One woman’s quest for truth reveals a dark family secret long buried in Prague’s Nazi past.
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Prague, 1943
Despite the basement room’s damp November cold, the boy dripped with sweat. His breath fogged out in gasps as he rocked, face huddled between spindly knees that peeked out through his threadbare trousers like two dim streetlamps in an otherwise dark alley. He’d drawn himself into a ball, hugging his legs so tightly with his stick-like arms that the tips of his dirty fingers had gone white.
He’d already seen more than a twelve-year-old should have to witness, let alone process.
He grasped the individual details of the scene, many of which were by themselves familiar: the table, the flickering bare bulb dangling from the ceiling as if on an umbilical cord, his father’s sharp and varied tools.
They’d been familiar sights, but when his father had moved aside, no longer obscuring the boy’s field of view—that was when the whole had become incomprehensibly greater than the sum of its parts. That was when his heart leapt out of his skinny chest, commanding the scuffed leather-clad feet to run, run, RUN!
And he had run. Back to the empty basement storeroom, with stone walls that sweated in the summer and radiated cold in the winter. He’d spent more time down here in the basement, as the weather had grown colder, rainier, and more dismal. Since it was no longer possible to play outside in the building’s small, dingy courtyard, he’d turned the mostly empty building into a personal playground. From nooks like his current subterranean roost, up to the attic rooms whose small dormer windows, reached eagerly en point, provided a glimpse of occasional passersby on the narrow cobblestone street below—the boy knew the limestone-faced building inside-out.
Now, he drew closer to the building’s main sewage pipe, which provided faint warmth that always comforted, as long as he didn’t dwell on its origin. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near his father’s workshop in the sub-basement, the equivalent of several floors below his current refuge. “Never pass this door, do you understand? Promise me.” His father had made him promise, out loud.
And he never did pass the heavy metal door with the symbol engraved on it, which led to the brightly lit staircase curving so steeply down. But at twelve years old, with no people around, he was lonely and bored, not to mention relentlessly curious. It hadn’t taken him long to find the wide ventilation ducts that let him move surreptitiously throughout the building, down to the basement where he now hid, and even to the massive sub-basement. Today, the workshop door had been left open—irresistibly so—just wide enough for a small eye to peer through the crack....
His breathing slowed and he raised his brown-curled head tentatively, opening first one eye, then the other, checking the safety of his surroundings. The small stone storage room sat empty, and he was alone. For now.
He’d been alone the first months, too. Father had not had any time for him, between long hours in his workshop and seemingly constant dealings with the man who came several times a day, regal and straight-backed in his black woolen overcoat, fedora, leather gloves, and silver lapel pin that bore the same strange symbol as the door. Father always showed the man respect and gratitude, and made the boy do the same, because if they were polite and worked hard, the man would bring Mother. She’d been left behind in Terezin, but remained warm and secure.
The beginnings of a smile budded on the boy’s chapped lips. Soon, at least, he wouldn’t be alone. More people would come. They always did. He liked meeting them, these new people. They were kind, and hopeful, and they told stories with funny accents, which he sometimes couldn’t understand, and had strange clothes and smells. He rose to his full height, brushed the dust from the seat of his trousers, and started toward the door.
As he left the room, he turned and looked back, the light of childlike curiosity just beginning to eclipse his dark visage. He imagined the room full again with voices, smells, and hopes. Yes, he thought, now smiling fully, new people would make it so much better.
Prague, December 1991
A rickety tram wiggled by, its unpainted metal roof mismatched to its red paneled sides. Dual headlights peered through the early darkness like serpentine eyes as it emerged from under the building and rumbled by Vanesa Neuman. From her perch in the shadows of the four columns of the Church of the Holy Savior, the squeal of the tram’s wheels, muted by a crunchy dusting of snow, quickly faded with its passing. Only the sharp smell of electricity from the tangle of overhead wires remained, as if to preserve its memory.
For Prague in 1991 was a like a memory, she told me before she even left Tel Aviv—and not a good memory. She’d never been to the city, and had never intended to come. She’d heard all she needed to hear over the years from her father. She knew what she needed to know, and had never once felt a need to learn more about the city. All her life, she’d heard of Prague’s beauty, Prague’s mystique, Prague’s rich history, Prague’s breathtaking architecture, Prague’s insidious betrayal, and Prague’s slow downward spiral from discrimination, through persecution, into inhuman realms of misery, pain, and death.
No thank you, she’d thought. No need to see this place.
