Zdenka worried, though, and determined that it was time to take the enormous risk of accessing Terezín again. Understandably, her memoirs dwell on her emotional response to the situation, and it is not clear from them precisely when she snuck in. It must have been during the early-autumn months of 1943, when getting parcels through was becoming impossible, that Zdenka entered the camp a second time.
Once more, she dressed like an inmate and tagged along with the “country unit” working in the nearby fields. She searched for Otto in the Hannover barracks, and there she found him, on his shared wooden bunk. She had stitched hidden pockets within her shirt and skirts, inside which she carried tins of shoe polish for his hair, money, and other small items of value to him. Above all, she brought him hope.
One of the items in Lotar’s box is an unusual-looking ring, made in metal that is colored in bronzed pinks and dark grays. It seems to have been carved by hand from a piece of copper pipe. It is not delicate or pretty. The ring is arranged around a curved, bordered rectangle with the letters ZN intertwined. They are Zdenka’s initials.
Madla explained to me that her father had told her once that Otto made the ring in Terezín. Grateful to Zdenka for the parcels, for the letters, for her help and what seemed like unconditional love, he had stolen some metal from one of the workshops and molded it himself. Otto was an engineer, not an artist, and was unused to fashioning things using his hands. And yet somehow he managed to make this ring, which now sits on my desk as I write. Otto must have loved Zdenka very much. Perhaps it was during her brave incursion into the camp that a grateful Otto gave her the ring. Maybe he sent it out with one of their trusted couriers. Either way, this simple, essential symbol of love and gratitude made it out of Terezín. Zdenka kept it and wore it throughout the war.
I have some letters from the second half of 1943, but very few. Ella was convalescing, having been bedridden again in the hospital and unable to write much. The grapevine in Terezín worked efficiently, and Otto must have heard that Mussolini had been ousted and that the Russians were driving back the Nazis on the eastern front. Their optimism rekindled as the news spread through the camp. He wrote to Zdenka and his boys: I think of you night and day. Slowly I am starting again to make plans for our future. My only worry is that your mother and I stay here until the end and there is hope of that given Ella’s malady. One of the many paradoxes of life in Terezín was that, for a while, at least, Ella’s sojourn in the hospital protected her from being sent east.
In Berlin, Hans was also beginning to allow himself to think of the end of the war:
The noise of the dining room was overwhelming. The sound of cutlery, plates, people talking, laughing, shouting. It was so normal, so chaotic, and so mundane. There must have been 500 people having lunch. The high-ceilinged room used to be a depository for raw materials. Nothing needed to be stored any longer, all materials that arrived were immediately transformed into products and the workforce had grown so quickly that a new dining place was needed. So here we were.
Conversations were being held in German, Russian, French, Polish, Dutch, and other languages that I could not easily identify. At our table we spoke Czech. The majority of the workers were people from occupied countries. They were not the scientists, those were usually German. We, the others, were the ones made to perform the most dangerous tasks, handle the corrosives and the explosives. Many had the scars of scalds and burns on their hands and arms. They had been forced to leave their countries and work here for no real pay and no safety regulations.
Posters everywhere threatened us that this new Reich would span the globe and last a millennium. Images of Hitler were everywhere. He seemed perpetually to observe us all, unthinking and pitiless. A poster above us bore the words: “One nation, one people, one Führer.”
We all devoured the food even though it was disgusting. As I cut the meal on my plate, I realized that there was a high likelihood that the brown concoction I was ingesting consisted of cows’ lungs and rotten potatoes.
As I cleared my tray, I noticed a man wearing the hallmark blue overall of a forced laborer standing slightly too close to me. He whispered with a Dutch accent: “Šebesta, right? I have been watching you. I am a friend. I will wait for you by the main exit tonight.”
And before giving me time to get a proper look, he walked away. His broad shoulders, too big for his uniform, disappeared amid the blue and brown herds filling the corridor. That evening the broad man waited for me by the gate as he had promised. He looked straight at me and without hesitation said, “Šebesta, let’s walk.”
It was early autumn and the evening was filled with auburn light. I followed him, partly out of curiosity, partly because there was something familiar and compelling about him. As we turned the corner onto Gustav-Adolf Strasse and approached the cemetery, he spoke calmly.
“Let’s go in here.”
We meandered among the ancient trees and tombs, taking our time and idly perusing the inscriptions.
“You are like me. You don’t want this war to go on longer than is necessary.” I did not say anything. Tombstones have always made me nervous. He continued.
“The Nazis will lose sooner or later. You and I can do our best so that it is sooner.”
We stopped near a mossy cracked headstone, its engraving erased by time.
I looked at him, unsure whether I should try to hide my surprise. This could easily have been a trap. Perhaps it was some sort of test, but something about him reassured me. He smiled and said, “It is okay. This seems unreal, I know, but then don’t most days?”
He started to walk again. I caught up with him. I let him lead the way.
“I dislike the war. I mean, who doesn’t?” I said carefully.
