Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  In Dachau he had shared a bunk with Leopold Sommer. They were all suffering from typhus. When Leopold realized he was losing his strength he asked the man to go to Alice and Stephan.

  Silence fell again. Finally the man fumbled in his pocket and drew out a packet rolled in newspaper and handed it to Alice. She nodded to him as if to say that he should unwrap it. It was a battered tin spoon: Leopold’s spoon, which he had taken from Prague to Theresienstadt, and on to Auschwitz, Flossenbürg and Dachau.

  “Did he have to suffer much?” Alice asked, looking through the man into nothingness.

  At the end Leopold was scarcely conscious. In his bouts of fever he had often whispered Alice and Stephan’s names; and he had smiled.

  * * *

  “MAMINKO, ARE we going to take the tram today?”

  Alice had no idea how long she had been sitting there already, staring at the tin spoon, when Stephan came running through the door: “Didn’t you promise me?”

  Alice clutched the table and forced herself to smile as she rose to greet her son. She stroked his head gently, first with her right hand and then with her left, and then with her right again. Breathing deeply and slowly she brought herself back to the here and now. Stephan was what it was all about.

  Although she had to concentrate as hard as if she were playing a piano concert before a full house, she managed to say in a manner that was as warm as it was spirited: “Yes, let’s go, my love.” It was yet another “yes” to life.

  As they were going out Stephan’s gaze fell on the spoon without taking it in. Alice followed him. “It is just a spoon,” she thought. “The memory of our time together no one can take away from me. And Stephan? He is Leopold’s legacy. He must not suffer.” But Alice still has the spoon.

  The tram stop was about 200 meters from their door. Whenever he was allowed to go out onto the street alone, Stephan watched the tram coming and the passengers getting in and out, and heard the driver ring his bell to announce the fact they were heading off. Stephan was firmly convinced that he had never traveled on a tram in his life. He was only four when the Jews were banned from using public transport.

  When Alice and Stephan turned into Bělsky Street, the next tram was drawing up to the stop. “Maminko,” Stephan urged. Alice didn’t let him see that it was only with supreme effort that she was able to put one foot in front of the other. “We are going to go from here to the last stop on the line,” she said, “and then we’ll come home.” Stephan was as pleased as punch and pulled on his mother’s hand. They rushed to reach the rails and got into the front carriage. Stephan had his heart set on standing at the front by the driver.

  Alice bought two tickets: “To the last stop and back again.” The driver waved at her as if to say “I have already got that.” And then he turned to Stephan: “And you, my little friend, what’s your name?”

  “Stephan, but everyone calls me Stepanku.”

  “Would you like to become a tram driver one day?”

  “No, I am going to conduct an orchestra.”

  The driver was amazed, but he was quick to find a fitting reply: “Do you know, Stepanku, a tram driver and a conductor, there is no difference in the end. The conductor decides when to start, and so do I. The conductor decides whether to go faster or slower, and I do that too.”

  Stephan’s face registered disbelief.

  “All right then, come here. I’ll show you how a tram driver conducts.” The tram driver laughed and helped the boy into his compartment. They held on to the wheel together, they braked together, they rang the bell together. At the last stop, together they negotiated the loop. Stephan was ecstatic.

  “You are welcome to drive with me whenever you feel like it,” the driver told him as he said goodbye. “I can always use a good tram conductor like you.”

  In the next few weeks before school began there was hardly a day when Stephan did not wait at the tram-stop until Josef, “his driver,” came by. Then, after school, he spent most of the afternoon with him trundling around the north of Prague.

  * * *

  “I DON’T think Josef has any idea about music.” At dinner that evening Stephan tried to come to terms with what driving a tram and conducting an orchestra had in common, and the similarities between applying the emergency brakes and a string orchestra that is playing out of time. “Both of them sound frightful,” he said in satisfaction. “Daddy needs to play for Josef one day.”

