The Book of Dirt

A silken frost settled across the fields beyond the town’s northern ramparts. Here, beneath the volcanic peaks, where grey cones threatened unspeakable violence, a great fortress had risen from the earth, its ravelins, escarpments and redoubts arranged like cascading stars, holding strong against malevolent winds. On top of the third bastion, Jakub R stood gazing out at the Elbe River and, on its furthest shore, the lone spire of Lidomerice’s oldest church.

It was almost a year since he had arrived, since he had trudged through the slush in the streets of Bohušovice, hurrying his mother along on the final leg of their journey to the town once called Terezín. There they waited a week in the sluice yard, lying on straw, filling out forms, eating potatoes, before being shown to their separate barracks. Gusta quickly made a home of it—to her, Theresienstadt was just another exile, no better or worse than the city. With her knitted doilies and pinned pictures, she made her bunk comfortable enough. What little she ate satisfied her meagre appetite. Work in the central laundry was demanding but bearable. And, when the day was done, she had two of her sons, Jakub and Shmuel. She waited for them to come and, at the sound of the curfew siren, as they hurried off back to their barracks, she lay down and closed her eyes.

From the moment he stepped through the camp’s sluice gate, Jakub, however, felt only the chill of confinement. He felt it in his back and in his knees as he crouched down to scrape ice from the pavements. He felt it in his arms and his neck as he hammered wooden boards to the crumbling barriers that separated the inmates from their captors. He felt it as the tepid brown liquid they called ersatz coffee sloshed around in his empty stomach. And he felt it on his cheek as he lay against the frozen straw pillow at night, breathing in the stench of his bunkmates.

Midway through January, Jakub was transferred to the Youth Welfare Department. ‘Formal classes are forbidden,’ said Gonda Redlich, when Jakub reported for duty at the boys’ rooming house on Hauptstrasse. Jakub knew of Redlich from his student days in Prague. A few years his junior, Redlich had been a popular leader in the Zionist youth group movement. His distinct light curls, button nose and thick, round spectacles were instantly recognisable and lent him an unlikely, bookish authority. He had been transported to Theresienstadt early, in 1941, and following a brief tussle with Fredy Hirsch was appointed department head. ‘Teach them songs, play games,’ Redlich continued. ‘And should the lyrics contain some educational elements, or the game include passing through the cities of Palestine, we cannot be blamed for what knowledge the children might absorb.’

Jakub stood before the class that morning and tried to sing but his voice shook and the children laughed. ‘You shouldn’t think about it too much,’ said Redlich. ‘The children get decent food. They have their own barracks with clean sheets and pillows. They do not experience this place like we do. You’ll learn to play and sing and lie. That is your role. And for your efforts you will get extra bread, extra butter, sugar…sometimes even sausage.’ Redlich shook Jakub’s hand. ‘I have put in a request that you be exempted from transport. There’s talk in the Council of Elders of an amnesty, but until then we need to look after our own. Tell your mother you’re safe. All of you.’

The bread was mostly stale, the butter often mouldy or rancid. The sugar was laced with grains of dirt and dead insects. Jakub tasted the sausage only once. It made him double over with cramps as he waited for the latrine. Still, he thanked Gonda Redlich and took his allotted rations so that he could provide for his family. Gusta made of them what she could, glad not to stand in line for the thin broth ladled out in the ground floor dining hall. She made stews and cakes in the warm-up kitchen and brought them back to her room. She divided them into portions, always sure to give herself the smallest one, and watched her sons eat—Shmuel quickly, ravenous from a day in the labour detail, and Jakub slowly. She could not see that he struggled to swallow, his throat clenched as he counted down to curfew.

Gonda Redlich was right. A transport amnesty was declared, but not before six transports had left the camp, taking more than seven thousand people east to a place called Auschwitz. It was, according to the Council, a labour camp. Jakub could see the change in the streets and in the barracks, but most of all he could see it in the classroom: children disappearing overnight, others turning to him when their parents were taken. Many knew him from their time at the school in Jáchymova Street. He sang them songs plundered from a childhood he had tried to escape. He invented stories, stringing them out until he could see the children smile. When Fredy Hirsch came to take the children for exercises in the yard, Jakub sank to the floor and folded his arms over his head. With eyes closed, he imagined himself under his father’s tallis, and willed more stories, more songs to come back to him.

He righted himself against the wall. Gonda Redlich was standing at the door, bemused. Jakub brushed himself down and nodded for Gonda to come in. ‘Sir?’ It still felt strange to address the younger man like that.

‘I’m glad you haven’t left for the day,’ said Redlich. ‘The classes are going well?’

Redlich fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. ‘This came from the Council. Murmelstein asked me to give it to you.’ He handed the paper to Jakub. ‘You are to report outside the post office tomorrow morning. Murmelstein was cagey on the details but I know there’s some new register of scholars. You’ve all been summoned.’ Redlich pulled off his spectacles and rubbed them on his shirt. ‘There’s more to you than we knew.’

‘You take us for fools, Doctor Israel. Thankfully that is not my concern. Family?’

‘My mother and brother. He has stayed on in the mobile labour detail. She was assigned to the laundry.’

‘What is it your sage says? The son must sustain his father and mother according to his capacity.’

‘Maimonides, yes. Almost ten years my father has been in his grave. I am the eldest son.’

‘Bread, yes. But also…how do you people call it? Vitamins C and P. Connection and pull. Essential for long-term health. I might add another vitamin: L, luck. That we seem to have in common.’

‘Your people have always fascinated me, Doctor Israel. My colleagues jeered when I set about studying you. Still, a passion is a passion. There is no escaping it. Five years ago I was in a small office surrounded by your books, praying for tenure, waiting on the next dinner invitation to remind me I was still alive. Then this…this all began. Those who had mocked me found themselves at the front lines while I am here, where my learning is valued. Such was the tide of history. Luck. Do you believe in the soothsayers, Herr Doctor?’

‘Our sages warn against it. Superstitions can harm only those who heed them.’

‘The Book of the Pious. Indeed. Still, they intrigue me. Those you credit as sages, those you fail to recognise. Take Maimonides, for example. Behind the misplaced devotion, he saw it exactly as it has come to be.’

‘But the meaning is undeniable. This war of Gog and Magog. You have already lost. God has moved on, chosen someone else. We of the Aryan bloodline have our Messiah, one who rules from Berlin. Yet here, in this town, in all the lands we control, your people continue to pray for miracles. You cling to folktales, blasphemies. I don’t know what you expect. Soon the war will be over, just as Maimonides said, and when it is, the prophecy will have been fulfilled. The Book of Judges, chapter twelve. You are familiar with the first verse, Doctor Israel?’

For weeks after the strange interview Jakub waited but there was no news. He watched the children draw, helped prepare issues of the student paper, Vedem. He tried to speak with Gonda Redlich but he was always busy.

Georg arrived at the start of July. Somehow word reached Jakub the following day; his friend was in the Bodenbach Barracks awaiting registration. Jakub hoped he would be assigned to the Youth Welfare Department. He asked Fredy Hirsch to pass on his request. Back in Prague the children loved him, he said. He shares your views, is passionate about them. He will bring credit to the work. I’d ask myself but…Fredy pulled him aside a while later. No luck. Gonda says he has been promised elsewhere.

Jakub’s disappointment lasted only a few days. One evening, as he trudged back from his mother’s barracks, trailing behind Shmuel, he thought of his friend and how it would feel to have a brother for whom he did not have to care, an equal. He went to the washroom where he splashed his face with water and rinsed his mouth of the foul lentil broth that had crept back up into his throat. Outside, the siren sounded, a call to fitful sleep. The main lights of the barracks flickered then went out, leaving only the dim bulbs that hung from the corridor ceilings. When he reached his bunk, he could see the outline of a man. It had happened before. Lost, confused souls. Souls who had ceased to care. Sometimes a stray from the madhouse in the Kavalier Barracks. The ghetto guard would come soon to collect him. But no, this outline was familiar. The rakish figure. The staccato finger-twitching.

For six months they had merely acknowledged to each other that they were alive: one or two carefully crafted sentences on official card. Jakub had wanted to explain, but this place could not be described. For his part Georg, too, held back. Prague was desolate, every building a reminder of what once had been. He went from his apartment to the museum and back again until the inevitable summons, when he was herded onto a train. Just another transport of Jews.

‘They’ve scattered us around the barracks,’ Georg continued. ‘Father is in Magdeberg, my brothers in Sudeten. Mother is in Dresden, at the other end.’

‘Not really, but they keep him close. Light work, tending to the halls mostly.’

‘It says only Arbeitsgruppe M. I’m to be at the gate on Südstrasse by eight.’ Georg turned the narrow slip over as if there might be a clue on the back.

Georg said little about his work, only that it involved books, ones they had not even known existed. Jakub didn’t press the matter. Georg was still adjusting to life in the ghetto.

‘I mentioned you to Otto Muneles,’ Georg said a few days later. ‘Murmelstein has put him in charge of the group.’ Georg sat down on his bunk and began to unbutton his shirt. ‘He is giving a lecture tomorrow. Go and speak with him.’

Otto Muneles had lost little of his gruffness in the months since Jakub last saw him. He was stooped, as if still tending to the dead. He did not move while he spoke, his arms thrust downwards, his hands balled into fists. His voice was a whisper, a seesaw of pitch and punctuation. Jakub found it unsettling that Muneles spoke in public at all, even in the dusky greyness of a barrack loft; listening to someone who communed with the dead tore away the scab of civility.

A polite smattering of applause and it was over. The small audience dispersed, climbing over beams, ducking, tripping, until they reached the stairs. Jakub made his way into the light.

‘Ah, Jakub! Good. Come closer.’ Muneles leaned over the lectern. ‘This group I have…I have gone over the original lists. Your name jumped out immediately. The officer who interviewed you was impressed. He was not certain you had the discipline required, but was confident you had the knowledge. In the end, he approved. It was the Youth Welfare Department that reclaimed you. Maybe Gonda thought he was doing you a favour. They have a healthy supply of Vitamin P. When it comes to drawing up the transport lists, the Commission immediately removes all their cards from the central registry. You can’t be put on a train.’

Muneles gathered his notes and tucked them under his arm. ‘Go back to your room. I just wanted to say that I’ve put in a request to have you transferred. Eichmann is unhappy with our progress. Like everyone else, we work slowly, make the job last as long as we can, but it is the attrition that troubles him. Murmelstein needs this to curry favour. He has installed me as a buffer, I know. He can’t be seen to fail and will sacrifice me if he must. In return he allows me to speak in his name. Now we wait and see where the real power lies.’

Each night, as those around them drifted off to sleep, Georg spoke of paper wonders, the treasures of a mighty kingdom far from the dirt and noise. He guided Jakub’s dreams to a world balanced on a spire of knowledge. The titles alone drew Jakub forward, called his heart to where the rest of him could not follow. Then, in the late summer, he received a yellow ticket.

The Klärenstalt was a short walk from the gate, back in the direction of Bohušovice, tucked beneath the town’s southern rampart. Three rooms sectioned off from the gardener’s hut in what was once a barn. They gave themselves a name too. Not what was printed on their time sheets. Not Arbeitsgruppe ‘M’ or Bücherfassungsgruppe. No, they called themselves the Talmudkommando. These men, who sat on wooden benches, their knees aching, were the custodians of wisdom, of the divine inspiration that had found its way onto the reconstituted pulp of a felled tree. Together they would compress the knowledge into a catalogue that would itself be a library to be plundered, devoured, rewritten.

Their names had once reverberated through the streets of Josefov. Jakub had sat in lecture halls and felt his soul ascend on a chariot of their words. He had read their commentaries on the sacred texts. Mojžíš Woskin-Nahartabi, Rabbi Šimon Adler, Rabbi František Gottschall, Dr Isaac Leo Seeligmann, Josef Eckstein. Jakub saw in them the wise men of his youth, who had huddled around cluttered tables in the shtibl with his father, and argued with an intellectual ferocity Jakub could not fathom. He longed to tell his mother, to say that the spirit of her beloved sat with him while he worked, and guided her son’s pen. But he would not add to her suffering.

In time, Jakub came to know the books by touch alone: the texture of their jackets on his fingertips, the deckled serrations on his knuckles, the pressure on his wrist as he lifted each one from the pile.

At first it had only been rumour, frantic whispers that cut across New Year’s prayers. Then came the paper slips, left on bunks for the occupants to find at the end of the day. Shmuel was among the first. He ran to Jakub. There must be a mistake. They…they promised. You have the letter. Gusta, too, misunderstood the nature of Jakub’s privilege. ‘Go to the Council,’ she pleaded. ‘We are only three left. It is not right.’ He joined the line of supplicants at the Transport Department, only to be summarily dismissed. ‘This time we have no choice,’ the man said. ‘The Kommandant himself selected the names. Nobody is exempt.’ His mother would not hear it. ‘You should not have left the children,’ she sobbed. ‘With them we were all safe. What good are your books?’ He tried to calm her. ‘Don’t listen to the bonkes. It is just another labour detail. And he will be free of this place.’ He handed her what was left of his rations so she could make Shmuel something for the journey. For three days he made do with ersatz coffee. Six weeks later they received the first postcard. It said only that Shmuel was well and hard at work. Jakub stared at the postmark: Arbeitslager Birkenau bei Neu-Berun.

Gusta rocked the pot over the stove in the warm-up kitchen on the ground floor of the Hamburg Barracks. The aroma was not unpleasant. She knew that most nights they ate better than the others in their room. What was left she would share, a spoonful here, a spoonful there. She had stitched together a family as best she could. Two hours was not enough to be a mother, even before Shmuel was taken. The boys would come straight from work every few days at six and be gone by curfew at eight. Otherwise she was alone. Then the mischlinge arrived: a large transport in early March, dumping an entire community of confused children in their midst. The youngest among them found homes with adoptive mothers but the older ones were forced to fend for themselves.

Two sisters were assigned to the bunks beside her. The older one was surly, protective. She came from Prague. She didn’t need any help, thank you. In a way Gusta found comfort in her brashness; the girl sounded much the same as her own daughter, Růženka, had at that age. The younger sister was different in both looks and manner. She spoke softly, politely, but seemed to feel safe only in her sister’s presence. Gusta tried approaching when the girl was alone, but she shied away and scuttled to her bed, the bathroom or the corridor.

The sisters spoke hurriedly between themselves. Gusta gleaned that their father was also in the camp, a metalworker and roustabout, by the sounds of it. He seemed to arrange to see them but would be late or not show up at all. She heard them lament the nights they had sat on his bunk, picking at the straw, pressing their faces to his dirty sheets, breathing him in, waiting in vain. They spoke of his apologies and his promise of gifts that, they said, never came. They depended instead on their mother. Parcels would arrive regularly, some by the camp postal service, others through less sanctioned means—Gusta heard talk of a gendarme, a Sudeten man who was known to the family. For the first weeks the girls seemed impervious to the resentful stares from those around them. They refused to speak, not even to her. They showed no interest in her sons when they came to visit. And yet, when the lights hissed and went out, they joined in the chorus of sniffs and whimpers. Gusta edged towards them and cooed them to sleep.

Their manner thawed with the summer sun. One evening, when Shmuel arrived, the girls stopped talking and turned to watch. The young man handed Gusta a shirt and a button. Soon Jakub appeared. He hurried across to his mother, kissed her forehead and unloaded food from his jacket pocket—bread, jam, butter, flour, a jar of the acrid Terezín spread made from mustard powder and vinegar. Shmuel rubbed his hands together. ‘Tonight another feast,’ said Gusta. The brothers waited while Gusta rushed off to prepare their meal. When she returned the three of them ate on the bunk as if it were a banquet table.

Before leaving, Jakub and Shmuel kissed their mother, then touched their lips to a grey square of paper nailed to the inside column of her bunk. The next morning the older girl leaned across while Gusta was tucking in her sheet. ‘What is that?’ she asked, pointing to the paper. ‘That is my husband, the father of my children.’ The girl held out a small bonbon. It was all that remained of her most recent package. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘My name is Daša.’

‘Your mother…’ Jakub bit the corner of the schnitzel and sucked on the oily crumb. ‘I’ll be at your house every night, I think.’

Daša laughed and cut into her potato. ‘She knows it is my favourite. I’m just worried they’ll spoil.’

‘No. Keep them coming, please.’ Jakub took another bite. He didn’t wait to swallow. ‘We promise they won’t go to waste.’

Gusta put her arm around Irena’s shoulder. ‘It’s good?’ The girl smiled and leaned into her. Gusta held her for a moment, savouring the warmth. Then, to Daša: ‘I’ll come too. If it’s not too much, of course. To think, we’re almost neighbours and we’ve never met.’

‘I didn’t know such charming girls existed. I must meet their mother. We have a lot to discuss.’

‘Well,’ Jakub said as he stood up, ‘thank you both. And your mother.’ He leaned over and kissed Gusta on the cheek. She prodded him, nodded towards Daša. ‘Go on,’ she said. Jakub began to crouch but caught himself and smiled awkwardly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks again.’ He knew not to turn around. Gusta would be shaking her head.

Gusta’s room had changed since Jakub’s last visit. A maintenance crew had lopped the top tier from each bunk in the name of beautification. Some of the remaining inmates were packing cases while others bartered with what they would leave behind. Only the mischlinge were sitting casually on their bunks, indifferent to the bustle around them.

‘They’re saying another five thousand people will go. Half on Wednesday then the rest on Sabbath. The lines outside the Magdeberg Barracks stretch past the gate. Those who aren’t seeking rescission are at the Labour Department begging for transfers.’

‘For now, yes. She longs to be with Shmuel in Birkenau. What do you hear from your father?’

‘Not much. He promises a visit to the new café soon, maybe for Irena’s birthday. His job pays, not enough for an entry ticket, but something. He has found a new circle. They play skat in their barracks after curfew. He’s confident he’ll be here for Irena’s celebration but I don’t hold him to his word. Mama wrote. She is making plans.’

The transports left as scheduled. In the streets and the barracks, there was a sense of relief. Of space. Of guilt.

On the morning of Irena’s birthday, Gusta reported sick to the Labour Department. A quick visit to the infirmary confirmed a mild case of Terezínka, the camp illness, diagnosed without examination by a harried nurse. The dormitory was empty by the time she returned but, as promised, each woman had left half a day’s bread ration under her pillow. Jakub, too, had saved his extra rations and Daša had arranged for dried fruit to be brought in from Prague. See you soon, the accompanying note from her mother had said. Gusta crumbled the stale bread into her pot, tipped lukewarm coffee over it and waited for the mixture to thicken. She then stirred in the margarine, jam, sugar, fruit and some extra flour she had traded with a baker for more regular access to the laundry.

They waited until after curfew to celebrate. The women gathered in the centre of the room as Gusta carried in the cake. Together they sang the ‘Terezín March’ while Irena merrily clapped along.

At first, the postcards were enough. They came every few weeks, a couple of lines here and there: ‘Just to say we have arrived and all is as it can be. Daddy sends his love too.’ Then: ‘I have found work in the kitchen. Irča and Daddy are also working.’ And: ‘Try as I do to mend them, our socks and underwear are wearing thin.’ Františka Roubíčková sent long letters back, detailed stories of her work in the factory, of their sisters, and of their family in Miličín. But there was no warmth in words alone and, in time, she began to despair. How could she hope to help them when they were so far away? How could she hope to be a mother? That she still had Marcela and Hana was, she knew, only temporary. They, too, would be called for when they reached the requisite age.