Yet here she was, and damn it, he was late. She must be in the right place, for there was only one Church of the Holy Savior in Prague, on Krizovnicka Street, across from the iconic Charles Bridge. He was supposed to meet her right here, in the shelter of the church’s massive columns, at five o’clock. The impassive eyes of the six marble statues above Vanesa, white-cloaked in fresh snow, gazed disdainfully down at her. It was already five-thirty, and almost fully dark. Still she, and the statues, waited.
Huddled deep into dark coats and scarves, pedestrians flowed by. Streetlights flickered on, as did the gay Christmas decorations strung between the lampposts, throwing shadows dangerously into the paths of oncoming Skodas.
Vanesa pressed deeper underneath the meager shelter that the columns afforded. They loomed over her, heavy, their menace unabated by the veneer of holiday cheer that draped the city. She pulled her long wool coat tighter around her petite frame, and tugged the hat further down over her ears, making her dark curls stand out at crazy angles. Still she shivered, stamping her booted feet halfheartedly in a futile attempt to warm them.
She’d never really known actual cold. In a lifetime of nearly year-round Tel Aviv sunshine, cold—at least biting cold, like Prague’s December air—was an unknown commodity. Tel Aviv cold nipped lightly at you. The Golan Heights cold, which she’d encountered in her army service, snapped at your chin, numbed your earlobes and toes. The damp Jerusalem cold could actually get into your bones. Prague cold, however, clamped right down and gnawed on you, like a Piranha going after aquarium-dipped fingertips.
She hadn’t wanted to come, she told me, to this land where her parents’ family had lived for over 500 years, to this land from which some 85% of Jews were eradicated at places she’d read about, or heard mentioned in hushed Czech whispers when her father spoke to friends or customers at the shop.
“Of course I remember Luba!” either he or the friend would gush, confronted with a just-discovered mutual acquaintance. This elation inevitably preceded an understanding blink, a subtle nod in her direction, and a lowering of eyes, as either one or the other knowingly whispered the words—usually “Auschwitz,” but sometimes “Maly Trostenets,” “Sobibor,” “Izbice,” or simply “the transports.”
She’d come to Prague not out of want, but out of need—a need that led her to wait on this frozen street corner to meet a man she only knew through Uncle Tomas, and who’s gravelly, authoritative voice she’d only heard briefly over a scratchy international telephone line. She needed to make sense of her father’s dying gift, to fill in the vast empty space that was his life during the war. She needed to put some sort of face on this man who had raised her after her mother died—a face not lit by gaudy Tel Aviv sunshine, but rather by the same fading, winter-gray Bohemian light that currently lit her own face.
She sighed. Her primary contact in Prague was a no-show, leaving her the lone actor in a slowly-fading street scene.
A tram lumbers by, she narrated to herself, attempting to alleviate her boredom and forget the cold. A faulty streetlight flickers. Tourists straggle off the Charles Bridge, closely followed by artists lugging wares in cleverly-designed carts. Another tram, this one with a squeaky wheel. Cue more cars. Cue pedestrians. Enter boy on a bike, slipping in the patchy snow. Fewer and fewer pedestrians now. Finally, following an agonizingly slow fade, the spots darken, the street grows silent. The curtain falls.
At six-fifteen, she gave up and turned to walk the half kilometer back to her hotel next to Old Town Square. Halfway down Platnerska Street, she could already see the mismatched twin spires of the St. Nicholas Cathedral peeking from above the buildings and leafless trees. Her footsteps, squeaking occasionally on the patches of foot-packed snow, had begun to echo on the deserted street.
Unlike in the movies, she told me later, she’d never even heard another set of footsteps. She’d never spotted a shadowy figure trailing her, had never seen a suspicious car with a figure in a dark hat glancing furtively in her direction as it glided by. She was simply walking one second, and being pulled into the alley the next second.
Two men, both bald, both in high, black, military-style boots, grabbed her. One stank of garlic; the other reeked of alcohol, likely vodka. Once off the street, Garlic grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms behind her back, his rank breath on her neck. Vodka clamped a cold hand over her mouth. They ignored her admirable yet futile attempts at resistance, pulling her deeper into the alley and through a low doorway into what had to be a garbage room, based on the ripe stench. A metal-grated door clanged shut, abruptly cutting off any remnants of city sounds audible over Vanesa’s silent struggling.
