A Delayed Life Page 12

  I was paralyzed with fear. I crouched with knees under my chin, eyes shut, leaning on whoever was next to me—in the darkness I could never locate my mother—hands clamped together, unable to think of anything but my terrible fright. Others around me conversed, counted the bombs, commented how near or far each of them fell and even guessed by the thud if it was a fifty-kilo or a hundred-kilo bomb. I was terrified. Every night for an hour or two I huddled there, while rats scurried between or over my feet.

  When the all-clear was sounded, we climbed wearily back into our bunks, hoping to continue our sleep. Most nights, however, there was a second raid and then it was morning and we were hunted out to work.

  When the command was given—“In Fünferreihen auftreten!”—to form rows of five abreast, it was important to stand next to your mother or sister or friend, because as they counted us—five, ten, fifteen—the sentries separated us into teams. We were allocated to the various factories and refineries that had asked for prisoner-workers, and if you were in a different group, you were all alone the whole day among less-familiar faces. Actually, no one was a stranger, we all knew one another, but we had formed units of friends who kept together and helped one another.

  It was an arrangement of utmost importance. The support of a friend was often the only way to overcome a black mood, some pain or illness, homesickness, and loneliness. There were a few mothers with daughters among us, which of course was the best. Some had a sister, and the rest formed fast friendships, usually two girls, but there were also some threesomes, who held together and shared whatever they had. If a girl acquired some extra food, she would divide it into equal parts and share it with her friend. This may sound a little too noble, but it really was so, and I believe it was necessity that caused such behavior. You needed someone to listen to you, someone to whom you could talk about your home and family, about your fears and anxieties. We came to know our friend’s innermost world, the intimate details of her past, all her secrets. We were totally exposed to each other. You couldn’t let her down when she needed encouragement, when she lost her will to struggle on and survive. It helped you to overcome your own depression when you had the responsibility to boost her morale. You talked yourself into new hope and made both of you believe it, for the next time, it would be her turn to do the same for you. None of us was immune against loss of heart; when everything seemed hopeless, the care of your friend saved you from desperation. In winter we lay close together under both our blankets for warmth, and when one turned over in her sleep, the other had to follow and wedge her knees again into the proper shape in order not to leave openings for the cold air to come between us.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My Italian Boyfriend

  In Dessauer Ufer we had to rise when it was still dark. We stood Appell in the street to be counted, weary from lack of sleep. I actually learned to fall asleep standing up, leaning my forehead on the woman in front. The guards needed a long time to count us, and we had to be on the landing dock in time for the steamer that ferried us to our workplaces.

  We boarded the regular ferry that served the civilian population, but there were special precautions to prevent any contact between us prisoners and the other passengers. We climbed the stairs to the upper deck, then the doors were locked and our neighbors, the Italians, were allowed to board. Only when they had been separated on the lower deck could the civilian commuters enter. Most of them were housewives, with kerchiefs knotted on their foreheads, as was the fashion of the time, carrying shopping bags, or they were elderly men. No able-bodied German men were seen; they were all “on the front.”

  While we were separated from the people below, there was no way to keep us from looking over the rails. And there just below us stood our neighbors, the handsome Italian prisoners of war who, like us, were on their way to work. They looked up at us, and we looked down at them. Relationships were spun, smiles exchanged, conversations went on in pantomime, and gestures conveyed feelings between the men and the women. Some were faked and exaggerated, but others turned into more.

  The Italians—they were commonly called Macaronis—were POWs, prisoners of war, all in their early twenties or younger. Although they had to work, their conditions were much better than ours; they received Red Cross relief parcels, could write home, did not suffer from hunger, and were not treated cruelly.

  For us women, contact with the Macaronis was beneficial. They would find ways to smuggle food to us; they wrote funny love letters in broken German, in which they swore eternal love.5 They could laugh and joke without punishment, and they raised our spirits with their jollity and vitality.

  One of the Italians, Bruno by name, started an affair with one of our young women. The Italians resided right next door, and it was possible to talk from window to window if you leaned out far enough. In this manner Bruno and the girl held long conversations in French and in time even discovered a way to meet.

  When the tide was low, the cellars became interconnected, and if one had the courage, or the passions were stronger than the fear, one could crawl in the wet darkness through the openings to the neighboring cellar and find the lover, while outside the bombs were falling. Next morning however, there were telltale marks on her neck and cheeks, which earned her mocking remarks from the women. She was not the only one, but the others managed to keep their affairs more discreet.

  I also had a boyfriend. His name was Franco, and he was less daring than his boisterous friends. At first he looked up at me admiringly from the lower deck, waved shyly, and then lowered his eyes. He became bolder the next time, placed his hand over his heart, and formed my name with his lips. I smiled in return. He was very young, perhaps nineteen, rather short, but very handsome with a dark complexion and black hair.