She lay awake at night, afraid of what dreams might come. And what of Ludvík? Was there not, in the blood that had brought about their captivity, an obligation to protect, to make good on his sacred oath? She might even find it within herself to forgive if now, when they needed him most, he could finally be a father. As Marcela and Hana slept beside her, Františka buried her face in the pillow, stifling the litany of curses that she spat into the feathers. The hours passed and her rage turned inwards, a caustic mix of exhaustion, fear and loneliness. Most of all, guilt. She was, at last, living well. While most had been sent to munitions factories, she had been conscripted to a small textile firm in Nové Město, sewing garments that would be sent to the Eastern Front. It provided a steady wage, enough to feed three mouths. And that wasn’t even allowing for the visits to Miličín. She had been spending much of her spare time navigating the bureaucracy of obtaining admission stamps for the packages, and the rest stockpiling the twenty kilograms she was permitted to send in each one: boxes with flour, salt, lentils, vegetables, with sweets and dresses. Most of all she sent a mother’s unguarded heart and then waited anxiously for the official postcards of receipt. But that was no longer enough. If she was to hold them again, she would have to go to Theresienstadt.

At dawn she kissed the two sleeping girls and rushed to the factory. She sat at her machine, forcing the material across its dimpled plane. The needle pecked at the seams, snatching them together. When a piece was done, Františka tossed it in the basket at her feet. Before lunch, she rose from her bench and approached the supervisor. ‘I must go for a while.’ The man was not unsympathetic; he had grown fond of Františka. She was skilled, able to patch together a jacket in half the time it took many of the other women. She was also known to slip him the odd cigarette, offer to join him outside for a smoke. He, too, had lost family. His wife’s brother had married a Jewess. For months they tried to obtain an exit visa, bribed everyone they thought might have influence. The supervisor himself had given them money against his better judgment, money that he now wished he had kept. When the borders closed he found himself trapped in a hopeless cycle of charity until the letter came from the Jewish Council summoning the woman and their three children to the fairgrounds. Then he sighed with relief. ‘Certainty, Roubíčková,’ he said. ‘That is what the family needed. Better just to know.’ His wife now spent all her days with the brother, comforting him with lies. She hardly ever came home to see her husband. ‘It has ruined us. But I dare not ask her to choose. Afterwards, we will see.’ He wished Františka luck and sent her on her way.

Františka waited across the road, beneath a canopy of summer blossoms. She lit a cigarette, her third, and studied the uniformed men streaming through the main gate of Peček Palace. The building had grown into its reputation. If she was not mistaken, it had blackened during the occupation. Its very presence was oppressive, this greystone Goliath that stomped on the skulls of her neighbours. Even in the heat of the day, almost all the windows were sealed. Františka puffed one last time on the cigarette then dropped the smoking butt on the ground. She was ready.

The man behind the desk had not even looked up when he called her from the queue. She was one of many and had waited for over an hour. Most before her turned around in tears. One man fell to his knees, pleading, crying. His howls echoed through the great hall as he was dragged away. Or perhaps Františka had confused them with the screams from the basement.

‘If they are here, there is reason. Go home and wait. You will be notified soon enough.’

The clerk flinched, lifted his head. ‘They are Communists? Criminals? Jews?’

‘No favours. It is simply not possible.’ The clerk looked over her shoulder. ‘Next!’

‘I am not leaving. I demand to see my children, to know they don’t suffer.’

‘Even the Reichsprotektor eats gruel, Paní Vrtišová. Your girls are no worse off than you or I.’

‘Four months! Do you hear me? Four months I’ve had to survive on scraps of paper from my girls. Enough.’

The clerk looked nervously towards the approaching guards, shaking his head to ward them away. ‘Paní Vrtišová, I wish I could help. The town is closed. That’s a fact. Then there is the issue of travel within the Protectorate, registration and other such administrative burdens. First you must get…’

The clerk flicked through the wad of forms and pulled out two sheets. He slid the glasses from his face, squeezed the bridge of his nose. ‘Do as you wish. What’s a piece of paper if it will calm your nerves? Maintain order. That’s what they tell me. But understand this: nothing will come of it.’

Františka returned every few weeks to renew the application. They all came to know her, this pitiful Aryan woman, her good sense turned septic with Jewish dreams. She took the forms without a word and filled them in at the bench in the corner before defiantly returning to have them stamped and filed.

When the plain enevelope arrived in late November, Františka Roubíčková tore it open and pulled out the paper. It took a moment to sink in: her name, a date, a heavy blue stamp. And beneath it a single word: Bohušovice.

Františka Roubíčková tilted the coat rack against her shoulder and dragged it through the hallway into the lounge. Scarves and coats drooped from its arms, brushing against the doorframe before coming to rest in wilted repose.

This will have to do, she thought as she stepped away from her makeshift tree. It could not stand in the usual corner, to do so would make a mockery of Christmas. Let it remain there awkwardly, in the middle of the room. She grabbed the coats from the rack and threw them against the window bench.

The gurgle of bubbling sour sauce drifted from the kitchen. Františka rushed back to stir the pot. The sauce was thick; specks of flour had congealed into tiny pebbles. In the oven below, orange light glowed over a fat fillet of beef. It was already blue by the time Marcela returned from Miličín, and had the whiff of decay, but Františka salted and scrubbed it before throwing it to the back of her icebox. To have beef at all was a luxury when the ration provided only for the discarded flank of a horse. She lowered the flame and left the sauce to simmer.

Marcela and Hana played in the back courtyard, diving into snowy dunes, squealing with delight. Most of the neighbourhood children had disappeared with their parents and so the building and its surrounds had become their private playground. Each day they invented new games based on the rumours that echoed through the stairwell, games like Razor Blade Man, where they took turns playing Prague’s most feared phantom, hunting each other down with a sharpened twig. Or Gestapo Raid, which was much the same. Františka watched on from the window, proud that she had raised such resilient girls, but more so that Marcela had kept the worst of the occupation from Hana. More than once she had seen the two of them marching together with gusto or singing or sharing parcels of food she had packed for them. She asked them what they were playing, though she knew the answer. It was always the same. ‘Daša and Irča.’

She opened the door and called to them. ‘Come inside and wash. Aunt Emí will be here soon and there is svíčková for lunch. Then a surprise.’ The girls looked up, uncertain. ‘Marcela, watch over the pot while I’m gone.’

Františka headed towards the tram stop in Mladoňovicova Street. As she neared the corner, she glanced at her watch, Ludvík’s watch; she was early. Emílie’s train was not due for a while. A few steps away, the chimes above Žofie Sláviková’s grocery door jingled. Františka ducked inside. Neither woman acknowledged the other. Žofie was eyeing her only other customer with suspicion, notebook in hand, pretending to write orders. Františka stopped to examine each item on the sparsely stocked shelves. She waited for the stranger to leave then picked up a few potatoes and a bushel of sugar before heading to the counter. Žofie Sláviková stamped the cards and handed them to Františka as the chimes went into a jangled frenzy. The two women watched Štěpánka Tičková scurry through the door, muttering to herself, arms wrapped around her hessian satchel.

‘I have it on good authority—’ she spat through cracked lips. It had been like this ever since her co-conspirator Jáchym Nemec was sent to the fortress town: Štěpánka Tičková wandered the streets of Žižkov, searching for a sympathetic ear. Turned away by all, starved of attention, she grew thin and mangy, her voice hoarse.

‘Your daughters—’ Her index finger unfurled with arthritic effort. ‘I have noticed they grow fat.’

Žofie Sláviková slammed her fist on the counter. ‘Štěpánka Tičková! Take what you’ve come for and be quiet about it.’ Františka tucked the paper bag under her arm and rushed out the door to meet her sister.

Emílie sucked the sauce from her bread dumpling before dipping it back in. It was something she’d done since childhood, a habit that had infuriated their mother. ‘So,’ she said as a rising brown tide consumed the spongy dough. ‘What time do you leave?’

‘The train is at eight. I should arrive at Bohušovice around ten. Terezín is not far. And I will return on the last train.’

‘If you don’t mind, I brought gifts.’ Emílie reached into her bag and pulled out a damp cloth sack tied with red ribbon. ‘It’s Christmas cake. Irena’s favourite. For her birthday. Also, these.’ She placed two wooden angels on the table. ‘One for you. One for them. To watch over you all.’

Františka picked up one of the angels and ran her finger along the crest of its wings, up its neck, to the halo. From the lounge she could hear Marcela and Hana searching through Emílie’s case for Christmas presents. ‘Come,’ Františka said.

So this was the surprise, a chance to chase away the storm outside. They plundered the drawers in Františka’s studio and tore at the fabrics they found with scissors, with knives, by hand. They threw the strips in the air and watched them catch on the coat rack’s outstretched arms. In each leaf on their makeshift tree was a forgotten dream, reclaimed and repurposed for merry hearts.

Long after Emílie had nestled into the forgotten recess of Ludvík’s mattress, after Marcela and Hana fell asleep under quilted down, after the angel had been placed on top of the coat rack to bring peace on this refuge of tranquillity and hope, Františka Roubíčková tiptoed over to the dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. There it was, Daša’s old jewellery box, its hinges broken, the felt worn down to the chipped wood. It was all she could think to grab when Ottla B had tapped frantically at her door that night, almost a lifetime ago, hours after she kissed her eldest daughters goodbye. ‘Please,’ her neighbour had said, dropping a folded piece of paper in Františka’s hand. ‘Take this. For Bohuš.’ Františka was lost for words. In her most desperate hour Ottla had found the courage to run, to escape Žižkov. ‘When this is over, when he comes home, give it to him. Tell him his mother is coming. Promise me you will—’ Ottla’s voice faded on the wind. She looked around, saw two figures turn in from Mladoňovicova. ‘Thank you,’ Ottla said as she ran into the night. It was the last Františka saw of her.

Františka pushed aside the paper, pulled out a small felt pouch and tipped its contents onto the kitchen table. She picked up each ring in turn, testing them on her fingers, under her tongue, beneath the folds of her clothes. Her eyelids grew heavy and she settled on one Ludvík had given her soon after they first made love. A simple gold band. So this was the value of her heart, a currency greater than cigarettes, greater than coffee. Almost weightless, the infinite rounding of life. She pushed it into the moist Christmas cake and waited for dawn.

She danced between the lines in the kingdom of paper. It started with the slightest glimpse, a blonde curl behind a slanting lamed, a flash of skin—perhaps a wrist, a shoulder or even a thigh—through the crook of a beit. By some mistake of gravity he had ascended to the heavens where only gods and angels dwelled. He looked at Georg, at Muneles, at Gottschall, at Seeligmann, but they were lost between pillars of pulp, blinded to this shimmering sprite. She grew more brazen with the days, revealing more of herself on each new page. There was nothing suggestive in her moves, just the sheer delight of freedom. She cared little for his startled gaze. At times she swirled the ink around her in a frantic pirouette until the words blurred like a shroud across her shoulders.

Jakub sat back and wiped his brow. No, it was pointless. It was like leering at a sister, a child. And was he not just seeing her with his mother’s eyes? He knew how Gusta looked on when they talked, imagining what might have been, what still could be. But theirs was nothing more than a convenient alliance: her packages, his privileges, pooled to create a semblance of plenty. Outside the barracks, away from these books, she danced for others. He had seen her in the park on his way back from the bastion, huddled close to a young man under a tree. And what to make of the other times when she would loiter near the gate at day’s end and run the moment she caught sight of Jakub coming up Südstrasse? Jakub was certain he saw the gendarme right himself before hurrying over to unfasten the lock.

Jakub looked at the SS man by the door. He rarely moved, as if asleep. Only once had he stood to attention, when Eichmann himself came to visit, to compliment these shackled scholars, to show that he, too, could speak in their tongue. It is very important work you are doing, gentlemen, Eichmann had said. That was before September, before the Council announced the resumption of transports. Before they took Shmuel away. He should have known. Eichmann’s presence boded ill for them all.

Jakub pressed down on the calfskin jacket of his next book and hoped that when he opened it she would not be there. He read the words: Sefer Darchei No’am, The Ways of the Torah. A book of responsa by Mordechai Halevi, published in 1697. Now item number Jc 10008b. He jotted down the details and a short commentary, first on a blank sheet and then, when he was satisfied with what he wrote, on a standard index card. This time Daša was nowhere to be seen.

My dearest Emí,

I send you kisses and, of course, Marcela, who I hope remembers to pass on this letter.

Everywhere the winter’s sun plays tricks with the light, making rainbows on the frost, but inside me there is only black. It is two weeks since I saw them, two weeks since I felt the warmth of their fingertips through the wire. Yes, a wire fence. Oh, Emí, forgive me. There was so much I couldn’t tell you when I returned. I was tired but also ashamed, as much for them as for myself. I don’t know what I expected, how I hoped it would be. Perhaps you will understand why I held it inside that night, why the following morning I walked you to the station without a word, why now I must tell you like this.

The train arrived at Bohušovice before eleven. Two men in different uniforms sat on the platform, smoking and playing checkers. One rested a rifle across his lap, the other had a whistle hanging from his neck. When I asked them for directions their faces darkened. The rifleman signalled for the other to deal with me.

The whistle jangled against his buttons as he stood. He looked me over from head to toe before his eyes came to rest on the box under my arm. I pretended not to notice but then the rifleman shook his head and mumbled something. Yes, the other man said. An inspection is in order. Can’t be too cautious. I held open the box and he looked inside. At last he took out the Christmas cake wrapped in its cloth sack. My wife will like this, he said. Anything, I thought. Anything but that. I thrust my hand into the box and—oh God, Emí, I am sorry—I pulled out the carved wooden angel. I held it out to him and for a moment he hesitated. Then the rifleman jumped in. Yes, yes, he said. For my daughter. The other placed the Christmas cake back in the box and escorted me outside.

Bohušovice was a quiet town. The man with the whistle pointed to a road that cut through the centre. Just keep walking, he said. Do not branch off. In the end I would reach the fortress. The people of Bohušovice are no longer accustomed to seeing strangers. I could read it in their puzzled faces. They have closed their minds to what festers beyond. I am told this is the same path they all walked, Ludvík and the girls, but they have since built a railway line so the townsfolk do not feel like accomplices to it all. I walked for half an hour, past the town and through the valley. Emí, it is strange to say but in many ways it reminded me of Sudoměříce. Even in the cold, with snow underfoot, there was a sense of serenity, of beauty. I wondered whether perhaps the girls might feel at home.

Then I saw it. A heavy wire fence with razor wire curled across its top, stretching across the sunken brick walls of an immense fortress. The road led to a gate where a guard stood warming his hands over a fire pit. I greeted him. He responded in Czech; he was a gendarme, not a soldier. We spoke for a while; he seemed uncertain about my presence. One arm rested on his truncheon throughout. I asked him about the daily funeral procession. It would be here soon, he said. Just like Daša told me. I asked if he knew many of the people who lived here and he said he did. I took two cigarettes from my pocket and offered him one. We stood there smoking, taking in the strangeness of our encounter. There was something about him that bothered me. I asked whether he knew my Daša. It was an innocent question, just a way to pass the time, but his face, Emí, his face changed. You know what it’s like to see a pleasant smile contort into a lecherous grin? There was hunger in his eyes. Hunger and knowledge. My chest burned. Yes, he said, letting out a great puff of smoke. She comes here some days during the lunch break. She has been making arrangements for your visit. I am glad to oblige.

I’m sure he would have gone on but we were interrupted by the approaching wail of the funeral procession. The hearse—a horse’s cart wheeled by four men—was heading towards us. In front walked a rabbi with a deep voice, chanting lamentations for those who trailed behind. I saw the awful cargo, a pile of bodies, ten or more, covered only by a sheet that kept lifting with the wind. The gendarme released the latch on the boom gate and allowed the hearse to pass. The rabbi motioned for the bearers to halt and, for a moment, these poor souls rested on the precipice between two worlds. The families set upon the tray, clutching at their loved ones’ arms. They kissed their hands and faces, whispered blessings. Only when the hearse moved on did I see the girls, at the back, among the mourners. They played the part, as if they hadn’t seen their mother waiting there.

The gendarme stood guard while the mourners squeezed against the fence, straining to see the hearse as it rolled off. When at last it was gone, they began the slow march back into the ghetto until only my girls remained. Daša ran over to the gendarme and whispered something in his ear. He shook his head. She whispered something else. Without a word, he took out a cigarette and crossed to a nearby hut, where he sat on the stoop, his face turned away.

How we rushed at each other, Emí. Even through the wire we smothered one another’s faces with kisses, careful not to catch our lips on the freezing metal. It is less than a year but they have grown! Daša is a woman now and Irena no longer looks like a child. Ludvík was unable to come. He is employed in a workshop at the other end of town. I asked if he provides for them. They were reluctant to answer but Daša kissed me again on the cheek and said, as if in jest, He gives what he can. I could not let the atmosphere spoil so I reached into the box and pulled out some socks and other things that I had packed. I threaded them all through the fence, told Irena they were for her birthday but that she should share them with her father and sister. Then we sang together, loudly, joyously, because she was growing up and, no matter what the current situation, it was still Christmas. The gendarme appeared entranced by our ways, as if for a moment he had forgotten himself.

Too soon the lunch break came to an end. Daša said that she was returning to the kitchen and Irena to the sewing workshop. I laid the box at my feet and pulled out the last package. I had wanted Irena to unwrap it but it was too big to pass through the wire, so it was left to me to peel away the cloth. They clapped and cheered when they saw it: the moist Christmas cake. Irena began to laugh. What is it? I asked. What is so funny? Oh, Mama, she said. If only you could have been there to taste my birthday cake. You cannot imagine how we must make do. I passed them both a small handful. Eat carefully, I said. You never know what Saint Nicholas has hidden inside. We are not children, said Daša. Yes, I said, but your teeth can still break.

It was I who got the ring. I felt it the moment the cake hit my tongue. What a fool I must have looked digging into my mouth, catching hold of it while I sucked the dough from its surface! I looked at the gendarme but he was facing the ghetto. I pulled Daša close and dropped the ring into her palm. For Christmas, I said. Use it however you must. I looked again to the gendarme. Remember who you are, I said. Remember what you are. And like that it was over. Daša and Irena gave me one last kiss and ran off back down the road. The gendarme resumed his position by the gate.

Oh, Emí, can you forgive me like I have forgiven Daša? To have kept this secret when my whole life I have told you everything. Why is it that I thought the worst of Daša and that gendarme? Could it simply be that I no longer recognise myself? That my eyes have lost focus? It is true. This situation has dressed us all in fraying rags. Pray that we may stitch them back together.

Always your loving sister,

Františka

Draymen in ragged trousers, their chests bare in the morning light, hauled wooden hearses towards the delousing station. Gaunt faces stared up—elderly and infirm—wincing with discomfort, grey hair tumbling in matted clumps around protruding cheekbones. Soon they would be back, standing outside the kitchens, begging for scraps, but for now the promise of chemical clouds, relief. Jakub and Georg kept their distance; rather be late than infested. At the nearest crossroad they branched off onto Südstrasse. The gendarme tipped his hat, greeted them by name and unlocked the gate. They passed through and headed towards the Klärenstalt.

Spring had thickened the air inside. It was early, or late. Here there was no time. Weiss, the carpenter, scurried from table to table, picking up books, darting back to place them in the waiting crate. The others hunched over their stations. Jakub reached across and took the next book on the stack. A simple siddur, Jakub thought. A prayer book looted from the genizah of a synagogue that was now ash. Worthless. The leather was dry, worn, rubbed, with splits along the spine and edges. Only the clasp remained intact: a tarnished lion, its claws clutching at a small orb. The blackness hid the intricacy of the metalwork, clogging the grooves that fashioned the beast’s fur.

Jakub eased his nail beneath the lion and gently pulled. The clasp strained before springing open with a muted pop. He slid the strap aside and lifted the cover. The first page was blank, mottled by specks of mould and the smudges of impatient fingers. He flipped the page over, then another and another. All blank. Running his hand along the paper, Jakub could feel the faint relief of letters that might have been. The page was uneven: taut around the edges but slack in the middle. He turned several more pages then stopped. He looked around quickly and leaned over the book, shielding it from view.

