And still no tears.
Terezin, 1941
Vanesa Sr.’s father toiled among the 300 Jewish workmen sent to prepare Terezin for its transformation into the “paradise ghetto.” By January the following year, nearly 10,000 more Jews would join him, initially from Bohemia and Moravia but soon from all across Europe, eventually swelling the ghetto until its population density reached a staggering average of over 130,000 per square kilometer.
The notice had come in October of the previous year, a laconic, one-page form letter in German. Vanesa brought the envelope home from the post office, wrapped up against the autumn chill in her mother’s long and thick woolen scarf. Her mother set down the tea she was drinking when Vanesa came in, and her hands trembled as she slit the envelope. Skimming the flimsy page, her mother pressed her knuckles to her lips, unable to answer her daughter’s stream of questions.
Later, when her father came home, he explained that the paper said that they were going to move. He called it “relocation.” They were going to live in a new Judenwohnbezirk, a Jewish residential district—the Nazis had forbidden the use of the term “ghetto.” They were lucky, he said, using the same smile he used when convincing her to eat something that he himself despised. Since he was to be part of the “advance guard,” they’d get their choice of where to live.
This, at least, turned out to be true.
On February 22, 1942, Vanesa, with her mother and younger brother Nicklas, arrived in Thereisenstadt on Transport Y from Kladno to join her father. The railroad spur extending into the walls of the Terezin ghetto would only be completed in June of the following year, built by some 300 Jewish slave laborers, including Vanesa’s father. She and her family, along with tens of thousands of other Jews, had to walk three frigidly damp kilometers from the train terminus in Bohusovice. Their route took them through the village: past bored-looking Nazi guards posted every 100 meters along the treeless cobblestoned route; past countless eyes peeking from curtained windows, watching the macabre parade; past the more brazen villagers who congregated on street corners, shamelessly offering the marchers food at wildly inflated prices.
With heavy suitcases held by now-aching arms, they reached the thick, snow-covered, brick-vaulted ramparts of Theresienstadt after several hours. The barbed-wire barricade was moved, and they were marched into the ghetto that would be their home for the next three years. Nicklas whined feebly, his hand no longer sweaty in hers, as their mother prodded them on.
True to her Father’s promise, they did enjoy “privileged” private quarters when they first arrived in Terezin, although the family was soon split up. The Nazis assigned them to a drafty attic apartment near the Dresden barracks, by the fortress’s northernmost rampart, where her father worked. A narrow iron staircase twisted up from the back of the building’s treeless courtyard to the low apartment door. The apartment was a dark, twenty-square-meter space divided in the middle by a rough shelving unit that held the family’s meager wardrobe. Their carefully-packed, labeled, and weighed suitcases were immediately confiscated upon arrival, and never returned.
“We need to ask ourselves,” my Vanesa once lectured me, “why the Germans would go to the trouble of making them pack according to such stringent restrictions, when they knew that their bags would be taken away immediately upon arrival in Thereisenstadt. The answer is simple: the power of hope. The very same reason the gas chambers at Auschwitz had hooks for people to hang their garments on prior to ‘showering.’ Hope, even when it is consciously or unconsciously known to be false hope, is the great normalizer. In its absence, we are adrift and unpredictable, and predictability was key to the Nazis’ plans. They knew that people who had packed for relocation were far likelier to cooperate than people rounded up in the middle of the night, and that people who had to pay for their transport tickets to Auschwitz were more likely to get quietly on the train.”
The apartment’s small floor space was flanked with short sleeping bunks built into the walls. A small wood stove, not much bigger than a large soup pot, blossomed at the terminus of the winding chimney, whose harried window exit let in chilly air in the winter and mosquitoes in the spring.
And then… there was no more. Vanesa Sr. never spoke of the years between walking into the attic apartment in Terezin in 1942 and meeting her husband, Michael, in the Displaced Persons camp in Cyprus in 1946.
