Somewhere There Is Still a Sun

by Michael Gruenbaum

  “I won’t,” I said, my voice all messed up. “I won’t.” And we walked home in total silence.

  “Misha”—Kapr taps the back of my head—“at least pretend you’re raking, okay?”

  “But,” I mumble, “but back in Prague . . . I mean . . . schlojsing . . . whatever you call it . . . it’s stealing.”

  “Yeah, maybe it is,” Kapr says. “But this place, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this place is definitely not Prague.”

  December 1, 1942

  “APEL!” FRANTA SHOUTS, WALKING BACK and forth between all our beds. “Apel in ten minutes!”

  Jiri crawls over me and gets out. I know I need to get up, but I’m so tired. I’m still not sleeping so great here. Was up half the night again listening to everyone’s groaning. And a few were crying this time too. Not to mention the bedbugs or the fleas or whatever those were that were biting me all night.

  “Nine minutes!” Franta shouts.

  Plus it’s so freezing, I can almost see my breath. My blanket might be thin, but it’s warmer than nothing.

  A couple of minutes later I get up fast and pull on my pants and shoes, since the floor might as well be covered in ice.

  The bathroom is packed, and I get in line for a sink, even though the lines for the toilets are shorter. But Franta barely approved me last night, and I’m not taking any chances this time.

  He calls out the minute again, but there’s too much noise for me to hear the number. I reach the sink and get to work on my nails with the cold water. The dirt is pretty much impossible to remove from under them. It would be much easier if we actually had some soap.

  “Misha,” someone annoyed behind me says. Gorila, I think. “Hurry up already.” I splash my face and rub my ears a few times. Hopefully that will be enough.

  * * *

  “Hands out, palms up,” Franta says. And we do as he says, all of us lined up shoulder to shoulder in front of our beds. It sort of feels like we’re in the army and Franta’s our commander. He walks slowly down the aisle, arms crossed over his chest, peering down at our hands. Sometimes he stops and turns a boy’s hands over, sometimes he just keeps going.

  I’m sure he’ll stop at me.

  “Much better today,” he tells Pavel, who is standing only two boys away.

  Franta gets to me. And I was right. He stops. Takes both my hands, turns them over. Bends down to inspect my nails. I got most of the dirt, but not all. Even though I tried.

  “Misha,” Franta says.

  “Yes,” I answer, trying to sound confident.

  “I am glad you are working in the gardens. It’s good to have a job, and even better to have one outside. The work will keep you strong. Your mother must be a very capable woman to have arranged this for you so quickly after your arrival. But the garden is dirty work, and we cannot have dirt in this room. We simply cannot. There may be tiny creatures living in that dirt, and we already have too many creatures living in Room Seven. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” I answer, and nod my head quickly.

  “Mendel has developed an excellent technique for the nails, which he can show you. After you clean the bathrooms.”

  A few boys giggle. Franta pats me on the shoulder. I stare angrily at the stupid brown lines under my nails and tell myself I better not cry. Far down the line I hear the giggling continue, and then someone says what sounds like “Kid’s a total slob.”

  Franta, still standing right in front of me, freezes. “Who said that?” he asks, not turning in the direction of the voice. No one answers. “Who called Misha a slob?” Again, no answer. Franta doesn’t move an inch. He doesn’t say a word. And even though he must be angry, he doesn’t look it. More like sad, actually.

  Ten seconds pass. At least. The giggling dies down, but still no one says a word. Total silence. Franta definitely looks sad at this point.

  “Misha,” he says calmly, still not moving, “is not a slob. He’s a boy who joined the Nesharim eleven days ago. Twelve days ago he was living in Prague. Prague, not Terezin. With his mother and his sister. Now his mother and sister are over in the Dresden Barracks, and he’s a prisoner here like the rest of us. He works in the garden and his hands get dirty. Mendel will teach him how to get the dirt out from under his nails. Misha is trying his best. He is not a slob.”

