Galerie

by Steven Greenberg

  Vanesa shuddered and looked around the cramped space, which must have been an inferno in the summer and miserable in any weather. Could I have lived like this? she wondered. Would I have had the strength to get out of my bunk, infested or not, every day? Perhaps the true test of strength would have been to willfully not get out of bed, to not succumb to false hope, to not play a part in the giant and twisted ruse that was Theresienstadt.

  Marek’s flashlight beam shone from the far side of the room.

  She headed in that direction, stepping around partially disassembled bunks, discarded suitcases, and stalagmite-like piles of pigeon droppings. The noise of the pigeons increased, as if they resented the imposition on their previously quiet haven.

  Marek turned when she arrived, handed her a small flashlight, and indicated that she should start searching the next row of bunks. “I recall the room for sure, but not the exact bunk.” He shrugged apologetically. “When I surveyed this barracks, I was not yet aware that this symbol had any significance. It is, I recall, somewhere on the second tier of bunks, more or less at eye-level.”

  Vanesa carefully made her way to the adjacent row of bunks, and stopped, suddenly struck by the recollection that her grandfather Hayim, her mother’s father, had been among those brought to Terezin in early 1942 to prepare the camp’s infrastructure. She hadn’t thought of it until now. She caressed the bunk’s rough wooden vertical supports with her flashlight beam, then ran her free hand over the wood, smoothed and oily from the thousands of hands that had grasped them since, she imagined, her grandfather had built them.

  What must it have been like to build your own prison? Would there have been any satisfaction in having a personal stake in such a hell?

  She recalled her mother’s occasional memories of Hayim, which would simply pop out at the most incongruous times—in line at the neighborhood makolet—‘mini-market’—at the sink washing dishes, walking together back from school. These recollections were so few and far between that each had left a lifelong impression on the girl so starved for answers. Her mother’s eyes would grow distant, and her hands would stop whatever they were doing, as if the power of the memory had completely seized control of her body. She’d tell stories of how Hayim would pick her up and swing her around when he came home in the evening, until she was so dizzy that she’d beg him to stop, not actually wanting him to. Or how he’d bring her metal shavings from the factory in Kladno, beautiful and in interesting shapes but razor-sharp, and how she’d kept them, over her mother’s strenuous objections, in a small metal tea box by her bed. Or of the handmade dollhouse, complete with miniature furniture that he’d worked on every night for months prior to her sixth birthday. Her mother always punctuated these stories with, “But that was before.” Then, inevitably, her mother would end with a session of closed-door crying that left young Vanesa alone in the apartment’s small living room, head swimming, wondering what she’d done wrong, overcome with guilt at having made her mother so sad.

  These memories, despite their impact, had never made Vanesa feel any closer to the grandfather she’d never met. Now, walking down the row of bunks he may have built with his own hands, she felt an intimacy she’d never imagined grow between her and Hayim. He had been here, she thought, and he would have been glad she’d come to see this place, a monument to the powerful, calloused hands her mother had remembered. A monument to his love, forever denied her.

  From across the room came a sudden shuffling, an audibly sharp intake of breath, and a faint gurgle. The pigeons stopped cooing their lullaby. There was a flapping of wings. A palpable silence fell over the dark and fetid dormitory room.

  Tel Aviv, November 1991

  My wife stormed out the door, but turned back to get in the last word.

  I let her, still reeling from guilt, and smart enough to know when to keep my mouth shut.

  “Take your baseless collaboration theories, and go fuck yourself.”

  With that, she slammed the door to our flat, leaving me behind in the silence I’d come to know so well. I berated myself for being so crass and thoughtless, yet at the same time I doubted the veracity of her theory, whatever it was. What connection could there have been? It was far more likely, I reasoned internally, that there had been a paperwork mess-up, that her father and grandfather had been in Prague, but not on the transport to Auschwitz. It was reasonable to assume that Michael had simply seen this symbol, whatever it was, and become enamored with it, as young boys would.

