A Delayed Life Read online

  Soon Johann returned to Brno. Had our ways parted then forever, he would have remained in my memory as a presumptuous young man. However, our acquaintance later developed into friendship, and I came to know him as one of the kindest and most amiable persons I have met in my life. He became a professor of Greek and Latin and won great esteem from his students. He later became senator for the Social Democrats in Prague.

  * * *

  I was surprised to learn that Johann’s father had been a porter in Vienna. Uncle Ernst-Benjamin, in an article for a German publication, wrote that “Johann was the eldest son of a poor farmer and carter in Velké Bílovice near Kostel (Moravia), the only Jew in the village.”

  Perhaps his poverty made him go to Vienna to try his luck?

  Johann met Kathi when she was visiting her younger sister Sophie in Vienna. Sophie had to marry quickly when she was very young, perhaps sixteen. Her husband was a housepainter in Vienna and a distant cousin of Johann. Kathi had come to help her sister with the new baby. After some time of courtship, Johann and Kathi were married, and their firstborn was Hans, my father. By chance he was born in Vienna, when Grandfather and Grandmother were on a visit there. Their two other sons were born in Brno.

  Grandfather was quite a tall man, a bit stooped when I knew him. He had a gray goatee, but his hair, although sparse, was still black. He wore spectacles called Zwicker in German, or pince-nez, which were fastened by pinching the nose.

  Grandfather suffered from a strange disease. He would get seizures that resembled epilepsy but were diagnosed as something different. A few seconds before an attack, he would become suddenly rigid, stare fixedly ahead, and utter a cramped cry. I was sent out hurriedly while Grandmother and the maid Liesl, or my mother or father, laid him flat on his back. For a few minutes, his body shook and then he fell asleep. When he woke he knew nothing of the attack, and I was included in the conspiracy not to tell him what happened. Sometimes he didn’t have an attack for months, then two or three in a row. Once when he was alone in the room, he fell from his chair and broke his collarbone. After that he was never left unattended.

  Grandfather was a highly esteemed and respected man. His colleagues and friends were politicians of the first rank. The names I heard as a child were those of members of Parliament, of journalists and writers—for example, senators Holitscher and Jaksch; Erich Ollenhauer; Friedrich Stampfer, chief editor of Vorwärts; and Ludwig Czech, minister of social welfare. After World War II, when Grandfather was no longer alive, I came across the names of some of these men, who were now ministers and party leaders in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany.

  On one occasion I became the witness of the reverence accorded to my grandfather. The German Opera in Prague staged a gala performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in honor of the Workers’ Day on May 1. The entire theater was reserved for members of the Social Democratic Party and its leaders. My parents and I were invited to join my grandparents in a ground-level box, the choicest seats of the opera house.

  I was still very small and had never been out at night. Mother made me take a nap in the afternoon, but I was unable to fall asleep, I was so excited. I pretended to be sleeping, afraid that they wouldn’t take me with them in the evening. But although Mother knew I had been faking, she went ahead and told me the story of Figaro. It was too complicated for my understanding, but it didn’t matter.

  We took our places in the stall before the curtain went up, with Grandfather sitting in front and us behind him. And as the people came in, they stopped in front of Grandfather, greeted him reverently, some bowing low, others shaking his hand. He was treated with such respect that I could feel what a prominent personality he was. I still have in my possession two newspaper cuttings with his photo. The occasion was Senator Johann Polach’s sixtieth birthday.

  * * *

  Every day my grandparents walked to the Café Continental on Příkopy Street. Grandfather sat at his customary table, and the waiters brought him all the newspapers of the day. Grandmother would knit or also read something, and Liesl would be released till their return. Anyone who wanted to meet Grandfather had only to come to the Café Continental in the afternoon.

  When Mother had something to attend to “in town,” we sometimes walked to the Continental to say hello. I liked to see how the waiters bowed deferentially, addressing the Herr Senator or Herr Professor, and then asked what madam and the young lady wished. I was allowed to choose a slice of cake from the glass bell. This was an ingenious contraption with six or eight compartments, in each a different kind of cake, one with fruit, another with chocolate icing or jelly, a Mozartkugel, a strudel, or a marzipan. You inserted one koruna coin and then you could turn the bell to the opening of the cake of your choice.

  When the weather was nice, my grandparents would come to the garden café in the Stromovka. The waiters there also addressed my grandfather with reverence and brought him the day’s newspapers attached to a bamboo frame with a handle, but they didn’t have such a large choice as in the Continental. When Mother took me to the park in the afternoon, we would have a look if Grandfather and Grandmother were in the café. If they were, we joined them, and Mother would order strawberries with whipped cream for me. That was something I liked. It came in a tall long-stemmed glass, and both women watched me with satisfaction: I’m sure they were thinking, At least the child is eating something nourishing to strengthen her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Operation

  An important event in my young life was my operation. I was in the second grade of elementary school, just after the half-term vacation, when I became ill. I had a bellyache, and Dr. Desensy-Bill, who came to our home, said I should stay in bed for a day or two. But it took longer, and I wasn’t better. Finally I couldn’t even sit up, and the adults looked worried. Another doctor was summoned for consultation: a specialist, Professor Růžička. His decision: I was to be rushed to hospital immediately.

