“Šebesta,” I said, “Jan Šebesta.”
“And you don’t have an appointment,” she stated, already knowing the answer as she signaled for me to follow her down the corridor. “Herr Dr. Högn will see you.” She took me to a bare office with three metal chairs and a desk by a window. A picture of the führer on the wall by the large window was the only decoration. I was faint with fear.
“This is Šebesta,” she said to the man behind the desk.
Högn was a bald man with a sweaty, ruddy face and glasses.
“Heil Hitler! Šebesta, I hear you want a job at Warnecke & Böhm?”
I wished desperately that I had listened more carefully to the endless work discussions between uncle Richard, my father, and Lotar at the table, instead of writing verses in my head.
“I am qualified in chemistry and while I studied I also worked in the summers in paint development at the Montana factory in Prague.”
I heard Zdeněk’s words of caution and added, “I worked mostly developing industrial paints.”
“And your papers?”
I explained,“The issue, you see, is I am a specialist in polymers and synthetic paints and my friend said that’s what you do here. If I had stayed in Bohemia, I would have been sent with all the men of my age to perform menial work for the Reich. Most of my friends are being sent to work in farms or mines and that would be a waste of my talents.”
“It is true, of course,” I went on with an assurance born of desperation, “that I am avoiding laboring in the mines or fields, but you have to understand that I came here not just for me but also for the good of the Reich.”
My interviewer looked up at me from his seat with steel-blue eyes that contrasted with the blood-red border of the swastika pin on his lapel. I could tell from the way he held his hands, both index fingers pointing upward, that he was giving my gabbled plea real consideration. I kept my own sweaty clenched hand behind my back and tried to smile.
After a pause, he pronounced, “We’ll give you a try. The problem is going to be getting you a permit from the Ministry of Work. We’ll have to say that we hired you in Prague. But you are in luck, Šebesta. You’ve come to the right man. I have a friend who works in the ministry. He’ll help us out.”
He disappeared for a few minutes and then came back saying he would accompany me.
“You have your own mind and I admire that, Šebesta, but you must not use it too much. That’s where danger lies.”
We crossed Berlin by train. I tried to make conversation and ask him about the city and about his powerful friends. Zdeněk had been right in saying that Dr. Högn liked to appear important; he was buoyed by showing off his connections.
Once inside the ministry, he approached a man in a brown suit. Wary, I hung back a few steps. They looked in my direction a few times as they whispered. From where I stood, I could not hear what they were saying, but I tried to hold on to the fact that both seemed to nod their heads more than they shook them. They came over and asked for my Czech identity card. I tried to quiet my terror as I handed them Míla’s forged one. The two barely looked at it as they completed pages of forms for what seemed hours. Then the man in the brown suit took me to present the papers at a teller’s window. The teller automatically stamped and returned them. Those were my forms, my proof that I was allowed to work, live, and get food in Berlin. I folded the papers and put them inside my breast pocket. I thanked them both profusely and bowed my head deferentially.
As we returned together to Warnecke & Böhm’s personnel office to obtain yet more documents, I pushed my luck and asked Dr. Högn if he knew how I could find a room to rent.
“I can do better than that.” He smiled. “I have a friend, Frau Rudloff. She lives here in Weissensee. She is a widow and is looking for a tenant for a room. She wants someone quiet and serious.” He called her then and there and told her that a sensible young man called Šebesta would be coming over to talk about the room.
Frau Rudloff’s dark apartment was very close to the factory, a minute’s walk away at number 108 Langhansstrasse. The widow seemed very old and severe. Her curled lips gave her a sour expression, but she seemed harmless enough and the room was clean and cheap. I unpacked the few items from my bag, arranged the lucky doll and books on the bedside table, and collapsed onto the wooden bed.
I was exhausted but trying to sleep seemed unnatural. As my body sank deeper into the mattress, I stared at the shadows on the ceiling and realized that I was shaking. As I tried to calm myself, Frau Rudloff knocked and opened the door. I sat up on the bed and covered myself with the gray wool blanket.
