Violent gusts of wind grabbed at their coats, unwrapped scarves, and clawed at hats. As that wind screamed in their ears and their rapidly-whitening scarves chapped their chilled noses, Vanesa and Marek made their way across the utterly deserted Marktplatz, Terezin’s central plaza. They traversed gravel paths whose white dusting lent them neither grace nor mystery, in Vanesa’s eyes. Even through the cold, she felt clearly the weight of the evil that had transpired here, as if it had seeped into the earth, coated the buildings, and infused the very air itself—inescapable, suffocating.
They crossed to the south side of the square.
In 1944, the Nazis had built a music pavilion there, facing the coffee shop that opened in 1942, which offered comfortable chairs and steaming ersatz coffee or tea. Around the corner, a small shop sold items of clothing and other indispensables, all of which could be purchased by the Jewish residents using specially-issued Kronen from the Theresienstadt Bank of Jewish Autonomy, opened in May of 1943. The bank’s 50 staff members used state-of-the-art adding machines to keep detailed records of deposits and withdrawals for its 50,000 registered customers.
The healthy, happy Theresienstadt residents could return after concerts in the pavilion to their airy, well-apportioned barracks or cozy apartments, and rest on sheets freshly starched in the local laundry. After a nourishing meal cooked in the central kitchen, the evening air fresh and cool, they could attend lectures on literature or philosophy, or view exhibitions of paintings created by Theresienstadt’s numerous artists. For Theresienstadt was, as the Nazis went to such astounding lengths to prove to the outside world, definitively not a concentration camp, nor even a ghetto. It was, rather, an actual city, given to the Jews by the Fuhrer himself, and well-documented in the 1944 film titled Der Fuhrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt—‘The Fuhrer Grants the Jews a City.’
Over the years since she initiated her quest, Vanesa had watched the remnants of the 90-minute propaganda film numerous times in the Yad V’Shem archives, hoping anew with each viewing to gain some small insight. The film had been directed by a noted Jewish actor, who was forced into the task in exchange for his life, and later gassed along with the rest of the Jewish cast and crew. The odd project was initiated on the heels of an overwhelmingly successful—from the Nazi perspective—and tightly-orchestrated visit by representatives of the Danish and International Red Cross to the Theresienstadt ghetto in June of 1944. Having convinced these representatives of the international community of the favorable conditions in Theresienstadt, and by extension successfully whitewashed the tremendous industry that comprised the Final Solution, the film was to be the coup de grace of the well-oiled Nazi propaganda machine.
Kurt Gerron, the film’s director, had done his job well, crafting a cunningly well-planned piece conceived to project exactly the image that the international community so blindly wanted to believe about the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. He gave them well-narrated scenes of cleanly-dressed, clearly well-fed residents enjoying a classical music concert; men working in metal workshops, playing soccer, or working in communal gardens; old people enjoying the sunshine on park benches. He even gave them children frolicking and eating to their hearts’ content in an orchard. What more could the public ask for, than black-and-white proof dispelling the rumors of starvation, disease, and persecution?
What Gerron simply couldn’t, or perhaps didn’t want to, control was the minute expressions on his actors’ faces. It wasn’t something anyone picked up on in a single viewing, but when one watched the footage over and over, it became clear that none of the adults were really smiling. The children were sincerely happy, at least some of the time, but the adults were deathly serious. It was in their eyes. They knew. They understood.
Marek and Vanesa passed the former ghetto coffee shop, now an antiques store, and continued south with heads lowered against the wind and biting cold. Marek obviously knew the town well, guiding Vanesa confidently towards the Hanover Barracks, just across from the fortresses’ southern rampart.
A lone Trabant glided by them over the snow, fishtailing on balding tires as it turned the corner. Vanesa followed Marek blindly, imagining each step she took crushed a lie.
Step: the lie of happy well-fed residents. Theresienstadt inmates subsisted on less than 1000 calories a day, and the film’s famous orchard snack scene had to be shot several times, as the children at first wolfed down the food they received so ravenously as to clearly betray their starvation.