The handiwork was crude but effective. Slivers of wood had been pasted around a hollowed compartment. The walls were far enough from the fore edge and top square not to arouse suspicion; to the casual eye it was a siddur like any other. The compartment was packed with a clump of tawny dirt, little more than a handful, but enough to fill the space. Jakub pushed the dirt aside, spilling some onto the surrounding paper. There must be something buried inside, he thought, something to warrant such effort to conceal it, but he could find nothing. He pulled a spoon from the buttonhole in his lapel and began to scoop the dirt into his tin cup, watching it suck at the last droplets of water. Soon the compartment was empty, only a few dark streaks across the pastedown at its base. Jakub blew into the space to clear the remaining dust. The streaks held firm, curled, purposeful. Two letters. Mem. Taf. Together Met. Death. He blew again and they were gone.

‘Pencils down, gentlemen.’ It was Muneles. Jakub grabbed the cup, covered it with his palm and rushed out of the Klärenstalt into the late afternoon sun.

Professor Leopold Glanzberg had been transferred to the Ghetto Watch after the August purge of young and, in the Camp Kommandant’s opinion, potentially rebellious men. The new Watch consisted exclusively of men over forty-five, men who could be easily subdued, whose only real authority rested in the esteem with which these elders were held by the other Jews. Professor Glanzberg was little more than a kindly face standing at the gate to greet those who had business in the Magdeberg Barracks.

‘And you are quite certain about the orb?’ The black cap with its thin beige cresting wave and scalloped clover insignia was too small for Glanzberg’s head. When he spoke it shifted around, releasing sprigs of grey brush that disappeared into his unruly beard. It was said his mind had softened but his eyes still burned with the intensity of the learned.

‘A grape. Yes, a lion picking a grape from its vine. The symbol of Rabbi Judah Löew, the great Maharal of Prague. He had it etched above his door in Široká Street. Few know of this detail. Most only think of the lion. Still, it’s the empty pages that interest me.’

Jakub followed as Professor Glanzberg set off along the street. The town pulsated with the activity of another day’s end. Shoulders collided, dust kicked at worn heels. Gendarmes manned the corners, tried to direct the flow. Jakub tried to pick Glanzberg’s voice from the crowd.

‘It is not permitted,’ Jakub said. ‘Weiss will have taken it. I…just…no.’

Professor Glanzberg broke from the weary stream into a narrow alley between two houses. ‘Here,’ he said and turned another corner to reach a deserted cul-de-sac. ‘Please,’ he said and held out his hand. Jakub passed him the metal cup. Professor Glanzberg peered inside, shook the cup, nodded. For a few moments he stood there, as if unsure of how to start. Then:

‘It sounds preposterous, I know. There was a woman, impossibly old. Mad. We didn’t know her name, hadn’t seen her around the community. She started coming to the museum several months before the occupation. She would visit every few days, more so once the Nazis came. We didn’t charge her admission, there was no point. It was obvious she couldn’t pay. She greeted us all warmly, hung her coat near the entrance. Then she would begin her rounds.

‘I was given the task of following her, working out her game. It was the great advantage of my role; I was invisible, just the man in the background tending to the exhibits. I don’t think it would have mattered to her, though. She was blind to all who passed by. It was always the same route through the display halls; she never missed a single exhibit. She talked to herself as she walked, not the soft mutterings of the old and infirm, but full, animated conversations.

‘It took me a few days but I came to understand that she was giving tours, talking to an audience only she could see. On closer inspection—I dared step as close to her as I am to you, pretending to dust a nearby plinth—I saw that she looked only to the gaps between our displays. Her babble seemed to unscramble as I drew near. When I was right beside her I could understand every word she said. Here was a fragment of stone from the Ten Commandments, there was the knife Abraham had intended to use to sacrifice Isaac. In this cabinet was a dried chunk of flesh from the fish that swallowed Jonah, on that wall a spoke from the chariot Elijah rode to heaven. I reported back to the directors. They decided to leave her be. There was a certain charm in her presence. After all, what harm is there in a woman who sees what isn’t there? It is a quality we might all do well to develop.’

‘The Kavalier Barracks are filled with such people.’

‘Pshah…Listen. There was one exhibit towards the end of her tour…something clearly tacked on to appease her imaginary audience. Like all our visitors they hungered for local fare. So she told them of a book, an ordinary siddur, with no identifying marks other than a clasp made of silver, a lion facing the rising sun, its claws stretching outwards, holding a grape. The Maharal’s own prayer book. Nobody dared open it, she said, so great was the respect for this holy man. Just as well. They would have been horrified. Its pages were rubbed clean. Before he died, she said, he gathered the words so that he could take them with him to heaven. But there was another more pious reason for the harvest: he didn’t want to desecrate a holy book. You see, she said, he had one final task before he could depart this world, something that would ensure he could die in peace, and the siddur was to play an integral part. Using the blade with which he had performed countless circumcisions, he fashioned a storage compartment within its pages. Then, she continued, in the middle of the night, while his students and followers slept, he dragged himself up the stairs into the attic genizah of the Altneu Synagogue where, in the back corner, under the old discarded Torah scrolls and holy books, there lay a splintered pine coffin with the disintegrated remains of his beloved golem. Rabbi Löew shuffled over, reached into the area that would have been the corpse’s chest and, whispering a solemn prayer, pulled out a fistful of dirt.’

‘The clay man’s heart?’

‘Precisely. I could see from the glint in her eye that she knew her audience was, like you, feasting on her every word. She went on: For years the Maharal had ascended his pulpit, confident in the knowledge that the golem was resting peacefully above his head. But one day he noticed that it had become an effort to take those steps. He could no longer address his people in the same strong voice that, for so long, had filled them with awe. He was an old man. Soon God would call on him to return to the kingdom of souls. Naturally, his thoughts turned to his child. What would become of it when he was gone? He’d watched his congregation grow sick, watched saintly men turn devious and conniving. They spoke openly of finding the golem, bringing it back to life. With such a servant they would have no need of faith. He summoned his beloved disciples, Yitzchok ben Shimshon Ha-Cohen and Yaakov ben Chaim Sasson Halevi, to prepare them for what was to come. When I am gone, take the dirt and bury it in the cemetery on the hill, he said. Mix it with the earth so it may rest undisturbed, free from the designs of man.

‘A few days later, on what would soon be his deathbed, she said, he was struck with a sudden bout of remorse. To think his beloved child would return to the earth like any other man, that he would be nothing more than a memory. He simply could not bear it. What father can contemplate the erasure of his child? And so he resolved to use what remained of his strength to save the most vital organ, the clay man’s heart. It would live on forever in the known world, in a simple siddur, hidden within the shelves of the eternal library of life.’

‘Is dirt. By its very nature it is what you make of it. But now I must go. Come by my kambal tomorrow night. Bring the dirt. There is something else you must know.’

Cold water sputtered from the washroom tap. Hands pushed forward, scrubbing, stippling the trough with the muck of a day’s toil. A steamy haze emanated from the stinking bodies crammed together. Some soaked their shirts, squeezed them out, applied the cool dampness to their skin. Others threw handfuls of water against their chests. Jakub held his spot, watching the earth swallow the murky liquid and congeal into a muddy sludge that would not be washed away.

Alone on his bunk he spooned the mud into his hand and rolled it between his palms. It took form, not quite a ball, more the uneven contours of a child’s fist. He squeezed and waited for a response but none came. The clay was heavy, warm. It left no residue on his skin.

When he woke it was still beside him. Who would steal a lump of clay, anyway? Shoes, cups, spoons, yes. But not this. Not dirt. Jakub reached out, slid his finger along its smooth surface. It was still moist. Across the narrow gap between the bunks, he saw Georg beginning to stir. Soon there would be moans, movement, chaos. Jakub slid the clay under the corner of his straw mattress and hoisted himself from the bunk.

For the first time he made mistakes. The books felt foreign, otherworldly. He had to check each detail, double-check. The words would not come, there was nothing to say. Had he not fled the village and escaped the folktales of his ancestors? Was he not a man of reason? Of enlightenment? Why now, in this ghetto prison, must his mind retreat into fiction?

Jakub rested his pen on the desk and looked around. The work continued as normal. That night he would go to the Magdeberg Barracks and find the Professor’s kambal. Jakub knew little of such places, only that they existed. Neither bunkrooms nor apartments, they were the requisitioned nooks under staircases, behind storage shelves, in disused spaces, closed off and decorated for personal use. It was in these kambals that contraband changed hands, that young lovers met for undisturbed trysts, that false kings held court. But it was also where composers filled pages with clefs and crotchets, artists created life with whatever substances they could find, great minds distilled their thoughts. Professor Glanzberg’s kambal was at the back of the Hall of Souls, the central filing room in which every prisoner’s details were kept in triplicate, one copy for this world, one for the next and one to hang precariously in geheinem Terezín, the purgatory of Theresienstadt.

The halls of Magdeberg’s administrative wing were deserted when he arrived. For once the ghetto was at peace. Jakub made his way past the department offices to the door of the Hall of Souls. He held the cup firmly to his shirt. The ball of clay had dried during the day and crumbled. By the time he returned to his bunk it was as he had first found it, an unremarkable mound. Jakub was careful to scoop what he could back into the cup.

The door opened to a narrow staircase lit only by a dull glow from the corridor. Scraggy grey carpet lined the stairs, crushed by the recent passage of ten thousand feet. He removed his shoes and socks and stepped down into the dim passage. The door whined shut behind him, drawn back by a rusted spring. Blackness. Jakub steadied himself against the wall, picking up speed on the stairs as plaster turned to stone against his hand. He knew he had reached the subterranean maze, an arterial system of tunnels that ran beneath the fortress town, where soldiers once scrambled to defend their empress’s name against invading hordes that never arrived and partisans now ferried whatever necessities they could carry on their crooked backs. The hollowed earth held the chill of winters past.

A sliver of light across the ground signalled a door. He searched for a handle but felt only wood and cold metal straps. The light caressed his toes, and with it a warm breeze that carried the drone of a chant. He pressed his shoulder to the door and nudged it open. It was exactly as the bonkes had it: a vast corridor of filing cabinets reaching to the ceiling, lit by bulbs, stretching into the distance. At the far end, Jakub could make out a curtain, behind which were the shadows of two figures sitting in stillness over a raised ledge. The drone grew louder, swirling from all around in the dead air—AH, H, AH, AV, V, AV—a diminuendo of sighs.

As he approached the curtain, Jakub saw the shadow figures stir. One slid back and rose, growing to a monstrous height then shrinking as it darkened against the fluttering fabric. The curtain was pulled aside to reveal a squinting face. ‘Jakub!’ It was Professor Glanzberg.

‘Please, please,’ the old man said. ‘You’ll have to excuse the state of the place. With every new trainload the filing room expands and I have to make the necessary adjustments. The clerks fuss over the files. Bureaucrats! The noise is unbearable—paper brushing against paper…I tell you, it toys with one’s sphincter. Then they ship a trainload off and I’m back to where I started.’ Professor Glanzberg held open the curtain to allow Jakub through.

It took a moment for Jakub’s eyes to adjust to the harsh light of an unshaded floor lamp near the hanging divide. The kambal was sparsely appointed: a single mattress wedged into the corner, a plain bookshelf against one wall and a table near the centre with four chairs—short, like those found in a house of mourning—placed around it. The man sitting down did not turn around but Jakub recognised his shape.

‘In Prague we were ten,’ said Otto Muneles without waiting for Jakub to sit. ‘Now we are two. The Council of Formations. Or what’s left of it. For years we gathered in the attic of the Altneu where nobody dared tread, but here…Please, take a seat.’ Jakub lowered himself onto a chair. ‘We weren’t sure that you’d come,’ continued Muneles. ‘You have enough to worry about without this. And old Leopold’s tales…I know how it must sound.’

‘Prague is a city of stories,’ said Glanzberg. ‘Words are in its very mortar. Mostly we dismiss what we hear as legend or gossip. But know this, young Jakub: much of it is true. Take us, for example.’

Muneles shifted in his chair. ‘Five hundred years ago, Rabbi Löew had a private audience with Emperor Rudolf II. To this day what they discussed remains a closely guarded secret.’

‘Rudolf was a kind, tolerant man,’ said Glanzberg. ‘But he was surrounded by advisers who wished only ill for the Jews, and who filled the emperor’s head with false accusations: sorcery, witchcraft, all kinds of treachery. Naturally, he grew fearful of what he had been told, but he trusted the great rabbi. He trusted in his reputation for learning and wisdom and honesty. And so the emperor summoned Rabbi Löew to an apartment in the castle where they could speak in private, and laid out his offer: Rabbi Loew was to investigate the legends and report back to the emperor. Bring them to me, Rudolph said, so that my mind will be at ease. Together we can banish your sheds and mazziks from these lands. In return, the emperor vowed to revoke all expulsion orders that his father had made, and allow the Jews to live freely in his kingdom.

‘Rabbi Löew rushed back and called together nine of his most trusted friends to form the Council of Formations, and appointed as its leader the one who dwelled with the spirits, the head of the Chevra Kadisha. On the first night, they met in the attic of the Altneu. We will do as he asks, Rabbi Löew said. We will make the proper enquiries. Then we will report back that it is all rumour, the superstitions of country folk. Quell his fears, yes, but whatever we find we must save. Beware the king with good intentions.’

‘Since then,’ said Muneles, ‘it has fallen upon those in my position to continue the holy charge. Here we are. Still searching.’

‘There are others,’ said Glanzberg. ‘All working with the burden of their titles. The librarian, the architect, the slaughterer, the keeper of youth. You’d be surprised by the evidence they’ve found. The brick thrown at King Wenceslas—for which, legend has it, the quiet Jew Shime Sheftels paid a martyr’s price—uncovered by my predecessor in 1753. Then, at the turn of the last century, a lump of dripping coal, prised from the hand of a dead woman as her body was being prepared for the grave. It was brought before the Council and tested extensively. Wouldn’t you know, it proved to be just as its finder suspected: a magical artefact from the underwater kingdom, one of the gold coins given by the water sprite of the Vltava River as a dowry for his beloved on condition that her family remain absolutely silent. Legend has it that when the girl’s mother could keep the secret no more, the riches turned to ashen clumps that continued to cry freshwater tears…

‘It is a complex charge,’ continued Glanzberg. ‘These legends have a way of growing into themselves, multiplying. In every one there is the seed of the next. Our job is to examine those seeds, but also to scatter others so that the Jews do not make idols of them.’

‘And so we obfuscate,’ said Muneles. ‘We muddy the waters. In that way we, too, have grown into ourselves, into our names. And we have lost control.’

Professor Glanzberg rocked back and forth in his seat, as if praying. ‘When the stories began to circulate about Rabbi Löew, the Council of Formations did what it could to cultivate them. Let him become a myth, a legend. Then the Germans came.’

‘They came and it all changed,’ said Muneles. ‘We met as the Council of Formations always did, in the attic. Leopold here saw in the occupation a chance to gather whatever artefacts remained and test them for evidence of folk magic. We approached the Department of Rural Affairs to petition the authorities, and ask that everything from around the Protectorate be shipped to Prague.’

‘We also sent out teams in the city,’ said Glanzberg, ‘under the strict watch of a particular Jewish brute, to search every house that had been left empty by deportation. Only the odd piece proved to be of any worth. There were, however, two things…two things that made us reconsider the legend of Rabbi Löew.’

Jakub felt his fingers tighten around the metal cup. He pulled it back along the table, towards him. It seemed somehow heavier, as if the dirt inside had grown dense with Glanzberg’s words.

‘The first,’ said Muneles, ‘was a simple wooden box. On its sides were unsophisticated carvings, symbols that might have been a forgotten language or just mindless doodles. We could find no opening, nothing to indicate its purpose. We’d have tossed it aside had it not started jingling every time our colleague Pavel Pařík picked it up. For two days we watched as it rang out or stayed mute according to his presence. It became something of a game. We would place it wherever we thought he’d be going next. We even joked about giving it as a gift to his wife. Then, on the third day, he didn’t come to the museum. At ten o’clock we received the call. Pavel Pařík was dead. He’d suffered a stroke overnight. It was then that we remembered the story: Rabbi Löew, in an effort to cheat death, once made a box that would chime out whenever the dark angel was approaching. Leopold rushed with the box to the nearby hospital and, just as we feared, the moment he stepped inside, it began to ring out and shake uncontrollably.’

‘The second thing,’ said Glanzberg, ‘was a great deal more confounding. You are no doubt aware that the whole fascination with Rabbi Löew and his man of clay is based mostly on the work of the Polish Rabbi, Yudl Rosenberg, and his book Nifla’ot Maharal. Rosenberg claims to have come across the manuscript about Rabbi Loëw and the golem in the Royal Library at Metz in Northern France. He claims it was written by Rabbi Löew’s own son-in-law.’

‘In his introduction,’ continued Glanzberg, ‘Rosenberg wrote of a second manuscript, penned by Rabbi Löew himself, that Rosenberg was willing to sell for eight hundred kopeks. An exorbitant amount at the time. He could be certain that nobody would take him up on it.’

‘Except,’ said Muneles, ‘it appears that somebody did. And it was sold on through the years until it fell into the hands of the industrialist Max Landsberger. We found it in his son’s house. Actually, you and Georg found it. You just didn’t know.’

‘We were forced to review our position on Rabbi Löew.’ Professor Glanzberg gestured towards the cup. ‘We had to face the possibility that the tales about him were real, that his golem was real.

‘Prague was all abuzz over the clay man. Books, movies, plays—a steady stream to fill their heads with wonder. We began to hear new stories: the Nazis had tried to burn down the Altneu Synagogue only to be thwarted by the raging golem; a senior Gestapo man was found dead on the stairs leading to the attic, his body battered and broken. The people had found in this golem a saviour more tangible than any messiah. The transports were already in full swing. If only the force of the golem’s fury could be released before the last Jew was taken away. Frightened fathers beseeched the chief rabbi to open the attic, to let the clay man out to save their children. The rabbi came to me one night. What could he do? We both knew there was nothing to be found up there. The genizah had been cleared out years ago and, other than ten wooden benches upon which we would sit to meet, the attic was empty. But what rabbi will take away hope when it is all that is left to his congregants? And who will admit to having broken Rabbi Löew’s prohibition forbidding anyone from ever entering the attic again?’

‘So we did the only thing we could do,’ said Muneles. ‘We returned to the sources, studied every permutation of the legend, scoured the notes of our predecessors, hoping to find sign of the creature. Perhaps they had been too quick to dismiss it.’

‘Picture this if you will: ten of Prague’s greatest minds, crawling along the banks of the Vltava River,’ said Glanzberg, ‘feeling for the spot where the clay had maintained its shape. We searched the cemeteries, dug up the graves where damaged books and Torah scrolls were buried, went to Rabbi Löew’s old house in Široká Street and lifted the floorboards. But we found nothing.’

Jakub peered into the cup. The dirt rested loosely inside, a few clay pebbles on top. He wanted to tell the men about it, about how it had kept its form, how it had stayed moist and firm beside him for one night before drying and crumbling in his hands. But, all of a sudden, he was not so sure. Had that even happened? Could it be that his memory was being shaped by the stories they told, that they were building golems in his mind? He shook the cup and watched the dirt tumble from side to side.

‘It shames me to say,’ continued Glanzberg, ‘that we even tried to create him anew. Only this year, just before Passover, Otto and I went down to the water’s edge and fashioned a figure from the mud. We followed the formula, recited the two hundred and thirty-one gates in the Sefer Yetzirah, just as the great Rabbi Eleazar of Worms instructed. We stayed there until morning, chanting, praying, crying and pleading, dancing in circles until the water lapped at our inanimate lump and called it back to the river. We trudged home but there was no clay man to keep us company.’