  I should have known better than to use the word “collaborator,” though. When the new evidence had come to light earlier that year about John Demanjuk, the Ukrainian Treblinka guard who’d been tried and convicted in Israel, we’d had a long argument over the usage of the term.

  “Now, he is a collaborator in the true sense of the term,” she had said. “But the word has been vastly misused as regards the Nazis, especially in Israel. It has been applied far too loosely, in my opinion.”

  I settled back on our hard couch to listen as she continued her lecture.

  “There were no shortage of Jews who worked with or for the Nazis, but were they all collaborators? I don’t buy into the theories of Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg, who claimed that without the cooperation of Jews, the extent of the genocide would have been measurably diminished. Did Jews in any sense facilitate the tragedy of the Holocaust? Undeniably. Would alternatives to this assistance have been found by the Nazis? Absolutely. And would these alternatives have resulted in even greater suffering and losses? I truly think so.”

  Because the Judenrat, the Jewish Councils who oversaw the ghettos, the members of the ghetto police force, even the Jewish kapos in the concentration camps—most of them, Vanesa believed with all her heart, were not collaborators in any sense of the word. These people had chosen or been forced to carry the burden of responsibility in impossible circumstances. They acted either out of pure self-preservation or out of a sense of duty, not necessarily for personal gain, and not necessarily from cowardice. They bore the derision of the Nazi masters and the hatred of their fellow Jews. They made difficult decisions that often saved lives, even as they shouldered the massive guilt for lives that would likely have been lost in any case.

  Theirs was the “grey zone,” as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called it—a place in which black-and-white morality, in the absence of the social contract, faded to uniform grey. Who was more guilty, the “collaborating” kapo that ensured all prisoners in a barracks received equal portions of food, even if this involved beating prisoners to keep them from stealing, or the individual prisoner, who stole food from his weaker companions? Who caused, and who prevented, more suffering?

  In any case, Vanesa contended, these “collaborators” paid dearly for their choices, or for the simple misfortune of having been chosen. Many were killed by their fellow prisoners, and many eventually committed suicide, some long after the war had ended. In Israel, a handful were tried in the 1950’s and 60’s in the so-called Kapo Trials, although they were based on populist legislation, designed more to placate the 200,000-strong survivor community in the fledgling state than to seek true justice.

  The grey zone was, Vanesa concluded, as devoid of justice as it was of clear-cut morality.

  Terezin, December 1991

  “Marek?” Vanesa called softly toward the light from Marek’s flashlight, which was now shining up from the floor in the direction of the room’s outer wall. Perhaps he was looking under the bunk for the symbol, she thought. She lowered her voice now. “Marek?”

  She started to move toward the light, still keeping an eye on the beams of the bunks she passed. As she rounded the end of the row, with anticlimactic banality, she saw it. It was right above the spot where she’d placed a steadying hand to step over a fallen board—the symbol, partially obscured by net-like cobwebs, but clearly carved into the soft wood. She brushed a hand across the beam to remove the remaining dust. The symbol was colored in black—perhaps pencil, perhaps soot—and directly below i
t, in letters no taller than her thumb, Vanesa uncovered the validation she’d come to Terezin to find.

  “Zachrana zivota,” the words read, carved and colored such that their connection to the proximate symbol was unquestionable. She exhaled, suddenly realizing that she’d been holding her breath, and read the words again, as if finding them difficult to comprehend. “Preserving life,” they read, in Czech.

  So it was true. Rather than wait for the hope he knew would never materialize, her grandfather Jakub had opted to facilitate the lesser of two evils. He had chosen to work with the Nazis, but did so with the clear motivation of saving Jewish lives. And he had taken Michael with him. Michael, who in his impressionable youth had raised the symbol of the Nazi unit they’d worked with to iconic status, carving it into the wood of what had briefly been his bunk, before leaving for Prague. He would have been proud of it, would he not? They were, after all, preserving life. This would have been something to celebrate, a clear moral lifeline in the maelstrom of their day-to-day hell that even a twelve-year-old could understand.

