by Alison Pick
It was later, as the older survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen began to die, that these now-adult children started coming out of the woodwork. The first Kindertransport reunion sparked an incredible reaction. The participants came to understand that they had been part of something larger, pawns in a story for which they had not been to blame. They had been caught inside the giant train of time. They compared notes, and in the end they did not feel so totally alone.
Telling this to you now makes me wish I had been at that reunion. I still would have been an outsider, though. Isolated because my story is different from theirs. The truth is, it suits me being alone. Put me in a crowd and I only feel more lonely. Looking always at the shape of people’s backs. For someone in an orange sweater. For a kerchief.
Could you excuse me, please? I need a moment.
Don’t worry. I’m not about to cry.
It’s like this: since the sixtieth anniversary reunion in London in 1999 there has been a flood of stories about the Kindertransports. The word in vogue is testimony, although that word doesn’t sit well with me, with its implications of a justice system, the possibility of retribution. Still, the things people tell me are often remarkable. For example, two sisters. Their parents took them to the station on the date of the Winton transport and put them both on the train. But the smaller was only a baby, and she’d been sick with a flu that had been going around; at the last minute the parents pulled her off. The older girl remembers handing her infant sister out through the window, the weight of her tiny body like a warm loaf of bread. It was the last time she saw her sister. Or either of her parents, for that matter.
Another story: a boy whose parents left it too late. The Kindertransport was already full. The waiting list was three times the train’s capacity, but Winton’s secretary took a liking to the boy. Something about the way his ears stuck out, or how his knobby knees were wider than his thighs. He was just six years old and does not remember his father’s words, but he can still describe his happiness when the secretary moved his son to the top of the list. Perhaps a bribe was exchanged, but that’s not what the man remembers. He remembers seeing his father cry tears of relief; he might die—did die—but his only son would get out.
For several years—many years—I was able to lose myself in the vastness of these stories, the stories of losses and searches and discoveries. They allowed me to forget the person I was looking for. The child from the letter I carried with me. When I finally sought you out, I was surprised by how easy it was. I knew your last name: I looked you up in the phone book.
There you were, in my city. It was simple.
I gazed out the window while the telephone rang, trying to ignore the fact that I could hear my own heart. A single tennis shoe, tied by its laces, hung from the neighbour’s clothesline. I heard your voice on the answering machine and was confused by the muddled accent. I stood still, blinking rapidly, taking deep breaths. Finally I realized the machine was recording my silence. I forced myself to speak before it was too late: I gave you my name and a bit about my research. Then stumbled over my telephone number and had to repeat it several times. I must have sounded like a blubbering old idiot. Which, I suppose, I was.
When I hung up the phone, I did not step away from it. It was clear to me all at once that you probably wouldn’t call back. Why would you? I should have said something different.
But what should I have said?
The truth, I told myself.
Which is? I answered back.
Which is the most crucial piece of the puzzle.
I nodded. And all at once every bit of me agreed: I should have told you what only I knew. That I’m the sibling you never knew existed.
Chapter Four
THERE WAS A CRIB AT MAX AND Alžběta’s that belonged to their little daughter Eva. Anneliese could not stand to look at it. Marta knew what she was thinking: how old would her own baby girl be now, had she lived? Marta tried to picture what she would look like. Dark curls, like Anneliese, or the slightly paler brown of her father? A kind child, or petulant? There was a phantom in the family, growing taller all the time, but never quite catching up to her brother, Pepik, to the world of living flesh and blood.
The Bauers unpacked their belongings. They waited to hear from Max, but there was no news. Maybe he was still en route to meet Alžběta and their daughters, or maybe he had other reasons to make himself scarce. Either way, the apartment was empty, and they moved into it like actors onto an empty set. Pepik chose the room that had been his Uncle Max’s when he was a boy: it had a bunk bed and a stag’s head mounted on the wall. Marta had a whole suite of rooms to herself—cook’s, butler’s, chauffeur’s. It was much more space than she was used to, but she tried to act nonchalant, wandering the large urban flat as though she belonged there. At night you could see from the front window of the parlour all the way down to the heart of Praha, the streetlamps lit and glittering like debutantes coming out for a ball.
