My Crazy Century Read online

  When we first moved into our new home, there were lots of boys and girls to play with. Our favorite game was soccer, which I played relatively well, followed by hide-and-seek because there were many good hiding places in the neighborhood.

  Then the protectorate issued decrees that banned me from going to school, or to the movies, or into the park, and shortly thereafter I was ordered to wear a star that made me feel ashamed because I knew that it set me apart from the others. By this time, however, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union. At first Father was delighted. He said that it would be the end of Hitler because everyone who had ever invaded Russia, even the great Napoleon himself, had failed, and that had been long before the Russians had created a highly progressive system of government.

  Of course it all went quite differently, and on the large map, the vast Soviet Union got smaller each day as the Germans advanced. Father said it couldn’t possibly be true. The Germans must be lying; they lied about almost everything. But it turned out that the news from Hitler’s main headquarters was mostly true. Whenever they advanced, they posted large V’s everywhere, which stood for “victory,” while at the same time they issued more and more bans that eventually made our lives unbearable. I was no longer allowed out on the street at night; I couldn’t travel anywhere by train; Mother could shop only at designated hours. We were living in complete isolation.

  Father’s beautiful sister, Ilonka, managed to immigrate to Canada at the last minute. We were not permitted to visit Mother’s eldest sister, Eliška, or even mention her name, since she had decided to conceal her origins and try to survive the war as an Aryan. Father thought she would have a hard time succeeding, but in this, once again, he was wrong. Mother’s youngest sister fled to the Soviet Union, and her Communist brothers went into hiding for a while before they too fled. When the party recalled them to work in the underground here, the Germans quickly tracked them down, arrested them, and shortly thereafter put them to death. Mother’s other sister, Irena, moved in with us. She was divorced, but it was only for show, since her husband, who was not Jewish, owned a shop and a small cosmetics factory that, had they not divorced, the Germans would have confiscated. The family had no idea, since very few people had any such ideas then, that they had offered my aunt’s life for a cosmetics business.

  In our apartment building there were two other families wearing the stars—one on the ground floor and the second on the top floor. In September 1941, the family living on the ground floor, the Hermanns, were ordered to leave for Poland, apparently for Łódź, in what was called a transport.

  I remember their departure. They had two daughters slightly older than I was, and both girls were dragging enormous suitcases on which they had to write their names and the number of their transport. As the Hermanns left, people in our building peered out from behind their doors, and the more courageous of them said goodbye and reassured them that the war would soon be over and they’d be able to return. But in this, everyone was wrong.

  My parents rushed about trying to find suitcases and mess tins, and they bought medicines and fructose in a recently opened pharmacy. They couldn’t lay in any other supplies because everything had to be purchased with ration coupons, and we had been allotted scarcely half of what those not wearing stars were given. Less than two months after the Hermanns were taken away, Father received a summons to a transport. He didn’t go to Poland, though, but rather went to Terezín, a town not far from Prague built long ago as a fortress to protect our country from the Germans, which, Father said, had never been used for that purpose. His was the first transport to Terezín. Father also had to write his name and number on his suitcase. Mother was distraught. What would become of us now? she sobbed. How were we going make ends meet and would we ever be together again? Father tried to console her and said that although the Soviets might be retreating, they were doing it only to lure the Germans into the depths of their enormous land, as they had lured Napoleon. The terrible Russian winter was about to begin, and that would destroy the Germans. In this he was not wrong; it just took longer than he’d imagined.

  Several days later, we too were assigned to a transport. The very same day, America entered the war against Japan, and the insane Hitler immediately declared war against the United States. Our neighbors, who helped us hastily pack, assured us that Hitler had now signed his own death warrant, and in this they were not wrong.

  In the Terezín ghetto, they put us in a building called the Dresden Barracks. In a small room they referred to as our “quarters,” they crammed thirty-five people, all of them women except for my brother and me.

  The fact that so many of us had to live in a single room and that we all had to sleep on the floor depressed most of the women. We had been allowed to bring our mattresses from home, but there was so little space here that they could be laid down only end to end. The first evening I remember hearing a woman sobbing, and someone was walking through the room and few of them could sleep. But even though I didn’t like going to sleep, I managed to sleep pretty well that first night on the floor. The next morning they announced breakfast, and so I went with my mess kit, wondering what I would get. It wasn’t good: bitter black ersatz coffee and bread. I don’t remember our first midday meal, but lunch was almost always the same: soup with a little caraway seed and a piece of turnip or a couple of strands of sauerkraut and, for the main course, several unpeeled potatoes in a sauce. The sauce was made from paprika, mustard, caraway seeds, and sometimes also powdered soup, and once in a while there was even a mouthful of meat floating in it.