When her father told her that her mother had died, alone at night in the off-green sterility of Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, Vanesa had not cried. Neither had she cried at the funeral, nor during the shiva—the traditional seven-day period of mourning. She’d never been an “emotional girl,” she told me, because she’d always known—and frequently been reminded—that whatever her current tribulations, they paled in comparison with her parents’ experiences. What right had she, a girl who’d always had clothes to wear and food on her plate, to complain to two Holocaust survivors... about anything? Who was she to mourn a lost toy, a stubbed toe, an insult, even a single death, when her childhood memories were as populated by the ghosts of her parents’ past as by living souls?
“So, from a young age, I fought epic battles with tears,” she said. She’d won, but it had been a Pyrrhic victory. The tears, once defeated, were disinclined to return, even when needed.
Only Uncle Tomas had managed to elicit a dribble of tears from the dry well of twelve-year-old Vanesa. Uncle Tomas, with his wool coat that had in those years always smelled vaguely of carrion, and the fading blue-black number on his forearm that she’d long ago committed to memory—A-25379. His stiff Germanic manner was, she believed, only a frozen exoskeleton that the Mediterranean sun had not yet thawed. Her father seemed to alternately despise and grudgingly admire Uncle Tomas, always keeping him at arm’s length, but never farther. Despite his family status as closest living relative, Uncle Tomas wasn’t really even a relative, but rather her grandfather’s business partner, co-owner of the cramped shop on Nahalat Binyamin Street in south Tel Aviv’s working-class Florentine neighborhood.
Nor had the tears returned of their own volition when her grandfather Jakub died four years later. They’d found him slumped over his workbench in the dingy back room of the shop, a single bare bulb reflected in the stainless steel scraping tool he still clutched in one hand, his forehead resting lightly on his other hand.
Again, only in the comfort of Uncle Tomas’ stiff embrace could she mourn, as if he held some secret key to the floodgates of her grief. Thankfully, he had always been beneficent in his duties as gatekeeper.
If her parents were closed books, her grandfather had been to Vanesa a locked library, a restricted section cordoned off with gaily painted steel mesh that was superficially decorative but ultimately foreboding. Vanesa had never met a more silent person, yet he always smiled sweetly when she waltzed into the shop after school on her way home, the family apartment being just one floor above. He would look up from whatever he was scraping, stretching, or trimming, with a distracted smile, as if he’d forgotten something and her arrival had pleasantly jogged his memory—a vague “aha!” moment. Then he would lower his head, wordlessly turning back to his work, leaving her to poke around the shop until she found the piece of hard candy he placed in a different hiding place each day.
“It was like I learned, both in the shop and in my life, to look past the silence and find the sweetness,” she told me.
But no sweetness could be found in what Vodka and Garlic did to Vanesa in that dark Prague garbage room, just as there had been no sweetness whatsoever in the untimely death of her father at age 60, just six months previously.
No sweetness, and still no tears.
Prague, December 1991
They flung Vanesa to a cold concrete floor. She slid backwards over the frozen film of garbage juice until the back of her head connected with a filthy brick wall, the unhealthy thunk making her teeth rattle.
Her head cleared slowly, and an ominous silence followed. Her eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, picking up wisps of light floating in through the rusty mesh metal door.
The two hulking silhouettes loomed above her, sufficiently backlit that she could see the swastika tattooed on one’s neck when he turned. Neither made any effort to hide his face. They stared at her, as if impressed with their accomplishment thus far but unsure how to proceed. Garlic finally took the lead, speaking in unaccented Czech.
“So, bitch, Miss....” He looked at the palm of his hand, as if reading what was written there but then deciding not to vocalize it. He looked sideways at Vodka for encouragement, turned back to Vanesa, smiled—showing a number of sickly black teeth—and adopted a quasi-formal, oratorical tone. “Uh... welcome to Prague, the jewel of Bohemia. As part of our city’s welcoming package to intrusive cunts like yourself, we’d like to enlighten you as to certain local rules and customs. The very first rule is that too much curiosity can piss people off.” He spat in her direction, again turning to Vodka for reassurance.
Vodka nodded sagely, wringing his hands in undisguised anticipation.
Vanesa pressed herself tighter against the damp coldness of the brick wall, which provided faint reassurance, simply owing to the fact that it was not tall, muscular, swastika-tattooed and looming.
Garlic began to unbuckle his belt, looking back at Vodka with leering satisfaction. With her defiance now supplanted by visible fear, he was pleased with himself, and continued. “...and pissing people off in Prague has historically held somewhat unpleasant consequences, as you may know.”
“Prosim,” she stuttered in Czech. “Please....”
