“Mother,” I whisper the third time he says it, and pull her head down to my mouth. “Don’t hide anything, okay?”
Without looking at me she says, “There’s nothing left to hide, Misha.”
“Promise?” I ask.
She kisses the top of my head but doesn’t say anything.
For some reason I breathe in extra hard, and this weird, gross smell hits me. I can’t figure out what it is exactly, but it makes me think of the time I went to pee in a station at the very, very end of a tramline. Father and I were setting out on a hike. He told me, “Wait five minutes, Misha. Go in the forest.” But I couldn’t wait, so I hurried into the station’s bathroom. The light inside the freezing, filthy room was flickering on and off, and the whole place reeked like it hadn’t been cleaned in forever.
That’s what it smells like here, only much, much worse.
There are about twenty people in front of us in line. In this line, that is. Because after you talk to the person at this table, you have to wait in line for the person at the next one. When someone finishes with one table, they take their stuff and drag it to the back of the next line. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m bored. It’s not fair that on top of everything else, we have to stand here like this. The least they could do is give us numbers or something and let us sit down until our number gets called. Then we could read or play cards or even just rest. But no, they want us to stand instead.
Finally we get to the front of our line. Sitting behind the table is a Jewish man with glasses resting at the end of his nose. Mother hands him our pink summons. He reads it, looks up over his glasses at the three of us, bites his thumbnail, and starts leafing through a giant stack of papers. It takes him a while, but eventually he crosses something out. Then he takes three small rectangles of mostly white paper from another corner of the table. The man, looking back at the summons Mother handed him, writes out one of our names on each piece of paper.
977, Margarete Gruenbaum
978, Michael Gruenbaum
979, Marietta Gruenbaum
He grabs a stamp, pushes it into an ink pad, and quickly stamps a W on each rectangle, right above the name. He extends all three rectangles to Mother.
“Thank you,” I say.
The man doesn’t answer me, just chews on his thumb again. Its bright pink skin is badly torn.
“What’s that transport box for?” Marietta asks.
“It’s for the name of the transport we’re on.” Mother says. “They must have left it blank because everyone here is on the same transport as us, Cc.”
“Cc?” I ask. “Why Cc?”
“They started with A,” Mother says. “Last year. After they got to Z, they started over at Aa.”
I think for a few seconds. “So we’re on the twenty-ninth transport?”
“Anyone caught hiding valuables,” the SS guard says again, “money, jewelry, et cetera—will be shot.”
At the next table another man with a yellow star on his chest asks us for our rations book. Mother gives it to him. The man, with curly hair and a big bald spot on the top of his head, flips through the book before tossing it into a cardboard box at his feet. The thing is half-filled with them.
“But how will we eat?” Marietta asks Mother in a loud whisper.
“You won’t need those there where you’re going,” the man says with about as much emotion as the SS guard. “Next.”
When we’re halfway to the next table, where people are handing over their keys, I tell Mother, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
Mother scans the whole hall slowly. “Can you wait?” she asks.
“How long?”
Mother looks down this line, then over at the lines for the next two tables.
“Marietta,” she says, “take Misha to the bathroom.”
“But I don’t have to go,” Marietta says.
“Marietta,” Mother says, “please.”
“But what about our stuff?”
“I’ll watch our things. Just please go.”
“I don’t even know where the bathrooms are,” Marietta says.
“Then ask someone,” Mother says, brushing something off Marietta’s shoulders.
It takes us a while, but eventually we find a sign that says MEN’S LATRINE.
The smell is much, much stronger here.
“Hurry up,” Marietta says, lifting her shirt collar up and over her nose.
I walk through an entranceway and then down a thin corridor, the smell growing with each step. The corridor turns and then opens up into a square about half the size of my old classroom. The stench makes something rise up in my throat. Against one wall is a row of metal buckets. Blue puddles surround each bucket.
A man with gray hair and pale legs squats over the bucket farthest from the entrance, his back to me and his pants down past his knees.
* * *
Marietta runs into an old friend on the way back to the tables. They hug and chat like they’re in between lessons at their old school. I stand a few feet away and wonder how the Exhibition Hall can keep filling up with people. The line behind the first table is now a hundred people long, easy.
* * *
After the last table we take our bags and walk to the other end of the building, where rows and rows of small mattresses lie on the floor. People have already grabbed the ones closest to the rear wall, their bags piled up in the narrow spaces between the mattresses.
We reach the far edge of the unclaimed mattresses and throw our stuff down.
“Now what?” Marietta asks.
“Now we wait,” Mother says.
“How long?” I ask.
“I’m not sure.” Mother unbuttons her jacket, even though the hall isn’t very warm. “A day, two days. Maybe three.”
I don’t say anything, just plop down onto my mattress. The thing barely breaks my fall though, since it’s really just a long, narrow sack filled with straw.
* * *
Someone peed on Mother’s mattress not so long ago. We grab our things to move somewhere else when a Czech policeman, patrolling the room, tells us moving is strictly forbidden.
