The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  CHAPTER 52

  LENKA

  With the absence of Friedl, my mother and the head tutors of the children’s home, Rosa Englander and Willy Groag, continue to work with the children in Terezín. But with each passing day, we hold our breath, wondering when we will receive our transport papers. On October 16, 1944, Petr’s wife is notified of her transport and Petr elects to go with her. He does not tell me about his decision; I find out when I see his empty chair. It is only then, after I ask someone where he might be, that I am told that he has volunteered for that morning’s transport.

  I feel as though I am beyond emotion. Since my interrogation, I have almost nothing left inside of me. On October 26, we hear that the Gestapo has sent Fritta and Leo Haas on the transport east as well. I find that I am unable to cry. I am like a machine. I exist on almost nothing but air.

  In November 1944, my mother is informed of her transport.

  That evening, after we hear the news, our family huddles outside the barracks. The air is so cold we see our breath as we speak. Marta holds her hands up to her mouth for warmth. Father’s long, weary arm drapes over Mother, who is now so frail, she looks like she might break under its weight.

  “Your mother and I have discussed it, children. I am signing up tomorrow to join her on the transport. The two of you will remain here.”

  His words ring eerily in my ears. An echo of those years before, when Father had been insisting that I leave with the Kohns and that the rest of my family remain.

  “This time you’re telling me I cannot go?” I say it in such a way that he has to recognize the irony of the situation.

  “Lenka,” he says. “Please.”

  “We came as a family, we leave as a family.”

  “No,” he says. “There is no question about what life is like in Terezín. Your mother and I will rest easier knowing you remain here.”

  “But, Papa . . .” Marta now interjects. “We can’t be separated. Boundaries can be changed during the war, and what if we are forced to remain on one side, you on another . . .”

  Father shakes his head and Mother just stands there and cries.

  That night, I told Marta not to worry. I would go myself to the Council of Elders and put our names on the transport. And that is exactly what I did.

  My father was furious when he discovered my transgression.

  “Lenka!” he yelled. His face looked like a skull. A blue bruise was right below his left eye; clearly someone had hit him since I had last see him. “You and I both know that you are safer here in Terezín than on that transport.”

  “The ghetto is changing,” I tell him. “We no longer feel safe here. What difference will another place make?”

  He is shaking now in front of me. I want to reach out and touch his bruise. I want to find twenty kilos of flesh and put them back on his bones. I want to feel that I can hug him again.

  “We cannot be separated,” I tell him.

  “Lenka . . .”

  “Papa, if we separate now, what is the point of my having stayed in the first place?”

  I am crying now. My eyes like floodgates.

  “We cannot break apart now. Not ever, Papa, not ever.”

  He nods his head. His eyelids closing like two paper-thin curtains.

  “Come here,” he whispers. He opens his arms and takes me to his chest.

  And, for a second, I am able to forget the smell, the dirt, the hollow, concave skeleton that is my father. We are two ghosts sewn to each other. I am his daughter. And my father’s heart beats against mine.

  There were over five thousand people in our transport that November. We were quarantined the night before. We were roused at the crack of dawn. Then we somberly carried our suitcases and rucksacks, now noticeably lighter than the fifty kilos we had brought to Terezín. We no longer had any food to bring, and much of the clothing we had brought had long since disintegrated. As we walked to the waiting cattle car, newspapers flapped on the empty sidewalk. I strained to read the headlines. One of the men in our transport tried to reach down and grab one, but he was met with a rifle in the back of his head by one of the supervising soldiers.

  Do I need to tell you the next part of my story? Do I need to detail what it was like in the cattle car, where we were each pressed so close to one another, how the pot that served as a latrine overflowed over our feet, or how the car was so dark that I only saw the whites of my parents’ and sister’s eyes? To this day, I can see the fear, the hunger. In one of the last memories I have of my mother, she looks like a starved wolf. Her hair is white and wiry. You could serve soup from the hollow basins of her cheeks or scoop the tears from the valley beneath her eyes.

  I remember the sight of my father’s emaciated arm slung around Marta. The three-day trip—the starting and stopping of the train—the pitch-blackness of the car, the stench, the near dead pushed to the far corner with the suitcases. We knew that the place where we were going would be even worse than Terezín. Squeezed next to my sister, I hear her whisper words that I have never been able to forget, no matter how many years go by. “Lenka, where is the Golem now?”

  There was a huge jostling when we finally arrived. The door to our cattle car was slid open and SS men with German shepherds straining at their leashes yelled at us to get out. We stumbled into knee-deep snow. Gaunt prisoners in striped shirts and trousers, with caps on shaved heads, carried boxes with blank, tired faces. I saw the sign marked AUSCHWITZ, a name I wasn’t familiar with.

  I looked at the steel-gray sky and saw chimneys blowing black smoke. That must be where we’ll work, I thought. Factories for the German war effort.

  How wrong I was.

  We were told to drop our suitcases into piles. I thought that was strange. In Terezín, we were allowed to carry our own belongings, and as I stared at the large heap of valises and rucksacks, all of which were labeled with the numbers of our first transport but not with our actual names, I wondered how they would ever get the right ones back to us.

