The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  The next morning, we left our apartment with our suitcases and rucksacks. We had slept little, and now spoke only a few words because we were anxious and had no idea what to expect. Our deportation cards informed us that we were to report to a local school where we would remain for three days until our transport to Terezín. When we arrived, the school was already teeming with hundreds of people. Marta found one of her former classmates immediately, but I recognized no one. We slept on the floor with our sheets and blanket. The air was stagnant with the smell of sausages and warm milk. It was an awful, rancid odor, one that made me sick. I remember reaching for my pillowcase to inhale the scent of the coffee mother had boiled them in. My stomach ached, not yet from hunger but out of a sense of dread. A fog of nervousness and fear hung over all of us. Every pair of eyes seemed scared. Even the toddlers who roamed about with their little stocking-clad feet and rounded faces appeared tense. I looked at them with sympathy. My own childhood had been so carefree. Long walks with Lucie and Marta, painting watercolors by the Vltava, and slices of rich chocolate cake. I had not yet let myself feel thankful that I had lost my baby; that would come much later, but it pained me to see the child who was looking longingly at other people’s food, the one who already needed a bath, or the one whose parents had lacked the room in their suitcase to pack a single toy.

  There was one little boy whom I befriended the first night at the school. His name was Hans and he had turned three the month before. I had left my parents and Marta by our makeshift beds and gone for a walk alongside the perimeter of the auditorium. Out of habit, I took my tin of charcoal and sketchpad out of my rucksack, and hoped to find something of interest to draw. I found a quiet corner and made myself as comfortable as I could.

  But before I had the chance to settle in, Hans found me. He was wearing a white shirt that was already stained with what looked like jam, and a pair of brown trousers. His dark hair was thick and curly. His eyes were bottle green.

  I’m not sure why he chose to sit next to me. I didn’t have a cookie to offer him or even a stick to play with, but he settled by my feet and smiled at me. I showed him my sketchpad and asked if he minded if I drew him for a little bit. He nodded and smiled. I felt such a pang in my heart as I looked at his curls and the color of his eyes. I wondered if my baby would have looked like him at three.

  “Hans,” I whispered. “Look at the shadows on the glass.” High above, the gymnasium windows were filled with the reflections of the trees outside. Almost like large puppets, they swayed back and forth. One branch resembled the neck of a giraffe; its cluster of leaves on the top could have been the animal’s bobbing head. Another tree had a long sweep of boughs that looked like a dangling jellyfish. Hans giggled, and I began drawing him in profile.

  Over the next two days, we became fast friends. I met his parents, Ilona and Benjamin, who were close to the same age as Josef and me. I sketched them holding hands, with Ilona gazing past her husband’s face, past her son drumming on the floor. She was already trying to envision where we were headed, a mother’s worried anticipation of the unknown written all over her face.

  Before Terezín I wrote at the bottom of the page. One could scan the room at every other mother, the gaze was the same. Where were they sending us?

  The name Terezín meant nothing to me at the time. I did not know of extermination camps or work camps, or even really the concept of a ghetto. I had never heard a whisper about a concentration camp.

  We had heard we would only be with Jews, which was a relief to us. To be in a place where we were all the same, and not have to live next to others who would be permitted their freedom while we were saddled with one restriction after another. We knew there would be SS and that there would be work for us to do. But did we know what else truly lay in store for us? No. We did not. Absolutely. No.

  We were loaded into the train, over one hundred of us herded inside a space that would have been overcrowded with less than half that. I stood next to Marta and Mother. Papa was pushed away from us as we were forced deeper and deeper into the car. Once the doors were closed, I looked for him. There was only a faint line of sunlight in the car, coming from a narrow window above, but I could see a glimmer of his profile in the back of the train. Every time I tried to look over in his direction, he was staring straight ahead.

  The train crawled over the tracks. Babies cried and people tried not to complain, but we were terribly uncomfortable and there was no place to sit. The air was stifling and ripe with the smells of everyone’s provisions. I looked to find Hans, just so I could lift him for a second and smell his unwashed hair.

  By late afternoon, the train came to a halt and the door of the car was finally opened. We had arrived at the small train station of Bohušovice, which was about three kilometers outside Terezín. We were told by the Czech police to carry our suitcases and rucksacks for the remainder of the journey.

  There was already quite a lot of snow on the ground. The white drifts were piled high against the road, and a light mist had begun to fall as our transport headed in the direction of Terezín. I remember looking at the sight of snowflakes on Mother’s and Marta’s hair. The two of them already looked so tired, and their black coats no longer seemed elegant after such a long journey. But in the fading sunlight, they looked almost like fairies, with their coils of red hair now adorned with snow. Little crystal beads that sparkled for a second before disappearing.

  Later on as we walked, we finally saw the ramparts of Terezín on the horizon. I noticed Mother ahead of me, fumbling in her pocket, then bowing her head, her gait slowing for a moment. Later on, when we were standing and being counted, I noticed that she looked different, that the color in her face was almost revived. When I looked more closely, I realized what had caused the change. She had secretly applied some lipstick.