Step: the lie of a thriving ghetto economy. The 50,000 registered customers whose transactions the bank staff recorded never existed, and items for sale in the ghetto shop had been looted from the confiscated luggage of the inmates themselves.
As she trudged on, Vanesa ground her heels ever deeper into the unyielding cobblestones, her rising anger finding vent as she strove to ground out the most heinous lie of all.
Step, step. She stamped each foot hard enough to jar her backbone, pulverizing the lie that the world didn’t really know the truth about Theresienstadt or the other camps. She crushed the lie that the Red Cross delegation did not realize that their six-hour, minutely scripted, carefully choreographed tour was a farce; the lie that the various passing groups of freshly scrubbed, healthy children encountered during their tour was in fact the same group, herded surreptitiously by camp guards from one “chance” encounter point to the next; the lie that the camp was not overcrowded during the visit, because almost 20,000 inmates had been shipped to their deaths in the months preceding it to make room.
As they took their final steps towards whatever awaited them within the Hanover Barracks, Vanesa mentally crushed the final lie: the lie that today’s residents of Terezin could live, could work, could raise their children in this city of ghosts, without knowledge of or regard for the evil that infused the place. Did they not know that their home would forever be Theresienstadt, could never again be Terezin? She looked at a snow-dusted, flowerbox-adorned window, its lace curtains demurely hiding the residence inside. Did they know but not really understand? Did they not grasp the significance? Were they unaware of the scope? Or, she thought, slamming a final heel viciously down on the snow-free cobblestones in the building’s main entrance, was it that they simply didn’t care?
Terezin, December 1991
The anger that had now replaced Vanesa’s initial shock at being in Theresienstadt warmed and refocused her, much like the sudden escape from the relentless and biting wind. She passed through the arched, tunnel-like passage that ran under the building and into the courtyard of the Hanover Barracks. The courtyard held a small collection of old cars, some on cinder blocks, and a larger collection of tall weeds, everything dusted with snow. From beneath crumbling plaster, patches of the building’s original brickwork leered malevolently. Rows of windows—some broken, some boarded-up—glowered from above. On either side of the passage, glass-enclosed guard stations stood open to the elements, their doors missing or ajar. Beyond the broken glass and rubbish littering the floor of the station, to her left, a staircase led up into darkness.
Without hesitation, Marek entered the guard station, picking his way among the debris, and headed for this staircase. Turning impatiently, yet not unkindly, he gestured for Vanesa to follow.
Silence and a heavy smell of decay permeated the stairwell. Paint peeled like rotting flesh in long strips from the walls. Light filtered with difficulty from the first-floor landing ahead.
Marek stepped cautiously, keeping to the side of the narrow staircase and testing each step before placing his weight on it.
Vanesa followed closely behind, her anger diluted with an irrational yet tangible fear. She was suddenly aware that she was not just entering an abandoned building, but a torture chamber in which thousands of people, some of them her people, had languished in the not-so-distant past. How many tens of thousands of feet, shod in tattered leather shoes—if they were lucky—had trod this very staircase on their way down to forced labor or up to bedbug-infested and hungry sleep?
How many emaciated bodies had been carried or dragged down, destined for the crematoria, their ashes dumped unceremoniously into the Elbe?
The intangible held no allure for Vanesa; the inexplicable was only the precursor of explanation. And yet, as she drew breath after breath of Theresienstadt-tainted air, she herself succumbed to the weak irrationality she so despised. She saw a river of tears running down these stairs, flowing over her feet as she conjured the ghosts that lurked in these walls, their continued crying the source of the torrent. She froze upon entering this tomb, a place where living, healthy, well-fed bodies did not belong. Her fear intensified, becoming palpable as her breath shortened and the greyness of the faded walls around her became more pronounced. She looked up to Marek, who had already breached the top stair.
After leaving the stairwell and entering the broad first floor hallway, he turned and again beckoned to her gently.
Regaining mobility, she looked behind her to the looming blackness of the stairwell, and stepped forward.