My Vanesa knew that her mother remained in Terezin until almost the end of the war, and was then sent to Auschwitz. She knew that neither her grandmother, grandfather, or Uncle Nicklas had survived the war. The rest she had to imagine, and later, piece by piece, to learn for herself.
Sometimes, she daydreamed that Vanesa Sr. had been a resistance fighter, hiding in the sewers, popping up at incongruous places, silently slitting the throats of unsuspecting Nazis. Or an intrepid saboteur, a factory worker who sabotaged munitions production by day and printed anti-Nazi literature by candlelight at night. Or even a nurse, caring for the sick, the elderly, the children of the ghetto. Anything, my Vanesa thought, anything but what Vanesa Sr. had most likely been after both her mother and father had been sent East on one of the countless transports from which no one ever returned: a scabby ghetto orphan, lice-infested, dressed in rags, scrabbling for blackened potatoes in the dirt, stealing from supply carts as they left the kitchens.
Later, as she learned more, my Vanesa imagined another scene. She dreamed that, nine months after her mother’s arrival in Thereisenstadt, her interests in the surroundings not yet eclipsed by loneliness, hunger and rumors of the next transport, Vanesa Sr. might have looked out the dusty window of the sweltering third-floor barracks one day in July 1942. She might have seen a little boy almost her age struggling along the steamy rain-washed street behind his mother and father. She might have seen his arms straining at a child-sized leather-covered valise, which had been clearly labeled in white paint with his name, transport number, and destination. If Vanesa Sr. looked closer, she might have seen him pause, sitting carefully on the curbstone to avoid wetting his pants, as his father asked directions to the quarters the Nazis had assigned them. She might have seen her future husband Michael gaze around at the treeless streets, taking in the cracked plaster of the buildings and the uneven cobblestones over which the carts rattled in the morning, some bringing thin soup or moldy bread, others collecting the night’s dead.
And maybe, just maybe, she saw him find a twig and scratch absentmindedly into the dirt the symbol he’d only recently first encountered in Prague:
Prague, December 1991
She didn’t call me. I’ve never gotten over this, even knowing how important Uncle Tomas was to her then, even knowing I was out that night, anyway. I allow myself the irrational luxury of indignation. I tell myself that I was her husband, damn it, she should have turned to me first, especially in light of what she was to discover. As if I was somehow derelict in my husbandly duties, as if I were the one so damaged as to lack the capacity to love.
She should have called me. But she didn’t.
As petty revenge for her imposition on his late-night poetry writing, the indifferent night clerk made sure that getting through to Uncle Tomas in Israel was as difficult as possible.
She sat on the plush yet dusty bench in the hotel lobby’s glass-walled international phone booth. She listened to many minutes of scratchy clicking—like thousands of kittens playing on sandpaper—and waited to speak to the one man capable of eliciting her tears.
Uncle Tomas picked up with a cross and sleepy hello, but recognized my Vanessa’s distant gasp immediately. He said one word, Kotě—kitten—his pet name for her since time immemorial. Then, as he had since she was a girl, he waited for the flash flood to arrive and pass, simply listening and uttering occasional words of comfort. When her waters slowed to a muddy trickle, he spoke, asking in his soft, old man voice what had happened.
She blurted out the story, and imagined him nodding gravely, stroking his chin, considering what she said.
He always took her seriously, even when the entreaty was a simple childhood dispute. “And what do you think we should do about this, now, Kotě?” he would say after she finished, and then succinctly but flawlessly summarize the point of contention she related in his own words, to emphasize that he’d been listening.
Her own father would nod sagely and pretend to listen, but be hard-pressed to relate what she just said, at any age. Her mother would tear up at the first mention of anything even smacking of conflict.
But Uncle Tomas actually and truly listened.
