by Bram Presser
The cramped offices of the Jewish Religious Council exploded with activity as directors and secretaries alike sat hunched over their desks, frantically compiling lists and transcribing the information onto index cards. On each one was printed a name, an address, a date and the same location: Wilson Station. Those summoned were to bring a single suitcase. A combination of warm clothing and valuables was recommended. On some, where Dr Kafka recognised the name, he printed a short message. Forgive me.
The cards went out en masse. Their arrival was met with confusion, but the news soon spread and within days an unexpected knock at the door became the most feared sound in all of Prague. In this way, five trainloads of Jews, some five thousand people in all, mostly academics, professionals and aristocrats, were resettled in the Polish ghetto of Łódź. Among them were Ludvík’s parents, Papa Roubíček and Mama Roubíčková.
What Von Neurath had sown, Heydrich reaped. The entire harvest took less than three weeks.
‘Victory for the Zionists! We shall have a homeland after all.’ Jáchym Nemec dropped a small bag of potatoes on the shop’s counter.
‘Enough with your glibness, Jáchym,’ said Žofie Sláviková. ‘It does not become you.’
‘And why not? They have cleared the town. Even Kafka won’t deny it, the damn flunky. Trains full of Czech peasants flooding into Brno and the Sudeten, wherever there is space, proudly doing their civic duty. They are offered our property as incentive. It’s a fine trade they have made.’
‘The prospect is not without promise.’ Žofie Sláviková pulled the ration clip from her apron.
‘Yes, to live like wildlife on a reserve, left to fend for ourselves. Look at us, Žofie, and tell me how long we’ll survive. We are city folk now; the farming life is foreign to our kind. We count on people like you, with courage to sell us what we need from under your counters.’
‘You’ll survive,’ she said as she clipped Jáchym’s ration book. ‘I would be glad to see the back of this overflowing sewer. Banish me to wherever, just leave me in peace. Eventually this war will end. I almost envy you Jews.’
‘But a military garrison? When Štěpánka told me I didn’t know whether to believe her. It sounded so…so—’
‘Obscene.’
‘Yes. I thought maybe she had misheard. You know how she is. But she insisted, said she’d heard it from the Council herself. It has begun, she told me. Go see for yourself. So I did and, sure enough, they were there at the precise hour she had said. Young men, strong men, huddled together, sitting on their suitcases, some playing cards, a few smoking, all looking bored. At last the wait was over. A crowd had gathered, watching as the men boarded the carriages. The direction of the tracks did not escape our attention. The train was headed north, not east. These young men would remain in the Protectorate. The rumours about Terezín were true. A hundred faces, more, rolled by as the train set off. They all blended into one until, suddenly, I saw him. Leaning against the window, staring right back at me. Bohuš B. Older, broader. But I’m certain it was him.’
Františka Roubíčková woke from a night of fitful dreams to glimpse the silhouette of her eldest daughter scampering across the window bench like a frightened animal. The girl’s thin arms swatted away the curtains so she could peer at the street.
Františka slipped from the bed, careful not to wake the others. The pale light of an early dawn cast eerie shapes on the far wall, nightmare visions of the avenging angel that had descended on the city just hours after the attack on Acting Reichsprotektor Heydrich. With each of Daša’s jolts, the shadows shifted to reveal momentary scenes of horror, ever more ghastly as the tyrant succumbed to his infected wounds.
A pushbike and a leather coat dancing a slow waltz in the window of a city store.
Conspirators cowering behind a closed door, hoping to hear a familiar voice.
A praying mantis, encased in wood and red silk, blind to the wailing masses filing past its mangled corpse as they mourn their own impending deaths.
An entire village engulfed in flames.
‘Daša?’
The girl continued to twitch against the glass.
Františka moved towards her. Any moment now Daša would turn around, let out a gasp or fall from the bench. The sound would set the neighbours howling with fright. The sentries would be alerted; a detachment would turn up at the apartment. They’d find what she kept hidden.
Daša reached out and snatched at the air between them.