  The elderly and the youngest children were ordered to the right side. The younger, the more vital of us to the left. My father was shuffled off so quickly I lost sight of him within seconds.

  My mother was also sent to the right with the aged, the infirm, and the smallest children. I remember thinking this was a blessing, as she would not have to work as hard as those of us who looked strong. She will take care of those children, I told myself. I will find supplies, just as I did in Terezín, and she will continue to teach them to draw.

  How many times have I returned to that last image of her? My once-beautiful mother standing like an egret. Her long white neck straining above the neckline of her torn, dirty dress. Her bent spine straining to stand straight. She is already an apparition, skin as translucent as eggshells. Watery green eyes. She looks at Marta and me, and through our fear, we communicate. As if through our own private code of secret gestures—the rapid blinking of our eyes, the shiver in our fingers that we are too afraid to raise—I tell my mother that I love her. I bind myself to her, despite my sister and I being in one line and her in another. My mother. I hold her to this day, in an eternal embrace, locked forever in my mind.

  We are forced to walk through the snow, in the direction of the black iron gate and the chimneys with their dark plumes of smoke. The drifts feel like icy needles at our skin, soaking through my stockings. My black coat from Prague is worn through and covered with holes.

  People are asking for their suitcases. “You will get your things later,” the SS bark at us. The dogs are foaming at the mouth. I am petrified by the sight of their razor-sharp teeth, the pink of their gums.

  There is no Council of Elders to meet us, as there was in Terezín. There are no organized lines proceeding at a slow pace. Instead there is chaos and constant yelling all around. Other inmates hit us with canes and order us in either Polish or German to stay in line. Marta is walking in front of me, her stiff movements suggesting she is in a trance. I want to run up to her, hold her hand,
and tell her that we are together—that we will protect each other—but I am too fearful. I see her breath against the cold. I see her legs shaking.

  We walk farther, and pass through the gate. I read the sign above in German that says ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work will make you free.

  The watch towers shine tubes of blaring white light. Against barbed wire, I see the bitten-up corpses of those who could not escape the dogs.

  We are marched to a bare wooden building and told to take all our clothes off. Inmates sit behind desks and write down where we are from, and our names, and tell us to sign the cards.

  We are sent to a hall. We are shivering; our bodies have no fat on them to keep us warm. We see the lines of each other’s ribs, and the snakelike outline of each other’s spine. I want to put my arms around Marta and cover her, my little sister whom I am powerless to protect.

  We all try to cover ourselves with shaking hands, but it is of no use. We are soon ordered to raise our hands as men shave us under our arms and around our genitals. One man works under each arm, another works down below. I would later learn that all the prisoners but those in the Czech transports had the hair on their heads shaved. For some reason, we were allowed to keep ours.

  They herd us into another room, where we are hosed down with ice-cold water and given clothes by SS women who are dressed in riding boots and hold crops in their hands. Already I’ve learned that everything in Auschwitz works efficiently. Everything is as methodical and precise as the assembly lines of a well-run factory.

  I am given a brown sack of a dress that is several sizes too big and a pair of wooden clogs that are so ill-fitting I can barely walk in them.

  That night we are told to crouch on a cement floor with our heads bowed. If we raise them, we are beaten with a stick.

  I am now certain of one thing. Whatever belief I still had in God while in Terezín is now completely gone.

  The next morning I find myself lying on the ground. Marta is not beside me, and I am seized with fear. I push myself up and retch, spitting bile onto the snow.

  A girl I knew in Terezín is pulling me toward something. “We’re to be gassed,” she whispers. “You can smell the crematorium, can’t you?”

  I tell her I don’t believe her. “It’s true,” she says as she pulls me farther on. She points ahead to those two tall chimneys I remember from yesterday. “They burn all day and night,” she says. “We are all going to die.”

  I tell her she is wrong. I tell her this could not be. “They need us to help with the war. Why would they kill us now after all those years in Terezín?”

  She stops talking, but continues to tug my hand as we walk toward the light ahead. She was wrong about what would happen to us. Instead of being gassed, we are sent to a room to have numbers tattooed on our arms.

  I received the number 600454, and it was that night that I lost my name, Lenka Maisel Kohn. I was now only to respond to my number, and identify myself by that alone. I was six blue numbers, inked forever to my skin.

  We marched toward our barracks and it was there that I found Marta. She was one of ten in the bed. Rolled to her side, looking at her number. She looked at me and I saw that she was too scared—and too tired—even to cry.

  We are summoned at the crack of dawn and told to move boulders from one part of the camp to another. It is mindless, stupid work, meant to exhaust and humiliate us. We hear the whistle blow and see the men in the barracks forced to run around in circles. Some, who don’t run fast enough, are shot, their blood soaking through the soot-gray snow.

  On the barracks walls, the Germans have painted slogans. CLEANLINESS IS GODLINESS is written on ours. I am enlisted to work painting numbers on plates that are used to mark each barracks.