As the two men closed in on Vanesa, the remaining inky light left the fetid room like a final solemn breath.
Wisconsin, 1981
When I first met Vanesa Neuman, she had more questions than answers, and a clear willingness to ask them. I once joked that her truly insatiable curiosity made her a sort of bottomless intellectual sinkhole, swallowing anything thrown into her. She lived her interrogatory life in a kind of stream-of-consciousness, one question inevitably leading to another. A discussion about peeling paint could easily unravel into the Allegory of the Shadows, meander back to the inner life of mosquitoes, flit to the merits of that evening’s dining hall fare, and roost thereafter on the branch of Mongolian falconry.
As the years passed, Vanesa’s question-to-answer ratio slowly tipped. In the way of zealots, technocrats, taxi drivers, and the clinically insane, she gained too many answers. They pushed her questions aside, as if her intellectual storeroom had finite volume. And she grew further and further away from me.
Nonetheless, the touch of some people who intersect your life never completely fades. In the summer of 1981, more than a decade before I’d even heard the word “Galerie,” Vanesa became one such person.
I was an oh-so-serious nineteen-year-old college student, working as a counselor for high school-aged kids, in a sleepover camp tucked back in the woods two hours north of Chicago. The camp’s ample grounds snuggled at the edge of a still wooded but increasingly urbane subdivision that had sprung up uninvited on one side. On its other side ran a copse of dense forest whose depths even the most adventurous camper dared not plumb. To the east, the property hugged a mud-bottomed lake with a trucked-in sand beach, which boasted a speedboat and small catamaran, not to mention a number of canoes and paddle boats renowned for providing only the illusion of movement.
Donna, the waterfront director, lorded over the lake. Her word, inevitably reinforced by an eardrum-piercing whistle, was absolute—as absolute, it was irreverently rumored, as her prodigious posterior, which was said to have once crushed an errant kitten that made the regrettable life choice of napping on the lifeguard chair.
Vanesa was a quintessential sixteen-year-old, a camper in the oldest group in which I was a co-counselor for a boys cabin. She stood 162 centimeters in her All-Stars, shorter and slightly chubby compared to the Madonna wannabes in her cabin. But you could feel the fire in her at a glance—in the way her eyes met yours without a shred of hesitation, without an inkling of self-consciousness, probing you like a district attorney and then delivering judgment like a Wild West hanging judge. She had a way of tossing her dark, shoulder-length curls when she argued, of leaning her small-chested figure in to engage you when she spoke—as if not just her mind, but her whole body tried to prove her point.
I was instantly smitten, and remain so today—less with what she’s become than with what she still is to me, which is, of course, sixteen years old.
My pimple-faced, hyper-hormonal yet laudably under-experienced campers—this was the 1980s, after all—lived for the duration of each month-long camp session in a rickety wooden cabin, together with my co-counselor and myself. The cabin—the camp brochure called it “rustic”—boasted screen-only windows quite effective at keeping the mosquitoes in the cabin, gaps in the floorboards wide enough to accommodate the entrance of almost any spider or vermin, and a screen door whose industrial-strength spring slammed it closed with a bang loud enough to grace the finale of the 1812 Overture.
Teenage boys being teenage boys, my campers lacked interest in much beyond sports and girls. So I was drawn to chatting with the girl campers during my free time. They were strictly off-limits romantically, and I maintained the propriety of the camp rules, but what nineteen-year-old straight male would not enjoy the fawning admiration, chaste though it may be, of a gaggle of boy-struck teenage girls?
Vanesa did not penetrate the inner circle of the girls’ cabin intrigue. Neither did she linger on the fringes. Instead, she struck me as standing some three meters above. She sat apart reading, writing in a journal she kept in a simple spiral notebook—not a pretentiously locked and frilly girl-diary—or just gazing at the sky, with a gently curving nose flaring out to meet cheeks that retained just the right accent of baby fat. Sixteen, perfect, and untouchable—I was staff, after all—and she was a visiting Israeli camper.
We had no hope romantically. Or so I thought that summer.
Vanesa was born in Israel, a true sabra, which made her all the more beguiling to a young American Jew like me. Her father, Michael Neuman, was a Czech immigrant to Israel, which explained her impressive command of not only Hebrew and English but also Czech, which she spoke at home. It also explained her real name, Limor, which she used only in Israel—or so she told me at the time. Vanesa was actually her mother’s name. She said she’d adopted it because “it’s easier on your American ears and tongues.”
