“UP! UP! EVERYONE UP!”
Czech policemen and a few SS guards are walking around screaming at us, even though it’s still pitch-black out.
“What time is it?” Marietta asks.
“I don’t know,” Mother says. Of course she doesn’t, she sent her watch to London almost a year ago. “Very early I think.”
* * *
Maybe an hour later, after everyone has packed up and eaten a horrible breakfast, they have us standing in five long lines, according to our numbers. The black outside the windows is now pale gray. Everyone is holding all their things, or has them on the ground next to them. Regular German soldiers have arrived, a couple dozen of them, and they stand along our lines with bayonets in their hands. About twenty people ahead of me in line I see the old woman. Somehow she’s actually standing. Well, not standing exactly, but she’s upright and leaning on that other woman, her daughter.
After all the lines have been formed, an SS officer enters the hall. I don’t think I’ve seen him before. He looks older than all the other soldiers and officers here. His face is pretty fat. The room knows to shut up the moment he clears his throat.
“Today you start a new life, in a land free from persecution. In Theresienstadt.” His last word echoes in the hall for a few seconds. No one makes a sound. “There you will join thousands of other members of your race already living in perfect safety. Upon your arrival each of you will be assigned work, and in this way you will thus be given the opportunity to become productive members of the Reich. Your new future begins today. Heil Hitler!”
Even after the officer finishes speaking, turns quickly on the heels of his shiny boots, and leaves the hall, no one says a word. Maybe because everyone is stunned just like me. A new life? A land free from persecution? Safety?
Is there a chance he might actually not be lying?
“Mother,” I whisper to her. “Do you think he’s lying?”
I think Mother nods, but I’m not sure, because we’ve started marching forward.
* * *
I don’t know how far they plan to have us march, but at this rate it’s going to take forever. People seem to stop every ten steps to adjust their bags. At which point someone always bumps into the person in front of him. One time an older man trips over a large bag. A German soldier goes over to him, grabs him by the arm, and begins to lift him up. But then he just throws him back to the ground and kicks him in his side. The man doesn’t get up.
* * *
The old woman and her daughter step out of our line. The daughter leans her mother against the side of a building. When a soldier walks over to them and points his bayonet at the mother, the younger woman puts her hands together like she’s praying. Then we turn a corner, so I don’t see what happens next.
* * *
The Praha-Bubny station. So that’s where we’re going. The station’s plain gray building waits for us across Bubenska Street. Behind it a few long trains peek out, ready to take us to Terezin.
* * *
“Nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty, this car!” an SS guard shouts, and points. People begin to load slowly, stuffing themselves and their bags into the train. There are six or seven tracks here, and our train is on the second of them. Past the station there isn’t much to see, except some small hills spotted with just a few buildings. At some point the clouds disappeared, so the sky is blue.
“Nine hundred fifty-one to one thousand, this car!” he says and points again.
A few minutes later I’m stepping up the stairs and onto the train. We stuff whichever bags will fit under our seats and leave the rest in the aisle. The three of us squeeze into a single bench.
Out through the window I see three people approach. The old woman and her daughter, plus another Jewish man. They’re carrying her actually, it looks like she’s asleep. Maybe she passed out again. Then they’re in our car, and the sound of the daughter crying rises over all the other voices.
I lean my head against Mother’s side. The sun warms my head. My eyes close, and I see the faces of boys pointing and laughing, their white teeth bouncing up and down. I see Leci, and the man sitting in that puddle, and my pants around my ankles, and the rungs leading to the Golem’s attic, and that couple falling through the air, and Father putting on his jacket and never even saying good-bye to me.
I’m so tired that I can’t pretend I’m not the saddest kid in the world. And I’m so sad my empty stomach hurts and my face hurts too, like it’s been crying for weeks, even though it hasn’t. Then I realize I’m too tired to care about being so sad, so my sadness just sits there in my empty gut, like a thing that doesn’t really have anything to do with me anymore.
But as the train jerks into motion, that feeling disappears, and in its place something else shows up, something unfamiliar, something I haven’t felt in a long, long time.
Relief.
Good-bye, Prague.