‘We had failed,’ said Muneles. ‘And God laughed from on high, thunder rumbling in the distance.’ He rested his hands on the table and lowered his head. Jakub had not seen him so uncertain, so defeated. Then: ‘I returned to the museum and kept an eye out for artefacts until, two months later, I received my summons and was brought here.’

‘The work continues in the city,’ said Glanzberg. ‘We made sure to leave one of our own in charge of the museum.’

‘Pieces of all kinds come before him and his team examines them, tests those that might be of any significance, squirrels them away in the piles of confiscated goods. Here we only have books. Until now we had found just one item: the list of names read by Rabbi Löew to the Angel of Death at the cemetery gates in defence of his congregation. And now this…’

‘The most unlikely evidence of all.’ Muneles looked at the cup in Jakub’s hand. ‘When Leo came to tell me, I thought the fortress had gone to his head. Nowhere has the story of the hollowed book been written down. Could it be that the mutterings of a senile woman hold the key to the greatest mystery our city has known? The Council had already dismissed it out of hand. Now, in our little Klärenstalt, a siddur matching her very description appears…It is too much.’

‘There is no way to test it here,’ said Glanzberg. ‘And woe to us all if the administration gets hold of it. No, we must get it to the city, to Jakobovits. He must store it with the rest of the artefacts so that it might survive even if we do not. Who knows, when this is all over, perhaps it can be taken to the banks of the river and mixed with the mud so that the creature may rise again and avenge us.’

Otto Muneles pulled a crumpled paper sachet from his pocket and flattened it against the table. Jakub made out the word ‘Sugar’ stamped in faded ink. ‘Put it here,’ said Muneles.

Professor Leopold Glanzberg took the cup from Jakub and tipped the dirt into the bag, clapping his palm against the cup’s base to be sure he’d emptied it all. ‘There are boys,’ said the professor, ‘young men who know their way through the tunnels, who have contacts in the towns outside the fortress gates. I will take it on my daily rounds, see it gets to one I can trust. Dr Jakobovits will have it in days. And Jakub?’ He placed the sachet on the table and took Jakub’s hands between his. ‘Not a word to Georg. In the past I’ve tried, but he does not listen. Now this…I’m afraid he will think—’

Muneles picked up the sachet and rolled the top closed. Holding it in his palms, he tilted back his head and began to chant quietly: ‘A heart with no form, with no chambers, no vessels. A heart that does not beat, that cannot ache, cannot love. A heart that can be scattered to the wind just as easily as moulded with the ground. What good is a heart alone, with no body, no home? It can only stain those around it with blood. AH, H, AH, AV, V, AV.’

Jakub tried to push it from his mind. That night, a heaviness set in his chest, a soft wheeze that whistled when he slept. By morning it had worsened, a burning in his throat. He could not swallow. With the pain came the chance of escape. Jakub put in for a transfer to the hospital barracks, where he was misdiagnosed with the early stages of pneumonia. He coughed and choked his way through four uneasy nights before he was deemed well enough for light work and discharged.

As he made his way back along Neu Gasse towards the Hannover Barracks, Jakub saw Professor Glanzberg scurrying about near the entrance to the girls’ home. Catching sight of him, Glanzberg stood to attention, clicked his heels and ran up the road to greet him. ‘Jakub,’ he said, trying to catch his breath. ‘Have you heard? No? There are rumours. Nothing official yet but…transports. Any day now. And worse. Our boy. The tunnel. He was captured. They’ve taken him to prison in the Small Fortress. And they’re searching the kambals, clearing them out. Here!’ Professor Glanzberg stuffed something into Jakub’s pocket. ‘A sympathetic gendarme from the security detail. Take it. Keep it safe and wait for word from Otto. We will find another way. Now go.’

The Hannover Barracks were deserted. Beds made in haste, rags strewn across the lumpy covers. The distant clamour of a cleaning detail. Jakub opened the battered case at the foot of his bed, fished the paper sachet from his pocket and placed it inside. There were others: salt, flour, lentils. A small reserve of rations, should the need arise. Jakub locked the case and set off to find his mother in the Hamburg Barracks.

Daša Roubíčková twisted her hand from side to side, watching the light dance on the surface of her mother’s ring. She scraped at the veins of starch that lined her palms—the remnants of a day peeling potatoes. She had so little time to ready herself after work, to change from the stinking rags into something more appropriate, something he might like. She had settled on a pale blue dress that would distinguish her from the other girls in their drab greys and browns. In the washroom she patted down her blonde curls and tied them with a piece of twine. She searched for her reflection in the steel trough and tugged at the hem of her dress to stretch out the creases. He would be waiting, she knew. Or maybe he was fussing with his shirt, trying to assume an air of casual indifference to mask his yearning.

She didn’t yet understand the contours of their love, if that’s what it was. And why shouldn’t it be? Love, after all, is the dominion of the nourished. Empty stomachs swallow hearts, devour them without grace. Daša knew how the other girls spoke of him, how they spoke of anyone with privileges. She knew how they skittered through the halls of the Magdeberg Barracks, ready to profess their love for whoever clutched an extra crust. In every sweaty liaison there was an unspoken contract. A lecher’s bed was better than chastity’s eastbound train. But that, Daša thought, was not love. It was not even commerce. It was subsistence. Survival. Too many times she had watched them pull bloody rags from beneath their skirts and hold them tenderly, as if wondering what might have been had they not sought treatment at the hospital, had they not given themselves over to the plague of so-called ‘endometriosis’, the cure for which was guilt and loathing and longing. Not her, though. Since she had watched her mother disappear into the snowy folds of the valley, she had sworn herself to purity. She had chased away the desire that spread through her like butter sauce whenever he brushed up against her. Remember who you are. Remember what you are. Yes, true love was found in resistance, in control. Only when there is nothing to be gained can you ask yourself whether you are in love, whether you can be loved.

Daša dropped her hand to her lap and looked across at the freshly painted pavilion in the town square. Two months it had been standing and there had yet to be a concert. Word around the fortress was that the Ghetto Swingers would be the first to tread its boards. She had seen them only once, a random assortment of players thrown together by circumstance, the very friction of which had electrified their performance. In the barracks at night, starstruck girls whispered their names and hummed tunes, riding the disorderly waves of jazz to temporary freedom. Sometimes Daša joined them, but her heart was not in it. She loved opera, like her mother.

He was late. Two gendarmes ambled towards the square. Without thinking, Daša clasped her hands together, hiding the ring from view. The ring. What had possessed her? She always kept it on her, dangling from a string under her blouse, against her heart. In the washroom, she held it under her tongue and clinked it against the back of her teeth to check she hadn’t swallowed it. But to wear it on her finger? Madness. Could it be that she had grown brazen in this place, her good sense lost to privilege? No, it must be something more: a way to reassure him that she needed nothing, expected nothing. Or maybe it was the whisper of a mother who understood what she tried not to see and was watching from afar.

‘Daša.’ She jumped at the touch of a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re early.’

Daša skipped through the gate of the Hamburg Barracks. All around, women clamoured in the vast courtyard, heaving their mattresses to the dusty field in the hope of escaping the bedbugs that had invaded again with the early heat. Clouds of Zyklon B had sent the vile creatures into the walls’ deepest crevices, but it was a short-lived reprieve. In darkness, they continued to breed, feeding on the squalor between the cracks. When they dared venture back out, they found only the emaciated bodies of the overworked, their blood a turgid syrup, difficult to draw from the veins. And so the bugs bit harder and burrowed deeper, leaving angry pustules on papery skin.

They were all standing around Gusta’s bunk when Daša burst through the door. For a moment her heart sank. She had seen the bodies laid out each morning, the ones who had not made it through the night. ‘Dear God!’ Daša cried and the others parted to reveal Gusta curled up on her mattress, clutching a card to her cheek. The woman’s lips were twitching, whispered words addressed to the greyed paper on the nearby strut. As Daša knelt close, Gusta jerked forward, pressing the card into her hands. ‘Please,’ Gusta said.

Daša read it aloud, as she did when each new card arrived, translating from the German. She paused at the last line: Papa is waiting. When she read out Shmuel’s name, Gusta gasped and begged her to read it again. Daša read it over, Gusta’s voice echoing hers. Only when the woman could say it by heart did she take back the card. The others had lost interest and were going about their nightly routines, readying themselves for bed. Daša climbed up to her bunk, where Irena was already asleep. Typhus had wracked the child’s body in the winter and recovery was slow. Daša pulled the blanket over them both and turned to look down at Gusta. The woman was still whispering and kissing the card, her head nodding like a woodpecker.

Again she waited on the bench. It was over a month since she’d succumbed to folly and worn her mother’s ring. Every week since that day, when she came and sat down in the square, waiting for him to arrive, she felt it hang from her neck, a millstone for her inattention.

Around the square, members of a cleaning detail scrubbed at the concrete. Swathes of colour radiated from the surface of the pavilion, as if the sun, tired of waiting for the Ghetto Swingers, had set about a performance of its own. In the surrounding plots, newly planted flowers watched on. They were all willing players in this process of beautification: Daša, the cleaners, the sun and the flowers. Behind her, on the main thoroughfare of Neu Gasse, couples strolled wearily towards the barracks, stopping to pick at the leaves of a tree or admire the fresh paint on an empty shopfront marked Pharmacy or Perfumery.

Daša refastened the bow on her collar. The blouse had arrived that morning, in a package from the city. Pink, frivolous. For the new season, her mother had written on the accompanying note. Daša hoped it would be enough to keep his interest. How long would he wait, she thought, when she could not see to his needs? Her body had jerked in fright when he took her hand. She was not ready for his touch, with its suggestion of shame and sacrifice. He had looked at her with kindness, with sadness. With pity. And they had talked, not of what had just happened, but of their memories of Biskupcova Street.

The next week he came but it was not the same. He appeared anxious. He spoke of strange men and tunnels and secrets that, for her own safety, he said, he dared not share. When she returned to the barracks she clung to Irena. The younger girl, exhausted from an evening’s gymnastics, pushed her away. Daša rolled over and waited in the darkness for sleep. She woke with new resolve: she would promise herself to him, to the warmth of their own beds, to the disapproving stares of their mothers. It wouldn’t be long, she knew. On every front the Germans were losing. The news swept through the streets with the gusts of spring. Italy had fallen. The Russians had pushed beyond the Polish border. Yes, their communion would be a celebration of freedom. If only he would wait. She readied herself to tell him. Next week, she said to herself.

She had not recognised Ludvík’s old employer when he first approached her near the entrance to the Hamburg Barracks. The gendarme’s greatcoat, with its rows of gleaming buttons, added bulk to his frame while the rounded metal helmet hid the warmth in his eyes. His beard was gone. He was, in her mind, a stranger. To hear a gendarme call her name filled her with dread, not so much for herself as for her father. From the moment she had arrived in the fortress town she expected to hear that some calamity had befallen him; it was, after all, his way. He had not changed. Only when the gendarme began to speak of Prague’s Old Town Square, and how the girls had played beneath the café awnings while Ludvík haggled, did it occur to her that she had nothing to fear. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out three cigarettes and an envelope. It was from her mother in Prague.

Since then they had always met behind the kitchen. There he could tell her news from Žižkov, give her the gifts he had stashed in his case—money, cigarettes, coffee and tea—things forbidden in the ghetto mail. Otherwise, she hardly saw him. So why had he come now, while she waited for Bohuš? Daša felt the skin on her arm prickle.

‘Look ahead,’ said Pan Durák. ‘I’m leaving for Prague tonight. No doubt your mother will be glad to hear you are well. Have you enough until I return?’

‘Daša…’ His voice was soft, cautious. A snatch of music rang out behind them as the café door swung open to swallow a patron. ‘I…I am here about your friend.’ Daša went rigid against the bench. ‘The boy.’ How long had he known? What crude fantasies had he conjured in the things he saw? Poor mother, Daša thought. To be met in her own home with such tales, such disappointment.

She made to turn around but Pan Durák gripped her shoulders and held her fast. ‘Straight ahead.’ Daša felt the pressure ease. ‘There has been an incident of sorts. Smuggling. Much of it is condoned, controlled even by the SS and gendarmes for profit, but this…this was different. Your friend was found under the fortress, in the tunnels that lead to a nearby village. There was a small group of them, I’m told, all arrested. They have been taken to the Small Fortress for questioning. It is not good, Daša.’

‘I have not heard. Which means he is alive. He will likely be sent to the mines. When his body gives way he will be deported. That is, of course, if—’ Daša stared towards the pavilion. The colour was gone. The flowers had drooped. ‘There is another thing,’ Pan Durák said. ‘A car came today. With Eichmann.’ He paused. ‘Stay safe, Dašinku. I will report everything to your mother, have her keep making enquiries about your welfare with the Gestapo. It is your greatest privilege: to be loved, to be known, to be asked after. I return in a fortnight. God willing, I shall see you then.’

That night she did not sleep. She did not want to close her eyes, to abandon him to the damnation of her dreams. And so she listened to the sounds of the barracks, its creaks and hisses, moans and hacking coughs, until orange light leaked through the clouded glass. Daša climbed from her bed and crept into the corridor, towards the warm-up kitchen. On the wall, a fresh bulletin had been posted by the night sentries. She read only one word before spinning around and running back to her room:

The word rang out like a morning bell. In the barracks, in the kitchens, in the streets, in the park, it was all they spoke about. The Kommandant had directed the Jewish Council to draw up a list of two and a half thousand people to be deported to Birkenau in three days’ time. Another work detail.

The women reassured each other that they were safe. Daša sat on her bunk, her knees pulled up to her chest. She could think only of Bohuš, how he was now lost to this uncertain tide. She wanted to ask, to search, to beg, but what did they care? There were rules to be followed. He was not deserving of their pity, even if they had some left to give. Daša watched Irena tear into the loaf of bread that Magda, the block warden, had distributed the previous morning.

Then: night. From the corridor came the crescendo of approaching footsteps. The solitary bulb sparked to life. The room filled with groans and muttered curses. A few soft mewls. One woman banged a cup against her bunk and began to laugh as if the night itself were a joke. Another sang an old folk song, shrill, out of tune. Dazed, Daša watched Magda weave from bunk to bunk, checking numbers, shaking those who had not woken, handing out the strips of paper. It pained Daša to bear witness, she who was still drenched in the lamb’s blood of privilege. When Magda approached, she closed her eyes and waited to be passed over. Gusta R? The voice was firm. CK-571. Gusta R? Daša peeked out to see Magda lean over and shake Gusta’s shoulder. Louder: Gusta R.

Gusta pitched upwards and snatched the paper slip. She held it close to her face and scanned the unfamiliar script, first from right to left and then the other way. What little she knew of the written word came from the pages of holy books. Eshet chayil, a woman of worth, whose value far exceeded rubies. Such a woman needed only learn to read God’s language, and even then no more than was necessary for her to converse with Him at the proper time and in the proper manner. Beyond that, the world of letters was not her business. On the paper, Gusta knew, were the words of another god, a god that was fickle and malevolent, a human god, but a god who had at last listened to her deepest prayer: Gusta R had been summoned for transport to Birkenau.

Daša vaulted from her bunk the moment Magda left the room. She knelt beside Gusta in the dark, protesting, but Gusta shooed her away. ‘Not now,’ she said as she pulled the blanket over her head. ‘Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.’ Gusta was asleep in no time: a deep, dreamless slumber.

The suitcase lay open on her bed, its contents scattered across the mattress. Three times already Gusta had been made to distil her life like this, to strike the balance between the needs of her body and that of her soul. Each time she grew more compact. She found that value was, by nature, transient; it could depart one object and embed itself in another. That which remained—a threadbare blouse, a sturdy pot, a pair of leather shoes —held the accumulated worth of all that came before. And so it was again. She would share out what she could not take, let her presence linger in what was left behind, just as it had in the village, the city, Prague.

At first light, Daša ran to the Hannover Barracks with the paper balled in her fist. The ghetto had already lurched to life, set in motion by machine memory. Soon a train would roll through the southern gate, ready to ferry its load to the next world. Birkenau. All transports from Terezín went there. Depending on what the local engineer could spare, it might be a third-class carriage or freight or cattle carriages. For now though, the tracks lay bare, straps of wood and steel warming in the morning sun. Daša ran from them as fast as she could, up Badhausgasse, into Lange Strasse. Around her, a familiar routine: those unable to sleep, who had packed through the night, resigned to their fates, now filled the streets, dragging their suitcases, their backpacks, their bedrolls, circling the Hamburg drain.

She found Jakub outside the latrine on the second floor. He smiled and self-consciously patted at his damp hair. She could not speak, the breath rushing from her chest, her mouth hanging open as she gulped at the stale barrack air. She held up the paper strip for him to see. Jakub took in the details: his mother’s name, a new number—DZ-1211—a time to report for transport. She had less than a day. ‘It is possible she is in the reserve,’ he said. ‘They always call up more than they need.’ From the latrine door they heard the crotchety snarl of the hygiene attendant. Jakub continued: ‘Go back. Help with her preparations. I’ll go to the Council and plead her case.’ Daša took his hand and held it to her cheek. His lips twitched as if anxious to keep talking, but he pulled away and headed for the door.

A great bazaar fills the courtyard. They hawk their wares from tables and chairs; rags flutter in the wind, wooden spoons clang against steel pots. The ghetto town has contracted until it is just this: a tempest of beggars and thieves. A rumour: there are some who still have gold. Take only what you can carry. Gold is light. Gold is small. Gold has lost its meaning. A case. A backpack. A hamper. Shoes. That is what they want. That is what they will pay for most of all. Gold. Gold for shoes. Bigger cases will be loaded as cargo. Lighter bags can be carried by hand. Shoes. Gold. Food. Be sure to keep them with you at all times. There is no security in cargo. No guarantee that you will see your cases again. Take only what you need. Take only what you can bear to lose.

Jakub returned without news. The man had dismissed his plea before he’d even finished. The camp’s Kommandant—its third, its most vicious—wanted too many this time and the Council could not supply them without reaching into the pool of the privileged. Compromises were made but it still wasn’t enough. Jakub explained that those whose protection was only by association were no longer exempt. ‘The train leaves tomorrow. I’m sorry.’

Gusta pulled the case from her bunk. It landed with a thud. From inside, the muffled clatter of metal. Gusta bent over and tested its weight. Jakub reached for it. ‘Please,’ he said.

They streamed into the western wing from the gate, from the courtyard, from the floors above. The train had not yet arrived. Hamburg was choking. Those who came in the afternoon could not get near the assembly hall and had to wait in the adjoining arcades. Members of the transport kommando worked their way through the crowd, checking names off lists, distributing labels, wading through the desperate horde. If only they could hold off until after curfew, when the numbers would thin, when husbands, wives, children and lovers would return to their barracks, not to sleep, but to listen, listen.

For the final time they ate as a family. Jakub stirred his spoon through the discoloured broth, watching potato peel and onion stems swirl up in its wake. The ghetto cooks had taken pity on the deportees and filled the vats with more scraps than usual. Those left behind would make do with a thinner broth for a day, if only to assuage their guilt. They went with food in their bellies. The kitchen hands, accustomed to skimming liquid from the top, plunged their ladles until they could feel solids collecting in the scoop. On that night, all who ate in the limbo of the Hamburg Barracks were favoured, all were privileged. Jakub plucked out the larger pieces with his fingers and dropped them into his mother’s bowl. Daša surprised them with a heavy loaf she had baked from crushed chestnuts, salt and water. It softened in the steaming liquid and expanded like a bread dumpling. Irena, too, brought what she could: a stick of butter sent from Prague, sitting misshapen in the corner of a cardboard box. They slurped and licked, savouring the hints of flavour.

