The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941–1942

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Suddenly he felt someone’s light touch, like an electric spark. Petr lifted his head with difficulty in his sailor’s cot, looked around, and saw the figure of Crazy August bending over him. “Come with me!” Petr sat up and stretched. “Come quickly,” August’s voice urged him. Petr stood up without a protest, even though it was warm under his blanket and cold outside. He followed him quietly. They entered the lower deck. August lit a candle. Its weak light barely hid the dark that was hiding behind every corner, in every crack. They reached a small room on the subdeck. Crazy August went inside and Petr followed. The key rattled in the lock and then disappeared in August’s pocket. He placed the candle in the centre, sat down on a crate, and held his head in his hands. Petr crouched, as he was feeling cold. August lifted his head. His expressive face shone in the light of the candle, its small reflections dancing like tiny fires in his eyes. A moment passed. Small flies buzzed around the flame. Finally, August spoke, his voice cutting into the dead silence. “Life? What is life? It’s like the light of this candle, which burns the wings of these stupid mosquitoes!” Silence again, interrupted here and there by the cracking of the candlewick. “Poor mosquitoes.”—“Why do they fly so much around this light?”—Pause. Slowly, he spoke to himself, as if reflecting: “Habit—a move toward individual existence and uncertainty …” He buried his head again in his hands and said harshly: “They fly, fascinated, around the flame, until it burns them and they fall down, destroyed. Idiots!”—“Idiots? Habit and uncertainty are too strong, they can’t overcome them. Poor insects! …” They both sat in silence. Petr was actually surprised—how come he was there instead of sleeping peacefully in his cot? “Think about life, my boy,” August said to him, “look, it is like this flame. Do you see it, do you understand it? We circle it out of habit, and we must die. We want to be ourselves, and we sacrifice everything for this price!”

  He reached out and extinguished the candle. Darkness enveloped the room. The mosquitoes could be heard flying away, deprived of the fascinating candle flame. They whizzed around for a little while longer, but soon the buzzing of their wings stopped. They probably made their way into the open space through some crack.

  “Did you see, did you see?” August’s voice spoke from the dark. “Did you pay good attention, my boy?” he repeated as he removed the lid of the crate with gunpowder.

  “One more time, Flamarion.” The captain could be heard as if from a far distance, playing cards.

  “Deliverance …” August whispered. He straightened his hand and threw a lit match flame into the crate of powder.

  And the room was lit up by a tremendous glow, and in the blaze of the explosion Petr saw the light of the Great Communion.

  Petr Ginz

  THE ORCHIDS THIEF

  Once upon a time there was a gardener who took great pride in his horticultural talents. His special hobby was orchids. He was especially dedicated to one flower bed. He fertilized it carefully with potassium chlorate, watered and nurtured it. He also had a few more patches of orchids that he was not so concerned about. He left them to nature and birds and wasn’t at all surprised when these orchids began to rot, the flowers were not that big, beautiful and heavy. What used to look like orchids turned into quite ugly little monsters, creepy and disgusting. But the nurtured orchids were blossoming, they were becoming more and more beautiful and the gardener couldn’t stop looking at them. “When I sell them,” he said to himself, “I will be well off until the end of my life, because no one in the world has such beautiful orchids.” Every Tuesday, rich men from town would come to buy flowers. The gardener was looking forward to their arrival, although he was sorry to be selling the beautiful orchids.

  On Monday night the gardener suddenly heard quiet footsteps squeaking on the sand in the garden. “Such a late buyer?” he wondered and looked out the window. And what does he see? A ragged boy carrying a basket is quickly approaching the flower bed with the beautiful orchids. He looks around to see if he is being observed, then bends down and quickly begins to pluck the beautiful flowers. When the boy stood crying in the gardener’s shed, without the basket, without the orchids, the gardener said: “Why did you want to steal my orchids? Didn’t you feel sorry for them?” The boy remains wilfully silent. He is standing in the light of the kerosene lamp and his face looks white, twisted, his sleeves are like the leaves, the haggard body like the stem of—those uncared-for orchids! And that silence of his! Everything is as if intentionally arranged so that I will understand!

