It was my grandmother, Rosa, who had started the trend for holidaying in this mythical hotel in 1946, with the money she had inherited from her new husband. Her sister Ilona, who had sought refuge in London at the time of the Anschluss, had established a philanthropic foundation over there, whose members were very, very old gentlemen, barely aware they were alive, but who were prepared to come to the aid of good, deported Jewish women. And so it was that my grandmother had married a certain ninety-two-year-old Mr. Williams in his home in November 1945, a man she had known for five minutes, all the time it took to strip every one of his heirs of their inheritance. He was dead within a few months of the ceremony and after having come into money — after all, one could hardly sue a good Jewish deportee — she paid for herself and her daughter, my mother, to do what together they had dreamed of in the camp: take a long and luxurious holiday in a neutral, German-speaking country, eating cakes while looking out at a lake. And that’s how the very chic English lady by the name of Mrs. Rose Williams paved the way for future generations of her family at the Belvedere — in the process kicking off her own endless summer, which unfortunately only lasted fifteen years or so because her body, worn out by the deprivations suffered during the war, gave out at the age of about sixty.

I’m under no illusions — had it instead been Rosa Zielberman, the pleb from the Prater district, who had attempted to make the reservation for that month of August in 1946, she would have received the pleasant reply that the hotel was fully booked, and none of us would ever have set foot in the place.

My father came to join the two women in 1955 and I joined them in 1963, after my birth. It became a family custom to start our summer travels with a stay at the Belvedere so my mother could recover from her exhausting year of doing nothing. We used to book from one year to the next and would always arrive on the same dates so we could enjoy the fireworks on the 1st of August. My husband replaced my father at our side and my daughters were born. Then he died, leaving behind an all female table setting, until my mother was no longer able to pay for our holiday. After a long absence, here I was returning alone for the first time.