by Bram Presser
Any assistance or information you could provide will be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Bram Presser
TO: BRAM PRESSER
AW: SEARCHING FOR DR JAKUB RAND
Dear Mr Presser,
In reply to your inquiry concerning Jakub Rand, born 25/12/1911, I inform you that unfortunately no documents have been found in our archives.
Almost all the documents of the headquarters of Sachsenhausen including the card index of the detainees and nearly all the files of the detainees were destroyed by the SS in spring 1945 before the liberation of the concentration camp. The little, incompletely preserved files are for the most part in the archives of the Russian Federation. As far as these contain information on individual persons, they have been incorporated in a database.
In this database I could not find information relating to Jakub Rand.
Yours sincerely
Archiv
Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen
Straße der Nationen 22
D-16515 Oranienburg
Numbers
1
THERESIENSTADT
Dusk.
A silken frost settled across the fields beyond the town’s northern ramparts. Here, beneath the volcanic peaks, where grey cones threatened unspeakable violence, a great fortress had risen from the earth, its ravelins, escarpments and redoubts arranged like cascading stars, holding strong against malevolent winds. On top of the third bastion, Jakub R stood gazing out at the Elbe River and, on its furthest shore, the lone spire of Lidomerice’s oldest church.
It was almost a year since he had arrived, since he had trudged through the slush in the streets of Bohušovice, hurrying his mother along on the final leg of their journey to the town once called Terezín. There they waited a week in the sluice yard, lying on straw, filling out forms, eating potatoes, before being shown to their separate barracks. Gusta quickly made a home of it—to her, Theresienstadt was just another exile, no better or worse than the city. With her knitted doilies and pinned pictures, she made her bunk comfortable enough. What little she ate satisfied her meagre appetite. Work in the central laundry was demanding but bearable. And, when the day was done, she had two of her sons, Jakub and Shmuel. She waited for them to come and, at the sound of the curfew siren, as they hurried off back to their barracks, she lay down and closed her eyes.
From the moment he stepped through the camp’s sluice gate, Jakub, however, felt only the chill of confinement. He felt it in his back and in his knees as he crouched down to scrape ice from the pavements. He felt it in his arms and his neck as he hammered wooden boards to the crumbling barriers that separated the inmates from their captors. He felt it as the tepid brown liquid they called ersatz coffee sloshed around in his empty stomach. And he felt it on his cheek as he lay against the frozen straw pillow at night, breathing in the stench of his bunkmates.
Midway through January, Jakub was transferred to the Youth Welfare Department. ‘Formal classes are forbidden,’ said Gonda Redlich, when Jakub reported for duty at the boys’ rooming house on Hauptstrasse. Jakub knew of Redlich from his student days in Prague. A few years his junior, Redlich had been a popular leader in the Zionist youth group movement. His distinct light curls, button nose and thick, round spectacles were instantly recognisable and lent him an unlikely, bookish authority. He had been transported to Theresienstadt early, in 1941, and following a brief tussle with Fredy Hirsch was appointed department head. ‘Teach them songs, play games,’ Redlich continued. ‘And should the lyrics contain some educational elements, or the game include passing through the cities of Palestine, we cannot be blamed for what knowledge the children might absorb.’
Jakub stood before the class that morning and tried to sing but his voice shook and the children laughed. ‘You shouldn’t think about it too much,’ said Redlich. ‘The children get decent food. They have their own barracks with clean sheets and pillows. They do not experience this place like we do. You’ll learn to play and sing and lie. That is your role. And for your efforts you will get extra bread, extra butter, sugar…sometimes even sausage.’ Redlich shook Jakub’s hand. ‘I have put in a request that you be exempted from transport. There’s talk in the Council of Elders of an amnesty, but until then we need to look after our own. Tell your mother you’re safe. All of you.’
The bread was mostly stale, the butter often mouldy or rancid. The sugar was laced with grains of dirt and dead insects. Jakub tasted the sausage only once. It made him double over with cramps as he waited for the latrine. Still, he thanked Gonda Redlich and took his allotted rations so that he could provide for his family. Gusta made of them what she could, glad not to stand in line for the thin broth ladled out in the ground floor dining hall. She made stews and cakes in the warm-up kitchen and brought them back to her room. She divided them into portions, always sure to give herself the smallest one, and watched her sons eat—Shmuel quickly, ravenous from a day in the labour detail, and Jakub slowly. She could not see that he struggled to swallow, his throat clenched as he counted down to curfew.