Daša woke in a pile of unfamiliar bodies. They had shifted in the night: those who would soon be gone and those who could not let them go. Only Gusta seemed at peace. Sitting on her case, she pulled out slices of dry sausage and stale crackers from her knapsack. The girls had packed it with enough for the journey—knots of black bread, jam, onions, turnips, crackers, a sausage and two tins of sardines from the Red Cross. She ate unhurriedly, from habit not hunger, her eyes fixed on the rear gate, the sluice through which Daša knew she was eager to pass. The train had still not come.

From across the room, Irena scrambled towards her, tripping on bedrolls and pillows. She must have woken early to get coffee from the warm-up kitchen. She clasped a metal cup in each hand, one for herself, one for Gusta. Nothing for Daša. Tepid liquid splashed over the rims, waking those who still slept.

Gusta’s gaze did not shift. She reached out when the girl drew near, let the cup come to her hand and then brought it back to her lap. Irena crouched beside her, nestling against the woman’s legs. They stayed like that, a single organism, mouths sipping the same murky swill, eyes staring off in different directions. Daša edged forward, stepping over an old man, asleep, his body wrapped around a beaten suitcase. As she passed, he kicked out and grunted. Daša skipped out of harm’s way, landing softly by her sister. Still Gusta looked towards the gate. Daša cleared a small space with her foot and sat down.

‘Maybe there’s no train,’ said Irena, her voice a whisper in the morning bustle.

‘They…’ Irena looked around the room. ‘It’s not fair. To make them work. It should be us.’

‘She will grow strong. With Shmuel she will find strength. Yes, with him she will grow tall and fat and strong.’

‘Maybe.’ Daša slid a hand through the crook of her sister’s arm. ‘Maybe.’

‘You slept?’ Jakub crouched beside his mother and kissed her on the forehead. Gusta flinched. Daša watched Jakub, sensing his despair, the knowledge of his own failing.

Whatever he might have said was drowned by a cacophonous shrieking from around the hall. Ghetto Watchmen and gendarmes had started filing through the sluice door, the signal for the transport kommando to reach for their metal whistles and call the waiting deportees to order. German soldiers also appeared, although they were careful not to step inside. Voices rose to a tumult then fell to a murmur. From the crackling speakers, a voice rattled out instructions nobody could understand. Outside, dogs were barking. And, in the background, the unmistakable chug of a train snaking its way through the southern gate towards the barrack siding that had, once again, become a platform.

Perched on top of an upturned crate, a gendarme raised a loudhailer to his mouth.

They are called in groups of one hundred. The first ones must push through the hall towards the men who wait by the gate with lists and pens and officious glares. This place is no longer their home. They are setting off for where it is said they are needed to fill the labour shortage brought about by a war that refuses to end. Men, women, children. The elderly, the sick, the infirm. Irena is right. It is not fair. But what is fair anymore? To stay or to go? It is for each passenger to create his destination. Why choose despair? Why not give yourself over to the conviction that the next place will be better? Birkenau. A word of beauty, of hope. Where they could toil on wooded hills. Where mothers might once again hold their sons under the birch trees for which the land is named. Birkenau. Life.

The slurry of syllables. Daša Roubíčková tried to pick out the sounds that would call Gusta away. An air of resignation had settled over the hall. Deportees waited patiently, stepping forward when their group was called, leaving orphaned cases for the transport kommando to load. Clutching their bedrolls and knapsacks, they assembled in line, flanked by friends and family, who would escort them as far as the rear gate. There, the Ghetto Watchmen would shout their transport number again and cross them from the list. One last kiss, one last embrace, and they disappeared behind the barrier.

In the far corner, the gendarme was calling through the loudhailer: DZ-1000 to 1099, please step forward. Daša looked at the tag on Gusta’s case. Only two more groups before her.

Daša turned around to see Jakub shaking Gusta’s knapsack. Gusta snatched at it but he stepped out of her reach. They had been huddled together, spitting whispers in each other’s ear. Daša dared not move closer. It was not for her, this squabble of departure. Gusta slumped back onto her case and crossed her arms. To her, the affair was over. Jakub held the knapsack out to Irena and then to Daša. ‘She can’t go like this,’ he said. ‘She has given the food away. We have enough here. She must take more.’ The girls looked at Gusta, but said nothing. Jakub reached down, grabbed Irena by the arm and pulled her up. ‘Here,’ he said, shoving the knapsack into her chest. ‘Take it. Go to your room and fill it. Whatever you can spare. And if that isn’t enough, go to my room too. In my case there are supplies. Please. Just go.’ He pushed her with a force that frightened Daša. ‘Hurry.’

Irena disappeared behind the procession. Jakub, too, stormed off in the direction of the sluice gate where two members of the Transport Committee had just appeared with a sheath of rescission papers. They swatted away the encroaching throng as they made their way to the Ghetto Watchmen. For a moment the boarding stopped. All eyes were on the four men as they shuffled through the papers, looking at their clipboards then the sheath and back again. When they called out a series of numbers, great wails of relief resounded through the hall. Otherwise, curses. Daša moved herself behind Gusta and pulled the woman’s head to her bosom. She could feel the warm, measured breaths, each one a sigh of surrender. A tug at her sleeve. Daša hunched until she could hear Gusta. ‘Forgive him. Please, forgive him. It is against himself that he rages.’

Gusta readied herself, pushed her hands into her knees, and stood up. ‘It’s time,’ she said. Daša checked the buckles on her case. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Irena—’ But Gusta had already moved to take her place in line. Daša held the bedroll under her arm; the worn horsehair prickled her skin. Jakub was at Gusta’s side by the time Daša reached her. He held her in his arms, a protective shield. It was not how Daša had rehearsed it in her mind. Over a year the woman had found space in her heart for two more daughters. But here, in the assembly hall, Gusta had only one child, imperfect as he was in his parting. Daša saw how she looked at him: the inevitable realisation that, in the hope of reuniting with one son, whose only presence was an occasional, cryptic postcard, she was sacrificing the certainty of another. This man who had cared for her, protected her from the worst ravages of the fortress town, was once again just a boy, confused by a world over which he had lost the illusion of control. For the first time Daša saw Jakub cry, his face propped against his mother’s shoulder as he muttered words of comfort. Lies. And Gusta, too, replied with the words a mother is supposed to use to calm a child. Daša could watch no more. She would not have the opportunity to say goodbye. She would merely place the bedroll at Jakub’s feet and step away.

Daša Roubíčková leaned against the far wall. The deportees shuffled past, disappearing through the gate. In their wake, husbands and wives, children and friends, craned so as not to lose sight, then shrank back, collapsing into something less than they had been before. They filed out from the Hamburg Barracks, a single, continuous line, and disappeared into the dusty streets. Daša rested her head against the cold concrete. Bohuš. He was there, somewhere. In the Small Fortress, on the train. How was she to know? Prisoners do not pass through the sluice. Yes, Bohuš was there, but only when she thought of him: a memory.

Daša listened to the numbers. There was an oddly comforting randomness to it all. Whoever came was called. It slowed the process, the shuffling of pages, the search for each one. DZ-1243. Hurry, hurry. Okay. DZ-1261. Daša spotted Jakub in the crowd near the gate, his head jerking as he looked around for Irena. Gusta marched beside him in pixie steps. DZ-1204. Across the hall, Irena appeared and began pushing through the crowd. DZ-1211. Jakub stepped up to the man, pleaded for time. DZ-1211. Jakub reached out and pulled Gusta to his chest. She stiffened then slumped into him. For a moment they were one, a child returned to his mother’s womb. Then: a visible shudder. She reached up and held him. He crouched, whispering behind her ear. DZ-1211, now. The Watchman was insistent. He grabbed Gusta by the arm but she brushed him off and stood straight. She would leave when she was ready. She looked around, at the Watchman, at Daša, at Jakub and, lastly, at the large, open gate. A moment of freedom. Now she was ready. As Gusta stepped into the sluice, Irena crashed through the pack and thrust the bloated knapsack into Jakub’s hands. ‘Mama!’ Jakub called, lunging forward, past the Watchman. The gendarme, still standing on the crate, scrambled for his whistle but Jakub was already backing away. She had taken the knapsack and pulled his head to her lips for one last kiss. Then she turned around and walked on. She did not look back.

Daša Roubíčková stabbed the paring knife into the potato’s flesh, its blade sinking to the wooden hilt. Bubbles of creamy white dribbled through the fissure. Daša pulled at the handle, felt the potato split in her palm. She had come straight from the station, leaving Irena at the wooden partition that hid the platform from the street. Jakub, too, had rushed out when Gusta was gone. Daša chased after him but he was too fast. She watched him run up Badhausgasse, his hat bunched in his hand, and disappear in the direction of Südstrasse. Without Gusta they would be a burden for him. To stand by the bunk where his mother had slept would only remind him how his was a lesser privilege, a privilege that could, after all, be tossed away or forgotten. Around them, his power was diminished. Around them, he was less of a man.

What remained of the day passed like any other. The vats’ deep gurgle erupted to a sputtering hiss, clouding the room with a heavy, earthen brume. The women wiped at their brows with their muddy forearms, peeling, scraping, potato skins falling at their feet. There were turnips too, and onions, all from the sunken garden beds on the shores of the fortress moat. Here there could be no waste. It all went in, the skins, the peels, the stalks, the roots. Pan Durák needn’t have worried. There was little to steal anymore. Even the filth that collected on the ground was now scooped up and tossed into the slop. It seemed a formality that their pockets and socks were checked as they left. The kitchen supervisor looked bored by it all. At the end of the day, Daša held out her empty palms for inspection. She received a nod, and she was gone.

The other women stood clear of her bunk. Daša froze at the door, taking in the disarray. The sheets had been pulled from her mattress and were hanging from the wooden struts. Shredded stuffing spewed from the torn pillows. Her case was open, its contents strewn across the slats. Daša looked at the other women. Surely she would have heard had there been a raid. On Gusta’s bed, an unfamiliar woman sat against the rear board, her legs crossed like a child, picking from a bag of lentils. Judging by her twitches and tremors, the woman must have just been discharged from the hospital in the Hohenelbe Barracks. Or worse, the Kavalier madhouse. Daša saw how the others looked at her, expecting the worst. This thief. This beast. Daša charged forward and jumped at the muttering witch. The woman scurried back but Daša was already upon her, clumps of hair clutched in her fist. The lentils fell from the bunk and scattered across the floor.

‘Roubíčková!’ Daša bucked at the hands on her shoulder. ‘Roubíčková!’ A searing pain across her cheek, the force of an open hand. Daša tumbled into the wall. Above her stood Magda, arm cocked, ready for another blow. ‘I’ll not have this in my room,’ said the warden. ‘I should report you. Now get off that bed. Leave the poor woman alone.’ Daša slid from the bunk. Magda grabbed her by the shoulder and swung her across the narrow aisle. ‘It was your friend,’ Magda said. Daša scrunched her brow. ‘The boy.’ When she saw the hope in Daša’s eyes, she shook her head. ‘Jakub.’ Daša clambered up the ladder and knelt on her bunk. She righted the case and began to sweep up her scattered belongings. Magda climbed the first rung and held on to the sideboard. ‘He came here in a fit. Poor thing, his mother gone and all. We tried to stop him, but…’ She pointed to the mess. ‘Irena came in. He was screaming at her, angry words, hurtful words. He shook her. She ran away. I thought she’d run to find you.’

Daša dumped what she could in the case. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘If Irena comes, tell her to wait here for me.’

She found the girl in the eastern wing, crouched at the top of the stairs to the attic. ‘Irča?’

‘I only did as he asked.’ Irena shifted to the side, her eyes red and swollen.

‘When he returned this afternoon. He’s on the list. His friend too. They leave on Thursday.’

‘He was scared. I’ve never seen it before. He said it was my fault. That I’d ruined everything. That I shouldn’t have taken the sugar from his case. But Daša…’ Irena straightened herself, suddenly composed in her defiance. ‘It was him. He told me to.’

‘Come. Forget him.’ They walked on along the corridor. From below they could hear the muffled bustle of another transport, shuffling towards the assembly hall. A second train would leave tomorrow, then another on Thursday. He would be gone, with his frustration and rage. Back to his mother’s arms, to Shmuel. How fragile is family, Daša thought. How easily broken and stuck back together, its pieces never quite fitting like before. She had thought of him like that, and he, perhaps, thought something else. Not now. This creature he had become was no brother of hers. But she would remember Gusta, remember her kindness, the way she welcomed the girls into her family. Yes, she would remember Auntie Gusta with fondness. And damn it if he, too, would not creep into her thoughts, the way he cared for his mother when the silt of failure was all he had left to give.

Daša Roubíčková stood at the bunkroom window and looked out. The moon bathed the empty streets in deep purgatorial blue. The transformation was complete: beautification, with its park benches and flowerbeds, bandstand and sporting fields, shopfronts and children’s pavilion. All off limits to the townspeople. The last train had gone, leaving her behind in this unfamiliar place: the Jewish Settlement of Theresienstadt. A model town. The jewel in a crooked crown. Soon the Red Cross would arrive. Rehearsals were already underway. Oh no, Uncle Rahm, the children would chime in unison. Not chocolate again…

A semitone sharp and several beats too late, the last voice faded out to a wave of childish titters. They all waited for the doctor, their eyes fixed on his pigskin gloves. Jakub stood uneasily to attention. Beside him, Georg fidgeted with a loose button, winding a wayward thread around its sagging base. ‘Bravo, kinder,’ the doctor said in his thin voice and brought his hands together once, twice; the damp slap of leather. They looked at each other—the children, the instructors—and when they were sure, they, too, began to clap. The doctor stepped forward, arms outstretched, to pat heads, caress cheeks. The children were eager to please. Perhaps he would take them from this place, across the dusty Styx to the Hospital Block where, it was said, there was more food, even beds with white sheets and pillows. They could not know for sure. None had returned. But the doctor was not like the others—not like the Camp Elder Arno Böhm, not like Büntrock, not like Tadeusz. The Kapos. The savages.

Jakub rubbed his temple, trying to relieve the pressure. He could not bear the children’s shrill squawking. When he first heard them rehearse in the vast latrine block, their boisterous ‘Ode to Joy’ set to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony bouncing from the concrete walls, Jakub had cursed them to silence and then perched on the concrete slab waiting for the moan of his bowels. The music instructor, Felix Baum, took him aside that afternoon to apologise. It hadn’t been this way when Imré was here. Poor Imré, the optimistic fool. Soon after Fredy Hirsch had talked the Nazis into allocating a barracks to the children, Imré offered his services as choirmaster. ‘In music they will be free,’ he said. Fredy took little convincing. He knew the power of song, not just to liberate but to teach. And so, while the other instructors recited books from memory and played games and pieced together performances to nourish these pitiable souls, Imré built up the greatest choir that Hell had ever seen. So great were they, so accomplished, that it was said they went to the gas singing the ‘Internationale’, the ‘Hatikvah’ and the Czech National Anthem in perfect harmony. Imré was last seen waving his arms with joy outside the large brick house from which he left as smoke.

With a polite bow and a wave, the doctor took his leave. Jakub watched him hurry along the central path to the front gate. His step was nimble, carefree. The children shuffled down from the makeshift stage, away from Snow White and her misshapen dwarf, away from the meadows and flowers, and broke into their groups, eager to resume their rehearsals. Having long ago forfeited their names, the children had once again found something of an identity in Block 31. They were not the numbers crudely carved into their arms. They were Swallows, Bears or Maccabees. And they fought for supremacy any way they could: scrubbing their stalls the hardest, chanting the loudest, picking the most dandelions from the patch by the perimeter fence. They fought with the ferocity only children can rally, the kind that knows no limitations, that is oblivious to danger. They fought as if their very lives depended on it. As if they didn’t know they were already dead.

Jakub was scraping at the scab on his forearm, watching the numbers bleed black and red, when he learned that he, too, would die. ‘My brother,’ he said to Michal, his new bunkmate, on the first night in Birkenau. ‘Shmuel Rand. Please, I need to see him.’ It had been his first thought as he stepped down from the train with Georg. Find Shmuel. Find Gusta. Then find the dirt. His heart sank when he heard the shouts: ‘Leave everything on the train. All luggage is to remain in the carriage.’ Those who did not hear, who would not listen, had the bags snatched from their hands. Michal’s arm snaked from beneath his splayed greatcoat. ‘They’re all there,’ he said, pointing to the ceiling. ‘The chimneys, the fire. The smell. That is him. Next it will be me. Then you. Six months.’

Jakub turned to Georg but his friend was already asleep. On the train he had been quiet, sullen. Leaving his father tormented him. In Theresienstadt their roles had reversed. The ghetto policeman’s uniform could not hide the old man’s creeping confusion. He spoke in ever more peculiar fancies. More than once Georg had been called to the gate of Magdeberg to calm his nerves. There was even talk of sending Professor Glanzberg to the Kavalier madhouse but Georg pleaded with the Council on his behalf, for the sake of his father’s dignity. ‘He is harmless,’ Georg had said. ‘This place has undone him, it’s true, but he carries on with his duties.’ When Georg received his transport slip he pleaded again. ‘You needn’t worry,’ said the clerk. ‘Herr Professor Glanzberg is safe here. Go in peace.’ On the train, Georg cursed himself. ‘I’ve damned us both,’ he cried as it began to heave along the track. Jakub sat beside him on the bench and held his hand. He longed to comfort his friend, to blow away the veils of pity and doubt. But to say something now, to speak of books and myths and secrets, would only confirm what Georg feared most about his father.

Jakub lifted the blanket from his chest and laid it across Georg’s shoulders. Give him this moment of peace. Jakub lay back on their third-storey bunk and stared at the ceiling.

A storm of crashing wood snatched him from what he’d mistaken for a sleepless night. Shouts, like thunder, echoed through the barrack. Georg spun around, grasped at Jakub’s leg. Michal, seemingly unfazed by the uproar, sat up and stretched, his bony arms pushing past his bedfellows’ heads. ‘Welcome to the first day of your death.’

Jakub and Georg climbed down and followed Michal outside to a large area near the gate between two kitchen blocks. Weary hordes streamed into the space. Jakub tried to spot his mother but it was no use; she was small and would be hidden in the crowd. In the distance he thought he caught sight of Shmuel. Then again. And again. All around him were faces that, for a moment, might have been the boy, but weren’t. Beyond the fence, two towering chimneys loomed above the forest. From their black-tipped stacks, flames licked the grey dawn.

More shouting. Jakub looked back along the unfinished road that cut between the rows of barracks. Old men hobbled towards the assembly ground beneath a hail of blows. Their malevolent shepherds cursed them and laughed as they brought down the wooden cudgels. ‘Green Triangles,’ said Michal. ‘Murderers. Rapists. Here they thrive.’ And then, as if an afterthought: ‘You’ll learn.’ Jakub turned his gaze to the ditch that ran alongside the cobbled path. All around it the ground was parched, but through this channel ran a constant flow of oily, effluent sludge. ‘The big one is Böhm,’ the bunkmate continued. ‘He runs the place. Then there is Büntrock, the imbecile. But it is Tadeusz you should watch. Last month, for Passover, he threw the body of a poor boy who’d died in the night onto the camp flour supply. Cut him, he shouted. Bleed him out. Make your bread. And he waited until one of the bakers stabbed at the boy’s chest. Never mind that blood would not flow. It was entertainment enough.’ Michal spat on the ground and snorted. ‘Do you have a wife? A sister?’ Růženka. Jakub had not thought of her in months. Safe in America, thank God. He could not bear to imagine her in this prison. ‘Here, no,’ he said. Michal ran his fingers across his chin. ‘Good. There is no end to his depravity. Even here, where we are already corpses.’

