The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  “I’m all alone,” he says over and over. “I’m all alone.”

  That night I can’t get the sound of his cries out of my head. I reach over to touch my sister, who now shudders when she feels my fingertips.

  She does not awaken from her sleep. But I’m comforted just to have her body close to mine. Anything but to be here all alone.

  Terezín is becoming a stage. Over the next few months, fresh paint is applied to the outside of the barracks, a makeshift café suddenly appears, and the fence comes down from the central square.

  We see men removing bunks from some of the barracks so that now half as many people will sleep and occupy the space. Many of us, especially the women and children, are given new clothing and shoes that actually fit.

  The men who organize the operas and the concerts are told they will be able to perform, and that they should prepare something to impress the visitors.

  Hans Krása rallies the children for an encore performance of Brundibár. Rudolf Schachter convinces the choir to sing something the observers will never forget.

  My father, who, now well into our second year here, is nothing but skin and bones from working so hard, has been told to help create a small sports stadium.

  Teams are established for a soccer game. The infirmary is cleaned and provided with fresh linens. The nurses are given crisp new uniforms and the sickest patients are sent on the next transport east. A large circus tent in the ghetto’s center, where more than a thousand inmates were forced to do factory work, is dismantled, and in its place grass and flowers are planted. A music pavilion is built next to the square, along with a playground for the children across from one of the barracks.

  Three months before the delegation from the Red Cross is to arrive, the guards carry out a search both in the technical department and in František Strass’s sleeping quarters. One of the drawings that Haas had sent to the outside has been published in a Swiss newspaper and the Gestapo back in Berlin is up in arms. This will be bad publicity for the Germans, and could undermine their attempt to conceal the true conditions at Terezín from the Red Cross and the world at large.

  During the search, the officers in charge find more banned drawings in Strass’s barracks, but the compositions are unsigned. The bulk of Fritta’s drawings have already been buried in the cylinder Jíří made for him. Otto has bricked his own work within a wall in the Hannover barracks, and Haas has hidden his in his attic room in the Magdeburg barracks. My own painting, thankfully, has been buried, too.

  No arrests are made, but the tension in the technical department is thick in the air. Every time I go to work, I smell the fear.

  “Keep working,” Fritta tells us as we sit at our drafting tables. “We must not get behind in our work.”

  On June 23, 1944, the Red Cross delegation and members of the Danish ministry arrive. They are accompanied by high-ranking officials from Berlin. Commandant Rahm has scripted a filmworthy scene for their arrival and, in fact, the entire visit is filmed to be broadcast to the world. The movie is entitled Hitler Gives a City to the Jews.

  As the men disembark from their military jeeps, they are greeted by the most beautiful girls in Terezín, their pretty figures wrapped in clean aprons and rakes in their hands. They sing as the men walk through the gates.

  The Terezín orchestra plays Mozart. Fresh vegetables are on display in a shop. White-gloved bakers load fresh bread onto the shelves. There is a clothing store where you can repurchase your own confiscated pants or dress.

  Real coffee flows in our “Jewish café.” Our children suddenly have a real school, more than enough nourishment, and adequate medical care.

  We are ordered to cheer when one of the soccer teams scores a goal. Our plates are laden with food, gravy, and fresh bread, all served on tables with clean cloths and cutlery.

  As the Red Cross walks through the camp, a German film crew continues to document their visit.

  We curtsy in our new clothes and new shoes, our faces clean and hair neatly braided, as we have been given access to showers and handed brushes and combs. We sleep in barracks with half the normal amount of people, the other half already on their way east. We are allowed to sing and dance. Men line up at the post office to receive fake packages that are filled with nothing. The children perform Brundibár and the members of the Red Cross clap with wild approval, not understanding the political implications of the production.

  But after their departure a week later, all of the luxuries and added liberties are taken away as abruptly as they had been given. Within twenty-four hours, the extra bunks are put back in the barracks, the stadium is dismantled, and the fence reappears in the central square. The food vanishes, as does the coffee in the makeshift café. The tables with the clean cloth and cutlery end up on a truck headed back to Berlin.

  CHAPTER 51

  LENKA

  Shortly after the Red Cross’s departure, the technical department is turned upside down. Commandant Rahm storms into our studio with two other SS officers. He screams insults at Fritta and Haas. He demands to see what they have been working on. But Haas does not flinch. He lifts a sign that he has been painting for the ghetto. There is an illustration of a garbage bin and below it the words PICK UP YOUR TRASH. I notice Fritta’s hands are shaking as he pulls a booklet of drafting illustrations from his desk.

  The two SS officers walk around the room peering over our shoulders.

  Rahm stands in the doorway and yells his insults at all of us. He screams that we better not be drawing anything that is offensive to the Reich. On the way out, he takes his crop and smashes a table covered with ink bottles. For the rest of the afternoon, I remain badly shaken. The shattered glass is swept up, but the puddle of black ink seeps into the tile floor. Even after several washings, the stain remains, the shape and color of a storm cloud.

