* * *
But the external world of this story is really only half the book. The other half is Michael’s internal world—what he thought and felt about everything. If you connected with this book, I’m guessing the precise way Michael experienced and narrated these events had a lot to do with it. In other words, reading this book isn’t just learning what happened to Michael, it’s also learning what it might have been like to be Michael while all this was happening. Only Michael didn’t really narrate these events as they were happening seventy years ago (and even if he had, it certainly wouldn’t have been in English!). This means that I may be more responsible for Michael the narrator (the narrator who narrates in present tense as things are happening) than just about anything else in this book. But here, too, I worked off what I thought Michael might have been like back then, even though in the end I had to construct a new Michael who could, in a sense, go through these events all over again.
So why didn’t we just have Michael tell his story in his own voice today, as a bunch of memories he now has? Why didn’t the publisher want that kind of book (a much more conventional memoir), which would then, perhaps, have been touched up a bit by me, the professional writer? In writing this book the way I wrote it, I was aiming for immediacy. I wanted to give the reader the experience of going through these events with Michael as Michael goes through them himself. This is why Michael narrates in present tense. I thought a book like that would make the events more powerful, more vivid, and more alive. I thought this would best capture the truth of what it was like to have these experiences, and Michael and the publisher agreed.
I think this is an especially valuable exercise for the reader when it comes to the Holocaust. In the seventy years since those horrible events, people have published thousands and thousands of books on the topic, made thousands of movies on the topic, and asked thousands of survivors to tell their stories over and over again. This is important, and it’s a very good and necessary thing overall. But as everyone knows, the more you tell a story, the more it grows apart from the original event itself. Think about some crazy story you’ve told a bunch of times. After a while, the story hardens into its own thing, until you’re not really remembering what happened, you’re remembering your story about the thing.
I didn’t want this book to read like a story about the Holocaust, I wanted it to read like a person living through those events at that time. For that reason, Michael the narrator doesn’t really know he’s narrating at all, the reader is just somehow getting the words that surface in his head at that time. Sure, sometimes the words might be beautiful or a little poetic, but what do you want from me—I’m a writer.
There is another reason I wrote this book this way. In the case of the Holocaust, we write a lot of these books and tell a lot of these stories in order to educate all the people who didn’t go through it themselves. We want to educate people not just about what happened, but how something so unimaginably horrible could have happened, all so we might prevent something like this from ever happening again. This is also a very important thing to do, to tell a story in order to encourage people to behave in a particular way in their own lives.
But this wasn’t really my goal here, even though I know (and hope) that teachers might use this book to discuss all these important topics. My goal here was simply to re-create what it might have been like for a pretty regular boy to go through these extremely irregular experiences. Michael didn’t know that later on we’d have all sorts of terms (“survivor,” “death camp,” even “Holocaust” itself) to describe and name these events. He didn’t know that his experiences might be retold someday in order to educate people about what happened, all so we might prevent such a thing from happening again. Michael was simply going through it, moment by unbelievable moment. And so my goal here was simply to re-create those moments, and make Michael’s experiences of them as immediate, as vivid, and, in a certain sense, as real as possible.
I firmly believe that this approach was the right one for this story, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t come at a cost. There were certain real events that couldn’t be included in this book, because including them would have meant breaking the rule regarding what Michael knew at the time. The most glaring example of this has to do with how Michael’s father was killed. If you read the book closely, all you learned is that he was arrested, taken to a prison in Prague, and then sent to the Small Fortress at Terezin, where he died within two weeks. The reader never learns for certain how he died, though it seems clear that the reason provided by the Nazis (uremia, a type of kidney failure) was not the real reason. In addition, during the funeral itself, one of Michael’s uncles—disregarding a warning sent along with the casket itself—looks at the corpse and is horrified by what he sees. Otherwise that’s it.
The truth is that eventually Michael would learn with some certainty how his father died, and it’s a truly terrible story. A woman who lived with his mother and sister at Terezin wrote a letter that Michael would see years later. The crucial part of it reads:
A former director of a well-known banking firm, whose wife and daughter are both living in my room, was literally torn to pieces in the “small fortress” by dogs trained precisely for this purpose by the SS.
The unimaginable brutality of this killing is, understandably, a truth that’s deeply important to Michael, and so it’s no surprise that he very much wanted it included in the book. Unfortunately, it was clear to me that not only didn’t Michael know this at the time, but that his mother (who clearly did know about it then, since she was able to tell the woman who wrote this letter) intentionally hid it from him, most likely to protect him from the pain of such knowledge. We considered pretending this wasn’t the case in order to include it, but ultimately concluded that doing so would require not just breaking the rule but, just as important, following the aftereffects of Michael learning this throughout the rest of the book. Learning the truth would have, in other words, changed his entire experience of being in Terezin in a meaningful way. For these reasons, we chose to leave it out.