The muster began with a call for the fallen. Numbers sounded out from around the crowd. Family. Friends. Jakub lost count. After a pause, the roll master readied his list. Then: ‘A-One-Zero-Three-Six.’ Michal leaned over, whispered in his ear: ‘Tadeusz. Bastard.’ The one called Tadeusz was shorter than his comrades. Rags hung from his broad shoulders and over his paunch. Jakub could just make out the faded green triangle on his shirt. Tadeusz repeated the number: ‘A-One-Zero-Three-Six.’ From the crowd, a man’s voice: ‘Nein, nein. Present.’ Michal shook his head. ‘Pervert,’ he spat. ‘Bitte, bitte, nein,’ the man was crying. Then a woman: ‘My God. No. He is here. Can’t you see?’ Tadeusz fell back into line and the roll master called the first number.

The muster dragged on through the morning. The latest transport had filled the camp to overflow. When his own number was called Jakub shouted ‘Jawohl!’ as he had heard those before him do. Then, he waited. The sun beat down, an early summer. At last: Dismissed. Jakub pushed through the bodies, to where he had seen a group of women. He found Gusta near the Registrar’s office. ‘Thank God,’ she said. He held her against his chest. ‘He is gone,’ she said. There was relief in her voice, triumph even. ‘Oh, Mama. He’s—’ She cut him short: ‘In Heydebreck. I know. Don’t listen to what they say. The worst kind of bonkes. A mother knows. A dead son does not send postcards.’ Jakub chose not to argue. ‘Your bag?’ he said. She broke free, swatted the air. ‘They wanted to take it but I thought Shmuel might…They took it from me, emptied it on the ground. I went to pick it up but I was pushed along—’ She stopped, tilted her head. ‘And Daša and Irena?’ ‘They send their love. When this is over we’ll meet up in Prague.’ He looked away. Then: ‘I’d better go. They’ve assigned me to the Children’s Block.’ A quick kiss on her forehead and Jakub joined the procession back along the camp road.

Loss, he thought. That, too, is a holy incantation. To make something tangible out of loss is the soul of creation, of faith. And so Gusta had done what Muneles and Leopold Glanzberg could not: she had made real the man of clay in Jakub’s heart. The dirt was mere fantasy until it was gone. Now Jakub crushed it underfoot, or breathed it in, or watched it swirl in the distance. Yes, the golem was here, in this place where stories ended. It was here and then it was not. Like Daša. Like Shmuel. Like all of them in time.

‘Jakub!’ A cluster of inmates huddled near the doorway between two barracks. Again: ‘Jakub! Here!’ It was Michal. Jakub veered from the path to where the men were gathered. They were peering down the shaded corridor that ran between the buildings. Michal stepped aside and pushed him into the group. ‘Shhhh.’ He held his finger to his lips. At the far end Jakub could make out three heavy-set, bald figures standing over another, smaller man. The latter was lying on the ground, trying to shield his head. Even from a distance, Jakub could hear the thuds and cracks of wood and bone. ‘There you go,’ said Michal. ‘A-One-Zero-Three-Six. Tadeusz is correcting the mistake in his reporting. Tomorrow this poor fellow’s wife will be in the comfort block.’ Jakub stumbled away, up the camp road as fast as he could go, swallowing frantically to keep down the bile. The paving ended halfway along the road and he tripped over the broken ground. From the barracks up ahead, a familiar song— ‘Ode to Joy’—in pinched, uneven tones:

Again, a blur. The blinding fog of hunger. It was happening often since the rations had been cut back. Jakub steadied himself against a shelf. The children seemed distant, in another place. The haze gave way to a hundred tiny eyes, staring at him. Not children, puppets, seated in lines across the shelves, their feet dangling from the edge. Jakub reached out, picked one from the middle row. It was misshapen, ugly, like most things here. Still, he admired the crafting of its face, the droopy eyes, the smeared red on its cheeks. There was no mistaking the man after whom it was modelled: Tadeusz.

The performance had been planned for their final night. The night before they were scheduled to die. The doctor would be there. And the Green Triangles. Probably a guard or two. Most had seen the play before, when it was acted out by children, not puppets. Heavenly Auschwitz, Earthly Auschwitz. A comedy, really, written soon after the liquidation of the September transport. In it the children died and went to heaven, only to find that it was no different from what they had on earth. They were immortal, as souls are supposed to be, but stricken with lice and typhus and dysentery. They were beaten by guards and made to dig holes and fill them, senseless, purposeless labour, for all eternity. They begged for the release of death. God was confused. Had He not granted their wish once already? It was not possible to die again. And so the play ended with Him turning His back on the ungrateful brats like they thought He had done before to them.

The children, of course, were not fooled. If the message was supposed to appease, to make them thankful for what little they had here, it achieved quite the opposite. They knew of their classmates’ fate. They heard the rumours. They knew of Fredy Hirsch, their fallen hero, who did not resist as they dreamed he would, but who took pills to avoid what was to come. No, they were not fooled at all. Still, any chance to mock their captors was seized upon with glee. They fought for the roles of the overseers and played them with spiteful exuberance. The instructors tried to temper the offence. They pulled green triangles from coats, mussed up slicked-back hair. Soon after the May transports, they announced that the play would no longer be performed. They would just sing. Or act out traditional Czech stories. Fairytales. They even danced for Snow White, who looked down on them from the back wall, while the choir sang: ‘Hi ho. Hi ho. It’s off to work we go.’ Another comedy for the Family Camp.

In early June, the children grew restless. They counted their time in days. Oskar Fischel, captain of the Swallows, proposed one last reprise of the play. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘with puppets.’ The instructors liked the idea. The children had stopped listening to their lessons. They had begun to bicker. A new production of Heavenly Auschwitz would keep them busy. Ten days to build a cast from whatever scraps they could gather. The children argued among themselves over who would craft which character and then retreated to their corners: it would be a competition between the three teams. Jakub recognised figures in the camp—Dr Mengele, the Green Triangles, but also the children’s parents and friends and, of course, some of the children themselves. When the day was over, the instructors sat and ate their rations: soup and bread cooked in the nearby Gypsy Camp. ‘Dredge for teeth,’ Jakub had said to Georg the first time.

‘To think this is what they leave behind,’ said Erwin Glaser, the man who had taken Fredy’s place after the March liquidation. ‘They fashion their own faces, dust them with chalk to cover the dirt. Here, this puppet; once there was a boy just like him.’

Georg shifted to dangle his legs down the brick. ‘And the villains,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed? Crafted with the greatest of care, as if to remember them is the most important thing. Each brushstroke is the finger of accusation.’

‘But it’s a mistake,’ said Georg, ‘to put faith in creations. We cannot know God so we hope to stand in His place. We deign to know what will be. We’re playing at idols. Nothing more.’

‘Idols build strength too,’ said Glaser. ‘There is talk again of uprising. The locksmiths have come to deliver messages. The Sonderkommando are ready. They have been stockpiling weapons for months, hiding them among the cases in Kanada. Now they wait for our signal.’

‘We are under no illusion,’ said Glaser. ‘If we do not fight back we will die. And Georg and Jakub here will watch us spill from the chimney stacks.’

‘These,’ said Glaser, his hand sweeping over the benches strewn with half-finished figurines. ‘These are their weapons. The children must fight too. To what end? It hardly matters.’

Jakub cradled the puppet of Tadeusz in his hands. Across the room, the children were still in their groups, talking excitedly among themselves. The doctor’s visit was already a memory for them; they still clung to the hope of a performance and were practising their lines.

He looked up to see the familiar face of Arnošt Flusser. It had been two years since the boy first sat in his class in the Jewish school at 3 Jáchymova Street and, save for some facial stubble and a few inches of height, very little had changed about him. His eyes were filled with the same wonder and he often broke from his fellow Bears to float about on a mission none of the instructors could understand. When his father died, Flusser sat himself in the far corner of the Children’s Block facing the wall for three days. The other children knew to leave him be. On the fourth day he did not come to classes.

Rumours began to spread that the boy was now in the company of the Green Triangles. He was seen running errands for Böhm. Whatever the case, it was short-lived. A few days after Jakub had given up on him returning, the barracks door swung open to reveal a bloodied Flusser, with his hair bunched in Tadeusz’s fist. The Green Triangle dragged him halfway down the aisle, grunted, and threw him forward into a stack of benches. ‘Heil Hitler,’ Tadeusz said with a laugh and bounded from the barracks. The instructors rushed across to pick up the boy and whisk him into the cramped cubicle near the entrance. Arnošt Flusser remained silent while they tended to his wounds. He did not wince when they wiped at the cuts on his body, nor did he cry out as they tried to staunch the flow of pus and blood from his face. Only when they tried to help him from his clothes, loosening the string around his waist, did he flinch. Felix Baum took a damp cloth and dabbed at the spatter of dried blood and shit that streaked his inner thighs. The boy stayed silent.

Splotches of blue and purple on his body served to remind them all of what Arnošt Flusser had endured. The other children continued to ignore him as they had before. It was as though the strange boy absorbed their suffering. ‘I will make Earthly Tadeusz,’ he said, when the puppet show was announced. Erwin Glaser saw his lips move and hushed the others. The arguing stopped, freeing the air for his tiny voice. The children looked around anxiously. ‘Master Flusser?’ said Glaser. ‘I will make Earthly Tadeusz,’ Arnošt Flusser said again. ‘There is no Tadeusz in heaven.’

‘Oh,’ said Jakub. ‘I was just admiring…’ He held out the puppet, tilting it so the boy would not have to look at its face. ‘You have quite a talent.’ Of all the instructors in the Children’s Block, Arnošt Flusser had chosen him. Could he sense all Jakub had lost? It was said from the start that the boy had powers, that he could see beyond this world. Langer believed it. And Redlich. But they, too, were dreamers. Was it not simple familiarity that drew the boy to his old teacher when his faith in others had been so violently crushed? Jakub could not wipe the boy’s blank stare from his memory, a look that gave nothing and pleaded for nothing, as if he had left his broken body while the instructors pieced it back together. At the time he thought the boy was looking straight through him, but the stare continued long after the wounds had healed. No, the boy was not looking through him. He was looking into him, piercing the corporeal divide. Jakub would not have it. Who was this child to preside? No, he would not submit to the court of the innocent.

From somewhere outside, a low moan of wind gusting between the barracks. ‘Can I be excused.’ A statement more than a question.

‘I’m sure your friends will appreciate it.’ Your friends. Jakub did not intend the offence in his words. Jakub often saw the boy sitting in the patch near the fence, gathering the weeds, when all the other children had run to meet their parents. What he picked he brought to Erwin Glaser for dandelion soup.

That night Michal was restless. ‘It’s absurd,’ he said. ‘To live through your own death. I counted down the days, readied myself for what was to come. What a mockery, to make peace with it all for nothing. And you too. Were you not aching to be rid of me? It’s okay. I don’t take it personally. We’d all kill to make room, just to stretch out for one night. How do you think I felt when you came? God, I wished all manner of ills on you. I really didn’t think you’d last a week.’

Outside, the wind howled, clattering against the barrack walls. Georg pulled off his shirt and wiped it across his forehead. ‘You might still get your wish. For days I’ve dreamt of stracheldraht. Can you imagine?’

‘But you live,’ said Michal. ‘I am the ghost who eats your bread. I no longer know how to sleep because I despair each passing moment. What is it your children say? Heavenly Auschwitz? I can tell you it’s not the same. It’s worse. Death is no release.’ A great crash nearby. ‘There,’ Michal continued. ‘The wind seeks to punish us. We have failed this world. We have refused its natural order.’

‘And what of us?’ said Jakub. ‘We who remain in Earthly Auschwitz and are forced to resent the dead? Every day I meet my poor mother, I see how she withers away, and still I take the crust she has saved for me. Yes, it’s true. I blame you. I blame you for staying here when you are supposed to be gone. I blame you that you share in what is supposed to only be ours. And most of all I blame you that my body aches, that my hunger plunges the dagger into my mother’s chest. But I am grateful too. When I suck on the stale bread, feel it soften in my mouth, I thank you for absolving me of my crimes. That is the thing. Earthly Auschwitz cannot exist without Heavenly Auschwitz.’

‘Well, I’m glad you are here,’ said Michal. ‘Dying is a lonely business. Your anger, your resentment. They are my anchors. I know it sounds strange, Jakub. But I don’t think I’m ready to leave.’

The whispers and moans of waking. Jakub turned restlessly and waited for the call to muster. Michal woke with a start. He looked at Jakub in fright and vaulted from the bunk. ‘Today,’ he said and ran off down the aisle. All around, a rising tide of voices. Jakub shuffled across and stretched into the new space. Georg was stirring, his eyes easing open then falling shut again. A single voice rose above the others: the block elder. An announcement. Jakub could not make out the words. He leaned across the side rail and looked towards the front. The barrack doors had not been opened. Georg sat up and crawled to the edge. ‘What’s happening?’ said Jakub. ‘Michal…I think it’s begun.’ As if conjured by the mention of his name, Michal appeared again beside the bunk, grinning like a madman. ‘It’s Tadeusz,’ he said between breaths. ‘Someone’s killed the bastard.’

Jakub and Georg pulled Michal back up into the bed. ‘Last night,’ he continued. ‘In the dust storm. An SS patrol found him this morning. The son of a bitch attacked a boy over near the fence. Poor kid was still alive, lying naked in the dirt, covered in blood. Someone must have seen it, come to save him.’

‘I know. They can’t make head or tail of it. Who’d have the strength to strangle that brute, anyway? We, who are starving?’

‘Yes. Can you believe it? Big, muddy handprints around his neck. Crushed his throat.’

The barrack doors were opened at noon. The men spilled out onto the camp road, kicking up the dirt that had settled in the night, and hurried towards the assembly ground. The day would be spent at attention. The jubilation at Tadeusz’s demise was tempered by the news that soon followed: the boy had died. In the barracks, some spoke of him as a martyr: the one who had given his life so that the world could be rid of a monster. Arnošt Flusser died picking flowers, they said, as if freeing him from the savagery of his death.

Jakub turned against the flow of bodies. He ran between the barracks towards the fence that separated the Family Camp from the quarantine blocks. When he came to the dandelion patch he fell to his knees. Around him, a scuffle of boot prints. The patch was bare. If there had been dandelions, the boy must have picked them. Jakub saw that the dirt was raised. In his head, a familiar chant. AH, H, AH, AV, V, AV.

Their bodies no longer radiated the warmth of the living and so they huddled together five, six, seven to a bunk to stave off the chill. Each night a new battle raged, to be the furthest from the wall, from the wind, to find the one who had eaten well, whose heart beat a little stronger, whose skin was not bursting with pustules, whose rags were not stained with brown dysenteric slop, who could be trusted not to try, when everyone else was asleep, to prise away a small soup tin or serviceable shoes, who might not, when the siren sounded before dawn, be found stiff against the straw.

They counted the days by the stubble on their flaking scalps and the angular shadows of their protruding bones. They knew it was an imperfect measure, that the body’s regenerative ability slows as it starves, that there comes a time when the skin is just a paper sail across hardened calcium masts and it can retreat no further. Only those who had recently arrived still possessed a sense of real time. So it was that Daša Roubíčková knew she had been in Birkenau for three weeks. The bruises had almost healed, a swamp of yellowed puddles. She brushed her hand across the numbered cloth patch on her shirt then reached over to pull Irena close.

When the door slid open at the platform, she could see nothing. For almost a day they had been locked inside, standing, pitching to and fro with every jerk of the train. It had been dark, the tiny window slats obscured by heads craning upwards for air. Her eyes adjusted with the dawn, drawing faces on the shadows around her. They were all the same, exhausted, desperate for this journey to end. She looked to the back wall. Irena was sitting on her case, her face buried in her palms.

A blast of icy wind threw her backwards into heaving flesh. From outside, a savage explosion of dogs and, behind it, the barking of men. And the air: heavy, sweet, rancid.

Batons clanged against the sidings. Sobs, screams. The noise spilled over them as a thousand prisoners tumbled onto the platform. At the door, men in filthy striped suits and caps reached out to help the straggling few. She felt a cold hand against hers, a violent pull. Then a voice, surprised, choking. ‘Daša?’

She looked into the man’s face, his darkened cheeks, his wild eyes. ‘Can it be—’ the man exclaimed.

‘Listen…’ A swarm of SS pushed through the crowd, snarling, hitting bags from hands. ‘You are twenty. Irena is eighteen. You are both hard workers. Remember, Daša, please.’

From a loudhailer nearby: ‘Attention. Form two lines on the platform, men on one side, women on the other. If you are ill or do not have the strength to walk, identify yourselves and you shall be taken by ambulance…’

‘Daša,’ continued Bohuš. ‘Be smart. You must appear strong, whatever it takes.’ A guard drew closer. Bohuš pinched Daša’s cheeks, first one, then the other. Traces of pink appeared in her face. ‘Your father is here. I will tell him you’ve come. Look out for me near the trains, I will find you.’ He pushed past her, began to climb up. ‘Daša,’ he whispered, eyes locked on her finger. ‘The ring. Swallow it.’ And with that he disappeared into the carriage.

The line moved forward at a slow, steady pace. At the front, a thin man in a deep green uniform glanced at the arrivals, pointing left or right. Occasionally, he stopped one, asked a question, considered the answer, looked them over again, then pointed. He was, she could see, deaf to their pleas. Couples who arrived holding hands were sent in opposite directions. Parents and children too. They would cry, scream, but he ignored them. All around, SS men watched on, talking to one another, joking, laughing.

‘Age?’ The man stared through her. His black hair was slicked down on his scalp, the widow’s peak pointing at her in accusation. Bolts of lightning flashed on his collar.

‘Twenty. I come from the country, a hard worker.’ She spoke slowly, to make sure he could understand, but more so for the pain of metal in her parched throat. The rumbling splutter of an engine, a momentary distraction. The man turned away then back to her. He pointed to the right. ‘My sister—’ she began but a guard shoved her aside. Daša walked towards the huddled mass, checking over her shoulder. Irena skipped up to the man. Daša could see that she was pointing, nodding in earnest. The man pointed. Right. Daša felt the ring dislodge, slip down her gullet.

Neither one could remember the last time she’d seen the other naked. Daša did her best to shield Irena from the lurid gazes of those who came to leer. It was enough that the girl was still at the age of misplaced shame and bodily confusion. But to be stripped, to have all her hair shaved—it was too much. They stood in the vast chamber and waited. When it was full, the door slammed shut. All around, silence, then frantic whispers. Someone began to cry, then another. Low moans. The shema, sung in a soft, rising undertone, trapped in concrete.

From above: creaks and pops, then a long, steady hiss. Daša looked up to the network of copper pipes and held her breath.

The block supervisor, a surly Slovak with charcoal teeth, took an instant dislike to her.

‘That’s the problem with you mischlinge,’ the woman said on the first night. ‘Part of you believes in their nonsense. You think yourself above us, that your Aryan blood somehow makes you superior. And goddamn it, you’re right. Look at you: plump, proud, strong. But stay here long enough and I swear…’ And with that, the Slovak slapped the soup tin from Daša’s hand, splattering her feet in brown muck. Daša scraped out the dregs and pushed them between her lips.

The breakfast ration stabbed at her gut and Daša hurried to the latrine block at the end of the camp. She shoved open the door, the odour of burning flesh overwhelmed by the stench of shit. The fumes of quicklime scorched her eyes and through her tears she could just make out the rows of figures crouched over holes along a concrete plinth. Daša found a place and squatted over the putrid hollow, clenching her anus until she could reach underneath and make a net with her fingers. Watery slop dribbled through. She closed her eyes and pushed. A terrible cramp gave way to an explosion of sludge. And then, something hard on her palm. Daša snatched her hand away, rubbed the ring against her shirt then slid it under her tongue.

