Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Alice knew Stephan’s hopes that his father was going to come back and sweep him up in his arms were fading day by day. Then, one morning a woman rushed into the room crying, “Sommer is here, Sommer has arrived!” Stephan was ecstatic.

  Alice took him by the hand and together they ran to the station as fast as their legs could carry them. With great excitement they spoke to one group after another asking about Leopold Sommer, to be rewarded with nothing more than shakes of the head; then Alice saw her brother-in-law Hans Sommer, his face fallen in and his body no more than bones. Their joy at the unexpected sighting was short-lived, followed by a more chilling realization: Leopold Sommer had not come back.

  And although she continued to exude confidence to Stephan, Alice knew deep down that the hope of seeing her husband again was disappearing.

  * * *

  ON 2 May 1945 Paul Dunant and the rest of the Red Cross delegation returned to Theresienstadt. Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April. On 6 May the Council of Elders announced:

  Men and women of Theresienstadt, the International Committee of the Red Cross has taken Theresienstadt under its protection11 … The representative of the Committee, Mr. Dunant, is now responsible for the running of the camp. He has confirmed the following members of the Council of Elders in their positions as leaders of the Autonomous Jewish Administration. You are safe in Theresienstadt. The war is not yet over. Anyone who leaves Theresienstadt exposes himself to all the dangers of war … Keep calm and maintain order, help us with your labors which will render your journey home possible. Signed Dr. Leo Baeck, Dr. Alfred Meissner, Dr. Heinrich Klang and Dr. Eduard Meier.

  Early in May Stephan fell gravely ill. The doctor diagnosed a rare form of measles, which, above all, causes terrible stomach pains. During the night he was in agony and could not sleep. Alice held her son in her arms night and day, trying to comfort him.

  On the evening of 8 May, the day after Germany surrendered, a strange noise echoed around the camp. At first it was faint and far off but became louder and louder. Eventually Alice heard a loud cry spreading through the entire camp: “Freedom!” Everyone was shouting the word, over and over again. Alice wrapped Stephan up, ill though he was, and ran out into the street. Russian tanks were coming down the street and heading in the direction of Prague. The headlights of the tanks and the military lorries lit up the night.12 All Theresienstadt was on its feet. In their enthusiasm the people sang the Internationale in German, Czech, Dutch, Polish and Hungarian.13 The next day the Czech gendarmerie arrived with their national flags flying and drove triumphantly through the streets.

  Freedom was still not much more than a promise. Alice was desperately worried about Stephan, who was too exhausted to stand up; and she was missing Paul, whom she had not seen for two days. Someone now told her that he had taken a gamble with the Russian forces and that, the day before Germany’s official surrender, Paul had gone with them to Prague. Long before, Alice and he had agreed that she and Stephan would come to him and Mary there, as soon as they left Theresienstadt.

  But there were still difficult days ahead. The attempt to keep the newcomers away from the long-term residents had been a failure and typhus had spread like wildfire. In order to avoid infection, Alice and the other women she lived with left their room only when it was absolutely essential. Hundreds of people died every day. On 12 May a Russian medical unit arrived in Theresienstadt—it took weeks before the camp was rid of typhus.14

  Finally they were free to go, and in the middle of June Alice and Stephan at last returned to Prague together with Alice’s close friend Edith Kraus. Though Alice was physically much stronger, she grew weaker mentally. With every passing day she heard more horror stories of the SS murder squads and of the extermination camps in Auschwitz, Sobibór, Treblinka and elsewhere. At last she understood exactly what she had been saved from by her music and where she had really been for the past few years. “If they can organize concerts there it can’t be such a terrible place.” This thought had comforted Alice from her first day in Theresienstadt. That she had been playing incidental music for the transports leading straight to the gas chambers now threatened to drive her insane. And as she and Stephan returned to their home town, they had no idea whom they might see again.

