CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Vienna, Austria
November 4, 1956
A pink mist was rising off the Danube as we arrived in Vienna. The city resembled Budapest so strongly, architecturally, that I was surprised to find it intact. It was too early on a Sunday morning for the trams to be running on the famous Ringstrasse; we had the vast boulevard practically to ourselves.
“There’s the State Opera,” said György, pointing to an elaborate building that filled an entire block, statues of men on horseback crowning its pillared facade. He’d traveled to Vienna frequently for his job as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, but it had been twenty years since his last visit.
Jakub had passed through the city after the war and remembered how much of it had been destroyed. “They’ve finished rebuilding it, I’m glad