‘Mama,’ she whispered. ‘I heard cars doors slamming. And voices. I ran to the window. There were legs, in suits not uniforms. Polished shoes.’ Františka crouched beside the bench and put her arm around Daša’s waist, but the girl pulled away. ‘Look towards Mladoňovicova. There. It is still curfew and there are people at the crossroads.’
The girl was right. Františka wedged herself into the corner, her cheek and nose squashed against the glass. Down the road, people were milling about. Two black cars were parked at the end, obscuring her view across the thoroughfare to number seven. Františka put a finger to her lips, nodded in the direction of the door.
They went to find their coats. On the small table by the rack, a crumpled handbill taunted them with the promise of unimaginable wealth for any information. When Ludvík had taken it from his pocket yesterday and held it up, he looked imploringly at Františka. ‘Maybe you’ve heard something,’ he said. She shook her head, tried to turn away. He would not let it pass. ‘We have five days, then more reprisals. Harsher. It’s not about the money, Frantishku. They’re killing people. What happened to Heydrich, it isn’t the salvation we had hoped for.’
She looked at him, steely, then scrunched the paper.
Who was he, anyway, to ask such things? Most nights he wasn’t even home and, although she tried to hate him, hate the idea of him, she would find herself praying for his safety, praying that he was sleeping on a friend’s sofa or on the floor of a barkeep’s apartment. Since the deportations had begun, it was not unusual for people to just disappear. Family members and friends would rush to the assembly grounds near Stromovka Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of their loved ones, to know that they were still alive, and that perhaps, when their own time came, they would meet again. Františka, on the other hand, knew to wait. He would return.
The morning sun cut through Biskupcova Street in its summer splendour. Weeds unfurled in the pavement cracks and birds chirped in the dense bloom of linden trees.
Františka and Daša Roubíčková ran to the corner and elbowed through the crowd. Several men in suits, with long black trench coats and gloves, stood guard at the kerb, forcing back the occasional surge from the anxious neighbours. Beneath peaked caps, beads of sweat lined brows framing dead eyes. Daša watched the bustle on the opposite corner as sharp-faced men in identical garb weaved in and out of the door to number seven. Františka listened to the panicked whispers around her. Names were bandied about, most of which she had never heard. How could she live so close to this many strangers? But there was one name that kept recurring: Moravec.
Moravec. Moravec. Moravec.
‘To think I sold her supplies.’ Františka recognised Žofie Sláviková’s stern voice. ‘I hope they don’t take me for an accomplice.’
‘I knew it.’ This time, Štěpánka Tičková. ‘Didn’t I tell you I knew it?’
Then Jáchym Nemec: ‘You wouldn’t know it if the entire resistance was operating from your kitchen.’
Františka felt her daughter’s grip tighten around her wrist as she was pulled to the front of the crowd. The bodies parted to afford her an unbroken view across the intersection. Gestapo men surged out of the building and stood at attention beside an idling car. A moment of absolute stillness. All eyes fell on the door, as they waited to see what would emerge.
In the days that followed, Štěpánka Tičková would tell how Alois and Ata Moravec held their heads high in defiance and marched with singular purpose as they were escorted to the waiting car. No one in the crowd woul
d have the heart to say otherwise—it does not do well to speak ill of the dead—but they would all remember a middle-aged man, glasses askew on his sunken face, walking beside a whimpering youth with unkempt blond hair, both in shabby pyjamas, their hands tied behind their backs. It was only a few steps to the kerb and it was over in a few seconds. The car door slammed, the motor revved, and they disappeared in the direction of the Old City and, inevitably, Peček Palace. ‘The men should be ashamed of themselves,’ said Jáchym Nemec, ‘walking to their slaughter like that.’
‘She’s escaped,’ whispered Štěpánka Tičková. ‘I knew it. Stole away in the night and left the others to pay. That is what becomes of—’ She would have continued cursing her neighbour, regaling those who remained on the corner with tales of the woman’s descent into moral ruin, had everyone’s attention not been drawn back to the open door. From where they stood, it was almost comical: a uniformed soldier tripping backwards over the threshold, out onto the pavement. In his hands, two feet, then came a torso and at last the strange sight of another soldier gripping his load under the arms, his chest melded to its shoulders, obscuring the head and creating an obscene sideshow attraction of flailing limbs.
