The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  She had no idea what it felt like to visit her office and be told no progress had been made. It was impossible for her to understand what I was going through—what those people she pointed to outside her window were going through. How could she fathom what it was like for us to search for someone who was an ocean away? Day after day, Americans were inundated with photographs of war-torn Europe. The piles of dead bodies. The mass graves. The stories emerging about what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

  So, yes, on more than one occasion, I sat across from Ms. Dobrow and simply put my head in my hands. Or pounded my fist against her desk. Or swore out of frustration that her office wasn’t doing enough to help me.

  And most of the time, she sat quietly across from me, her hands resting on a large stack of manila folders.

  “I told you from the beginning, Mr. Kohn, that it could take a long time, a very long time, to locate your wife.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Europe is in a shambles right now. We are relying on the few Jewish organizations over there that are in the middle of registering the living, accounting for the dead. Millions of people have been moved around in displaced persons camps. It’s complete mayhem over there.” She cleared her throat. “You will need to brace yourself for what might be a very long search. As I keep saying, you’re going to need to be patient.”

  She looked me straight in the eyes.

  “And you need to be prepared to find that she did not survive.”

  I shuddered.

  “She is alive,” I told Ms. Dobrow. “She is alive.”

  She did not answer me. It was the only time I remember she lowered her eyes.

  I remained undeterred. For six years, once a week, I went to that office. The tracing center continued to receive new lists from Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau, as well as from other smaller camps like Sobibor and Ravensbrück. Lists of both the living and the dead.

  Ms. Dobrow was replaced by a Mrs. Goldstein, then by a Ms. Markovitz. And then, one day, I was told they had found Lenka’s name on a list from Auschwitz, which by then was well known as the most dreaded of the camps. Hers, along with her sister’s and her parents’. There was no mention of any child.

  “We believe they were all gassed the day of their arrival,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Dr. Kohn.”

  She handed me a copy of the transport list.

  Lenka Maizel Kohn, it said in typed letters. I pressed it to my lips.

  “If you need to be alone,” Ms. Markovitz said, touching my shoulder. “We have a special room . . .”

  I don’t remember much after that, except for a small room with several other shocked people sitting on plastic seats around me. I remember hearing two young girls reciting the kaddish. I remember seeing some people holding each other and weeping. But there were a few like me. Alone, and too stunned even to cry.

  CHAPTER 43

  LENKA

  I gave Rita the drawing of her and her baby as soon as I finished it. I placed it next to her small cot and hugged Oskar, who was now trembling in a tattered undershirt, his ribs rising beneath the threadbare cloth.

  “Thank you, Lenka,” he said, trying to regain his composure. “We will treasure this until our last breath.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. I looked at my friend, who was still clutching her now-lifeless baby.

  I went over to squeeze Rita’s leg through the blanket. I still remember the sensation of touching her. That feeling that there was no flesh on her, only bone.

  All I could do was embrace her, as gently as possible.

  She did not look up at me. She did not even hear me. When I left, she was singing the Yiddish song “Eine Kinderen,” into the dead child’s ear.

  I wish I could tell you that Rita was able to rebound after the death of her baby. But that would be lying. Who can ever recover from such a loss? I watched as my friend grew weaker. She was unable to paint. Her hands shook too much, and she was unable to concentrate. It was as if her will to live had died with Adi.

  Terezín had no tolerance for such inefficiency. It allowed you to live—and perhaps even create—within its walls, as long as your work proved valuable to the Reich. Certainly you might die in the infirmary from typhus or on your cot from starvation, but your passing would be seen merely as an inconvenience. And when you were no longer needed, or when the barracks were too full and new space was required for the next arriving transport, you were simply sent east.

  Within a few weeks of Adi’s death, Rita received notice of her transport. Oskar did not receive such a notice, but he volunteered to go anyway, not willing to remain in Terezín without her.

  We were not permitted to walk with them as they were sent away, so I had to say my good-byes the night before.

  Oskar had taken Rita to meet me outside my barracks just before curfew. He held her up with his arm. She looked the way Adi looked the first time I saw him. She was almost transparent except for the blue veins of her throat straining through her skin.

  She was nothing more than a ghost now. Her pale green eyes were the milky color of apple jade, her blond hair the color of ash. She was little more than a tired, empty shroud containing sparrow-thin bones and a world of heartache. I hugged my friend. I whispered her name and told her we would see each other again after the war.

  Her husband nodded to me and squeezed my hand. He reached under his shirt, where my drawing of Adi and Rita was rolled up and lodged against his waistband.

  “Here,” he said. “We’re afraid to take it where we’re going.” He was choking on the words. “It is safer with you, where it won’t get lost.”

  I took the drawing and told him I would keep it safe. “I will find you after the war and give it back to you then. I promise.”

  Oskar placed a finger to his lips, signaling me that I needn’t say another word. He knew—just as I knew Lucie would do when I gave her my most treasured possessions before the transport—that I would do anything to keep it safe.

  I hid the drawing between two pieces of cardboard under my mattress. But I began to worry that the weight of three women might harm it in some way. Then I placed it in my suitcase, but soon found myself racked with fear that someone might steal it.