The morning passed in a daze. They were unable to make sense of this place that was not Theresienstadt. Daša kept watch over her sister. ‘I thought maybe it would be over when I woke up,’ the younger girl had said when they first woke, her hand rubbing her naked scalp. Daša had no words to comfort her. She thought instead of Bohuš and wondered if he had merely been a spectre. Would it be the same with the others? Ludvík? Auntie Gusta? Jakub? Shmuel? As she was led back from the shower, Daša had been overcome by the vastness of the camp. Buildings, fences, soldiers as far as the eye could see. Through it all, a procession of phantoms.

She climbed onto the bunk and nestled in beside Irena. ‘Daša?’ said Irena, but Daša lifted her finger to her lips. ‘Today we rest,’ she said. They drifted off to the hum of muffled chatter and the fluttering of the coarse sheets that hung from each bunk. Before sleep claimed her, Daša thought of Žižkov and how Marcela and Hana might also be asleep behind the gauze. Her mind conjured the smell of svíčková, and then nothing.

Panicked shrieks jolted them awake. Outside, the howl of a siren then an almighty explosion. The bunk rattled, throwing the two girls against the wall. The barrack lights dimmed and brightened with a buzz. Nearby, the mutterings of prayer. Daša pulled aside the sheet and swung her legs over the bunk’s edge. ‘Come,’ she said to Irena, and jumped to the ground. Another blast followed by volleys of gunfire. The earth shook. She joined the stampede towards the barrack door, pulling Irena behind her.

They spilled into the afternoon light, their hopes hitched to the sound of fearsome battle. ‘Liberation!’ shouted one as if the word itself would set her free. ‘The Red Army!’ cried another. A loud cheer went up. Hurrah! The forest beyond the barbed wire was aflame, grey smoke billowing to the sky. Along the road outside the camp, a convoy of flatbed trucks roared by, German soldiers poised with pointed guns. The women rushed at the wire, stopping only at the last moment, when reason returned to temper their frenzy. Daša pushed her way through the scrum. ‘The chimney,’ said the women next to her. Daša looked out at the forest and saw the chimney was gone. The earthen spire that had only yesterday spouted ash was now itself consumed by flame. A crescendo of gunfire, another blast, some lone shots and then silence. Only the crackle of burning birch. The women looked around, waited. Then: trucks rumbling slowly back along the road. By nightfall it was quiet. Whatever had happened, it was over. Better to forget.

Days of filth and boredom, the unforgiving monotony of suspended existence. They were not here to work, nor were they here to die. They were here only to wait.

Twice a day they left the barracks to be counted. An hour, two, they stood, stripped to the waist, the rain like daggers on their skin. The SS men counted with deliberation. They had sickened of the starving female form, but these new arrivals were different. There was still enough of a shape on them to bring to mind their women back home. Some they made jump or skip or dance or run or just fall to their knees in the mud. The skinny ones, the sickly, the damned—those who had become one with the place—they simply marked off in their folders and moved on. Occasionally there was a selection: for reassignment, for transport, for death. When it was over most of the women returned to their bunks.

Waiting, they sewed, scrubbed and scraped. They talked of home and family, averting their eyes from the smokestacks beyond the forest that, once again, were breathing fire. They talked of war, of shifting fronts, approaching freedom. From it they learned a new language, more useful than any other. Even here it was possible to gain privilege if you knew how, who. This Kapo, that guard. They listened out for voices at the fence, the barking of dogs, the approaching ruckus of another transport. Together, they rushed to the edge, called out to those who had arrived, for food, for water, for clothes, for anything that could be thrown over the wire.

Long after the latest train had been emptied, after most of the women had given up and turned back, Daša lingered at the fence, the hum of electric current charming the hairs on her arm, and waited for Bohuš. The men from the Kanada kommando stood on the ramp with mountains of bags, hauling them onto carts and trucks. She spotted him, watched as he ducked away under the guise of collecting more bags. He came close, tossed a small package wrapped in cloth over the fence. ‘Your father sends his love.’

‘Look.’ He pointed beyond the wire to the far end of the camp. ‘For a while everyone sent from the fortress was there. Now they are gone. I didn’t want to tell you before. I’m sorry.’

After the first week, Daša thought about home. She must write to her mother. For days she had been composing the letter in her head. My dearest golden Mummy…

Daša sat on the furthest hole in the latrines, facing the wall, scribbling furiously. When the lead grew blunt, she bit at the surrounding wood, refashioned the point. Her life, here, on two small pages. In each word, her own mortality, that of Irena, their father. She omitted nothing, just to be sure.

She read it over, pictured her mother holding it. It was not goodbye, but if it was, it would be enough. She folded the paper, stood and headed back to the barracks. A figure loomed at the door, blocking the way.

At the evening roll call, she was ordered to step forward. An officer stood, rigid, shielding the letter from the rain. Daša dared not look around. Twelve hundred eyes bored into her back.

The Slovak waded into the group, pushed one of the girls to the front. Daša did not recognise her.

The girl scanned the letter, drew a breath. ‘It say…’ she began in stilted German. ‘It say: My dearest gold Mother. I am moved away from Terezín, off east.’ The girl looked up at Daša. ‘We have long train ride together. Here I am…healthy. Sister too. It is big place with many of…’ A pause. ‘Many of friends. Do not be fear for me. We are treating us well. We have big food and warm bed. I am waiting for chance to work again and I write you soon to tell about it. I miss you very much, dearest Mother, and also family. But I know’—the girl was barely looking at the page—‘soon we be together again. Please give to everyone big kisses that I love them and always am thinking of them. Your biggest daughter, Daša.’

Daša woke from dreams of electric wire. Her ears were throbbing. The taste of metal on her engorged tongue. It was coming back to her, the beating, the horsewhip, black, polished boots. Her head filled with Irena’s desperate howls. For a moment she caught the Slovak, arms around her sister, holding Irena back. A jolt—the ring was gone—but Daša could not break free of her delirium, could not sit up. Through puffy slits she could just make out a figure standing above her, observing. The face was warm, caring. It did not belong in this place. ‘Try to drink,’ it said. She looked at the glass, at the liquid they called coffee, and closed her eyes. Not yet. It still hurt to breathe.

The infirmary block was like all the others. Long, wooden, hollow. A home for dysentery, for typhoid. There was little medicine to speak of, only rest and the promise of a less disturbed sleep. The orderlies fussed over Daša, daubed at her wounds with dirty rags, scraped away the crusted blood. When her sister came, they busied themselves elsewhere, ignored the precious bounty she carried. There is a man who gives it to them, they whispered over soiled linen. Irena waited for them to move away, then leaned in close. ‘It’s okay,’ she said and lifted her tongue to reveal the golden band. ‘I have it.’

For three days she slept, oblivious to the bodies that climbed over her, the one that clung to her at night. She recognised her sister’s breath, the even flow of whispered stories of the lake at Sudoměřice. She was woken only for roll calls, when she stood in a trance while she was counted. Twice a day Irena held a metal rim to her mouth and she sipped. Small clumps of bread passed her lips on pinched fingers and she waited for them to dissolve.

On the fourth day she stood up and headed to the cubicle near the front of the barrack. Her knuckles smarted against the flimsy wood. She did not wait for a reply, just turned the handle and stepped inside. The Slovak sat on a low bench, tearing at crusts of bread. A grunt.

‘Tell me, mischlinge, to whom would you have given it? Your boyfriend in Kanada? It was a fool’s errand. You would have been killed for sure. The guards, they’d have taken your letter, taken your ring’—she registered the surprise in Daša’s face—‘and seen you shot for sabotage. As it was, you wrote a dream. You are a young girl. There is no harm in that. I knew you’d be punished, but not death. Not now. Things here have changed.’

‘She has been transferred to the main camp to work as a nurse. Now she eats, she has warm quarters. I don’t expect to hear from her again.’ The Slovak held out a piece of bread. Daša sat on the woman’s bunk and pocketed the crust.

‘In this place, why anything? To protect myself. To save your friend. To help the little nurse. Because I, too, was a mother, a sister. Because I am hungry, bored. Because when this is over I want someone to remember that I was here, in this world. Listen up, mischlinge. Tomorrow there will be a special selection. A flax mill in Silesia has purchased two hundred of you to replace the boys they’ve sent to the front, and for some reason they want only Czechs. They are sending a foreman to interview possible workers. When they call for volunteers at the roll call, be sure to step forward. Take your sister. Remember, you are weavers. Your family are weavers. All you have ever known is weaving.’

The next morning, Daša was ready. She had stood before the man, told him of their mother, her millinery. He asked about fabrics, material, machinery. Yes, she said, she was familiar with them. Her sister even more so. Her head filled with the voice of Pan Durák, the way he spoke of clothes as living beings, and his words became hers. The man tested her with numbers, seemed satisfied with the answers. When it was over he jotted something in his notebook and thanked her for her time. The kindness in his words was jarring.

She waited to hear their numbers at the next roll call, but there was no selection and her heart grew heavy. Snow tumbled from the blackened clouds, the colour of midnight. Irena looked at her, anxious. ‘Maybe they haven’t decided,’ she said. They lined up again in the evening. When the counting was done a different man stepped forward. ‘If you are called, approach.’ He read the list with indifference and she watched the women step forward. More than fifty, sixty, seventy. Then her number. And Irena’s. Daša looked for the Slovak but she had returned to the barracks.

In rows of five, one hundred women march along the road in the direction of the forest. They follow the path between the ruins of Krema IV and the belching stack of Krema V until they reach the Sauna block. They recognise it in the fading light, see in it hope for what is to come: the water scalds, a welcome fire. As they file out, dripping, naked, they are thrown new dresses and shoes, ill-fitting but clean. Wind whips through the trees, lashing the fabric to their skin. They march onwards, past the Kanada Barracks and come to a stop beside Krema III. There they stand throughout the night, until the dawn comes, and with it, the shape of a third-class train.

Behind the wire, inmates stumble from barracks for the morning roll call. She watches them flock into the muddy fields, gather in rows as she makes her way down the ramp towards the train. She is leaving this world, will never speak of it. As she nears the carriage door, her eye catches a lonely figure standing by the fence. In his face she sees her own, her sisters’. She pulls at Irena’s arm, points in the man’s direction. He brings his fingertips to his lips. They do not see his tears, of joy, of relief, of farewell.

She watched him leave the Family Camp from behind the wire. He marched in step, turning to catch one last glimpse. Then another. Take it, she had said, holding out the stale crust. He snatched it greedily from her fingers, felt his hand brush against hers. Little more than bone. She cried while he ate and he began to mutter, Sorry…sorry. She wiped away a tear and ran her tongue along the shimmering trail it left on her wrist. No, she said. Eat. Just eat. He felt it crumble in his dry mouth. He sucked on the crumbs and waited for the flow of saliva. It isn’t true, that the body cannot forget. It had been like this for weeks, since the day they were scheduled to die. He could feel his throat tense, a memory of swallowing. The bread stung as it tumbled through him. Sorry, he said again. His voice, hoarse.

It had come at last, the day they’d been expecting. Dawn. The camp filled with soldiers. He was told to report to the schoolroom. Block 31. He stood in line, stripped to the waist, as the doctor made his way across the room. A pinch. A prod. The thin skin on his arm puckered, unable to settle outwards. He flattened it back with his palm. By the afternoon he had received new orders. Prepare yourself, the man had said. You are moving on. He ran to her with the news, but she was not coming. She was old, weak, a woman. She had not even been examined. Please, she had said. Don’t remember me like this. He marched away in the early light. How could he leave her? Outside the gate a truck was waiting. Georg marched beside him, almost unrecognisable but for the rhythm in his step.

She stood against the wire, still. As he stared at her, in a flash, her skin dried out and cracked, her body atrophied, and creeping wisps of earth sprouted from the ground to fill the spaces. The sky was empty above them. An engine turned and sprang to life. Puffs of black smoke. He stepped up onto the truck. It was the last he would see of his mother: a pillar of dirt.

He lay in a shroud that might have been his father’s tallis, drifting in the darkness. The sounds of purgatory, uncertain yet reassuring, floated past his sinking grave. His eyes were glued shut, his skin torn open. He had come apart but was somehow whole again. He remembered the skies filling with the shriek of impending hellfire while he staggered forward. Sirens, growing louder, pushing him into the field. He turned towards shelter but was chased away with barks and snarls and the tips of bayonets. Metallic fists fell around him like hail. He watched the others, his comrades, disappearing in clouds of pink mist, their loads crashing to the ground and sinking into the dirt. For a moment he was flying. Then nothing.

He woke to a stiff cocoon of hospital linen, surrounded by panes of shifting light, a constellation of swooping angels. Here. A hand slipped behind his head and pulled him forward. A lukewarm liquid splashed across his lips. Drink. The faint whistling continued inside his head from… from…It came back in fragments. Every day it was the same: sent into the fields to clear the rubble. The bombing was relentless and still the Schwarzheide plant churned on, synthesising fuel, fabricating hope.

Jakub drew his arm up from under the sheet and rubbed at his eyes. Georg’s haggard face emerged. ‘The front is moving closer. They are evacuating the camp. At least if we walk there’s a chance…Here.’ Georg grabbed Jakub’s arm and slung it across his shoulder. ‘I’ll help you up.’ He braced his knee against the wooden bedframe.

‘Save your strength. I’m not coming.’ Jakub went limp, a dead weight. Georg heaved, twice, a third time, but grew tired from the effort. ‘There’s no point. I can’t walk.’

‘It is just an infection. Rest on my shoulders if you need. I’m not leaving you here.’

Jakub reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the small clay pellet that had been digging into his breast. ‘Do you remember Tadeusz?’

‘Take this, Georg. It will keep you safe on your march. And when you get home, when this is all over, take it to the bank of the Vltava, the one closest to where the Maharal rests, and bury it in the mud. Next time the creature wakes, let him rise with the force of our murdered souls.’

‘Jakub, I know. The book of dirt. I’ve heard it too. And many more. They made a fortress within a fortress, he and his friends, its ramparts built of legend. Those poor men, great sages one and all, cut down by circumstance. Any other time and it might have been different. But in that prison? What did they have but each other and the comfort of dreams?’

‘Killed in a cloak of dust. It’s tempting, of course. To ascribe it to a clay man. But I’m afraid whoever killed that brute was all too human. Who didn’t want him dead? And coming upon him in the act with that poor Flusser boy. Some horrors even the devil won’t abide.’

Still, Georg closed his hand around the clay. After the bomb had fallen, after he had watched Jakub hurtling through the air in a spray of dirt like a discarded doll, after the silence had passed, Georg rushed across to mourn his friend, to stand over his broken body and utter the words he wished he could have said for his parents, his brothers, all his people: Blessed is the true judge. He had crouched to kiss Jakub’s forehead, a final goodbye, but instead felt the warm rush of air from between his friend’s lips. The soil had turned to peat in the blast, wrapping around Jakub and cushioning his fall. Georg reached down and helped Jakub to his feet. They stood at the bomb crater’s edge and he brushed the dirt from Jakub’s clothes. The blast had ripped a hole in the fabric at his calf, a gorge of open flesh filled with bloody loam. ‘I’ll get you to the hospital.’

The doctor cleaned it, poured in alcohol and sewed the wound together. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘The mud staunched the flow.’ The following day, Georg helped Jakub hobble back to the site and watched as his friend sifted through the earth until he found a single hardened piece of clay unlike all the rest. They returned to news of liquidation: Schwarzheide was to be emptied. They would have to walk. Those willing to work would be exempted and transported by truck to Sachsenhausen, the main camp in the north. Jakub stepped forward, careful to look steady on his feet. Georg stayed back a moment, then joined him. But there was no work to be done at the other camp. Jakub and Georg waited in their new barracks, lost among the sea of unfamiliar faces. Jakub scratched at the wound, felt the molten lava of sepsis throb beneath his skin. Three days after they arrived, Jakub collapsed outside the barracks.

Jakub turned to the wall and rested his face against the straw pillow. His eyes grew heavy.

A shock of blonde hair and the girl was gone. He chased her through a paper city, the ground tearing beneath his feet. All around him towers of books lurched in the storm. In the distance, he could make out the roar of an open furnace. She was leading him on towards the darkness. He ran blindly, panicked. He stopped to catch his breath, bent over. When he looked up he saw that the street had changed. The smell of smoke, ash, stripped of the sickly sweetness of burnt flesh, drifted from the city’s glowing edge. The street shrank as the towers staggered inwards to consume him. At their foundations he saw the bent forms of old friends—Langer, Muneles, Jakobovits—a band of crumpled Atlases, their faces twisting under the weight. He jerked forward, tried to push his way through as they closed in around him, but it was too late. He was in the room again, in the old converted barn, at a desk sifting through the dirt he had found inside a weathered prayer book. They sat in their assigned spots, soldiers of clay, going about their duties. A blizzard of white cards blew around the room, each one streaked with crusted filth. He looked down to the pile before him and could see it pulsing to an irregular beat. From within, laughter, the forgotten sound of carelessness, of freedom. Then, the sound of his name. He thrust his hand into the dirt and sent it spilling onto the floor. He kept digging, throwing aside muddy clumps, filling the room around him. The laughter grew louder with each fistful. Soon the hole was deep enough for him to reach inside with his arm. He felt around, surprised at the warmth, until his finger caught on something: a delicate tripwire. He tugged at it. Nothing. Again. Propping his other arm against the desk’s flat surface for leverage, he grasped at the thread and pulled it out of the hole. It was shorter than he had expected and coated in earth. He ran the thread between his lips and wiped it clean. It hung limply between his fingers: a single, delicate strand of blonde hair.

Our golden beloved mother

I have just had lunch and got up to write to my dears. I am writing this in such a lovely room, that is the toilet. Today is Christmas Day and I remember how you visited us last year. At the time, of course, we indeed did not think that we would still not be home this year. However, already next year we will certainly be home and make up then for the whole of the three years.

The last strain of the air-raid siren echoed down the deserted street. From above, silence—no hum of engines, no piercing whistle, no shaking thunder. Piles of garbage clustered like barricades on the kerb, spilling onto the snow-covered road. A low wind licked at the corner of a hastily pasted sign—Closed for the Victory of the Reich—on the door to Žofie Sláviková’s grocery. Žižkov was at peace.

In the coal cellar of 13 Biskupcova Street, Františka Roubíčková flicked through an old copy of Kinorevue and waited for her neighbours to leave. Yet again they had crouched together in the shadows, in the chill of the bluestone crypt, those few who had not been taken, those not blighted by the yellow star, and braced for tremors that did not come. Liberation was near, if only they could live to see it. Františka was tired of this paranoid waltz, the way it insinuated itself into her anticipation. She resented the way it struck fear in her daughters’ eyes, how it set back her quotas at the factory and forced her to work late, how it chased her tired legs from the tram to the nearest shelter, how it turned her fingers to matchsticks as she scoured her purse to find her papers lest the warden turn her away or, worse, report her. It was a farce, another way to shackle them inside this national prison. But after the November attack, when Allied bombs had rained down on a suburban electricity station and killed four people, one could never be certain. And so she had no choice but to relent, to cower, to wait for whatever might drop from the sky.

Why, though, must it always be such a bother? When the siren bellowed across the network of loudspeakers, Františka had been frying schnitzels. Christmas was approaching and Marcela had just returned from the country, her case full of treats. The southern rail was safe from strafing aircraft and so they could feast, both here and in Silesia. The fillets sizzled in the oil, hissing as the crust browned around them. It was an art: knowing the precise time to rescue them before the meat had dried or the crumbs had burnt. That the alarm should sound then, at the very moment she had put a new batch in the pan…Františka struck the bench with her spatula and cursed the clouds.

