A Delayed Life Page 8
In spring 1942 a place became vacant in the Jewish school, and I began attending classes again. The main school building on Jáchymová Street was filled to capacity. More classrooms were rented on the first floor of a residential building on Havelská Street. Even that was not enough to hold all the pupils, and instruction took place in two shifts. I have several vivid memories of that time. There were real classrooms, with a blackboard and rows of tables and benches. A bell would announce the breaks, and the pupils would crowd in the corridor until it rang again for the next lesson. I made new friends, especially with some children from the Jewish orphanage. There was Lilly Flussová, who died of typhus in Terezín; Hana Radoková; Erik Polák, who in the 1990s became the first director of the Museum in Terezín; Zdeněk Ohrenstein (later Zdeněk Ornest), nicknamed Orče, who wrote poems in Terezín for Vedem; and many more.
Orče would go on to study acting after the war, and he, my husband, Otto, and I were good friends. Otto and Orče held animated discussions about politics. Like many youngsters who were influenced by their instructor Walter Eisinger in Terezín, Orče believed in the Marxist doctrine. Otto once described these fanatic Communists as people whose heads are encased in a cardboard box, with two holes for the eyes, which allow them to see in only one direction. Otto and I lost touch with Orče for about forty years. But when we met him again in 1989, he was a well-known actor, no longer the starry-eyed follower of Marx. Sadly, Orče died tragically under a train at the age of only sixty-one.
In the class I fancied a boy: Zdeněk Lederer. He sat in the rear of the class, didn’t pay much attention to the lessons, and seemed always to be daydreaming. I was fascinated by his mouth. He had a permanent pout, and I imagined how it would feel to get a kiss from those lips. He lived at the Jewish orphanage. Although Zdeněk must have seen me staring at him, he was oblivious and remained detached.
I still have his photo, which I acquired by subterfuge from one of the orphanage girls. When I came to Terezín, the first thing I was told was that Zdeněk was no longer alive. He died of typhus, barely a few months after his arrival.
There was another boy in my class who in his turn wanted to become my “boyfriend.” His name was Erik, and I didn’t especially like him. But he was better than nothing. Erik carried my schoolbag as he walked me home. Sometimes we stopped at the Old Jewish Cemetery, a substitute for a park with tall green trees and quiet paths. Here and there we met a mother with a baby in the pram, but there were secluded corners where we could sit on an old gravestone and talk. I already mentioned the first kiss I got from him on the grave of some long-forgotten Jew.
We were both thirteen.
* * *
I liked the teachers and fondly remember pediatrician Dr. Reich, who taught us about the human body. We adored him for his marvelous sense of humor and his lovely attitude to us children. He perished, together with the Białystok children, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
At the end of the school year, we got a kind of school-end certificate with grades.
In autumn I did not go to school anymore. I don’t know if it was because the school had closed down or because my parents expected us to be deported at any day.
Later, when my parents and I arrived in Terezín, I reunited with some of my schoolmates, but many had already been sent on to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Only a handful of them survived and returned after the war.
* * *
During the summer of 1942, I had my first encounter with Zionism. I knew there was a land called Palestine—Uncle Ernst-Benjamin had emigrated there—but at home I never heard about Zionists, nor about Theodor Herzl, the Zionist visionary of the State of Israel.
That summer a kind of vacation camp was arranged on the Hagibor playgrounds, and I went there almost daily with my new friends from Bílkova Street (renamed by the Nazis Waldhauser Street), careful, of course, to return home before the eight o’clock curfew.
There was a football field with a racetrack around it, volleyball courts, lawns, and a changing room. At a small kiosk one could buy a lemonade or grillage—browned sugar with nuts. The disadvantage was the distance, because we were now no longer allowed to use the tram at all, not even standing on the rear platform as before. Hagibor was quite a distance from where I now lived. So we walked daily, a few boys and girls together, through the town, one hour each day. My new friends were Herbie (whose face was full of acne. He would whistle below our window for me to join them. Mother objected strongly: “You are not to respond when a boy whistles”), Bobby Jochovitz, Esther Wohlová, and a few others. From them I started learning about life in Palestine, about the settlements and kibbutzim.