He paused and looked at me. For a moment neither of us spoke. He seemed assured for a mere laborer. He looked out of place in his overalls and thick gray jacket. I could tell by the way he spoke that there was a sophistication to him. He could not be much older than I was. He spoke German fluidly, with just the smallest hint of a Dutch accent. As I examined his face, I realized that I had seen him before at the factory and that I had heard him chatting in French as well. I no longer hid my surprise. “Are you some sort of academic?”
I pulled a crumpled pack from my pocket and offered him a cigarette. We headed to the exit as the light faded.
“University student,” he replied. “But that was another life.”
Looking around him, he spoke quietly and deliberately now.
“You have the opportunity to obtain information that could be interesting to the Allies. If you get the papers to me I will ensure they fall into the right hands. Just make eye contact in the lunch hall and I’ll wait for you by the gates. I’ll be in touch, Šebesta. I trust you.”
He stared straight at me.
That was it. He didn’t ask for an answer or a promise. Nothing. He was measured and determined. He didn’t waste words. He seemed to know what he was doing. Or did he? He left me on the side of the street, didn’t turn around, didn’t say goodbye.
I was not sure what to do. I couldn’t ask anyone’s advice. Not Zdeněk. Obviously not Traudl. There was no one I could trust with this. The decision had to be mine. I could not get anyone else involved. It would have been a risk for me and could also be their death sentence. I was utterly alone. Alone in a ridiculous situation. I had a false name. Hunted by the Gestapo, I had come to the center of their world. Pretending to be a technical specialist, I was working in a factory for the very people who were starving my parents, torturing and killing my family. I was living with a German war widow. I was in a city that was constantly being bombed by the people whose side I was on. As my new Dutch friend had remarked, it was all entirely unreal.
And it wasn’t really a choice. There was only one thing to do. The longer the war went on, the less tenable my situation. My odds of survival were minimal anyway. The sooner this war ended, the more chance I had of coming out alive and seeing my family and my friends a
gain. The Dutch student was right. I wanted to help end this war. I made up my mind as I walked the few blocks back to Traudl at 48 Wigandstaler Strasse. The next day I would find the Dutch student and tell him that I would do it. I would find him at the lunch hall and just say yes.
That night I had to drink three cupfuls of my revolting alcoholic mixture to fall asleep. I had made it to barter for supplies, but that evening I was thankful to have not traded it all.
I will probably never find out who the Dutch student was. My father’s writings are filled with names, most of which I have been able to verify either from Warnecke & Böhm’s employee records or from the old Berlin phone books. But the name of the Dutch student is never given. I wonder if my father even knew it. Perhaps he had never been told for reasons of security. Maybe he thought that omitting the name was the correct thing to do.
Instead of the Dutch student’s name, my father left me a document in the box, stolen from the factory, which details the kind of work that he carried out. This document, dated December 14, 1943, was signed by Dr. Högn and marked Sebesta/3. It detailed research that had been undertaken to assess the effectiveness of sealing lacquer that was being developed for Messerschmitt, the aircraft manufacturer.
Šebesta’s papers containing details about lacquers for Messerschmitt
The boy from Prague was defying the Nazi system by living in the middle of it all. Sharing details about his work in the defense industry made the defiance even more acute. He could not share this further fact with his best friend, as doing so would endanger him as well. It was risky enough for them both that Zdeněk knew Jan Šebesta’s real identity.
There was one photograph in the box that took me years to place. My father is in it, a mischievous grin on his face, one of two young men in shorts, at some park in front of a statue. My father looked so young and happy that I assumed it must have been taken before the war and left at the bottom of the box for sentimental reasons.
I realized that the other man in the photograph was Zdeněk when I finally found his passport photograph in a Czech archive. The photograph was of the two of them, taken on some outing during a summer day. Much later, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to locate the exact site of the photograph, so I used Google to look up statues in Central Europe. I scanned hundreds of online images until I found it. Any Berliner would have recognized it at once.
The Bismarck Memorial was moved by Hitler in 1938 to its present location in the Tiergarten, the principal park of Berlin. The imposing bronze of the first chancellor symbolizes German might as mythical heroes pose beneath him. Atlas signifies force. Siegfried forges a sword as a metaphor for industrial strength. Sibyl personifies learning as she peruses a book of history. Germania bears down on a panther to symbolize the suppression of rebellion.
When I finally traced Zdeněk’s son, he sent me the same photograph. His was stamped by the photographer and years later inscribed on the back with the words: Handa and Zdeněk, taken during an “educational” walk in Berlin. In the image taken by Otto Kohler in 1943, the two friends are standing in front of the Bismarck Memorial.
Two Czech boys with their secrets. Two pranksters grinning, in their shorts, in front of a symbol of German power.
Hans and Zdeněk in the Tiergarten in Berlin, summer of 1943
CHAPTER 14 Frightened Eyes
On December 10, 1943, Otto wrote a letter to say that his only worry is that your life may not be as peaceful as ours. A few days earlier, Ella had been admitted once more to the hospital in Terezín for emergency repair of her gallbladder. She wrote her children a brief note saying that before going into surgery, she had placed the photographs of the three of them, Lotar with Zdenka and Handa, by her bedside so they would be the first thing she saw as she came around from the anesthetic. She reassured them that she retained her iron will to live and asked them to focus on nothing else other than of the time that they will meet again.
