The Book of Dirt

TO: FRANK BRIGHT, formerly František Brichta, fellow student at the Jewish School in Jáchymova Street

One day before the death march to Litomerice–Terezín in April 1945, about 70–90 prisoners were transferred from Schwarzheide to Sachsenhausen, among them J RAND.

When I met Dr Rand (as he then was) in Prague at the end of May 1945, or over 65 years ago, I seem to remember him saying that he had to work in a factory producing poison gas for the German Army (i.e. not Auschwitz and probably Sarin), that prisoners had not been issued with gas masks and that the plant had leaked.

Your grandfather was in Sachsenhausen from 15.04.1945 till 22.04.1945, or one week. What happened after that I don’t know. He must have recovered quickly enough to have made his way from wherever the Russians had taken him to Prague because that was where I met him, both of us wandering, I somewhat aimlessly, round the Old Town around the third or fourth week in May.

She kept it with her for the rest of her life. On a chain around her neck, beneath her blouse, her apron, her hospital gown. After she died we found it tucked in a jewellery box in a drawer beside her bed. She’d put it there before we drove her to the hospital for the last time. While we still lived in hope, she had already come to terms with her fate.

I held it just once, this witness to her ordeal. It was the touchstone of her legend—stories of courage, of strength, of devotion—and yet it seemed so insignificant, resting there in my hand. I rolled it between my fingers, hoping it would reveal her secrets. So much of what we’d come to believe seemed impossible but, as one survivor told me, survival itself was impossible. Don’t be too quick to dismiss the illogical, he said. The fanciful, the absurd, these things happened. Refracted through that simple, perfect circle, I could see another Holocaust. Every story is different, the survivor had said. Every one of us endured his own Auschwitz.

After her death we made peace with the silence. We couldn’t have known what lay in a shoebox at the back of her sister’s apartment in Prague. It took another sixteen years before I would sit at a café table watching Ludvík unfold those delicate sheets of paper, and then another few months before he sent them to me.

Dear mother and little sisters,

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I am happy that you have received my news. I can imagine how terribly worried you must have been, my golden mother. You write and ask whether we were well kitted out. I can tell you kitted out we were wonderfully, unfortunately it was of no use to us. They took from us absolutely everything, even the clothes we were wearing. However, do not think this is something awful, since there exist much worse things. We were where all transports from T go and I am happy that we are together and that we have escaped with our dear lives. Only very few people manage this. I will only tell you that gas is used there on a very large scale. Do not ask, dearest mother, because we will tell you everything when we come home. Now I hope that it will be soon. I thank God that we are all the way we are. Do not worry about daddy, he is in the same situation as us. I still had news, when we were there. We, thank God, are in good health and daddy also. When we return, we will have become only factory labourers but perhaps you will accept us as such. Mummy, please send us one lot of warm underwear, but old, and three pairs of stockings, thick, and also old. Send only that which I have written for. We have received the parcel in perfect condition. Perhaps you will be offended if I write to you to send us lots of food (because you already are sending a lot of it), but there is quite a severe shortage here. We are issued soup at midday, in the evening soup, a piece of bread and something with it. But everything is so minimal that it is not enough for even half a day. Aside from this I work hard, and all day outside. You must not send food in glass containers, mummy. You cannot, poor you, imagine how it is. I smuggle everything into the camp under SS watch. I have to be very careful since I know what it means for one’s life to hang on a thread. And, believe me, I act accordingly. In the parcel everything was correct, except for the glass jars. Also, thanks to you, everything was wonderful. You will be able to calculate how many parcels you should send. So that it is enough for three people. You can also include food in parcels for daddy. If you are [illegible] mummy sending any meat, then not in [illegible]. Send no lard at all. Cigarettes the same as last time. Mr B is a very nice person. He also has children and a wife. I hope that one day we will be able to reciprocate to him. Mummy, please write to us about what the situation is and when we will see each other again. You cannot know how happy I would be if we were all together again. Above all, I wish you good health and to be courageous. Do not, mummy, worry about Irča. In the first place I am almost 20 years old and secondly, after such a rich experience, believe me, I am a fully grown up person. So, hold your head high.

Regards and kisses to you,

Daša

In it there is everything: what she knew, what she didn’t. That she had survived, and Irena too. Perhaps even their father. She had caught sight of him in Auschwitz on the day she left. He was standing at the barbed wire fence, watching as she was herded towards the train. He waved goodbye, blew her a kiss—some tenderness, familiarity—in that place. Little did she know that he would soon be dead, shot in the head after he collapsed, his strength finally deserting him just as freedom was on the horizon.

Daša carried them, kept her mother and sisters alive. You say that you would give many years of your life to be able to come to see us, she wrote in another letter. What foolish things you write. We will return in a few months’ time and you would have lost years of your life. Do not worry about daddy not writing. It is sometimes not possible. And certainly, when he has the tiniest opportunity, he will write to you. She absolved her mother: I have forgotten something else. And that is, you write that you will never forgive yourself that you were so weak towards daddy and brought us up in this faith. It is fate and I’m surprised that a woman as intelligent as you can let something like this come out of her mouth. I hope it never happens again. And I promise you that we will return to your motherly embrace healthy and strong. To her sisters too, humouring them, as if she were just on holiday. My dear little golden Bumblebee.

Words: they clung to her words in their grief and fear. Smuggled words. Words that could have seen her killed, that almost did. Words I have tried to understand. I smuggle everything into the camp under SS watch. But two most of all. A name repeated, a flicker of light in this darkness.

Those who survived wanted nothing more than to disappear, and so they sought refuge in faraway lands. Entire suburbs sprang up, designed to go unnoticed, to be passed over when the next catastrophe came along. Identical houses of dull, monotonous brick. The curtains, thick white filigree approximations of knotted lace, were usually closed. Inside, lives were refashioned through photographs and knick-knacks that told of every moment spent on Lazarus’s back. Here in Australia, they lived and they died, one by one, until only Uncle Pavel remained.

For years he lived on, cursing each new dawn that broke outside his window. He went into a nursing home when Irena needed full-time care, and stayed after she died because he saw no point in leaving. It’s comfortable enough. I eat, I sleep. I just want to be left alone. As he struggled for breath, as his eyesight failed, as his movement slowed, as his body shut down, he somehow still managed to cheat death. Listen to me, darling, he’d say to me. Don’t grow old.

