Under a Cruel Star
For Ivan
Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.
The first force was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. They made my life a microcosm in which the history of as small country in the heart of Europe was condensed. The little bird, the third force, kept me alive to tell the story.
I carry the past inside me folded up like an accordion, like a book of picture postcards that people bring home as souvenirs from foreign cities, small and neat. But all it takes is to lift one corner of the top card for an endless snake to escape, zigzag joined to zigzag, the sign of the viper, and instantly all the pictures line up before my eyes. They linger, sharpen, and a moment of that distant past gets wedged into the works of my inner time clock. It stops, skips a beat, and loses part of the irreplaceable, irretrievable present.
Heda before the war.
The mass deportation of Jews from Prague began two years after the outbreak of the war, in the fall of 1941. Our transport left in October and we had no idea of our destination. The order was to report to the Exposition Hall, to bring food for several days and essential baggage. No more.
When I got up that morning, my mother turned to me from the window and said, like a child, “Look, it’s almost dawn. And I thought the sun would not even want to rise today.”
The inside of the Exposition Hall was like a medieval madhouse. All but the steadiest nerves were on the point of snapping. Several people who were seriously ill and had been brought there on stretchers died on the spot. A Mrs. Tausig went completely crazy, tore her false teeth out of her mouth, and threw them at our lord and master, Obersturmbannfuehrer Fiedler. There were babies and small children who cried incessantly and, just beside my parents, a small fat bald man sat on his suitcase playing his violin as if none of the surrounding bedlam were any concern of his. He played Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major, practicing the same passages over and over again.
I wandered around among those thousands of people looking for familiar faces. That was how I first happened to see him. To this day, I believe he was the most handsome man I have ever seen. He was sitting, calm and erect, on a black trunk with silver brackets, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a gray tie, and a black overcoat topped by a black homburg. He had gray eyes and a perfectly trimmed gray moustache. His slim, delicate hands were folded on the handle of an umbrella rolled up as thin as a toothpick. In the middle of that chaos, among all those people dressed in sweaters, heavy boots, and ski jackets, he looked as incongruous as if he were sitting there naked.
Startled, I stopped, and he rose. With a slight bow and a smile, he offered me a seat beside him on his trunk. He was a professor of classical philology from Vienna. After the Nazis had annexed Austria, he had found refuge in Prague, and there the Germans had caught up with him. When I asked why he had not dressed in a more practical way for such a journey into the unknown, he answered that he always dressed in the same way and disliked the idea of changing his habits under the pressure of circumstances. In any event, he said, he considered it most important to maintain equanimity rebus in arduis. Then he began talking about classical literature and ancient Rome. I listened with rapt attention. From that time on I sought him out whenever I had the opportunity, and he always welcomed me with his courteous smile and, it seemed, with pleasure.
Two days later, we boarded the train. Even though in the following years I would experience infinitely more grueling transports, this one seemed to be the worst because it was the first. If every beginning is hard, the beginning of hardship is the hardest. We were not yet inured to sounds of gunshots followed by agonizing screams, to unendurable thirst, nor to the suffocating air in the crammed cattle cars.
Upon our arrival in Lodz, we were greeted by a snowstorm. It was only October, but in the three years I spent there I never again saw such a blizzard. We left the railroad station, plodding with difficulty against the wind and, for the first time, saw people who were dying of hunger, little children almost naked and barefoot in the snow.
A few days later, I wandered into a basement. The young people from our transport were sitting on the floor around a kerosene lamp and someone was playing Czech folk songs on a harmonica. There was an arched ceiling on which the lamp cast long strangely shaped shadows, making it look like the vault of a cathedral. I stood in the doorway and thought: now an angel should appear and leave a mark of blood on the forehead of everyone who will die here.
The concentration camp of Lodz, officially called the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, was really part of the outskirts of the city, a dilapidated slum enclosed by a wall that was made of wooden boards and barbed wire. For some time after our arrival, people in our transport stayed together in one of the few undamaged buildings of the ghetto, and I could still see my professor once in a while. Some weeks later, another transport arrived and we received orders to move. We scattered into the decaying tenements already populated by close to one hundred thousand Polish Jews living in unimaginable conditions, and we lost track of one another.
One of the people in our transport was our family doctor, a splendid old gentleman, who had known me since birth. He was now more than seventy years old, but every day he would go out into the narrow streets of the ghetto, walking at an even pace, cane in hand, searching for those who needed his help. Medications were in pitifully short supply, but he would say that often just the appearance of a doctor would make a patient feel a little better. I was glad when he accepted my offer to help him. The two of us wandered together from one hovel to the next, climbing thousands of stairs, often unable to offer the sick more than the comfort of a few kind words. Frequently, I had to bring in a pail of water first and wash and tidy up around the patient before the doctor could examine him.