  “Stepanku,” Alice launched in. She had been looking for her chance all evening. “Stepanku, your father is not coming back. This afternoon a man came here. He told me what happened to Daddy…”

  Stephan climbed without a word onto his mother’s lap. Instinctively he took on the role of the comforter. “But Maminko, you always said that Daddy’s soul could not die.”

  “You are right, my love, of course Daddy will always be with us. We can’t see him, but when we are as quiet as mice and we open our hearts as wide as this, then we can feel him there. He will protect us, always.”

  Stephan slept comfortably that night. Alice sat up thinking for a long time and eventually made a decision that she kept to for many years: she would utter not a word about Theresienstadt, and not a word about Leopold’s death.

  * * *

  LOOK AHEAD, resume life; for Alice that also meant giving concerts again as soon as possible. Before the war she had played regularly on the wireless, both on the German station and the Czech. Paul Nettl, the husband of her friend Trude, had been in charge of the German station before fleeing to the United States with his family in 1939.

  The German station had been taken over by the Nazis and at the end of the war it had been shut down by the Czechs; but Alice found people with whom she had worked well before the war still working at the Czech station. A leading producer offered Alice the chance to resume her concerts. From time to time she could appear on the short-wave program and he even suggested a date. The concert would be broadcast live, would be heard worldwide and would be very popular.

  “I must try and tell Marianne and Irma about this,” Alice thought. “But at least if they hear me on the wireless they’ll know I am still alive.”

  In the months before the war began, the sisters had exchanged a few letters, but since then they had had no news of one another. Alice did not even have an address for them, and there were no telephone connections with Palestine. Not even the Jewish Community could help with this one: contacts with Palestine were only slowly being established.

  On the off-chance, Alice went to the post office to try to send a telegram to Jerusalem: “Coming Thursday, midnight concert from Radio Prague on the Short Wave. Stop. Alice.”

  The post office clerk was unable to help. Alice needed to come back the next day, and in the meantime he would make inquiries as to whether he could send the message to Palestine. Eventually she was able to send it, but without a proper address all she could do was hope that a telegram sent to “Prof Emil Adler, doctor, Jerusalem” would arrive. She had originally intended to send the message to her brother-in-law Felix Weltsch as well, but she abandoned that idea when she heard how expensive sending a telegram would be. She assumed that, as a physician in the public service in Jerusalem, Emil Adler would be better known than the university librarian Felix Weltsch and therefore the telegram would be more likely to reach him.

  The days sped by as she prepared for the concert. On the Thursday in question Alice sat down shortly before midnight at the concert grand in the studio of Czech Radio. Her neighbor, Valery Fuchs, had just woken Pavel and Stephan so that they could listen to the concert, but had her message reached Jerusalem?

  It was not until weeks later that Alice learned what excitement the telegram had caused in the family. It had arrived promptly in Emil Adler’s office at the Hadassah Hospital. Since 1940 he had been running the rehabilitation clinic there. Generally a calm man, his hands shook when he opened the telegram and he immediately dropped everything and rushed home: Alice was alive. When Marianne read t
he telegram it was as if a dam had burst, she cried so much.

  On the evening of the concert the relatives gathered around the Adlers’ wireless set: besides Marianne and Emil, there was Felix and Irma and their daughter Ruth. It was midnight, but Palestine was an hour ahead of Prague and they had to be patient for another hour. On the dot of one came the announcement in Czech: “We will now hear Beethoven’s Appassionata played by Alice Herzova in Prague.” By the end of the first few bars even the men had hidden their faces in their handkerchiefs. Alice was alive, but what of Leopold and Stephan? Within a few weeks, Alice was in regular correspondence with her relatives again.

  Alice’s live broadcast had made others aware that she was still alive, too, among them, the Czech journalist and writer Michael Mareš. Mareš had met Alice at a private concert in 1943, not long before she was deported. She had played the Appassionata then, too, and he had always felt the sonata was like the voice of an unavoidable catastrophe. From their very first meeting, Alice felt a kind of community of souls with Mareš, despite their age difference; she was twenty years his junior. Although his rough and ready wit and his particular brand of repartee were strange to her, they fascinated her nonetheless. He was like an uncle to her, but there were frequent moments, however, when his extravagant compliments revealed that he was in love with her.