His had been a different kind of survival. Born into Czech aristocracy, a scion of the Bondy empire, Pavel’s birthright proved a curse. It was his kind that was taken early, forced from their stately homes, exiled to Łódź. This was before the main transports, before Theresienstadt, when people were chosen not just because they were Jewish but because they were the worst kinds of Jews: intellectuals, aristocrats, journalists, political enemies. For Pavel, the nightmare of Łódź became a memory as he was forced from ghetto to ghetto, from camp to camp, until he found himself a Sonderkommando in the stoking house of hell, clearing gas chambers and throwing emaciated corpses into pits of fire. He was not afforded the small mercy of denial, of believing the smoke came from nearby brick factories. His premonition of death was pink and tangled, scratched and bruised, coated in blood and soot.

When it was over he returned to Prague and lived a sad imitation of the life he had once been promised. He married Irena, had a son. Those years had taught him to work, to seize opportunities. He took his young family to Israel, where he became a plumber and carpenter, then to Australia, where he chose to stay. But no matter where he ran, he could not escape the crematoria, the bodies. That was what he was left to relive, when they had all gone, when he woke up and saw the sun taunting him with another pointless day.

I tell him about Hana and the shoebox. He shakes as he holds the letters. He listens, reaches for a handkerchief. He caresses the page, his wife, in her youth. Irena, too, had written home. I am writing this in a hurry, that is why it looks as it does, but you will not be angry with me, mummy dearest, will you? What do you do all the time? Mummy, please take care of yourself. Pavel leans over the yellowing pages, his magnifying glass positioned close to his milky eye, his finger pausing on each word. Slow wheezes. The stale smell of old age. Beside some pills, his teeth.

He talks as he reads, tells me his story; the anger and then resignation in his voice will later wrestle against the tape recorder’s metallic hiss. When he has finished he lets out a tremendous sigh. I wait a moment, let him regain his composure. Then: Irena and Daša? They stayed together throughout. Did they lay sleepers for trains? No. They worked in fields, in laundries, then in factories. How you say? Textiles. To make warm clothes for Nazis on the Eastern front. When they were liberated, did the Russians…? They were bastards. But no, not that.

‘It’s been a while,’ he says, heaving himself upright. ‘There was a boy from the neighbourhood, a friend of the family. He went on the first transport, the one sent to turn the old fortress town of Terezín into the camp the Germans called Theresienstadt. I knew him only through stories: that he had watched over them, kept them safe. As for his name…you have to understand, they lost so many friends, but to me each was the same as the next. Except one. Yes…there was one in particular that stood out for no other reason than that they never said it directly to me. It would only come out when they thought I wasn’t listening. Bohuš. Maybe that was him. Maybe that’s your Mr B.’

They were electricians, carpenters and builders, plumbers, machinists and masons. Three hundred and forty-two young Jewish men chosen for their skills and sent north on 24 November 1941. Transport ‘Ak’, the Aufbaukommando. They left in good spirits, clinging confidently to what the Nazis had promised: they would be able to return home on weekends; they would receive regular food; they would enjoy greater comfort; their wages would be paid to their families back in Prague. They arrived at Bohušovice station and were marched the three kilometres to the fortress town, Terezín, where they were assigned to the dilapidated Sudeten barracks. Rubbish was strewn across the cold, damp concrete. Windows were smashed, doors hung open, screeching in the wind. They slept on the concrete floors, rationed their meagre supplies. For the most part they were confined to the stables. One man tried to send a postcard home to his girlfriend but it was intercepted and he was hanged. The Nazis brought them nothing: no food, no bedding, no word from the outside.

By the time the first civilian transport arrived six days later, the Aufbaukommando had done little to prepare for the new inmates. Confronted by a thousand bewildered faces—Transport ‘H’ consisted mostly of older men and women—they turned away in shame. Then, on 4 December, a third transport rolled into Bohušovice. Another thousand men, mostly young, mostly skilled. They, too, were assigned to the Aufbaukommando. Officially, the transport was designated ‘J’, but to those in the camp it was known as ‘Ak2’. Close behind it, almost unnoticed, was one more train from which twenty-three people disembarked, including Jakob Edelstein and the rest of what would become the Council of Elders.

By the end of that grey winter’s day, there were two and a half thousand Jews in the fortress town that would, for the next four years, be called Theresienstadt. One of them was this neighbour who might have been Bohuš.

Names cascade like dirty snow across the pages of the Theresienstadt Memorial Book. Here they lie, the reconstituted ashes of all those who were taken from their homes and dumped together on the dusty clearing beside the tracks at Bohušovice station. I look at the record of the ones who didn’t come back, whisper each name, the white noise of guttural stutters filling the desolate room. First names. Surnames. There is nobody called Bohuš.

‘Bohuš,’ he says, this time with more confidence. ‘I heard them whisper Bohuš.’

They reach out from the page, begging to be remembered. For months I try to conjure their voices, their stories, from a squall of dates and places. With each pass I eliminate some from the list, those who don’t fit Pavel’s description. This one, too old. That one, from too far afield. This one sent not to Auschwitz but another camp, maybe Riga or Dachau or Maly Trostinec. I delete them again from history, negate their brief resurrection, strip them of the lives that might have found meaning in what I write.

