The metal-on-metal banging increased in intensity and urgency.
Vanesa raised her voice and leaned in to ensure that Tomas could hear. She had prepared this speech, and refused to be interrupted.
“It was like nausea, a bad, long-term case of nausea—needing to throw up but never getting the relief of actually doing so. I was emotionally obsessed. I could recognize it—still can—like nausea, but there is no controlling it. There is no magic milk of magnesia I can take to eliminate this feeling. I wish there were.”
Tomas gazed impassively, without emotion, not yet comprehending.
The metal banging trailed off, as if Henya had tired or despaired of ever receiving an answer from her lost son, then renewed furiously. This time, it was not accompanied by a motherly holler, but by a deep and resonating wail, a gut-wrenching cry that launched fifty years of pent-up despair out into the hallway, “Mooooiiiissssshhhheeee, why? Why? Why!”
Vanesa shifted in her chair and continued in a tremulous voice, which grew in both volume and intensity now. “This is why I went to Prague, Uncle. This is why it was worth it. This is what I have to make you understand. I know you know about my research, the details of what I discovered about you, Father, and Grandfather. And I know you know the answers to my questions, but I will not ask you to share your memories. They are yours, and I respect your right to keep them in the dark. At the same time, they are mine, too, and I need to bring them out into the light. I need to touch them, even if they’re dusty, or razor sharp, or rotten. I need to feel them because, as you said to me when I was ten, they will never desert me, even if I try.”
A scratchy male voice sounded now, rising coarsely above the din of clanging and wailing, confronting the wall of sound emanating from Henya’s room. “He’s never coming to dinner, you old bitch. He’s dead. He’s smoke. He’s ashes. So shut the fuck up!”
Vanesa took a breath, and took Tomas’ hand. As she held his palm, so soft and smooth, his grey pajama sleeve slid back to reveal the faded number tattooed on his forearm: A-25379. She touched it with a tentative index finger, then covered it with her palm and squeezed his arm firmly.
“And that’s why I’m going back to Prague, Uncle. I sold the store, but I’m keeping the apartment. I took a leave of absence from the university. My physical therapist says I’m ready, and my trauma counselor says it may actually be an important psychological step, going back. As for my husband, well, we….” She registered the sudden alarm that had appeared in Tomas’ wide eyes.
They were watery, and he was blinking urgently, emphatic double blinks, over and over, separated by a pause. No, no, no, no…. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and a fresh trickle of saliva ran from his mouth as he strained to speak, managing to produce only a grotesque bark that slid from the back of his throat, wet and incomprehensible.
From the hallway, Henya’s voice began again, this time with pleading. “Moishe, please come home to Mommy. Please come back to me, my sweet, sweet boy. I’m waiting for you. Pleeeeeaaassseeee….” The banging resumed with increasing urgency.
Vanesa squeezed Tomas’ arm more firmly, perhaps a bit too firmly, but the effect was immediate, as his breathing slowed and his eyes refocused. She again traced the number with her finger.
She looked into Tomas’ eyes when she spoke, her voice not accusing, perhaps even kind, yet resolute. “The numbers in the A series in Auschwitz stopped at 25378, Uncle. They were supposed to stop at 20000, then restart in the B series, but some clerk overlooked this, and the last 5378 of these were issued to a trainload of women that had arrived from Hungary. A-25379 is not a number that was ever issued at Auschwitz, nor at any other camp that used tattoos for prisoner identification, as far as I could find.”
Henya’s voice now changed. Insistence had failed. Anger had failed. Pleading had failed. Her voice now rang flat, tired and hungry, as unemotional as a frayed gray-striped camp uniform. “I’ll come find you, Moishe. I’ll find you, and we’ll eat together. We will.”
Vanesa dropped her voice a notch lower and squeezed Tomas’ hand lovingly. “Whatever I discover, Uncle—about you, about Father, about Grandfather—none of that can change this. This is real, and no past can change it. I have respected your silence over the years, and I still respect it. I understand that you can’t tell me what you know, that for whatever reason this is not a story you can share, but now you have to respect my need to know. Regardless of the outcome, regardless of the nature of the truth, regardless of the cost—I must know.”