Later, I learned the real reason, but she has always remained Vanesa to me.
Prague, December 1991
With his belt opened and his fly now unzipped, Garlic continued. “In accordance with rule number one—which, you’ll recall, is that in Prague, pissing people off has consequences—we have a message for you. An important message,” he continued. He nodded to Vodka, who followed Garlic’s lead and unbuckled his own belt. “You see, in Prague, if you piss off the wrong people, you can end up in a whole world of mess.” He chuckled and nodded in Vodka’s direction. “And not just any mess, but, in fact, a whole world of piss.”
At this, both men, having unzipped and taken themselves in hand, began urinating on Vanesa. Steam rose from the horse-like streams as they sprayed her and laughed.
She cowered silently, scooting away from them, squeezing into the corner of the room, trying to shelter her face and head from the relentless, sickly-warm torrent. It was no use. Her face, hair and torso were soaked in a matter of seconds. An incongruous passing thought of how much these two must have had to drink before meeting her flashed through her brain, defying both the gravity of the situation and her gagging disgust.
When the drenching waned and stopped, she raised her dripping head to look defiantly at her attackers, wiping the liquid from her eyes with the back of one garbage-congealed hand. As she did so, Vodka hocked and spat directly onto her forehead. The viscous liquid ran down over her eyebrows and dripped onto both cheeks.
Now it was Vodka’s turn to speak. He leaned in and raised a hand as if to backhand her, and she shrank from him. “Bitch! Go home. If you don’t, there will be worse for you next time.” Satisfied, he re-zipped his trousers and joined Garlic at the mesh metal door.
They chuckled and exited the garbage room, leaving Vanesa’s sodden, steaming, gasping figure on the floor in the corner.
Kladno, 1941
My Vanesa’s mother—I took to calling her Vanesa Sr. when we spoke of her, which was infrequently—was born Vanesa Rokeach in 1930 in Kladno, a medium-sized industrial and mining town north of Prague. Both sides of her family had lived for more than four generations in Kladno. Her father’s surname still reflected the fact that, some one hundred years prior to her birth, her great-grandfather had been a noted apothecary, serving both Jews and Gentiles, despite being officially limited to doing business in the Jewish section of the town. Like thousands of Jewish communities across Europe, Bohemia’s Jews—the Kladno Jews among them—had for centuries been regarded with suspicion and dislike, at best. Tolerated for their commercial usefulness, they were treated with varying degrees of severity and persecution, depending on the whim of the current ruler and fickle public sentiment.
Vanesa Sr., dark-haired with warm eyes that carried the precursor of the fire that blazed in my Vanesa’s eyes, was the daughter of a seamstress and a machinist. Her father’s profession was unusual for a Czech Jew, but less so in Kladno, the center of Bohemia’s industrial heartland—a heartland later coveted by the German war machine for its iron and steel works. Vanesa Sr. left Kladno once, when she was twelve, and never returned. Kladno was, to the day of her death, the very embodiment of betrayal—much as Prague became for her future husband, Michael, my Vanesa’s father. Every memory that Vanesa Sr. related to her daughter, every happy moment, every personal childhood triumph, every family achievement, was tainted, inevitably qualified with “...but that was, of course, before they....”
The “they” Vanesa Sr. referenced constantly was amorphous and nameless, but terrified my Vanesa as a child. Were “they” also the menace who had attacked Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973, when my Vanesa was just eight—old enough to still remember both the scary sirens and the sweets the kind man next door had shared with her during their hours in the neighborhood bomb shelter? Were “they” the menace against whom Vanesa Sr. double-locked the doors of the small Tel Aviv flat, refusing to leave the apartment unless absolutely necessary so “they” wouldn’t come and take, burn, destroy, or worse? Certainly, “they” were the menace against whom my Vanesa contrived her bedroom’s childhood guardian force, comprised of conscripted teddy bears and warrior dolls armed with popsicle-stick swords. “They” had made Vanesa Sr.’s childhood itself seem like poison to her daughter, something to be put away on the back of a high shelf, toxic to the touch.
Vanesa Sr.’s memory, like wood smoke in a winter forest, floated wispy yet pungent in my Vanesa’s mind. My Vanesa carried mental snapshots of her mother that sparkled, soundbites that crackled, and grainy videos that wept. Mostly wept. For my Vanesa’s overwhelming memory of her mother was of crying, tears in endless permutations of liquid grief. In the open, and more often behind closed doors, she’d let flow tears of frustration, tears of longing, tears of remembrance, tears of remorse, and later, tears of fear. At the end, as Vanesa Sr.’s body shut down, the tears had dried up, and her deathbed weeping had been dry, inconsolable and empty.