Bedřich Altschul. Gustav Bacharach. Hugo Bacharach. Erich Bauer. Bohumil Benda. František Bergmann. Jíři Bergmann. Rudolf Bergmann. Alfred Bernath. Bruno Better. Erich Bloch. Heřmann Bloch. Pavel Bondy. Richard Brauchbar. Farkaš Braun. Kurt Brodt. František Budlovský. Emil Bustina. Bedřich Friedländer. Bedřich Gratum. Bedřich Gross. Bedřich Hoffman. Bedřich Lubik. Bedřich Meisl. Bohumil Reinisch. Bedřich Strass. Bedřich Straussler. Bedřich Weiss. Bedřich Weltsch. Rudolf Jokl. Nachman Basch. Leo Bass. Rudolf Bauer. Vilém Baum. Alexandr Bäuml. Bodhan Beck. Erich Beck. Josef Beck. Karel Beck. Louis Beck. Theodor Beck. Max Becker. Leo Beer. Mojžiš Belligrad. Bruno Berger. Ota Bergler. Alexandr Berkovic-Katz. Nathan Berkowicz. Šalamoun Bernfeld. Ludvík Bernstein. Wolf Besen. Hersch Biber. Ota Bienenfeld. David Bleicher. Heřman Bleiweiss. Gustav Bloch. Valtr Bodanský. Emil Bondy. Pavel Bondy. Kurt Brammer. Oskar Brand. Eduard Braun. Karel Braun. Otto Breslauer. Jan Breth. Julius Bretisch. Bertold Fantl. Bedřich Friedländer. Bedřich Glaser. Bedřich Goldschmidt. Bedřich Grosser. Bruno Grünstein. Bedřich Heller. Bedřich Hirsch. Bedřich Kraus. Bedřich Liepmann. Bernhard Lichtenstein. Bedřich Löwy. Bedřich Lustig. Bedřich Müller. Bedřich Pick. Bohumil Polák. Bedřich Pollack. Bedřich Pollert. Bedřich Prager. Bruno Reik. Bedřich Reitler. Bernhard Ringer. Benno Rynarzewski. Bela Salomon. Bedřich Schnabel. Bedřich Schön. Bedřich Schöpkes. Bruno Tausk. Berthold Ucko. Bedřich Wermuth. Bohumil Winter. Bedřich Zucker. Ervín Bandler. Arnošt Basch. Zdenek Basch. Otto Baum. Otto Baumgarten. Valtr Baumgarten. Viktor Bäuml. Arnošt Bazes. Alexander Beck. Pavel Beck. Jindřich Beck. Arno Behrendt. Jíři Běhal. Viktor Beneš. Adolf Berger. Bedřich Berger. Evžen Berger. Pavel Berger. Hugo Berglacz. Josef Bergmann. Bedřich Bergstein. Josef Bernstein. Jan Beutler. Arnošt Beykovský. Hugo Bienenfeld. Walter Bischitzký. Kurt Bleyer. František Bloch. Kurt Bloch. Pavel Bloch. Arnošt Blum. Simon Blumental. Rudolf Bondy. Vilém Bondy. Jindřich Boschan. Zikmund Brauch. Heřman Braun. Leopold Braun. Leo Breitler. Vilém Brik. Vilém Bruml. Kurt Brumlík. Kurt Buschbaum. Bedřich Fauska. Bedřich Feigl. Bartolomeus Friedmann. Bedřich Fritta. Bernard Gerber. Bedřich Grab. Bedřich Heller. Bedřich Holzbauer. Bedřich Jakobovič. Bedřich Kaf ka. Bedřich Kaufmann. Bedřich Klein. Bohumil Klein. Bedřich Kohn. Another Bedřich Kohn. Bedřich Kollin. Bedřich Kompert. Bedřich Kraus. Bedřich Krieger. Bedřich Küchler. Bedřich Langer. Berthold Laufer. Bedřich Löwenbach. Bernard Macner. Bedřich Mautner. Bedřich Meisl. Bernd Nathan. Bedřich Pollack. Bedřich Sachs. Bruno Schuschný. Bertold Schwarz. Bedřich Seidner. Bedřich Stein. Bohumil Steiner. Bruno Steiner. Bedřich Sternberg. Bedřich Tetzner. Bertold Wassermann. Bedřich Weiss. Bedřich Zentner.

I want to run back and show the last few names to Uncle Pavel, to see if there is a spark of recognition. Bohuš is a nickname, another code word. If only Pavel could think harder, push through the fog. They must have uttered his real name. Just once Irena must have told him everything.

I want to run back but I can’t. Pavel died yesterday. He finally beat the sun.

I had hoped to give what they could not—gratitude, recognition, for their lives, for my own—but now there is no way of knowing who he was. I settle on a name, one that did not exist, one that can be demonstrably proven false by the simple act of running your eyes down those two lists—Transport Ak, Transport J. And so I create a boy, a neighbour called Bohuš, give him a family, friends, all of whom will disappear. This representative construct might be one or all of Jiří Bergmann, Alfred Bernath, Erich Bloch, Bedřich Gratum, Bedřich Strass, Vilém Baum, Ludvík Bernstein, Arnošt Basch, Jindřich Beck, Jan Beutler, Arnošt Beykovský, Kurt Bleyer, Leo Breitler, Vilém Bruml, Bedřich Feigl, Bedřich Holzbauer and Bedřich Sacks.

Or perhaps it is none of them. Perhaps Uncle Pavel was mistaken. He was desperate to help me, so he drew together long forgotten stories, stories that he had only half-heard and, spurred on by my insistence, my encouragement, unwittingly created a composite of his own. There was a boy, as he said, a boy who helped them in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, but his name is lost. Might there not have been someone else too? Someone who didn’t come along until much later, towards the very end, when they had been sold as slave labour to Kramsta-Methner und Frahne AG, a company that processed flax in a four-storey factory in Merzdorf, Upper Silesia?

The factory was situated in a village where the prisoners came into contact with the locals, as well as with other foreign workers—machinists, builders, labourers. It was from there that Daša and Irena sent the letters. Could Mr B have simply been a man who worked there too, a supervisor, a guard, a stationhand, a kindly German townsman who collected the packages sent by my great-grandmother Františka and brought them to the girls?

I can find nothing more about Mr B, so I turn again to the search for my grandfather. Since the beginning I had been hoping to single out his words from the discordant noise. Those who spoke about him. Those who spoke for him. It came at last in urgent whispers, from the moulded metal tips of an antique Czech typewriter: Unfortunately it contains many inaccuracies. Each syllable tearing through the fabric of these projected memories. From the fissures an echo, what he means to say: but it also contains truth.

His description is unembellished. I was a member of that small group of Rabbis and Hebraists selected by Murmelstein, our object was to catalogue and comment on all books and manuscripts that were stolen from all over Europe.