Gonda Redlich was right. A transport amnesty was declared, but not before six transports had left the camp, taking more than seven thousand people east to a place called Auschwitz. It was, according to the Council, a labour camp. Jakub could see the change in the streets and in the barracks, but most of all he could see it in the classroom: children disappearing overnight, others turning to him when their parents were taken. Many knew him from their time at the school in Jáchymova Street. He sang them songs plundered from a childhood he had tried to escape. He invented stories, stringing them out until he could see the children smile. When Fredy Hirsch came to take the children for exercises in the yard, Jakub sank to the floor and folded his arms over his head. With eyes closed, he imagined himself under his father’s tallis, and willed more stories, more songs to come back to him.
‘Jakub?’
He righted himself against the wall. Gonda Redlich was standing at the door, bemused. Jakub brushed himself down and nodded for Gonda to come in. ‘Sir?’ It still felt strange to address the younger man like that.
‘I’m glad you haven’t left for the day,’ said Redlich. ‘The classes are going well?’
‘Thank you, yes,’ said Jakub. ‘For the children, at least.’
Redlich fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. ‘This came from the Council. Murmelstein asked me to give it to you.’ He handed the paper to Jakub. ‘You are to report outside the post office tomorrow morning. Murmelstein was cagey on the details but I know there’s some new register of scholars. You’ve all been summoned.’ Redlich pulled off his spectacles and rubbed them on his shirt. ‘There’s more to you than we knew.’
‘Next. Yes, this way…Number?’
‘CK-572.’
‘Name?’
‘R, Jakub.’
‘Jakub Israel R?’
‘Doctor Jakub Israel R.’
‘Yes, yes. Here you are. Your qualification?’
‘Law. Charles University.’
‘I see. And you are working in—’
‘Jugendfürsorge, sir.’
‘Teaching the children?’
‘It is not permitted. Mostly we play, sing, the like.’
‘You take us for fools, Doctor Israel. Thankfully that is not my concern. Family?’
‘My mother and brother. He has stayed on in the mobile labour detail. She was assigned to the laundry.’
‘And your position affords them some…some privilege?’
‘For now they are exempted from transport, yes.’
‘But still you are here.’
‘On Murmelstein’s instruction. I am told this is important.’
‘And with importance comes greater privilege.’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘What is it your sage says? The son must sustain his father and mother according to his capacity.’
‘Maimonides, yes. Almost ten years my f
ather has been in his grave. I am the eldest son.’
‘And so here?’
‘Here the currency is bread. Extra rations, exemptions—’
‘Bread, yes. But also…how do you people call it? Vitamins C and P. Connection and pull. Essential for long-term health. I might add another vitamin: L, luck. That we seem to have in common.’
‘Luck?’
‘Your people have always fascinated me, Doctor Israel. My colleagues jeered when I set about studying you. Still, a passion is a passion. There is no escaping it. Five years ago I was in a small office surrounded by your books, praying for tenure, waiting on the next dinner invitation to remind me I was still alive. Then this…this all began. Those who had mocked me found themselves at the front lines while I am here, where my learning is valued. Such was the tide of history. Luck. Do you believe in the soothsayers, Herr Doctor?’
‘Our sages warn against it. Superstitions can harm only those who heed them.’
‘The Book of the Pious. Indeed. Still, they intrigue me. Those you credit as sages, those you fail to recognise. Take Maimonides, for example. Behind the misplaced devotion, he saw it exactly as it has come to be.’
‘This? Here? With all respect—’
‘But the meaning is undeniable. This war of Gog and Magog. You have already lost. God has moved on, chosen someone else. We of the Aryan bloodline have our Messiah, one who rules from Berlin. Yet here, in this town, in all the lands we control, your people continue to pray for miracles. You cling to folktales, blasphemies. I don’t know what you expect. Soon the war will be over, just as Maimonides said, and when it is, the prophecy will have been fulfilled. The Book of Judges, chapter twelve. You are familiar with the first verse, Doctor Israel?’
