The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  The next morning one of the SS saw my sister throw a brooch into the latrine. He yelled out at her, asking her what she was doing. Marta stood there like a frozen swan. Her white legs poked out from the hem of her brown sack dress, but I did not even detect a shiver. “Go in and get it, you filthy Jewish whore,” he shouted. She did not move at first. My beautiful redheaded sister. He came closer to her, his rifle sticking right into her face. “Get into that latrine now, you Jewish piece of shit!” I saw her standing there, looking him straight in the eyes, and not in a whisper, not with a single tremor to her voice, my little sister said her last word, uttered with defiance. “No.”

  And then, right in front of me, with the swiftness that only evil can deliver, Marta was shot in the head.

  CHAPTER 54

  LENKA

  My parents vanished into the air of Auschwitz and my sister into its blood-soaked earth. A few weeks after Marta’s death, the Germans, sensing that the Soviets would arrive at the camps any day, began moving us by the thousands to other camps farther west. Entire barracks would vanish overnight.

  In early January 1945, we were roused just after midnight and forced into the freezing cold. We could see the burning factories in the distance. Even the crematorium seemed to be smoldering.

  “They’re burning the evidence,” one of the girls whispered. “The Soviets must be at the borders already.”

  After the Germans called out each of our numbers, they began yelling at us to start walking. We were half asleep and were completely emaciated, and many of us stumbled in the snow. Every person who fell was shot. Their bodies did not make a sound as they hit the frozen earth. The only evidence of their deaths was the ribbon of blood snaking from their skulls.

  We were driven in the January snow, like cattle they hoped would die before reaching pasture. I watched as nearly each person walking in front of me fell down and did not get up. Others were shot for walking too slow, and some were shot just for glancing at a Nazi with a despairing look. I only survived because there was a woman directly behind me who, in her grief, thought I resembled her dead daughter. When I fell down, she picked me up. When I was near dead from starvation, she made me eat snow. The few times we were allowed to stop for a break, she cupped my frostbitten feet with her hands and tore her head scarf to bandage my bleeding toes. I have no idea what became of her, and to this day, I wish I had had a chance to thank her. Because it was this nameless woman, who wrongly believed I was her daughter, who kept me walking when it was so much easier to die.

  We marched for three days before arriving in Ravensbrück, where the SS continued to beat us and shoot whoever was too weak to stand. I remained in Ravensbrück for only three weeks before being transported by train to another, smaller camp called Neustadt Glewe. There, fifteen other girls and I were taken to an airplane factory. For three months, I dug anti-tank ditches, standing in the cold with nothing more than a brown burlap dress and a pair of wood-and-canvas shoes. Every day and every night, the other girls and I would look up at the sky and hear the sound of the American or Soviet airplanes circling above, and do you know, we did not even think about liberation. We just assumed that they would bomb the factory and we would be unfortunate casualties.

  But in early May the unthinkable happened. We woke up one morning to a camp that had been completely abandoned overnight by the SS. They had snuck away like cowards, so when the Americans arrived, all they saw were piles of the dead and those of us who were as near death as the still living could be.

  We remained there for a few weeks before the Soviets took over the camp, directing us to displaced persons camps that were being erected throughout Germany. And it was there, in a small camp, outside Berlin, that I first met an American soldier named Carl Gottlieb.

  The same way a mother can love an orphaned child or a child a motherless kitten, that is the way Carl fell in love with me.

  I could not have been anything much to look at. I was no more then eighty pounds, and though we in the Czech barracks had not had our heads shaved, my black hair was now so dirty and infested with lice that it looked like an old matted rug.

  Carl told me that he fell in love with my eyes. He said they were the color of the Arctic. That he saw many a journey in their pale light blue.

  I told him, years later, that only with the birth of our daughter had they finally learned to thaw.

  I cannot tell you that I loved my husband at the time I married him. But I was a widow, an orphan, and completely alone. I allowed this warm, handsome man to take me under his wing. I let him spoon me soup. I allowed him to escort me to the infirmary for my checkups. I even allowed myself to smile when he danced with his fellow soldiers to the music on their radios.

  And when he told me he wanted to take me home to America, I was so tired I did the only thing I could still manage.

  I gave him my hand.

  CHAPTER 55

  LENKA

  I returned to Prague in the spring of 1945. Carl was unable to go with me because he was not granted leave in Germany, but I insisted that I was strong enough to travel by myself, and he had no choice but to let me go.

  How strange it was to travel through war-torn Germany and then to arrive in Prague, which had suffered far less from the bombings and blitzes that blighted much of the rest of Europe. Here was my old city, seemingly untouched. The lilacs were in bloom and the intensity of their scent brought tears to my eyes.

  I walked as though in a trance to our old apartment on the Smetanovo nábřeži embankment, and discovered it was occupied by the family of a government official. The wife, who answered the door, had an expression that was close to horror.

  “It is our apartment now,” she said, without offering to invite me in. “You will have to speak to the relocating committee to get new housing.”

  I did not know where to go for the night and it was already getting cold. And then I remembered my beloved Lucie.