“Do you need something, Herr Šebesta? Can I get you anything at all?” I was startled by the kindness but the sight of her breasts, clearly visible through her nightgown, made me uncomfortable. The scarcity of men was noticeable. I thanked her, told her I definitely did not need anything, and wished her a good night.
My first day in Berlin and thus far all had accepted Jan Šebesta’s story. I had a job, papers consistent with my new identity, and a warm room in which to sleep. Miraculously everything had gone according to plan. I gave up my attempts to fall asleep and I sat down at the small desk to write to Míla one of what would be many almost daily letters. I wanted her and Lotar to know that my first day had gone well. I asked her to burn the letter immediately after reading it. I would do the same with her replies. They were coded but still there were risks you simply could not take. It was too dangerous to keep anything that could possibly identify me as a fraud and her as the accomplice of a man wanted by the Gestapo. I finished the letter by writing a short funny poem to cheer her up.
Eventually, I managed to sleep. The next day was to be my first day as Jan, the Czech chemist officially employed at Warnecke & Böhm in Berlin.
Jan Šebesta’s certificate of employment, stamped by Warnecke & Böhm
So Hans was now Jan, and Jan was employed in Berlin. The work insurance card issued to Jan Šebesta that my father left me gives a start date of May 3, 1943, the Monday morning that he arrived by train in Berlin. This would be the first of many official documents that he would amass under his new identity as the weeks passed—ration cards, address registration, tax forms—and that he would eventually leave for me in the box.
Jan Šebesta’s insurance card, stamped by the Reich authorities May 10, 1943
Hans’s absence did not pass unremarked in his parents’ letters. Precisely two weeks later, Otto wrote a coded latter to Lotar from Terezín:
We can only imagine all you have gone through and how upset you must have been with H’s illness. What a beautiful reward it is to hear that he recovered like Richard a long time ago. But you must not keep things from me, you did not relay his greetings while he was sick. I implore you not to hide the truth from us as cruel as it may be. As well you know, I also write about unpleasant things when the situation merits it.
Richard was the Neumann brother who had emigrated in 1939 to America. Otto’s words made clear that, ever the patriarch, he was unhappy at not being told that his son had been in hiding during March and April. Nevertheless, he was plainly relieved that Hans had recovered like Richard and managed to escape Prague. It is unclear whether my grandparents were told that Hans had left for Berlin. I imagine that Lotar would have spared his parents that detail, which would have only worried them and endangered Hans. Lotar would have borne well in mind their written pleas at the time to keep safety above all and not to attempt anything where much danger is involved.
It is evident from their continuing letters that in 1943, my grandparents were becoming accustomed to their surroundings and doing their best to create some semblance of a life. Even the deterioration in Ella’s health, resulting initially in hospitalization for stomach ulcers and then an inflamed gallbladder, did not dampen their hopes that the family would soon be reunited. They missed no opportunity to use the letters to pour out their love and gratitude to their boys and to Zdenka.
At the beginning of the year,
Otto’s boss had written a reklamatzia, an appeal to the Elders of Terezín. Thanks to this, they had managed to obtain a repeal of Ella’s Weisung, which brought them some relief from the threat of being listed for the next transport to the east and immediate execution. But even without a Weisung, the threat of what they referred to as excursions to camps in the east remained a daily menace. If only the monstrous excursions completely disappeared.
Nonetheless, Otto still seemed to strike notes of optimism. In one letter, he recounted that he caught himself on the way from work crooning Golem, a comic song made famous by Voskovec and Werich, a duo of avant-garde entertainers who had been critical of Nazi ideology. The Golem was a mythical creature reputed to protect the Jews of Prague from anti-Semitism in the sixteenth century.