  Thus it was also true that her father had met the people in his stories. They’d passed through on their way to Istanbul and new lives—lives made possible by her grandfather’s dedication, sacrifice, and altruism.

  A surge of pride rose in her chest, and her cheeks flushed with excitement. With joy in her voice, she called out, this time with no hesitation or fear. “Marek? I found it. Over here!”

  She smiled and swung her flashlight toward where he had been standing, but the narrow beam of light revealed only empty space. Perhaps he’d left the room, she thought, or decided that this wasn’t the right dormitory, after all, and moved on.

  Her excitement suddenly retreated before uncertainty. Fear crept back in, and the hairs on the back of her neck again prickled. She forced her fear down, relaxing her shoulders and furrowing her brow analytically.

  “Marek?” she again called, now with growing annoyance. She had no time for this. There was still so much work to be done.

  The sound of footsteps echoed about her. She turned rapidly back in the direction from which she had come, then swung around again, confused as to the actual source of the noise.

  “Look,” she called out, exasperated, “we need to get out of here, okay? Let’s go.”

  Now she was truly focused. There really was no time. She’d tasted the elixir of discovery, and intensely wanted to drink more. In fact, this thirst so consumed her, the questions flooding her mind so captivated her, and so intent was she on sharing her discovery with a fellow scholar, that when she slipped in the pool of blood spreading from the inert form wearing Marek’s clothes, she had no time to process what or whom she was seeing.

  She had no time before the hand clamped over her mouth. She had no time to puzzle at the motivation for this attack or its connection to the incidents in Prague and the secret she’d just uncovered. She had no time to consider her grandfather’s decision, her father’s stories, her mother’s anguish, Uncle Tomas’ long silence. She had no time for moral quandaries, no time to debate the borders of collaboration and self-preservation. She had no time before she felt the knife pierce her back once, twice, three times—red hot pinpricks that quickly faded to dull throbbing. She had no time as her questions, like the moral conundrums of her grandfather before her, were engulfed by Terezin’s darkness.

  Tel Aviv, January 1992

  The first time I told Vanesa Neuman I loved her, we were barefoot on a grassy hill at a Grateful Dead concert. Or so she claimed. We’d driven the hour or so to the show, a group of eager young counselors crammed into my station wagon, Vanesa warm against me in the middle of the front bench seat. We’d shared a joint on the way, then another when we arrived, then another when we found a spot on the hill, next to a group of acid-heads convinced that I was Jesus and Vanesa was Mary. We didn’t argue with them, making the most of our temporary deific notoriety.

  In my pot-induced stupor, I might just as easily have professed my love to Margaret Thatcher or Ethel Merman, had either incongruously showed up at a Grateful Dead concert in Wisconsin.

  Yet Vanesa recalled quite clearly slow-dancing to Ripple, and me bending down to push the long dark hair back from her perfect earlobe so I could whisper the words into her ear. These words had been in my soul from the moment I met her, so they may have found their way to my mouth in such an uninhibited context. I don’t remember it, but I believe her. Why would she lie?

  The call from the Foreign Ministry came the morning after the stabbing. Awoken from a deep sleep, and then quickly overwhelmed by the news, I comprehended only keywords, like some Cliff Notes version of a traumatic notification phone call: Terezin… stabbed… critical condition… medical airlift… lucky….

  She was unconscious for three weeks, and in and out of hospitals for three months. Although she was never again the same Vanesa I’d loved, at least we were still together. And together, we deteriorated during those first grinding weeks, both regressing to a lean and feral state.

  Her curves fell away, the fertile rolling hills of her body turning to craggy mountain peaks and valleys. Her cheeks sunk and bags grew under her eyes.

  My body, too rebelled—against endless hours in a plastic chair next to her bed, against sporadically consumed cafeteria food, against sleepless hours of angst.