  The gardener realized the truth; he saw that the boy was the product of a ruined and bad world, just like the neglected flowers had become deformed through his own mistreatment of them. Was that a reason to punish the boy? It would be the same as punishing neglected orchids for being ugly. In the meantime, the boy disappeared. “Really, these orchids are basically the same, but the environment caused good qualities to develop on one side, bad ones on the other. Yes, and this is called character in people, a collection of tendencies. Under the influence of the environment, these tendencies are either blocked, or developed. And it is the task of gardeners in the entire world to take good care of and to water the gardens that have been entrusted to them.”

  Thus the gardener sat long into the night and reflected, until he fell asleep, his head on his chest. Sleep well, gardener, and may you dream about a garden full of beautiful white orchids.

  Petr Ginz

  EXCERPT FROM THE UNFINISHED NOVEL

  THE SECRET OF SATAN’S GROTTO

  … An adult usually pretends that he thinks only about sensible and worthy things, but this isn’t true. In unguarded moments when the ironclad vest surrounding his head opens up and his real face appears, the mask of social stiffness falls off. And I think he feels better when this happens. I know it from my own experience: having once lost my way in the woods and found a lake with dark, calm water, I threw a pebble into it and was very happy to see the circles spreading fast.

  It occurred to me then that my feelings at that moment were like a newspaper before it hits the rolling press. All the pressure from every side disappeared. I wondered: why does the pure paper of children’s souls have to pass from a young age through the rolling press of life and society, which imprints it with all sorts of qualities and crushes it under the pressure of worries about livelihood and the attacks of enemies. Just as the paper thinks that the picture of its life has been printed, it reenters the printing machine, which prints more qualities and opinions on top of the others, often not complementing but rather contradicting them. Every colour tries to take up as much space as possible on the paper, then a new one comes and can replace the old one. And it’s sad that the paper can’t change it any longer, it is moved back and forth and covered with print without any regard for its own will, and when the rotating press finally spits out the finished copy and sends it off into the world, it enters a battle against other printed copies, which were maybe accidentally produced differently.

  The world is a rumpus, if you look at it objectively …

  Notes to Petr Ginz’s Diaries

  (in chronological order, corresponding to the entries)

  Chava Pressburger

  19. IX. 1941

  Jews were told to wear a badge … Police ordinance of 1 September 1942 forced Jews to wear a yellow six-cornered star in public with the black inscription Jude. This separation of Jews from the rest of society was the first step by the Nazis toward “the final solution of the Jewish question.” K. H. Frank, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, asked the Reichskanzlei for permission to mark the Jews in order to separate them from the rest of Czech citizens. After several cases of expressions of solidarity by Czechs (workers in a Moravian chocolate factory came to work wearing yellow stars), it was announced that whoever is seen with Jews or publicly declares that he sympathizes with them will be treated as a Jew. He will receive limited food rations, no tobacco or clothes rations, and will have to wear a yellow star himself.

  In the afternoon I went wit
h Eva to Troja … A suburb of Prague that Jews were allowed to frequent. Jews were forbidden to go in the opposite direction, against the flow of the Vltava River, along the embankment in the direction of the Old Town.

  22. IX. 1941

  … near the slaughterhouse … Prague central slaughterhouse in Holesovice (opened in 1895, finally closed down in 1983), today Prague Market Place (Trznice).

  25. IX. 1941

  Denis train station … The Ginz family lived on Starkova Street in Tesnov (called Starek-Gasse during German occupation), directly opposite the Denis station, which was called Vltavske during the war (Moldau-Bahnhof). The station building was torn down in 1972.

  27. IX. 1941

  Signed by Heydrich instead of Neurath … Konstantin von Neurath, Nazi politician and diplomat, was from 1939 Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. After the war he was sentenced by the Nuremberg tribunal as a war criminal. On September 29, 1941, Neurath left for a “health vacation” and the new Reich Protector in the Czech and Moravian Protectorate became SS Obergruppen-führer and police general Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the central office of Reich security (RSHA). He instantly introduced harsh repressive measures and declared a state of emergency, during which by January 1 about six hundred persons were executed. K. H. Frank was named as his successor.