  The SS makes more surprise visits to the Zeichenstube, as the technical department is called in German. We all continue to work with our heads down and our eyes averted, not even looking at each other. During one inspection, an SS soldier tears a sketchpad from the hands of one of the artists and I feel my heart stop, so afraid for him that a personal sketch might fall out from its pages.

  The next week we are each randomly summoned out to the hallway and searched. When my name is called, I feel sick. Faint.

  “I said you!” the SS officer barks at me. I stumble from my chair and follow him out.

  “Arms up and legs apart,” he says.

  I place my palms against the wall. My knees are shaking as I spread my legs.

  “Am I going to find a pencil here?” he asks, moving his hand between my thighs. His touch is sickening. His breath smells like kerosene. Again he touches me, and I believe I’m seconds away from being raped.

  And then I turn my head to face him. He seems taken aback, as though the sight of my eyes has somehow jostled him from his viciousness.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” He shoves me again, but this time I am thrown toward the door. I don’t look back. He is now shouting at some other people in the hallway. I run toward the door of the technical department.

  Once inside, I rush to my chair and desk. I feel as though I might vomit up what little is in my stomach.

  I try to steady myself. I look at the faces of the people around me who have not yet been called. Everyone is shaking with fear. If I had the courage to depict the scene around me in a painting, all of our faces would be colored a sick, ghastly green.

  On July 17, 1944, Fritta, Haas, and the artist Ferdinand Bloch are ordered to report to Commandant Rahm’s office. They also call my friend Otto. No, not Otto, I pray. My heart rises to my throat. I watch, my body trembling, as Otto rises from his chair. He is visibly shaking when they take him out by the arm, and I desperately want to cling to him, pull him back into his chair. My head is spinning.

  His eyes lock with mine, which are wide as saucers. I know I must try to signal to him not to do anything that might anger the officers. I try to whis
per to him to remain calm. I want to tell him everything is going to be fine, even though I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that something terrible is about to happen to all three of them.

  An hour later another SS officer arrives at the studio and orders the young architect Norbert Troller to report to Rahm’s office as well.

  Later that evening Petr tells me he spoke to a woman named Martha, a housekeeper in the VIP barracks where Rahm’s office is located. She overheard some of the interrogation of my friends. She is a friend of Petr’s, having bartered for some of his paintings. Three days before, she had hidden them in a hollowed-out door.

  Commandant Rahm does not conduct the artists’ interrogation at first. He leaves the first round of questioning to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Haindl. Haindl accuses them of creating horror propaganda that undermines the Reich, and of being part of a Communist plot.

  The artists deny everything. They say their only “crime” is doing a few harmless sketches. They are not Communists, nor are they involved in any plot.

  Still, Haindl continues to attack them. He wants the names of their contacts on the outside. He throws down a newspaper from Switzerland and demands to know who painted the image that is reproduced on the front page.

  “You ungrateful little shits! How dare you paint images of corpses!” He pounds his fist on the table. “We fucking feed you, house you. Half the fucking world is starving!”

  The artists say they have no idea what he is talking about.

  The SS interrogates them separately. They try to get each artist to inform on the others. They hold up one painting after another and demand to know who did it. Every question is answered the same way. The artists insist they “do not know.”

  Haindl and Rahm’s tempers rise to a pitch of fury. The artists are beaten. Haas does not scream out as he is kicked over and over again. Fritta swears at his interrogators, but he is silenced with a boot to his mouth. The housekeeper, Martha, says the worst beating was given to Otto. After pummeling him with their fists, they smash his right hand with the butt of a rifle. His cry was so terrible, so gut-wrenching, she says, “I had to cover my ears . . . Even now, I can still hear the sound of him screaming in pain.”

  At sunset, she sees them all being loaded into a jeep that is already filled with Fritta’s wife, Hansi, and his son Tommy; Haas’s wife, Ern; and Otto’s wife, Frída, and their young daughter, Zuzanna. The jeep heads to the Kleine Festung. The Small Fortress.

  The Small Fortress is on the outskirts of the ghetto, on the right bank of the Ohře River.

  We all knew terrible things happened in that place and that no one who was sent there ever returned. There were rumors that the SS made prisoners use their mouths to load wheelbarrows full of dirt, and people were routinely beaten to death or executed.

  With our leaders gone, my colleagues and I are losing any confidence we once had.

  “We will all be on the next transport,” someone says.

  “They won’t waste the space on the trains,” says another. “They’ll just hang us all from the gallows.”

  “Fucking idiots,” one of the newcomers says, referring to Fritta, Haas, Bloch, and Otto. “We’re all going to pay for what they did.”

  “What did they do?” one of the younger girls says. “What did they do?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Petr slams his fist on his desk. “All of you just shut up and get to work!”

  The technical department now turns into a place of despair.