  I walked back to the station and took the next train to her village on the outskirts of Prague.

  In a small house, not far from the station, I was greeted not by Lucie but by her daughter, Eliška, my mother’s namesake, who was now almost ten. The little girl was the spitting image of Lucie, with the same white skin and black hair. The long, almond-shaped eyes.

  “Your mother and I were friends . . .” My voice began to choke as I tried to explain myself. “You are named after my mother,” I said through falling tears.

  The girl nodded and ushered me into their small living room. On the mantel, I could see the wedding portrait of Lucie and Petr. There were small, hand-painted plates on a dresser and a little wooden crucifix on one of the walls.

  Eliška offered me some tea while I waited for her mother, and I accepted. I could not stop myself from staring at her as she lit the stove and pulled some biscuits from a tin box. While we had spent the war dying in concentration camps, she had grown from a toddler to a little girl on the verge of adolescence. I was not bitter, but I was amazed at the transformation all the same.

  It wasn’t until an hour later, when Lucie walked through the door, that I realized how changed I was myself. Lucie stood in the threshold of her living room and looked at me as though she were seeing someone who had just risen from the dead.

  “Lenka? Lenka?” she repeated as if she could not believe her eyes. She placed her hands over her face and I could hear her trying to stifle her weeping.

  “Yes, Lucie, it’s me,” I said as I rose to greet her.

  I walked up to her and pulled her palms from her face, grasping her hands. The skin was that of an older woman, though her face was still like my old Lucie, the sharp-cut angles even more pronounced.

  “I prayed every night that you and your family would return safely,” she said through her tears. “You must believe me. I hope you received the packages that I sent to Terezín.”

  I did not doubt that she had tried to send us provisions, though truth be told, these packages were often stolen, and we had not recei
ved a single one.

  “Your mother and father and Marta?” she asked. “Please tell me they are safe and well . . .”

  I shook my head and she gasped. “No. No. No,” she said over and over again. “Tell me it isn’t so.”

  We sat down next to each other and held each other’s hands. I asked about Petr, her parents, and her siblings, and she told me that they had struggled during the war, but everyone was alive and well.

  “I have never forgotten my promise to your family,” she said. She stood up and went into her bedroom; when she came back she was carrying the basket in which she had so carefully placed mother’s jewels years before. “I still have your mother’s things . . . and your things, too, Lenka. They are yours now,” she said, placing them in my hands.

  Lucie’s little girl came and sat beside her as I unwrapped the pieces one by one. My mother’s beautiful wedding band and choker, the cameo from Josef’s mother, and my own wedding band, golden and inscribed to me within.

  “Thank you, Lucie,” I said, embracing her. I never thought I’d ever have anything of my mother’s again.

  She could not bear to speak and I kept seeing her glance over to her daughter.

  “You are named after Lenka’s mother,” she finally told her. “You will give up your bed for tonight and let Lenka sleep in your room, Eliška.”

  The little girl seemed confused by my presence. She clearly had no memory of who I was, much less how, only a few years ago, I watched her take her first steps.

  “It is an honor to have you here, Lenka, and I want you to stay as long as you need to.”

  I stayed for a week, and in that time learned that the young man, Willy Groag, who had worked alongside my mother, had been liberated from Terezín. He had returned to the city with two suitcases full of children’s drawings that mother’s colleague Friedl had entrusted to another colleague, Rosa, on the night before she was sent to Auschwitz. There were forty-five hundred drawings.

  Leo Haas had also survived Auschwitz and returned to Terezín to unbrick his drawings from their hiding places. He, along with the engineer Jíří, who had also survived the war, went to the farmyard where Fritta’s drawings were buried and dug with shovels until they reached the tin canister that contained all of Fritta’s work.

  Years later, I met up with Haas and learned how he and his wife had adopted Fritta’s son, who had been left an orphan after the war. Haas appeared softer than he had been in Terezín. Gone were the dismissive tones that I remembered; he now spoke as if we were equals, as if we had become such just by surviving. Over tea, he told me how he’d carried Fritta, sick and frail from dysentery, out of their cattle car as it arrived in Auschwitz and how he and another colleague tried to nurse him back to health. “Fritta lasted only eight days, hidden in a barracks,” he said “A doctor friend of ours tried to administer fluids to him with an eyedropper, but he died in my arms.”

  “Petr and Otto?” I said their names tentatively, as if my memories of them were about to shatter in my hands.

  “Petr and his wife were gassed a few days after their arrival.”

  “And Otto?” My voice was cracking.

  “Otto . . .” He shook his head. “He was last seen alive in Buchenwald, but he died days before liberation.” Haas, never one to show emotion, struggled to compose himself.

  “The last image someone claimed to have seen of Otto was of him crouching on the side of the road with a lump of charcoal in his left hand, the other hand limp at his side. He was trying to sketch the corpses around him on a piece of scrap paper no bigger than this . . .” Haas drew a circle around the center of his palm.

  I held my hand up to my mouth.

  Haas just stood there shaking his head.