Little is known about the Talmudkommando. In his historical overview of the camp, Murmelstein mentions it in passing. Otto Muneles wrote a brief report on the ‘book sorting work’ immediately after liberation, but it focuses on the minutiae of cataloguing and the whereabouts of the books. A more detailed, albeit clinical description, is given by H. G. Adler in his monumental study, Theresienstadt. The only insight into the human dimension of the Talmudkommando’s work comes not from one of its members, nor a historian, but a labourer, Franz Weiss. Initially given the job of converting an old barn into a workspace for the group, Weiss stayed on to cart boxes of catalogued books back to the main camp. He was able to observe the members at work and, occasionally, talk with them. Some considered him a friend.

It is likely that the order to establish a group to sort looted Jewish books came from Adolf Eichmann himself sometime in early April 1943. The Gestapo chief knew he could count on Benjamin Murmelstein to get the job done efficiently. The two had worked together in Vienna after the Anschluss, when the city’s Jews needed to be resettled in camps. For his diligence Murmelstein was rewarded with transport to Theresienstadt and given a place on the Council of Elders. To assist him in assembling the Talmudkommando, Eichmann appointed an expert from within the Nazis’ own ranks. There is some suggestion that it was SS Sturmbannführer Karl Burmester, the Gestapo library chief.

The selection process took close to three months, during which time the applicants returned to their previous work details. Meanwhile, crates of looted Jewish books started to arrive from Berlin, where, until Allied bombing forced a change in plans, Nazi experts had been sorting them for use in what was to be a representative library of Jewish thought known as the Advanced School of the Nazi Party (Hohe Schule der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Afraid the books might be destroyed, the Nazis split up the collection and shipped it off for safer storage. Those already catalogued or deemed of lesser importance ended up in castles in Silesia and Northern Bohemia. The rest were sent to Theresienstadt.

Although some of its key members would not arrive for another few weeks, the Talmudkommando began its work on 26 June 1943. That day, they were escorted under SS guard out of the main camp to the south, along Südstrasse, until they reached a converted barn built into a hill. It was only half a kilometre but it must have felt like another world. There was no barbed wire, no moans of desperation, no crowded streets, no snarling dogs. In time, the members of the Talmudkommando would come to call it the Klärenstalt, the Clarification Plant.

Each man was assigned a place on one of the low wooden benches and told that it would be his workspace until further notice—the threat of deportation was always there. The same Nazi officer who had overseen the selection now outlined their duties. The books were to be sorted using the Prussian cataloguing system. They were to be given the designation Jc, followed by a number, and a brief bibliographical description. Then they were to be put in a crate for storage and, ultimately, returned for use in the Advanced School. Any works of particular rarity or value were to be set aside and reported to the SS for individual collection. No book was to leave the Klärenstalt in any other way.

For almost two years the Klärenstalt proved a silent haven for those locked inside. They worked with a diligence bordering on fever, the mind-numbing monotony broken by the beauty of the books that came before them: illuminated manuscripts, handwritten tomes, works dating back over a thousand years. To think these might survive, even if the scholars would not. It was consolation enough to urge them on. By war’s end many of the scholars had been transported to Auschwitz and killed. They left behind a catalogue of wonders, numbering some 28,250 volumes that would live on.

The Advanced School never came to be. When the war was over, 257 crates of books as well as another 237 tied parcels were found in the outer fortifications of Theresienstadt. Still more were found in the Klärenstalt. They were shipped to the Jewish Museum of Prague, where they joined the countless Jewish artefacts that had been plundered from the homes, synagogues, libraries, community centres and businesses of those sent to concentration camps.

Of everything in my grandfather’s story, only the books remain. It is to them I must go.

The streets of Prague’s Old City teem with tourists. Here, among the cobbled stones, the buildings and the graves, they will find what they need. A name on the wall of the Pinkas Synagogue, hidden among the 80,000 who perished. A fine silver Torah pointer from a village that is now just a field. Rabbi Judah Löew, reduced to the etching of a lion on stone. Even Franz Kafka himself, cast in bronze, sitting on top of a headless man, just as he prophesied in Description of a Struggle. There is only one thing that eludes them, the one thing they’d hoped most to find—the golem.

The tourists pay little attention to the modern building just around the corner from the Spanish Synagogue. Metal-encased lights hang from the ledge above its fortified glass doors. To the left, a grey intercom unit. Only a small chrome plate, with the Star of David perched on two stone tablets, gives a clue as to what is inside: the inner sanctum of the Jewish Museum of Prague. I push the button and wait. A crackle, then a soft voice: ‘Ahoj.’

Another crackle. The doors slide open with a mechanical hum and I step into a brightly lit alcove, a security lock. ‘Identification?’ She startles me. The same voice, still soft. The woman is sitting at a counter behind streaked glass, staring at a bank of video screens on which I can be seen from various angles.

I hand over my passport and driver’s licence. She looks at me, at the documents, then back at me, before sliding a white laminate pass through the hole in the partition. From behind I hear a shrill buzz and a click.

Identical grey doors stud the drab walls of the administrative centre. The offices are like cells for those cloistered inside. It is deserted, a hollow heart. On the third floor I see an office door ajar. I knock, wait. ‘Come in.’

I enter and am already beside her. The director of the Jewish Museum is much younger than I had expected. Waves of brown hair spill across her face and she brushes them aside as she stands to greet me. She sits back down and gestures to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. I have to squeeze past. There is no natural light; it is a fortress of books. Papers are scattered across the floor. Only her desk is clear, except for a single page. I see him, my grandfather, staring up. It is the original article.

‘Yes. After the war everyone was searching for meaning: Why? How? And here in Prague, particularly. What to make of this great collection of books, of artefacts, of treasures stored in our synagogues? Why would the Nazis do such a thing? They allowed a functioning Jewish museum to stay open under their watch? It simply did not make sense.’

‘Some secret plan, yes. But there wasn’t. For three years it operated, until the end of forty-one, when the Nazis closed it down. By then the transports had started and they needed the space to store all the property they were confiscating. Warehouses. That’s what they made of our synagogues. The Jewish community, however, was quick to rally. Its leaders saw what was going on, the liquidation of satellite communities, the transports out of Prague. They convinced the Nazi authorities to ship all Jewish artefacts—Torah scrolls, books, silverware, anything that related to Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia—to Prague and allow them to select the most precious, the most valuable for exhibition in a “new” museum—’

The director smirks. ‘The Nazis agreed to the request but they didn’t really care about it. They didn’t actively involve themselves in its operation. Thousands of artefacts poured in and the Jewish staff catalogued them with exemplary care and skill given the circumstances. By November 1942, the curators had prepared the first exhibition of manuscripts and books and the Central Jewish Museum, as it was now called, was opened for business. Needless to say it didn’t get too many people through the door, but that wasn’t the intention. For the curators, it was an act of preservation. For the high-ranking Nazis who made up the majority of its visitors, it was a curiosity. I think there was only ever one official Nazi directive, a complaint, really: that the museum was too nice.’