  6. X. 1941

  There is a new inventory … Jewish possessions were gradually listed, cataloged, and confiscated.

  10. X. 1941

  Ehrlich … is leaving with the first transport … On October 16, 1942, the first transport of Prague Jews left for the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. This is the beginning of a new phase in the persecution of Jews, which began in Germany in 1933, when Hitler was elected chancellor of the German Reich. The second phase occurred in 1935 with the publication of the Nuremberg race laws, where Jews were defined as a lower race and deprived of all civil rights.

  This new phase in fact begins with a long meeting between Hitler and Himmler in September 1941, after which Himmler wrote to his closest colleagues: The Führer wishes that Germany and the Protectorate be as soon as possible emptied and freed of Jews. Most of the first transport to Lodz, which consisted of a thousand people, was murdered immediately upon arrival and only a few individuals survived.

  13. X. 1941

  I received notice to go to school and fill sacks with sawdust. … The full sacks are sent to Veletrzni Palace … Famous building of Czech constructivist period, a palace built in Prague 7, Holesovice, during the years 1925–1928 for the purpose of presenting Prague trade fairs and exhibitions. From 1939 the palace and its adjoining grounds were used by German Reich authorities for assembling Jews before the departure to concentration camps. The Germans convinced Jewish authorities everywhere in Europe that it was in their own interest to co-operate so as to make the resettlement of Jews as smooth as possible, stressing that it would be made more painless. The Jewish community and its leadership were fully involved in these efforts. Children filled sacks on which those who were called up for transports slept while waiting. The Prague Jewish Community had twenty times more employees than in peace times. Every Jew knew that bad things were happening, but no one guessed what a cruel fate was in store for all of them.

  Between 16. X. 1941 and 3. XI. 1941

  Six transports left for Lodz and one for Riga. Petr remembers the departure of relatives, the Miluskas and the Jirinas. The registration activity is intensified, organized by the Jewish Community under Nazi supervision. The elimination of the Jewish population is gathering speed.

  3. XI. 1941

  To Regnartova Street … Jachymova Street, Old Town (Josefov), was named during the years 1940–1945 after Jakob Regnart, a composer and musician at the court of Rudolf II.

  23. XI. 1941

  Transports to Poland … are stopped for the time being; now they are sending people to work in Theresienstadt … The town of Terezin (Theresienstadt), sixty-five kilometers north of Prague, former fortress built during the reign of Josef II in the years 1780–1790. The first transport arrived here on November 24, 1942. By the order of the Reich Protector of February 16, 1942, Theresienstadt was declared a closed Jewish settlement, a concentration camp. Altogether 140,000 prisoners passed through it.

  In November 1941 the Nazis came to the conclusion that they had insufficient means for exterminating so many Jews in a short period of time and therefore, in order to prevent Jews from continuing to live among Aryans, it was decided to concentrate them in temporary ghettos. Only later did the construction and improvement of gas chambers and crematoria allow them to commit mass murder at full speed. Therefore, they asked the president of the Jewish religious community, Dr. Weidemann, and his deputy to work together and present proposals for the creation of ghettos. Their promise that transports to Poland would be stopped quickly spread among the Jewish population. The Germans did not keep their word and on November 26, 1941, another transport left for Poland.

  The lie was the foundation of all relations of Germans toward the Jews. After his conversation with Eichmann, the deputy president of the Jewish Community, Jakub Edelstein, was convinced that the creation of the ghetto could save many Czech Jews. Edelstein even demanded that young and strong Jews volunteer to go, in order to prepare an adequate basis for a self-governing Jewish town with bearable living conditions. He decided to leave for Theresienstadt himself and on December 4, 1941, he travelled there with his Prague team, by a regular personal train and carrying only a small suitcase. He thought that he could return for the rest of his luggage later. But he quickly realized that he had been lied to.

  Here are two examples from an infinite number of the Nazis’ lies:

  When the Theresienstadt SS caught two letters that had been sent illegally, they assembled the entire population of the ghetto and the Kommandant, Dr. Seidl, announced that if those who had written them come forward, nothing will happen to them. But if they don’t, there will be terrible repercussions. After a brief hesitation two seventeen-year-olds came forward; they had written to relatives, one of them to his grandmother. Both were arrested. The next day all the prisoners were assembled again and the two boys were publicly hanged.