She had wept the moment she saw Daša’s handwriting. Only a fortnight before, Pan Durák had appeared at her door in a panic—the girls had been transported east from the fortress town—and they cried in each other’s arms. Then this. The envelope gave nothing away, her name and address in a stiff masculine scrawl. On the back a man’s name, unfamiliar, and an address in Germany. She held it to the light, anxiety creeping through her at the thought of all Daša had risked, all she had come through. My dearestMummy…The note was short. Again they had been moved, this time to a garment factory in Silesia. Write back, dear Mummy. Let me know you have received my news. And, if it was not too much trouble, send some underwear.

Now, Františka looked across at her two other daughters crouched in the cellar. She had not yet mustered the courage to tell them of the other letter, the one on official Gestapo paper. The age restriction had been lifted. Marcela and Hana were to report in the New Year, to be taken and resettled in one of the camps for mischlinge.

You ask how is the postal service. Parcels arrive perfectly. We hugely enjoy the taste of everything. The parcel with the schnitzels was unfortunately delayed somewhere and, I hear, arrived all mouldy. It arrived at the same time as the last one. Mr B had to throw out all the bread, all the schnitzels and some cakes. The rest he saved. He is very nice and very busy with it. You ask whether you are doing it right with the contents. It is absolutely correct…

The tram clattered unsteadily through the snow towards the city’s black heart—the Gestapo office in Peček Palace. Around it, the road was empty, only the snaking trails of bicycle tyres. Prague had fallen into disrepair, its trams a fleet of moving wrecks. Františka braced herself for each shrieking halt. Litter filled the wooden slats at her feet.

‘Madame?’ The girl was no older than Marcela, her long dress a bright field of flowers, a premonition of spring. Františka wondered if they’d met, shared a class, played in the courtyard, this girl and her own. The New Year brought only the prospect of better tidings for such a child. In a perverse way, it helped to know that there were still those who could frequent the cinema, dine at restaurants, scrape finely chopped offal from snail shells in feigned elegance, rifle through racks of fashionable dresses at the emporia; those afforded the luxury of boredom, of searching out ways to fill their day. Františka tucked her foot back under the seat and let the girl sit next to the tram window.

She got off near the museum and hurried across the thoroughfare to the park. Below her, the great stretch of Wenceslas Square. From above, the stony eyes of gargoyles perched on top of the Prague Museum followed Františka as she walked towards the great columns and disappeared into Peček Palace.

Františka looked around at the sparse chamber. ‘I’ve had other concerns. Time has its way. This—’

‘Is what happens if you’re not sent to the front.’ The clerk shifted in his chair. ‘Paper warfare,’ he continued. ‘I had hoped for a more active role in the organisation but in winter it is some mercy. Perhaps there is glory in shelter. My wife certainly thinks so.’

‘It wasn’t my doing. I was pleased for you nonetheless. When you stopped coming I knew. You weren’t the type to give up. A few of us had a wager. I have you to thank for six cigarettes. Tell me something Paní—’

‘I’ve seen them all. I suspect they use the square as a waypoint. We are forbidden from taking shelter so we run to the windows. This place is safe enough. If the bombs should drop, assuming there isn’t a direct hit, we won’t come to any harm so long as we move to the middle. But this city is charmed. The planes have no appetite for its beauty. So we just watch them pass over in waves, stalking their way to the Fatherland while we play a fanfare of sirens in the streets below. You know, my parents are still in Berlin. I fear for Mother’s heart. The years have weakened it.’

‘They don’t know. What little they have of Christmas I wasn’t going to take away. But it’s almost the New Year and—’ She pulled the little purse from her pocket and emptied it on the table.

‘There is cash too. I have managed to save. Just take them from your list. Find a way.’

‘You’ve never asked about my family. You know, all the times you came and begged to see your daughters you never once thought to ask.’

‘Three daughters. All under ten. My wife still promises me a son but we’ve finished. The thought that he might be conscripted, sent to the front. Not in this war, but there’s always the next. I would worry from the moment he was born.’ He scooped up the rings and carefully dropped them back into the purse. ‘Take it. You will want to wear them again. Italy and France have fallen. Greece too. Stalingrad is a memory. The Reich is collapsing. The Protectorate…he will hold on until his dying breath but eventually…’ The man pushed back in his chair and stood up. ‘I ask only one thing in return. When the time comes, find me. Wherever I am, with the Russians, the Americans. Speak for me, for what I’ve done.’ He scribbled his name on a sheet of notepaper and handed it to her. ‘Tear up the letter, forget it ever came. Nobody will come for them.’ He ushered her to the door. ‘Take care of your girls, but also spare a thought for mine.’

The afternoon sun had turned the ground to a dirty grey mush. Františka Roubíčková stepped out onto Bredovská Street, pulled the sheet from her pocket and dropped it to the ground. With each step she cast him further from her mind until, when she climbed aboard the tram back towards Žižkov, he was lost to her, to history, forever. There will only be this: once there was a Gestapo man who sought in her an absolution she could not give.

So Mummy dearest, this is all for today, since I must still write to Marcelka and Hanička so that they are not angry with me that I never write to them. I wish you all a happy and merry New Year. Let it be happier than the last.

With many memories I say goodbye to you and send my kisses,

Your only Daša

They did not stop to rest. Throughout the night they had walked along the road. The sun rose soon after they passed the second village, where roosters crowed to wake the locals, who stumbled from their shanties and stood at the roadside so they could spit and curse at the ragtag parade. Georg threw his clogs away before morning; the wood had sliced purple arches into his swollen skin. As he trudged on, he tore the blanket on his shoulders into strips. He asked one of the guards if he could stop to relieve himself. He squatted on a nearby knoll, his pants strung across his calves as sludgy droplets fell beneath him. The guard watched on, his bulky frame perched on an old bicycle, as Georg wrapped his feet in the blanket.

To a volley of threats and blows, they marched until sunset, when they began to slow. Georg lurched to the centre of his column and let the miserable stream of bodies push him forward. He looked at the ground, at the stumbling feet of the man in front of him. He did not look up when the shots rang out, or when the barks and screams and sounds of ripping flesh shattered the country air. Only the cheerful trill of a bicycle bell pulled him from the monotony of the march. The guards laughed like children and roared like beasts.

Another village. They were diverted from the road to an open field. Some fell to the ground, kissing the earth like it might open up and swallow them, steal them away from this glacial hell. Others plucked at the grass, hungrily snatching it to their mouths, chewing the blades. Nearby, a commotion. One man had found a snail. He chomped on it, shell and all, while those around him watched with envy. At the field’s edge the guards had gathered to eat and drink: sausages, bread, canned meat, cheese and schnapps. They sang and laughed and shot indiscriminately into the horde of prisoners. They threw the leftover food into the mud, crushed it beneath their boots, then stood around to drench it in streams of their own piss. Then they gathered their columns and sorted the thousands of prisoners into groups of five hundred, to continue the march to Wittstock. The prisoners close by set upon the discarded slop, clawing at the mud with their bony fingers, digging out what morsels they could salvage. They swallowed them without chewing, the bread softened by urine, only to vomit them back up with a force long forgotten by their bodies. Those who did not scrabble to pick up the slurry were pushed aside by others who did not hesitate to see if they might fare better. Men who, for a moment, had glimpsed hope, life, were now doubled over in agony, on their knees, shivering in the field. When the guards were ready to move on, they sauntered over to those men and shot them one after the other so the march would not be delayed.

At night, while the stars hid behind a fleece of clouds, they were guided only by the sting of bitumen under their feet. The blackness spared them the sight of blood and pus and sloughed skin that streaked the road in their wake. In the early morning, they passed another town, larger than the others. Not a soul stirred as they trudged through its main street. Even the animals slept in their pens. Suddenly, Georg began to laugh. Had he not once said to Jakub that one must walk humbly before the Lord? That one ought not make a spectacle of oneself? Well, here it was, the paradox of observance. If only Jakub could have been with him to see it. For was there ever a more humble walk than this? Or a greater spectacle?

Not that it mattered anymore. Jakub was dead. Of that Georg was certain. Sachsenhausen was already in flames when Georg had begun to march. The SS were burning everything they could in the rush to flee. Georg could not look back, could not bear to see the inferno consume his friend. He walked on, hand in his pocket, his fingers playing their melodies around the hardened clay. It did, he had to admit, have a music of its own. He would fulfil Jakub’s dying wish and bury it on the banks of the river. It was in this act that he would honour his friend’s memory.

On the third day they reached Wittstock. Georg thought they might stop. He had heard the guards talking, heard them say they would wait for other columns to join before continuing. All the camps around Berlin had been evacuated. Most of the prisoners were marching north to the port of Lübeck, where they were to board ships, destination undecided. Wittstock was to be their point of convergence, the town that would remove the last vestige of their individuality, their camp identities. The people of Wittstock came out to watch them, left buckets of water and stale bread along the way for those who dared break from the columns. By the great gothic cathedral, women turned away so that the prisoners would not see them cry. Onwards they marched, five hundred after five hundred, thousands of men and women, flanked by SS guards and the German prisoners enlisted from among their own ranks to accompany the procession, through the streets and past the north-western boundary. The pavement gave way to gravel and the houses to trees: a canopy of spring foliage, teeming with birds and forest creatures that peeked out with curiosity and horror.

Without warning they came to a stop. The guards blew their whistles, told the prisoners to rest. They would wait for further instructions. Until that time, anyone caught trying to escape would be shot. They scavenged like voles, picking at the grass and leaves, searching for hidden veins of water. Georg slumped against an immense trunk. The bark scraped at his back. He tried to pick at the crusted green barnacles but his nails could not withstand the pressure and tore from his fingertips. He had not eaten in three days.

He woke to the sound of engines. Around him, a swell of excitement. He could catch only phrases. They were calling it the camp in the Below Forest. Sachsenhausen’s final outpost. Then familiar words: Red Cross. They arrived in convoy, trucks laden with boxes of supplies. They kept the engines running as they jumped from the cabins to unload the cargo. Georg watched from a distance as Red Cross men negotiated with the guards, had them sign off on the load. The cluster of heaving bodies untangled to form long lines, winding through the trees. When the Red Cross boxes were torn open, a great cheer resounded through the forest. Georg pressed his hands firmly to the tree roots and pushed, willing himself up to join the line, but he could not lift even what little was left of his body. They had been right, those around him: this was a camp like any other. There was no need for gas chambers or crematoria; here nature would play the executioner. Georg let the air fill his chest, then closed his eyes. Beside him, a crouching woman was nibbling at a sausage and some chocolate. Georg reached out to her but the woman stumbled backwards, clutched the food to her chest. Georg began to speak, pleading for a bite. The woman looked at him, confused by the strange words. From her muttering, he understood that she was, like many of those on the march, a simple woman from rural Hungary, recently evacuated from Ravensbrück and brought to join the great procession from Sachsenhausen. What did she know beyond simple survival? Georg slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out the clump of dirt. He held it out to the woman, pounded at his ribs with his free hand and tried to explain, but the woman staggered away. The first stars appeared through the tree canopy. Georg closed his eyes.

The next morning the guards blew their whistles and told the prisoners to reassemble in their columns. The march to Schwerin would commence before midday. Georg tried again to stand. He straightened his back against the trunk, pulled his knees to his chest and pushed with his legs. For a moment he lifted from the mossy earth but his strength deserted him and he landed back with a thud. He could see the columns begin to move. He could see the march had begun. He didn’t, however, see the SS man approach from the side. He didn’t see the guard unclip his holster. He didn’t see the gun raised to his head. And he most certainly didn’t see the flash that watered the old tree with his blood.

Many years later, it might have come to pass that an old Hungarian woman would, on her deathbed, remember the slight man with the wavy hair who struck at his chest and cried out with that strange word: golem, golem, golem. But she, too, perished, shot in the neck only two days later, when she collapsed on the roadside not far from the town of Zapel-Ausbar. And so nobody will ever know.

She no longer knows silence. For almost three years there has only been noise. The hubbub of an overcrowded street. Gasps, whimpers, sobs. The steady hum of electricity pulsing across deadly filaments. Dogs: panting, barking, scratching at wood. The swish of buckets filled with human waste. Screams, coughs. An orchestra of motors. The crunch of heavy boots. The screeching needle of the loom. The thud of falling sacks. No birds. Never any birds.

She no longer knows freedom. And so she stays: a day, another. She ventures outside the factory only to find him, the one who saved her. But they have gone, deserted the town. She watched them flee on bicycles. Now she sits in the attic watching over the pile of rags that is her sister. Of all that she has endured, this is the hardest. She counts the breaths, uneven, quick, and waits for the thick fluid to break up. It is a relief, the cough. It means the girl is alive. From the corner window she sees them swarm in, their uniforms like the spring. Their voices drift upwards; they speak in tongues and she is relieved at last not to understand. Their guns are slung loosely on their backs. In their hands, bottles held aloft to toast the day. They crash into the surrounding houses, disappear. She hears them laugh, sing, cheer. But beneath their sound, there are others, yelps, grunts. Their conquest is all consuming.

‘You must leave.’ She recognises the man’s voice, is surprised he is still here. For months he had sat in the corner, watched over them. She had not considered that he would have nowhere to go. ‘It is worse than I feared,’ another voice says, a fellow worker. ‘The Russians. They are telling us to take what we want. Follow their example.’ She points at the rags. ‘Nothing is too much, too weak.’

The plague of consumption had swept the garment factory in the spring, striking them down where they slept. Those who stayed strong kept vigil, watched the rash expand outwards on their bunkmates, waited for the cramps, the vomit, the hacking cough. She checked Irena every morning, was relieved to find no marks. She paid little attention to the fatigue, the weight loss—everyday symptoms of factory life. Then a cough, not like the others, with blood. The girl clutched at her chest with every shudder. Each day Daša went out to the station, unloaded the sacks, waited for his visit. A kind-faced station orderly, the villager who asked only for cigarettes. When she returned, her clothes stuffed with parcels, food wedged between the burlap, she would check on the girl and feel the feverish skin shrink from her touch.

She knows what she must do. She puts Irena on her shoulders and walks to the stairs. Down, past the looms, another floor, the same. Then the bottom, where the soldiers once camped, and out the door. On the western road she finds a house, its door open, food still on the table. She lays her sister on the bed, props her up with pillows. She pulls a couch across the door so it cannot be opened. She opens the window, climbs out onto the grass and closes the window behind her. They are everywhere, shouting down the streets, knocking on doors. She doesn’t understand what they are saying but picks up the word for freedom; it is close to her own: osvobozhdenny. One of the men approaches her, grasps her wrist and talks as if she might speak his language. He strokes her hair and tries to pull her towards him. She wrenches herself free, slaps his face. He stumbles back then falls to his knees in peals of laughter. His bottle spills over and he grabs it and takes another swig. She stands her ground, doesn’t flee: no more running. The soldier stands, composes himself and grabs her again, this time with both hands. His breath is warm against her face. He kisses her on the cheek, a chaste gesture, and lets go. The last she sees, he is laughing again.

She hurries on, unsure of what she is after. Only when she sees it does she know. A wheelbarrow, left upturned in the front yard of a cottage. She runs her finger along its wheel, checking for punctures. It holds firm to her touch. She turns it over like it is a precious chariot. The handles are worn, digging into her hands. She wheels it back towards the house careful to avoid any looters who might want to use it for their load. At last she arrives. The door does not budge; the window is still closed. Her sister is safe. She lays the barrow on its side and pushes up the windowpane. A jump. Another. On the third she catches the ledge and heaves herself onto the sill. From the bed, a familiar soft wheeze. She pulls the couch away from the door and brings her sister to the porch.

The barrow is gone. She expected it. She runs to the corner and looks down the street. It is being pushed by an older woman she knows from the factory. It is already full with food, blankets, silverware. From the surrounding houses she hears laughter and grunts, the shattering of glass. She runs towards the woman, sees that she can hardly stand up. The barrow is her crutch. In the distance, the grumble of approaching engines. She grabs the woman’s shoulders, shoves her to the side. The woman falls to the ground and looks up at her with hollow eyes. There is no time. She empties the barrow beside the road and runs back to the house. Scooping up the pile of rags, she barely registers the weight of her sister. She begins to walk west.

Františka Roubíčková unfolded Daša’s letter again. The paper had already begun to age. The war was over. But where were her girls? In March she had answered a knock on her door and been met with a face she had never seen. His name, he said, was Josef. He had been in Birkenau with Ludvík. For several months they had shared a bunk. He had come, he said, to fulfil a promise to his friend. They had survived together until January, when the camp was evacuated. For days they marched in step, clutching at each other’s shoulders for support. They huddled against one another at night in barns and open fields. They were, Josef said, like brothers. Ludvík had spoken of Františka and his girls. He spoke of love, of sacrifice. The rest of his life, Josef said, he had committed to making amends. On the fifth day, for no particular reason, he was shot in the head by one of their escorts. His body was dragged to the side of the road and the group marched on. ‘I’m sorry,’ Josef said, ‘but I’ve no idea where it was.’ Josef offered his hand in consolation; Františka was too stunned to take it. He tipped his hat and left. Františka returned to her chair and looked up at the last remaining picture of her husband.

That word: widow. She could grow into it no more than she had the others: wife, divorcée. But what do you call a mother who has lost her children? No. She wouldn’t accept it. She made enquiries. She owed it to Marcela, to Hana. They still harboured hope. Every day she went to the authorities to ask if there was any word about Daša and Irena Roubíčková. Always ‘and’, never ‘or’. She could not leave one behind. The men who received her were sympathetic and counselled patience. Be comforted by the lack of news, they said. Most news, they said, was bad. And so she would return to 13 Biskupcova Street and take the letters from the Baťa shoebox and read them beneath Ludvík’s watchful gaze. For those few moments they were together again. Her family.

A knock. Františka jerked, her thumb crumpling the page’s edge. She cursed and tried to straighten the tissue paper. Time was already stealing her daughters’ words away. Again, a knock. Františka turned the page over to protect the faint pencil marks from the light and stood up. Outside the window she noticed the unlikely shape of a wheelbarrow. She shrugged. War drags all kinds of flotsam in its wake. Františka bustled down the hallway and opened the door.

‘Ahoj, Frantishku.’ It was Radka Fialová from apartment four. ‘I…I bring news.’ Radka was the quietest of the neighbours. A kindly woman with no children, she had lost her husband in the first war and mourned him ever since. Františka would often make a point of speaking to her on the stairwell or in the street. ‘It’s the girls,’ Radka continued. Františka felt a thump in her chest. She steadied herself against the doorframe. Perhaps it was the younger ones that Radka meant. Maybe they had got themselves into mischief. They were of that age now. But then…Oh God. Most news that comes is bad. Radka didn’t wait for a reply. ‘They are with me. Daša and Irena. They came just now. It…they wanted to warn you. They look… it is possible you won’t recognise them. They asked I come first.’ Františka Roubíčková could not move, could not breathe. Her knees grew weak. A single tear fell from her eye. Radka fumbled in her apron pocket, muttering to herself. She was not good at these things. She knew only how to be consoled, not to console. Her hand stopped suddenly and she pulled it out in a fist. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘They said to give you this.’

A man comes to a door in an ordinary apartment block, at 13 Biskupcova Street, in the city that is once again his home. He has come almost every day for over a month. In his hand, as always, is a gift: bigger, more precious every time he comes. The door is ajar; he hopes to recognise voices in the apartment.

He has come here, this man from the country, directly from the Old Town Square, where he stood before an idol, his idol—its fur coat, its large, pointed nose, and its long, thin, black beard resplendent in the sun—and prayed for those he has lost. His suit does not fit; it is too big. It was given to him when he returned to the city. He is sure there are fleas under the lining. Sometimes he talks to them, asks them for the courage that seems always to elude him. He tugs at his cuffs to make sure they cover his wretched mark. A-1821. All his experiences over these long years gather themselves in his head to one point: he must keep his word. He must see her. This time he will not run away. He goes back onto the street and double-checks the names on the list of residents, his gaze resting on the one he wants: Roubíček.