The two soldiers released their hold and the body of Marie Moravcová fell with a dull thud to the ground. Much would be said about her after the siege at the church: her involvement in the plot to assassinate Heydrich, her bravery in biting into the cyanide pill, the beheading of her corpse at Peček Palace. Word would soon spread that the bloody tendrils hanging from his mother’s neck were the last thing Ata Moravec would see before breaking down and telling the Gestapo everything he knew. They would try not to blame him; after all he had delivered them from a violence Prague had never seen and still paid with his life.
When the clock struck curfew’s end, and Biskupcova Street filled again with its usual bustle, Františka would return to the corner and look across the street, remembering the face of Alois Moravec. This, she thought, is the measure of true worth. This is a man.
8
Jakub R curled up in the corner of the cart, arms locked around his legs, the jolt of every cobbled stone like a bayonet in his spine. It was his turn to rest now—to lean against the pillows and couches, the steamer trunks, the sacks and boxes—while the cart lurched through the street, pulled by two horses, and Georg Glanzberg holding the reins.
Jakub pressed his eyes to his knees and was back home, in his village. It was deserted now. Only the clack clack clack of a horse’s shoes on stone could be heard. From nowhere, four children appeared, rushing towards him. ‘A newspaper,’ said the oldest, holding out his hand. Jakub rummaged through the bric-a-brac, but all he had to offer was Der Stürmer, that awful gutter rag whose very ink was venom. Still they took it, just to have word from the outside. They thanked him, and ran to the river to imbibe its poison. He watched, waited. Then he laughed, his entire body quaking, as they lay down and died at the water’s edge, their bodies sinking into the mud.
Clack! Jakub sat up, startled. They were gone. They were never here. The pile of newspapers rested beside him, held fast by thick twine. It was not for reading, but wrapping. Anything fragile, anything of value. So said the director.
Beside Jakub was a black folder, a record of the accumulated worth of those who had moved on. Each page told a tale of frantic packing: decisions made, then taken back and made again. Words were crossed out, others scribbled in the margin. Fights between husbands and wives. Pleas from children. What to take, what to leave behind. Jakub closed the folder between each stop, so that the echoes of these sorrowful cries would not frighten the cherry blossoms from their branches. And, as the cart rattled through the streets, from house to house, collecting things left behind by his people, he knew that he, too, was just another forsaken item.
‘Like Haman,’ Georg had said when taking the reins. ‘The vile prince of Amalek.’ And he was right, thought Jakub. The ignominy of it all, parading through the streets of Shushan. It was always the same: his fellow employees of the Jewish Community Trust waiting in the doorways for the cart’s arrival, hoping that this time, at this address, it would not be their colleagues, their friends, their families.
For a third time Jakub had been saved. By Emil Kafka, Jakobovits, perhaps even Muneles. The cart floated on Pařisžká Street like a lifeboat. The waters below: boredom, hard labour, despair. But the cart was protection from the index cards that sealed the fate of those less fortunate than him. His harbour, still, was Jáchymova. ‘I am sorry, Jakub,’ said the principal when it was decreed that the school must close. ‘We will find you something else.’ That was in June. The young teacher was soon summoned to the Religious Council with Georg. Their employment would continue, in a new role. A scrap of paper with that familiar address: 3 Jáchymova Street. ‘Report tomorrow to the stockroom,’ the secretary said. ‘We are struggling to keep on top of the transports.’
Jakub barely recognised the place. The school had transformed overnight into a maze of scaffolding. Shelves lined every wall and there were vast piles of goods, fragments of broken lives. The rooms were arranged by contents. Never before had he seen in one place so many clocks, so many sewing machines, so much silver cutlery. In some of the items he saw his students’ faces. This book is František Brichta, that rocking horse, Hana Ginzová. He would meet them again, in photo frames, portraits, as he emptied their houses, always struck by how little they had. So few items by which to remember you, he would think. Some of the children were still in Prague; he would see them in the street making mischief, bored, and he would turn away, hoping they didn’t notice him.
