by Bram Presser
Maria takes my arm, leads me towards the door. The boys stop playing and watch, suspicious, protective. ‘After the flood, the insurance company wanted to demolish the whole place. They said it would be safer to start again. But there was something in the back of my head, a voice. I couldn’t do it. We argued for months. My husband too. He thought the same as me. This house, our home, it had a history.’
Still grasping my arm, Maria pushes open the door and leads me inside to a cluttered kitchenette. A marionette hangs from the ceiling, its oversized lips stretched into a vulgar smile. ‘My husband,’ she says by way of excuse, ‘he collects things. He likes to repair. It’s his hobby.’ She shuffles across the room to a yellow door with a smashed leadlight window. ‘We couldn’t allow it. So we came to an agreement with the insurance people. We could keep one room. You must forgive us, we have put up partition walls. It was no use to us, such a large space.’ She opens the yellow door. I peer inside. The room is crammed with junk: electronics, toys, spare parts. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘This is what’s left of where your grandfather worked.’
When I step back outside, Maria is waiting. She says nothing. The boys have disappeared and there is a soft cooing in the trees as the sun sinks on the horizon. Maria reaches out, takes my hand, holds it in hers. I must leave now, drive back to Prague. Tomorrow I begin my final journey.
Ludvík has already packed the car by the time I walk around the corner. I am late. We should have left by midday, made it through the main cities before peak hour. Ludvík is leaning against the door, cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks up and waves.
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I drive faster.’
In the car we don’t speak. The radio squawks out old rock songs, interrupted only by the bleating of station IDs. This was his idea, to drive from Prague to Auschwitz. When I told him I planned to go he said, yes, he’d come too. It was something he’d been thinking about since his mother died. She had regressed in the end, returned to the Prague of her youth. There were moments when Ludvík saw it flash in her eyes: that place, the one his mother had never been to. It could still reach out and take her. It was part of him.
An hour out of Prague and the road bears the scars of Communist neglect. Hamlets appear by the highway and then, just as quickly, they are gone. Giant billboards, the garish flags of capitalist expansion, stake their claim on the hills. Soft drinks, fast food chains. The old Škoda rattles along the cracked surface. ‘Soon we stop,’ Ludvík says. ‘You like McDonald’s? Is better than Czech cooking on road. There you get sick.’
At the table he checks his phone. ‘I book us hotel in Oświęcim. Is okay?’ It doesn’t seem possible. There is a hotel in Terezín, the old SS quarters. That is tasteless enough. But Auschwitz? I shrug.
Half an hour after we pass the city of Brno, Ludvík stops on the side of the road. He unwinds his window and points to the field outside. ‘You see here,’ he says. ‘Is famous battle. Austerlitz. Maybe this interests you.’
I look at the vast green emptiness and try to picture the carnage.
We continue east.
‘Do you judge her?’ he asks me.
‘Babička?’
‘Yes. I am reading the letters. Try to imagine for her, for my mother and sisters. I think about grandfather. What he did. But you know she loved him. I think even after divorce they keep up relationship. Secret. He was very difficult man. Not only she says it, also neighbours.’
‘And the times were difficult too.’
‘She never married again. Maybe this interests you. Before Babička dead I ask her: You know now he sacrificed for you, for daughters. Maybe do you forgive him for gambling, for destroying happy family?’
‘And?’
‘She not even stop to think. Just look at me and say: No.’
The highway detours north as we pass the city of Ostrava and soon we are in Poland.
‘Look,’ Ludvík says, tilting his head towards the road’s edge. Train tracks, clearly visible. Further along we pass the first sign: Oświęcim 52.
I turn to Ludvík. ‘About the letters, the smuggling…’
‘It is Marcela. She is one who went to country. She gets from uncles and aunts to send to sisters in camp. For Babička is not safe. Only for little girl. She learn from Daša and Irena before. How to go. How to bribe police at train station.’
‘And Mr B?’ I ask. ‘Did your mother ever speak of him?’
