A Delayed Life Read online

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  But the best times were the rehearsals for the children’s opera Brundibár. At first I noticed that some girls would disappear from the room and when they returned, they would sing such unusual, attractive, modern melodies. When I asked what they sang, they said that they were rehearsing an opera. I also wanted to sing, and they said I could come with them to the next rehearsal. It took place in the cellar of our building. There was a harmonium played by Rudolf Freudenfeld, known to us as Baštík, the young man who had directed the summer performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He checked my voice; I had to sing scales as he played them. He told me that I could join the choir.

  The performances took place in a large room in the Magdeburg barracks. The small stage was decorated with a backdrop of roofs, a school, and a wooden fence. The soloists sang in front of the fence, while the choir was hidden behind it. Three animals—a dog, a bird, and a cat—were painted like a poster on the fence. We sat on our heels quietly, waiting for our cue. When our heads and shoulders suddenly became visible, the audience let out a loud “Aah.” How I loved that moment! Later, the face of the soloist, who acted the animal, suddenly appeared in the hole cut out in the picture on the fence, and again the audience reacted noisily. After the twenty-fifth reprise, all the singers, including the choir, received a special bonus: one hundred grams of sugar and margarine.

  I loved to sing in Brundibár. Of course I soon knew all the solo roles—everybody did. One day Greta, who was the lead singer, was ill, and Baštík needed to replace her in the evening’s performance. I offered myself, and he let me sing a few lines. “A pity,” he said. “You can sing it, but you are too tall.” The opening words of the opera are:

  My name is Pepíček

  Our father died long ago

  I’m holding Aninka’s hand

  Our mother is sick

  They are sung by a boy who is obviously the older brother, and I was much taller than the boy who sang the role of Pepíček. That was the reason I lost the only chance of my life to become a soloist in an opera (but being tall would save my life a few months later, when I passed the selection of Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz).

  I still remember a few fragmentary scenes from the time in the ghetto. I remember Sonia’s mother standing in her mud-caked work boots in the middle of our room, looking up and talking to her on the upper bunk.

  Sonia was in love with a boy, puppy love. She knew him from the vegetable gardens, where she worked. I am not sure he was even aware that she fancied him. One day, as we were standing at the window looking into the street, Sonia pointed at a boy walking by and said, “Look, that’s him, that’s Harry Kraus.”

  Another scene. The well-known singer Karel Berman once came to our Heim. The piano was brought up from the cellar, and he played and sang parts from the opera Rusalka by Dvořák. He explained to us how each character in the opera is represented by a certain melody. It was an exhilarating experience, and I never forgot it.

  Another memory: I am standing in the corridor with my mattress placed in the open window, trying to catch the fleas that are hiding in the seams. I also remember the woman who came to the Heim once a week to check our hair for lice.

  In room 25 there was a small, round wood-burning stove on which we stuck potato peels, and when they were toasted, they fell off.

  During the thirteen months I was in the ghetto, we got one wonderful treat. We received tickets for one hour’s swimming in the only indoor pool of Terezín. That was a unique pleasure indeed.

  My parents did not visit me in the girls’ home, but I would see them at my grandmother’s. She lived in one of the women’s barracks, and it was there my parents and I would meet almost daily after work. She always managed to have some bit of food to give us, often saved from her own rations. Two or three times we received parcels from Manya. Grandma kept them for us; they were safer with her, because she did not have to work.

  My father was an intellectual who was unable to manage everyday chores. He did not know what to do with his shaving utensils; he just wrapped them in his rolled-up wet towel. He never washed his mess bowl properly. I began feeling responsible for him and often went to put his things in order.

  One day my cousin Pavel Uri Bass, who worked in the carpentry workshop, brought me a present he’d made. It was a double-level shelf and became the envy of all the girls. Now I could keep my toothbrush and a few other items on it and did not have to rummage through my suitcase, which was stashed with all the others under the bunk. Cupboards or other furniture did not exist in the room, apart from the one table and bench.

