The Trick

by Emanuel Bergmann

  Moshe immediately felt ill. His knees were weak and there was a knot in his stomach. He was reminded of his nights at the Hannover morgue. With each breath the stench of decay entered his body, like a rancid gas. It drove tears into his eyes. The bodies seemed like puppets with broken strings. Their skin was as pale as ash, their limbs were hanging down at grotesque angles, and Moshe thought: That must hurt. But then he reminded himself that they were beyond hurt. He began to feel a sense of awe. And shame. Each of these human deaths made him feel ashamed to be alive. He was ashamed at the thought of transience, at the immeasurable loss of everything each of these men and women ever was and ever could be. Who were they? Who would they have been if he had met them on the street? He felt rage against the thieves who had robbed them of their futures.

  Seidl gently put his arm on Moshe’s shoulder and turned him away from the pit. “Maybe,” he said, “you can teach me a few of your tricks.”

  Moshe nodded weakly and said, “It would be my pleasure, Commandant.”

  Seidl considered himself a patron of the arts. The majority of the Jews sent to Terezín were scholars, artists, and musicians. They were encouraged to lead seemingly creative lives. Within the camp, the Nazis had installed parks, flower beds, concert venues, and statues, all to hide the truth—that Terezín was a way station on the road to extinction. Most of the intellectuals here were going to be sent to extermination camps. Sooner or later. Places without parks or concert halls, where the regime showed its true intentions. Moshe had heard rumors back in Berlin, but he had closed his eyes, like so many others, refusing to see. The truth was too bitter. It couldn’t be so.

  Over the next few days, Moshe slowly got used to daily life in the camp, which held no pleasures, despite the flower beds. It was all unworthy of him, an artist of the highest order. The soup, if you could call it that, gave him the runs. The nights in the barracks were terrible. Moshe had always hated sleeping in the presence of strangers. He constantly woke up from the coughing, the fleas, and the stench of others. All night long, there were sniffles and whispers, cries and prayers. And fear, constant fear.

  Roughly one week after his arrival, in the soup line, there was a miracle.

  The person in front of him was old and haggard, like so many of the others. He seemed frail, weighed down by the burden of his years and the many injustices of the world. His beard was white. Moshe stared at him. Could it be true?

  “Papa?” Moshe said tentatively.

  The old man seemed not to recognize him. Was he wrong?

  “Papa,” Moshe said again, this time louder. “Don’t you know me?”

  Slowly, the old man turned around. And as recognition lit up his weary, lined face, Moshe could feel hot tears well up in his own eyes.

  He took his father into his arms.

  Laibl told Moshe how the Nazis had kicked in his door one day and dragged him out of the apartment. Moshe asked what had happened to the Locksmith. He hung himself, his father said, since all his locks had proved useless. Laibl’s friend Dr. Ginsky had been forced to wear a pink triangle, which had been his undoing. He was stomped to death by a group of SS men.

  As Laibl told him this, he began weeping.

  He didn’t cry for my mother, Moshe thought bitterly. But he’s crying for this doctor.

  Laibl took hold of Moshe’s maimed arm with both hands and said: “I’m so sorry. . . .”

  Occasionally, Seidl invited Moshe into his luxurious office. After sitting down with a brandy and discussing the finer points of magic, Moshe would perform a few simple tricks for him. One day, Moshe made Seidl’s party pin disappear, a small but satisfying act of insubordination. Seidl merely laughed and applauded like an obedient child. Moshe started to teach him, but was careful not to divulge too many tricks at a time, because he quickly realized that his survival depended on how amusing he was to Seidl. He was Scheherazade, the Persian princess from A Thousand and One Nights. And Seidl was the evil King Sharyâr, who married a different woman each night, only to have her killed in the morning. Except, of course, for Scheherazade, who stayed alive as long as she entertained the king with a new story each night.