‘By the Nazis, no. It is a romantic ideal, this symbol of Nazi arrogance, of what could have been. But it never existed. There was never a plan by the Nazis to make a Museum of the Extinct Race. The term wasn’t even coined until after the war.’

‘Then why agree? Why allow a community you intend to exterminate to set up and operate a museum?’

‘Free labour. Nothing more, nothing less. The Nazis saw it as part of the confiscation program. It also served as a balm of sorts—if they allowed a Jewish museum to be run by the community, maybe their intentions weren’t quite so wicked. Maybe the Jews would be more willing to believe their promises of resettlement.’

‘Had nothing to do with it. He never worked here, not during the war and not after. We became aware of him when this article was published. He wrote to us and included it along with a short biographical note, pointing out the obvious exaggerations. He said he had worked in Terezín sorting through books and promised to send a full report on the Talmudkommando. It never came. It is a shame, really, but we have learned not to hope for such things. Those who don’t wish to be seen will always find new places to hide.’

‘But he kept reaching out,’ I insisted. ‘To Yad Vashem, Beit Terezín. Only once did he get anywhere, much later on. One of his letters ended up with Alisah Shek. She was among the few who knew about the Talmudkommando and the only one to really care. For her it was personal. Her husband had been its youngest member.’

‘But he wasn’t. He only worked in the Central Library in Terezín. Shek was a youth leader, a very promising young man. Murmelstein took a liking to him and, to protect the boy from transportation, assigned him to the library. But not the Talmudkommando.’

‘They weren’t related?’ I was starting to feel dizzy. All these names, these institutions, blurring into one. Further obscuring my grandfather from view.

‘Most who look back see the Holocaust as some great monolith. We’ve lost the ability to make out the contours, the cracks, the individual shapes. Who still cares about a bunch of books in any one camp? What difference does it make that there was a Central Library in Terezín, a Central Jewish Museum in Prague and, quite separately, a dedicated group, all sorting obscure Jewish books? Distinctions like this no longer matter. The horror has outgrown them.’

‘Unfortunately, no. Of course, we knew of the group from Murmelstein and the others but, aside from Otto Muneles, there was no survivor testimony. So far as we could gather they had all been killed. Muneles was a taciturn fellow. Dour. He struggled with survival, lost himself in the running of our new museum. He didn’t speak of the others. When he died, so did our first-hand knowledge of the Talmudkommando.’

‘So that’s it, then? These few letters, cries for help, awkward posturing?’

‘No. And here’s what I find most troubling. As it turns out, your grandfather isn’t unknown to us. His name appears on several documents, Nazi records from Theresienstadt. Only now do we have ready access to them. It’s been our big project, digitising our archives, resurrecting them from their paper tombs. We couldn’t have known it then, when he contacted us. We just didn’t have the resources. And, anyway, we were too busy wrestling with the other Holocaust institutions for ownership of these memories. Each one was sitting on its own stash from the camp, guarding it like a nervous mother.’

She reaches into a drawer, pulls out a thick envelope and places it on the desk.

A ration card. Rand, Jakob. Ck572. Category II. Eligible for premium margarine and sugar rations.

A time sheet. Rand, Jakob. Eight hours every day throughout October 1943 except for two absences: on the sixteenth and twenty-fourth.

A single notation in some medical records. Rand, Jakob. 6 April 1944. Requiring medical transportation for an inflammation of the throat.

A pink docket, terminating his employment, preparing him for transport to the east.

There are other people, too, similarly listed, similarly marked. They are bound together on ration cards and time sheets, on exemption lists and pink dockets, this constellation of names under a common but shifting title: at first Arbeitsgruppe ‘M’ then, later, Bücherfassungsgruppe, the book sorting group.

At any one time there are around thirty of them; sometimes a name will disappear and be replaced by another. They are dispensable, interchangeable. That is what it meant to be privileged. I have come to know them like family. Georg Glanzberg, master violinist, lover of chess, Doctor of Oriental Languages, my grandfather’s best friend. Isaac Leo Seeligmann, son of the eminent Dutch bibliophile Sigmund Seeligmann, whose fate was to sort through his father’s beloved collection. His story will be remembered even if his name is not. It will live on in Yiddish, recast in the name of another, a man who will cry over his father-in-law’s candelabra. That man will be Dr Eppstein. Much like the museum itself: a name misheard, misconstrued. There was no Eppstein. But there was a Josef Eckstein. And, of course, there is Otto Muneles, former head of the Prague Jewish Burial Society, future chief archivist of the Jewish Museum of Prague. They are all here, one way or another.

In 1987, Dr Jan Randa picked up his copy of the Australian Jewish News and found himself the main character in a story that resembled his life. How could he tell them, all those who had read it too, that it was not him, this man with the same name, the same face? How could he say that, yes, like this man, he had been taken outside the camp but not to the Prague Museum, not to some great gothic structure, but to a converted barn, a modest little house at number 5 Südstrasse, within walking distance of the main gates, separated from that hell by a couple of chapels where, day by day, the steady moan of funeral dirges rang out? And, yes, he too knew a Murmelstein, a Muneles and an Eckstein. For God’s sake, the name was Eckstein. Not Eppstein. They all featured in his life, but not as this story would have it.

To have trusted a journalist with his memory and have it end up like this. That was the greatest wound.

None of them spoke in any detail of the Talmudkommando. Nor did they speak to one another. Each guarded his silence alone.

‘We have scanned the catalogue too,’ says the director. ‘The entire work of the Talmudkommando is available online.’

She cuts me off before I can finish. ‘I’m afraid it’s not allowed.’ She scribbles down a web address. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. They are too fragile. We have a responsibility. I hope you understand.’

