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This letter from 1941 is labeled #118 – meaning that Helene had sent at least 118 letters to her family in San Francisco since she began numbering them in December of 1939. I have about 100 letters from that period – as Helene suspected, not all of her letters made it to their destination. The letter is damaged so the last big paragraph might not be translated correctly.
Vienna, 1 August 1941
My dear children! 2 years ago today we were running around with pleasant stomach aches. We imagined we were going to see you on the 4th at 8 in the evening. I can still see myself walking the whole train to get a glance of my children but this didn’t happen. Eva was already standing on the train platform talking to Papa. Harry decided it was a good idea to stay in the background a little bit and let Eva prepare us for what he looked like. The stomach ache and the shivering knees are still with me today, just that the hope of such a train station scene is now with the roles reversed and it seems very far away. We are condemned to sit around and do nothing about our issues here and our hope is that our luck is dependent on yours and on your cleverness in dealing with these matters. It is impossible not to believe that fate has a hand in the game. It is very distressing that the door was slammed in front of us, but on the other hand, when believes in fate, it’s possible to endure it. “We will get away on time” says Papa, as he always does. He’s in such a good mood and he is so confident that he can hardly understand my impatience. This time I even insist that he must be right about this after all. There’s not much left of our tiny circle of acquaintances here and there is nothing nice to report so I will just confine myself to writing about generalities.
“C’mon let’s get to it,” speaking in Harry’s jargon. It is August now. The heat is the only thing that has remained the same and the airy clothing (usually none at all) of the neighbors across the way, assures us that they find it so hot as we do. Yesterday following Papa’s orders, I took 2 aspirin and I was surprised that these candies had such a prompt effect which for me is usually not the effect of being all sweaty. My nightgown was all wet, the pillows felt warm and damp, I lay in a murky puddle. Was I in a jungle? I wasn’t at all surprised when a cobra laughed at me and stuck out its tongue. This feverish bath atmosphere got on my nerves. I threw the pillows, sheets, and my nightgown off of my bed. There’s the solution to this problem. In my hands, I felt a leaking heating pad [Thermophore - brand name for a moist heating pad]. It had leaked out and it seemed like it was dried out. I have never seen Papa so quick and nimble. In no time, he brought fresh bed clothes and he turned the mattresses over, which on the other side looked like they had been under a chronic bed wetter. He rubbed me down and said “My word, you’re like a big chamois! Couldn’t you have called me a little earlier?” I was so proud of the unusual effect that the aspirin had had on me. Although I had been dried off, my skin looked like the hands of a washerwoman after a big wash day. My mattresses are standing up against the window and are being exposed mercilessly to the rising August sun and I hope that they will have the strength to get rid of the water they have soaked up. Well...
I was just interrupted by Jo. She had had some sort of argument 14 days ago and she vented about her bad mood. She came to make it an issue with me because I had not bothered about her while she was sooo sick. Of course, she was so sick that I am happy right now, but you know my mentality. I believe everything, so I am deceived by the stupidest people. Why shouldn’t I give my loved ones a little joy?
To close off the letter, I will make my stereotypical communication that I hope to get mail from you and that I love you unendingly.
I am greeting all of our dear ones and I still long to see you.
Helen
P.S. Please when you get a chance can you let me know which of my letters by number did not arrive? Of course, I mean those from the last months.
Helene begins her letter recalling her joyful reunion with her children two years earlier when they returned to Vienna after a few months in Istanbul to obtain their passports. As we saw in the June 6 post, in that short time, Harry had changed a lot – growing much leaner and taller, becoming almost unrecognizable. In recalling this earlier reunion, Helene is dreaming of a future one. The roles are now reversed and she is relying on her children to help them in their efforts to leave Vienna and join them in San Francisco.
In many of her letters, Helene looks to fate to pave the way. In the February 15 post, we saw a story Helene wrote about Vitali entitled “On being fatalistic.” When writing the Febraury 18 post, I realized that her description of fate comes from Goethe’s Faust. Sadly, in so many ways, fate was unkind to Helene and Vitali.
Throughout their lives, both Eva and Harry would describe themselves as fatalists – one of the many lessons they learned from their parents. I now realize that each time they would call themselves fatalists, they were evoking the memory of their parents. At the end of Harry’s life, we worked together to write his obituary. Harry spoke at length about how lucky he had been in his life – being an optimist, he dwelt on the aspects of fate that had been kind to him.