Both Otto and Ella forged new relationships and engaged in helping others in Terezín. They used their network of helpers, the gendarme and Mrs. Rosa the laundry woman, not only to receive clothes, food, and money but also to get messages to their own and other families outside. Otto established a friendship with Stella Kronberger, a Viennese widow from Prague whose husband had committed suicide the day before their deportation. Otto had also “adopted” a young girl named Olina, whose parents he knew from Libčice. She was alone in the camp, as her father had not been deported by virtue of being in a mixed marriage. However, as a mischling, a person deemed to be of mixed race and over fifteen, she had been interned in Terezín. Otto’s letters often mentioned both Olina and Stella, with whom he spent time, sharing rations and any surplus he received from his illicit packages.
Ella begged her golden ones to write, giving details of their everyday lives in Prague to keep the image she had of them vivid, vital, and current. Not a day, evening, or night passes in which I do not think of you. My only desire is to see you again and reunite our family. She remained focused on the day when they would be together again.
Despite her illnesses and situation, her longing for beautiful things and tendency to coquettishness were intact when the warmth of spring arrived. Ella wrote in mid-April that the budding flowers on the trees make me dream of Libčice. She requested her spring coat, her cork shoes, her face powder, and some perfume. She complained that many of the parcels’ contents had been looted, but clarified that she had received: clothing, food, toiletries, and the shoe polish that was so crucial to maintain the darkness of Otto’s hair. It seems that amid the chaos, illness, overcrowding, hunger, and cold, they found a way to carry on. They forged new friendships, managed to relish small pleasures and find moments of relative peace.
They were not the only ones. Ella’s niece Zita, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of her sister who had died of pneumonia in 1923, had been interned in Terezín since January 1942, yet she managed to fall in love and even marry in the camp.
I first encountered the name Zita while poring over my grandparents’ letters. When Magda the researcher helped me put together a family tree, we discovered that I had living relatives not only in the U.S. but also in France, England, Israel, and the Czech Republic. One of them, from Prague, was Zita’s daughter, Daniela, born in 1948. We met for the first time one evening in October 2017 at the bar of the hotel where I was staying and talked for hours, a bit in French and a bit in English, about our family. Afterward, Daniela sent me a few pages of Zita’s recollections, together with photos of Zita’s mother and father, Rudolf Pollak, and his second wife, Josefa; of her sister, Hana, and her brothers, Zdeněk and Jiří. All of whom were detained in Terezín when Ella arrived. There were pictures of the children lined up in sailor suits and elegant outfits and of Ella’s sister posing proudly with her firstborn son. One photo shows Ella’s nieces and nephew seated happily around their father; it was taken some months before their deportation to Terezín. Still today I am struck by its depiction of shared affection and a moment of careless joy.
Ella’s brother-in-law Rudolf Pollak with his three children: Zita and Hana on the left, and Zdeněk on the right. Teplice, c. 1940.
Rudolf, Josefa, and Jiří Pollak had been deported to Auschwitz in September 1943 on Rudolf’s fifty-ninth birthday, but Zita, Hana, and Zdeněk Pollak provided some respite for my grandparents in the camp. Otto reported, after one of the many moves of barracks, how relieved he was to have Zdeněk in the same bunk. Ella helped her nieces steal some flowers from the trees for Zita’s marriage bouquet.
In her letters of this period, Ella started to refer to Otto as Grumpy. Otto had always been cantankerous, and life in Terezín could only have magnified this. Instead of allowing them to find strength in each other, it appears that life in Terezín had begun to wrench my grandparents apart.
Ella’s relationship with her employer seems to have been a key catalyst for this division. In her first Terezín letters, she often mentioned Eng L. He is very influential. He takes good care of me. He eats out of the palm of my hand.
In the first weeks after his arrival, Otto was also grateful for Engineer Langer’s kindness, which benefited both Ella and him. Otto wrote in early 1943 that he had Langer to thank for his new job, which afforded him some protection from being transported. He suggested that the boys get in touch with Langer’s wife in Prague to give her news of her husband. Otto also asked his sons to offer Mrs. Langerova the opportunity to use their parcels as a conduit for her to send messages to Langer.