  Perhaps my memory is deceiving me by driving out unpleasant recollections, but today it seems to me that I was not aware of any particularly cruel suffering. I accepted whatever happened as an interesting change. I had lived apart from other people for a long time; now this isolation was broken. Several children my age also stayed in the barracks, and I was able to get together with them. Foremost in my memory is a moment of one of my greatest achievements in life until that point. In the courtyard, the only place where we were allowed out during the day, several boys were playing soccer. I didn’t know them and it never occurred to them to invite me to play. I stood some distance away and waited. Finally the ball came in my direction and I stopped it and dribbled it into the game. I kept possession of the ball for almost a minute before they were able to take it away from me. They stopped the game, divided the players again, and let me play.

  After a week, Father showed up in our room, but he said he’d dropped in only to repair the electricity. The lights were always going off and it was around Christmastime and the days were very short, so we either groped about in the dark or burned the last of our candles that we’d brought from home. He embraced Mother and us and then quickly shared news that the Germans were fleeing Moscow and that the entire German army had frozen to death. The war would soon end and we could return home. He was talking to Mother, but the other women in the room were listening, and I felt a sense of relief and hope fill the air. The mood in our living quarters improved, and sometimes in the evenings—when the windows were shut and blacked out—the women would sing. I didn’t know most of their songs and I didn’t know how to sing, but I liked listening to them. But right after the New Year they started handing out orders to join transports that were going somewhere in Poland.

  Some of the women cried, and those who were stronger—or perhaps it was just that they had less imagination—reassured them that nothing could be worse than this place. Those whose names were on the list packed their few belongings and got ready for a new journey, which for most of them would be their last, though of course they could not have known that. Over the course of a few days our room was all but emptied, but it wasn’t long before fresh transports arrived in Terezín, and the living quarters began to fill up again. I understood that from now on, the people around me would come and then leave again and that it made no sense to try to remember their names.

  For the time being we didn’t go on a transport becau
se Father had been among the first to be sent to Terezín in a group that was assigned to build the camp, and the Germans had promised that these men and their families would remain in Terezín. I accepted this promise as ironclad, not yet comprehending how foolish it was to believe promises made by your jailers.

  Each day was like the next: The biggest events were lineups for food and water and for the bathroom and for outings in the courtyard. Mother said she would tutor me, but we had neither paper nor books, so she told me stories of long-ago times about the Emperor Charles, who founded Charles University in Prague (though I had no idea what a university was and I didn’t want to ask), and about Jan Hus, the priest they burned at the stake in Constance. My mother stressed that justice never flourished in the world, and those in possession of power would never hesitate to kill anyone who stood up to them.

  My brother Jan also listened to her stories, even though he didn’t understand anything she was saying because he was barely four years old. From several toy blocks that he had brought from home, and from the sticks that we were given in winter so that we could have a fire in the stove, he would build fortresses on the floor between the mattresses.

  Then Mother’s parents were also forced to come to Terezín, along with my other grandmother and Aunt Irena. They were assigned to our barracks. They told us what was going on in Prague and how the Germans were winning on every front: In Russia they were nearing the Volga River. But Grandfather claimed no one would ever defeat the Russians because Russia was huge, and no one had ever occupied it.

  I was fond of Grandfather because he talked to me as though I were already grown up. He told me how our allies had betrayed us and about collaborators and Fascists who informed on anyone the Germans didn’t like.

  Suddenly, in the summer of 1942, the ghetto police disappeared from the gates of our barracks and we could go into the streets of the town, which was surrounded by ramparts and deep moats. I ran outside, happy as a young goat let out of the barn, knowing nothing about his fate.

  Then we were moved again, this time to the Magdeburg Barracks, where a lot of prominent people lived. They put us in a tiny room above the rear gates, where we could live with Father and the grandmothers and Grandfather and our aunt, and where there was a single piece of furniture: a battered old kitchen cabinet. Father was in charge of everything in the ghetto that had to do with the electrical power supply, and as a perk, we were allowed to live together. Next door to us were three painters with their wives and children.

  One of the painters, Leo Haas, asked me if I would sit for him as a model, even in my ragged clothes with the yellow star on my jacket. I gladly obliged, not because I longed to have my portrait done, but because it allowed me to escape the dispiriting grind of life in the barracks. When Mr. Haas was finished, I plucked up my courage and asked him if he could let me have several pieces of paper. He replied that paper was a rarity even for him because he had to steal it. But he gave me a sheet and I tried to sketch a lineup for food in the forecourt.

  When our Nazi jailers learned that the artists, instead of working at the tasks they were assigned, were drawing and painting scenes from the ghetto, they immediately arrested them, even though we were all de facto prisoners already. The painters ended in Auschwitz, and their wives and children were sent to the Small Fortress in Terezín. The only one to survive was Mr. Haas and, miraculously, his little son, Tomáš, who was scarcely five years old. What also survived, however, was a cache of the pictures and drawings all the painters had hidden beneath the floorboards.