I also became friendly with another boy, Štěpán, who was two years younger than me. I visited him at his home in Maiselova Street and often walked with him to Hagibor, preferring him to my older friends. The friendship puzzled both our mothers, a teenage girl with a small boy who didn’t even know yet how children came into the world! Nobody guessed the real reason for my strange behavior. Štěpán was a lovely child, very talented and inventive, and it was interesting and amusing to talk with him. But he had an older brother, Peter, aged fifteen, and I used Štěpán as a kind of back door to get closer to my idol, Peter, who I thought would never deign to look at such a nobody as me.
Both boys perished together with their parents in the camps. All that is left of Štěpán is a crayon drawing of a country alley that he dedicated to me, together with his photo.
Hagibor was the only place where Jewish children were allowed to gather for games, competitions, sing-alongs, and all kinds of sport. I became quite good at several sports, short-distance races, and long jumps. There were madrichim and madrichot (Hebrew for instructors) for each group; they played with us, taught us, and coached us. One of them was Avi Fischer, who later became a lifelong friend.
The organizer and leader of the program was the sports teacher Fredy Hirsch, beloved by all the children. He was our idol and role model. There I learned some Hebrew songs, which we got mimeographed in phonetic spelling. We sang enthusiastically, “Anu banu artza livnot ulehibanot ba” (Hebrew for “we came to our land to build it and be rebuilt”), without understanding one word.
In summer there were tents, where we could take a nap in the afternoon or just sit and read. Many of the adults who worked with us were Zionists and spoke about the land of Palestine, which they would build up as soon as the war was over. They transferred their enthusiasm to us children, and we began wanting to know more about it. These were bright days we spent at Hagibor, despite the ominous gloom of the deportations, which awaited all of us.
I also remember several performances of a magician named Borghini with his assistant, Harry Kraus (I did not know then that one day I would marry Harry’s older brother, Otto). Another show was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed by the children of the Jewish orphanage, directed by a young man—Rudolf Freudenfeld—nicknamed Baštík. The role of Puck was acted marvelously by Zdeněk Ohrenstein.
While I spent such happy hours on the playground, momentous events took place all around. More and more people were deported in transports, and one day in July it was my grandparents’ turn. We helped them pack their bags, which neither of the old people could carry anyway. Young Jewish volunteers came to help. Within two days, they were gone.
A magic show in Hagibor, August 1941—Harry Kraus, the magician Borghini, and Fredy Hirsch
Just a short while before, a letter sent from Palestine by Uncle Ernst-Benjamin had arrived in a circuitous manner via England. He’d written that he now lived in Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, that he had married a woman named Hadassa, and that he had become the father of a boy called Doron. That was wonderful news, and I was given the responsibility of conveying it to my grandparents. Mother told me how to do it gradually, so as not to overwhelm the old people. While I was walking the short distance from Waldhauser Street to Kostečná Street, I rehearsed how I would tell it: first I would tell them only about the letter itse
lf; then, by and by, the rest of the happy news in installments. Grandmother was relieved to get the first sign of life from her son since his departure and was overjoyed to have another grandchild. But Grandfather remained apathetic; he didn’t show any signs of joy.
* * *
The summer ended, and everything became darker. Not only were the days shorter and colder, but the world grew emptier, and there was nothing one could look forward to. There were fewer friends, all the time only transports and deportations.
* * *
In November it was our turn. There wasn’t much to prepare, as my parents had sorted our belongings well in advance. My mother’s brother, Hugo, had come from Brno a few weeks before and taken a shoebox full of photos and some other items for safekeeping. A few non-Jewish friends came to say goodbye. And of course Manya, who tried to help as best she could.
