by Bram Presser
Although some of its key members would not arrive for another few weeks, the Talmudkommando began its work on 26 June 1943. That day, they were escorted under SS guard out of the main camp to the south, along Südstrasse, until they reached a converted barn built into a hill. It was only half a kilometre but it must have felt like another world. There was no barbed wire, no moans of desperation, no crowded streets, no snarling dogs. In time, the members of the Talmudkommando would come to call it the Klärenstalt, the Clarification Plant.
Each man was assigned a place on one of the low wooden benches and told that it would be his workspace until further notice—the threat of deportation was always there. The same Nazi officer who had overseen the selection now outlined their duties. The books were to be sorted using the Prussian cataloguing system. They were to be given the designation Jc, followed by a number, and a brief bibliographical description. Then they were to be put in a crate for storage and, ultimately, returned for use in the Advanced School. Any works of particular rarity or value were to be set aside and reported to the SS for individual collection. No book was to leave the Klärenstalt in any other way.
For almost two years the Klärenstalt proved a silent haven for those locked inside. They worked with a diligence bordering on fever, the mind-numbing monotony broken by the beauty of the books that came before them: illuminated manuscripts, handwritten tomes, works dating back over a thousand years. To think these might survive, even if the scholars would not. It was consolation enough to urge them on. By war’s end many of the scholars had been transported to Auschwitz and killed. They left behind a catalogue of wonders, numbering some 28,250 volumes that would live on.
The Advanced School never came to be. When the war was over, 257 crates of books as well as another 237 tied parcels were found in the outer fortifications of Theresienstadt. Still more were found in the Klärenstalt. They were shipped to the Jewish Museum of Prague, where they joined the countless Jewish artefacts that had been plundered from the homes, synagogues, libraries, community centres and businesses of those sent to concentration camps.
Of everything in my grandfather’s story, only the books remain. It is to them I must go.
The streets of Prague’s Old City teem with tourists. Here, among the cobbled stones, the buildings and the graves, they will find what they need. A name on the wall of the Pinkas Synagogue, hidden among the 80,000 who perished. A fine silver Torah pointer from a village that is now just a field. Rabbi Judah Löew, reduced to the etching of a lion on stone. Even Franz Kafka himself, cast in bronze, sitting on top of a headless man, just as he prophesied in Description of a Struggle. There is only one thing that eludes them, the one thing they’d hoped most to find—the golem.
The tourists pay little attention to the modern building just around the corner from the Spanish Synagogue. Metal-encased lights hang from the ledge above its fortified glass doors. To the left, a grey intercom unit. Only a small chrome plate, with the Star of David perched on two stone tablets, gives a clue as to what is inside: the inner sanctum of the Jewish Museum of Prague. I push the button and wait. A crackle, then a soft voice: ‘Ahoj.’
‘Ahoj, yes. I am here to see—’
Another crackle. The doors slide open with a mechanical hum and I step into a brightly lit alcove, a security lock. ‘Identification?’ She startles me. The same voice, still soft. The woman is sitting at a counter behind streaked glass, staring at a bank of video screens on which I can be seen from various angles.
I hand over my passport and driver’s licence. She looks at me, at the documents, then back at me, before sliding a white laminate pass through the hole in the partition. From behind I hear a shrill buzz and a click.
Identical grey doors stud the drab walls of the administrative centre. The offices are like cells for those cloistered inside. It is deserted, a hollow heart. On the third floor I see an office door ajar. I knock, wait. ‘Come in.’
I enter and am already beside her. The director of the Jewish Museum is much younger than I had expected. Waves of brown hair spill across her face and she brushes them aside as she stands to greet me. She sits back down and gestures to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. I have to squeeze past. There is no natural light; it is a fortress of books. Papers are scattered across the floor. Only her desk is clear, except for a single page. I see him, my grandfather, staring up. It is the original article.
‘So you’re done chasing phantoms, then?’ she asks.
