Significant enough that a plaque on the mountain’s side read boldly, “What Mecca is to a Muslim, Rip should be to a Czech.”
Had her mother watched Mount Rip go by from the window of the train from Prague? Her father? Had they still felt themselves Czech, even with yellow stars so carefully sewn to their coats? Had they wondered at their fellow Czechs, whose collaboration—with many, many notable exceptions, Vanesa reminded herself—facilitated their deportation and imprisonment?
She tried again, for the millionth time, to pick at the emotional scabs covering the raw fear, the grief, the putrescence below. She was unsuccessful, her mind still firmly rooted in analytical safety.
She turned back to Marek. “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure it will be difficult, as many of your travels must have been for you. You have done significant research in and about Terezin, I gather?”
He confirmed that he had, and clutched suddenly at the seat’s armrest as the bus slid again and then righted itself.
The driver appeared unperturbed by the increasingly dangerous road conditions, showing no signs of sacrificing expediency for mere safety’s sake.
Marek seemed relieved to return to the emotionally-neutral safe haven of his research. So relieved, that he asked perfunctorily whether Vanesa was familiar with Terezin’s history, and then, ignoring her positive response, launched into a lengthy monologue that was only interrupted by Vanesa’s gasp as the ramparts of Terezin came into view.
“As you know, Terezin is actually a fortress constructed between 1780 and 1790, under the rule of the Hapsburg monarchy. It was constructed at the confluence of the Elbe and Eger rivers, to defend the important route between Dresden and Prague, and named after Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa, who died the year construction began. The large fortress, which became the Jewish ghetto known as Theresienstadt, covers almost four square kilometers, and was designed to comfortably accommodate some 11,000 soldiers. It’s basically a town with massive fortifications surrounding it.”
Moving into full lecture mode and with increased animation, Marek spoke at length until, perhaps sensing he’d lost his audience, he paused to look at Vanesa.
She’d been staring out the window, eyes unfocused and glistening, facing the white landscape. Now she turned toward him and nodded vaguely to show that she actually was listening.
He continued. “The perimeter fortifications stretch over three kilometers, are up to thirty meters thick and thirteen meters high, designed in the tradition of the Marquis de Vauban, the most famous military engineer of the age. When you stand in front of these brick-faced ramparts, when you look up at the enormous bulwarks and ravelins from the moat—which could be flooded thanks to a system of floodgates built on bridges crossing the neighboring rivers—you really have to marvel at the enormity of effort required to build something like this. Ironically, the fortress was never attacked.”
Vanesa again nodded vaguely, which was all the encouragement Marek required.
“Fast-forwarding to modern times, the Terezin Jewish ghetto was a pet project of Reinhard Heydrich, who initiated the ghetto in 1941 when he became Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.”
Vanesa turned toward him as he continued to speak—of Wannsee, of the removal of the town’s small non-Jewish population, of barracks, of transports—and as she watched his mouth, she imagined she could actually see the streams of words coming out, the letters flowing into the air above his head, bouncing off the luggage rack, being sucked out of the window, and dissipating like smoke into the bus’s snowy slipstream.
They turned off the divided highway onto a two-lane road by the town of Lovosice, and the bus went into a full slide, careening alarmingly as the driver counter-steered. Several luggage items fell from the overhead rack.
Vanesa, intending to grab the seat’s armrest, instead gripped Marek’s hand tightly. She did not let go, even after realizing her mistake.
After regaining control, the driver came over the intercom and apologized. He then succinctly announced that the bus would only go as far as Terezin, with no return service guaranteed until the weather improved.
A collective groan rose from the passengers.
Marek seemed to take the news in stride. Pausing to let the driver finish, and still holding Vanesa’s hand, he continued his monologue.
His fingers were pudgy, his palms sweaty, but the hand was warm and solid. She held on as he spoke of population density, of daily caloric intake, of the governing council, of epidemics, of cultural events, of children’s drawings, of musical events. She held on as the white-frosted sign said Terezin 5km, and still Marek spoke. His words began to swirl in her mind, mixing with the grey sky, the windshield slush, and the white landscape to form a toxic sludge that slowly coated her brain from back to front.
