Read The Chosen Ones for Free Online Page A

upkeep of a family, he risked being picked up in the street and driven to the front line, or maybe even some worse place. As it was, the authorities had found him a job on the assembly line in the Floridsdorf locomotive factory. They worked round the clock out there, building locos for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The job had strings attached, though:Ziegler had had to promise to take his wage packet home to his wife, hand over all the money and then she had to sign for it. Also, the factory foreman had apparently said that once is enough, Ziegler, if I hear you’re coming to work pissed or not taking all the money home you’ll be out on your ear. And even though his sobriety might have slipped some evenings and weekends, officialdom had the whip-hand and, throughout the war years, Eugen Ziegler dragged himself along to Floridsdorf every day and did his bit on the production line that was to build more than 1,000 engines of the type DRB Class 52. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk at the time, in a modern flat with a bathtub and a toilet, and had the authorities to thank for that as well. Ferenc still stayed in Kaisermühlen even though he had got a job in St Pölten, driving coal trucks for a haulage company delivering to businesses that weren’t too pernickety about paperwork like orders and receipts. The job was dangerous because they had to drive at night with the headlamps off and might at any moment get caught by the police. Adrian’s mother was beside herself with worry, but she worried even more about Uncle Florian. He had never been a problem for as long as he was with them. True, he could be confused at times and it could be confusing to talk to him because his speech was so slurred and rambling that it was hard to understand him. But he was a kind man, and if only he had some way to use his hands he was as precise and diligent as you could wish (but you always had to place whatever it was in his hands). For instance, it happened that Mr Gabel, the greengrocer, allowed him to come along on trips to the wholesaler out in Kagran. When they returned, Adrian remembers, Florian would be wearing tough gloves and an apron that made him look like a real stevedore. In the spring, he would help Ferenc with cleaning and waxing the boats in the marina at Alte Donau. Seated on a small stool, he would sit in the white sunlight holding the brushas delicately as if he were painting on a costly linen canvas. His sister, Adrian’s mother, always used to say that Uncle Florian had such warm and sensitive hands. But after the eviction, all this came to an end. No work could be found for Florian. He stayed for a while in a hostel for single men in Brigittenau but could never settle down among strangers, and then his mindset and behaviour changed, he became restless and wandered in the streets, playing the fool , as his sister said. By the autumn of 1937, she had managed to find him a bed in the mental asylum in Gugging. The relief lasted only a few months, until the Anschluss. The old hospital board was replaced only weeks later and Florian was transferred to Steinhof, where he shared a ward with forty deranged men who sat or lay on their beds, sometimes tied down and screaming because there was no one who came to look after them. Leonie would visit her brother at least once a month, always on a Sunday. Adrian has a clear memory of how she would get dressed before the visit, standing in front of the mirror, something she normally did not do. She’d put on a grey, woollen cardigan and a beret. Her face always looked blurred with crying when she came back from Steinhof. She complained that the staff treated Florian worse than they would a dog and that her brother was fading away in front of her eyes, more and more at every visit. (The abyss that separated how they lived then, during that last, unreal year of freedom, from the insanity that was to take over, was so deep that it would take many years before Adrian managed to join up the two