  But, I thought, who would steal a simple drawing of a mother and child? It couldn’t be used for bartering. It had no value except to me, Rita, and Oskar.

  So the picture remained in my suitcase for some time, and I tried not to think of it too often. I considered myself only its temporary caretaker, whose job was to keep it safe until its rightful owners could reclaim it. Every now and then, though, I would climb the ladder in our barracks to make sure that it remained hidden and out of harm’s way.

  Terezín had grown even more crowded. Later, in books, I would learn the exact population. By 1943 there were over fifty-eight thousand men, women, and children within the walls of a town that was built to hold seven thousand.

  And with each newly arrived transport, hundreds, sometimes a thousand at a time, were sent away.

  Girls with names that were foreign to me like Luiza, Annika, and Katya began to fill the beds in my barracks that were once occupied by girls with Czech names like Hanka, Eva, Flaska, and Anna.

  The fights increased within the barracks. The girls were irritated from lack of sleep and hunger, and from working so hard that the skin of their once-elegant fingers was worn to bloody tatters.

  One girl steals from her own mother. Her younger sister accuses her. Their fight begins as verbal insults; then it escalates. Soon they are fighting like animals, pulling hair, one even biting the other’s arm. The dorm matron tries to break them up. I watch, speechless. I have often shared what little bread I have with Mother or Marta, but I cannot help but wonder how much longer it will be before I become like them.

  The stealing in the barracks has gotten out of control. Articles I would have once considered garbage—a broken comb, a single shoelace, a wooden spoon—are now commodities that can be used for bartering f
or something more precious: a single cigarette, a pat of margarine, a piece of chocolate. We sleep in our clothes. Some of us even in our shoes—frightened that if we leave them below our bunk, someone will steal them.

  Everything is at risk for pilfering by another pair of hungry hands. And anything that isn’t of use, people will think nothing of throwing onto the brazier as fuel. I think of my drawing in my suitcase and know that when winter comes, someone will find it and use it for kindling, one more discardable thing someone will decide to throw into the empty stove for an extra second of warmth.

  In November 1943, a census is ordered from Berlin. The entire ghetto is summoned one morning at 7 A.M. to a large field at the outer perimeter of the ramparts. We are forced to stand without our coats, some of us without shoes, until every head is counted. We stand there through the morning, through the afternoon, and then the evening. We are given no food, no water, and are not allowed to go to the toilet. After they finish their tally, reaching a total of more than forty thousand, we are led back in the darkness to our barracks. We walk past the bodies of hundreds of people who were too weak to endure the seventeen-hour ordeal, their corpses remaining in the exact spots where they fell.

  In the technical department, I continued to work on my assigned project. I completed fourteen drawings illustrating the ongoing construction of the railroad into the ghetto, and began others that showed the addition of new barracks. Fritta told me he was pleased with my work, though Leo Haas rarely looked my way. Sometimes, I would hear the two of them arguing in a corner about something. Haas would raise his arms and his face would be red with frustration.

  “These are excellent,” Fritta said one afternoon as he lifted my pages to the light. “Too bad you have to waste your energy on this nonsense.” He shook his head. “In another time, your talents would be put to better use.”

  While he is saying this, I want to interrupt him and shout, Yes! Let’s put this hand of mine to a higher purpose! Let me in on what you and Haas are working on. Let me paint pictures of the transports, or the smoke from the new crematorium . . .

  But my voice is caught in the back of my throat. I look up at him, hoping he understands that I am eager to work in any kind of underground movement that is taking shape within the concentration camp.

  I think he senses what I am thinking. He takes one of his large hands and places it on my shoulder. “Lenka,” he whispers, “when this is over, you’ll always have your brush and paper to record it all. Until then, don’t do anything that might jeopardize you and your family’s safety.”

  I nod and take my drawings back with me to the drafting table. I put my elbows down and rest my head in my hands for a few minutes to compose myself. When I straighten up, Otto is looking over at me and I manage a smile.

  One afternoon, when I am waiting on line to receive my lunch ration, I find Petr Kien standing behind me.

  “What is it today, Lenka? Water soup with a slice of potato or water soup with one black turnip?”

  I am surprised he knows my name.

  “I think it smells like rotten cabbage.”

  He laughs. “It always smells rotten, Lenka. You must have figured that out by now.

  “Where’s Otto?” he asks.

  I look at him. The handsome face, his shock of thick black hair that reminds me of Josef.

  I am suddenly flushed. Could it be that he has been watching me?

  “Otto’s wife was able to have lunch with him today,” I say. I had been so happy to see the rare look of pleasure on Otto’s face when he set out to see her.

  Petr doesn’t mention his wife, though I know he’s married. We sit on a bench outside the Magdeburg barracks, sipping our soup without tasting it.

  A single cabbage leaf floats on top.

  Petr was clear bright light. Otto, a melancholy slip of shadow. I loved them both. Being friends with men of such contasting personalities helped sustain me. Petr volunteered to illustrate every operatic program, every poster promoting a play or concert. He could not stop drawing even at lunch, even when we were done with our work in the technical department, even when only a few hours remained before curfew.