  Most of us did not know anything about the town of Terezín. We had no reason to, given our previously comfortable lives back in Prague. I eventually learned that at the orders of the Emperor Josef II, Terezín had been built as a Baroque fortress in the late eighteenth century. In the beginning, it served as a political prison for the Hapsburgs, with an addition of a small town to house the garrisons and soldiers. So do not imagine Auschwitz or Treblinka when I tell you what follows next in my story. There was no chimney of smoking, burning ash to greet us when we arrived. There were no brown, split-beam barracks. It resembled a small town—with buildings, dirty and dusty. Facades once painted Maria Theresa yellow, were now faded and peeling; the church was boarded up. But it was also the perfect place to prevent any escape: the town was surrounded by a moat, its perimeters lined by ramparts, and all exits and entrances marked by iron gates.

  Upon our arrival, we were led to the Schleusse—the arrival hall—where we were registered, our bodies searched, and our luggage expertly checked by a special detachment of German women. For several days after our processing, we were kept in the Schleusse until we were assigned our housing by the Raumwirtschaft—a special department of the Jewish self-administration. The men and women in this department had been notified and had already prepared the bunks for the new arrivals in our transport. Luckily, Mother, Marta, and I were all placed in the Dresden barracks, and Father was assigned to live in the Sudeten. Most of the barracks, we soon discovered, were named after German towns.

  As we were about to make our way to our barracks, I saw Ilona standing in a corner, holding Hans close to her. His legs were wrapped around her waist, and his head was nestled against her shoulder. I tried to look over in his direction and get him to smile, but he was lethargic from the journey and the lack of food. I made a shadow puppet with my hand and saw a little smile cross his lips. Ilona told me that she and Benjamin had yet to receive their barracks designation, and I told her I hoped she would be with us. That way, we could all look out for each other and maybe also care for Hans, who was still too young to be taken from her and put in the children’s barracks.

  She nodded, but already seemed as though she we
re in a dream. Her eyes were cloudy and her hair not pinned back. How quickly our appearances had changed without the luxury of clean clothes, a bath, and a mirror.

  My family and I said good-bye to the people we had befriended over the course of our few days in the Schleusse, and began to make our way deeper into the ghetto.

  While heading to the barracks, I searched for the gaze of someone we passed on the road who might somehow reassure me that Terezín would not be a terrible place to live during the war. I, like so many other Jews, could not then conceive that there was a master plan to exterminate us, but only to segregate us. But as I walked through Terezín that first afternoon, it was clear that this was a place of great deprivation. The roads were filled with half-starved prisoners, their cheeks hollow and their clothes threadbare. Men as thin as skeletons pulled old funeral carts loaded with suitcases or supplies. There was no color or vitality to be seen. Even the park in the center was fenced off.

  Already another transport was arriving from Bohušovice, and I will never forget the sight of the people it contained. Men with long white beards, some wearing top hats and tails. Women in long dresses, fur coats, a few even walking with parasols that were bending from the snow. Later we would learn that this was a transport of German Jews—distinguished war veterans, intellectuals, and men of culture—who had paid thousands for supposed contracts that falsely promised them a privileged resettlement during the war.

  I was craning my neck to watch them as they headed down the path to the Schleusse, when Marta tapped me on the shoulder. “Have we underdressed?” It was the first time I had laughed in several days, and I wanted to reach out and hug her. Our whole lives it was I, the older sister, who had tried to be strong and make Marta smile, so it was a strange feeling to see her trying to be so brave when inside I knew she was just as afraid as I was. “If we have, it will be the first time,” I answered her.

  Our parents had not heard us. They were walking solemnly in front of us like two people who were already resigned to following orders. Their pace slackened when the others in front of them slowed down. They did not talk between themselves. They looked not at each other, but straight ahead.

  We had already been told that the men would live separately, so Marta, Mother, and I did our best to give Father a brave good-bye when the group stopped in front of our assigned barracks.

  Papa kissed each of us on the forehead. He had been carrying Mother’s rucksack, and I could see him inwardly struggle as he handed it over to her. It pained him not to be able to help her anymore.

  “It’s fine,” I heard Mother whisper. She extended her arm to take the bag from him. “It’s not heavy,” she said.

  Father’s arm was shaking. A strong arm trembling through a woolen coat sleeve.

  “I will look for my girls at the curfew tonight.” He touched Mother’s wrist.

  Mother nodded.

  “Yes, Papa,” we both said as we reached to help our mother with her bag. We saw Mother look back one more time at Father, her face straining to remain composed.

  We climbed the stairs, our hearts sinking as we were greeted immediately by a gut-wrenching stench. The smell of dirty latrines and unwashed bodies laced the air. Marta had walked ahead of Mother and me. She turned to us with a frightened look in her eyes.

  “Lenka,” she whispered. “Where have they taken us?”

  I quietly mouthed, “It will be fine . . . just don’t stop . . . keep moving.”

  Eventually, we got to our room. Imagine hundreds of people crammed into a space the size of a small classroom. With three-tiered bunk beds laid out in blocks. With dimensions so narrow and small that one could not have turned over in the night without touching another person in the next bed. The people in the lower and middle bunks could not sit up on their straw mattresses without hitting their heads. Even though it was midafternoon, the room was cast in an eerie twilight. A small incandescent light dangled from the ceiling, a single lightbulb on a crooked wire.

