Mendelssohn is on the Roof

by Jirí Weil

  One day the old locomotive – the one they used to call ‘the coffee mill’ – clattered right into the centre of town. The children all screamed joyfully, ‘A choo-choo!’ They thought it would take them home. But the grownups did not rejoice. They knew that now they’d be taken away on rails hammered in by their own hands. The whistle of the locomotive had the sound of a death knell to their ears.

  The town was enclosed by battlements and gates which were guarded night and day. Forcibly extracted from the countryside and closed off from the world, the once sleepy garrison town had been turned into a massive prison. Nobody was allowed to look down from the ramparts. One time only – just before a visit of the Red Cross commission – they permitted small children to go for walks on the ramparts; the commission might notice that the children were too pale. After the commission’s visit, the children were no longer allowed there, but long afterwards they continued to draw pictures of what they had seen outside: the enchanting countryside with its tall bluish foothills, green meadows and orchards (real apricots and peaches hung from the branches of trees and looked quite different from the fruit they had seen in picture books), roads with signs telling how many miles to the capital. Beyond the battlements people walked more freely and everything was different: children sat at tables set for dinner in rooms with curtains, waiting for their mothers to bring them their food. Or they played outside their little suburban houses; they went to school, they flew kites, they skated on ponds, they went sledding, in the summer they swam in the river and bought ice-cream, they rode on merry-go-rounds and played ball. Cars of all sorts went tearing along the roads, buses stopped at railway crossings, trams rolled out of stations, and aeroplanes flew over cities. Cats warmed themselves on windowsills, dogs barked beside their kennels, cows grazed in pastures, while horses drew carts along the roads. Here in the fortress town there were no animals. Even butterflies avoided it.

  Only once did the children see live animals, emaciated, miserable sheep with singed wool. They were being herded through the town past the railway crossing where the SS authorities had their headquarters. It was evident that the sheep were exhausted, that they had come a long way. They had the same hopeless look in their eyes that people had as they placed their transport numbers around their necks.

  The grownups avoided looking at the sheep; they were reminded of their own fate. The children heard that the sheep had come from a village that had been burned to the ground. The children knew nothing about the village and didn’t remember its name. It must have been very far from the fortress town, because the sheep were so exhausted they could hardly move.

  The children drew everything they saw. In their drawings the sheep resembled wooden sawhorses. But they drew the eyes more carefully.

  The eyes were big and sad. Even though the town was carefully secured by battlements and guards, news of the world still managed to filter in somehow. It was passed along from mouth to mouth, filled in, distorted; sometimes it spoke of hope, sometimes it cried out in despair. How the news got into town nobody knew. To make it believable people said it came from the troopers.

  Only a special few maintained a different connection with the world: a radio with transmitter and receiver that moved about from one chimney hiding place to another. It had been put together by skilled technicians out of various stolen components – they had even used part of a rubber heel. Those who guarded it in its small suitcase, the kind that is sold in chain stores, did not pass along any of the news they heard. Their purpose was to send word of the ghetto out into the world, and to listen for the signal bringing tidings of the end of the war.

  But on occasion a few people from the outside world stole into the fortress town. They sewed on stars, and the troopers and ghetto guards allowed them to pass through the gate to meet their loved ones, if only for a moment. Some of these were caught, others got away. So it happened that a few managed to break through the iron circle and send greetings to friends and acquaintances, to bring in a little food and some books of poetry. These were exceptional beacons of light in the darkness and despair, small rays of hope. Songs and poems have been written about these people who managed to overcome all obstacles.

  Meanwhile, the countryside surrounding the fortress town was silent. Barbed wire twisted through the meadows, with the blue hills in the background. The road-sign PRAGUE shone with the same yellow colour as the stars bearing the ignominious inscription in a foreign language.

  Now, however, the special line brought a new element into town the SS men had not counted on: railway men.

  The SS men knew how to handle the troopers. But railway men were a different story.