  Franta looks at me briefly, though there’s no expression on his face. No one else talks.

  “Do you know what will happen if there is an outbreak of typhus in this room?” He lifts his head back up and pauses for a bit. “When we are underfed and packed together like this? Most every last one of us will get sick. Fever, rashes, and terrible, terrible, terrible headaches. Some of us will get better. But some will not. Some will die. And do you know what the Germans will do if a truly serious outbreak attacks our room? They will isolate us, because even they are afraid of typhus. A big sign on our door—or perhaps even the entire building: Achtung—Infektionsgefahr. And then they will wait. Two weeks, three weeks, perhaps even a month. Until every last one of us has either recovered or died. The more who die, the better for them. If the final score is typhus forty, Nesharim nothing, they won’t care one bit. No, just the opposite. They will celebrate.”

  Franta looks down the line, toward the direction of the giggling, which seems like it happened an hour ago.

  “So the Nazis want us to make fun of each other. They want us to call each other ‘slob’ and ‘lazy’ and ‘weak’ and ‘stupid.’ And things much, much worse than that. Oh, what they’d pay to hear one of you call another a dirty Jew. Because instead of supporting one another, instead of loving each other like brothers—and you are all brothers now—they want us to mock each other. This will make us hate ourselves. This will make us weak. And the weaker we are the easier their work becomes. The weaker we are, the harder it will be to fight the typhus when it comes.”

  Franta looks down to the floor and his eyebrows come together, almost like he’s trying to remember something. Then he clears his throat, rubs his face, and inhales deeply. Half the boys are still holding their hands out.

  “The Nazis do not believe we are humans. They believe we are something less. They believe we are animals. Why else would they crowd us together like cattle? But they are wrong!” Franta crosses his arms while that last word echoes back and forth. “We will let nothing separate us from our humanity. Not their insults, not their edicts, not their camps. Our duty here is to survive, and survive as human beings. Not as animals. This is our duty to ourselves, and to our parents. We must be ready for life when this ends, because it will. It must. When Misha returns to Prague”—he points at me—“and Pavel to Ostrava, and I to Brno, we all must return as human beings, as people still capable of respecting and loving others.”

  Franta smiles and begins walking down the line, his hands behind his back. He sort of sways from side to side.

  “So, no, Misha is not a slob. He is a young man doing his very best here. And after breakfast”—he points at a couple of boys down near the end of the line—“Hanus and Kurt, you two gigglers will show Misha that the Nesharim excel in all areas. Including the cleaning of toilets. Now, all of you, off to breakfast.”

  December 13, 1942

  “I’M SORRY YOUR WORK IN the garden is over,” Mother says, “but I’m hopeful you’ll return there come springtime. That is, if we’re still here then. But so, tell me. How is school going?” I’m sitting across from Marietta at a long table in their room in the Dresden Barracks. Well, it’s obviously not just their room, because this place is packed with triple-decker bunk beds too. There might even be more people living here than back in Room 7. Right now the place feels only half full, but still, women are all over the room, reading, napping, sewing, cleaning, or chatting.

  It’s like this most evenings, which is when I usually come to visit. Because it turns out that we can go pretty much anywhere we want whenever we want. Inside Terezin, that is, and so long as we don’t have somewhere particular Franta wants us to be
. And, of course, so long as we’re back before curfew, because no one can be out after that.

  “It’s not school,” I tell her, swallowing the last bite of a small, delicious pastry she somehow got her hands on. I could eat another hundred like it, even though there was finally a bit of salami with dinner tonight. “It’s called the Program. School’s not allowed. That’s why some days I have to stand guard out front. Remember? In case an SS officer comes to the building.”

  “Which would never happen,” Marietta says. “So long as we don’t cause any trouble, the Nazis couldn’t care less about what we do here. I haven’t seen one of those monsters since we arrived.”

  Mother’s behind us, doing something to their bed, though I can’t figure out what.