  I find Dina, my old friend from Prague, in our barracks. The last time I had seen her was on the street near our apartment, when she had slipped her yellow star into her pocket so she could see the Disney movie Snow White.

  Over a year ago, she tells me, she painted a mural on the children’s barracks here in tempera paints. She tells me that Freddie Hirsch, whom she knew during her time at Terezín, had asked her to paint it.

  “I was in Terezín for only eighteen months. When I first arrived in Auschwitz, a friend took me to the children’s barracks, where I saw a huge drab wall in front of me,” she whispers. “I looked at the wall and pretended it was a Swiss chalet. I began painting flowerpots, then cows and sheep in the distance. As the children came around me, I asked them what they wanted me to paint, and they all clamored that they wanted Snow White.”

  I listened to her, mesmerized. “I had seen Snow White several times back in Prague and I had painted it a thousand times in my head,” she said. “I made all the dwarfs holding hands and dancing around Snow White. You should have seen the look on the children’s faces when I was done!”

  She told me that the children had even been able to use the mural as a backdrop for a secret play they performed. She made a crown out of paper and painted it gold for the queen. She took black paint and painted strips of paper and attached them to the crown to make it look like black hair.

  Even though the play was supposed to be put on in secret, some of the SS watched. “One of the guards told Dr. Mengele that I was the painter of the mural and now I paint portraits of the Gypsies in his clinic.”

  I fell asleep that night, exhausted. Dreaming of my friend’s mural. Wishing that all of this were nothing more than a fairy tale, a wretched spell cast by a wicked queen, and that a beautiful Snow White would soon wake up and foil her evil plan.

  CHAPTER 53

  LENKA

  There have been so many losses in my life. I can count them like the beads carried by a Bedouin. Each bead warmed and smoothed over by a nervous hand. I hold this rosary in my head, each bead with a color all its own. Josef is the darkest blue, his death the color of the ocean. My parents, who left this world in the most unforgivable chimney of smoke, are the color of ash, and Marta, the purest white. Hers is at the center of my string.

  My sister and I worked in Auschwitz together, side by side in a room next to the crematorium. After the SS had ordered the men, women, and children selected for the gas chamber to strip off their clothing, it was our job to go through their things.

  There were piles of coats and hats. Piles of dresses and socks. Piles of glass baby bottles. Piles and piles of pacifiers, tiny black shoes. To this day, I cannot look at a pile of heaping laundry in my house. I fold everything and put it away quickly, lest I find myself having to stare at a mountain of clothes and remember Auschwitz.

  We were told to dig on our hands and knees and sift through each discarded item. We were told to open up seams and look for hidden pieces of gold, and diamonds sewn secretly into suit linings, and to check for pockets that still contained money. We also checked inside the heads of dolls, searching for a string of pearls or a bracelet that might have been stuffed inside their ceramic craniums.

  Every day we worked from dawn until dusk. The gas chambers and the crematorium burned seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. In the morning we’d arrive and the clothing would be piled almost to the ceiling. Our fingers learned to work nimbly, to feel the hem of a skirt, not for the precision of the stitches, but with the questing touch of a blind person feeling the letters of a book in Braille.

  I tried to put myself into a trance as I worked. I did not want to think of the poor, desperate woman who sewed her wedding band into the lining of her coat, the diamond earrings that were stitched inside a collar, or the small pieces of gold I found inside the brim of a fur-lined hat.

  Marta and I were ordered to drop everything we found into boxes. I did as I was told. I did not even look up from my work as I tore open seams and cut through silk linings. I worked like a person who was already dead. How could I not work like that, when I heard the screams of the most recent transport passengers lining up outside, shrieking when they knew they were about to be gassed? And the cries of the children, or the mothers b
egging for mercy? For every piece of gold I unstitched from the cloth, one of those cries is stitched into me. Until I take my last breath, I will never, ever get them out of my head.

  As weak and nearer death as my sister seemed to me with each passing day, there was a defiance to her that I could never quite fathom. As we worked side by side, I would sometimes see her take a piece of jewelry she found and throw it into the latrine.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed at her. “If they see you, they will shoot you!”

  “I would rather they shoot me than give them any of this!” She was clutching a woman’s velvet skirt and the sight of her hands was ghastly. They no longer looked like the hands of my sister, but like claws. All tendon and bone.

  “If the Jew who cleans the latrine finds that diamond, maybe he can barter with it and save his life . . .”

  “They will shoot you,” I told her. “If they knew we were sisters, they’d shoot me first. Make you watch and then shoot you.”

  But Marta did not back down. “Lenka, if I give them everything . . . my life is already lost.”

  That night I huddled even closer to my emaciated sister. I felt the thinness of her pelvis next to mine, the near weightlessness of her arm as she flung it over me in her fitful slumber. It was as if I was clasping an empty birdcage, her ribs like wire, her body hollow and without song.

  Had I known it would be the last time I would touch her, I would have embraced her so tightly that her bones would have sprung from beneath her thin sheath of skin.