Vanesa Sr. was nine years old when she stood on Kleinerova Street on a rainy March day in 1939, looking up wide-eyed, huddled between her parents’ overlapping umbrellas. Her brother’s chubby hand, clutched tightly in her own, was so clammy that she had to keep releasing it to dry her own hand on her skirt. Vanesa Sr. watched her parents, far more interested in their stony faces than in the seemingly endless line of grey tanks and troop transports rolling into Kladno, shaking the ground, clouding the air with diesel fumes. She did look up, however, as several cars and troop transports stopped first—as they would later do in Prague—at the looming limestone façade of local Czechoslovak Central Bank, where they made a one-sided, cripplingly large transaction.
In Prague, the German Reichsbank special commissioner accompanying the invading forces “persuaded” the directors of the Central Bank there, at gunpoint, to transfer some twenty-three tons of gold to Reichsbank accounts. In Kladno, the withdrawal was smaller, but monstrous nonetheless.
“We often forget,” my Vanesa told me one evening in her best university-lecturer voice, “the strictly economic considerations of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and indeed of all Europe. In today’s popular consciousness, the Nazi period doesn’t carry the stain of pillage. Of terror, certainly. Of genocide. Of betrayals and petty reprisals. But the fact was that Germany stole billions of dollars from the countries they invaded—just plain stole, like sticking up a convenience store, but on a national scale.”
Vanesa Sr. understood that the Nazis’ coming was a bad thing. She recalled her father’s fury the previous year when he read of Chamberlain’s cowardly Munich Agreement, in which Czechoslovakia’s most loyal allies sacrificed her on the altar of Nazi appeasement. She understood and feared the armed troops, with their large black guns, fierce helmets, long coats, and uncaring eyes. What she never understood, even after numerous and patient parental explanations, was the nature and purpose of that second Nazi army, armed to the teeth with boxes and boxes of pens, papers, forms, and regulations. Vanesa Sr. could understand guns, but over the next ten months, every time she waited in an endless line with her mother or father for some bespectacled clerk to examine, sign, stamp, or reject in angry guttural German yet another piece of paper, she wondered how it was that this strange army’s power to change her life was so vastly superior to the first’s.
This army of bureaucrats had changed her very identity. Whereas before she’d just been Vanesa Rokeach, a Kladno schoolgirl who’d never lit a Sabbath candle in her life and never seen the inside of a synagogue; now their papers and their forms had transformed her. She was no longer a nine-year-old girl that liked lollipops, loved to play Pesek, and tried to avoid brushing her hair before bed.
Now, she had become this “Jude” word. It was written on the yellow star that her mother had sewn to her coat with such tight, small stitches. At first, she didn’t really understand what this word was, but she quickly learned what it meant. It meant she couldn’t go to her school anymore, that she couldn’t play in the park with the high slide, and that there was no meat for dinner. It meant Father stayed home more frequently, unshaven and often cross.
Soon it would come to mean much, much more.
In 1941, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, under the personal supervision of the notorious Adolf Eichmann, changed gears. The office and its bureaucratic procedures had been created, first in Vienna and later in Prague, to “assist” Jewish families in leaving the Reich. This was allowed following payment of all relevant levies and taxes—generally amounting to well over 80% of a given family’s net worth. Now, the office focused primarily on systematically relocating the Jews of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into a 150-year-old, sparsely-populated but sprawling garrison town named after the mother of Austrian emperor Joseph II, Maria Theresa. The Jews of Kladno, Vanesa Sr. and her family among them, would be some of first offered “relocation” to this new Jewish Reichsaltersheim, paradise ghetto, in Terezin—better known today by its German name, Theresienstadt.
Prague, December 1991
Tears or no tears, horrific yet mute wartime experiences notwithstanding, my Vanesa knew that her mother’s strident European sensibilities would have been gravely offended at her current state—hair matted, coat smeared with garbage floor grime, reeking of urine. She almost laughed at the thought, but the laugh came out as a muffled sob, which she choked back with no small effort as she passed a couple walking arm in arm in the arctic Prague dusk. This was decidedly not how she had expected this evening to turn out.
She had expected to find answers. Like a porter carrying a load up endless flights of steep stairs, she had fervently hoped to finally set down the list of questions she’d been accruing since childhood. It was a list that had ballooned since her father’s death a month previously, since she’d inherited the shop, since she’d received the diary.