‘I have not heard it. I know about letters only afterwards.’
‘Uncle Pavel said Mr B was a friend, someone who knew the family. They called him Bohuš. I have gone through the list. He isn’t there. But maybe it’s not his real name, just something they called him. Maybe it’s short for Bohumil. Or Boruslav…Bedřich?’
‘Bohuš?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. This is not Czech name. It means nothing.’
Night has fallen. We have arrived in Oświęcim.
The stillness unsettles me. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. Over my shoulder there is a small window without curtains. There is only darkness outside. We should have stayed in Kraków. It is not right to be sleeping here.
I wake to a shaft of light creeping up the far wall and the sounds of a suburban morning. I am in a town, Oświęcim, Auschwitz, where people live, work, talk and breathe. Most of all, they hear. They see. I look out the window to the cobbled courtyard and, just beyond, to the grey, slatted concrete wall with its crown of barbed wire.
Its name was a cancer that spread in the soil, sprouting new tumours in the surrounding towns. Budy, Gleiwitz, Sosnowitz, Hubertschütte. With every kick, every shot, every bite, every cry, the poison grew stronger, extended further. In all, forty-three subcamps would bear its name before they sank back into the Polish countryside. But only one metastasised so aggressively that it came to consume its host. Birkenau. Two and a half kilometres away. That is what we mean when we say Auschwitz.
I walk the rail line through the gaping brick maw that once hungered for human flesh. I could turn around, walk away, but I continue. They are waiting.
It is the vastness that strikes me. The ruins stretch on to the distant forest. One hundred and forty-seven acres. An entire city. To imagine it full, pulsating—I simply cannot. And yet I have seen the mounds of shoes, of glasses, of hair, of dolls. I have searched for familiar names on suitcases. I have witnessed what little remains of their lives. The last gasps of hope. But for me, my generation, it can only be this: an eleventh plague, emptiness.
Along the northern fence there is a dirt road that few bother to walk. Every hundred and fifty metres, a wooden guard tower looms overhead. I had asked a guide where I could find the Czech Family Camp. ‘Go past the quarantine barracks and the Kommandant’s house until you reach the main camp road,’ he said. ‘The Familienlager is the second subcamp on the left.’ I thanked him and set off. ‘It is not open for tourists,’ he called out. ‘But the chain on the gate is loose. You can probably squeeze through.’
When I reach it I am taken aback by how ordinary it looks. There are no grand promises here, no Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes You Free. That feted symbol of Auschwitz, with its mocking rejoinder to their suffering, belongs elsewhere. Those who found themselves in this place never saw it, were never given cause to hope. The wind is picking up and the two halves of the gate jerk wildly against the chain. I stare at the mountings, thick cement pylons braced to tall iron posts, studded with tarnished knobs that once pulsed electricity through the surrounding wires. Now, it is all oxidised, coated in rust. I lean forward, my eye almost touching a single black-crusted barb, and look through to the ruins, to a boulevard of bloodied fingers.
They jut out from the earth at unnatural angles, rough and flaked. When all went to ash only they remained, pointing accusingly at the sky, how could you have let this happen? But their question went unanswered and so they were left to point for eternity at a God that was deaf, dumb and blind.
Five thousand people arrived in the Czec
h Family Camp in September 1943. Set apart from the routinised slaughter that was the very essence of the industrial complex, they were given this land as their own, to administer as they saw fit, answerable only to the savage criminal, Camp Elder Arno Böhm, and his Kapo cronies. Thirty-two wooden barracks in which to build a world. Men and women. Children too. Within weeks there was a school, a hospital, but also disease and hunger. The inmates began to die. In December, another five thousand came. The barracks overflowed but those inside made do. It was better than beyond the wire, where bald, emaciated Muselmänner—those who had given up on life—floated by in filthy striped rags.