  The trains went back and forth; they had to keep going, bringing weapons to the East and plundered goods back to the Reich. Without the trains the army couldn’t fight and the robbers couldn’t pillage. Once, they had thought they could manage without the railway. A fat marshal screamed about it on the radio, boasting of his Panzers’ Blitzkrieg, which would roll across the Caucasus, ever farther and farther, all the way to the Ganges, where they would join the armies of the eastern predators. But the Panzers’ glory ended in Stalingrad, and the army had to flee on foot in the Caucasus. Then the railway was all that was left. There were Dutch, Belgian, French, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian, Yugoslavian railway trucks all mixed up together. And they needed people to make repairs in various shops and engine rooms, to throw switches, to drive the engines.

  You couldn’t just shoot railway men to create fear among them; you had to handle them carefully, especially at a time when the front stretched two thousand kilometres from the Reich and fuel was running low.

  The Gestapo were well aware that the railway men were enemies. The engineers who drove the trains were escorted by guards with drawn automatics. Still, trains collided, trains were derailed. Bridges and rails blew up in every occupied town. Lead seals disappeared from carriages, bills of lading were misplaced, and whole trucks full of ammunition and provisions were mysteriously lost on unused sidings or in out-of-the-way stations.

  Thanks to the special line, a clever, tenacious and tough enemy found its way into the fortress town and with it letters, packages, newspapers and information. Now, in spite of the ramparts, gates and guards, they could no longer keep the fortress town so perfectly isolated.

  In the centre of town they stuffed the living freight being shipped to the East into railway trucks: they unloaded goods for the SS men – food, wine, liquor and meat for their dogs, and they loaded furniture, ceramics and ornamental metal objects produced in the fortress town workshops. Also crates from the woodworking shop and split slabs of mica for the Wehrmacht armed forces.

  The town lived in misery and hunger. People gasped for air in the multi-layered bunks of the overcrowded dormitories. The old were dying in the muck and dirt, and the helpless doctors didn’t know what to do with them. Colonies of slaves went off to labour each day. The smoke from the crematoria filled the town with its fumes. In the Appellplatz prisoners stood in rain and wet snow from dawn to dusk, while the sick were carried away on stretchers to die to the sounds of noisy roll calls.

  Behind the gate stood a new building where the SS men lived. They called it Friendship House. They decorated it with hammered metal sconces and ornamental screens. They would meet in a large room on the ground floor, where they would sit at tables covered with clean tablecloths and set with plates of Carlsbad porcelain. Wooden candelabra with burning candles hung from the ceiling. They ate and drank there and roared out their raucous songs. They drank to the health of the Leader and his Reich; they exchanged filthy anecdotes before collapsing on the floor in their own spittle.

  The trains carried ammunition and new reserves to replace armies flattened by Soviet tanks and shattered by Soviet guns. The trains carried their suffocating and dying human freight to the East, where they were unloaded on to platforms in the extermination camps and herded with sticks into gas chambers.

  Richard Reisinger was often
on duty at the special-line station. From the day he had to witness the execution, his job was ever more hateful to him. But were he to quit he’d immediately find himself among those being sent to the East. He was thinking about running away – some people had tried it – but he had seen them brought back all bloody and beaten up, to be displayed in the Appellplatz before being taken off to the Small Fortress.

  One day he was standing by the train with the old locomotive and the battered cattle trucks from all countries of Europe. The railway men were resting, looking around them at the queer streets with houses marked with letters, plaster cracked and falling off, at the broken-down courtyards and wooden animal sheds that now contained people. The train was surrounded by ghetto guards, troopers and SS men. They were waiting for a transport.

  The SS men and the troopers guarded the outer circle. Only the ghetto guards stood directly next to the train. The day was just beginning, and darkness still lay on the town. The ghetto was sleeping. Soon the procession of the condemned would appear, bowed down under the weight of their baggage. Suddenly, in the semi-darkness, someone crept out from under a railway carriage directly in front of Reisinger. Reisinger couldn’t make out the man’s face clearly, but from his uniform it was evident that he was a railway man.

  He looked at Reisinger for a while, and he seemed particularly interested in his yellow belt and cap. Then he said slowly and quietly, ‘You wouldn’t know Reisinger, Richard Reisinger?’