* * *
I should mention one last thing, a confession actually: I didn’t want to work on this project when I was first given the opportunity. I had read many books about the Holocaust myself—not to mention seen the movies, been to the museums, and listened to the survivors. I had, I guess, started to mistake all those stories—told over and over again—for the thing itself. This mistake somehow almost caused me to forget that all these stories are about absolutely real things that happened to absolutely real people. I don’t feel good about this, but it’s true. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, how is one supposed to make dinner or give his daughter a bath or go to work while remembering what really and truly happened in Europe from 1939 to 1945?
Writing this book helped me to remember. Trying to imagine what it might have been like to be Michael Gruenbaum during those years allowed me to see, almost for the first time again, what it must have truly been like. This wasn’t the “Holocaust” anymore, this was simply a boy watching his world, bit by bit, steadily transform from something close to a paradise into an unbelievable nightmare. This was a boy laughing and kicking around a soccer ball with his new friends one day and watching them disappear the next. It’s my hope that this book might allow its readers to have a similar experience, however painful that may be. Because, it’s true, all this actually happened.
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Baby Michael in 1931
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael’s father, Karl Grünbaum, with baby Marietta, Michael’s sister, 1926
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael and Marietta Grünbaum, 1933
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
The Grünbaum family together
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Young Michael before the war, 1936
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
> Michael and Marietta with their father on a Sunday morning walk, circa 1938
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
A carefree meal in the country with family and friends before the war, circa 1937
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Karl and Margaret Grünbaum happy together before the war
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael, Marietta, and Leci, their governess, circa 1934
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Aunt Louise Fleischer, Karl’s sister, whose postcard helped save Michael’s, Marietta’s, and their mother’s lives
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael and his mother in Prague after the war, 1946
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael rowing a boat on the Moldau River in Prague, 1946
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael’s mother helping him with his homework in Prague, 1945
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael during his military service, 1954
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael and his wife, Thelma, on their wedding day in front of their temple in Chicago, 1956
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael and his proud mother at his MIT graduation, 1953
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael’s Czech passport photo, 1947
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael with his surviving Nesarim “brothers” at one of their periodic reunions in Terezin
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael and Franta Maier
Photo courtesy of Michael Gruenbaum
Michael with his three sons, their spouses, and his grandchildren, 2014
Photo courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The summons to a transport from Terezin to “the east” (Auschwitz) for the Grünbaum family
Photo courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Simchat Torah card Michael made his mother in Terezin
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Henry Kahn
Map of Theresienstadt (Terezin)
Photo copyright © 2015 by Corbis
Entrance to the Small Fortress at Terezin, where Michael’s father was killed in 1941
Acknowledgments
I WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE MY father, Dr. Karl Grünbaum, and especially my mother, Mrs. Margaret Gruenbaum, for not only giving me my life, but saving it on numerous occasions during the most perilous times during World War II and having the wisdom and energy to make us emigrate from Czechoslovakia and start a new life in the United States shortly after the end of the war. My mother has been a beacon to me as I reflect on how she overcame incredible difficulties during her lifetime, always having a positive attitude and teaching me never to give up in the pursuit of my goals. At the same time, I wish to thank my sister, Marietta, for helping my mother take good care of me and always being on the ready to help me when such help was needed, especially during the trying days during World War II.
I also wish to acknowledge my late wife, Thelma Gruenbaum, for her encouragements during fifty years of a most wonderful and loving partnership and for researching and writing the splendid book Nešarim: Child Survivors of Terezín, which helped solidify the team spirit of the small number of Nesharim survivors. In addition, her love for children and music and her striving for excellence resulted in a very successful upbringing of our three sons.
Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic support of our sons, David, Peter, and Leon Gruenbaum, for all the projects I have been involved in during my lifetime, and especially the development of this particular book. I am very proud of their individual achievements and their contributions to make this world a much better place.