Tel Aviv, 1976
Vanesa was eleven years old, and the silence in the flat slid from one room to the next with snail-like viscosity, broken only by the honking of the truck horn, which still burst through the evening quiet at occasional intervals from afar. The silence in the living room stifled, flowing from under the now-unlocked bathroom door, palpable, sticky. It would never wash off—not with words, not with detergent, not even with hope.
Tonight’s silence hung heavier than usual, however, much heavier. It had been her fault—her fault that Father had been at his desk, head bowed as if praying over the small leather album with the collection of black-and-white photographs that had clearly once been crumpled and re-smoothed. She’d been confused because he browsed the album from the end, not opening it in the direction her Hebrew readers opened.
He explained patiently that this book worked in a different direction, a direction not of this place, not of this time. Then he turned back to the album, and the silence had resumed.
It was her fault—her fault that Mother had been silently crying in the bathroom, again, and her fault that…. The thoughts ran through her head as she sat absently rubbing her sticky hands on her dress. She’d made two terrible, terrible mistakes, and now they were all paying for her thoughtlessness, her insensitivity, her stupidity. What had she been thinking?
The first mistake was not cleaning her plate.
She knew food was sacred, something to be hoarded in bulk bags that strained pantry shelves, overflowed into storeroom cabinets, expanded refrigerator capacity to extremes that defied the laws of physics. Only spoiled children left food on their plates, and as she pushed her chair back, deep in thought about what she’d heard that day, she left the trimmings of the tough beef roast bleeding watery gravy from the high side of her plate.
Her father glared; her mother lowered her gaze.
Father set down his fork and knife with deliberate purpose, and started to raise his voice in the tense tones of his there-are-starving-children-blah-blah-blah lecture, which inevitably spiraled into a tirade about spoiled sabra children, who never wanted for anything. The brats. Did they not realize? Did they not understand?
The honking outside, previously sporadic, grew more insistent as the driver’s annoyance grew. Her father turned with brief but feral animosity towards the open window, silently mouthing the word “barbarians” as he turned back to the table.
His lecture had not had time to grow beyond its initial outrage before she cocked her head, the thought that had been whirling inside finally ready to move from brain to mouth, and said, “I have a question. What are sabonim? Are you sabonim? Does that make me a sabon, too?”
Her father jumped to his feet, knocking the chair over behind him, and rushed at her, the lecture forgotten, the horn—which was blowing ever more urgently—forgotten.
She froze, staring at the bulk of his onrushing figure until he was upon her, his strong, calloused hands closing on her shoulders. She saw his fingernails were only half grown back since they’d last loosened and dropped—a result of the constant exposure to the arsenic he used in the shop. She went limp as he shook her, demanding to know where she’d heard this?
“Who said this? Who could say this? What kind of people live in this godforsaken place, who can say things like that? What do they think, that we were on vacation over there?”
The intensity of his interrogation abated only when the horn from below turned into a long single blast, at whose sound
he dropped her like a child’s forgotten toy, flew to the window, and screamed curses in Czech at the driver below.
She fell to the floor, hitting her head on the chair on the way, and lay there dazed, her father’s curses mixing not unpleasantly with the horn’s whine into a sickly-sweet cacophony, on which she drifted until the slam of the bathroom door shook from her reverie. She scrambled to her feet, but the door was already locked.
The driver’s voice from below, answering her father with equal belligerence and rancor, forced its way into the flat. The harsh voice partially drowned out the determined rustlings she could hear through the door, and muffled her ineffectual pounding on it, but could not completely mask the echoes of her mother’s harried murmuring. Then a car door slammed, an engine raced, tires squealed, and a throw rug of silence fell over the room.