  Suitcases were stacked either in an available corner or on a shelf above a bunk. Clothes were strung everywhere, and the foul smell that had initially greeted us had grown even more intense. It was freezing cold, as the only source of heat was a small stove with a coal scuttle. There was a single sink and one latrine for every hundred people.

  Standing in what now would be our room, Mother turned to Marta and me, tears rolling down her cheeks. Both Marta and I were rendered speechless. Our always proud mother, her mouth frozen for a second from the shock, touched my arm and I heard her whisper the words “Children, I’m so sorry.”

  The thought that she felt the need to apologize to us still makes me want to cry. That and the image of my sister trying to sleep that night—spreading the pillowcase that Lucie had embroidered for her so many years ago over a “pillow” made of hay.

  “Education?” he asked me. I stood in front of a desk at the office of the Council of Elders, and nervously informed the man with the gray-stubbled head that I had been a student at the Art Academy in Prague.

  The Council of Elders was a group of elected Jewish representatives who worked out of the Magdeburg barracks and oversaw every branch of activity of the ghetto. Terezín, we would all later learn, was an experiment within the Reich. A “model ghetto” that was created to show the world that the Jews were not being exterminated and that in fact was largely run by the Jews. There were Czech gendarmes and SS officers within Terezín, but the Council of Elders oversaw the logistics of daily life. Like a small government, it organized the housing and work assignments, the water and power of the ghetto, the welfare programs for children, the running of the infirmary, and was even responsible for maintaining the amount of people who were on the next transport “east.”

  I stood in front of the men who were in charge of deciding my work assignment. Two bald men, whose eyes barely glanced over me, before one of them asked my age, my education, and any particular talents I might have.

  “I’m Lenka Maizel Kohn,” I said strongly, as if I already needed to remind myself who I was. Behind me, there was the rustle of a mother trying to soothe her fussing baby.

  “Two and half years at the Prague Academy of Arts,” I said. “I studied life drawing and painting.”

  The older of the two men raised his head and now squinted at me. Something I said had piqued his interest.

  “You’re an artist?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “You have a good, steady hand?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  The man whispered to his colleague who then nodded.

  He then reached for a small piece of paper from his desk on which he scribbled the words Lautscher Werkstatte.

  The room number was marked at the bottom. He didn’t bother to look up from his desk, he just told me to go and report there at once.

  I walked with my papers to the Lautscher Werkstatte, a small room in the Magdeburg barracks. When I arrived, the door was open and there were already ten artists working at a large table.

  To my relief, I was greeted by the comforting smells and colors of my days at the Prague Academy: the piercing scent of turpentine, the oily perfume of linseed oil, and the rich, fatty smell of the blended pigments. Large canvases of Old Master paintings, created either as forgeries or as decorative copies, rested along the perimeter of the room. On a countertop, I could see small, postcard-size watercolors of cheery, pastoral scenes and a few of small children.

  I was approached by a woman who looked close to my age. She was petite with short blond hair. Although she was wearing a Jewish star on her smock, she had the face of a Slav. Broad cheekbones, a small flat nose, and wide green eyes. She was razor thin.

  “I’m Lenka,” I said, and showed her my work assignment. “I was told to come here and work.”

  She smiled. “So I assume you have some artistic experience?”

  “Yes, a little over two years at the Academy in Prague.”

  “Good,” she said, and smiled again. “You can call me
Rita. I think you’ll be happy to be here. We’re a bunch of painters, primarily unsupervised, save for an occasional German soldier who comes at the end of the week to give us our assignments and to ship off the works that we’ve completed.”

  I looked around the room wide-eyed. I was confused by what I saw. Every surface was occupied with drying paintings. Some were landscapes, but others were copies of well-known paintings. “Who’s ordering all this?” I was incredulous.

  “It’s all requests from the Reich. Some of the postcards are to be sold in Germany. The enamels and decorative pieces will most probably be given out as gifts within the SS, and the Old Masters will be sold for a lot of money because they’re flawless copies . . . Theresa over there is a genius.”

  She pointed to a thin girl of no more then eighteen who was standing by an easel. She painted without a smock; her palette was nothing more than an old piece of cut plywood with the paint clustered around the edge.

  “No one can do a Rembrandt as perfectly as Theresa. Perhaps not even Rembrandt himself.”

  I looked over at the copy of The Man with the Golden Helmet that the girl was working on, and could not believe my eyes. The painting was an exact replica of the original. The tight, solemn-looking mouth, the downcast eyes. Even the figure’s armor was perfectly rendered—its heavy weight draping over his shoulders.

  The embossed scrolling on the brass helmet was painted with such precision that it seemed to be bursting from the canvas. But it was the reflection of the metal itself that took my breath away.

  “Are you given any gold leaf to work with?” I asked. I knew how rare and costly gold had been even before the war, and couldn’t believe that the artists working in Lautscher would have access to it.

  “No, we aren’t,” Rita answered. “We have no idea how she does it.”