“There’s the opera house,” Anneliese pointed out the first night, her cheeks pink with excitement. And beyond it was the castle itself, lit up, like the largest jewel in a crown.
“Hitler’s new house,” Pavel said flatly. He didn’t look his wife in the eye, still angry.
“I prefer the Belvedere,” Anneliese said.
“I heard someone call the castle ‘Hitler’s new house’ today,” Pavel persisted. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Over my dead body,” he said. But his voice sounded hollow to Marta. The new flat elevated Anneliese, but it had the opposite effect on Pavel. He seemed younger here, Marta thought, or smaller. He seemed defeated.
A night-letter arrived and Pavel left early the next morning to meet Max’s foreman, Hans, at the factory. Anneliese took Pepik and Marta out to see the city. Winter was just setting in, a dusting of snow over everything like confectioner’s sugar. Marta’s breath made puffy clouds in front of her face. She wiggled her toes to warm them in her stiff lace-up boots, and rubbed Pepik’s fingers in his mittens. They walked down Vinohradská, past Italská, Balbínova, and Španělská streets, past the Živnostenská banka and the Myslbek art gallery on Na Přikopě, which was showing an exhibition of Nazi paintings. They strolled the periphery of the broad tree-lined avenue, Marta looking around, trying to take it all in. She had never seen so many people in one place. Women in Chanel coats with silk scarves tied at their throats, groups of teenagers clustered together like grapes, old men riding bicycles. There was an Orthodox shop on a corner: through the boarded-up window she saw a calendar with a picture of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. The blue and white Zionist collection boxes abandoned.
Anneliese pointed out the bakery, still the same as when she was a girl. They passed the butcher shop and saw carcasses, pink and bloody, hanging on hooks in the front window. They looked, Marta thought, strangely human. At the Wagons-Litz Travel Agency there was a line snaking all the way out the front door, people trying desperately to leave the country. Red trolleys criss-crossed the square like fate lines on the palm of a hand.
Marta had had a picture in her mind of Prague, a picture she hadn’t even known was there and which she now realized was basically an enlarged version of their old town: two of each kind of shop instead of one. But Prague was something else altogether. “I feel like I’m in a completely different country,” she said.
Anneliese shrugged and smiled. “Welcome back to Czechoslovakia,” she said. A sign caught her eye over Marta’s right shoulder. “Look at what’s showing! Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s that American fellow, Walt something-or-other.”
Marta looked down at Pepik, his cheeks pink like apples. “Well?” She clasped her hands in front of her chest, beaming. And before she knew it she was about to see her first moving picture.
The cinema was dark, with seats ascending on an angle. It smelled stuffy, like dust and stale peppermints. They were plunged into blackness and Marta reached for Pepik’s hand. There was silence, someone sneezing, someone unzipping a coat
. For a moment they heard the tick-tick-tick of the projector and then all at once the screen lit up. A girl with creamy skin, jet-black hair, huge eyes. A princess, Marta thought. It was like entering another dimension, the vastness of the girl’s face, the brightness. Marta didn’t know where to look. The scene changed to a forest, and everything in front of her had life in it: the trees, the stones, the animals. Her whole field of vision teemed with colour. She wanted to glance over at Pepik to see how he was taking it but found herself unable to peel her eyes from the screen.
After the film there was a newsreel that showed Hitler spouting off about the expansion of his Lebensraum, but even this couldn’t dampen Marta’s spirits. When she exited the cinema it was as if no time had passed, and at the same time as if a new era had begun. She could hardly speak. It had been, she realized, so long since she’d felt pleasure. Anneliese looked at Marta and Pepik and clapped her hands. “I told you you’d like the city,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
She too had a big smile plastered across her face, her tension with Pavel momentarily forgotten.
Pepik was hopping from foot to foot. “Dopey!” he shouted. “Sneezy!” And he began to make sneezing noises in the direction of his mother.