‘The Museum of the Extinct Race,’ I say. ‘This is it. A phoenix?’
‘Yes. After the war everyone was searching for meaning: Why? How? And here in Prague, particularly. What to make of this great collection of books, of artefacts, of treasures stored in our synagogues? Why would the Nazis do such a thing? They allowed a functioning Jewish museum to stay open under their watch? It simply did not make sense.’
‘Unless there was a greater purpose.’
‘Some secret plan, yes. But there wasn’t. For three years it operated, until the end of forty-one, when the Nazis closed it down. By then the transports had started and they needed the space to store all the property they were confiscating. Warehouses. That’s what they made of our synagogues. The Jewish community, however, was quick to rally. Its leaders saw what was going on, the liquidation of satellite communities, the transports out of Prague. They convinced the Nazi authorities to ship all Jewish artefacts—Torah scrolls, books, silverware, anything that related to Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia—to Prague and allow them to select the most precious, the most valuable for exhibition in a “new” museum—’
‘—of the Extinct Race?’
The director smirks. ‘The Nazis agreed to the request but they didn’t really care about it. They didn’t actively involve themselves in its operation. Thousands of artefacts poured in and the Jewish staff catalogued them with exemplary care and skill given the circumstances. By November 1942, the curators had prepared the first exhibition of manuscripts and books and the Central Jewish Museum, as it was now called, was opened for business. Needless to say it didn’t get too many people through the door, but that wasn’t the intention. For the curators, it was an act of preservation. For the high-ranking Nazis who made up the majority of its visitors, it was a curiosity. I think there was only ever one official Nazi directive, a complaint, really: that the museum was too nice.’
‘There was no plan?’
‘By the Nazis, no. It is a romantic ideal, this symbol of Nazi arrogance, of what could have been. But it never existed. There was never a plan by the Nazis to make a Museum of the Extinct Race. The term wasn’t even coined until after the war.’
‘Then why agree? Why allow a community you intend to exterminate to set up and operate a museum?’
‘Free labour. Nothing more, nothing less. The Nazis saw it as part of the confiscation program. It also served as a balm of sorts—if they allowed a Jewish museum to be run by the community, maybe their intentions weren’t quite so wicked. Maybe the Jews would be more willing to believe their promises of resettlement.’
‘And my grandfather?’
‘Had nothing to do with it. He never worked here, not during the war and not after. We became aware of him when this article was published. He wrote to us and included it along with a short biographical note, pointing out the obvious exaggerations. He said he had worked in Terezín sorting through books and promised to send a full report on the Talmudkommando. It never came. It is a shame, really, but we have learned not to hope for such things. Those who don’t wish to be seen will always find new places to hide.’
‘But he kept reaching out,’ I insisted. ‘To Yad Vashem, Beit Terezín. Only once did he get anywhere, much later on. One of his letters ended up with Alisah Shek. She was among the few who knew about the Talmudkommando and the only one to really care. For her it was personal. Her husband had been its youngest member.’
‘Ze’ev?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he wasn’t. He only wor
ked in the Central Library in Terezín. Shek was a youth leader, a very promising young man. Murmelstein took a liking to him and, to protect the boy from transportation, assigned him to the library. But not the Talmudkommando.’
‘They weren’t related?’ I was starting to feel dizzy. All these names, these institutions, blurring into one. Further obscuring my grandfather from view.
‘Most who look back see the Holocaust as some great monolith. We’ve lost the ability to make out the contours, the cracks, the individual shapes. Who still cares about a bunch of books in any one camp? What difference does it make that there was a Central Library in Terezín, a Central Jewish Museum in Prague and, quite separately, a dedicated group, all sorting obscure Jewish books? Distinctions like this no longer matter. The horror has outgrown them.’
‘When my grandfather wrote to you, did you know?’