  As we had never been close, I did not tell him my own story. The story of how I returned to Terezín a few months after liberation.

  After bidding good-bye to Lucie, I took a train that followed the same route that I had taken with my family to Bohušovice years before. Although I now carried no rucksack, only a small canvas handbag, the weight of my parents’ and sister’s ghosts was as heavy as a case of bricks strapped to my back.

  I walked silently down the dirt path until I reached the ghetto’s gates. I felt as though I were returning to a strange dream, a recurrent dream about a stage play; in this version the set remains the same but the entire cast has vanished. There was no familiar sight of Petr walking down the street with his sketchpad and bottle of ink. Gone was the once-omnipresent sight of a hearse pulling a mountain of suitcases or a gaggle of elderly bodies that could no longer walk. On the contrary, there was hardly a person to be found in a place that was once teeming with people.

  I had to blink several times to adjust to the sight of a vacant Terezín. The ghetto had turned into a ghost town.

  The barracks, too, were completely empty and only a few Allied soldiers patrolled the streets.

  “What are you doing here?” one of them asked me.

  I stopped in my tracks, suddenly terrified, adrenaline coursing through my body. It would take me a lifetime to get over that fear. Even though I was now technically a free person, I did not yet believe it.

  “I’ve left something here.” My voice was shaking. I reached into my purse to show him the identification card I had been given upon liberation. “I was a prisoner here and want to see if what I am looking for is still here.”

  “Is it valuable?” the soldier asked. His smile was crooked and he was missing one of his bottom teeth.

  “To me it is. It’s a painting I did.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, clearly not interested. “Go ahead, but don’t take all day.”

  I nodded and walked hurriedly to the Hamburg barracks.

  If shadows had a smell, that was the scent of Terezín. I could still smell the wretched odor of packed bodies. The damp walls. The dirt floor. But as I walked down the steps of the basement in the barracks, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had heard the sound of my own footsteps while I was in Terezín. I suddenly felt cold, the very echo of my shoes reinforcing just how alone I really was.

  I tried to think of Carl in order to soothe my nerves. I tried to hear his voice in my head telling me to keep my resolve. I would come here and find my painting. And once I had it in hand, I would leave this place forever.

  I had entered an antechamber in the basement, just as Jíří had described. I stood there for a moment like a child in a house of mirrors, not knowing where to look or where to begin my excavation. I kicked the earthen floor with the toe of my shoe. The ground was hard and compact.

  I reached into my canvas bag and removed a small spade that I had borrowed from Lucie. I pulled up my skirt and fell to my hands and knees, like an animal digging for something lost.

  I told myself I would not stop digging until I found it. I would not stop for a moment. I would unearth the drawing of Rita and Adi, just as I had created it, with torn cuticles, weary hands, and cracked skin, my own blood soaking into the earth.

  It took me nearly two hours to find my painting. There it was, just as Jíří had promised, placed within a slender metal pipe.

  CHAPTER 56

  LENKA

  I was married to my second husband at the American consulate in Paris. A dozen other couples, all GIs and their European brides, waited outside. On the way there, we bought some flowers on the Rue du Bac and stumbled over cobblestone streets, my feet unused to shoes that fit as they should. I wore a navy suit and did my hair without any artistry, a simple brown barrette tucked above my ear.

  After the ceremony, Carl asked me where I wanted to go to celebrate.

  All I wanted was palačinka.

  “Crêpes,” I told him, and he squeezed my hand as one might a child’s. I imagined my younger self at my mother’s table. The white eyelet cloth, and the china plate stacked with crêpes filled with apricot jam and dusted with powdered sugar.

  “How easy you are to please,” he said, smiling. We found a small ca
fé and sat down. I ordered crêpes with melted butter and jam and he a croque monsieur. We toasted each other over warm cups of tea and a shared glass of champagne. I misplaced my flowers on the way home.

  That night, in a small hotel on the left bank, Carl made love to me, whispering that he loved me, and that he was so happy I was his wife. I remember I trembled in his arms. I saw my white sticklike limbs threading through his, my ankles tucked around the barrel of his back. His words sounded to me as if they were actually meant for another person. Who was I to evoke such feelings? I no longer thought of my heart as an organ of passion, but one whose only loyalty was to the blood it pumped through my veins.

  Once in America, I strove to be good and dutiful. I bought the Fannie Farmer cookbook and learned to make a good casserole and a raspberry gelatin with tangerine slivers tucked inside. I told my husband how kind he was to give me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday and to bring home white roses on our anniversary.

  But in order to survive in this foreign world, I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy. The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in between our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas, and the rest our relationship—the laughter and the memories—were the brushstrokes applied over time.

  When I held my husband of fifty-two years, I could never quite hear his heartbeat the way I did Josef’s in those handful of days and nights we lived together. Was it because I had grown more plump over the years, and the extra padding against my chest prevented me from feeling the rush of blood in his body in the way I remembered it flooding through Josef’s? Or was it that with a second love, we are not as attuned? My heart was thicker with my second love. It had a casing around it and I wonder what else it shut out over the years.