  ‘That’s me. What do you want with me?’

  ‘I’ve got regards for you from someone called Franta. He’s sending you this.’

  It was a box of Victoria cigarettes. As the cigarettes changed hands, the railway man’s movement was imperceptible in the half-darkness.

  As long as the transport didn’t arrive and as long as it remained dark, they were able to talk together. The railway man told him about some Finnish huts built for the Wehrmacht that were supposed to be taken to the East but had mysteriously found their way to the Vranany station. With a fake bill of consignment it would be quite possible to get them to the fortress town if only there was someone to receive them.

  Reisinger promised to inquire – maybe it could be arranged. Wood for crates arrived regularly at the timberyard. Neatly numbered sections of huts with ceilings of deck wood could easily vanish there, to be transformed into wood slivers, chips and slats. This was possible to arrange, for confusion was mounting in the midst of the perfect organisation.

  They agreed to meet again. Reisinger had to work carefully, but he had an acquaintance in the timberyard. And so it happened that when the train finally arrived with a shipment for the fortress town, sections of Finnish huts managed to get in as well. From there they were sent to the timber yard and quickly processed. The wood was distributed to the dormitories in small bundles, and loaded into stoves, fireplaces, tin barrels. The children’s houses received the biggest load. The warmth brought colour to cheeks. It heated the soup made of bread crusts. It helped nurses sterilise hypodermic needles and doctors examine undressed patients.

  A circle was completed that had started somewhere at a shunting station where a bill of consignment seemed to be lost; then a chain of signalmen, brakemen and dispatchers moved the train to a blind siding at Vranany so that it would end in the fortress town and give a little warmth.

  It was a small nothing in the overall economic picture of the Reich, where they squandered millions, where they destroyed, slaughtered, burned, and then plundered, amassed and used up again.

  But this small nothing signified a helping hand and solidarity with all people who uphold freedom and sacrifice their lives, solidarity with the Soviet Army, which swooped down upon the half-million-strong horde of arrogant marauders with all their decorations and crosses and medals in Stalingrad and drove them out to die like rats.

  This small nothing overcame Richard Reisinger’s irresoluteness. Now that he had decided to fight, he had something to sacrifice his life for.

  The wood had been burned long ago, yet the trains kept arriving and leaving from the fortress town. Occasionally Reisinger ran into the railway man who had smuggled in the wood, and some friends of his as well. They rarely had a chance to speak: either the troopers were too near or the SS men were paying too close attention.

  Then one day Reisinger said to the railway man, ‘I’d like to get out of here, but I don’t know how to go about it.’ He told him he’d been thinking about it a long time, and that he hoped to climb over the battlements and walk along the highway to Prague.

  The railway man knew a better and simpler way: they’d hide him in the brakeman’s hut and get him a uniform. Then he could simply leave from the station. Nobody would notice an extra railway man, because there were always so many of them hanging around. After that, Franta would take care of everything.

  One day a member of the ghetto guards disappeared. They searched for him long and hard, but they didn’t find him. They tore apart the entire countryside, they asked their neighbours in the Small Fortress for help. But the trail grew cold. Nobody knew what had become of number BA 450.

  In the end they dissolved the ghetto guard and sent all its members on a transport to the East. They left the commander of the ghetto guard in the fortress town for a while longer. Perhaps they thought they might need him again.

  TWENTY

  THE TRANSPORTS LEFT for the fortress town and for the East. Thousands of people went on them. Weighed down with baggage, numbers hanging from their necks, they walked through the gates of the Radio Mart and past the SS man on guard there. They were never to return. They were detained for as long as a week in makeshift huts and then they departed at night in sealed cattle trucks. Passers-by had to notice the SS man standing arrogantly on guard; they had to notice the procession of the condemned, burdened with bundles, wearing yellow stars.

  One day the transports ceased. The supply had been used up.

  In the offices of the Jewish Community new faces appeared. New workers arrived, ones whose life expectancies had been extended by the Central Bureau because they were related by marriage to people classified as Aryans.