  THIRTEEN

  Homecoming

  “Perhaps there are too many of us Jews in the world…”

  ALICE’S EYES fell on the delicately embroidered letters on the cushions: SH—Sofie Herz. It had been a blessed childhood. Every evening her mother had sat on the bench before the bright blue stove listening to her playing the piano and deftly sewing or embroidering.

  After two years in Theresienstadt Alice was once again lying in a properly made bed, without lice or bugs, and breathing in the comforting smell of the bed linen; but her physical well-being could not dissipate her anguish: as soon as she closed her eyes she saw a sequence of nightmare images drawn from her memory which robbed her of her sleep.

  Alice was on stage. She was playing the Beethoven Appassionata. Suddenly she heard her mother crying out for help. She leaped to her feet and to the alarm of the audience she ran out of the room, but her mother was nowhere to be seen. Her thoughts cut to the scene in the cemetery. She was walking arm-in-arm with her mother, following her father’s coffin. There was another scene-change: Leopold was looking Alice in the eye and saying nothing. His look said it all: he knew what would happen to him. Then came another sequence of images: “Now I am all alone in this world.” It was Stephan with a raging fever, crying bitter tears. He would not be comforted. The sequence came to an end.

  Alice gasped for breath and reached for Stephan’s hand. Although Mary had provided Stephan with his own bed he had crept into hers; in Theresienstadt he had got used to getting under her blankets and going to sleep at once.

  She had to stay strong for her son’s sake; she needed to put these thoughts out of her mind and look forward. For him she needed to conceal her mental torture. He had come through nearly two years incarcerated in a concentration camp virtually undamaged. The truth would destroy his childish soul. Later, perhaps, when he was bigger, she might tell him if he asked; but now there was no question of it.

  The day before, Alice and Stephan had arrived on a train with hundreds of other survivors from Theresienstadt. Paul and Mary had fetched them from the station and taken them to their flat in Ververka Street. “You must think of this as your home,” Mary told them. She meant well: she served up the kind of meal that Alice had not seen since before the war, let alone eaten. She had put one of her three rooms at her disposal, saying “as long as you want to live here you are welcome.” She had no idea what people had had to suffer in the concentration camp, but that did not bother Alice. She herself was only just beginning to realize the extent of Nazi crimes against the Jews. And, at the same time, she suppressed her worries about her own family.

  What had happened to Leopold? Where had they taken her mother? What had happened to her mother-in-law? Where were they all, her relatives, acquaintances and friends? How many of them would make it home? As soon as they had arrived at the station in Prague she had pestered her brother with questions. At first Paul had simply shaken his head in silence and then he explained that the Prague Jewish Community office was collecting reports on the fate of the Jews who had been deported.

  Alice decided to go there the next day, but before that she had to fulfill the promise she had made to Stephan on their way to Prague and show him all the places of his earliest childhood. She was pleased when dawn came. She listened with gratitude to the morning noises coming from the neighboring rooms: the clattering of cups and saucers, the whistling of the kettle, Paul’s cough and her sister-in-law’s laugh. Stephan was just stretching awake when Mary called them to breakfast.

  Paul had got bread and rolls, and Mary brought in a soft-boiled egg for everyone: there was jam, cheese, butter and milk. Mary had a remarkable talent for organization and the best of relations with the black market. Stephan h
elped himself to a slice of fresh dark bread and made Alice butter it for him. He was as little interested in the rolls as he was in the egg or the jam.

  * * *

  ALICE AND Stephan set off immediately after breakfast. Hand in hand they made their way to the house at One Sternberg Street, which had been their home until their deportation. Not much seemed to have changed in Prague’s Seventh District. Alice was clinging to the thought that she might find news of Leopold.

  She summoned her courage and rang the bell. It seemed an eternity before a Czech woman opened the door. She came out onto the landing and closed the door behind her. She didn’t want Alice and Stephan to see inside. She was not only brusque, but cold. There was no news, she told them, adding that although she was sorry for Alice she was not prepared to move out under any circumstances; she and her family had had a bad time of it themselves.