On the way back to the Vinohrady they passed the Havlíčkovy sady. Two German Jewish peddlers were sitting on a park bench selling pencils. It was a reminder of the hard times they were living in—but Marta didn’t want to be reminded. For now, even momentarily, the hard times seemed abstract. They had been shucked off like a pair of dirty trousers and dropped in a heap in the corner. The people, the automobiles, the vibrant pulse of the city: Marta felt she might as well be living in the fairy tale herself. In a place where war was a word never spoken. She climbed the hill home with lights in her eyes.
The following day, though, Karel Čapek died. The radio carried a tribute, noting among his literary achievements the coining of the word robot.
“Five years from now nobody will use robot,” Anneliese said. “One year from now.” She massaged the nape of her neck with her knuckles.
“You never know,” Pavel said testily. Marta saw that the death of his favourite writer depressed him. The radio broadcast had given the impression that Čapek had not even been sick, that he had lost his will to live now that his country was carved into pieces and Hitler was making doe-eyes at the capital.
For the next while Pavel was preoccupied with his new position, leaving the house before the rest of them were up and dashing out to meetings late at night. He avoided his wife, who was out all day anyway, at luncheons with Mathilde or getting a marcel wave with hot irons at the Salon Petra Měchurová. Marta wondered if they would celebrate Christmas, after the baptism incident. Though it was spoken of less frequently, Pavel was, she knew, still angry. On the other hand, Christmas for the Bauers wasn’t Christian; it was tradition, plain and simple. When Anneliese told her to go ahead, Marta threw herself into the preparations. The kitchen in Max and Alžběta’s flat was equipped with something called a blender—she had no idea what it was for—and an electric kettle with an automatic shut-off. Marta made vánočka, the traditional holiday bread, and slivered almonds and meringue macaroons with strings baked into them. She put Pepik to work on chains of coloured paper. She was worried that a tree might not appear on which to hang all their decorations, but finally, on the twenty-third of December, Pavel returned home with a scrawny fir. Where had he found it in a city as covered with concrete as Prague? He set it up in the corner of the parlour; the large room made the tree look small, like a naked child shivering after his bath.
“What do you say?” Marta asked Pepik. “We’d better put some clothes on him!” Usually the decorated tree would be presented to Pepik as a surprise, but the Bauers didn’t have time for that this year, and Marta was glad to be able to give her charge a project. The Walt Disney film had lifted his spirits temporarily, but he had now fallen into a sullen funk. He reminded Marta of a tiny field marshal, his lead soldiers spread around him like casualties.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth Marta got up early and peeled the potatoes and the parsnips and took the carp out of the icebox. She rolled out some dough for vanilkové rohlíčky, and soon the kitchen was filled with the sweet smell of vanilla crescents baking. What else did Sophie usually make? Fish soup, which was served before the carp: it would have to simmer for several hours. Marta made a list as Sophie used to do, and wondered idly where the girl was now. “You shouldn’t go,” she remembered Sophie saying. “There’s a man who is very angry about Mr. Bauer being hired in his place . . .”
Marta went down her list of tasks one by one, ticking off each thing. Finally, at quarter after five, Anneliese came home. “The carp,” she said. “Is it sweet-and-sour?” When she knew that was how they had it every year.
At half past six Pavel rang the little Christmas bell. Pepik had been lying on his top bunk staring at the ceiling, but he could not pretend he wasn’t excited by the holiday; he dropped to the floor and bounded down the hall to the parlour. Marta stood behind him, holding his shoulders, as they took in the beautiful room. Pavel had dimmed the lights and lit a fire in the hearth and all of the tiny candles in the tree’s branches. The flames leapt up and were reflected in the mirrors on the front wall of the parlour and in the big glass chandelier; it looked as if the room were alight with fireflies.
Pepik went straight for the lowest branch, took off a macaroon, and bit it in half.