Only one more stop for the day, unscheduled. A boy had come to the house in Břehová Street with a message from the Council that there was an urgent assignment. The cart was already full, but there was no choice. The horses strained to heave the load along the uneven street. Jakub was now walking beside Georg, so that he did not add to the poor creatures’ suffering. They were all exhausted, these four beasts of burden. Sometimes they tugged on the bridle; the horses halted and they all waited until the pile no longer swayed.
The two friends had to reach the house on V Kolkovně Street, empty it and return to Jáchymova with enough time to get home before curfew. When they arrived, another cart was already there, as was one of the few delivery trucks still owned by the Trust. Weary packers leaned against the wheels or sat in the gutter. Only one man was standing, hands buried in the pant pockets of his suit, impatiently tapping his feet. The foreman. Jakub had not seen him before, but he knew to fear the man’s presence. He was the only one in the Trust’s employ without calluses on his palms.
‘You are late,’ said the foreman. Jakub stared across the street at a shopfront that had been sealed off with planks of wood. Someone had scrawled a crude Star of David on the middle plank. The foreman continued: ‘The Gestapo came earlier. There were reports of sounds, movements. Impossible for an empty house. The Landsbergers lived here, but they were transported over a month ago. We should have already been here. An oversight. A neighbour became suspicious, called the authorities. The Gestapo wanted to make sure there were no Jewish ghosts hiding in the walls, if you know what I mean. They snooped around for two hours. Then they came out, said it was clear for us to start. Of course, they put a few boxes in the back of their car and crossed the valuable items from my list. Here,’ he said as he handed the clipboard to Georg, ‘take it.’ The other packers had already begun to gather near the entrance. ‘You have an hour,’ said the foreman as he opened the door. ‘Maybe less.’
They rushed up the three flights of stairs, spilled onto the landing and waited at the door marked 5. Ten men, more than could possibly be required. Jakub was relieved that he wouldn’t have to drag the furniture down with Georg. Neither of them was cut out for it. Georg ran through the inventory, divided it among the packers. The bigger men would be responsible for the heavier items: tables, couches, beds and the like. The slighter men could handle the kitchenware and religious
artefacts. The books would be left to Jakub and Georg. ‘You heard him,’ Georg said. ‘Time is against us. Take your items, wrap them up, whatever you can find. Someone else will sort it at Jáchymova.’
They had once lived well, the Landsbergers. That much was evident. The name was revered in Prague; it could be traced back over five generations. Maximilian Landsberger, his son Aleš, and Aleš’s son Matěj had all been in shipping. Then came Max, named after his great grandfather, who steered the course of the family business away from what he called yesterday’s fancies. Max was a man of his times; electricity was his passion but, to his dismay, it was not shared by his own son, Heinz, the present Mr Landsberger. His love was steel. Czechoslovakia, still in its infancy, was booming thanks to foreign investment and local naivety. Heinz seized the opportunity and used his inheritance to partner with the great Max Bondy. To many, Heinz symbolised the fledgling nation: something new forged from a turbulent past. Such was his renown that Karel Čapek had wanted to make a character of him, and even went so far as to work him into the first draft of his lizard book. Landsberger vetoed the idea, and told the author to use Max Bondy instead. ‘He prefers the attention.’
That was before the occupation. Like all business owners, Heinz Landsberger sold his interest to a non-Jewish administrator for a pittance and was surprised to find that it did not bother him. He already had what he wanted. A wife, two children, the trappings of comfort. He also had the luxury of time to take stock of his life. With each decree he gave away more of his possessions, and came to appreciate the humbling effect of austerity. By the time most of Prague’s Jewish aristocrats were forced from their homes, he had already taken up more modest accommodation in the Old City. The change pleased him. What had begun to look sparse in the great mansion in Smíchov fitted perfectly in his new home on V Kolkovně Street. They didn’t come looking for him when they rounded up the Czech gentry; he was no longer counted among them. Rather, Heinz Landsberger was a fatalist and an ascetic; any remnants of his former life were merely nostalgic, and mostly his wife’s. He was resigned to the same fate as every other ordinary Jew.