  And so, in Seidl’s office in Terezín, Moshe converted all the tricks of the trade he had learned from the Half-Moon Man into his currency for survival. Over time, he taught the commandant about production, the vanish, teleportation, legerdemain, and the art of mentalism. He found himself constantly performing, laughing at stupid jokes, in exchange for another day of life. Another day with his father.

  Several weeks passed. Cold, hard, dreary weeks. One day, Laibl contracted typhoid, like so many others. Moshe tended to his father as best he could. It was as if, in the face of death, father and son were making up for lost time.

  Like Rifka before him, Laibl was granted the mercy of dying in his son’s arms. But his death was neither easy nor painless. It happened at night, in the barracks. Moshe held the frail shape that was once a man.

  Laibl was shivering. “Moshe,” he said, “it hurts.”

  Moshe put a finger to his lips and shushed his father, as if the old man was a child.

  “I’m scared,” Laibl cried out.

  “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Moshe said.

  “Where’s Rifka?”

  After a moment, Moshe said, “She’s home. Waiting for you.”

  He saw that his father was weeping. Is he weeping for her? he thought, or for himself? For all these wasted years?

  “When can I see her?” Laibl asked.

  “Soon,” Moshe said. “Very soon. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  There was no more tomorrow. At sunrise, Moshe carried his father’s body into the death chambers and watched as the man who had raised him was swallowed by the abyss.

  He was an orphan now.

  Moshe continued with his lessons. As long as he did, he was still breathing. His student was not particularly gifted, but he was slowly making progress. Seidl reminded Moshe of an idiot child, grinning, laughing, clapping, delighted and surprised at the obvious. But if he didn’t master a trick quickly, he would lose his patience and turn moody. Moshe was a seemingly calm teacher. He had taught himself not to feel. That was a luxury he could ill afford. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He simply was.

  That was his true art: living in the shadow of the slaughterhouse and pretending not to notice the slaughter.

  It came as no great surprise to him one day when he was told that he would be boarding a train to “the East.”

  He knew what that meant. Seidl had grown tired of him. The last time Moshe had been in his office, the commandant had seemed listless. Moshe had tried his best, he had joked and fooled around, but Seidl remained distracted, flipping through the papers on his desk.

  Moshe had no more secrets left to reveal, having taught Seidl every trick he knew. Scheherazade had told her final tale. Moshe packed his few meager possessions into his trunk, his vanishing trunk, and, together with several hundreds other lost souls, waited for the train that would usher him away from this world.

  HIS LAST FIGHT

  Several hours later, there was still no news. Max and his family sat around the waiting room at Glendale Memorial. Zabbatini had been brought from the emergency room straight to the operating room, but Max was not allowed to go with him. The doctor, a large Armenian woman with a mane of thick, black hair, named Dr. Arakelian, had told Max in no uncertain terms to stay out. The doctors were doing everything they could.

  Zabbatini was in critical condition. Every once in a while, as the giant double doors leading from the waiting room to the operating room swung open, Max could see glimpses of hectic activity. Doctors and nurses were standing around the old man. A machine emitted a drawn-out beeping noise, which didn’t sound promising, Max thought. One of the doctors looked as if he was about to climb onto Zabbatini’s chest. He placed metal paddles on the old man’s chest, gave a sig
nal, and the body jerked upward like a puppet on jangled strings. Then the doors swung shut again. It was like a commercial break on television, when the story is brought to an abrupt stop. Max paced nervously up and down, passing his grandma, who was sitting stiffly on one of the visitors’ benches staring at the linoleum floor. Finally he sat down next to her, something he had not done in a long time.

  “Grandma?”

  She turned to him.

  Max cleared his throat and said, “How come you know him?”

  Mom and Dad looked up. Dad moved closer to Grandma.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like to know.”

  Grandma waved her hand dismissively. “Ach . . .” she muttered.

  “Mommy!” Dad said in a whiny voice, a voice Max normally couldn’t stand. Grandma raised her head and looked at them with an expression of wonder, as if she were seeing the world for the first time.