And he listened now, despite the hour, despite the collect call, and despite Vanesa’s long-distance snuffling. To her repeated entreaty, “What could they mean, I pissed people off?”, he surmised that her Western clothes, her clearly non-native Czech, and even her Judaism could easily be an affront to some of the more bitter remnants of the recently-ended Communist era. They’d seen her leave her hotel, he guessed, perhaps spoken with the insouciant night clerk, and found out she was Israeli. She was lucky, he said, that it hadn’t been worse.
“But what we need to do is learn from this, Kotě. Now will you come home? I worry about you. This trip, it was a bad idea. No good can come of this grubbing about in the past. Take it from an old man—look forward, not back.”
He was not surprised when she flatly refused to even consider abandoning her quest. He knew that the stubborn little girl he’d once counseled had grown into a stubborn young woman—a young woman “as persistent as a kitten with a cockroach,” he once joked, and the nickname had stuck. But he was right.
The persistence of a people that had not taken “no” for an answer from the world community on its path to nationhood seemed to have embodied itself in young Vanesa, who exceeded even Israeli standards of “devotion to mission,” as the Israel Defense Forces liked to put it. From learning to ride her bike in one single day of scraped knees and bruised elbows, to using those very same elbows to make room for herself as a cub reporter in the competitive world of the IDF radio station, Galey Zahal, during her compulsory military service, to scrabbling her way to an MA cum laude in Modern History and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University—Vanesa was persistence incarnate.
This was a girl, he probably reminded himself as he hung up the phone, having vaguely promised her that he would contact his friend and find out what happened, who had grown up with parents she never really knew. Now she was willing to go to great lengths to finally know at least one of them.
My Vanesa’s father, Michael Neuman, was born in Prague in 1931, a year in which still-young Czechoslovakia was experiencing the thrill that roller coaster riders feel at the peak of the largest hill, moments before plummeting into the unknown. Just prior to Hitler’s 1933 rise in neighboring Germany, it was a time when the country, founded only thirteen years earlier on the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was growing in commercial prowess, well on its way to becoming the tenth largest industrial economy in the world. Skoda automobiles, Prague ham, Pilsner beer—Czechoslovak products were in demand across Europe.
Even as Austrian and German banks failed in the wake of the worldwide depression that started in 1929 in the United States, the Czechoslovak economy remained stalwart… for the time being, at least. It was the age of prominence and almost universal esteem for the country’s inveterate and seemingly eternal founding father and President, Tomas Masaryk. On the coattails of the country’s prosperity, small businesses like that owned by Jakub Neuman, my Vanesa’s grandfather, flourished.
The cramped, dank, and odious shop was tucked away in a courtyard just off Wencelas Square, only a block from the massive and stately National Museum building, wherein many of his works were displayed. Reached through a long dark passageway under the street-facing building, the entrance to which was bordered by a coffee shop on one side and a barber shop on the other, his store was a Mecca for Prague’s elite hunting and naturalist community.
Unlike her mother’s toxic memories, Michael’s early childhood, he recalled to my Vanesa, was “pastoral.” Pastoral. This was the exact word he used, she told me. Pastoral, in the heart of a burgeoning European capital, a mixture of horse-drawn wagons and cars choking the central square of the city. This was where her father had played, with the din of the streetcars clanging all hours of the day, living in a small flat above the shop.
“This is not my definition of pastorality,” she said once, “and I always tried to imagine what he meant. Was it some kind of calm he found in the city? Was it the hunting trips he used to take with my grandfather? Or did he have some other, inner definition of pastoral in mind? Perhaps, in light of what was to come, he really meant simple, understandable, or just safe?”
She never asked him, and he never explained.
The more I think of this, the more I question Vanesa’s ability to ever understand it. She too grew up in the heart of a city—a city, in which nature has been vanquished and humanity lives unafraid of feral competition, immersed in its own seething juices, self-absorbed, asking questions about and afraid only of its own kind. What could she know of pastorality?
Like Vanesa Sr., his future wife, Michael was nine years old when the German army marched into Prague. Like her, he could recall his parents’ grim faces, the rumbling of the trucks and tanks, the tramp of leather-booted feet, and the outrage of the people around him, which was in short order locked tightly away, packed like Bohemian crystal under layers of cottony self-interest and let out only in private whisperings.