‘Unfortunately, no. Of course, we knew of the group from Murmelstein and the others but, aside from Otto Muneles, there was no survivor testimony. So far as we could gather they had all been killed. Muneles was a taciturn fellow. Dour. He struggled with survival, lost himself in the running of our new museum. He didn’t speak of the others. When he died, so did our first-hand knowledge of the Talmudkommando.’
‘So that’s it, then? These few letters, cries for help, awkward posturing?’
‘No. And here’s what I find most troubling. As it turns out, your grandfather isn’t unknown to us. His name appears on several documents, Nazi records from Theresienstadt. Only now do we have ready access to them. It’s been our big project, digitising our archives, resurrecting them from their paper tombs. We couldn’t have known it then, when he contacted us. We just didn’t have the resources. And, anyway, we were too busy wrestling with the other Holocaust institutions for ownership of these memories. Each one was sitting on its own stash from the camp, guarding it like a nervous mother.’
She reaches into a drawer, pulls out a thick envelope and places it on the desk.
A ration card. Rand, Jakob. Ck572. Category II. Eligible for premium margarine and sugar rations.
A time sheet. Rand, Jakob. Eight hours every day throughout October 1943 except for two absences: on the sixteenth and twenty-fourth.
A single notation in some medical records. Rand, Jakob. 6 April 1944. Requiring medical transportation for an inflammation of the throat.
A pink docket, terminating his employment, preparing him for transport to the east.
There are other people, too, similarly listed, similarly marked. They are bound together on ration cards and time sheets, on exemption lists and pink dockets, this constellation of names under a common but shifting title: at first Arbeitsgruppe ‘M’ then, later, Bücherfassungsgruppe, the book sorting group.
At any one time there are around thirty of them; sometimes a name will disappear and be replaced by another. They are dispensable, interchangeable. That is what it meant to be privileged. I have come to know them like family. Georg Glanzberg, master violinist, lover of chess, Doctor of Oriental Languages, my grandfather’s best friend. Isaac Leo Seeligmann, son of the eminent Dutch bibliophile Sigmund Seeligmann, whose fate was to sort through his father’s beloved collection. His story will be remembered even if his name is not. It will live on in Yiddish, recast in the name of another, a man who will cry over his father-in-law’s candelabra. That man will be Dr Eppstein. Much like the museum itself: a name misheard, misconstrued. There was no Eppstein. But there was a Josef Eckstein. And, of course, there is Otto Muneles, former head of the Prague Jewish Burial Society, future chief archivist of the Jewish Museum of Prague. They are all here, one way or another.
I have found the Talmudkommando and, with it, my grandfather.
In 1987, Dr Jan Randa picked up his copy of the Australian Jewish News and found himself the main character in a story that resembled his life. How could he tell them, all those who had read it too, that it was not him, this man with the same name, the same face? How could he say that, yes, like this man, he had been taken outside the camp but not to the Prague Museum, not to some great gothic structure, but to a converted barn, a modest little house at number 5 Südstrasse, within walking distance of the main gates, separated from that hell by a couple of chapels where, day by day, the steady moan of funeral dirges rang out? And, yes, he too knew a Murmelstein, a Muneles and an Eckstein. For God’s sake, the name was Eckstein. Not Eppstein. They all featured in his life, but not as this story would have it.
To have trusted a journalist with his memory and have it end up like this. That was the greatest wound.
It would take him two years to recover.
Otto Muneles survived.
Isaac Leo Seeligmann survived.
Rabbi František Gottschall survived.
My grandfather survived.
None of them spoke in any detail of the Talmudkommando. Nor did they speak to one another. Each guarded his silence alone.
‘We have scanned the catalogue too,’ says the director. ‘The entire work of the Talmudkommando is available online.’
‘And the cards themselves?’ I ask.
‘We keep them in a warehouse on the outskirts of Prague.’
‘Would it be possible—’
She cuts me off before I can finish. ‘I’m afraid it’s not allowed.’ She scribbles down a web address. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. They are too fragile. We have a responsibility. I hope you understand.’