  “He saved my life,” she said.

  While the doctors and nurses rushed in and out of the operating room, Max and his parents gathered around Grandma.

  “Water,” she said to Harry. “Give me water. I’m thirsty.”

  Dad got up and went to the water cooler, filled a paper cup, and brought it over to Grandma, who put it on the table next to her and proceeded to ignore it.

  “When the war broke out,” she said, “I had only just been born.”

  “I know,” Dad said. “You told me. You were born in Zirndorf—”

  “Yes,” Grandma said. “In Bavaria.”

  Max stretched his legs. He had heard all this before. But usually, Grandma’s memories were all mixed up, like scrambled eggs. He had never heard her talk like this before. Her voice was clear and calm and steady.

  “The war had been going on for a few years, but we didn’t notice. Not in Zirndorf. In Zirndorf, there was peace.”

  “Mommy,” Dad said, “don’t you want your water?”

  “Don’t interrupt,” Grandma snapped at him. “I’m talking. You never let me finish!”

  “Sorry,” Dad said. “Go on.”

  Grandma huffed and continued: “Everything was very peaceful, Mama used to say. We were lucky. We had very nice neighbors, who let my mama and papa stay in their barn. All of a sudden you weren’t allowed to be a Jew anymore.”

  “Not allowed?” Max asked.

  “No,” Grandma said. “There were laws, and you could break most of them just by being a Jew.”

  “How is that possible?” Max wanted to know. “How can it be wrong to just be?”

  Grandma shrugged. She finally reached for her water, which allowed her to make a dramatic pause.

  “The Germans,” she said, “made the impossible possible.”

  She drank; then she put her cup down.

  “At the time,” Grandma continued, “the Germans were very poor. And Hitler said, ‘We will simply take from the Jews.’ So they elected him. They stole everything from us. And when there was nothing left to steal, they locked us in ghettos and camps. And they went to other countries, to France and Poland and Russia, to steal everything there, too. The Germans were like magpies—they grabbed everything they wanted.”

  “What happened next?” Max asked.

  “Then they had to kill everyone. It is no good to steal from people and let them live.”

  “But you said you were all right?”

  “Yes,” Grandma said. “At first. Our neighbors were decent people: they hid us. Not for free, mind you. My papa paid them money so that they would hide us.”

  “Ah,” said Max.

  “After a while, my papa, your great-grandfather, ran out of money to pay our nice neighbors.”

  “And then?”

  “Then they went to the Gestapo. And the Gestapo paid them for my mama and papa.”

  “What’s a Gestapo?” Max asked.

  “It was Hitler’s secret police,” Dad explained.

  “You mean, like secret agents?” Max was puzzled. As far as he could tell, secret agents were good. And Hitler was evil. James Bond was good. James Bond would never work for Hitler.

  “These were evil agents,” Mom explained with a forced smile.

  All right, Max thought. I can see that. Even Bond runs into enemy agents once in a while.

  “So,” Grandma continued, “the Gestapo came to our barn.”

  “And they wanted you to come out?”

  Grandma shook her head. “No,” she said. “They wanted us to stay inside.”

  “But I thought they wanted to steal from you?” Max asked. He was confused.

  “They already had,” Grandma said. “My papa said that they already took his shop and his money. He was a clockmaker.”

  “Then what happened?” Max asked.

  “They knocked on the barn door. My mama hid me and pressed my mouth shut, so that I couldn’t say anything. No one said anything. And they kept knocking and said, ‘Come out, Jews!’ ”

  “But you didn’t come out?”

  “No,” Grandma said. “We did not come out. We thought if we just hid under the hay, they would go away.”

  “And did they?”

  “No. They locked the barn from the outside and set fire to it.”

  Max was shocked. He thought about it for a few moments, then said, “But you survived.”

  Grandma nodded. “When the fire almost reached us, my papa jumped up and yelled, ‘Let us out, let us out!’”