* * *
A couple of hours later they call us for lunch. We get in line and show our badges to someone who checks our numbers off from a long list and hands each of us a tin bowl.
I try counting while we wait. Around the time I get to five hundred, some man dumps half a potato and some nearly brown liquid into our bowls. I guess it’s soup.
* * *
There’s nothing to do here. Marietta disappears for a while after lunch, looking for that friend of hers. I see a couple of boys my age, but I don’t know them. Plus there’s nowhere to play here anyway. So I open my bag and take out the one book I packed. Klapzubova Eleven.
It’s pretty much the best book ever, because the Klapzubova family is probably the best family ever, even if they’re just made up. The Klapzubova family is the dad and his eleven sons. And they’re eleven because that’s how many people you need for a soccer team. Not only is every one of the brothers an amazing player, they all play separate positions. For a while they were worried, because none of them was any good in goal. But then the youngest brother, Andrej, he turned out to be a natural.
I’ve read it about ten times, but it never gets boring.
So I just open it to the place where they accept a challenge from the top club in Prague, which really wants to beat the Klapzubovas because the oldest brother, Lukas, who is probably the best player in the whole family, refused to sign with them. Of course he wins the game with a bicycle kick, his specialty.
And I’m nearly at the spot that describes him leaping up into the air with his back to the goal when I hear a loud thud, followed by a bunch of people up on their feet about ten mattresses from me. I put my book down and walk over. It takes me a while to see through the small crowd.
An old woman has collapsed.
* * *
Dinner is the same as lunch, plus half a carrot. Whic
h I counted to 617 before getting.
* * *
I don’t remember falling asleep, just thinking I never will. The giant hall is mostly dark, but it’s never even close to quiet. Babies cry, sick people moan, and a thousand people toss and turn on their cruddy straw mattresses. At one point, in the middle of the night, I’m suddenly awake. I turn over and notice Mother. She’s sitting straight up, her face frozen, her eyes open wide.
November 19, 1942
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO do here.
Except hold in my pee for as long as I can.
* * *
I count to 429 before getting breakfast, which is something I don’t recognize. It’s nearly white, very mushy, and tastes like paste. When we finish and return to our things, Mother removes a loaf of bread from her bag and lets me and Marietta split a quarter of it.
* * *
More people arrive, but not as many as yesterday.
* * *
A different, shorter SS guard threatens to shoot people hiding valuables.
* * *
An SS officer screams at the man working behind the table who kept biting his thumb yesterday. The man says something, and the Nazi slaps him hard on the back of his head twice. When I look over there an hour later, someone else is manning that table.
* * *
I play a game with some boys in a corner of the hall. Using a crumpled up piece of paper, we play keep-away until some woman screams and makes us stop.
* * *
The Klapzubovas beat the Italian national team on penalty kicks, Andrej deflecting the Italian captain’s try with the tip of his pinky. The ball hits the crossbar, bounces high up into the air, and falls back down, right into Andrej’s arms. It was the first time ever the Italian captain had his shot blocked.
* * *
Lunch is the same as yesterday. But I had to count until 714 to get it.
* * *
A woman calls out Mother’s name. It’s the wife of one of Father’s old coworkers. Holding hands, they talk for over an hour. Then they hug for a very, very long time.
* * *
Every once in a while I somehow forget that it smells like pee here. But at some point I always remember again.
* * *
The old woman who collapsed yesterday hasn’t gotten up yet today. A woman around Mother’s age spends pretty much the whole day sitting at her side and wiping her forehead with a damp cloth.
* * *
After I ask her about fifty times, Marietta finally agrees to play cards with me. But she doesn’t try, and so I beat her easily, which is no fun.
* * *
Before dinner (a carrot and some broth with little pieces in it that might be chicken) I get up the courage to go to the bathroom. On the floor about twenty feet from the entrance is a young man with a very puffy face. He’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bare floor. There’s no mattress or bags near him. A badge with the number 741 is pinned to his chest. He’s singing or moaning or both and keeps hanging his thick tongue out of his mouth while he rocks back and forth. As I pass him, I notice he’s wet his pants. He rubs his hands back and forth in the puddle surrounding him. Then he sticks one of his hands into his pants, but not into his pocket. He sticks it in around the back actually. Something tells me I should look away, but I don’t, or can’t. He removes his hand a few seconds later, a clump of something dark brown stuck to the tips of his fingers. The next thing I know, he’s eating it.
My stomach feels like it’s about to turn inside out, so I run into the bathroom, inhaling the stench there as much as I can. But even with my lungs full of the bathroom’s horrid air, I’m not distracted nearly enough. Worse than that, something tells me that just like with the couple jumping a few years ago, I’m not ever going to be able to forget what I just saw.
I slowly walk toward our mattresses, my stomach still turning over and over and over on itself.
* * *
“I think I’m going to go to sleep,” I tell Mother when I get back.
“So early?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m tired.”
She leans over to kiss me good night, and as she’s sitting back up I grab her shoulder.
“Mother.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember . . .”