She walked on with increasing urgency, occasionally breaking into a stumbling, shivering trot. She tripped on the stairs of her nondescript hotel, looking up as she caught her balance at the façade whose architectural glory was intact yet well concealed under decades of Soviet-era grime, as was much of the city. Prague’s most notable color in 1991 was grey. The bright colors of centuries past had faded with the neglect of collective ownership and the exhaust from two-cycle engines in East German Trabants, the cars with the quasi-cardboard body that had descended on Czechoslovakia in recent years.
It brought to mind the story about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody: there was an important job to be done, and Everybody and Anybody were asked to pitch in. However, since Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it, in the end Nobody did. Until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, only two years previously, Nobody had done much in the way of preserving Prague’s architectural heritage because, after all, it was Everybody’s responsibility.
The night clerk barely acknowledged her as she brushed through the lobby. Far worse than the corruption, oppression and poverty the Soviets had brought with them from the East was the uniquely Russian ability to utterly ignore anyone they didn’t feel like seeing.
Vanesa recalled her foray to the Information desk of the Intourist section of the Prague airport after she landed at 3 a.m. Intourist had been the Soviet agency responsible for handling incoming tourism to the empire. Among the agency’s goals had been to minimize exposure of Soviet citizens to decadent Western influences. This had been accomplished in Prague, as in many other Soviet airports, by completely segregating Westerners. In Prague, they used a separate wing of the airport. In less central Soviet-era airports, they literally herded foreigners into corrals populated by rough wooden benches and surrounded by three-meter high corrugated metal walls, often erected right in the middle of a busy terminal hall.
The green-uniformed Information attendant, blowing on tea steaming in a clear glass embraced by a metal cup holder, pored over a newspaper and simultaneously sucked on a smelly Belomorkanal cigarette. She’d looked up with one apathetic eye as Vanesa approached to inquire about traveling into the city. Without putting down her cigarette or spilling a drop of tea, in a gesture as clearly practiced as blowing her nose or cupping her hands against the wind to light a cigarette, the attendant had reached up with one hand, slammed the office reception window down, and flipped the handwritten sign dangling on the frayed string from Otevreno— open—to Zavreno—closed. Vanesa’s entreaties, first verbal and then increasingly percussive on the office window, had not even caused the woman to look up. If Vanesa had spontaneously self-combusted right there in front of the window, she felt sure that the attendant would have laconically and tiredly reached up and tripped the fire alarm, still cradling her tea cup in one hand, and then gone back to her newspaper.
If she’d noticed at all.
Passing by the night clerk, one part of her briefly wondered if he was even breathing. She ran up the two floors of steep and carpeted stairs to her room, and fumbled with her key, almost breaking it off in the lock. After entering the room, she threw herself into the white sterility of the bathroom, stripping clothes desperately off her body in layers, some already dried and crusted, others still wet and sticky. She left the reeking pile of clothes in a corner and climbed into the tub. She turned the water on full force, and didn’t even wait for the shower to run hot before immersing herself in the cleansing, stinging stream.
And still no tears.
Terezin, 1941
Vanesa Sr.’s father toiled among the 300 Jewish workmen sent to prepare Terezin for its transformation into the “paradise ghetto.” By January the following year, nearly 10,000 more Jews would join him, initially from Bohemia and Moravia but soon from all across Europe, eventually swelling the ghetto until its population density reached a staggering average of over 130,000 per square kilometer.
The notice had come in October of the previous year, a laconic, one-page form letter in German. Vanesa brought the envelope home from the post office, wrapped up against the autumn chill in her mother’s long and thick woolen scarf. Her mother set down the tea she was drinking when Vanesa came in, and her hands trembled as she slit the envelope. Skimming the flimsy page, her mother pressed her knuckles to her lips, unable to answer her daughter’s stream of questions.
Later, when her father came home, he explained that the paper said that they were going to move. He called it “relocation.” They were going to live in a new Judenwohnbezirk, a Jewish residential district—the Nazis had forbidden the use of the term “ghetto.” They were lucky, he said, using the same smile he used when convincing her to eat something that he himself despised. Since he was to be part of the “advance guard,” they’d get their choice of where to live.
This, at least, turned out to be true.