‘Not as you interpret it, but yes.’
‘Very good. Then let us begin…’
For weeks after the strange interview Jakub waited but there was no news. He watched the children draw, helped prepare issues of the student paper, Vedem. He tried to speak with Gonda Redlich but he was always busy.
Georg arrived at the start of July. Somehow word reached Jakub the following day; his friend was in the Bodenbach Barracks awaiting registration. Jakub hoped he would be assigned to the Youth Welfare Department. He asked Fredy Hirsch to pass on his request. Back in Prague the children loved him, he said. He shares your views, is passionate about them. He will bring credit to the work. I’d ask myself but…Fredy pulled him aside a while later. No luck. Gonda says he has been promised elsewhere.
Jakub’s disappointment lasted only a few days. One evening, as he trudged back from his mother’s barracks, trailing behind Shmuel, he thought of his friend and how it would feel to have a brother for whom he did not have to care, an equal. He went to the washroom where he splashed his face with water and rinsed his mouth of the foul lentil broth that had crept back up into his throat. Outside, the siren sounded, a call to fitful sleep. The main lights of the barracks flickered then went out, leaving only the dim bulbs that hung from the corridor ceilings. When he reached his bunk, he could see the outline of a man. It had happened before. Lost, confused souls. Souls who had ceased to care. Sometimes a stray from the madhouse in the Kavalier Barracks. The ghetto guard would come soon to collect him. But no, this outline was familiar. The rakish figure. The staccato finger-twitching.
‘Georg?’
‘It is hardly how you described.’
For six months they had merely acknowledged to each other that they were alive: one or two carefully crafted sentences on official card. Jakub had wanted to explain, but this place could not be described. For his part Georg, too, held back. Prague was desolate, every building a reminder of what once had been. He went from his apartment to the museum and back again until the inevitable summons, when he was herded onto a train. Just another transport of Jews.
‘They’ve scattered us around the barracks,’ Georg continued. ‘Father is in Magdeberg, my brothers in Sudeten. Mother is in Dresden, at the other end.’
‘You’ll get used to it. It’s a nightly waltz.’
‘Father will be glad to see you.’
‘He is with the Council of Elders?’
‘Not really, but they keep him close. Light work, tending to the halls mostly.’
‘And you?’
‘Three more weeks in the labour detail then we’ll see what happens.’
‘It says only Arbeitsgruppe M. I’m to be at the gate on Südstrasse by eight.’ Georg turned the narrow slip over as if there might be a clue on the back.
The following night Jakub waited for Georg in their room.
‘Sorry, I was with Father. He sends his best.’
Georg said little about his work, only that it involved books, ones they had not even known existed. Jakub didn’t press the matter. Georg was still adjusting to life in the ghetto.
‘I mentioned you to Otto Muneles,’ Georg said a few days later. ‘Murmelstein has put him in charge of the group.’ Georg sat down on his bunk and began to unbutton his shirt. ‘He is giving a lecture tomorrow. Go and speak with him.’
Otto Muneles had lost little of his gruffness in the months since Jakub last saw him. He was stooped, as if still tending to the dead. He did not move while he spoke, his arms thrust downwards, his hands balled into fists. His voice was a whisper, a seesaw of pitch and punctuation. Jakub found it unsettling that Muneles spoke in public at all, even in the dusky greyness of a barrack loft; listening to someone who communed with the dead tore away the scab of civility.
A polite smattering of applause and it was over. The small audience dispersed, climbing over beams, ducking, tripping, until they reached the stairs. Jakub made his way into the light.
‘Ah, Jakub! Good. Come closer.’ Muneles leaned over the lectern. ‘This group I have…I have gone over the original lists. Your name jumped out immediately. The officer who interviewed you was impressed. He was not certain you had the discipline required, but was confident you had the knowledge. In the end, he approved. It was the Youth Welfare Department that reclaimed you. Maybe Gonda thought he was doing you a favour. They have a healthy supply of Vitamin P. When it comes to drawing up the transport lists, the Commission immediately removes all their cards from the central registry. You can’t be put on a train.’