  “Maminka, why won’t she let us into our flat?” whispered Stephan, as he walked downstairs holding his mother’s hand. He sounded sad and anxious, but Alice was not listening. She was tortured by the thought that she had lived from concert to concert in Theresienstadt while thousands of men were being taken to extermination camps and murdered.

  Had she worn blinkers? Hadn’t her music given her strength, and not just her but her fellow prisoners too, even if only for a minute? Since the liberation of the camp, she and Edith had reflected over and over again on what might have happened if they had refused the commandant’s orders to play, whether it would have made any sense at all. They came to the conclusion that it would not.

  “Maminka, why can’t we go into our flat?” Stephan repeated, a little louder this time. In the past two years he had asked so many questions like this. What could she tell him to stop him from losing his faith in mankind? How could she stop him learning to hate? Although her heart was not in it, she tried to explain what had happened to them.

  “Stepanku, when we had to go to Theresienstadt we had to leave our flat to some Czechs who were also having a bad time. We can’t simply drive them away. That would simply mean matching one injustice with another. I am sure they will soon be given another flat.”

  Stephan understood what his mother had told him, but despite that his childish sense of justice spurred him to say: “I’d be happier if we could go back to our old flat…”

  “Me, too, Stepanku: this afternoon I am going to go to the Jewish Community with Uncle Paul. They will help us out,” Alice told him on the way to the Baumgarten. Stephan wanted to see his favorite playground, but Alice could not bring herself just to sit on a bench and watch the child on the swings. She was anxious to press on to Bělsky Street to her parents’ house. The nameplates on the door revealed only Czech names. Alice rang what had been her parents’ bell. There was no answer and none from the floor above either, only a chilling silence.

  Alice tried not to let her disappointment show. “Do you see,” she said in a weak voice, “your grandfather had this house built. I was born in this house, and Uncle Paul too. It was here that we gave our first concerts.” She laughed at the memory. “Now come on. Let’s go to the center of town before we go home.”

  As they crossed the river, Alice told Stephan stories of the bridge-keeper that she had known when she was his age. They walked down the former Elisabeth Street and along the Graben, wandered over to the New Town and crossed Wenceslaus Square. At last they stood in Havlíček Square, near the former German Theater, in front of the house which had been her parents-in-law’s home.

  Her father-in-law had died before the German occupation. Alice was grateful for that. She had not heard any news of her mother-in-law since the beginning of July 1942. But soon after, Alice learned that Helene Sommer, after three months in Theresienstadt, had been sent on to Treblinka on 15 October 1942 together with her sister Anna Holitscher.

  Saturday after Saturday she had joined the extended family up there in the drawing room: Leopold’s brother Hans, and his wife Zdenka and their children Eva and Otto; Leopold’s sister Edith, and her husband Felix Mautner and their children Ilse and Thomas. So far only Hans Sommer had come back.

  Alice looked at the row of bells and then at the letter boxes. There was no mention of the name Sommer. Her hopes faded, but she still went up the stairs pulling Stephan up behind her. When she knocked on the door her hands were shaking, but no one answered. The only thing that kept her standing were thoughts of Stephan. “Before lunch I’ll show you the view of the city from the Belvedere Park. It’s lovely.”

  In the park Stephan found a stick and, squatting at Alice’s feet, drew a road in the gravel and vroomed as he drove his wooden car along it. Alice sat on a bench and looked into the distance. She was a stranger in the city. The war had taken her home away from her.

  * * *

  IMMEDIATELY after lunch Paul and Alice made their way to the Jewish Community office. The administrative buildings of the Jews were situated in the former Jewish quarter of the old city, right next to the old Prague synagogue. The tiny waiting room had room for around twenty people. It was hopelessly crowded. Alice could hardly breathe, she found the atmosphere so depressing. Her gaze wandered from face to face, each and every one of them marked by the sufferings of the last few years. Most of them waited silently, a few of them muttered to one another. They were all preoccupied by the same question: which of their friends and relations had survived? And here they hoped to find answers.