  Food in Terezín was distributed from central kitchens. The inmates had to stand in line in the yard of the barracks with a mess bowl or any vessel they owned, and the kitchen people poured a ladleful of soup into them. It had a brownish-gray color from the main ingredient: the so-called lentil powder. The smell of lentils makes me nauseous to this day. On the top of the mess bowl came the main dish of the day. It was either a potato with gravy or a dumpling and sometimes a spoonful of goulash. There was never any vegetable or fruit. Sometimes there was a buchta (a Czech specialty, which was a kind of doughnut) with a sauce made of sweetened coffee and margarine.

  Bread of poor quality was distributed in the living quarters. Each person received a sixth part of a loaf, together with a slice of salami, a bit of margarine or here and there a spoonful of beetroot jam.

  People who did hard labor got some additional rations, and so did we children. We also didn’t have to stand in line outdoors, and the midday meals were brought into the Heim. This and the morning coffee substitute, without sugar, was all the food we received.

  It was too little to live on but too much to die. The worst sufferers of hunger were the old people. They neither had workers’ supplements nor any means to get more food. Some inmates worked in the kitchen, the bakery, or the vegetable gardens, where they could steal provisions at the source. Lucky inmates could get food parcels, for which they sent a permit once every three months to relatives or friends outside the ghetto.

  I remember my mother saying to someone, “We are suffering from hunger.” I asked her, “Is this what hunger means?” Her answer was, “Yes, we are starving.” Suddenly I felt great relief. If this was hunger, then I could bear it without problems. I could eat all the time if I’d had food. But I wasn’t suffering.

  That came later.

  Everyone over fourteen years old was obliged to work. The Youth Department of the ghetto administration sent us to work in the vegetable gardens. There were several reasons for that decision. First of all, work in the open is healthy, but also the youths would learn to grow vegetables, which would be useful when they went to Palestine after the war. And perhaps they would also be able to eat some of the vegetables secretly, although the entire produce crop was meant for the Germans and not for the Jews. The gardens were located in the space between, or on top of, the wide ramparts.

  I didn’t like the work. It was early spring, and nothing was growing yet. All day long it meant only carrying buckets of water. It was hard work and boring. I asked to be transferred to some other place. The referent at the Jugendeinsatz was Honza Brammer, later in Israel called Dov Barnea. My father worked in another department on the same floor and knew him. He took me to Brammer and asked him to find some suitable work for me. He sent me to a workshop that produced fake-leather wallets for Germany. Working there proved to be even more boring than carrying cans of water. The workers sat at a long table, and each performed one single step in the production of the wallet. The person on my left folded the top flap and shoved the item to me, I folded the lower flap and slid it to the worker on my right, and so on and so on, all day long. All the people around me were adults; I was the only youth. I lasted for a few days, then I quit. Afterward I did only chores in the Heim.

  We had a nice tradition in the Heim. When it was some girl’s birthday, we gave her a present, mostly something made with our own hands, a stuffed little cloth heart
with her initials stitched on it or a tiny notebook with a picture. Since there were so many girls, there was always something to prepare. Sometimes we made a gift for someone in the boys’ Heim, too.

  One such gift was saved by its recipient and is now on exhibit at Beit Terezín in Kibbutz Givat Chaim. On one of my visits there, it caught my eye. It looked somehow familiar, and I asked the curator to take it out from the glass vitrine. As I turned its pages, I found my signature. It was a gift for a boy named Honza Wurm. He had sent it to Beit Terezín from America. I don’t remember him at all.

  One day there was a frightening event in the ghetto. The entire population was sent to a field beyond the walls to be counted. Thousands of people stood there all day long in the cold drizzle, grouped by their “addresses.” To relieve oneself, one had to crouch on the ground hidden by a blanket held up by friends. We did not know what the Germans wanted to do to us, and we were very frightened. It was late in the evening when they let us walk back. There was great confusion, people lost their way in the darkness, and it took many hours until we got to our Heim.