My parents and grandparents had been very fond of both Ludvík and Manya, and she visited us often, even after Ludvík’s death. Christians were forbidden to have any contact with Jews, but she didn’t mind. She always brought us something to eat; food was scarce and already rationed, and we Jews got even less than the rest of the population. Later, when we were already in Terezín, she sent us parcels with bread, artificial honey, or a jar of goose fat. Manya’s parents were farmers who were able to conceal some of their produce from the German controllers.
The evening before our departure, Mother told me to give Manya my toys for her nieces, and I was glad that they would not remain behind to be given to some Nazi children. But as I was handing over my favorite doll, the one with the Shirley Temple ringlets, I couldn’t hold back my tears and started crying bitterly. Manya and mother were somewhat taken aback. A big girl of thirteen and a half weeping for a doll? They did not know that it wasn’t the doll I was mourning; I was grieving for my childhood and the end of life as I had known it.
Next morning we closed the door behind us, handed the key over to the janitor, took the tram for which we had received a special permit, and went to the collecting station at the exhibition grounds.
This was the most significant delay of my life.
Part II
1942–1945
The War Years
CHAPTER TEN
Terezín
After spending two days and nights on the floor in the Radio Exhibition Hall, we marched in a column in the early morning to the nearby Bubny train station. Our transport arrived in Terezín on November 20, 1942. I don’t remember the journey itself, only the arrival at Bohušovice. The train ended there, and we had to walk the two and a half kilometers to Terezín. A few carts transported the luggage, along with the old and infirm. Walking was difficult, because we wore several layers of sweaters and coats. Each person was allowed just fifty kilograms of luggage, but no one controlled what we wore.
The streets in Terezín were empty; no one was allowed to be outside whenever a transport arrived. But at the windows people peered out to see who arrived, and they waved and gestured to those they recognized.
Our suitcases, marked with our names and transport numbers in white paint, were strewn in piles all over the yard. We had to search for ours in that jumble. We never found one bag, that which contained the preserved food my mother had so laboriously squirreled away for our deportation.
At first we were housed in the catacomb-like space inside the thick city wall, a kind of dark dungeon with slits for windows. All day long my father, my mother, and I sat on our rolled-up bedding on the stone floor, together with hundreds of people waiting for accommodation. It was November, and we suffered from cold.
First to come and see us was Grandmother. She had sad news: Grandfather had died just a short time before we arrived. Because he was a former senator in the Czechoslovak Parliament, he had been given better accommodation in the so-called “prominents’ house.” It was the policy of the ghetto leadership, or perhaps by order of the Germans, to keep people of renown in better conditions. The better housing had consisted of a room shared by another elderly couple, with a blanket hanging in the middle to create “privacy.” Our modest grandmother, in typical style, gave up the privilege after Grandfather’s death and moved to the barracks of the common prisoners, saying, “I am not entitled to get preferential treatment.”
After some time, Mother and I were moved to a room in the Magdeburg barracks and Father to the Hanover barracks. In the Magdeburg barracks, we also didn’t have beds. We shared the room with some twenty-five or thirty women.
One day we heard that a transport would be sent from Terezín, but that the sick would be exempt. A kind of commission came, perhaps a doctor, a nurse, and some others, and I was determined to get a fever. I know that I wasn’t ill, and of course I couldn’t have rubbed the thermometer in front of the commission. Yet I had willed myself to be ill, and it really happened. The thermometer showed a high temperature, and we were saved from the transport.
* * *
My friend Raja’s mother became manageress of the girls’ Heim L 410. I wanted very much to live in the Heim to be with Raja. I asked her mother to arrange it, but she either could not or did not want to give me special treatment just because I was her daughter’s friend.