Tel Aviv, November 1991
“Look, it’s quite simple. I don’t know why you and Uncle Tomas refuse to understand.” Vanesa answered my protests to her impending trip while stuffing warm clothes haphazardly into a suitcase.
For once, Tomas’ and my own positions were completely aligned.
“There’s no possible way for me to confirm my theory from here. I’ve been at it for six months, as you’ve seen. I’ve exhausted every resource here, and I’ve come up with a plausible theory backed up by solid evidence. Now it’s time to move to the clinical trial stage, to borrow a medical reference. Field research. There’s no other way.”
I wasn’t prepared to concede yet, although I had recognized from the outset the futility of argument. “But this theory, I still don’t understand what interest this secret SS group would have had in helping Jews escape. I mean, you said yourself that this would have been in direct contradiction to Nazi policy after October 1941, right? So, how could a group that reported directly to Himmler himself do something so clearly against Himmler’s own policy? And on such a large scale? It doesn’t make sense.” My last sentence came out somewhere between a whine and an appeal.
Vanesa softened, put out her hand and stroked my hair, canine-like. “It does make sense, my poor boy,” she cooed. Then her tone darkened. “It makes perfect sense. Money. Live Jews brought in money, dead Jews cost money. Shipping Jews to Terezin cost money. Keeping them there cost money. Shipping them East cost money. Letting them leave brought in money. Don’t forget that any Jewish family that wanted to leave had to give up essentially all they owned. They’d have to pay a slew of quasi ‘taxes,’ in addition to the full value of any goods they wanted to take with them. They also had to hand over deeds to real estate and give the Nazis blanket Power of Attorney covering any other property. The voluntary cooperation of these people would have been more valuable to the Reich than their enforced removal—more property recovered, less effort expended. So yes, it was Himmler’s ‘official’ policy to ship Jews East and kill them. Eichmann did a bang-up job of it, as we know, but Himmler was nothing if not pragmatic. This would have been win-win for him and those under him: he could partially fund the Final Solution—not a cheap endeavor—and any number of side projects by milking a relatively few Jews dry, and still get rid of them. Not to mention,” she added sagely, “that he and the members of this group could probably line their own Swiss bank accounts, to boot.”
I sat down on the bed next to the rapidly-filling suitcase, moving aside a pile of bras, socks and underwear large enough to stock a used lingerie store, and tried again. “Fine, that makes sense. You’re right. I can buy the existence of the SS group, and I can see the logic in getting Jews to voluntarily give up their assets. So let’s say this group existed, and the symbol you found in the diary was theirs—that still doesn’t explain your grandfather’s involvement. What could he have possibly offered this group that would be sufficient to justify his, and your father’s, release from Terezin?”
She stuffed in the pile of underwear, threw a pair of boots on top, and took a quick assessing look around our bedroom—the discussion was drawing to a close. She secured the zipper on the now-bulging suitcase, silently righted the bag with effort, and set it by the door.
Her forehead wrinkled pensively as she turned to me, and after a long pause she said, “It’s complicated. She touched my forearm and looked straight into my eyes. “You’re going to have to trust me. I have a plausible theory, but I’m not quite ready to share it. I will tell you, I promise, but let me just convince myself first. Okay?”
Terezin, December 1991
Crack! The stair under her right foot buckled, then snapped. She pulled back in time to avoid an immediate fall, reaching for the rough bannister to her left. It broke off in her hand. She stared in amazement at the piece of wood she was now holding, and teetered backwards. A scream rose in her throat as she grasped the inevitability of a fall. Nothing remained to grab onto.
The hand that grabbed her wrist just before she fell was the same warm and pudgy-fingered hand she’d held onto as the bus slid into Terezin. It steadied and calmed her, pulling her up the remaining stairs, through the narrow doorway, and into the hall.
Marek took her by both shoulders, and bent slightly to look directly into her eyes. “It’s okay. You’re fine. I’ve got you. Nothing will hurt you here. Do you understand?”
Vanesa nodded dumbly and looked past Marek at the dim hallway, unbelieving, still fighting back the panic.