  Paul tried to cheer his sister up. The Jewish Community was performing real wonders. It was helping survivors to find their feet in Prague again, finding them accommodation, furniture and money. The official made it clear to Alice that only very few people had returned from Treblinka, where her mother had been taken on 19 October 1942. He still knew nothing about Leopold and her many friends and relations among the deportees, but he encouraged her, however, to come to the office every day and to ask if there was any news. Information was coming in all the time. Finally, he took a note of Alice’s details and asked her to be patient for three or four weeks: “There are few flats, but families with children have priority; that means you. And when that happens you will have your own upright or grand piano and you will be able to teach again.” Encouraged, Alice turned to go.

  “How old did you say your son was?” the man called out to her as she left. “In a few days we are going to celebrate his eighth birthday,” Alice answered deliberately. “That’s perfect,” the man said. He told her that the community was going to invite a group of children for a fortnight’s stay in a castle near Prague. Irma Lauscherová was running a holiday home there. Stephan would remember her from Theresienstadt and he would have a really wonderful birthday. “And take some clothing away for your son. The woman outside will help you. We have a depot.”

  The only way Alice could persuade Stephan to go on the holiday was by promising him that she would send him a birthday surprise. It was only then that he agreed to the adventure, albeit with mixed feelings, as for the past two years he had not spent a single night away from his mother.

  Alice found it even more difficult to part with her son but it seemed the sensible thing to do. She had endless meetings with officials and she didn’t want to impose these on Stephan. More than anything she needed to establish her rights as a citizen of liberated Czechoslovakia. Under clause eleven of the Reichs Citizenship Law of 25 November 1941, deprivation of citizenship, dispossession and deportation of Jews had been legalized throughout the Reich. Alice was stateless, she had no rights, she was an outlaw.

  At first it was easy to believe that the issue of re-granting citizenship to concentration camp survivors would simply be a formality, but the Czech authorities showed little interest in what had happened to the Jews at the behest of the Germans after 1939. They decided the matter of citizenship solely on the grounds of whether the petitioner had belonged to a Czech or a German cultural circle before the occupation.

  From June 1945 the new president of the republic, Edvard Beneš issued a total of 143 decrees based on his des
ire to outlaw, dispossess and expel the German population of Czechoslovakia. Sudeten Germans, Hungarians, all so-called ethnic Germans, South Tyroleans who had moved with the promise of new “living space” in the east, and even Jews whose mother tongue was German, all had to be transferred to German territory. For the surviving German-speaking Jews, this meant sending them off into the arms of their murderers.

  Paul had warned his sister when she arrived that she was only to speak Czech in public from now on. He had returned to Prague five weeks before Alice, and this time had been sufficient to convince him that, even if the country was freed from fascism, the position of the Jews had not fundamentally improved. The rights of Jewish citizens to remain in Czechoslovakia after 1945 hinged on what nationality they had given in the last census, which had taken place in 1930: German, Czech, Hungarian or Jewish.

  “We talked it over with Felix,” Alice remembered. At first they had thought about ticking the German box, but her brother-in-law had convinced them to claim Jewish nationality.

  “I always voted for the Jewish Party,” Paul told her, but he had put down “Czech” in 1930, because he suspected that if there were to be any problems in the future this would be the best thing to do.

  “They will ask you if your friends were Czechs or Germans, what papers you read and what music you listened to and what theater you went to. Do you understand that? The Czechs are screaming for revenge, Alice,” Paul continued. “The Germans brought their people terror and death. Today they will not acknowledge any difference between one German and another.”

  Reuven Assor, from Dux in the Sudetenland, who had emigrated to Palestine before the war and then fought in the British Army, described how threatening the situation was for German-speaking Jews in the new Czechoslovakia (or those few who had survived the concentration camps). In 1942 his parents were deported to Theresienstadt and had died there. In 1945 Reuven Assor returned to Czechoslovakia as a member of the Jewish Brigade. He set himself a target of two years to get as many survivors as possible to Palestine.