  “Well, okay, so what did you learn in the Program today?” she asks. Marietta puts down a jack of clubs, but I don’t remember what that means. She’s teaching me some new card game she learned here that she said I ought to show everyone.

  “Today”—I try to remember—“Professor Kohn—”

  “Professor?” Mother asks.

  “Yeah, I guess he was a professor in Prague. He gave us a math lesson.”

  “Ugh, math,” Marietta says. “I’m glad I have to work in the laundry all day.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I say. “We don’t have much to write on, so he taught us a song to help us remember the order of operations.”

  “How does it go?” Mother asks.

  “Forget it,” I say, and put down the ten of diamonds. Marietta moves the card under two of her cards already out on the table. Her fingertips are pale and wrinkled, which isn’t what they used to look like. It must be because of her work.

  Mother lifts up a corner of their mattress and yanks out the edge of a blanket. “Okay, so after Professor Kohn, then what?”

  “Uh, then Professor Zwicker—”

  “Another professor,” Mother says.

  “He gave us a lecture about Czech history.”

  “Was it interesting?” she asks.

  “It was okay.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  I pretend to rack my memory, but what I’m really thinking about is what happened right after his lecture. Professor Zwicker told us we’d have an exam on Thursday, and then he left. Franta left too, because he said he had to go check about practice times with Jacob, the other madrich. Dr. Jelinkova was supposed to come next to teach us English, but she was late for some reason. So there we were, waiting, when all of a sudden I heard two weird noises, one right after the other, coming from the other side of the room. The first was kind of a poof sound, the other was more like a thud.

  I looked over. Gorila was lying on the ground with a dazed smile on his face. Standing over him was Jila, with a pillow in his hand and a much larger smile on his face.

  Gorila sprung back up, grabbed a pillow, and whacked Jila hard in his side. Not two seconds later, every single boy in the room had joined in. Twenty, thirty, forty pillows swinging through the air. Jiri had a pillow in each hand and walked down the length of the table, bashing anyone within reach. Felix straddled two ladders and nailed Brena when he tried to run beneath him. Erich and Koko ganged up on Petr, who giggled and crawled quickly down the tunnel of middle bunks in their row.

  I just stood near the front of the room, both hands wrapped tight around the end of my pillow, which wasn’t actually my pillow, waiting for someone to attack. Brena nailed Felix in the side of the head so hard his pillow ripped open. Along with feathers, a weird combination of straw and wood shavings started pouring out. Felix grabbed a bunch and stuffed it down Brena’s shirt. Right around then I noticed clouds of feathers popping up in other spots of the room. A couple of seconds later I was spinning around and giggling, the pillow cocked behind my shoulder, when I noticed Franta standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest.

  I froze and let the pillow slide out of my hands and onto the floor. Without looking like I was running, I made my way through all those feathers and returned as quickly as possible to the stool I was sitting on before.

  Franta slammed the door. “Nesharim!” he shouted. A few of the boys noticed, but not all, because the rest of the room was total chaos. “Nesharim!!!” Franta yelled even louder, marching toward a clump of boys still bashing each other with whatever was left of their pillows. A few seconds later the pillow fight was definitely over, even though some feathers continued floating in the air.

  “Have you all gone mad?” Franta asked, his face red. “Where do you think you are? Do you think this is a resort?” No one said anything. “What are we going to do with all these feathers? How will we get them back into your pillows? And how will you sleep without pillows? And what if insects were happily living inside your pillows? Where do you think they are going to live now? And what if, what if an SS officer happened to be walking below our window at this moment, perhaps in the camp today for an inspection of some sort? Why, why would you ever do anything to draw attention to yourselves? I heard your racket from the other end of the hall. Do you not think Terezin provides enough challenges to us each and every day? Was it really necessary to create more?”

  No one said a word. Franta made a small pile of feathers and wood shavings with his shoe.

  “This, all of this, is to be cleaned up within five minutes. And after that, since Dr. Jelinkova is sick, we will have rehearsal instead.”

