American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  The train carried Emilie and her sons to the nearby city of Bielefeld, where she crammed with six hundred other local Jews into a large lecture hall near the Nazi parade grounds. They slept on benches and chairs in the building. Three days later, on July 31, the train left for Theresienstadt. Emilie’s daughter Hilda traveled from Essen to the Bielefeld station to say good-bye. Emilie’s sons, Arnold and Heinrich, were devastated, but Emilie climbed in with her “chin up,” Hilda told her daughter Helga, who recounted this exchange in a speech many years later. “I have to set a good example for my sons,” Emilie told Hilda. They were loaded into the cars, packed body to body. Before the train left, Hilda watched German soldiers haul away the bags that Emilie and her fellow prisoners had packed for the journey. They dumped the contents on the siding, and the train pulled away.

  twenty-four

  DESTINATION CAMP

  Portrait of an old woman waiting for food, Theresienstadt Ghetto, by artist and prisoner Leo Haas.

  PT 1693, Terezín Memorial, courtesy of Tomáš Fritta-Haas.

  The Theresienstadt concentration camp was not an official death camp like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Though tens of thousands of people died within its walls, it was a “ghetto” and transit camp—a holding spot to gather and prepare prisoners for transport “to the East.” Located in what is now the Czech Republic, about sixty kilometers from Prague, it held Czech Jews and political prisoners first, then Jews shipped from Germany, Hungary, and Denmark, among other countries.

  I hadn’t known of that particular camp until I heard from Wolfgang that Emilie had been sent there; now I wanted to learn everything about it. So after Margit showed us the sites of Emilie’s final humiliations—the electroplating factory that sits on the land where her grand house once sat, the train station from which she left Paderborn for the last time, the Jewish cemetery that should have held her remains—my mother and I set off for Theresienstadt.

  I wasn’t quite sure how Emilie’s story linked to her sister’s, except that they had both died sadly, whatever side of the Atlantic they were on and whatever steps they took to evade their fates. I had read the Holocaust books that left me with a days-long hangover of anger and sorrow: Night, Maus, Anne Frank’s diary. But to have found a sister of Julia’s who had her own role in this most haunting of Jewish stories made the consequences of Julia’s heritage—and my own—suddenly real to me. Had Julia not come to America, this might have been our family’s fate.

  My mother and I took a train from Paderborn to Prague, past Lügde and Bad Pyrmont, through Bielefeld and the rolling Weser uplands, then across the flat Northern Lowland and up the craggy Elbe River valley. Emilie would have traveled the same route on her last journey. In Prague, we spent an afternoon jockeying the narrow streets with the tourist hordes—the Charles Bridge, the Gothic excess of Saint Vitus Cathedral, a fifty-koruna spin through the shabby entrance hall of Franz Kafka’s first home—and then signed up for a tour to Theresienstadt.

  It was drizzling the next morning; the eternal steely mist of central Europe, the sky the same dirty gray as the stone and concrete buildings and streets. There were only four of us waiting for the bus: my mother and I, and a glamorous Canadian couple on their honeymoon. Our guide was named Oleg. The name fitted him. He seemed to inhabit a certain eastern European archetype: pale and rangy in blue jeans and a black faux-leather jacket, his brown hair flecked with gray, his eyes sorrowful and cerulean. He herded us onto the minibus.

  We set off with a screech, careening across a bridge, past the fairy-tale spires of the Staré Město and on toward the city’s outskirts. Oleg sat in the front seat and gripped a microphone in both hands. “There,” said Oleg, “is biggest statue of horseman in world. Sixteen meter tall.” He sighed. “On left-hand side, interesting church.” He did not look to the left as he made that observation. He held the microphone so close to his mouth that we could hear spit flecks bounce. I wondered if I should have done more research before booking the tour.

  We sped onto the highway linking Prague to Theresienstadt. Oleg launched into a brief, barely intelligible history of the camp. Theresienstadt, he said—I paraphrase, heavily—had been built as a fort in the late eighteenth century to protect the road to Dresden. In World War I, it had held political prisoners—Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who shot Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and ignited the war, had died there in a small, dark cell. After the Nazis invaded, they walled off the prison and surrounding town, expelled the residents, and turned the enclosed space into a Jewish ghetto. All told, 150,000 prisoners went to Theresienstadt; only 3,600 people survived until liberation. While most went on to die in Auschwitz or other death camps, more than 33,000 people perished in the ghetto itself—because, Oleg explained, “these conditions of the ghetto and political prison were absolutely non-acceptable for the human life.”