  She’d been lucky, the Foreign Ministry representative that visited the hospital told me. One of the workshop owners had seen her and her colleague go into the barracks, and had reported the trespassers to the local police. The doctors echoed this assessment. She’d been lucky that the knife had missed the Abdominal Aorta, hadn’t even nicked the Inferior Vena Cava, had only damaged the liver, only destroyed one kidney. She’d been lucky the ambulance had arrived quickly despite the snowstorm, lucky that Uncle Tomas had arranged for the flying medical transport to retrieve her from Prague, lucky that he’d managed to arrange this on such short notice, and lucky that she was a tough and stubborn young woman.

  Lucky.

  I sat in that chair, all day and every night, for those first weeks. The world moved around me, and winter deepened outside as I internalized the ICU’s noisy routine: the beeping, the gurgling, the intubated groans, the nurses who were noisy and the nurses who were quiet and respectful. The sun rose and set outside, and I learned which doctors would spare five minutes to give me a thoughtful assessment, and which were too harried or self-absorbed to bother; which orderlies would set aside a plate of hospital food for me, and which would more strictly obey the rules against feeding visitors. I got used to sleeping sitting up, in snatches of two or three hours, to changing Vanesa’s diapers, clearing her surgical drains, giving her a sponge bath, adjusting her feeding tube, emptying the bag from her catheter. I got used to the sterile hallway floor which always shone horseshit green, reflecting walls painted a complimentary shade of vomit. I wondered countless times who chose the color schemes for public hospitals. Was there a special design academy that taught the unique ability to disregard aesthetics, common sense ergonomics, and good taste?

  The enforced intimacy of caring for her, though certainly one-sided, made me feel close to Vanesa, a feeling I’d missed since we parted so badly when she’d left for Prague. I savored it in my own perverse way, as if I already knew that she’d never again need me.

  Then one day, it evaporated. As I returned from the shower the nurses let me use—against regulations but most likely out of self-interest—Vanesa opened her eyes and looked at me. Or looked past me. She blinked, scanned the room, recognized me, and vaguely smiled. It was like our meeting in the airport when I first arrived in Israel—surprisingly expected, disappointing, defining, devastatingly banal.

  She had no idea what had happened, no clue as to how she’d come all the way from Terezin to Tel Aviv in an instant. I started to explain, but had gotten no farther than the word “attacked” when she gripped my wrist roughly, blurting urgently in a voice still scratchy from intubation and lack of use, “What about
Marek? What happened to Marek?”

  I told her about Jonas Jakobovits, who called every couple days to enquire about her condition in his thick English, and who had applied for a visa to come visit. I told her about his updates of Marek, who’d been less lucky than Vanesa. Although he was alive, I told Vanesa gently, the knife had severed his spinal cord, and he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was lucid, however, and Jonas said he’d been asking about her incessantly. She could call him, if she liked, as soon as she was up to it.

  She turned away from me, her lips compressed together to suppress the sob or the scream welling in her, and nodded mutely.

  Then I told her the rest of the story: the police investigation turned up nothing; the authorities baffled at the seemingly random act of violence perpetrated in such a sleepy village as Terezin; the helpfulness of the Israeli consul; the swift airlift thanks to Uncle Tomas.

  Something in my voice gave me away, because she gripped my wrist again at the mention of his name. “Where is Uncle Tomas? Why isn’t he here?”

  I took her hands, summoned empathy as a substitute for actual regret or sadness, and told her about the stroke.

  It had happened several days after she’d been flown back, when it had still been touch-and-go as to whether she’d live. They’d found him in his apartment, alive, but partially paralyzed and unable to speak. He had quickly stabilized, but remained unable to walk, write or communicate. He was also, it turned out, destitute. This made it fairly easy for the courts, which had quickly released the low-rent “key money” apartment he’d lived in for some 30 years to its original owners, and ordered Tomas moved to a state-run hostel for Holocaust survivors near Pardesiya, where he could get the round-the-clock care he required.