One day we entered an almost bare but spotlessly scrubbed room where a child lay on a heap of rags, a little boy of four, just a small skeleton with huge eyes. His mother, so thin that she herself looked like a child, was crying quietly in the corner. The doctor took out his stethoscope, listened for a while, patted the little boy’s head and sighed; he could do no more. At that moment, the child turned toward his mother and sternly, like an adult, said, “You see Mother? I told you all the time I was hungry but you didn’t give me anything to eat. And now I’m going to die.”
As we left the house, we were stopped by an elderly woman who asked us to call in at the next building. There was a sick man there, she said, who had not been seen for several days. The building was deserted, split in two from the roof all the way down to the cellar, and looked on the verge of collapse. It took some time before we found the one room which still had a door. We knocked, but there was no answer. Then the doctor opened the door, and we walked in. A torn mattress lay on the narrow strip of floor. There was a pile of dirty rags and refuse in one corner; next to the mattress was a suitcase half-filled with books. Lying on the mattress was a dead man, his body swarming with a myriad of fat white lice. They also crawled over the face of the Venus de Milo, who smiled serenely from a page of the open book on the man’s chest. The book had dropped from his hand as he lay dying.
I leaned over him. It was my professor.
The doctor said, “He’s only been dead a few hours.”
About a year later, at work, I heard the be
ll of the ghetto’s one fire engine. Although this was nearly a daily occurrence at the time, I somehow knew that the fire was at the house where I was living. It was strictly forbidden to leave a place of work, but I sneaked out and ran along the walls toward the half-ruin where we were housed. I arrived breathless to find only my mother, throwing some essentials into a suitcase. My father came running a moment later and, although he had already grown quite weak by that time, began darting back and forth trying to help. My cousin Jindrisek was lying motionless in a heap, nailed to the floor by tuberculosis of almost every organ in his body. His black hopeless eyes followed our every move. Firemen surrounded the house. There was lots of smoke and screaming. The cold was bitter and the water did not run, but people did not panic. Even then, resignation prevailed. I remember how, with my father, I dragged out two suitcases, sat my mother down on them wrapped in blankets, and how I returned to the house to get Jindrisek.
The firemen would not let me back in. One of them swung at me with his stick and, while my father tried to stop him, I slipped back inside. Jindrisek tried to get up but could not. I started yelling at him, fiercely, desperately. I pulled his arm up around my neck – he was terribly heavy for someone made up only of skin and bones – and I dragged him outside, shouting at him all the while, trying to infuse him with my will, my energy. Over the threshold. Across the yard. Across the street. He sagged with every step but we got there and he fell, exhausted, onto another suitcase. My mother covered him and put his head in her lap. My father and I stood beside them and I hid my face on my father’s shoulder.
The fire was finally brought under control, and we dragged the suitcases back into the house. Now people began to help one another, all of us exhausted from the exertion and the excitement. After everything was back in place, I put a big pot of water on to heat. Jindrisek was lying on the floor with his face to the wall, his eyes closed, a slight smile on his face. Slowly I undressed, scrubbed myself clean, combed my hair, dressed, polished my shoes, and then went unhurriedly back to work.
Jindrisek died about three weeks later. When I returned home one evening, my mother told me in a whisper that he had asked her to sing the Czech national anthem, “Where is my home?” and at folk song called “Where have all my young days gone?” I sat down beside him on the floor. He was in a coma. I tried to force spoonfuls of food into his mouth and, although he was unconscious, his craving for food was so strong that he clenched his teeth around the spoon. It required some effort on my part to free it. I slipped my hands under his head and back and held him. He stopped breathing minutes later.
My mother prayed, but I could not see the point of pleading with God for someone who had to die at the age of sixteen after so much suffering. There is nothing more senseless, more cruel, than dying before we have become guilty of sins that might justify death. For a long time afterward, I felt as though those black yearning eyes were watching me from Jindrisek’s corner of the room.
It seems to me, sometimes, when people say that everything passes, that they don’t know what they are saying. The real past is what Jindrisek was thinking as he lay there in his corner on the floor and watched me walk out into the sun and the cold. It is what went through my mother’s mind as she sang “Where is my home?” to her dying nephew behind barbed wire in the Lodz Ghetto. The real past is enclosed in itself and leaves no memory behind.