She also entreated them to tell her something about her everything, her Handa. It seems she was in good spirits; after warning them not to laugh, she requested mascara and face powder. As always, she conveyed her gratitude and love. Even Otto sounded hopeful that this surgery would put an end to the ailments that Ella had suffered over the last eight months. He mentioned that with winter encroaching, his thoughts had turned to Zdenka, who hated the cold, and that he imagined her traipsing through a freezing Prague to Montana to handle the bureaucracy.
At the end of his letter, he added: We thought we would be able to spend these holidays together. Last year I cried all through them but this year I am not going to cry anymore. I hope with all my heart that you enjoy the holidays in peace and that we do too. I am certain that we will not remain separated for long. Only then, when we are again together, will we truly start living.
I will never know if Otto and Ella knew what Hans went through that December 1943. It certainly was not the peace that Otto had wished for him. There is no coded reference to Hans that I can find in the very few letters and postcards that remain from the period.
In November 1943, the British Royal Air Force led a series of air raids in a bombing campaign that became known as the Battle of Berlin. Newly developed fast-bombing planes equipped with radar technology enabled them to unleash increasingly damaging attacks on the city. Initially, the raids were conducted at night to minimize the inevitable losses from antiaircraft fire. Though Berlin seemed to withstand the attacks, the damage was devastating and widespread. Residential buildings, factories, churches, barracks, and warehouses were obliterated. The Charlottenburg Palace, the zoo, and the Tiergarten, where Hans had stood with Zdeněk the previous summer, were all bombed. Many structures and entire neighborhoods were destroyed. Between November 1943 and January 1944 alone, there were thirty-eight major bombing raids on Berlin. Thousands of civilians in Berlin were killed in those two months, and hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless. The war was far from over, but the city had begun the final terrible descent through fire into rubble.
Warnecke & Böhm and the surrounding area were bombed on November 22 and 23, 1943. My father was in the middle of it all, a period that he described in depth in the writings that he left for me.
When I narrate my father’s account of late 1943 and early 1944, I struggle to do it justice. It is better read in full as it was written, by an older man living in Caracas reviving memories that were then indistinguishable from the nightmares that woke him screaming in the night.
A visitor is welcomed at the gates of Warnecke & Böhm in Berlin in the late 1930s
Nietzsche wrote that what separates humans from animals is the ability to find one’s condition risible. Nazis tended to solemnity and humorlessness. They always showed what Nietzsche called “Tierischer Ernst,” a certain “animal earnestness,” a complete inability to laugh at themselves.
With every passing day I spent in Berlin, this became more evident. They could not recognize their own ridiculousness or indeed appreciate the absurdity of anything. Without imagination they were predictable. This realization enabled me to take calculated risks. I figured that by acting in an unexpected manner or in any way that ran contrary to their expectations, I could increase my chances of survival.
I must be clear. I behaved as I did out of an instinct to survive and not bravery. As was my intention, my colleagues found me eccentric. If they argued that the Germans were winning the war, I casually put forth a doubt, but without feigning much interest in the subject. At Warnecke & Böhm, as in all German factories, we were obliged to greet one another with a salute and a “Heil Hitler.” I refused to do this and instead would offer a simple but cheerful “guten tag.”
There were five of us Czechoslovaks in the company. I had convinced all in our group to adopt a similar approach. The others were tentative at first, but there is nothing like the comfort of numbers, united in nationality and hatred, to embolden one. These acts of mild insubordination confused the Germans, who expected absolute compliance but at the sa
me time represented a problem that they could tolerate. This meant that the focus on Jan Šebesta’s very identity was less intense, and any slips might more easily be explained as being merely a consequence of the cussedness of a lowly Czech. Paradoxically, drawing a little hostile attention might help me, as long as it was always consistent with Jan Šebesta’s character—a naive young Czech who was useful in a lab.
We had been doing this for months, so when the political commissary finally called me in, it took me by surprise.
“Šebesta, I have received a complaint from your superiors. It seems you are not saluting in the appropriate manner.”
I made up my answer as I went along. “In my family, we always greeted one another with ‘guten tag’ and it’s very hard for me to break the habit. My father used to say that it was important for one’s greeting to have meaning. The first thing to do when you encounter someone is to wish them a good day. It would be inconsiderate to do otherwise.”
He appeared unconvinced.
“Also, to proclaim ‘Heil Hitler’ when the führer clearly does not need a simple worker’s support when he is doing so well just doesn’t seem right. So I prefer to greet people with words that have significance.”
He seemed baffled. “Very well, Šebesta, I will include it all in my report.”
Just when I thought we were done, he looked at me again and his upper lip twitched slightly. His tone changed. “There is something else. You are scandalizing the company with your relationship. She is the widow of a hero.”
This made me uncomfortable and I hesitated. He stared up at me from behind his desk as I locked my fingers behind my back. I was no longer registered as living in Traudl’s apartment although we often spent evenings together. I knew of the prohibition on relationships between German women and “fremdarbeiter,” foreign labor. I reminded him that Dr. Högn was very happy with my work and pointed out that I had a contract approved by the Ministry of Work.
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