  Oleg fell silent. He seemed existentially weary—or maybe hungover. The drizzle had turned to rain, and the driver cranked the heat and cracked his window to stay awake. We were lulled by the road and the unbroken gray, my mother nodding off in the seat in front of me, the Canadians leaning in against each other. Oleg dropped his microphone into his lap and fell asleep, too, waking as we turned onto a smaller road and mumbling something about collective farms, and perhaps the Prague Spring. “And on the right-hand side,” he said, though we couldn’t see the right-hand side, because our windows had fogged over, “you can see the very typical small houses, after the armies in 1968, um”—long, woeful pause, twenty, thirty seconds—“about more freedom. But now we are in the Theresienstadt!”

  I wiped clear a spot on my window. We were passing a railroad siding. This was where the trains left for Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Oleg told us. We sped past an unremarkable blur of concrete and fog and continued on into the town of Terezín—the former ghetto of Theresienstadt. The streets ran on a martially precise grid: not a curve in sight; street, building, street, building, street; thick walls, big, blocky entrance arches, flat-faced, stark, symmetrical. There was a rectangular park in the middle, smeared with fallen leaves. A woman with a baby carriage walked hunched against the rain. “Now we are transcending the border between the Jewish ghetto and the small fortress,” Oleg explained as we sped past the town and pulled into the prison grounds. It was rather a poetic way to put it.

  The bus parked next to a vast cemetery, row upon row of low rectangular grave markers presided over by an enormous Star of David at one end and a cross at the other. “Attention of the hat,” Oleg said, motioning us down the stairs of the bus. We walked to the entry of the fortress, where we were to join a larger group of tourists with another guide before rejoining Oleg to visit the Ghetto Museum in the town. As we waited for the tour to start, Oleg asked me why I was taking notes. I told him I was writing about a relative who had been deported to Theresienstadt. He looked unhappy. “It’s a very sad place, very gloomy here,” he said. He pulled his collar up against the rain. “Not so often I go here, but every time I feel it bad.”

  The tour of the small fortress made me feel it bad, too. It was as horrifying as one would expect—the bone-chilling cold, the dark, the dank, the claustrophobic cells, the torture and execution sites, the German slogan over the entrance to a courtyard: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “Work sets you free.” But it seemed rather sterile and unreal amid the bustle of our group of Holocaust sightseers and English schoolkids. I couldn’t decide if the tour was educational or macabre, valuable or mercenary—nor where my own pursuit of Julia’s and Emilie’s stories lay on that spectrum. I wondered if I should feel the desolation of the place more strongly for knowing that my great-great-great-aunt had died there. And I wondered if revisiting these sad truths restored the humanity of the lost, or if it simply served to gratify the tellers and the listeners; if the act of retelling kept those who suffered imprisoned in their unhappy endings.

  We watched snippets of a propaganda film the Nazis had made about Theresienstadt. This was their model camp, their Musterlager, to pr
ove to the Red Cross and international delegations that they treated prisoners well. Prominent Jewish artists, musicians, professors, and functionaries were brought to Theresienstadt. The elderly were shipped here, too. The Nazis had claimed they were deporting Jews to camps in the “East” to perform hard labor, but it hardly seemed plausible that people as old as Emilie could work; thus the Nazis presented Theresienstadt as a “Jewish retirement ghetto,” a “holiday camp” where, as the Nazi commandant Heinrich Himmler explained, elderly Jews could “receive their pensions and benefits and . . . do as they will with their life . . .” Upon their deportation, those who still had homes had to sign “purchase contracts” exchanging their houses, their remaining money, their life insurance policies, and their belongings to the German state in exchange for room, board, and health care for life.