  I remember Professor Edith Weiss, the sister of our teacher Magda. She volunteered, together with a number of other ghetto inmates, to work with the Białystok children. These starved and bedraggled children arrived one day in Terezín. They were housed in some huts outside the ghetto, and contact with them was strictly forbidden. It was rumored that they would be sent to Switzerland in exchange for trucks for the Germans. The plan failed when it turned out that the children knew of the gas chambers where their parents had been murdered. Therefore they couldn’t be released to the world. They were sent to Auschwitz, where they perished, together with all the wonderful people who accompanied them.

  Another person I remember from the Heim was Mrs. Mühlstein, the mother of the boy who sang the role of Pepíček in the opera. She was one of the matrons in the girls’ home. Of course I also remember Willy Groag, the manager of our building. I was a little in love with him; he was young and handsome.

  For us girls in the Heim, life was somewhat less detrimental than for the adults. However, for me that changed in December 1943—when we were sent to Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Auschwitz–Birkenau, Camp BIIb

  What everyone dreaded most in Terezín were the transports. From time to time the news spread: a transport to the East is going soon. Some people were lucky to be exempt, either because they were members of the management or because they were hard-to-replace specialists.

  A messenger from the Jewish administration would hand the summons and a tag with a number to each person, usually a day or two before the transport. There wasn’t much to prepare. Our baggage had stayed packed anyhow since our arrival, as there was nowhere to store things. Some of the clothes we had brought had been lost in the laundry, despite the names we had stitched on every item. After thirteen months in the ghetto, I had outgrown some of my clothes and shoes. Thus I just had a backpack to carry.

  Our turn came on December 18, 1943. We had to wait for the train in one of the barracks. Sonia, with her mother and sister, was also in the transport. People were milling around in the yard. Sonia pointed out a young man in knee-high boots, which were very fashionable at the time; his name was Otto Kraus, and he was Harry’s older brother. We were fourteen; he was twenty-two. For us, he was an old, uninteresting person. Next morning, as we were brushing our teeth in the washroom, we saw an elderly gentleman in an undershirt who was shaving. Sonia whispered, “He is Harry’s father.” However, Sonia, her sister, and her mother were recalled from the transport and went back to the ghetto.

  Next morning Mother, Father, and I were pushed into a boxcar with dozens of people, until there was no more room. The sliding door was slammed shut. There was no window, just a narrow slit under the roof. There was no possibility to sit, and we stood squeezed together. During the journey, we arranged the baggage one on top of the other to make some space for a few persons to sit on the floor. For our needs there was one pail, which we used in view of everyone. It was soon full, but there was no way to empty it. It is simply impossible to describe the stench … the lack of air. There was silence; stunned by the horror of our reality, no one spoke.

  I don’t remember how long we were on the way. Perhaps two days and a night, or two nights and a day. The train often stopped for hours. We took turns to sit on the floorboards. One girl sat on top of the luggage pile, where she could look out and read the names of the stations we passed. We realized that we were on the way to Poland.

  The train, with more than two thousand five hundred passengers, reached its destination at night. Amidst blinding lights, strange men in striped prison uniforms shouted, “Raus, raus, schneller, schneller. Leave the bags.” They beat us with short sticks. On the ramp stood SS men with barking German shepherd dogs—shouts, screams, pandemonium. “Men here! Women here! Five abreast! Form a column!” We heard the word Auschwitz.

  This is where we are now, I realized. In the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz.

  In the wagons our belongings remained, along with a few corpses.

  * * *

  Looking around us, we saw rows of wooden, windowless huts surrounded by barbed-wire fences attached to concrete poles, which bowed inward like the stems of some giant flowers. At each corner stood a watchtower with a guard.