On February 22, 1942, Vanesa, with her mother and younger brother Nicklas, arrived in Thereisenstadt on Transport Y from Kladno to join her father. The railroad spur extending into the walls of the Terezin ghetto would only be completed in June of the following year, built by some 300 Jewish slave laborers, including Vanesa’s father. She and her family, along with tens of thousands of other Jews, had to walk three frigidly damp kilometers from the train terminus in Bohusovice. Their route took them through the village: past bored-looking Nazi guards posted every 100 meters along the treeless cobblestoned route; past countless eyes peeking from curtained windows, watching the macabre parade; past the more brazen villagers who congregated on street corners, shamelessly offering the marchers food at wildly inflated prices.
With heavy suitcases held by now-aching arms, they reached the thick, snow-covered, brick-vaulted ramparts of Theresienstadt after several hours. The barbed-wire barricade was moved, and they were marched into the ghetto that would be their home for the next three years. Nicklas whined feebly, his hand no longer sweaty in hers, as their mother prodded them on.
True to her Father’s promise, they did enjoy “privileged” private quarters when they first arrived in Terezin, although the family was soon split up. The Nazis assigned them to a drafty attic apartment near the Dresden barracks, by the fortress’s northernmost rampart, where her father worked. A narrow iron staircase twisted up from the back of the building’s treeless courtyard to the low apartment door. The apartment was a dark, twenty-square-meter space divided in the middle by a rough shelving unit that held the family’s meager wardrobe. Their carefully-packed, labeled, and weighed suitcases were immediately confiscated upon arrival, and never returned.
“We need to ask ourselves,” my Vanesa once lectured me, “why the Germans would go to the trouble of making them pack according to such stringent restrictions, when they knew that their bags would be taken away immediately upon arrival in Thereisenstadt. The answer is simple: the power of hope. The very same reason the gas chambers at Auschwitz had hooks for people to hang their garments on prior to ‘showering.’ Hope, even when it is consciously or unconsciously known to be false hope, is the great normalizer. In its absence, we are adrift and unpredictable, and predictability was key to the Nazis’ plans. They knew that people who had packed for relocation were far likelier to cooperate than people rounded up in the middle of the night, and that people who had to pay for their transport tickets to Auschwitz were more likely to get quietly on the train.”
The apartment’s small floor space was flanked with short sleeping bunks built into the walls. A small wood stove, not much bigger than a large soup pot, blossomed at the terminus of the winding chimney, whose harried window exit let in chilly air in the winter and mosquitoes in the spring.
And then... there was no more. Vanesa Sr. never spoke of the years between walking into the attic apartment in Terezin in 1942 and meeting her husband, Michael, in the Displaced Persons camp in Cyprus in 1946.
My Vanesa knew that her mother remained in Terezin until almost the end of the war, and was then sent to Auschwitz. She knew that neither her grandmother, grandfather, or Uncle Nicklas had survived the war. The rest she had to imagine, and later, piece by piece, to learn for herself.
Sometimes, she daydreamed that Vanesa Sr. had been a resistance fighter, hiding in the sewers, popping up at incongruous places, silently slitting the throats of unsuspecting Nazis. Or an intrepid saboteur, a factory worker who sabotaged munitions production by day and printed anti-Nazi literature by candlelight at night. Or even a nurse, caring for the sick, the elderly, the children of the ghetto. Anything, my Vanesa thought, anything but what Vanesa Sr. had most likely been after both her mother and father had been sent East on one of the countless transports from which no one ever returned: a scabby ghetto orphan, lice-infested, dressed in rags, scrabbling for blackened potatoes in the dirt, stealing from supply carts as they left the kitchens.
Later, as she learned more, my Vanesa imagined another scene. She dreamed that, nine months after her mother’s arrival in Thereisenstadt, her interests in the surroundings not yet eclipsed by loneliness, hunger and rumors of the next transport, Vanesa Sr. might have looked out the dusty window of the sweltering third-floor barracks one day in July 1942. She might have seen a little boy almost her age struggling along the steamy rain-washed street behind his mother and father. She might have seen his arms straining at a child-sized leather-covered valise, which had been clearly labeled in white paint with his name, transport number, and destination. If Vanesa Sr. looked closer, she might have seen him pause, sitting carefully on the curbstone to avoid wetting his pants, as his father asked directions to the quarters the Nazis had assigned them. She might have seen her future husband Michael gaze around at the treeless streets, taking in the cracked plaster of the buildings and the uneven cobblestones over which the carts rattled in the morning, some bringing thin soup or moldy bread, others collecting the night’s dead.
And maybe, just maybe, she saw him find a twig and scratch absent-mindedly into the dirt the symbol he’d only recently first encountered in Prague:
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