Her mother’s voice, clearly addressing no one, grew clearer. “Preserving life, he said. Preserving life. What kind of life was he preserving? Who’s? For what reason? For sabonim? For soap?” Her voice grew fainter as she mumbled on, but the desperate tone, so familiar to young Vanesa, hung in the air.
Her father walked wearily to his desk, opened the album, and hung his head.
She remained sitting with her back against the door of the silent bathroom, calling weakly every now and again for her mother to answer, telling her that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant it, that she didn’t even know what the word meant. Suddenly, her hands grew damp, as the sticky silence flowing out from under the bathroom door corporealized, turning from frozen white into warm red. She lifted her sanguine hands in disbelief, smelling the rusty odor of blood, and screamed.
Her father kicked down the door, and the sounds of his moans, the edge of hysteria in his voice on the phone, the ambulance’s siren wailing from the street, the heavy footfalls of the ambulance crew coming up the stairs—these sounds all faded into a vague mishmash. But the look in her father’s eyes as he followed the gurney out the door—a look of accusation, of silently vicious condemnation—seared into her mind.
Then she was alone, again, with just the silence for a companion, until Uncle Tomas arrived. She asked him, crying hysterically, utterly lost, what those kids had meant, taunting her by calling her parents sabonim.
“Soaps,” she said. “What’s so bad about soaps? It’s funny, no?”
Uncle Tomas explained, “It isn’t funny at all. It’s the worst kind of crass sabra slang. Some, and only the most insensitive,” he said, “called Holocaust survivors sabonim.”
Tel Aviv, 1991
“He didn’t say why,” she told me in her usual lecture tone, slightly deflated by the memories of the story she had just recounted. “Only years later did I learn what this referenced. It referred to the soap that the Nazis had allegedly produced from the body fat of murdered Jews.”
She sighed. “You see, not everyone in the newly-declared State of Israel, and even prior to the official declaration of independence, was happy about receiving over 200,000 refugees from Europe. They were not universally welcomed here with the warmth and compassion that popular history would have us believe. In fact, Holocaust survivors were largely resented by the population that had made aliyah before the war, some of them generations before. Survivors were, of course, resented for the simple reason that they added a tremendous economic and social burden to an already overburdened population.
“But the resentment went far, far deeper. Survivors were not resented solely for practical reasons. They were resented, in fact despised and frequently derided, both behind closed doors and sometimes quite openly—as in the sabonim slang—because of what they represented. They were perceived as victims, old-world Jews, sheep who had been led to slaughter without fighting back. Victims didn’t sync with the mask of the new self-sufficient Jew that Zionism had crafted, the self-reliant, tough and prickly sabras that were to populate this new country. They were, and still are, referred to collectively as she’erit haplita—‘the remnants of expulsion’—an idiom that suggests useless, ineffectual leftovers regurgitated from some lost world.
“In the post-war collective Israeli consciousness, survivors were not even afforded a distinct identity, like the Oriental Jews expelled from the Arab countries. These people who had lost so much, who had been exposed to unimaginable physical and mental trauma, were lumped together and perceived as soft, often crazy. They were a burden that had to be borne, surely, but not happily. Grudgingly. They were, in a very real sense, a source of shame.”
Vanesa paused for oratorical effect, leaned forward as if to better engage her audience of one, and lowered her voice to ensure maximum attention. “I believe that what the historian sees, and what the layman does not, is that human nature can be cloaked in ideology. It can have its face painted with the colors of culture, and it can don pluralistic plumage, but in times of trial, in times when the people fight over who gets to strip the last shred of meat from the bone, our true face is revealed, glorious and degenerate in equal measure. This happened in wartime Europe, and this happened in post-war Israel. It still happens every day, everywhere. Personally, this is what draws me to history, because the only recourse we have is to look back and understand our history, accept our nature, and unabashedly look our true selves in the eyes. This, I believe, is the only way to gain a realistic perspective on our future.”