  Over the next couple of days I watched my friend Petr cease to be able to draw. His hands shook uncontrollably. I saw him take one hand and rest it on the other, to try to steady himself and appear as though he was working.

  Everyone who works in the Zeichenstube finds their barracks have been searched. I watch as soldiers come and ransack our rooms. They turn over our beds, they throw our straw mattresses on the floor. They climb the ladder to the shelves where our suitcases are stored. They unlatch them and empty the contents onto the floor. When mine is opened, I see Mother close her eyes and bow her head to her chest, as if she is praying that I have not done anything foolish.

  When my suitcase is opened, all that falls out is a spare pillowcase. She and Marta exhale as it sails silently to the floor.

  I am not spared an interrogation, though. Everyone in my department is questioned by the Gestapo.

  In a brown-walled room with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, we are each questioned. Drawings depicting the hardships of ghetto life are spread on the table.

  Rahm stands over me and lifts one of the drawings. It is a pen-and-ink sketch of the inside of the infirmary. The figures, with sunken faces and hollow rib cages, are drawn in angry, black lines. There are several bodies lying on a single bed. The dead are piled on the floor.

  “Does this painting look familiar to you?”

  I shake my head. “No, sir.”

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know who did this painting?”

  Again, I tell him no.

  He brings it closer to my face. The piece of paper dangles so close to me I can smell the dampness of the pulpy fiber.

  “Look closer,” he demands. “I don’t believe you!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t recognize the artist.”

  Rahm reaches across the table for another drawing. This one shows the overcrowded interior of a dormitory. I need only a second to see that it is one of Fritta’s compositions.

  Again and again Rahm pulls paintings from the table. Every one is unsigned, but anyone attuned to nuances of line and composition would be able to identify their creators. I can immediately tell that one is Fritta’s by the vigorousness of the line, the way he has of rendering the absurdity and hopelessness of ghetto life. In Haas’s drawings, I can sense the anguish in the squiggle of the line, the ghostlike ink washes, and the faces that all but leap off the page like apparitions.

  But I say nothing to these German officers who bark at me, ordering me to identify the artists. They pound their fists on the table and ask me if I know the painters’ contacts on the outside. They tell me they have “intercepted these paintings” and will be able to find others.

  “If there is an underground movement within the ghetto, we will root it out and squash it,” Rahm barks at me. Again I tell them I know nothing.

  For some reason, perhaps because they are conserving their strength for beating my colleagues, they do not strike me. And finally, after what feels like several hours of incessant questioning, I am told I can leave.

  As I go to exit the door, I glimpse on a desk the Swiss paper with the drawing of the camp published on the first page. I want to smile, knowing that Strass’s people have been successful in getting one of my colleagues’ drawings to the outside world.

  Without our colleagues, the technical department seemed devoid of life and full of fear. Those of us who remained did not speak about our interrogations, but I often looked over at the empty chairs where my friends had once worked, and every time I did, I wanted to cry.

  Fritta, Haas, and Otto remained imprisoned in the Small Fortress until October. There were rumors that Ferdinand Bloch had been tortured by the Gestapo and then murdered, and that Otto’s hand was permanently maimed so he could no longer paint. I began to feel a noticeable difference in the ghetto. The number of transports leaving for the east began increasing, so now thousands of us would disappear overnight. I witnessed the hanging of someone who had tried to escape. The boy was no more than sixteen, and to this day, I can still see his head being forced into the noose as if it just happened. The look of confusion and fear in his eyes as the German officer screamed obscenities just before the floor fell out from under him. Then there was a terrible incident involving a young boy who had climbed the fence to pick some flowers for his girlfriend. “Flowers?” the SS officer had screamed at him. Seconds later, the officer was seen running the boy over with a tractor, leaving his bloodied body wrapped around a tire as a warning for us all.

/>   In early October, Hans, who is now nearly five, is sent east with his parents. His mother tells me outside the barracks that they will be leaving the following day. She holds Hans’s hand, his wrist as limp as a picked dandelion. I extend my hand to run through his brown hair.

  “Do you have any pencils, Lenka?” he asks me. His eyes are so sad. I can close my eyes to this day and imagine Hans’s, as green as leaves in spring. The shadows of his face seem haunted. I reach into my pockets hoping to find a piece of charcoal to give him, but I find nothing and it agonizes me.

  “I will get you some before you go,” I promise. Ilona, his mother, tells me that Friedl, his teacher and my mother’s colleague, will be on their transport as well.

  I extend my arms and hug them both. I feel the sharpness of their ribs and Hans’s heart pounding through his clothes. I whisper into his ear, “I love you, my sweet boy.”

  That night, just before curfew, I find him on the bed in their barracks. I’ve wrapped two pieces of stolen charcoal in a piece of brown paper. I’ve drawn a small butterfly on the top in pen and ink. For Hans, I write, October 5, 1944. With each new journey, may your wings always soar.