  Theresienstadt appeared, in the film, to be a pleasant place to while away a genocide. It was, the Nazis said, an idyllic lakeside spa “settlement.” When foreign delegations insisted on visiting, the Nazis shipped the sick and malnourished to the death camps and beautified the place for a time—planted gardens and flower beds; painted houses; built a playground; opened a café, a music pavilion, and a community center; and created a special Jewish currency (a hook-nosed Moses, holding the tablets of the law) so that prisoners could go “shopping” in stores stocked with items confiscated from arriving prisoners’ suitcases. To soften the numerical grimness of the place, they gave the streets names: “L1 Strasse” became “Lake Street,” though there was no lake.

  We sat in grim silence—the schoolkids, the ashen-faced Canadian honeymooners, my mother, and I—as the film showed smiling Jews, children giggling, eating, women gardening, a soccer match, a chess game, a lecture, a concert. “The organization of the leisure time is left to everyone’s discretion,” said the narrator. “I’m all right in Theresienstadt,” added the voice of a young prisoner. “I don’t miss anything.”

  After the film, Oleg guided us back onto the minibus, dropped us at the Ghetto Museum, and wandered outside to smoke. The museum was situated in what had been a boys’ home during the war, number L417. Theresienstadt had had its own Jewish administration, which worked to provide decent conditions for the children, placing them together in dedicated houses and trying to keep up their education and their spirits. Imprisoned artists and academics volunteered to teach the children, believing, still, that learning could salvage hope. The artists and the children sketched their sorrow. The musicians composed symphonies. An amateur chorus performed Verdi’s Requiem for the prisoners and their Nazi jailers. They had one piano and only a single score, so all the singers worked from memory. They sang their own requiem.

  In the downstairs rooms of building L417, the walls were lined with children’s drawings that one of the art teachers had preserved before she was deported to Auschwitz. There were dragons and princesses carefully outlined and colored, alongside SS guards and watchtowers—hope side by side with despair. Some were scrawled and simple, some more sophisticated. They were drawings by the doomed: a sign informed visitors that of the more than ten thousand children who passed through, only a few hundred survived.

  Next came the crematorium, an iron contraption in a barnlike building where the bodies of Theresienstadt’s dead were reduced to ash. A bas-relief sculpture of an owl regarded us from above the door. “Maybe is symbol of immortal memory,” Oleg suggested. We explored the stark rooms, clutching our raincoats closer around us, chilled by the statistics: the average death rate by September 1942 was eighty prisoners a day. Bodies arrived at the crematorium with a tag attached to one leg—name, transport number, group number—and left as dust. The crematorium was capable of handling almost two hundred bodies a day. At first the Nazis stored the ashes of the individual dead in wooden urns, and then in paper cinerary bags; later, they began incinerating the bodies together. By the war’s end, they stored the commingled ashes wherever they could, Emilie’s among them. In 1944, with the Allies approaching, the Nazis emptied 22,000 urns of those ashes into the river Ohre and buried another 3,000 in a pit nearby—a bulldozer operator found the macabre trove in 1958.

  We were running behind schedule; Oleg fairly pushed us onto the bus. We drove through the fallow fields surrounding the camp, a few husks still standing, and back to the pitched roofs and curved roads that you find in real villages where real people live, where things are cluttered and asymmetrical. The Prague skyline grew visible through the drear. Oleg, caressing his microphone, pointed out the horseman again, still “sixteen meter tall,” and a very tall television tower. I could see Wenceslas Square approaching, where Oleg would gratefully leave us. He began talking much faster, almost cheerful now, his words skipping away: “On the right-hand side the embassy of Brazil, on the left-hand side the embassy of Argentina, now we will finishing our trip today, I would like to say you welcome again Prague, welcome the Czech Republic, try to be careful, and good lock.”

  Emilie and her sons arrived in Theresienstadt in a wave of “elderly transports” from Germany—during the second half of 1942, 124 transports brought nearly 31,000 German Jews to the camp. The next year, the Germans built a siding directly into the camp. But until then, prisoners had to walk three kilometers from the railway station outside Theresienstadt to the ghetto—old, infirm, no matter. Emilie, age eighty, walked those long kilometers. And when she passed the ramparts, gates, and concertina wire that marked the perimeter of her new “destination camp,” she found no hot springs, no water cures, no lake—just people and more people, starving, filthy, doomed. In August 1942, the town’s stern grid, designed to house 5,000 people, held 50,000 instead—the next month, it would contain nearly 60,000 prisoners. That summer, 2,000 people were arriving each day. Almost half of the prisoners were over the age of sixty; more than half of those were women.