  In the small town of Horodenko in the Ukraine the Nazis ordered all Jews to report to the local church for vaccination against typhoid. Twenty-five hundred people were assembled there. They were loaded into trucks and driven to the bank of the river Dnester. When they arrived there, there was an orchestra playing and German officers were sitting at tables laden with food and drink. Large pits had been dug out opposite the officers. Between the pits and the tables lay soldiers with machine guns. When the Jews arrived, they had to stand next to the pits and were shot at in such a way as to fall directly into them. At night, a small number of Jews who were not mortally wounded ran away and told about what had happened there. A Sonderkommando arrived in the morning and pulled out the dead Jews’ gold teeth. Even those who were still moving were covered with earth.

  For the sake of truth it must be added that one of the German officers, Fiedler, who was responsible for auxiliary labor and commanded a group of Jewish prisoners, was always decent to them. He also tried to warn them that the “vaccination” action was a trap.

  2. XII. 1941

  opened by Deputy Mayor Klapka … From March 15, 1939, the Prague city hall was gradually becoming an organ of the Reich occupation powers. It was led by J. Pfitzner, professor of history at Prague German University, whose authority grew with the escalation of the German oppression. The last mayor, Dr. Otokar Klapka (born 1891), was shot by the Nazis on October 4, 1941.

  8. XII. 1941

  Japan has officially declared … On December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers attacked the American military base Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian islands. The next day President Roosevelt declared war against Japan.

  9. XII. 1941

  The Japanese attacked … On December 8, 1941, after attacking American and British holdings in the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese army occupied Thailand and quickly
moved south through British Malaysia in the direction of Singapore. They arrived in the domain of Singapore on December 29, 1941, and conquered the city itself on February 15, 1942.

  11. XII. 1941

  Stefanik’s Bridge … The chain bridge from the year 1868 was originally named after Franz Josef I; from 1918 it was called Stefanik’s Bridge, during the years 1941–1945 Janacek’s Bridge. After the war, in 1947, it was taken apart and in 1951 a new one made of concrete, called Sverma’s Bridge, was built in its place.

  12. XII. 1941

  On the way I saw six moving vans … about twenty Jews (among them Uncle Milos) were carrying furniture … German fascism did not mean only mass murder. It was murder that went hand in hand with the biggest looting in the history of mankind. It has been estimated that the theft of Jewish property during the Protectorate reached at least 2 billion Deutsch marks, i.e., at least 20 billion Protectorate crowns. On February 12, 1941, the Reich Protector published a decree forcing Jewish businesses to declare all home and foreign working capital. These confiscated items were transferred to the Evacuation Fund of the Central Committee for Jewish expulsion. Jews had to give up land, stock shares, bank accounts, securities, jewellery, and so on. The Gestapo enforced the fulfilling of these orders by applying drastic measures in businesses and households, with the co-operation of German occupation authorities and the Protectorate police force, often on the basis of a denunciation by a German or Czech fascist.

  But the Evacuation Fund did not include the enormous value of possessions the departing Jews were forced to leave behind in their homes. A special organization was set up for clearing them out, a so-called Treuhandstelle. By October 1, 1940, 14,920 Jewish apartments were registered in Prague. From the first 2,101 apartments, the furniture alone was estimated to be worth 25 million and stored in storage rooms of 36,400 square meters. The next storage area required a space of 145,600 square meters, three and a half times bigger than the Wenceslas Square in Prague. The Treuhandstelle document stated that by this date the looted collection consisted of almost 2.9 million textiles and the same amount of kitchen and household tools, more than a million pieces of porcelain and glass, more than 61,000 electrical items, almost 9,000 technical and optical instruments, more than 3,200 sewing machines, 2,500 bicycles, 34,500 fur coats, 52,000 rugs, 144,000 paintings, 1.2 million tons of coal and firewood, etc. (Miroslav Karny, The Final Solution).