Her brain grasped, just before the sludge flowed over the front, that she was going to a place beyond words. Transports, barracks, crematoria— there was no need for these words there. The toxic sludge spread to the backs of her eyes, tickling the back of her nose as the very air around her swelled with its stench.
The bus slid around a bend, passing a snow-covered tourist billboard with the picture of a stony-faced Hapsburg soldier in a blue waistcoat and white stockings, standing under the words “Visit the Amazing Fortress of Terezin!”
Because that’s where they were going, wasn’t it? A historical monument; an actual Hapsburg fortress that had existed for over 200 years; a tourist attraction; a town with churches and shops and restaurants, where people lived and children played. And the town was growing, she knew, with younger people moving in and new houses being built outside the ramparts. A whole new generation had rediscovered Terezin, and the municipality invested in a large rampart renovation project to draw more tourists.
The sludge got thicker, spreading down her throat now, threatening to choke her. Still the bus lurched and slid forward.
Marek’s words—guard towers, processing center, delousing—continued to pour from his mouth as a small white sign with the Star of David pointed right and said simply, “Krematoria.” Her eyes locked on this sign. How could it be so small, so unimposing?
The bus slid madly, relentlessly forward, and the railroad tracks of the spur from Bohusovice came up on her right—slave labor, transports, raw potatoes—meeting with the road in a blaze of rusted steel, cracked asphalt, and frozen filth.
The bus jogged left, passing a cheery white bed-and-breakfast with smoke rising from a tubular metal chimney. As it skidded across the railroad tracks through the ramparts of Terezin, the daughter of Vanesa Neuman, Auschwitz inmate number A-25034, felt she could see vivid details that were half-hallucination, half-memory, yet no less emotionally intense for their fleetingness. She saw the lines of people trudging from the direction of Bohusovice. She saw her grandfather and grandmother, and her mother, one hand clutching the sweaty hand of her toddler uncle, the other clasping the handle of the small brown valise with the white lettering. She saw not in the black and white of photographs but in living, three-dimensional color. It had been real. It had been here, and not only could she see, but at long last, she could feel.
She felt the little girl’s fear, masked by fatigue but still tangible. She felt the sweaty hand clasping so tightly, seeking comfort and trying in vain to shut out the terrible things outside. And she could smell, even in the frozen December air, the wood smoke from the barracks chimneys, the steam of potatoes boiling in the kitchens, the crisp disinfectant from the delousing sheds, the gun oil from the guards’ rifles, the loamy smell of razor wire barricades dragged aside in the dirt.
Marek was pointing alternately right and left now, speaking unintelligible words like Bahnhoffstrasse, Hamburg Barracks, Ghetto Guard, supply carts.
Vanesa remained deep in her reverie, seeing and now hearing. She heard not the squeak of rubber bus tires on snowy pavement, but the muffled rattle of wooden wheels on snow-padded cobblestones—carts carrying steaming vats, pushed toward the ghetto center by
women in filthy rags; carts carrying bodies, pushed by emaciated men in the opposite direction; children running alongside the food carts, begging the women for scraps.
Then, as the reverie waned, she felt not the gentle, sliding deceleration of the bus as it pulled up to Terezin’s broad central square, but the same sinking sensation that must have been in the little girl’s tummy as she stopped, lowered her heavy suitcase, and looked around the square at the cheerily-painted, uniform buildings, and the imposing façade of the Church of the Resurrection. In her mind’s eye, Vanesa met her grandmother’s gaze, as her mother must have done in that very spot fifty years previously, desperately seeking but finding neither reassurance nor hope.
And as Vanesa Neuman stepped down from the bus, a single tear made its way from her eye to her chin, then to space, landing in the impassive Theresienstadt snow like so many millions of tears before it.