  “And did they?”

  “They opened the door, and we all came out. Oh, they were laughing! It was very funny,” Grandma said, and she herself was smiling at the memory. “Only the neighbors were upset. Their barn burned down.”

  “Oh no,” Max said. He felt almost bad for them, those decent people. They were just trying to make a living.

  “What did they do?”

  “They complained to the officer who was there, and he wrote them a receipt. The Germans love things like that, receipts. But the neighbors were very upset, very angry.”

  “And you?”

  Grandma shrugged. “My parents were scared, so I was also scared. The whole time, I kept clutching my teddy bear. They put us on the back of a van and brought us to Fürth, to a police precinct. And there we waited.”

  “What happened then?”

  “After a few hours, we were brought with other Jews onto a bigger bus and brought to Munich, to the train station. It was a long ride. And then, from Munich, we were sent to the East.”

  THE TRICK

  It had been a long and arduous journey for Rosl Feldmann and her parents. First, they had to wait for hours at the train station in the sweltering heat, along with thousands of other people. At first they spoke to one another, but gradually, the talking gave way to exhaustion and heat. Finally, the train arrived. It was a first-class carriage, complete with curtains at the windows and plush seats.

  At Dachau, the train slowed down, which was puzzling to Rosl’s parents. Dachau? They had been there many times, going to the market or visiting friends. It was strange to them that the train would pass such familiar places. Rosl let her teddy bear look out the window. They stopped at an encampment surrounded by barbed wire. A bad sign. Rosl’s father insisted that things couldn’t get any worse, not yet realizing that things can always get worse. The world had an infinite capacity for getting worse.

  But Dachau was only a short stop along the way. They were headed to a small town in Poland, a place called Oświęcim. The journey took several days, and they were the most uncomfortable days that the Feldmanns had ever endured. The time for plush seats was definitely over. At a station in Poland, they had to board a different train. Along with hundreds of others, Rosl and her parents were herded onto a cattle car. Everyone was unwashed, sweating; many were crying. The air smelled of fear. The only place to relieve yourself was a small bucket in the corner of
the compartment. The passengers sarcastically called it “the most beautiful toilet in Poland.” The stench was unbearable.

  Several hours later, the bucket was overflowing. But Rosl absolutely had to go, and she made her way through the thicket of legs, pressing her teddy bear to her chest. When she finally arrived at the bucket, she began to have doubts. Here? Like this? Perhaps she could hover above the bucket. No easy feat in a moving train. But where was the toilet paper? Looking around, Rosl saw a young man near the bucket, with an arrogant and disdainful look on his face. He was sitting on a large suitcase and was wearing a torn black cape over his striped inmate’s uniform. He noticed her gaze.

  “What do you want?” he asked harshly.

  Rosl stared at the floor. “Nothing,” she whispered.

  But the man saw her glancing at the bucket, and he understood. He stood up.

  “Come here, your highness,” he said. “Your throne awaits.”

  Rosl carefully approached the bucket. Disgusting puddles had formed around it. She could hear flies buzzing, and she fought against nausea. When she was close enough, the man lifted his cape, shielding her from the others.

  “Come on,” he said. “I won’t look.”

  She held her teddy bear out to him. He sighed, took the bear, and spread his cape again.

  “Thank you,” Rosl murmured. She tiptoed close to the stinking bucket and carefully pulled down her underwear. Then she squatted down, not too deep, and closed her eyes.

  “Hurry up,” hissed the man. “I haven’t got all day.”

  “Oh,” replied Rosl, who did not appreciate being rushed. “Why, do you have plans? Maybe a walk in the countryside?”

  “No,” replied the stranger with forced patience. “But my arm is getting tired.”

  “Ah,” Rosl said. This made sense. She noticed that his left arm was deformed. She did her best to hurry.

  “Do you have toilet paper?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said the man. “The rose-scented kind?”