  That same afternoon he performed an appendectomy, but during the operation, my appendix burst and the pus spread into the abdominal cavity. The incision was therefore left open with a drain, which had to be cleaned and bandaged every morning. Days passed, and I wasn’t better.

  Mother was at my side all the time. She wet my lips with a damp cloth, which I sucked because I was terribly thirsty and wasn’t allowed to drink. She told me stories and read from books. Sometimes she dozed on an armchair in the corner. Once, I remember, as she was reading from a fairy-tale book, I noticed that tears were running down her cheeks. I had no idea why she was crying, and I felt guilty, thinking that I was cruel, making her read to me for so long when she was probably too tired.

  Something was wrong, but what? Anything I swallowed I vomited, even a spoonful of water. I grew thinner and weaker. They thought my mother made me nervous, being by my bed day and night. She was banished to the corridor, and only one nurse was allowed into my room. The hospital was staffed by nuns. They were nice, but I wanted my mother. I could see her face peeping in whenever the door was opened.

  On the twelfth day after the operation, I vomited the contents of my bowels. Now they knew what was wrong: a stoppage in the intestines, or ileus. The second operation was more severe than the first; I was brought back to my bed in a state near death. Of course I remember nothing but heard about it all later. They placed eight hot-water bottles around my body and gave me oxygen. The entire family gathered in the corridor—parents, grandparents, our Maria, and Liesl, the grandparents’ maid—fearing the worst.

  Slowly I came back to life. Most of the time I slept; once when I woke, I saw a tube protruding from my arm leading to a bag with some liquid hanging above my head. I became stronger, could sit up for a while. Every day visitors came, each bringing some present. It seemed the whole world knew of my illness, all our relatives, all my friends and Grandfather’s colleagues, neighbors. I got get-well letters from all my classmates and even the teacher and the headmaster. There were mountains of presents. My parents took them
home every day: dolls and games and books; there was no room for them all.

  But alas! The glucose they fed me through the infusion solidified and caused thrombosis. My arm became swollen and blue, and a third operation was necessary. How I hated the smell of ether, which they used to anesthetize me. Again this horrible feeling of falling into nothingness.… I opened my eyes and saw doctors and nurses pulling a long piece of gauze out of a cut in my arm. I heard someone say, “She woke up,” and then nothing.…

  There are two scars on my right upper arm. In the first incision, they did not find the clot, so they cut another higher up. The wounds on my belly healed very slowly, because of the drain, and left wide and ugly scars for life. But at the time my mother, happy to have me alive, said to me, “You just won’t become a belly dancer.”

  When I was about twelve, I gave up children’s literature and started reading adult books. In some of them I met the word dowry and understood that it was what the bride gets from her parents when she marries. One day I asked Mother, “Mama, when I marry will I also get a dowry?”

  Mother sighed, but then she laughed and said, “Your dowry is in your belly.”

  * * *

  During the school year in grade two, the pupils were urged to learn swimming. The daughter of our headmaster, a pretty young woman named Miss Scholz, taught us in the indoor pool, Axa on Na Poříči Street. There were about ten lessons, all of which I attended. But at the end of the course, all the children could swim except me. I felt guilty because my parents had paid for nothing.

  After my three operations, Professor Růžička forbade me from jumping, running, and, above all, swimming. (He didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.) He expected with certainty a hernia in my cut-up belly. That summer Mother and I, together with friends, a young mother and her little boy, went on vacation to Senohraby, near Prague. Father would join us later for two weeks, as he did every year. There was a river, Sázava, and when the weather was warm, we would go bathing. I was allowed to dip in the shallow water but could make only careful and slow movements. From time to time Mother went for a proper swim, and I used the time when I was alone to practice what Miss Scholz had taught us. Suddenly it was not difficult anymore, and I swam around happily.

  But Mother saw me, and that was the end of happiness, because the next day she rushed me back to Prague to see the surgeon. He examined my belly, pressed his fingers all over it, and declared with surprise that he didn’t find any hernia.

  I was allowed to swim, and we returned to continue our vacation in Senohraby.

  While we were staying in that holiday village, there was a festive event in which all the little local girls participated. They wore pretty new white dresses and flower wreaths on their heads. In their hands they carried baskets full of flower petals and, as they walked along the main street toward the church, they strewed them on the ground. I also wanted to become a drůžička like little Vera, the daughter of the people in whose villa we lodged for the summer, but Mother absolutely forbade it. I didn’t know why, and it was not explained to me.

  Similar restrictions had happened before. When other children hung an empty stocking out their windows on December 5 every year, expecting Saint Nicholas to fill it overnight with sweets and nuts, my stocking remained empty. We did have a decorated Christmas tree in our living room three or four times, when I was very small, but no longer when I started school. Mother told me that this was only for little children, and now I was big—a schoolgirl. But both Anita and Gerta were also big, and they always had a Christmas tree, and all my schoolmates, too.…

  On our walks with Maria we often entered the church on Strossmayer Square, and she would put her finger in a marble basin at the entrance and make signs with it over her forehead and chest. I also wanted to do it, but she didn’t let me.