That night I sit at my computer and begin to click through the scanned index cards, hoping to recognise my grandfather’s handwriting. Countless times I think I find it but I know only the script of an old man, his hand shaking, his letters ill-formed. He is everywhere in the catalogue. And nowhere.
It is after midnight when I go to bed. I cannot sleep. Next morning, once again, I will set off to find my grandparents.
I arrive at Bohušovice, the small outpost station that once serviced Theresienstadt. The building is abandoned. Bolts of tawny cement show beneath the cracked paint. Rusted pipes that once used to drain water from the roof now brace the corners like crutches. Bored teens have tagged the walls. I am struck by how small the station is, not much bigger than a cemetery chapel, here, where they all passed through on their way to the fortress town. There are no tourists, no other seekers of the lost. In its dilapidation, Bohušovice begs to be forgotten.
Outside, near the road, a corridor of grass cuts off the vast plain of dust and gravel that was once a parking lot and, before that, a gathering place for the damned. They were never in the station. Of that I am sure. When they arrived from Prague, when they stepped from the train, this field of dirt is where they came; it is where they stood and waited and wondered what was in store. From inside the station, the stares of those made accomplice. It was forbidden to look on, to bear witness. Often, the locals were ordered to stay home, close their blinds. And yet there are pictures of the endless procession through the main road, obscured by the flutter of curtains.
I cross the dirt towards the grass and find the tracks. What remains of the Theresienstadt rail spur—built by the inmates and opened in June 1943 to ease the constant flow of arrivals and departures—now lies buried in the overgrown brush. Bohušovice is lost to time. The station, the field, the tracks: they are not part of memory’s theatre.
I drive on through the valley to the fortress town.
Terezín has filled again, people have made it their home. In the streets, there is an unsettling mix of tourists and townsfolk. Mostly, those who live here are poor. They curse under their breaths as they pass groups of well-dressed foreigners. There is a psychiatric hospital nearby. Its patients roam the square, begging for money. A strange schism between present-day Terezín and the camp called Theresienstadt. But I am not here to see what all the other visitors are here to see. I do not stop at the exhibits. I am here to search the forgotten spaces.
I walk the deserted road to the south, gravel crunching underfoot. Dogs are barking from the next hill, their snouts against
the fence, their discoloured teeth catching the afternoon sun. They run back and leap at the knotted wire. I hear children laughing nearby. The dogs lose interest. To my right, the hill drops to reveal a wall of uneven bricks. A brown gate runs the length of this bunker. Flashes of colour between the pickets, and more laughter. At last I am here: number 5 Südstrasse. The Klärenstalt.
‘Please,’ says the woman, opening the gate. ‘I’ve never had a visitor before. My husband apologises. He cannot make it back from work. He very much wanted to meet you.’
We stand in the courtyard while two young boys chase each other around with hockey sticks. Maria is in her early sixties, too young to have known Terezín as it once was, but old enough to remember it as an army barracks for the post-war Communist guard.
‘I have been here all my life, in Terezín. My mother was a prisoner here, not Jewish. When it was over she chose to stay. It was all she knew. You have been there, seen inside. We are all victims. There is no escape, so why even try?’
My eyes are drawn to the house. It looks new, made from plasterboard. Only the window frames betray its age, chipped wood painted brown, peeling and cracked. It is as if the house has been built around them.
‘I’m afraid you’re too late,’ Maria says. ‘The house was destroyed in the floods back in 2002. We were evacuated and when we could finally return, when the water had subsided, it was gone. We lost everything, had to start again.’ She looks to the bulwark built into the hill. ‘See there,’ she says, pointing to a series of deep cavities in the brickwork. ‘It was a barn, to begin with. Those holes, they held the beams in place. Where we are now standing was once part of the house. When…’ she pauses. ‘Well, you get what I’m saying.’