  One morning he motioned to me to look at his hand; he was holding an apple. After two or three failed attempts, the apple did land on the upper deck, but another girl deftly picked it up and immediately proceeded to eat it. All the men below waved their arms frantically in protest and gestured—no, no—and a few girls also admonished her, saying, “That’s not fair, it belongs to Dita.” Grudgingly she gave up the rare delicacy and handed me what was left of it. Franco watched it all with dismay, and the next day, as we were disembarking, someone unobtrusively pressed a little folded note into my palm. A proper love letter it was, probably penned by one of his mates, who must have learned some German at school.

  That evening I produced a small souvenir. With a borrowed needle and some snippets of cloth, I sewed two hearts and embroidered Franco’s initials on one and mine on the other. I tied them together with a piece of braided colored string. Next morning I dropped him this present, together with a little note, over the rail. He beamed with joy at this token, and in the next exchange of notes, he wrote me his address, told me about his parents and his home in Milano. I learned the address by heart and of course threw the paper away. We might be stripped again of everything, as had happened before, and I would lose the note. I was also afraid of a search by the guards.

  In fact, I learned the address so well that I can recite it to this very day: Franco Z., Piazza Santa Maria del Suffragio, numero tre, Milano. I also gave him an address, that of my Aunt Manya. If we returned to Prague, she would know where I was. I had no home address of my own in Prague, of course.

  We never came close enough even to shake hands, but from then on, Franco considered me his girlfriend. Yet we didn’t see each other often, because the Italians also worked in other parts of the city.

  At the beginning of autumn, we were moved from Freihafen to another suburb called Neugraben. On a cold, gray day, as we were digging a narrow, deep trench, which stretched from horizon to horizon, the woman next to me nudged me with her elbow and pointed with her chin toward a cluster of trees in the distance. There, half hidden behind a trunk, stood Franco, waving cautiously so as not to attract the attention of the guards who were stationed along the trench. I also waved unobtrusively, but I don’t know if he could see my
smile; we were too far apart.

  It was the last time I saw Franco.

  * * *

  When I returned to Prague after the war, Manya said, “There is a letter for you, it was sent from Italy.” I knew immediately that it was from Franco. It was an extremely polite epistle, written in German with many mistakes, probably by some friend of his. He described what happened to him until the end of the war. He had also suffered much, but he returned to his family. He inquired about my esteemed mother and invited me to come to Milano, because he still loved me. He wrote that the little hearts helped him to overcome the bad times and that he still treasured them.

  We wrote each other a few more times. In one of his letters he sent me two photos of himself, playing tennis. He wrote that he told his parents about me. He wanted me to come to Italy and become his wife. But I was only sixteen and was being urged to go back to school. We both realized that his dream was not realistic. By that time I had already met Otto, and we stopped writing each other. But I never forgot Franco, my Italian boyfriend.

  Not only did I not forget him, but some years ago, I searched the Internet to find a trace of him. And to my surprise and joy, there was his name! But how sad! It was in an article about a tennis tournament, which was dedicated to his memory for the tenth time that year.

  But in the article that described the tennis champion Franco Z., there was mention of Franco’s son. I wrote him and received a warm reply. He asked me to let him, his mother, and his brother have as much information about Franco as I could remember from those tragic days.

  I did that with all my heart.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Neugraben

  Our next location, Neugraben—a satellite camp of the Stammlager Neuengamme—was small, just three wooden barracks or perhaps four. It was located at the foot of a modest hill, called Falkenberg, enclosed by a regular wire fence without electric charge and surrounded on three sides by a leafy forest. A short footpath led to a road, which connected a number of villages.

  A few meters below us, there was another camp with a collection of men from all over Nazi-occupied Europe, who had been coerced to work in Germany. They were free to move in and out of their camp and to write and receive letters and parcels from home. Of course we were forbidden to have any contact with them, but as in every prison the world over, some of us managed to find a way to communicate with them.

  One day one of our girls was summoned to the Lagerkommandant. She was arrested and sent to the Gestapo headquarters. A letter had been captured; she had written to a Czech man in the neighboring camp. The two apparently planned to escape together. We were distressed, believing she would be killed. It was incredible, but two days later, she was brought back to the camp, unharmed but crestfallen. As a punishment they had shaved her head. She was so unhappy! She lay on her bunk with her face to the wall, with arms crossing her head. But we laughed with relief. What is a bald head when we feared for her life?

  Our wooden barracks had a central corridor with three or four rooms on each side. The rooms were furnished with two-tiered bunks for about twenty women. There was a tiny oven in the corner, and when it became extremely cold that winter, a group of women, accompanied by a guard, were allowed to collect firewood in the forest.

  When we arrived in Neugraben, it was still quite warm, but with the coming of autumn, the weather changed. The only clothes we had were the paperlike overalls, and the women suffered bitterly from cold. Mother and I were lucky to have the sweater and socks given to us by the kind boiler man, but our footwear consisted of a kind of clogs: a slab of wood for soles and some hard leather substitute as the upper part. Walking in them was difficult, and our feet were covered with abrasions and blisters. On the way to work we collected old newspapers or occasional rags to wrap around our feet. But the wounds did not heal, and many became infected. Of course there was no medication, no gauze or dressing. One just had to bear it.