Another pair of eyes squinted through the blue smoke that rose from a cigarette dangling loosely from their owner’s lips. He watched Marek and a red-faced Vanesa alight from the bus on the north side of Terezin’s frozen central square. Then, he glanced across the square, through the heavy snow, to yet another watcher. A head was nodded, a glance thrown, a wink acknowledged, and the eyes turned away.
Tel Aviv, 1986
The first time Vanesa Neuman and I made love was in 1986, on a narrow Tel Aviv University dormitory bed. Topped by a thin foam mattress, one side touching the peeling whitewashed cement walls—which were delightfully cool in the summer but ass-chilling in the winter—the rock-solid bed couldn’t have made a noise even if it had wanted to. A good thing, because our lovemaking was unplanned, silent, and a bit tacky given that her roommate was snoring only meters away in the room’s other bed.
It was glorious. I’d never wanted anyone more than I wanted her that night.
She didn’t face me when we made love, not that night or ever. I never touched her breasts amorously again; nor would she ever, once we’d made love that first time, kiss me again, beyond a perfunctory lips-only exchange. Physical intimacy with Vanesa Neuman was a one-way escalator, each level trumping and invalidating the previous. By her unspoken logic, once we’d reached the coital level, previous levels were simply unnecessary.
When I landed in Israel that year, on my junior year abroad, it had been almost two years since I’d last seen Vanesa. Our letter writing had waned, understandably, as her workload in the university grew, but I wasn’t worried. We had never been closer, despite the distance and despite her sporadic letters. I believed this, and had spent the months preceding my trip mentally constructing an airport meeting scene that would have dignified a big-budget Hollywood melodrama:
After collecting my luggage from the crowded carousel in the Ben Gurion Airport arrivals hall, I push past overloaded luggage carts, wheelchairs, and old women waddling so slowly that I want to scream at them that I need to see Vanesa now. Can’t they understand? I need her. I make my way outside, where hundreds of people crowd the walkway’s waist-high metal rails, waiting to meet loved ones or colleagues. She’s not there, or so I think at first, scanning the crowd eagerly, disoriented by the noise. Then the footage switches to black-and-white. The men in their open-necked dress shirts, some holding signs with foreign-sounding names scrawled in magic marker, the mothers navigating prams expertly through groups of matching-hatted tourists, the children with eager faces looking up at me, first with joy, then with obvious distaste as my identity disappoints—all these fade to slow motion and out-of-focus anonymity as the camera finds Vanesa. She is glorious in tight jeans, white Keds, and a blue-striped untucked t-shirt. She is also the sole island of crystal-clear Technicolor in this sea of stark grey. She, too, looks disoriented. She doesn’t see me. Her brow is furrowed, her lips are set in a pout of concentration. I call her name, she turns, and the scene is reanimated in full living color as her smile dissipates the grey fog.
This meeting was so clear in my mind, and so occupied my imagination, that I walked right past Vanesa as I exited Passport Control. I was yanked out of my reverie by the sound of my name, but even after turning toward the source, I still didn’t recognize her. The next moments whirled in confusion. My brain simply refused to align the image of Vanesa waiting after I passed through Customs and exited the airport, with the image of this young woman, the temporary security pass clipped to her belt, who was staring so expectantly at me.
Finally, it clicked, and I blurted out incredulously, “What are you doing here?”
“That’s what you’ve got to say to me? ‘What are you doing here’?” Her eyes probed mine angrily, but my eyes were already downcast in quick response to her berating.
Every relationship has defining moments, some as dramatic as a sunset proposal, some as mundane as the shrug of a bare shoulder. These moments fade in intensity, but never in latent significance. For Vanesa and I, this airport meeting—so carefully planned on her part, since obtaining an airport security pass at that time was nearly impossible, and so minutely scripted on my part—was such a moment.
Every smile, every embrace, every kiss and caress thereafter were tainted by it, whether overtly or subtly. It was a wake-up call from the front desk of reality to our private suite of penpal bliss.