Prague, June 1992
The trip from Ruzyne International Airport to the house where Marek was staying in Prague’s plush Stresovice neighborhood took only twenty minutes in Jonas Jakobovits’ red Skoda Favorit. A clear June sky smiled down on them, blue with just a smattering of fluffy white clouds, making the open-windowed trip pleasant, if somewhat noisy. The Skoda, lacking air conditioning and with pieces of plastic interior already dangling loosely despite its relative newness, was not the best venue for conversation, even with the windows closed. Vanesa contented herself with a smile for Jonas when he looked over at her, and gazed out the window at the city going by.
He seemed happy to see her, although the trauma and stress of the past six months were clearly etched in the bags under his eyes and streak of grey at his temple, which she hadn’t noticed the last time she’d seen him. These small chinks in his aesthetic armor, however, seemed to have no effect on the overall power of his presence. He remained the tall, well-built, intensely intelligent and handsomely dark-eyed man that she’d met last winter.
When he wrapped his arms around her at the airport with an intimacy borne of six months of near-daily overseas phone calls, she’d felt momentarily safe and protected, a rarity for her since the Terezin attack.
As they drove east on the wide green Evropska parkway, they passed a billboard for the recent Guns-n-Roses concert at the Strahov Stadium, and Jonas gave a thumbs-up, indicating that he’d been at the packed concert. He took his hands off the wheel momentarily, attempting an electric guitar solo pose—à la Slash, the group’s iconic guitarist—that was as ineffective as it was hysterical, and smiled broadly.
She returned his smile, and turned her face back to the window. She tipped her head back and let the wind stream through her hair as she watched the overhead wires of the city’s electric tram lines, which now ran down the center of the broad street, fly by overhead. She felt Jonas’s glancing yet appreciative gaze as she did so.
She struggled to understand her feelings upon this return to Prague. Was it triumph to have returned alive, determined to find and confront her attackers? Was it resignation, understanding that the key to her destiny had long ago been interred somewhere under Prague’s rough cobblestones, waiting for her along with the answers she so desperately sought? Or was it less romantic, a simple, tooth-gritting determination, that Israeli let’s-get-it-done-and-move-on force of will which is both glorious and reckless in its unwillingness to stop and consider the personal consequences of failure?
In addition to his duties at the museum, Jonas had explained in one of their many phone calls, he’d taken on the role of research assistant, academi
c liaison, logistics manager, and errand boy for Marek, since they’d moved him into the converted bedroom in his Aunt Agata’s small flat four months previously. It was not an easy role, Vanesa knew, but having introduced Marek to her, triggering the chain of events which led to his injury, Jonas felt both morally obligated and at least as curious as Marek and Vanesa as to the motives behind the attack and its connection to Vanesa’s original mission. Over the past months, he’d spent nearly every evening with Marek, reviewing shreds of evidence from obscure historical records and passing references in testimonies obtained via mail from Yad V’Shem—anything that could help them find the meaning of the symbol that decorated Michael’s diary, Marek’s eclectic collection of Nazi-era paraphernalia, and the bunk in Theresienstadt.
It had finally happened, Jonas had told her excitedly after their embrace at the airport that morning, taking her elbow to steer her towards the baggage claim. Marek, with Aunt Agata’s help, had called him late last night, said that he’d found something incredible, but wouldn’t say what. Marek just kept repeating “it’s in the map, it’s in the map, how did we not see it before?” Jonas couldn’t get anything else out of him, so he and Vanesa would be surprised together.
They stopped at an intersection, and Vanesa watched pedestrians clad in short pants pass under a huge billboard that dwarfed them from above, displaying a giant map of Czechoslovakia, split in two, with the words “Dissolution Now!” emblazoned in bold red letters. The summer of 1992 was hotter than usual, by Prague’s cool standards, resulting in the ubiquitous short clothing that showed off legions of ivory arms and legs, which contrasted sharply in Vanesa’s mind with the tanned limbs of Tel Aviv’s masses.
The heat’s effect on the sweaty citizens of Prague was cooled by the shadow of the dramatic events shaking the country. The Velvet Divorce, the voluntary and peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, was finally at hand.
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