  The day after the broadcast, Michael Mareš went to the Jewish Community to find out Alice’s address. On his way to her flat he picked a beautiful bunch of flowers in the Belvedere Park, but they did not seem sufficient to express his joy at her survival and his admiration and love for her. Mareš was a passionate collector of modern art, and, knowing how open Alice had always been to the avant-garde, he decided that he should give her the most valuable picture in his collection. When, with great excitement, Mareš rang the doorbell of Alice’s flat, it was opened by Stephan who looked at him curiously.

  “Stepanku, don’t you remember? We went to the cinema together two years ago, a bag of ice fell on your trousers … I am Michael.” They both laughed.

  “If you like, we could go to the cinema again tomorrow.” The ice was well and truly broken.

  Alice’s face lit up when she came to the door. It was not really her style to hug guests when she greeted them, but in Michael Mareš’s case, she made an exception and gave him a kiss.

  “We have so much to tell one another,” he said joyfully, “but first of all I have a request: play me the first movement of the Appassionata.”

  Alice looked for an appropriate jar for the flowers, put them on the Steinway and began to play. After this private concert, Mareš handed her his present: a portrait of a young Parisian woman by Toulouse-Lautrec.

  From now on there was not a week that passed without a visit from Mareš, who would be a trusted support in the postwar years. Over the next few years Mareš was like a father to Stephan, always listening to what he was saying, and Alice could talk to him not only about everyday worries but also the difficult political situation. Mareš was a convinced communist and dreamed of a just society, but became increasingly angry with the way in which his Party friends dealt with their political opponents.

  * * *

  NOW THAT they had a flat, Alice had to find a school for Stephan. She and Valery Fuchs had become close friends and together they went to talk to the local school committee, but they were unlucky enough to come up against an incompetent official. Stephan and Pavel, both born in 1937, should have been starting their third year at school, but the official wanted to put them in a class with six-year-olds in the first year.

  Since the war ended, children who had survived the war in hiding places or camps and who had never had any formal instruction had to be interviewed by the committee. The committee decided that the boys would have to sit an entrance test to decide if they were fit to go into the higher class, and they were astounded at Stephan and Pavel’s performance in the exam. Both spoke perfect Czech, both could read and write without a problem, both knew their tables. In September 1945 they entered the third class and the primary school was just a few doors from their home. They had of course been well taught by Irma Lauscherová in her clandestine lessons in the camp.

  Stephan and Pavel loved going to school. What for most children was a duty was for them a privilege, at least at the outset. As Irma Lauscherová later wrote,

  They would then go to school in September. They were going to receive books, exercise books, pencil cases, pens, a sketch book, a pencil, crayons and a satchel! Maybe even a rubber! What joy! For those people who have never had the experience of being deprived of a sheet of paper where they could write on one side at least. For someone who did not live through it, it is hard to make them imagine what it is like to lack a pencil. No one knew what our children had to do without.1

  Stephan in particular excelled in all subjects. Over and over again he challenged the teacher, which made the other children laugh. No one took offense at this apparent cheekiness, for they could see there was no ill-will behind it.2

  When he came home from school at midday, Stephan did his homework first. In the cold winter months he kept his coat and hat on as the flat was badly heated. Although there was an incredible rapport between mother and son, Alice sometimes found it difficult to discipline Stephan. The day began at quarter to six with the morning wash and breakfast. From seven on the dot to quarter to eight, Alice taught her son the piano. Sometimes Stephan made an attempt to rebel: he could not see why he had to practice so much every day. Alice insisted on it, however, not only because he had such a prodigious talent, but because discipline and awareness of goals needed to become part of his life. The conflict did not begin in earnest, however, until Ilonka Štěpánova began to teach him.