  There was nowhere to put them. They slept wherever they could find a spot—in attics and dark corners, on the ground and in cellars, in sheds and converted stables and pigsties and hallways and entryways. There was no lighting; the electrical system had collapsed. We don’t know if Emilie was allowed to stay with her sons or if she was placed in a “home” for the elderly. Either way, she could have expected to occupy about five feet of floor space. If she was lucky enough to find a bed, it would have been a bunk three slots high, each bunk two feet wide, with two and a half feet of head space—too tightly stacked for sitting upright. In the bunk rooms, seventy prisoners might occupy a space designed to house ten soldiers when it was built. The elderly who arrived during the summer of 1942 weren’t typically assigned a bunk, however: most slept on the floor or on their own suitcases if they were lucky enough to arrive with one. Memoirs from the camp described prisoners sleeping on rotting straw mattresses vacated by the dead, riddled with maggots and bedbugs, and gnawed by rats and mice. Or on piles of wood shavings. The walls dripped with moisture.

  There was a desperate shortage of water, of sinks, of toilets. On July 20, shortly before Emilie’s arrival, the sewers stopped working entirely. The prisoners instead used latrines and outdoor ditches, whose smell caused even the hardened to heave with revulsion. Nonetheless, there were always long lines to use them. The prisoners bathed in icy water, if at all. They were allowed to wash three kilograms of laundry every six weeks. Dirt bred infestation—they were covered in bites: bedbugs, fleas, lice. There were typhus outbreaks, dysentery, rooms of people lying in excrement, one body on top of another.

  They were starving. The Jewish self-governing council rationed what little food was given the prisoners. The committee steered larger portions toward the young and more able, who worked in the camp’s factories eighty to a hundred hours a week, making wood boxes, splitting mica, and sewing uniforms. Those registered to work received fifty grams of sugar, fifty grams of margarine, and a quarter loaf of bread each week. Those who didn’t work—Emilie would have been among them—got ten grams of each. They ate rotten potatoes, soup that was nothing but warm water, and on good days a gruel made of w
atery coffee with pieces of margarine and potato starch. They’d stand in an endless line for a cup of ersatz coffee and a thin slice of low-grade bread, covered in mold—and Emilie had owned a mill! Fights broke out over a few grains of millet. People stole from each other, old and young. The elderly suffered greatly—carefully dressed old ladies with nets in their hair, men in pinstriped trousers wandering the streets and halls begging for bread and soup, holding their receipts, proof of the money they had paid for the privilege of living in a sham retirement camp. In August, Emilie celebrated her eighty-first birthday.

  In September alone, nearly four thousand people died in the camp, most of them elderly. They starved or succumbed to disease. To relieve the overcrowding, the Nazis dispatched eight elder-transports to the east. Of the 16,000 who left in the fall of 1942, only one man survived—he leaped from a train near Dresden. But Emilie avoided those transports and survived the difficult summer and fall.

  Then winter descended. A very few of the rooms housed stoves fueled with sawdust. The attics and stables, cellars and hallways had no heat. A lucky few still had the blankets they had brought with them; most had only the clothes they had worn on the train. Their overcoats, thin for such cold, grew even thinner. They died from malnutrition; they died from typhus, from typhoid, from tuberculosis, cold, despair—too many homeless ghosts to hold in the mind. They might stay frozen in place for days, the living threading through a maze of dead to leave the room.

  The bodies of the dead would be heaped on two-wheeled carts, rolled through the streets, stiff and gray, their legs and arms jutting out. Each day, wagonloads of corpses were wheeled to the crematorium. When Wolfgang first told me about Emilie, he said she had died from “exposure.” Exposure to the elements, I supposed; exposure to the worst, too, that humans can inflict. Her death certificate was more particular. The Nazis were precise about the details of death: she perished from “enterocolitis”—dysentery. Her Sterbetag—date of death—was January 1, 1943; her hour of death, eight in the morning.