The high-ceilinged hallway reminded her at first glance of the aisle of a medieval cathedral. A mixture of diffuse grey light and snowflakes flowed in through the broken windows that lined the upper southern wall, high out of reach. Strips of peeled paint, dead leaves, and an inordinate amount of grey feathers littered the floor, partially covered by the snow that had already begun to form small drifts. On the right, solid-looking wooden doors, most open, were set in the wall at regular intervals like a row of toothless, hungry mouths.
Marek worked his way down the hallway, staying next to the outside wall, where the 200-year-old floor timbers were less likely to have rotted. Near the fourth door, he stopped and turned back to Vanesa. “This is the room. Come.” He entered without another word, the darkness swallowing him.
Shaking off the ghosts and ignoring the hair on the back of her neck, which had begun to prickle as if stimulated by an unseen static-charged hand, Vanesa stepped lightly across the littered floor and entered the dormitory.
Tel Aviv, November 1991
“So, you’re going all the way to Prague based on a theory that’s so poorly formed, you can’t even share it with your husband?” I knew this was pulling the argument in a completely different direction, and that I would likely pay dearly in that intangible marital currency in which Vanesa and I traded like back-alley stockbrokers. I also knew how sensitive the issue was to Vanesa, how hard she’d worked to discover what she had already learned, what it meant to her to learn anything about her father, what he had been, who he had been, and what he had done. She was much more qualified than me to assess and analyze historical evidence, and I still trusted her judgment.
Nonetheless, since I’d already stepped in the steaming mound of marital dog shit, I decided to keep walking. “I can buy the SS group theory, like I said, but your grandfather helping these people escape? How? What could he have contributed to the endeavor? Why couldn’t the Nazis just ship the emigrants off without help? And, and….” I was grasping at straws. “…wouldn’t that have made him, if it’s true, some kind of collaborator?”
I regretted it even as it crossed my lips. I always had a unique talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to Vanesa. Was this a result of my lack of tact or her oversensitivity? Less the former than the latter, perhaps, but in any case, my deeply offensive words ripped the first irreparable tear in our fabric of trust.
She dropped the cup of coffee she was sipping, and it smashed on the hard ceram
ic tiled floor. Hot coffee and shards of glass spattered the legs of my jeans. She turned to me with a look of fury that would have put Medusa herself to shame.
“Collaborator?” she spat before I could apologize. “He was saving lives, you asshole. I don’t call this collaboration, I call it heroism. He left behind his wife in Terezin, remember? He took his twelve-year-old son away from his mother to Prague to help Jews escape the Reich. That’s selfless. That’s goddamn near saintly. What do you know about this, anyhow? Where is your family? Safe in America? Where were they in the war? Collaborator! If you’re too blinded by your own ignorance to understand the difference between collaboration and self-sacrifice, I don’t see that there’s anything further to discuss.”
And with this, my wife, my first love, the epicenter of my universe—for good or for bad—threw her long wool coat over one arm, grabbed her giant suitcase, and headed out the door on her way to the airport.
Terezin, December 1991
The small room had low ceilings and was completely dark. From somewhere above, a host of pigeons cooed. Vanesa found the sound, which seemed to increase in intensity as she ventured deeper into the room, deceptively comforting—like a lullaby, soothing and relaxing, distracting her from the fear that had settled in her throat along with the choking dust her footsteps raised.
In the dim light from the doorway, she could make out four rows of three-tiered bunks, each row subdivided into six sleeping sections that would have held three people each, sleeping side-by-side. She quickly did the math, and shook her head. A total of 72 people had lived in this small space—people who had not been allowed to bathe regularly, people who were more often than not sick with contagious diseases, people who had the bowel afflictions of the chronically undernourished. There was no lavatory on the entire floor, Vanesa knew from the survivor accounts she’d read. There would have been only a communal bucket in a corner of the room. The windows, which faced the courtyard, were boarded closed, as they would have been then to discourage suicide attempts. Surprisingly, of the roughly 150,000 people that came through Theresienstadt, only 500 attempted suicide, and less than half of those were successful.
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