  The departing ones bore a grudge against the new arrivals: they had stolen their jobs, they believed; it was the new arrivals’ fault that they, the departing ones, were forced to go off into the unknown. Unwillingly they handed over their daily schedules of affairs, filled with petty and meaningless activities, meaningless because there was only a tiny number of people left. Yet they boasted about their work as if it were incredibly important, as if it required extreme skill and experience.

  The meaningless affairs passed into new hands, and so did the stolen property in the warehouses, where those from the Reich would come to pick out requisitioned goods. And because they also stole many other things, it sometimes happened that the warehouse manager ended up with nothing but the bill of consignment.

  Of all the original workers at the Collection Agency, finally only eleven remained. These were indispensable because they helped the Central Bureau steal and store property. Among them was someone who searched for jewellery hidden in pawnshops or safes. Another was an antique dealer who specialised in paintings and knew how to estimate their value. Yet another was good at tracking down foreign currency and secret bank accounts. All eleven had become the robbers’ helpers – that was why they remained in town with their families. The twelfth was Dr Rabinovich. He had nothing to do with stolen property. He was a scholar. The head of the Central Bureau had charged him with creating a monument to the triumph of the Reich, a museum of the extinct race, and promised him the same protection as the other eleven.

  Dr Rabinovich was not happy. His new co-workers didn’t care about religion and most of them didn’t even belong to a congregation. They didn’t treat the religious objects that continued to come in from out of town with respect and they considered their work in the museum to be just another job. They weren’t as zealous as their predecessors, but they conducted themselves with greater self-confidence
: they weren’t afraid of him, Rabinovich. They didn’t seem impressed with the fact that the head of the Central Bureau himself often called him. Rather, they seemed to scorn his role. Their lives were secure, at least for a while, and that gave them the strength to avoid meaningless work. They didn’t bow to him, nor did they ask him to intercede for them. Secretly they laughed at him, some of them even openly. He was unable to yell at them and threaten them with the transport as he had their predecessors. They weren’t lazy, indeed they were glad to be able to work. But they didn’t extend themselves.

  He was obliged to work with these new people now. Only twelve of the original people were left, and he was one of them. They had been saved, and perhaps they would survive the war together with these new ones. The head of the Central Bureau continued to summon him to his office, but he had been in a bad mood recently. The Reich was losing on all fronts, and that equanimity he had always boasted about was beginning to go. He no longer went to the theatre wearing all his decorations. He no longer interested himself in music – indeed, lately it seemed to annoy him. He frantically devoured the various strategic studies forecasting staggering victories of the Reich in the nearest future, which he believed and didn’t believe. For doubts were beginning to assail him in spite of everything. He was irritable, bad-tempered and rude to his staff. The city where his mother lived hadn’t been spared the bombing after all. The old white-haired lady had not been killed, thank God, but her villa was destroyed. All the valuable keepsakes were now ashes and dust. Even that exquisite figurine of The Judgement of Paris fell victim to a bomb. Now there was only the one original left, in the Meissen museum.

  He had never been one to drink, but now he began. He drank alone, so his staff wouldn’t see him, carefully choosing the wines and liqueurs from the warehouse. People assigned to the Jewish Community created a little hideout for him with rugs, armchairs and a special cabinet for bottles and a radio. It was actually a nicely furnished room, though it was underground. He took refuge there, to listen to foreign broadcasts and to drink. Once drunk, he’d find a German station, turn it up to top volume, and listen to noisy patriotic songs about airmen who were always victorious, about the homeland where everything would be beautiful when the victors returned. And yet the airmen were victorious only in the patriotic songs. Bombs were falling on the homeland. The cities were piles of rubble. After these patriotic songs he would sometimes hear a cajoling, gentle voice exhorting his countrymen to hold back the savage hordes, promising that the Reich had secret weapons it would use to conquer the enemy. At those times he’d pull out his revolver and shoot wildly into the air – anything to avoid hearing that voice he knew so well. He knew that the voice came on only when it was necessary to cover up defeats.