“Remember what?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“When I was much younger, you used to . . .”
“What is it, Misha?” I pull her even closer. “What?”
“You would . . . ,” I whisper, “you would rub my back to help me fall asleep. Can you—”
“Of course, sweetie.” She smiles a bit and closes her eyes. “Of course.”
So she does, and if I concentrate hard on her hand as it glides back and forth along my skin, I can almost block out the sight of that man and the smell and the bickering and the moaning and the footsteps and the straw poking into my chest and that woman, ten mattresses away, who keeps begging, “Please, Mother, please. You must drink something. Please.”
November 20, 1942
“UP! UP! EVERYONE UP!”
Czech policemen and a few SS guards are walking around screaming at us, even though it’s still pitch-black out.
“What time is it?” Marietta asks.
“I don’t know,” Mother says. Of course she doesn’t, she sent her watch to London almost a year ago. “Very early I think.”
* * *
Maybe an hour later, after everyone has packed up and eaten a horrible breakfast, they have us standing in five long lines, according to our numbers. The black outside the windows is now pale gray. Everyone is holding all their things, or has them on the ground next to them. Regular German soldiers have arrived, a couple dozen of them, and they stand along our lines with bayonets in their hands. About twenty people ahead of me in line I see the old woman. Somehow she’s actually standing. Well, not standing exactly, but she’s upright and leaning on that other woman, her daughter.
After all the lines have been formed, an SS officer enters the hall. I don’t think I’ve seen him before. He looks older than all the other soldiers and officers here. His face is pretty fat. The room knows to shut up the moment he clears his throat.
“Today you start a new life, in a land free from persecution. In Theresienstadt.” His last word echoes in the hall for a few seconds. No one makes a sound. “There you will join thousands of other members of your race already living in perfect safety. Upon your arrival each of you will be assigned work, and in this way you will thus be given the opportunity to become productive members of the Reich. Your new future begins today. Heil Hitler!”
Even after the officer finishes speaking, turns quickly on the heels of his shiny boots, and leaves the hall, no one says a word. Maybe because everyone is stunned just like me. A new life? A land free from persecution? Safety?
Is there a chance he might actually not be lying?
“Mother,” I whisper to her. “Do you think he’s lying?”
I think Mother nods, but I’m not sure, because we’ve started marching forward.
* * *
I don’t know how far they plan to have us march, but at this rate it’s going to take forever. People seem to stop every ten steps to adjust their bags. At which point someone always bumps into the person in front of him. One time an older man trips over a large bag. A German soldier goes over to him, grabs him by the arm, and begins to lift him up. But then he just throws him back to the ground and kicks him in his side. The man doesn’t get up.
* * *
The old woman and her daughter step out of our line. The daughter leans her mother against the side of a building. When a soldier walks over to them and points his bayonet at the mother, the younger woman puts her hands together like she’s praying. Then we turn a corner, so I don’t see what happens next.
* * *
The Praha-Bubny station. So that’s where we’re going. The station’s plain gray building waits for
us across Bubenska Street. Behind it a few long trains peek out, ready to take us to Terezin.
* * *
“Nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty, this car!” an SS guard shouts, and points. People begin to load slowly, stuffing themselves and their bags into the train. There are six or seven tracks here, and our train is on the second of them. Past the station there isn’t much to see, except some small hills spotted with just a few buildings. At some point the clouds disappeared, so the sky is blue.
“Nine hundred fifty-one to one thousand, this car!” he says and points again.
A few minutes later I’m stepping up the stairs and onto the train. We stuff whichever bags will fit under our seats and leave the rest in the aisle. The three of us squeeze into a single bench.
Out through the window I see three people approach. The old woman and her daughter, plus another Jewish man. They’re carrying her actually, it looks like she’s asleep. Maybe she passed out again. Then they’re in our car, and the sound of the daughter crying rises over all the other voices.
I lean my head against Mother’s side. The sun warms my head. My eyes close, and I see the faces of boys pointing and laughing, their white teeth bouncing up and down. I see Leci, and the man sitting in that puddle, and my pants around my ankles, and the rungs leading to the Golem’s attic, and that couple falling through the air, and Father putting on his jacket and never even saying good-bye to me.
I’m so tired that I can’t pretend I’m not the saddest kid in the world. And I’m so sad my empty stomach hurts and my face hurts too, like it’s been crying for weeks, even though it hasn’t. Then I realize I’m too tired to care about being so sad, so my sadness just sits there in my empty gut, like a thing that doesn’t really have anything to do with me anymore.
But as the train jerks into motion, that feeling disappears, and in its place something else shows up, something unfamiliar, something I haven’t felt in a long, long time.
Relief.
Good-bye, Prague.
Part II
Terezin
November 20, 1942
“MISHA, MISHA, GET UP. WE’RE here, get up, get up.” Mother is softly pushing my shoulder. I open my eyes. Marietta stands in front of me, putting her arms through the straps of her backpack.
Somewhere There Is Still a Sun Page 7