Tel Aviv, June 1991
The day after Vanesa received Michael’s diary from the noir lawyer was the last day of the shiva. Several stragglers came by, in a hurry to get on with their business, the shiva call being just another line item clogging their weekly to-do list. Vanesa received them graciously despite having been up the entire night.
She’d sat at the Formica-topped table, the very table where she’d first seen the book on that rainy night so many years before. By the light of the single bulb, hung low above the table on the same dusty cord, she read and re-read Michael’s stories, all the time tracing the outlines of the symbol, which appeared on page after page.
On the eighth day following Michael’s death, Vanesa left the flat on Nahalat Binyamin for the last time. She walked out the apartment that Sunday morning, the diary tucked safely into her bulging briefcase, and went straight—as straight as the circuitous routes of the Tel Aviv bus system allowed—to her singular source of answers, a place where all made sense, and what didn’t make sense could be slowly, methodically unraveled.
She arrived an hour later at the boat-like concrete edifice of Tel Aviv University’s central library.
Over the next several months, throughout that long hot summer and well into the fall, I saw my wife only occasionally. She holed up either in the university library, or in the Yad V’Shem archives in Jerusalem, or with the survivors and researchers that staffed the Theresienstadt Martyrs Remembrance Association, on kibbutz Givat Haim, or in any number of the countless Holocaust remembrance and research institutes that sadly dotted our tiny country.
She took a two-pronged research approach. On one hand, she tried to work out the symbol’s meaning. She had quickly identified its runic origins, and had worked out the same possible interpretations that Jonas Jakobovits and Marek Wolff would later offer. The key, she believed, lay in the symbol’s context: where it had appeared, and how her father had come into contact with it.
To determine this context, she attempted to identify the individuals described, and thankfully named, in her father’s stories. She believed Michael’s stories must have been based on actual encounters with real subjects. The primary question was: how could a twelve-year-old Jewish boy living in occupied Czechoslovakia have come into contact with such a diverse group of Jews, whose origins ranged from North Africa, Europe, America, and elsewhere? Did he encounter them during his short time in Terezin, or thereafter? She struggled, unsuccessfully, to establish some correlation between the little she knew of her father’s and grandfather’s activities from 1942 onwards, and the detail-deficient stories her father had written.
Her first breakthrough came late that summer. She’d been working in the recently computerized Yad V’Shem archives in Jeru
salem, cross-referencing the eighteen names in the stories against various search terms. She’d first tried her father’s and grandfathers’ names, with no relevant results. She’d tried “Terezin,” “Theresienstadt,” “Buhosovice,” “Prague,” and a long list of other terms, all with similar negative findings. For “Praha,” however, the Anglicized Czech spelling of Prague, she found two very significant results.
There were a number of characters in her father’s stories for whom he had noted, in passing, years of birth. For two of these names, corroborated by the birth years, she found references to similar, albeit fragmentary, Nazi travel documents, which turned out to be partially burned but still legible on the microfiche viewer. The travel papers had allowed the named bearer to travel via train from Prag Hauptbahnhof, what the Germans called the central Prague train station, to Istanbul, Turkey, which was outside of Nazi-controlled territory.
“You do realize what this means, don’t you?” She tossed the question out to me while she was once again changing clothes, eating, and showering simultaneously, knowing full well that I did not. Without waiting for an answer, she excitedly continued through the shower curtain. “It means not only that these people actually existed, but also that they may have made it out of Nazi hands. It means that they could actually still be alive, and it means that I might be able to find them.”
Terezin, December 1991
On the bus radio, the announcer still talked of blizzard-like conditions as the vehicle’s door closed. It glided away from the bus stop, the crunching of tires on packed snow the only audible sign of departure. Other passengers hefted bags of various sizes and, quickly engulfed by white, scattered and disappeared into the snowstorm.
Vanesa nodded briefly to Marek, who had been questioning with his eyes the wisdom of their walking four blocks to the Hanover Barracks in the storm. She clearly had no intention of delaying for mere weather, he grudgingly accepted.
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