  “But we have rehearsal tonight,” Pavel said.

  Uh-oh, that’s right, I remember now, looking at my mother. Rehearsal.

  I totally forgot.

  “What time is it?” I ask Mother.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Why?”

  I stand up. “I’ve got to go.”

  “What?” Mother says. “You only just arrived.”

  “But we have rehearsal for our play. It probably already started.”

  Marietta shuffles the cards. “Play? What play?” she asks.

  “The Pied Piper,” I say, buttoning up my jacket.

  “Is the play a secret too?” Mother asks. “Like your school?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure,” I say, heading toward the door. “We’re just rehearsing right now.”

  “Remember,” Marietta hollers to me, “the ace can be high or low.”

  “Hold on, hold on, Misha,” Mother says. I turn around. She’s holding a folded-up blanket in her hands. I recognize the pattern; it’s the blanket she and Father used to sleep under back in Prague. “Here, take this.”

  “What?”

  “Take it. Winter is coming.”

  “What about us?” Marietta asks. “That’s our heavy blanket.”

  “Greta says she saw two flannel blankets in the attic this morning, we can use those instead.”

  “But,” Marietta says, “those won’t be nearly—”

  “I can’t take it,” I say.

  “What are you talking about, you can’t take it?” Mother asks.

  “It’s not fair,” I say. “No one else has a blanket like that.”

  Mother deposits it into my arms. “But you will, and that’s all that matters.”

  “No,” I say, pushing it back to her. “It’s not fair. Anyway, Franta won’t allow it.”

  “Franta,” Mother says, almost laughing, “Franta’s not your Mother. He doesn’t get to decide. I’ll come with you right now and talk to him myself.”

  “Don’t,” I say, even more firmly than I wanted to, and from the look on Mother’s face I might as well have slapped her. “Sorry. Just don’t. I’ll talk to him about it,” I tell her, even though I know I won’t. “Okay?”

  Mother holds the blanket against her chest, her cheeks red. I look over at Marietta, who just shakes her head. From the corner of my eye I notice a few women staring at us. I take a couple of steps toward Mother and hug her. When she doesn’t let go right away, I let my head sink deeper in between the folds of the blanket, where I swear I can smell our old apartment back in Holesovice.

  The smell wa
nts me to stay like this forever, but I yank my head out instead. “Thanks for the pastry,” I tell Mother. Before she can respond, I’m out the door. Hopefully Franta won’t be mad at me for being late.

  * * *

  After rehearsal I’m washing up when Franta comes in. Somehow we’re the only two in here. I look over at him, but he’s looking at the floor for some reason. Then he bends over and picks something up. A feather.

  Franta turns it back and forth in between his fingers. “We’ll be finding these for the next month,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Sorry,” I say, and start walking back to the room, scanning the floor to see if there are any other feathers we missed.

  “Misha,” he calls out to me when I’m almost to the doorway.

  “Yeah?” I say, and turn around.

  “It was fun, wasn’t it?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “The pillow fight,” he says.

  I don’t know how to answer, or what he wants me to say. I search his eyes, looking for a clue. Is he testing me?

  “Uh, yeah, kind of.”

  “Kind of?” His eyes soften a bit.

  “Yes, it was. It was really fun.”

  “I bet it was,” he says, a small smile on his face. “I bet it was.” I don’t say anything, just watch him stare at the floor, clearly thinking about something, who knows what.

  “Lots of things are fun here,” I say. “Soccer, even play rehearsal. I mean, I don’t know why my mother kept trying to get us off the transports here.”

  Franta laughs, though it’s not exactly a laugh. Maybe just a sigh.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m glad you’re able to enjoy yourself here. I wish that could somehow be a more common experience in this rotten place.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  Franta’s smile continues to grow, but his eyes don’t match it at all. “Nothing, Misha,” he says. “It doesn’t mean anything. Please forget I said it. And now, to bed. It’s late. Tomorrow’s another day.”