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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Tragedy at Central Park Zoo Exists in Mind of an Old Man - By BILLY ROSE -J ' Some of the sprightliest talk to be heard in Manhattan these nights is in the coffeehouses frequented by the talented and threadbare thread-bare refuges of Mittel-Europa. Night after loquacious night, you'll find them huddled over red - and - white checked tablecloths, and though many a cultural door has been slammed in their faces, they remain a spirited and sociable lot, short on money, perhaps, but long on banter and bravado. . Most of the stories spun by these continental kalzenjammers are on the comic side; yet, once in a while they come up with a. yarn which leaves a ping-pong ball in your throat. j For instance, there's the tale about' the old gentleman and his greying wife who, during the summer sum-mer months, can be seen almost every day on the carousel near the Central park zoo, , , ., , , ,,, holding hands as ( T,, their adjoining ponies pump up I and down. 9 Who are they? I Well, to tell you. f i I'll have to go 1 , back several y C! j years and several I s j thousand miles. LmiA . A Shortly after Billy Rose the Nazis goose-stepped goose-stepped into Vienna and decency went underground, a well-known surgeon and his wife, both of frowned-upon ancestry, were urged by friends to take their six-year-old son and leave the country. The surgeon refused. "I'm needed need-ed at the hospital," he said, "and I intend to stay as long as I can be of use." His usefulness, however, came to an end a few afternoons later when a detachment of SS men rang his doorbell. The doctor, who had been warned to expect them, led his wife and son out . the rear door, but as they hurried up the street a neighbor spotted them and gave the alarm. As the hunted trio turned a corner, cor-ner, they came upon a small carousel ca-rousel which had been set up in a public square to celebrate the arrival ar-rival of the German "liberators," and thinking fast, the surgeon bought three tickets and climbed aboard with his family as the battered bat-tered runabout started up. The child was placed astride a gaudy zebra while the parents sank way back in one of those chairs whose outsldei made a swan. The SS men searched the square and were about to move on when the boy, to whom it was all a game, reached out, and grabbed a brass ring and, turning to his parents, shouted, "Look, look! Now I get a free ride!" Attracted by the boy's cries, the storm troopers dragged the doctor and his wife from the carousel and were about to take the child when their leader, a youth with a hangman's hang-man's sense of humor, stopped them. "The kid got the brass ring," he said. "He's entitled to a free ride." As the carousel started up again, the tinny strains of "Chiri-biri-bim" drowned out the mother's screams, and the last the couple saw of their son he was riding on the merry-go-round. The surgeon was too valuable a commodity to kill right off, and so was his wife, a skilled nurse. They were sent to a slave labor camp to tend those prisoners considered too healthy for the ovens, and when the Allies marched into the camp in 1945, the couple were still alive. By this time, however, the surgeon's brain was a bit misty, but friends in New York paid his passage, and he and his wife were among the lucky ones who. got by the immigration immigra-tion quota. Ever since, the pair has been spending most of their summer days in the vicinity of the Central park carousel. The old boy Is pretty much off his trolley, but his wife continues to humor him, and whenever when-ever he gets agitated and mutters, "Where's Otto? I saw him on the zebra a minute ago," she patiently takes him by the hand and says, "Come along, dear, maybe he got tired and went home." |