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this year I had not even thought about skis.
    Two days before Christmas a thaw set in. The sun shone brightly and the snow melted rapidly. The streets were dirty. In the afternoon a German policeman knocked at the door. His shouting, at first unintelligible, turned out to be an order directing us to move to the basement, where Trude had lived. Papa, Mama, and I hastily started to bundle our things together and move some furniture into the hall.
    “Faster, faster,” shouted the policeman in a rasping voice, and Papa, poor Papa, struggled to lift the pieces with his lame arm. Going downstairs, I passed Trude. She was already taking her things upstairs.
    “I am glad,” she said, without malice or sarcasm, “that we are having a nice place for Christmas.” She simply stated it as a matter of fact. It seemed the most natural thing to her.
    I felt rage rising in me; I might have hit her but Mama was behind me, pushing me down the stairs.
    The basement was flooded, the walls were damp, and the electricity had been cut off. Mama went up to the attic and found an old kerosene lamp that hadn’t been used since the First World War. I watched her polish it and clean the chimney with a soft cloth. She then lit the wick. It smoldered but finally burned, smoking a bit. Mama replaced the chimney in its socket, and turned the wick up. The old lamp threw a soft light around the table, toward the mildewed walls, toward a few familiar furnishings. We were in our home still, yet I felt that we were far away.
     
    On Christmas Eve, as on all Christmas Eves as long as I
could remember, I went to see Niania. Niania was the only person who had come to see us regularly and who didn’t seem afraid of what the Germans would say or do. Her position in our household was unique. Niania Brenza was an old Austrian, still loyal to the long-dead Emperor Franz Josef. Reflecting the period when our region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she spoke only German. Niania’s life had been a hard one. She had lost her husband when she was quite young, and had brought up her four children by herself. Her only son, a lawyer, married shortly before World War I, enlisted in the Austrian Army at the outbreak of the war, and was killed in action. He never saw the daughter his wife bore him. Mrs. Brenza’s daughter-in-law had taken a job as housekeeper not too far away from us and Mrs. Brenza had brought up the child, Irma.
    Niania often told me about the events that led to her coming to our house. It was in April, 1924, that a fire destroyed the house she lived in, including all her possessions. Niania knew my grandparents slightly and, the day after the fire, came to ask my grandmother for some clothes. She came, she told me, wearing an old postman’s jacket which had belonged to her late husband, the only item of warm clothing that had not been destroyed by the fire. My grandmother had an idea.
    “My daughter Helene,” she said, referring to my mother, “is expecting a baby soon; we are looking for someone to take care of it.”
    So Niania, then fifty years old, and Irma, age seven, moved into our house. At the outset it was to be only until Mama was stronger but as it turned out Niania stayed in our house for the next thirteen years, until two years before the war.
    Once during those years Niania had taken a room a few houses away from us with her daughter-in-law and Irma but for the most part Niania lived with us and Irma grew up in our house.
    Niania took care of me from the day I was born. She taught me to sit up, she taught me my first steps and my first word, “Papa,” after that, “Niania.” I called her that always. We all relied on her, we confided in her. She seemed to be in charge
of everything. Best of all, she knew so many wonderful stories. It was not until Irma, her grandchild, married that Niania finally left our house for her own, nearby. She was then sixty-three. Every morning in warm weather she waited at her open window as