  Václav and Ilonka Štěpán were the first friends Alice visited after her return from Theresienstadt. She had a terrible shock when she heard that her former teacher had been suffering from a malignant brain tumor and had died in terrible pain in 1944. Ilonka nonetheless offered her services as Stephan’s teacher and Alice, thinking that it was sensible for the boy to have another teacher as well as his mother, had accepted. Despite this their morning classes continued as usual.

  Stephan was making enormous progress. At nine he played Debussy, at ten the first Beethoven sonatas. However great his interest in new works and composers, he always started the day with Bach. Alice left him to choose the piece.

  * * *

  AS SOON as Stephan left the house in the morning Alice sat down at the keyboard and practiced for four hours, just as she had done in the years before her deportation. While the boy was doing his homework or playing with his friends, she taught. She kept the evenings for going to concerts and little by little she found a new circle of friends. But horrible news continued to arrive. Leopold’s brother Hans was mourning his wife Zdenka, his ten-year-old daughter Eva and seven-year-old son Otto. All three were gassed in Auschwitz. Alice already knew that her mother-in-law Helene Sommer, together with her sister Anna Holitscher, had been killed in the gas chambers at Treblinka. For her sister-in-law Edith Mautner and her husband Felix there was clearly no hope left. Since their deportation to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in Łódź in October 1941 there had been no trace of them. Their children Ilse and Thomas were still waiting for their parents in Sweden.

  Joseph Reinhold, the former head of the Priessnitz sanatorium in Gräfenberg, survived the war in hiding in Russia in dramatic circumstances and with the help of his Christian wife. He returned to Prague a physical and mental wreck. On one occasion Alice took him along to one of her concerts. At the first Beethoven sonata he collapsed in tears and had to leave the auditorium before the end. A few months later he died.

  In Alice’s immediate circle twenty people had been killed by the Nazis, only she and Stephan had survived. Two survivors and twenty dead. The ratio directly mirrored the broader scale of the tragedy. On 15 March 1939 there were 118,310 Jews in the Bohemian lands. Of these 14,045 survived: about 8 percent.3

  When Alice
and Stephan received a letter from Robert Sachsel, Leopold’s oldest friend, they were delighted. Sachsel and Leopold had been to kindergarten together, trained together, moved to Hamburg together and returned to Prague together at the beginning of the 1930s. Only the war had separated them.

  Alice now learned that Robert had survived, but in dangerous circumstances. In the winter of 1941 he had been very ill with rheumatism and should have been in a wheelchair, but he still had to shovel snow on the streets of Prague. As Robert’s father could see that his son would not survive this physical torture, he bought a small house in the Slovakian spa of Piešt’any in the name of Robert’s nurse Anita, and concealed sufficient money there for Robert to survive on.

  The Sachsels were one of the best-known and richest Jewish families in Prague. Since the 1790s their forefathers had lived a deeply religious life in the orthodox community in Neubydzow (Nový Bydžov) about ninety kilometers northeast of Prague. They started a linseed oil factory which soon became a huge business with outlets all over Europe. In the nineteenth century Robert’s grandfather became one of Bohemia’s leading businessmen. He had seven sons and was able to pay for their training.4 Robert’s father, too, was a successful entrepreneur before he was deported to Theresienstadt with his wife; neither came back.

  * * *

  IN THE autumn of 1945, Alice and Stephan took their first holiday together. They traveled to Zwickau in the north Bohemian Sudetenland—a long and wearisome journey—where Robert Sachsel was living in the farmhouse of his nurse Anita’s parents. Alice was shocked at seeing Robert again. He seemed much older than she remembered and was wheelchair bound. Despite that Alice and Stephan spent some lovely days together, and the beauty of the surrounding countryside encouraged them to go on long walks. There were also lots of animals in the farmyard, which Stephan helped look after, and a neighbor’s child taught him to ride a bicycle. There was even a piano in the parlor, which Alice and Stephan could play to their hearts’ delight. For the next few years, they visited Robert annually.