  “What is it in the basin?” I asked.

  “It’s holy water.”

  “Why is it holy?”

  “Because the priest has blessed it.”

  “Why can’t I also kneel and pray to Jesus?”

  “It’s not for you.”

  Yet there were also no other feasts or rituals in my family. My grandfather had resigned from the Jewish community as a young socialist, and his sons were konfessionslos (i.e. belonging to no faith), and so was I. At school I had a free lesson during religious instruction; I was neither Catholic nor Protestant, nor anything else. I had never seen a chanukiah nor heard the words Pesach or Yom Kippur.

  I came across the word Jew for the first time when I was in grade three.

  The year was 1938. Hitler had occupied the Sudeten. My parents were worried; I heard them discussing the possibility of emigrating. Names like Chile, Bolivia, and Brazil were mentioned. A busy correspondence started with my father’s uncle, Adolf Pollak, in Tel Aviv, about moving to Palestine. What kept my father from making a decision was not only the difficulty of obtaining entry visas but also his doubts about his ability to provide for his family. Many people began learning some handicraft or skill to make a living in another country. But my father was not a handy person, and he knew that he would not be permitted to work in his profession as a lawyer. While my parents were hesitating, developments soon made emigration impossible.

  After the annexation of the Sudeten, the German minority of Czechoslovakia became overbearing and aggressive. In school one morning, I found a piece of paper on my desk with the words You are a Jew. I didn’t know what it meant and took it home to show my parents. They became very serious, and I could tell that something important was going on.

  “What is a Jew?” I asked.

  “It’s a special kind of people.”

  I kept asking more questions but was still not satisfied with the explanations.

  “Are we Jews?”

  “Yes, according to the Nuremberg Laws.”

  “What are these laws?”

  Father told me that Jews were being harassed and abused; however, this was happening in Germany, not in our country. But I sensed ominous implications in what he said. Within a short time, I was transferred to a Czech school.

  * * *

  There were only girls in my class; boys learned in a separate wing. I disliked the teacher from the first moment. She was short, old, and dry. But I was not the only new girl; Annemarie was there, too. The transition was not too difficult, because I spoke Czech as well as anybody and only had to get a few private lessons in spelling. My teacher was a young woman whose name began with the letter D, which she wrote with a flourish, without lifting her pen. It impressed me so much that I adopted it for my signature and use it to this day. By the end of the school year, I was fully integrated and got top grades in all the subjects on my school report.

  Gerta was also transferred to a Czech school but to a different one. However, we met almost every afternoon as before, either at her home or mine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Žd’ár

  The war broke out when I was ten years old. That summer, in 1939, my parents did not go on vacation as they had in past years. Czechoslovakia was now occupied by the Germans. As a Jew, my father was dismissed from his job. My parents worried about the dangers; they remembered World War I. They wanted me at least to have a vacation in the country, away from the city. And so I was sent to a friend of my father’s, who lived with his family in a little market town named Žďár. He had two daughters who were a little younger than me, and both families hoped I would feel happy with them. In Prague there might be air raids; the child would certainly be safer in the country, my parents thought.

  Mr. Weinreb came to our house to fetch me. We went by train, talking very little, and although I felt his kindness, I was shy. We arrived in the evening. Mrs. Weinreb had a meal ready, and we all sat around the large kitchen table. Their two little girls stared at me with their big, round brown eyes, and I felt awkward. But by the next day they’d already accepted me and excitedly showed me all their toys, took me out to meet their friends, and showed me off as their guest from Prague
. Hanna, the younger, was six, about to start school at the end of vacation. She was the stronger personality. Eva, who was seven, was her follower; she never had ideas of her own. Eva hadn’t mastered reading in the first grade, while Hanna read even before she entered school.

  It was a truly marvelous summer. The two girls became my devoted companions. With their mother, we went bathing in the nearby lakes; we gathered hazelnuts from the bushes that lined the field paths. In the forests that surrounded the little town, we collected blueberries in cans and came home with our teeth and tongues all blue. We went to the country fair and won prizes: plaster angels with wings painted gold. We picked cherries in the landlord’s garden, which he silently tolerated. We listened openmouthed to Mrs. Weinreb’s tales about her adventures in the nursing school. She and her fellow student nurses would spy on the young doctors’ activities from an opposite window. Some of the accounts must have been vastly exaggerated, but that made them only more fascinating. Most of the time I forgot about my home, my parents and grandparents, about the war and the danger.

  Dita Polach (center) with the Weinreb sisters in Žd’ár, 1939

  On the first day of the new school year, September 1, 1939, World War II broke out. In Prague, the Germans requisitioned my parents’ flat; they had to move out quickly. Another apartment was found, but it was in Smíchov, too far from my grandparents. My parents decided they would move in with us. About all this I knew only from the letters they wrote me.

  My parents made an agreement with the Weinrebs to keep me in Žd’ár for the time being, as a paying guest, I suppose. The first phase of my delayed life began. Instead of continuing school with my former classmates in Prague, I was temporarily removed from my accustomed world and put on hold until times were better again.