The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  I walked closer to Theresa and studied the painting. How, I marveled, was she able to create the reflection in the helmet without gold leaf? The girl must have layered fifteen pigments to achieve such an effect. She used a tool to scrape some of the paint away, changing the surface and altering the play of light on the surface.

  There were four other “Rembrandts” drying to the left of her, each an exact duplicate of the other. Every helmet, every feathered plume, every single line within the pensive face, was done with the same factorylike precision.

  “Unless you have Theresa’s remarkable talent, you should probably start on postcards first.” Rita pointed to the central table. “They’re easy and fast to do. The Germans come and collect on Friday, and you should try to have a hundred done by then.” I raised an eyebrow. A hundred postcards in a week seemed like an impossible quota.

  “Lenka, take this . . .” She handed me a book of landscapes. “Many of the girls like to work from this. Keep the colors light and cheerful. And try not to make mistakes. The less paper we waste with errors, the more we have to use ourselves for something else.”

  She paused for a moment and squinted at me. “Do you have a child here with you?”

  “No.” I went silent for a moment. “I have no children.”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps that’s for the best, the heartache of seeing them crammed into such filthy barracks . . . can you even imagine?” She clicked her tongue with disgust. “I guess we all try our best under these conditions. A lot of the girls here have been saving our scrap supplies. We take a strip or two of paper, some paints, or whatever else we can find back to the children’s barracks so they can use them there . . . it makes them so happy, and there’s a wonderful teacher who appreciates whatever we can sneak out to give them.”

  The memory and the wonder of my mother giving me my first set of paints and sketchpad came back to me. I could not help but smile that there were still people, even here, taking on great risk just so this magic could continue.

  And so I began painting in Terezín. I woke up each morning with the other women in my barracks, drank the miserable coffee, which really wasn’t coffee at all but lukewarm water with ersatz grounds floating on top, and ate a scrap of moldy or stale bread. But I was luckier then most. I did not expend much energy painting in a small studio, compared with the others, who worked in the fields or tended to the sick.

  Though Marta, Mother, and I remained healthy, the bedbugs and fleas were a problem that needed constant vigilance. Every night we looked over each other’s bodies for any little black spot, and removed it with two pinched fingernails.

  The barracks was a crowded place, teeming with restless, hungry women whose misery and agitation seemed to increase with each passing day. There was too little space for everyone and people grew irritated with each other at the slightest thing. One woman would start yelling at another if she was holding up the line for the latrine. Another woman might accuse someone falsely of stealing, when it was far more likely that the culprit was one of the female Czech gendarmes who pounced on what little possessions we still had.

  One evening, a girl named Hanka slit her wrists with a piece of broken glass. She had done it without making the faintest sound, slicing through her veins when the room was still filled with fifty other women just returning from work. Someone by the name of Fanny was the first to discover her.

  “She’s bleeding to death!” Fanny cried out. We all rushed to see the sight of Hanka, her tiny pale body curled at the edge of a lower bunk. One arm dangled to the floor. Beneath it was a puddle of blood, whose edges were spreading rapidly over the dirty, wooden floor.

  One woman ripped her pillowcase and tied a tourniquet around Hanka’s wrist while Fanny and I lifted her into our arms. We then ran as fast as we could, her featherlight body bobbing in our arms as we rushed her to the infirmary. Two days later, having miraculously survived, Hanka returned to our barracks. But not all of us had showed her an act of kindness. For when she returned from the infirmary, all the possessions she had brought from home were stolen. Everything from her toothbrush to her wool coat had vanished. Everyone in the barracks claimed they had no idea where her things had gone.

  CHAPTER 27

  LENKA

  The incident with Hanka had taught me that there was no one in our barracks whom I could completely trust. No one except Mother and Marta. Many of the other girls continued to socialize with each other, some even inviting me to walk with them before curfew or gossip outside, but I always refrained.

  My job at the Lautscher Werkstatte became my escape. It was also the only time I had any control regarding my life in Terezín. When I sat in front of that white rectangle of paper, paintbrush in hand, I could select the composition, the colors, and the lines I chose to draw. No one dictated how I arranged the scene. If I chose to put the windmill on the left or to paint a sky full of clouds, it was my decision alone.

  This eased the strain of my everyday life. My stomach ached from hunger, but I was thankful for the access to the art supplies. And although I mostly painted small watercolors—images of cherubic babies or landscapes to appeal to the German masses—who would buy them to use as greeting cards—it still gave sustenance to my spirit. And the sight of Theresa, who was one of the few people given the opportunity to work on the canvases or use the oil paints, gave me a bit of joy. Looking at her over in the corner, scrutinizing each brushstroke and applying layer after layer of pigment, reminded me of my school friends back in Prague.

  The others in my family tried to make the best of their work assignments. Father’s job was to deliver coal to the different buildings in Terezín. Marta was assigned to cleaning the soup vats in the kitchen. Mother worked in the children’s barracks with two other women. The three of them had begun to teach the children art, and I smuggled as much as I could to them every few days.

  At night, Mother told me about the Austrian woman with whom she was working at the children’s barracks, by the name of Friedl Brandeis. She was trying to give the children some release from their oppressive surroundings.