  Although Petr took risks to paint openly, what he chose to paint was by no means controversial. He painted mostly portraits.

  I watched him one evening as he worked on a study of a woman named Ilse Weber, her hand touching her cheek, her eyes dark and intelligent, her lips slightly upturned. Another time, he drew Zuzka Levitová in black ink, her large froglike eyes rendered like a caricature, her enormous bosom protruding from a checkered dress he did in quick crosshatched strokes.

  “I wish I could work as quickly as you do,” I tell him one night. Just watching him brings me so much joy. He paints a watercolor of Adolf Aussenberg in a palette of rose and blue, the slender figure looking downward, his hands resting on his knees. But it is the drawing of Hana Steindlerová that is the most beguiling.

  “A woman in the four stages of life,” he explains to me. First, he draws Hana as a young girl, her features in soft focus, his pencil smudging light shadows across her face. Next to this, a quick sketch of her as seductress, her hands behind her head, her hair tousled, her blouse undone, showing the faint outline of breasts, a naval, the gentle curve of hips. The largest image of her is as a wife and mother, her face now more serious, the youthfulness replaced by maternal softness, her expression one of distant thought. At the far bottom corner, the final image is a quick study of a girl with bobbed hair, her gaze downward, her smile almost impish.

  “I love that,” I tell him. “It’s both the image of Hana’s daughter and Hana herself as a young girl.”

  “Exactly,” he says, and I can see in his eyes a sense of happiness that comes from being understood.

  Every day, I see him working in the courtyard on another portrait. There is the portrait of Frantiska Edelsteinová. The portrait of Eva Winderová with her thick eyebrows and hopeful gaze. The striking rendering of Willy van Adelsberg, the young Dutchman, his long hair and ripe mouth so seductively drawn he appears as beautiful as a girl. With Petr, I am constantly awed.

  Then there is Otto. My sweet, soulful Otto. He works in color. Watercolor. Gouache. He paints the images that haunt him. The crematoriums, the coffin storeroom in front of the morgue, the long queues for food, the old praying over the dead.

  I see him slide his drawings between pages of his official work. He never shares them with me, but he doesn’t hide them from my view either. When he leaves for the day, he tucks them into his waistband. I always pray that no one will stop him on his way to his barracks. I cannot imagine him withstanding any form of physical punishment, and I shudder at the thought of him being transported east.

  After months of observing Petr work on his portraits, I finally hear him ask if he can paint me.

  We are sitting on the same bench we always sit on, but now the air is pregnant with fall. I can detect the wind cooling, and smell the perfume of drying leaves. The red, dry earth is a dusty veil on my shoes.

  He asks me to stay later one evening in the technical department. There is risk involved in this. The obvious risk of a German soldier discovering we’ve broken the rules and the risk that I will break my promise to Fritta not to come to the office after hours.

  “But Fritta will want us to leave with everyone else,” I tell him. I don’t want to seem cowardly in mentioning the risk of being discovered by a German. “He doesn’t like people alone there. I once made the mistake of coming early . . . I promised I never would do it again.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll speak with him. We have an understanding.”

  I raise an eyebrow. But he is evasive, giving little other explanation.

  That evening, after the others have packed away their work and headed out the door, Petr and I stay at our desks.

  Otto lingers a little longer, his eyes shifting from me to Petr.

  “Everything good with you, Lenka?” he asks. Again, he reminds me of my father. His sweet concer
n and the softness of his voice as he asks his questions, always careful not to appear too forward or direct.

  I wonder if Otto thinks Petr and I are having an affair. Even though Petr is married, affairs are not out of the question here. When everyone is convinced that they are soon going to die, a warm body, a beating heart, can cause them to do things they would never have contemplated before.

  Otto looks at us, then makes his way to the door. “See you both tomorrow,” he says. His voice is sad.

  “Yes, Otto.” I try to sound chipper. “See you tomorrow.”

  He gives me a slow wave and a paternal look of warning. I smile and shake my head.

  Petr does not bother to say good-bye. He pulls five tubes of paint out of the drawers. His hands are strong and assured; he knows the palette he wants to employ even before he makes the first brushstroke.

  Cadmium blue. Titanium white. Burnt umber.

  “Sit,” he says. I obey without thinking. I am dizzy just at the thought of his eyes fixed on me, and that he has considered me worthy enough to paint.

  He squeezes out the pigment carefully, reverently. Little oily blobs on a small, tin tray. He unrolls a piece of canvas, hidden beneath a pile of drawings on his desk. It is ragged at its edges, its shape not quite a rectangle or square.

  There are no stretcher boards to staple it around, so I watch as Petr flattens it with his hand and pushes two pins into the top corners to secure it to the top of his desk.

  “Don’t look at me, Lenka. Look at the door.”

  So I do. I focus on the threshold. The wooden framing. The imagined sight of my colleagues walking in and out, the shadows of those who have come to Terezín before me and left before I knew their names.