That night I sit at my computer and begin to click through the scanned index cards, hoping to recognise my grandfather’s handwriting. Countless times I think I find it but I know only the script of an old man, his hand shaking, his letters ill-formed. He is everywhere in the catalogue. And nowhere.

It is after midnight when I go to bed. I cannot sleep. Next morning, once again, I will set off to find my grandparents.

I arrive at Bohušovice, the small outpost station that once serviced Theresienstadt. The building is abandoned. Bolts of tawny cement show beneath the cracked paint. Rusted pipes that once used to drain water from the roof now brace the corners like crutches. Bored teens have tagged the walls. I am struck by how small the station is, not much bigger than a cemetery chapel, here, where they all passed through on their way to the fortress town. There are no tourists, no other seekers of the lost. In its dilapidation, Bohušovice begs to be forgotten.

Outside, near the road, a corridor of grass cuts off the vast plain of dust and gravel that was once a parking lot and, before that, a gathering place for the damned. They were never in the station. Of that I am sure. When they arrived from Prague, when they stepped from the train, this field of dirt is where they came; it is where they stood and waited and wondered what was in store. From inside the station, the stares of those made accomplice. It was forbidden to look on, to bear witness. Often, the locals were ordered to stay home, close their blinds. And yet there are pictures of the endless procession through the main road, obscured by the flutter of curtains.

I cross the dirt towards the grass and find the tracks. What remains of the Theresienstadt rail spur—built by the inmates and opened in June 1943 to ease the constant flow of arrivals and departures—now lies buried in the overgrown brush. Bohušovice is lost to time. The station, the field, the tracks: they are not part of memory’s theatre.

Terezín has filled again, people have made it their home. In the streets, there is an unsettling mix of tourists and townsfolk. Mostly, those who live here are poor. They curse under their breaths as they pass groups of well-dressed foreigners. There is a psychiatric hospital nearby. Its patients roam the square, begging for money. A strange schism between present-day Terezín and the camp called Theresienstadt. But I am not here to see what all the other visitors are here to see. I do not stop at the exhibits. I am here to search the forgotten spaces.

I walk the deserted road to the south, gravel crunching underfoot. Dogs are barking from the next hill, their snouts against the fence, their discoloured teeth catching the afternoon sun. They run back and leap at the knotted wire. I hear children laughing nearby. The dogs lose interest. To my right, the hill drops to reveal a wall of uneven bricks. A brown gate runs the length of this bunker. Flashes of colour between the pickets, and more laughter. At last I am here: number 5 Südstrasse. The Klärenstalt.

‘Please,’ says the woman, opening the gate. ‘I’ve never had a visitor before. My husband apologises. He cannot make it back from work. He very much wanted to meet you.’

We stand in the courtyard while two young boys chase each other around with hockey sticks. Maria is in her early sixties, too young to have known Terezín as it once was, but old enough to remember it as an army barracks for the post-war Communist guard.

‘I have been here all my life, in Terezín. My mother was a prisoner here, not Jewish. When it was over she chose to stay. It was all she knew. You have been there, seen inside. We are all victims. There is no escape, so why even try?’

My eyes are drawn to the house. It looks new, made from plasterboard. Only the window frames betray its age, chipped wood painted brown, peeling and cracked. It is as if the house has been built around them.

‘I’m afraid you’re too late,’ Maria says. ‘The house was destroyed in the floods back in 2002. We were evacuated and when we could finally return, when the water had subsided, it was gone. We lost everything, had to start again.’ She looks to the bulwark built into the hill. ‘See there,’ she says, pointing to a series of deep cavities in the brickwork. ‘It was a barn, to begin with. Those holes, they held the beams in place. Where we are now standing was once part of the house. When…’ she pauses. ‘Well, you get what I’m saying.’

Maria takes my arm, leads me towards the door. The boys stop playing and watch, suspicious, protective. ‘After the flood, the insurance company wanted to demolish the whole place. They said it would be safer to start again. But there was something in the back of my head, a voice. I couldn’t do it. We argued for months. My husband too. He thought the same as me. This house, our home, it had a history.’

Still grasping my arm, Maria pushes open the door and leads me inside to a cluttered kitchenette. A marionette hangs from the ceiling, its oversized lips stretched into a vulgar smile. ‘My husband,’ she says by way of excuse, ‘he collects things. He likes to repair. It’s his hobby.’ She shuffles across the room to a yellow door with a smashed leadlight window. ‘We couldn’t allow it. So we came to an agreement with the insurance people. We could keep one room. You must forgive us, we have put up partition walls. It was no use to us, such a large space.’ She opens the yellow door. I peer inside. The room is crammed with junk: electronics, toys, spare parts. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘This is what’s left of where your grandfather worked.’

When I step back outside, Maria is waiting. She says nothing. The boys have disappeared and there is a soft cooing in the trees as the sun sinks on the horizon. Maria reaches out, takes my hand, holds it in hers. I must leave now, drive back to Prague. Tomorrow I begin my final journey.

Ludvík has already packed the car by the time I walk around the corner. I am late. We should have left by midday, made it through the main cities before peak hour. Ludvík is leaning against the door, cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks up and waves.

In the car we don’t speak. The radio squawks out old rock songs, interrupted only by the bleating of station IDs. This was his idea, to drive from Prague to Auschwitz. When I told him I planned to go he said, yes, he’d come too. It was something he’d been thinking about since his mother died. She had regressed in the end, returned to the Prague of her youth. There were moments when Ludvík saw it flash in her eyes: that place, the one his mother had never been to. It could still reach out and take her. It was part of him.

An hour out of Prague and the road bears the scars of Communist neglect. Hamlets appear by the highway and then, just as quickly, they are gone. Giant billboards, the garish flags of capitalist expansion, stake their claim on the hills. Soft drinks, fast food chains. The old Škoda rattles along the cracked surface. ‘Soon we stop,’ Ludvík says. ‘You like McDonald’s? Is better than Czech cooking on road. There you get sick.’

At the table he checks his phone. ‘I book us hotel in Oświęcim. Is okay?’ It doesn’t seem possible. There is a hotel in Terezín, the old SS quarters. That is tasteless enough. But Auschwitz? I shrug.

Half an hour after we pass the city of Brno, Ludvík stops on the side of the road. He unwinds his window and points to the field outside. ‘You see here,’ he says. ‘Is famous battle. Austerlitz. Maybe this interests you.’

