewish shops were plundered, when Jews caught on the streets were hauled off to prisons from which many never returned, or were beaten to death on the spot. It was called Kristallnacht because of all the broken glass in the streets.

Joseph Knoll's luck could have been even worse. His mother, a brother, a sister, nephews, and nieces died later in the camps. They have no graves and no gravestones.

Almost 200,000 Jews lived in Vienna before the war. Fewer than 100,000 live there now, and most of them are postwar immigrants from Eastern Europe, largely middle-aged and elderly people. Some 300 Jews survived the war in Vienna by remaining hidden. They were called U-boats.

At the offices of the Jewish Community of the City of Vienna, we talked with Herr Blau, who administers the Community's modern and attractive old-age home. After the war, he explained, the city turned over to the Jewish Community a substantial amount of unclaimed Jewish assets. It was decided, after some deliberation, to use the money for an old-age home. "Given the nature of our population," he said, "it made no sense to build a kindergarten or a school."

Herr Blau, a man in his mid-fifties, was born in Vienna and spent the war years in a German forced-labor camp. He speaks no English, but was patient with my rusty and hesitant German. My line of questioning, however, did not interest him very much. I wanted to know about the role of Jews in today's Vienna, and particularly about their participation in music, art, the theater, literature, journalism, education. There was no Jewish role to speak of, he replied, and no participation. "Not even the Professor of Jewish Studies at the University is a Jew," he said.

I said that was distressing, and Herr Blau looked puzzled. "Warum?" he asked. Because, I said, the Jews were once such a vital force in this city's cultural life. Freud, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus.... "I can't weep over something that will never exist here again," Herr Blau interrupted. "There was a culture once in Egypt. There was a culture in Greece. There was a culture in Rome. And they are gone. And there was a culture once here. And it is gone."

Herr Blau asked, "Would you like to see the old-age home?"

At the Prater, the amusement park dominated by Vienna's famous ferris wheel, a pleasant young woman handed us a Bible tract. She turned out to be an American, and we chatted for a few minutes about the Old Country. She had been away for two years, bumming around the world. "I found Jesus in Afghanistan," she said. "You'd have a hard time finding him in the United States," said my wife.

It isn't hard to find the United States in Vienna. The movie-houses play American films, the newsstands display American magazines, the teen-agers wear American styles. I saw a billboard for a soft-drink called Afri-Cola--"Alles ist in Afri-Cola"--that proclaimed it to be "sexymini-super-flower-pop-op-cola." Wow--it sure doesn't taste like Kaffe mit Schlag!

The state radio's Third Program, which our hotel thoughtfully piped into our room, features a steady diet of American jazz, country-and-western, and rock-and-roll. The programs have such titles as "Uncle Sam's Favorites," "Western Saloon," and "The Big Band Sound." One can listen for hours without being disabused of the notion that he has somehow tuned in a Top-Forty station in Tulsa.

I had no trouble finding my old neighborhood in the Second District, across the Danube Canal from the Inner City. The yellow stucco apartment house at Hammer-Purgstallgasse 3 looked exactly the way I remembered it, though a plaque on the wall announced that it had been damaged during the war and restored. There are many such plaques in the city. The Viennese would rather rebuild than replace--a policy that accounts, I believe, for much of the city's livability and charm. I recommend it to American urban planners.

The janitor at Hammer-Purgstallgasse 3 when I lived there was a gentle old man who had served, I think, in the Kaiser's army during the Great War. He had a white, tobacco-stained mustache, and taught me how to whistle through my teeth. When I visited his apartment, his wife, a grandmotherly sort, would give me candy. One time--the last time I was there--I saw a new, pretty piece of handneedlework in a frame on the wall, the sort of sampler that says, "God Bless This Happy Home." This one said, "Heil Hitler."

Not far from the house I found the Karmelitermarkt, a collection of outdoor stalls selling fruit, vegetables, flowers, and meat, where my mother had often shopped. One day, after the Anschluss, she sent me there to buy some oranges. The woman at the fruit stand knew me, for she had waited on me before. But on this morning she looked down and said, "We have no oranges for Jews." I burst into tears and ran home.

The fruit stand was where I had last seen it thirty-three years ago. The woman--she couldn't have been the same one--put my two oranges in a paper bag and gossiped with another customer while I fumbled with the unfamiliar coins. There was no reason, really, for me to feel I was settling an old score and closing a chapter of my life that had been unfinished too long.

When we ate the oranges back at the hotel, my wife noticed the stamp on the peel. They were Jaffa oranges, imported from Israel.