  Mother somehow managed to hold on to one of the bags. Stunned and disoriented, blinded by the searchlights, we marched along the fences toward one of the barracks. We huddled on the bare floor, trying to sleep in the freezing cold. The men had been separated from us; here we were just women and children. Mother’s bag contained some food, painstakingly saved in the ghetto for the journey to the unknown. We knew that the bag would be taken from us. Mother and I ate all we could and shared the rest with the women around.

  In another hut we had to strip and take a cold shower while SS men watched on the side, snickering, pointing, and making remarks. No clothes, no towels. In the freezing cold we ran wet to another barrack. Miraculously, I was still wearing my boots. Women prisoners flung us pieces of civilian rags from a heap. Another prisoner threw old shoes of various shapes, disregarding sizes, from a separate heap. Among ourselves, we tried to exchange small items for bigger ones and vice versa. Then we stood for long hours in line to have a number tattooed on our forearms. I got a 7 and then there was no more ink in the syringe. The digit 3 was barely visible. With fresh ink I received the last three digits to complete the number: 73305. My mother was next.

  Hopelessness and desperation overcame us. At this point Mother and I decided to die. We had reached total despair. There was no spark of hope left, and we didn’t want to live. Yet there was no practical way to commit suicide; we had no weapon, no rope, no knife. We had to go on.

  In the morning they began hauling us to some distant compound. The women stood squeezed on top of the open truck. The last to be pushed up was a tall, white-haired old woman in a black cape. Mother and I were waiting for the next truck with the remaining women.

  The full truck started with a sudden jerk. The back flap had not been secured and hung open. The old woman lost her balance, toppled over, and fell from the truck. As she was falling, her white hair spread around her head like a halo, and she seemed not to fall but to fly. Her long black cape opened like a sail and descended slowly over her body on the ground.

  She stayed sprawled on the frozen earth, and no one came. She might not have been dead; perhaps she could have been saved. But the truck had driven off, and we, standing there, didn’t dare move because of the Kapos with their sticks. Yet she was perhaps the lucky one, spared the long suffering and a more horrible death.

  But for me, a girl of fourteen, the memory of the old, nameless woman has become the quintessence of the Shoah that was Auschwitz.

  * * *

  We marched the final stretch along the fence to Camp BIIb. This was the so-called “family camp.” Our men had arrived before us; they were unrecognizable. I didn’t e
ven recognize my own father.

  In the camp we met the people from the previous transport, which had come from Terezín in September. We met friends, relatives, former neighbors. They looked weird; they said strange things such as “we will go up the chimney” or “we will end in the gas chambers.” Their eyes had no expression, as if their light had been turned off.

  I thought they were crazy, that they had lost their senses. But they pointed to the tall chimneys beyond the fence, which exuded dark smoke; the air smelled of burned flesh, and thin gray ash filled the air. At last I could do nothing but accept the truth. Yet an inner voice kept repeating: I will not die, I will not die.

  In our compound, BIIb, there were thirty-two identical wooden huts without windows, each about seventy-five meters long. Sixteen sat on each side of the middle road, the roofs covered with tar paper. They were called blocks and had numbers. Inside there was a horizontal chimney with an oven at each end, but they were not lit. Some blocks were workshops; one was a clothes store, another a kitchen; there was a latrine, a washroom, and a Kommandatur (the commander’s headquarters); and the rest served as the prisoners’ sleeping quarters. Men and women were in separate blocks, boys with men, girls with women.

  Mother and I were housed together in Block 6, a women’s barrack. On the upper bunk next to me on each side lay the twins Annetta and Stěpa, and next to them Eva Weissová, one of our instructors in the Heim in Terezín.

  Six people on narrow bunks meant for four, a thin blanket and a straw mattress, the clothes on our bodies, a spoon and a mess bowl—that was all we had. From then on we lived without a change of clothes, without a comb, toothbrush, towel, needle, scissors or knife, or pencil, not to mention toilet paper or sanitary pads. We kept the spoon stuck in a length of string that served as a belt, for fear it might be stolen or lost.