‘Yes. I am reading the letters. Try to imagine for her, for my mother and sisters. I think about grandfather. What he did. But you know she loved him. I think even after divorce they keep up relationship. Secret. He was very difficult man. Not only she says it, also neighbours.’

‘She never married again. Maybe this interests you. Before Babička dead I ask her: You know now he sacrificed for you, for daughters. Maybe do you forgive him for gambling, for destroying happy family?’

The highway detours north as we pass the city of Ostrava and soon we are in Poland.

‘Look,’ Ludvík says, tilting his head towards the road’s edge. Train tracks, clearly visible. Further along we pass the first sign: Oświęcim 52.

‘It is Marcela. She is one who went to country. She gets from uncles and aunts to send to sisters in camp. For Babička is not safe. Only for little girl. She learn from Daša and Irena before. How to go. How to bribe police at train station.’

‘Uncle Pavel said Mr B was a friend, someone who knew the family. They called him Bohuš. I have gone through the list. He isn’t there. But maybe it’s not his real name, just something they called him. Maybe it’s short for Bohumil. Or Boruslav…Bedřich?’

The stillness unsettles me. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. Over my shoulder there is a small window without curtains. There is only darkness outside. We should have stayed in Kraków. It is not right to be sleeping here.

I wake to a shaft of light creeping up the far wall and the sounds of a suburban morning. I am in a town, Oświęcim, Auschwitz, where people live, work, talk and breathe. Most of all, they hear. They see. I look out the window to the cobbled courtyard and, just beyond, to the grey, slatted concrete wall with its crown of barbed wire.

Its name was a cancer that spread in the soil, sprouting new tumours in the surrounding towns. Budy, Gleiwitz, Sosnowitz, Hubertschütte. With every kick, every shot, every bite, every cry, the poison grew stronger, extended further. In all, forty-three subcamps would bear its name before they sank back into the Polish countryside. But only one metastasised so aggressively that it came to consume its host. Birkenau. Two and a half kilometres away. That is what we mean when we say Auschwitz.

I walk the rail line through the gaping brick maw that once hungered for human flesh. I could turn around, walk away, but I continue. They are waiting.

It is the vastness that strikes me. The ruins stretch on to the distant forest. One hundred and forty-seven acres. An entire city. To imagine it full, pulsating—I simply cannot. And yet I have seen the mounds of shoes, of glasses, of hair, of dolls. I have searched for familiar names on suitcases. I have witnessed what little remains of their lives. The last gasps of hope. But for me, my generation, it can only be this: an eleventh plague, emptiness.

Along the northern fence there is a dirt road that few bother to walk. Every hundred and fifty metres, a wooden guard tower looms overhead. I had asked a guide where I could find the Czech Family Camp. ‘Go past the quarantine barracks and the Kommandant’s house until you reach the main camp road,’ he said. ‘The Familienlager is the second subcamp on the left.’ I thanked him and set off. ‘It is not open for tourists,’ he called out. ‘But the chain on the gate is loose. You can probably squeeze through.’

When I reach it I am taken aback by how ordinary it looks. There are no grand promises here, no Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes You Free. That feted symbol of Auschwitz, with its mocking rejoinder to their suffering, belongs elsewhere. Those who found themselves in this place never saw it, were never given cause to hope. The wind is picking up and the two halves of the gate jerk wildly against the chain. I stare at the mountings, thick cement pylons braced to tall iron posts, studded with tarnished knobs that once pulsed electricity through the surrounding wires. Now, it is all oxidised, coated in rust. I lean forward, my eye almost touching a single black-crusted barb, and look through to the ruins, to a boulevard of bloodied fingers.

They jut out from the earth at unnatural angles, rough and flaked. When all went to ash only they remained, pointing accusingly at the sky, how could you have let this happen? But their question went unanswered and so they were left to point for eternity at a God that was deaf, dumb and blind.

Five thousand people arrived in the Czech Family Camp in September 1943. Set apart from the routinised slaughter that was the very essence of the industrial complex, they were given this land as their own, to administer as they saw fit, answerable only to the savage criminal, Camp Elder Arno Böhm, and his Kapo cronies. Thirty-two wooden barracks in which to build a world. Men and women. Children too. Within weeks there was a school, a hospital, but also disease and hunger. The inmates began to die. In December, another five thousand came. The barracks overflowed but those inside made do. It was better than beyond the wire, where bald, emaciated Muselmänner—those who had given up on life—floated by in filthy striped rags.

It didn’t last. One night in early March 1944, all four thousand surviving inmates from the September transport were gathered together, forced to write postcards to their friends and family in Theresienstadt and moved to the nearby quarantine barracks. They were told that they would be sent to Heydebreck, a work camp in Germany. But there was no Heydebreck for them. It was another Nazi lie. Some inmates sensed what was to come; they encoded their cards with messages of impending doom. Others chose, in their desperation, to believe in the promise of Heydebreck. The following day, they were all loaded into trucks, driven along the main camp road, and delivered to the gas chambers. Among them was my grandfather’s brother, Shmuel Rand.

And so the December arrivals came to learn the meaning of ‘6SB’, the vague cipher that had been scrawled next to their names upon registration. Sonderbehandlung—special treatment—after six months. If their calculations were correct, they’d be ash before July. And yet they persisted with their makeshift society, stretching out the days with familiar routines, watching the sun set with dismay, wondering how they might have made the hours last longer.

Three hundred kilometres away, in the converted barn just outside Theresienstadt, my grandfather was still scribbling bibliographic notes on stiff white index cards, oblivious to the cynical act of theatre in which he was about to play a minor part. The Nazis were preparing the camp for a visit by representatives from the International Red Cross. Beautification of the streets was underway. Inmates were rehearsing plays and operas to perform for their guests. Two transports—some ten thousand people—had already been sent east in an attempt to ease the overcrowding. But it wasn’t enough. By April, plans were afoot for one last transport to the Czech Family Camp in Birkenau. This would be my grandfather’s role: to leave Theresienstadt, to help clear its stage.