It didn’t last. One night in early March 1944, all four thousand surviving inmates from the September transport were gathered together, forced to write postcards to their friends and family in Theresienstadt and moved to the nearby quarantine barracks. They were told that they would be sent to Heydebreck, a work camp in Germany. But there was no Heydebreck for them. It was another Nazi lie. Some inmates sensed what was to come; they encoded their cards with messages of impending doom. Others chose, in their desperation, to believe in the promise of Heydebreck. The following day, they were all loaded into trucks, driven along the main camp road, and delivered to the gas chambers. Among them was my grandfather’s brother, Shmuel Rand.
And so the December arrivals came to learn the meaning of ‘6SB’, the vague cipher that had been scrawled next to their names upon registration. Sonderbehandlung—special treatment—after six months. If their calculations were correct, they’d be ash before July. And yet they persisted with their makeshift society, stretching out the days with familiar routines, watching the sun set with dismay, wondering how they might have made the hours last longer.
Three hundred kilometres away, in the converted barn just outside Theresienstadt, my grandfather was still scribbling bibliographic notes on stiff white index cards, oblivious to the cynical act of theatre in which he was about to play a minor part. The Nazis were preparing the camp for a visit by representatives from the International Red Cross. Beautification of the streets was underway. Inmates were rehearsing plays and operas to perform for their guests. Two transports—some ten thousand people—had already been sent east in an attempt to ease the overcrowding. But it wasn’t enough. By April, plans were afoot for one last transport to the Czech Family Camp in Birkenau. This would be my grandfather’s role: to leave Theresienstadt, to help clear its stage.
How my grandfather came to be included on the May transport is difficult to explain. If his initial letter to Beit Terezín is any indication, he seems to have believed that the work of the Talmudkommando was done. After almost two years of privilege and protection he had suddenly become expendable. Yet the Talmudkommando continued its work until the liberation of Theresienstadt. There were still books to catalogue. Why then summarily dismiss and deport almost half of the workers, including my grandfather and Georg Glanzberg?
I am here in the Czech Family Camp, by coincidence, on the anniversary of his arrival, May 19. Sixty-eight years ago my grandfather stumbled off the train, clutching Georg Glanzberg’s arm. They were met by a squad of prisoners, some of whom they knew. Walk with us, they were told over the tumult of barking dogs and soldiers. The train track through the main gate had not yet been built. They climbed into the back of a truck and were driven the short distance to the place where I now stand.
I slip sideways through the gate and walk down the cracked road that divides the camp in two. In the distance, the train track swarms with movement, a steady procession of tourists heading towards the crematoria. Some branch off, along the path of the living, into the two banks of sturdy brick barracks.
They know nothing of this subcamp.
Sonderbehandlung. Special Treatment.
Death.
That is what it meant to be privileged.
There was no roll call in June, no liquidation. Another seven and a half thousand inmates had arrived in May and filled the Czech Family Camp with stories of the model ghetto: its streets swept clean, the factory tents in the town square dismantled and replaced with trees and flowers. A new currency had begun to circulate, the Terezín Crown, to be spent at the café and shops that had popped up on certain streets. There was even a stage where jazz bands played on Sundays. Only the barracks put paid to the lie. They still coursed with squalor and disease. Inmates scratched angrily at their skin, picking off bedbugs and lice, eating them.
This place swallows names, lives, memories. Familienlager BIIb. Thirty-two wooden barracks, four latrine blocks, two kitchen halls. A shit-soaked shrine to cynicism, to arrogance, in this wasteland of the damned. Yet, viewed from the heavens, it is a small tract of dirt. Here, where reason left the world, the impossible flourished.
I am back where I started:
And so he taught Jewish children. He taught them in Prague. He taught them in Theresienstadt. And he taught them in Auschwitz.
I nestle into the crook of the chimney where Block 31 once stood. The Children’s Block. A school. My fingers trace circles across the ground.
The Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt on 23 June 1944 was a success. The delegates wrote a glowing report: rumours of the harsh treatment of Jews were unfounded and the planned visit to a labour camp would not be necessary. Eichmann was delighted. He no longer required a backup plan. On 11 July 1944, the liquidation of the Czech Family Camp began. Only a few inmates—my grandfather and Georg Glanzberg among them—were selected as fit for work and transported to slave labour camps in Germany. The rest were sent to the gas chambers. By nightfall of 12 July, the camp had been cleared. Of the 17,500 people who had been imprisoned there, fewer than 1300 survived the war.
I look through the fence towards the forest over a kilometre away. There are three destroyed subcamps just like this one. BIIc. BIId. BIIe. Beyond them, I can just make out the ruins of the Kanada Barracks, where inmates sorted the belongings of all who arrived at Birkenau. Then, trees. I count the camps again, stopping when I am sure which is the third—BIIe—where my grandmother was imprisoned after arriving from Terezín on Transport EO on 6 October 1944, almost four months after the Czech Family Camp had been liquidated.
Hers was a most unusual welcome. On the morning of 7 October the Sonderkommando rose up and destroyed one of the gas chambers and crematoria, Krema IV. It was the only major act of rebellion in the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. From their quarters in BIIe, my grandmother and her fellow deportees would have been closer to the battle than any other prisoners.
The rebellion was quickly put down and, for three weeks, my grandmother waited in the shadow of the chimneys, holding on to her last possession, a gold ring her mother had smuggled into the model ghetto. As it was for my grandfather, Birkenau would come to define her. Every story will be said to have happened here. To us, she will not have left in an undocumented transport on 28 October along with one hundred other women. To us, there will be no Upper Silesia, no Merzdorf, no textile factory where Jewish women were forced to process flax. Not until it is too late to ask.
I reach into my backpack, pull out the crumbling orange paperback and begin to read. I know these words by heart, an entire universe foreseen. For years I have pictured him in its pages but now I can see he is not here. This is not his story. Rather, he is both author and reader, both giver and keeper of lives. This book is the guide to his deepest grief, his enduring shame, to lives swept away by unknowable forces and cast aside. Between its covers lie his friend, Georg Glanzberg, and his mother, Gusta Randová.
There is a patch of grass growing on a mound of earth behind the foundations of Block 31. I crouch down and pick at the blades, dig my fingers into the mud. It is here their story ends, here where I must find peace in not knowing. There will be names—Schwarzheide, Sachsenhausen, Merzdorf—but nothing more. It is too late. What’s left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend, post-memory.
I lie down in the dirt and stare at the crook
ed red fingers. I try to see the horror but it grows distant, blurring into the autumn sky. A cool drizzle begins to fall. My eyes have grown heavy. The stillness is broken by birds: a great flock, circling the chimneys.
The scene recedes into the background, leaving only the dirt and its blanket of white flowers.
REF. I-ARCH-I/1121-22/12
Dear Bram Presser,
In reply to your enquiry, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim would like to inform you that we have searched partially saved documentation which is kept in our archives. Unfortunately there is no information about RAND Jakub and ROUBÍČKOVÁ Daša. Prisoner number A-1821 was received by a man who was deported to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, 1944 from Ghetto Theresienstadt. The State Museum would like to explain that during the evacuation and liquidation of the KL Auschwitz by order of camp authorities almost all important documents of KL Auschwitz including prisoners’ personal files were destroyed. On the basis of the partially saved documents it is impossible to impart complete information about all people who were imprisoned in the camp.
We suggest you contact in your further search the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen…
Yours sincerely,
Piotr Supiński
Biuro Informacji o Byłych Więźniach
Office for Information on Former Prisoners
21 APRIL 2014
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: SEARCHING FOR DR JAKUB RAND
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am currently researching a book about my late grandfather, Jakub Rand, who was one of the 1000 prisoners sent from the Birkenau Czech Family Camp to the BRABAG gasoline plant at Schwarzheide on 3 July 1944 and then, a day or so before the death march, to Sachsenhausen. I was hoping there might be some documentation of his internment in your archives. His birth date was 25.12.1911, his Auschwitz prisoner number was A-1821.