It was finally accomplished in a simple and official way. A bunk bed became available in room 23, and I moved in. It was a kind of anteroom, from which there was an entrance to both adjoining rooms, on the left to number 24 and on the right to 25. In order to leave passage space, there were fewer bunks in number 23, just for twelve girls. In each of the two other rooms lived some twenty-eight girls. One of the girls in my room was Lydia Holzner; she slept next to me. Another was poor Marta Pereles, who had no mother, only a father. Marta became sick, ran a high fever, and was taken to the hospital. No one was allowed to visit her. Just a few days later came the news that she had died. Her father, a hunchback, would come and visit our room even after her death. He would sit silently on the windowsill and mourn. We didn’t dare disturb him. We stopped talking, respecting his sorrow.
My bunk was the middle one, the least desirable, because on the top one there was room enough even to stand up, and you could sit on the bottom one with your feet on the floor. The middle bunk was so low that you could sit only crouched, with your head between your shoulders. Moreover, I was unfortunate enough to have Kuni Kulka above me.
She was a tall, redheaded girl who enjoyed driving us mad. She especially singled me out, perhaps because I was new and dared not start a fight with her. She liked to sing in a high, shrill voice, and I remember one of her melodies, the Hebrew song “Lecho Daudi Likras Kalo,” which is the traditional Jewish song to welcome the Shabbat. I heard it there for the first time; at home we did not celebrate the Shabbat. The funny thing is that Kuni was not born a Jewess; she had only been adopted by a Jewish family.
I bore her irritating behavior for quite a long time, not reacting to her provocations. When we wanted quiet, she would purposefully start singing at the top of her voice. She rocked the wooden bunk and made mocking remarks.
One day my patience ran out and I did something that was completely out of my character, for which I am ashamed to this day. It happened when Kuni started pulling straws out of her mattress and dropping them one by one on my bed through the slits between the boards. They landed on my head, on my face, in my hair. Asking her to stop was of no use. The angrier she saw me getting, the faster Kuni rained her straws on me. And then I boiled over and started shouting at her, calling her a bastard and an illegitimate child. I no longer had control of what I was saying; I only wanted to really pay her back.
Kuni started shrieking and sobbing. I had managed to strike her where it hurt. But I was wounded no less. I felt terribly ashamed; I knew I had done something forbidden, crossed some boundary, which is taboo. I also felt the shock of the other girls, although at the same time they understood me. I wonder which of them is still alive and remembers the event.
* * *
Not long after that, I finally got a bed in room
25 with Raja, and from then on, I enjoyed being with the girls. They read a lot, mainly poetry. They loved František Halas, Jiří Wolker, and Jaroslav Seifert and recited their poems. They would read famous novels such as those by Romain Rolland or Thomas Mann and discuss them. Each of us girls had brought from home a favorite book or two in our backpack, and we exchanged them among us. One girl, Sonia Shultz, would amuse us with her pantomime performance of “Granny, blow out the candle,” twisting her mouth in all directions.
Lessons took place after work with our teacher Magda Weiss. They consisted of most school subjects. We were not obliged to participate, but most girls were eager to learn. There was no prescribed curriculum. Specialists in various subjects, such as music, biology, or even astronomy, would also come to the Heim to lecture. Only a few girls had copybooks to write in. In our room there was one table and a bench for four. The others sat on their bunks. Of course no attendance list existed; teaching was strictly forbidden and had to be done clandestinely.
Friedl Brandeis, herself a well-known artist and designer, taught painting and drawing. Whoever liked could attend. Once, she invited a few girls who had showed an interest in art to her tiny room. The room was actually only the end of the corridor, partitioned off with an improvised door. She had a large book of reproductions, one of them Van Gogh’s sunflowers. She made us notice the bold brushstrokes, suggesting the wildness of the flowers.
She asked us, “Which colors do you see?”
We answered, “Yellow, green, and brown.”
Friedl said, “Look again, more closely.”
To our surprise, we discovered that there were specks of blue, orange, and even red.
It was a revelation for me. She taught us what to look for in a painting. It was Friedl who taught me to appreciate art.