  “She wants the children to close their eyes and put on paper what they are feeling,” Mother told us. “The younger children’s paintings and collages are of their fantasies and hopes, but the older children portray the hardship of living here,” she told us. “It’s a marvel to see what would otherwise be trapped inside them.”

  “You’re doing such a good thing, Mama,” I whispered. She was on one side of me, and Marta on the other. Marta had fallen asleep, and as Mother too began to drift off, I found myself staring at my sister’s neck and braids. Although her neck was bitten from lice, her braids dirty, they still gave me comfort.

  But on the nights when the memory of Josef crept into my head, it was impossible to get my mind to rest. I would imagine the ship sinking in the ocean, his limbs swollen with salt water, his black hair tangled like seaweed. Like a slow water leak, the sorrow still found a way of entering me, and it was often more than I could bear. On some other nights the hollow of my belly would ache for the baby I had lost. When these awful images snuck up on me, I tried to counter them with thoughts of our family before the war, to force away the heartbreak of seeing Mother as she now was—rolled on her side, tightly packed against Marta, her red hair twisted like frayed rope, and her body covered in a veil of dirt. Instead, I would shut my eyes tight and try to conjure up her image, resplendent as she was the day of Lucie’s wedding. In her sea-glass gown, her white throat encircled in pearls.

  At the Lautscher Werkstatte, Rita and I became close friends. I was continually learning from her the ins and outs of the system. Sometimes a German or Czech soldier would appear and bring a photograph and order us to do a portrait for him. Rita would always ask him if, by any chance, he had any extra food on him. “Of course not!” he would bark. But then a few days later, when he would reappear to claim his portrait, he would slide a small bar of chocolate into her hands or an extra gram of sugar. Those two
things were coveted more than gold.

  Rita also showed me the art of smuggling out some of the art supplies. At the end of our work shift, she showed me how she took near-finished tubes of oil paint and placed them in her brassiere so she could paint on her own late at night or save them for the children. The stealing of supplies and the creation of art other than for the Reich were punishable offenses, but she took the risks without hesitation.

  “What more do I have to lose?” she said when I looked at her. “If they take away my ability to see, to record . . . I am already dead . . . And if we can get some of the paint and materials into the children’s hands, then even better.”

  I knew what she meant. Aside from the joy it brought me to get supplies to the children, I also had an unyielding desire to channel what I was feeling. I had not felt such an overwhelming surge to capture what was around me since those first few months when Josef and I were falling in love, and all I wanted to do was paint in a palette of red and orange.

  But I was not allowed to paint what I was feeling. Had I been given that freedom, I would have used a palette of black and dark blue. Instead, I was forced to paint these inane caricatures of bouncy, rosy babies with captions that read Congratulations on the birth of your little angelic boy, when the Jewish children all around me were getting sick from typhus, or their bellies starving for more than a piece of stale, moldy bread.

  I looked at my palette of soft colors: the carnelian red, the pale yellow and powder blue, and remembered the colors of the Old Town Square with a bittersweet wistfulness. How many years before had I sat in the café with Father and looked up at the great Orloj clock. If I closed my eyes, I could almost taste the pastry, sticky on my fingers, with Father sipping his coffee with steam rolling off the white porcelain cup. Now, outside, there was only melting brown snow, black smoke from the chimneys, and skeletal men walking in half-torn clothes. Or women with hollow eyes, and children to whom a glass of milk and a chocolate biscuit would be heaven.

  Our daily rations were one hundred grams of bread and a bowl of soup. The bread was not baked with flour, but with wood shavings that gave all of us the most terrible digestive problems. Children were given a weekly ration of a quarter liter of milk. The elderly and sick received even less than the amount of bread we were given because they were not working. The old sat huddled on their beds, cramped next to one another, coughing and wheezing. Their eyes as cloudy as dirty dishwater.

  And although I was lucky enough to remain healthy, my former life seemed so far away to me. I had been married, lost a child, become a widow, and transferred to Terezín all within two years. My dark hair was already beginning to see the first threads of gray even though I was only twenty-three years old. Sometimes an SS guard who was in his early twenties would come to pack up our paintings, and I would catch him stealing a look at Rita or me. And as strange as it might seem, that fleeting look of interest in his eyes would allow me to remember that I was still young and perhaps even a little bit attractive. But on most days I felt a thousand years old.

  At night, I would return to the barracks and sit with Marta and Mother and hear about their day. Marta would steal some fruit from the kitchen, and we would share a precious apple or pear. She would always try to bring a little something to Hans, whom Mother was able to care for during the day.

  He had become so thin in the months since we arrived. His once-chubby cheeks were now sunken, his thighs half the size they were at the time of our transport.

  I continued to bring back scraps of discarded paper or small nubs of pastel or charcoal for Mother to give to the children.

  “They have nothing, these children,” Mother would tell us, “and yet somehow during the day they still manage to laugh or create a game among themselves.”

  Marta would shake her head. I could see how depressed she was growing with each passing day. But I was thankful she at least got some fresh air and sunshine when she was in the fields, or else I didn’t think she would survive.