But Langer was also the cause of friction that stemmed from Otto’s jealousy. A mere month after his arrival, Otto was scathing: Eng. L is responsible for ruining the family happiness, though I blame Ella above all, as she is not behaving like a normal person. In many instances in the letters that followed, he referred to his failed marriage. Ella repeatedly denied any romantic involvement with anyone and wished Otto could find better ways of expressing his love for her. In March 1943, she wrote about Otto’s jealousy: though he has no reason to be jealous he simply cannot stand that some men with power in Terezín like me and play into my hands. So in this respect I do what I can, my only mission here is to survive at all costs, if it wasn’t for my influential friends we would either be dead or have long been deported far away. She criticized Otto for being petty and senseless and suggested that he should be more focused on important things, such as surviving. In June 1943, she begged her children to not take Otto’s news so tragically and asked Lotar, especially, not to fret about their relationship. There are no circumstances in which you could imagine what life is like in this madhouse. She wrote, as she often did, that her only goal was for her and Otto to survive, while also clarifying that how I achieve this is not irrelevant as I don’t want to return to life outside crippled physically or mentally. While she remained focused on surviving, there were limits to what Ella would do to ensure this survival. This clarification to her boys implied that having an affair fell beyond those limits.
Nonetheless, over and over, she expressed a deep appreciation of Langer for taking care of her in what she described as a movingly fatherly fashion when she was alone and in the direst misery. She felt indebted to him for the housing, the employment, the possibility of storing belongings, the chance to connect with the outside. She also observed, perhaps a little wryly, that Otto was behaving ungratefully, as Engineer Langer had provided him with protection from the moment he arrived.
Eventually, thanks to files in the Jewish Museum and the archives in Brno, I was able to trace the youngest daughter of Ella’s benefactor. Having grown up in Czechoslovakia, Beatrice is a retired pathologist, now living in Australia. We corresponded by email for a few months before finally meeting for an afternoon in London. Through Beatrice, my letters, and the archives in the Czech Republic, I pieced together a picture of František Langer. Born in 1902 in Bohušovice, he had studied engineering at the University of Brno. He was a tall, lean, studious man, fond of reading, forest walks, and open fires. He had married a Franco-Czech Protestant in 1932, and they had their first daughter, Beatrice’s older sister, four years later. Ultimately, fearful of Nazi policies, František and his wife divorced to
protect the family and their belongings. František had arrived at Terezín alone a month before Ella. He was soon put in charge of the Bauhof, the workshop in the camp. This was a position of considerable status, although, unlike the Elders, he held no decision-making power over administrative issues or lists for transports. Nonetheless, his position meant that his opinion carried weight in such matters. It also meant that he had access to rooms, storage, and a measure of privacy that was unusual in Terezín. My grandmother acted as his cleaner and cook, and in the surreal conditions of their imprisonment, they became friends.
By all accounts, my grandmother had always been charming and flirtatious. It is clear from the letters that she retained a sense of joy and fun even in Terezín. Regardless of the reason, Langer did whatever he could to help both Ella and Otto.
Ella may have flirted or done what she could to stay alive, to be reunited with her golden boys. All I know is that in that world of absurd choices, Ella chose to survive. Her letters were filled with hope but also pragmatism and a determination to maximize her and Otto’s chances of survival. Ella consistently denied anything more than a friendship with František Langer, who was, after all, not only younger than she was but also loves his wife and daughter. She accused Otto of being irrationally jealous of everything, even his shadow. I will never know if Otto’s suspicions were well-founded or not. Either account could have been correct, or the truth could rest, as it often does, balanced somewhere between.
The fact remains that František Langer played an important role in my grandparents’ lives in the camp. Despite my grandfather’s reaction to it, he clearly afforded them both protection and was a source of comfort and kindness for Ella.
Beatrice and I had many conversations about Terezín, our families, and the letters. I had been apprehensive about disclosing Otto’s suspicions, but I should not have been. Joined by the invisible and improbable bond of being children of people who survived against the odds, we chatted openly and freely, on Skype, by email, in person. We agreed that we will never know the exact details of this relationship but that to us, so close but so far removed from the madness of the war, much can be beautiful and profound without being fully understood.
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