I want to thank Ms. Ava Farber for her help in writing the original children’s book. I also want to thank all the Nesharim for their camaraderie, and especially Erich Spitz, George Repper, and Paul Weiner for helping me remember some of the details of our stay in Terezin. I want to thank Franta Maier—not only for his leadership and care under very trying circumstances in Terezin, but also for his interest in the lives of the survivors of Room 7 in the school building L417 in Terezin throughout the remainder of his life. I want to thank Sidney Taussig and his family for transporting me with them from Terezin to Prague and for providing accommodations for me for several weeks until my mother was allowed to leave Terezin when the typhoid quarantine was finally lifted. I also want to thank Tommy Karas for his deep friendship, Judith Cohen of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC for her interest and initiatives in bringing my mother’s album of important Terezin documents to the attention of the public, and to my friend Mimi Dohan for her continued encouragement and support.
Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Amy Berkower, my literary agent, for always being there when help was needed, as well as to several staff members from Simon & Schuster: Ms. Karen Nagel and Ms. Liesa Abrams for their editorial acumen and Ms. Mara Anastas and Ms. Fiona Simpson for their enthusiastic support and expert guidance. I also wish to thank Ms. Fern Schumer Chapman for helping me turn my memoirs into prose and Ms. Bethany Buck for recognizing the intrinsic value of my story and for her excellent selection of Todd Hasak-Lowy to be my coauthor. I was amazed to see him immerse himself so completely and with such great imagination into the life of a twelve-year-old during the Nazi occupation in Prague and later in Terezin and to address constructive criticism with a very positive attitude; I think he did a terrific job, and it was truly a great pleasure to work with him.
—Michael Gruenbaum
I’d like to thank the following people, who helped me reconstruct the world in which this story takes place: Fern Schumer Chapman, David Gruenbaum, Peter Gruenbaum, Leon Gruenbaum, Petr Karas, the late Tommy Karas, Ivana Králová, Edgar Krasa, Hana Krasa, Vida Neuwirthová, George Repper, Erich Spitz, and Ela Weissberger.
Ron Lowy offered steady, unbridled enthusiasm. Noam Hasak-Lowy and Anna Levy read a full draft and provided valuable, thoughtful feedback.
Thanks to my agent, Daniel Lazar, for approaching me with this project, helping me make sense of what might be involved, and advocating for me throughout. Liesa Abrams, my brilliant, sensitive editor, did a wonderful job, as usual, understanding the potential of this story and figuring out how to realize it.
I’m grateful to Michael Gruenbaum for trusting his story with me. Michael was a pleasure to work with, did an enormous amount of crucial research himself, and helped me make the most of my short trip to Prague and Terezin. He managed time and again—and in a manner that still mystifies me—to distinguish between himself and his memories, on the one hand, and the needs of this book, on the other.
And, once again, Taal.
—Todd Hasak-Lowy
For those interested in reading more about Terezin, the following is a selected bibliography. Titles with an * will be of special interest to younger readers. You’ll notice that this list includes Vedem, the Terezin magazine published by boys Michael’s age and saved by Zdenek Taussig at the end of the war.
Nešarim: Child Survivors of Terezín, Thelma Gruenbaum
The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, Saul S. Friedman, editor
* A Boy In Terezín: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944–April 1945, Pavel Weiner
* Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp, Helga Weiss
* The Cat with the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in Terezin, Ela Weissberger
Ghetto Theresienstadt, Zdenek Lederer
We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine of the Boys of Terezin, Paul R. Wilson, editor
MICHAEL GRUENBAUM was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. His father was active in Prague’s Jewish community; he and Michael’s grandfather held prestigious seats in the famous Altneuschul synagogue. After the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 193
9, Michael’s father was arrested, tortured, and sent to the Small Fortress in Terezin, where he was killed within two weeks. Michael was sent to Terezin in 1942 with his mother and sister and remained there until the war ended two and a half years later. The family returned to Prague, having lost their relatives, friends, and possessions; they left in April 1948 and spent two years in Cuba before being allowed to enter the United States. In Cuba, Michael, who did not speak English or Spanish, attended an American high school, graduating in two years, in time to enter MIT.
Michael received his BSCE from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in three years; he was drafted during the Korean War and spent two years in the army. He worked for the Illinois Highway Department in Chicago and met his wife, Thelma, to whom he was married for fifty years. He earned his master’s in city planning at Yale University and worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, publishing a book entitled Transportation Facts for the Boston Region. He later served as special assistant to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, worked for a large consulting firm, and eventually helped form a private engineering company where he became a partner. In retirement, Thelma wrote a book about Michael and his friends’ experiences called Nešarim: Child Survivors of Terezín, which was published in the United Kingdom and is now in its second edition. Unfortunately, Thelma contracted ALS and lost her valiant fight three years later.
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