  We all had at least something that was good for our spirit. Mother had the children, I had the art, and Marta now had a job outdoors. But Father was not as fortunate.

  We could steal a few hours before our 8 P.M. curfew and see him outside his barracks. The hard labor already had aged him terribly. He looked weakened, and his skin was always covered with soot. The first time I saw him in his work clothes, he looked like a chimney sweep—black from head to toe.

  He tried to laugh when the three of us stood outside the door to his barracks.

  “Eliška, how about a kiss for your handsome husband?” he chided her.

  She blushed. I could read her face. She wanted to kiss him, but if the dirt got on her, would she ever get it off?

  “Papa,” I said, stepping close to him, “I’ll kiss you right now!”

  Both Marta and I kissed him on both cheeks and our lips and faces instantly were smudged with soot.

  “Look, now we’ve made him all clean for you, Mother,” we chided.

  She managed to smile and then walked closer to him. I can see the image of the two of them so clearly in my mind’s eye now—as if cast in eternal slow motion. Mother walks up to her once-elegant husband, who is now dressed in an old flannel coat that I have never seen. The white of his eyes shining out from coal-dusted skin. His black mustache erased from his face. And his once-full cheeks now sunken to two empty wells.

  But it is Father’s hands that I remember most clearly. How they trembled as they took hold of Mother’s narrow shoulders. How he kissed her on the top of her head so not to leave a smudge of dirt on her beautiful face.

  “Milačku,” he whispers.

  “Lasko Moje,” she whispers back.

  He closes his eyes as he kisses her again, as if he were wishing something that was now impossible. That, instead of being in the cold outside the Dresden barracks, he had transported my mother and him to the street of their first kiss, or to our apartment with its view of the Vltava.

  In the cold, I think of the story Father had told us of how when the swans were frozen and trapped in the river, the men and women of Prague cut them out to free them. And yet not a single one, when we were all rounded up for our transport, had come to help us.

  CHAPTER 28

  LENKA

  Several months after we arrived at Terezín, a warm breeze finally replaced the mounds of snow. Marta told us she saw fields of flowers across from the orchard where she worked, which lifted her spirit a bit, though we could not see anything within the walls of the ghetto. There were few birds, and one never saw the scampering of a squirrel or the wings of a butterfly. We had insects, of course, the mosquitoes, the fleas, and lice. The smarter creatures knew enough to stay away, while those who feasted on filth and squalor were more than happy to join us.

  I carried on painting my postcards. Theresa still created her enviable copies of Old Master paintings, and my beloved Rita continued to make me laugh with the faces she made as she churned out her innocuous landscapes one by one.

  “It’s too bad we can’t send secret messages through our work,” she whispered to me one day. I watched as she dipped her brush into a glass pot of watery blue paint and then drew a small Star of David in the center of the page where a pond would soon be.

  “Think of how da Vinci would paint one thing, and then cover it with an entirely different painting. One image buried under a layer of paint purely for the painter’s benefit, and another one created for his audience.”

  I sighed. The postcard I was working on was of a water mill with a mountainscape in the background. No secret messages were encrypted inside, that much was certain.

  Rita moved closer to me, her eyes alive with an idea. “What if I told you that I’ve heard rumors that a handful of artists are trying to document what’s really going on here. Some men in the studio next door are doing their own paintings . . . that some are being hidden within the ghetto. Someone even told me they have contacts with sympathetic Gentiles on the outside who want to
publish them abroad.”

  I looked at her with disbelief. “I don’t believe you. That’s suicidal.”

  Only three weeks earlier, an entire barracks had been raided because a letter had been intercepted that contained one forbidden line: I’m starving.

  “Imagine what they’d do if they found drawings of, say, the wooden beds filled with half-skeletal men and women, the piles of corpses we see each day,” I said skeptically. Just that morning, I had sidestepped a dead woman outside the doorway of our barracks. When someone died during the evening, they were placed outside the door to be carted away.

  “You wouldn’t take the risk, Lenka?” Rita raised one of her eyebrows at me. “I know I would. There would be no doubt in my mind.”

  I looked around the studio. Theresa was busy working on yet another canvas of The Man with the Golden Helmet. In front of me, I had painted over twenty postcards of a Bavarian windmill. And yet outside, I could hear the faint sound of a horse’s hooves as it pulled the funeral cart loaded with the dead.

  I stared at my friend.

  I had never been one to take risks in my life. I remembered how my schoolmate Dina had placed herself in danger just to be able to see the movie Snow White, while I had trembled at the thought of breaking any rule. Yet now I felt there was little more that could be taken from me. I wasn’t even sure, with the rate of starvation and disease that flooded the ghetto, that I would live another year. What did I really have to lose at this point? And didn’t I want to make an impact during what time I had left?

  And so I found myself nodding to her. “Yes, Rita,” I said with more enthusiasm than I knew was inside of me. “I would.”

  At night, the thought now became all-consuming. I could think of little else but this secret resistance movement within Terezín. I imagined myself receiving an assignment to memorialize the conditions. The filth. The squalor. The ravaged bodies. The sunken eyes.