How my grandfather came to be included on the May transport is difficult to explain. If his initial letter to Beit Terezín is any indication, he seems to have believed that the work of the Talmudkommando was done. After almost two years of privilege and protection he had suddenly become expendable. Yet the Talmudkommando continued its work until the liberation of Theresienstadt. There were still books to catalogue. Why then summarily dismiss and deport almost half of the workers, including my grandfather and Georg Glanzberg?

I am here in the Czech Family Camp, by coincidence, on the anniversary of his arrival, May 19. Sixty-eight years ago my grandfather stumbled off the train, clutching Georg Glanzberg’s arm. They were met by a squad of prisoners, some of whom they knew. Walk with us, they were told over the tumult of barking dogs and soldiers. The train track through the main gate had not yet been built. They climbed into the back of a truck and were driven the short distance to the place where I now stand.

I slip sideways through the gate and walk down the cracked road that divides the camp in two. In the distance, the train track swarms with movement, a steady procession of tourists heading towards the crematoria. Some branch off, along the path of the living, into the two banks of sturdy brick barracks.

There was no roll call in June, no liquidation. Another seven and a half thousand inmates had arrived in May and filled the Czech Family Camp with stories of the model ghetto: its streets swept clean, the factory tents in the town square dismantled and replaced with trees and flowers. A new currency had begun to circulate, the Terezín Crown, to be spent at the café and shops that had popped up on certain streets. There was even a stage where jazz bands played on Sundays. Only the barracks put paid to the lie. They still coursed with squalor and disease. Inmates scratched angrily at their skin, picking off bedbugs and lice, eating them.

This place swallows names, lives, memories. Familienlager BIIb. Thirty-two wooden barracks, four latrine blocks, two kitchen halls. A shit-soaked shrine to cynicism, to arrogance, in this wasteland of the damned. Yet, viewed from the heavens, it is a small tract of dirt. Here, where reason left the world, the impossible flourished.

And so he taught Jewish children. He taught them in Prague. He taught them in Theresienstadt. And he taught them in Auschwitz.

I nestle into the crook of the chimney where Block 31 once stood. The Children’s Block. A school. My fingers trace circles across the ground.

The Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt on 23 June 1944 was a success. The delegates wrote a glowing report: rumours of the harsh treatment of Jews were unfounded and the planned visit to a labour camp would not be necessary. Eichmann was delighted. He no longer required a backup plan. On 11 July 1944, the liquidation of the Czech Family Camp began. Only a few inmates—my grandfather and Georg Glanzberg among them—were selected as fit for work and transported to slave labour camps in Germany. The rest were sent to the gas chambers. By nightfall of 12 July, the camp had been cleared. Of the 17,500 people who had been imprisoned there, fewer than 1300 survived the war.

I look through the fence towards the forest over a kilometre away. There are three destroyed subcamps just like this one. BIIc. BIId. BIIe. Beyond them, I can just make out the ruins of the Kanada Barracks, where inmates sorted the belongings of all who arrived at Birkenau. Then, trees. I count the camps again, stopping when I am sure which is the third—BIIe—where my grandmother was imprisoned after arriving from Terezín on Transport EO on 6 October 1944, almost four months after the Czech Family Camp had been liquidated.

Hers was a most unusual welcome. On the morning of 7 October the Sonderkommando rose up and destroyed one of the gas chambers and crematoria, Krema IV. It was the only major act of rebellion in the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. From their quarters in BIIe, my grandmother and her fellow deportees would have been closer to the battle than any other prisoners.

The rebellion was quickly put down and, for three weeks, my grandmother waited in the shadow of the chimneys, holding on to her last possession, a gold ring her mother had smuggled into the model ghetto. As it was for my grandfather, Birkenau would come to define her. Every story will be said to have happened here. To us, she will not have left in an undocumented transport on 28 October along with one hundred other women. To us, there will be no Upper Silesia, no Merzdorf, no textile factory where Jewish women were forced to process flax. Not until it is too late to ask.

I reach into my backpack, pull out the crumbling orange paperback and begin to read. I know these words by heart, an entire universe foreseen. For years I have pictured him in its pages but now I can see he is not here. This is not his story. Rather, he is both author and reader, both giver and keeper of lives. This book is the guide to his deepest grief, his enduring shame, to lives swept away by unknowable forces and cast aside. Between its covers lie his friend, Georg Glanzberg, and his mother, Gusta Randová.

There is a patch of grass growing on a mound of earth behind the foundations of Block 31. I crouch down and pick at the blades, dig my fingers into the mud. It is here their story ends, here where I must find peace in not knowing. There will be names—Schwarzheide, Sachsenhausen, Merzdorf—but nothing more. It is too late. What’s left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend, post-memory.

I lie down in the dirt and stare at the crooked red fingers. I try to see the horror but it grows distant, blurring into the autumn sky. A cool drizzle begins to fall. My eyes have grown heavy. The stillness is broken by birds: a great flock, circling the chimneys.

The scene recedes into the background, leaving only the dirt and its blanket of white flowers.

In reply to your enquiry, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim would like to inform you that we have searched partially saved documentation which is kept in our archives. Unfortunately there is no information about RAND Jakub and ROUBÍČKOVÁ Daša. Prisoner number A-1821 was received by a man who was deported to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, 1944 from Ghetto Theresienstadt. The State Museum would like to explain that during the evacuation and liquidation of the KL Auschwitz by order of camp authorities almost all important documents of KL Auschwitz including prisoners’ personal files were destroyed. On the basis of the partially saved documents it is impossible to impart complete information about all people who were imprisoned in the camp.

We suggest you contact in your further search the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen…

I am currently researching a book about my late grandfather, Jakub Rand, who was one of the 1000 prisoners sent from the Birkenau Czech Family Camp to the BRABAG gasoline plant at Schwarzheide on 3 July 1944 and then, a day or so before the death march, to Sachsenhausen. I was hoping there might be some documentation of his internment in your archives. His birth date was 25.12.1911, his Auschwitz prisoner number was A-1821.

In reply to your inquiry concerning Jakub Rand, born 25/12/1911, I inform you that unfortunately no documents have been found in our archives.

Almost all the documents of the headquarters of Sachsenhausen including the card index of the detainees and nearly all the files of the detainees were destroyed by the SS in spring 1945 before the liberation of the concentration camp. The little, incompletely preserved files are for the most part in the archives of the Russian Federation. As far as these contain information on individual persons, they have been incorporated in a database.