The presents were laid out on a table by the breakfront. Marta got a big box of chocolates from the Lindt chocolatier shop in Prague. It was a much more expensive gift than the Bauers usually gave her. “No . . . really—” she started, but Pavel shushed her. “We’re grateful,” he said, “for all your extra work.”
His gift for Anneliese was in a small blue box: diamond drop earrings to match the sparkly watch. She held the earrings up to her ears; they were shaped like two perfect tears.
Anneliese’s gift for her husband was in a small creamy envelope with his name written on the front in fountain pen. Pavel peeled back the wax seal. Marta watched his eyes move back and forth as he read. She couldn’t tell from his facial expression the nature of the message from his wife. Had they worked things out, or was it just a temporary truce?
Marta, for her part, had picked a book about two Czech boys going to the market for Pepik; for the Bauers she had chosen a picture frame in which she had placed a photo of their son sitting on the front steps of the house in their old town. When Pavel saw it, his eyes filled with tears. “What a very thoughtful gift,” he said.
Even Anneliese seemed touched. Her fingers fluttered at her throat. “Marta,” she said, “you really should not have. This frame must have cost your whole—” But she stopped herself and said graciously, “Thank you very much, Marta.” She held the photo up and peered at it again. “It seems a long time ago,” she said, a peculiar look on her face. “Doesn’t it? If you think of everything that’s happened?” Marta knew Anneliese was thinking of Max. She had hoped he might join them for Christmas, but there was still no word from either him or Alžběta.
When the presents had all been opened, Pavel wanted to light the menorah. In the past when Chanukah fell at the same time as Christmas, the Jewish holiday was the one that got forgotten, but this year Pavel was determined.
“Aren’t we already . . . how many days—” Anneliese started.
Pavel brushed her away. He wasn’t sure, but they would light all eight candles to be safe. He also wanted to say the blessing, which was something that to Marta’s knowledge the Bauers had never done before.
Marta watched Pavel, with his eyes closed, chanting the Hebrew prayer. She was flabbergasted that he knew it by heart. Perhaps it had been taught to him as a boy? He threw in something he called the Shema—the Jewish prayer of God’s oneness, he said—for good measure. When he was finished he placed the menorah in the window. It was a mitzvah to do so, he said, but Marta saw Anneliese wince. She wouldn’t dare
criticize her husband, not after what had happened, but then Pavel seemed to reconsider and moved the candle-holder back to the credenza, out of sight of people passing on the street. The lights from the Christmas tree, reflected in the wall of mirrors, filled the room to overflowing with brilliance. By contrast, the menorah seemed small and incidental. It flickered in the corner unnoticed.
Anneliese was behind closed doors, getting ready for the festivities. They were going to ring in the New Year at the home of Mathilde, her oldest friend from the gymnasium. Mathilde and her husband, Vaclav, who owned margarine factories, were having several couples over to celebrate. “Hitler or no Hitler,” Pavel said.
Anneliese finally emerged from her room, her face powdered and her hair piled on top of her head. A telegram arrived just as the Bauers were putting on their coats. Although it was sealed inside the usual envelope, Marta had a distinct impression that the delivery boy knew its contents. He furrowed his brow as he handed it over, as if he hated to be the bearer of bad news. Or perhaps it was just that every telegram these days contained bad news.
Pavel took the envelope from the boy.
“Is it Max?” Anneliese asked. She was wearing a clingy red dress Marta hadn’t seen before.
“Or Alžběta?”
“Pass me my . . .” Pavel nodded at his scarf, his eyes still on the telegram.
“Pavel. I’m speaking to you.”
“It’s your man.”
“I wish you would—”
“Your man Wilhelm.”
Anneliese froze with Pavel’s scarf in her hand. “The priest?”
“He’s been arrested.”
“Arrested? Why?”
“Forget the scarf,” Pavel said. “It isn’t even snowing.”
Anneliese glared at her husband. “Why was he arrested?”
“For baptizing Jews. Why else?” Pavel buttoned his coat quickly. “We’re late,” he said, without looking at Anneliese. They took turns kissing the top of their son’s head and went out the door.