  *

  I was too young to work and so had lots of free time. We hung out in the courtyard or behind the barracks. There was a blacksmith’s shop there where Mr. Taussig shod the horses that pulled the wagons, sometimes laden with food and sometimes with garbage or suitcases left behind by the dead. Anything that had belonged to the dead now belonged to the Germans. Mr. Taussig had a daughter, Olga, who was about my age and had long chestnut hair and seemed very pretty to me. Two large trees grew in front of the blacksmith’s shop—I think they were linden trees—and we strung a rope between the trunks and outlined a playing area with stones and then we played volleyball. I was usually one of the two captains and could choose my team. I always chose Olga first so the other captain wouldn’t take her and I then tried to play the best game I could, full of spikes so that if we won, she would know it was my doing.

  We also played dodgeball and windows and doors, and we stole things. Sometimes it was coal and, very occasionally (it was too dangerous to do it often), potatoes from the cellar. Once we broke into a warehouse, where I stole a suitcase full of the sad personal effects of someone who had died, including a pair of climbing boots. Through the glassless bay windows we also tried to throw stones at the fleeing rats. I never managed to hit one, but since the barracks were infested with fleas and bedbugs, I became a champion flea catcher. When it was raining, we would simply wander up and down the corridors while I amused the others with stories. Sometimes they were stories I remembered from my Trojan War books about the wanderings of Odysseus, and sometimes I made up stories, about Indians, for instance (about whom I really knew nothing at all), or about a famous inventor who built an airplane that could fly to the moon (I knew even less about astronomy and rocketry). Then, for a short time, the Germans allowed us to put on theater performances in our barracks and even, to the accompaniment of a harmonium, operas. For the first time in my life I saw and heard The Bartered Bride.

  I also started attending school in the barracks. My classmates and I had not been able to go to school for several years, so teaching us must have been hard work. The teacher was already a gray-haired lady and she spoke beautifully about literature and recited from memory poetry that had been written by people I had never heard of. At other times we would sing Moravian and Jewish songs, or she would teach us spelling. She urged us to remember everything well because the war would one day be over and we’d have to make up for the lost years of our education.

  Once we were assigned a composition to describe the places we enjoyed thinking about. Most of my classmates wrote about the homes they had left behind, but I wrote about the woods in Krč and the park on Petřín Hill in Prague, even though I had probably been in either of these places only once. But in Terezín, where there was nothing but buildings, barracks, wooden houses, and crowds of people everywhere, I longed for woods and a park. Such places were as unattainable as home, but they were open and full of smells and silence.

  The teacher liked my composition so much that during the next lesson she asked me to read it aloud to the others. Though they were bored, I still felt honored. Perhaps it was at this moment that the determination was born to start writing when I got home—I imagined writing whole books—but our lessons lasted no more than a few weeks, since the transports began leaving again, and one of them swallowed up our teacher. That was the last I ever heard of her.

  Soon Grandma Karla fell ill; they said she had a tumor. She was bleeding and the room was full of a strange and repugnant smell. Mother wept, saying that Grandma would certainly die in such conditions, but there was no alternative. Grandma rapidly went downhill. She stopped eating and drank only water, which I brought in a bucket or in my mess tin after I stood in line for it.

  Whenever she could, my mother sat by Grandma and held her hand and told her over and over again that everything would be all right, that the war would soon end, that Grandma would return home to Prague, and we would go for a walk around Petrské Square. As she spoke, her tears flowed, but Grandma didn’t see them because her eyes were shut; she didn’t respond, just breathed in and out, terribly slowly. Then Mother sent me and my brother outside and asked us to stay there for as long as possible.

  Behind the barracks was a fresh pile of beams from the old wooden houses. Jan and I climbed about on it and then we went to see what Mr. Taussig was up to. Olga came outside and wondered what we were doing out in the evening, since it would soon be eight o’clock and if we weren’
t back by then, we could be in serious trouble. I explained that our grandmother was dying. And indeed, when we returned, the room was dark and the window was half open. Grandma’s narrow wooden bunk was empty and a candle burned beside it.

  *

  We heard that some people had gone missing from Terezín, but the population could be counted only with great difficulty because so many were dying every day. The Germans were uncertain how many people actually lived in our closely guarded town, so they decided to count us. Early one rainy morning on a gloomy autumn day—probably in 1943 because Father was still with us—they herded everyone out of the town and onto a huge meadow. We were each given a piece of bread, margarine, and liver paste, and they kept arranging and rearranging us in lines while the ghetto police trained their guns on us. People were constantly running up and down the lines, and then some SS officers appeared. I had never seen them before. Perhaps they’d come to reinforce the ghetto police—people were saying things were not looking good.

  We stood for the whole day while the rain kept getting heavier; the light started to fade, and we had to remain there all that time without moving. The women were wailing that this was the last day of our lives, that they would shoot us or toss a bomb into our midst. And as if to confirm their fears, a plane with a black cross on its wings passed overhead. Some could no longer stand by themselves, so others held them up, and some, mostly the very old, simply toppled into the mud and stayed, though others warned them that the SS officers would shoot anyone who collapsed.