It seems beyond belief that in Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948, people were once again beaten and tortured by the police, that prison camps existed and we did not know, and that if anyone had told us the truth we would have refused to believe it. When these facts were discussed on foreign broadcasts, over Radio Free Europe or the BBC, we thought it only more proof of the way the “imperialists” lied about us. It took the full impact of the Stalinist terror of the 1950s to open our eyes.
It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.
In the last of the concentration camps that held me during the war, we worked in a brickyard, far from the camp. It was late autumn, beautiful but cold. In the mornings when we stood for roll call long before dawn, a thick crust of hoarfrost covered the ground. It would not thaw until afternoon. We wore nothing but short shifts made of burlap, no shoes, no underwear. We used to collect the scraps of paper that were strewn about our workplace, especially the heavy cement bags that were thrown out. Even though it was strictly forbidden, we stuffed them under our shifts so that we would freeze a little less. The morning roll call lasted two hours. Then we marched to a funny little train made up of flatcars, each holding two long benches mounted on a wooden floor. The trip to work took one hour. Then there was a half-hour hike to the factory, twelve hours of passing along bricks, the trip back to camp, another roll call, a little turnip soup, a slice of bread, and a short restless night.
The trip on the train was the worst thing about it all for most of the girls. During that hour we became so chilled that when we finally reached our destination, we fell rather than stepped off the train. It took us half the day to warm up a little. But I loved those trips. The tracks crossed an area under which an entire industrial complex had been built. Clouds of steam issued out from the earth in many places; mysterious iron constructions and fantastic twisted pipes rose from the moss-covered ground of the woods. The sun was already rising and, since there was always a thick fog hugging the ground, the sun’s rays broke through it and colored the mist a variety of deep pinks, an orange, gold and blue. Out of this shimmering vapor, dark shapes of trees and bushes emerged, drifted toward us, and vanished again. Several clusters of trees seemed especially beautiful to me, and I always looked out for them. I remember, even now, a small uprooted spruce resting on a mound while another handsome symmetrical one stood above it straight and solemn, as if standing guard over the body of a fallen comrade.
Sunday was designated for work in the camp, but most often, we worked without food because our camp kommandant had calculated that even so cheap a thing as a turnip when multiplied by one thousand could bring a nice sum on the black market. We fasted on most Sundays as a result, until the management of the enterprise we worked for complained that the work force was fainting on Mondays and was not cost-efficient.
The owner of the brickyard where about fifty of us worked was an odd fellow. He must have been of Russian or German-Russian origin, skinny, with a shock of white hair, and he always wore a black belted Russian shirt. He would say, over and over again to our great amusement, that if we did not work hard and help the Reich to victory, the Russians would come and murder us all.
One Monday a trainload of coal arrived at the brickyard and the order was given to unload it, on the double. The chunks of coal were huge, mixed with stones, and very few of us had enough strength to lift our shovels. After a few hours, most of the girls were stretched out on the piles of coal, exhausted, nearly unconscious. At that moment, our boss appeared and began to shout: What kind of workers were we that we didn’t even know how to handle a shovel? For the money he paid us, all we ever did was loll around!
I don’t know what came over me then. The fast must have softened my brain. I threw down my shovel and screamed back at him: How dare he yell at us? Almost all of us were students, educated women. If he expected us to perform hard labor, why didn’t he see to it that we were fed properly and treated as laborers? The girl lying on the coal pile nearest me grabbed my ankles and tried to pull me down, but I went right on screaming as if I had lost my senses. The boss stared at me but did not pull his gun or call the guards. To everyone’s amazement, he turned around and left. The rest of the day passed in
great trepidation as we all waited for the consequences of my madness. But nothing happened.
The next morning he appeared as soon as we had picked up our shovels and asked: Wo ist die Studentin? My anger had long since cooled and I was stiff with fear as he led me away into the brickyard. But that strange man only announced to me in a dry and rather polite tone that, from that day on, I would be working at the kiln bringing in the coal from outside in a wheelbarrow and stoking the fire. It was the cherished dream of every inmate of a concentration camp to work under a roof where it was warm. However, this was labor for two strong men and I could not possibly have handled it had it not been for the workers inside, French prisoners-of-war, good fellows who helped me and who, in fact, often did a good deal of my work.
One afternoon, toward evening, the boss appeared with two Frenchmen and ordered them to help me bring in a supply of coal. He returned about an hour later, sent them out, asked me to sit down beside him on a stone ledge in the wall of the kiln and said only: Tell me.
As long as I live I shall not forget that dark cave-like place, the black walls streaked with the reflection of flames, the old man dressed in black who listened and listened and seemed to wither, to shrink before my eyes as if, with each of my sentences, part of him faded. Only once again was I to have a similar experience – with my own child, when I finally dared tell him how his father died.