  We did have a kind of clinic and even a doctor, a fellow prisoner. There were a few beds for the very sick women, but Dr. Goldová was allowed to keep them just for two days at the most. She had nothing to cure them with anyway.

  There was a rumor that we would get warmer clothes, though no one believed it. But for a change, this time it was true. One day a truck arrived with a mountain of coats of all colors. They were secondhand, but some still very pretty, even fashionable. Who knows what happened to the poor wretches who had owned them?

  We could pull out of the heap what we fancied; the guards did not interfere. What a delight! Margit, who became my close friend since her mother and sister remained in Auschwitz and her father was sent to Schwarzheide, picked a navy-blue one. Mine was wine-colored with a princess-cut—both were lightweight and thin. Silly girls! Mother sensibly chose a long dark coat with good lining, shapeless but warm.

  Our joy was short-lived. Soon came the order: exchange the left sleeve with one of a contrasting color. They even provided needle and thread. So now I had a blue sleeve and Margit a wine-colored one. Then we had to line up in the yard and our Blockälteste applied a stripe with a thick brush from a pail full of yellow paint on the back of each coat. This would make us easily recognizable when we worked near civilians.

  Our work here was different from that in the Freihafen. We had to dig the foundation for a large air-raid shelter, which was to serve the new settlement of prefabricated cottages, where the German families were relocated when they lost their homes to the bombs. Another project was to scoop out a narrow, one-meter-deep ditch that snaked for a long stretch across fields between distant settlements. Whether they were for water pipes or some other purpose, we were not told.

  When our work was rubble-clearing of the demolished houses in the city, we formed a human chain. The woman on top picked up the unbroken brick, threw it to the next in the row and she to the next until the last woman on the sidewalk laid the bricks in tidy stacks, each layer crosswise. The bricks had mortar sticking to them, and we had nothing to protect our hands, which were soon scratched and bleeding.

  Yet there are also memories of a more cheerful nature. After I stitched those two cloth hearts for Franco, other girls asked me to make them similar items, and sometimes I even sewed little stuffed animals. Before Christmas, one of the guards asked me to make a gift for his little granddaughter. He brought me small colored pieces of fabric, scissors, and thread. In the morning when we arrived at our workplace, he pulled me aside and led me to a cabin that served as the workers’ changing room. There I sat the whole day out of the cold and produced a doll dressed like a rococo lady. I wanted to give her a parasol, too, but had nothing for the stick. I went out to look for a twig, yet couldn’t find one. At last I pulled from the earth a weed with a quite stiff root, and it made an adequate handle for the parasol. The man was very pleased with my creation. I only wondered what the little girl would say when the root withered or perhaps started sprouting leaves.

  I became the Puppenmacherin (doll maker) for other guards, too. It was convenient for them to save the expense and trouble of buying Christmas presents. And I could sit sheltered among the laborers’ street clothes and do something I loved.

  Yet there was also a problem. Not only the workers’ coats hung in the cabin; so did their lunchboxes. All around me there was plenty of food, and I was so hungry, so hungry! If I took anything, I might lose my comfortable job. I had to fight the urge to help myself from their lunches and the struggle was enormous, almost unbearable.

  Of course in the end I was unable to resist.

  I opened a few boxes to see what I could snitch without leaving a trace and hoped the workers didn’t know exactly what their wives had prepared for them. I was frightened that at any moment one of them might come in for some reason and catch me stealing. But hunger is stronger than fear.

  The idyll lasted only a few days, then it was back to the hard work in the cold outside.

  Mother was not always on the same team with me. For several days she was working with her group
near the houses of the evacuated German families. She told me about a young man who watched her. Another time he managed to have a short conversation with her, unnoticed by the guard. He was a foreigner, drafted to slave labor in Germany, and was employed at a butcher’s. One day he brought her several sausages. Mother was extremely upset because he wanted to kiss her. She was crying when she told me. It was just eight months since my father had died. I was also shocked, but for another reason. I couldn’t grasp that my mother was a woman who could be desired by a strange man.

  One pleasant occasion in Neugraben was the Sylvester show produced by our women. I don’t know whether the commander knew about our preparations for the party. The fact is, however, that he and the guards attended the show and applauded enthusiastically. I am trying to remember where the show took place. Probably it was in the washroom, the only barrack with some empty space. The program consisted of several numbers, but I remember just two of them. On the makeshift stage, three girls appeared—Nanne Duxová and Gerti Hartmannová were two; the name of the third escapes me—clad in identical dresses, with crinoline skirts fashioned from dozens of those impractical sky-blue handkerchiefs we had been given in Dessauer Ufer. They sang Strauss’s “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald” in three voices, while moving their arms and gyrating in rhythm. It was a well-rehearsed performance, quite professional. Someone remarked that it was a good idea their dresses were floor length, so Gerti’s thick ankles were hidden underneath.