My Vanesa knew that Michael and his family were sent to Terezin in July 1942, as the Nazis stepped up relocations from within the Prague Jewish community. She knew that Jakub, like Vanesa’s father in Kladno, received a letter one day instructing him to report with his family to the Prague’s Hlavni Nadrazi—central train station—on the warm July morning, and informing what he could and could not take with him.
“How innocuously terrifying letters like that must have been,” my Vanesa lectured me. “History can truly come alive if you try to imagine yourself in a given situation. Try to feel what my grandfather must have felt, as he held a flimsy piece of typewritten paper that was to change his entire life. Can you? Can you even imagine?”
She liked to challenge me, but her motives were rarely pedagogical. This particular challenge, like a thousand others of its kind, was designed to viscerally demonstrate how insensitive I was—how lacking in empathy, how unable to comprehend the vast gulf of sorrow that she traversed as she pieced together what little she knew of her father’s trip to Terezin.
From her research, Vanesa knew when her father’s family left Prague, and from what train station. She knew that Michael and Jakub returned to Prague shortly thereafter, which was a rarity, since not many Prague Jews sent to Terezin came back alive. She knew that her grandmother, Alena, stayed behind in Terezin, too sick to travel, according to Uncle Tomas. And Vanesa knew that neither her father nor grandfather ever saw Alena again.
“And that was all I ever knew,” she said. As with her mother, Vanesa’s father’s life began in the 1930s and continued in the 1950s, but most of the years in between were blank, or at least blurred, like a charcoal sketch rubbed unrecognizable with the side of a hand. She had never pressed them for details, though.
“The biggest mystery of my life, and I could never bring myself to ask either of them about it. What if they thought I didn’t care?” she asked me desolately, yet rhetorically, one evening after Michael’s death. She was dry-eyed and remote, as if she mourned the loss of her father’s story as much as the loss of the man himself.
She knew so little of Michael. He had tried sincerely to be kindly, fatherly, loving and involved in her life. He was always ready to try to assist her with homework, and tried to interest her in the art to which he was so intensely devoted. He created beauty, he said, and beauty was uncompromising. Yet like most of us, he excelled at spotting the flaws in what he created, while remaining blind to those within him.
“He was there, but not really there. It w
as like he went through the motions of life and played the part of the basically nice father really, really well. But it was still an act, a persona he assumed, and there were, of course, cracks in this persona. He never, ever, talked about the War. I tried a couple times, especially when we started to study about it in school. He was polite and smiling, but I got the message very early on, from both him and my mother, that this was not something we spoke of.”
There was, however, a single revealing night, when she’d gotten a direct, if accidental, glimpse at the depths of her father’s pain. “It was kind of like peeking in the window of a torture chamber. You know more or less the nature of what you’re going to see, and one part of you just doesn’t want to see it. On the other hand, there’s no way you’re not going to look in, if you can,” she said.
She’d been sixteen, her mother’s death four years previously still an open wound festering in the silence of the small, tidy flat above the shop, its rounded Bauhaus balcony overlooking Nahalat Binyamin Street’s cramped intersection with Levinsky Street. It was late. She’d been out with friends. A winter rain lashed the windows, and she was chilled and wet, having forgotten her umbrella. Her sneakers were soaked and her toes cold. The lights in the flat were dimmed when she came upstairs. A scratchy Dvorak concerto played on the record player—cello now weeping, now imploring, now demanding, now breaking into radiant glory, as if all it had asked had been fulfilled.
Her father sat in the puddle of light that dripped from the single bulb over the scratched Formica kitchen table. The Kerosene “Fireside” heater glowed dimly nearby. He was almost incoherently drunk. “Like, one step short of alcohol poisoning,” she told me. “Yet when I walked in, he noticed me right away.”
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