Muneles gathered his notes and tucked them under his arm. ‘Go back to your room. I just wanted to say that I’ve put in a request to have you transferred. Eichmann is unhappy with our progress. Like everyone else, we work slowly, make the job last as long as we can, but it is the attrition that troubles him. Murmelstein needs this to curry favour. He has installed me as a buffer, I know. He can’t be seen to fail and will sacrifice me if he must. In return he allows me to speak in his name. Now we wait and see where the real power lies.’
Each night, as those around them drifted off to sleep, Georg spoke of paper wonders, the treasures of a mighty kingdom far from the dirt and noise. He guided Jakub’s dreams to a world balanced on a spire of knowledge. The titles alone drew Jakub forward, called his heart to where the rest of him could not follow. Then, in the late summer, he received a yellow ticket.
He was to report to the gate at Südstrasse the next morning.
The Klärenstalt was a short walk from the gate, back in the direction of Bohušovice, tucked beneath the town’s southern rampart. Three rooms sectioned off from the gardener’s hut in what was once a barn. They gave themselves a name too. Not what was printed on their time sheets. Not Arbeitsgruppe ‘M’ or Bücherfassungsgruppe. No, they called themselves the Talmudkommando. These men, who sat on wooden benches, their knees aching, were the custodians of wisdom, of the divine inspiration that had found its way onto the reconstituted pulp of a felled tree. Together they would compress the knowledge into a catalogue that would itself be a library to be plundered, devoured, rewritten.
Their names had once reverberated through the streets of Josefov. Jakub had sat in lecture halls and felt his soul ascend on a chariot of their words. He had read their co
mmentaries on the sacred texts. Mojžíš Woskin-Nahartabi, Rabbi Šimon Adler, Rabbi František Gottschall, Dr Isaac Leo Seeligmann, Josef Eckstein. Jakub saw in them the wise men of his youth, who had huddled around cluttered tables in the shtibl with his father, and argued with an intellectual ferocity Jakub could not fathom. He longed to tell his mother, to say that the spirit of her beloved sat with him while he worked, and guided her son’s pen. But he would not add to her suffering.
In time, Jakub came to know the books by touch alone: the texture of their jackets on his fingertips, the deckled serrations on his knuckles, the pressure on his wrist as he lifted each one from the pile.
Transports resumed in September.
At first it had only been rumour, frantic whispers that cut across New Year’s prayers. Then came the paper slips, left on bunks for the occupants to find at the end of the day. Shmuel was among the first. He ran to Jakub. There must be a mistake. They…they promised. You have the letter. Gusta, too, misunderstood the nature of Jakub’s privilege. ‘Go to the Council,’ she pleaded. ‘We are only three left. It is not right.’ He joined the line of supplicants at the Transport Department, only to be summarily dismissed. ‘This time we have no choice,’ the man said. ‘The Kommandant himself selected the names. Nobody is exempt.’ His mother would not hear it. ‘You should not have left the children,’ she sobbed. ‘With them we were all safe. What good are your books?’ He tried to calm her. ‘Don’t listen to the bonkes. It is just another labour detail. And he will be free of this place.’ He handed her what was left of his rations so she could make Shmuel something for the journey. For three days he made do with ersatz coffee. Six weeks later they received the first postcard. It said only that Shmuel was well and hard at work. Jakub stared at the postmark: Arbeitslager Birkenau bei Neu-Berun.
2
THERESIENSTADT
Gusta rocked the pot over the stove in the warm-up kitchen on the ground floor of the Hamburg Barracks. The aroma was not unpleasant. She knew that most nights they ate better than the others in their room. What was left she would share, a spoonful here, a spoonful there. She had stitched together a family as best she could. Two hours was not enough to be a mother, even before Shmuel was taken. The boys would come straight from work every few days at six and be gone by curfew at eight. Otherwise she was alone. Then the mischlinge arrived: a large transport in early March, dumping an entire community of confused children in their midst. The youngest among them found homes with adoptive mothers but the older ones were forced to fend for themselves.
