Somewhere There Is Still a Sun

by Michael Gruenbaum

  “Where are we?”

  “Bohusovice,” Mother says. “The train station.”

  “Bohuso . . . ? But aren’t we . . . ,” I say, rubbing my eyes, “I thought we were going to Terezin.”

  Mother doesn’t answer. She and Marietta are already heading toward the aisle, filled with people moving toward the exit.

  * * *

  I get off next to a building around the size of a very big house, its walls somewhere between faded yellow and faded orange. There aren’t as many tracks here as there were back in Prague, and there’s almost nothing beyond them. Just some mountains way off in the distance. The tracks themselves keep going, who knows where to.

  The narrow platform overflows with people and their bags. Guards shout angry, impatient instructions. I follow Mother and Marietta around the building, where bags are being placed into a giant cart. A long line of people walks along the edge of the muddy street leading away from the station.

  Right after handing our things to a young Jewish man in a cap, who tosses them up onto the cart right in front of us, I see the daughter of the old woman. She’s sitting under a small tree maybe fifty feet from here, her arms wrapped around her legs, her head buried between her knees. I watch her for a few moments until someone tells me to move. I turn aside and see two men carrying something long, which is wrapped up in a couple of blankets. They place it carefully onto the very back of the cart, at the edge of the high mound all our things have made.

  “C’mon, Misha,” Marietta says. “Let’s go.”

  So we join the line. Maybe ten minutes later the cart passes us. The back wheels pop up into the air for a second as the whole thing goes over a bump. It lands with a thud, and the end of the blanket falls open, showing me a pair of feet, their toes pointing down to the ground at two totally different angles.

  * * *

  Around a half hour later we turn off the main street and walk across a small bridge of sorts. On both sides below are fields with a small canal running down the middle. Up ahead a massive redbrick wall with gray cement stones running along its edges waits for us. The thing has to be twenty feet high. A big arched gateway has been cut out of the middle of it. Somehow there’s grass growing above the top of the wall.

  We reach the gateway and enter an arched passageway, probably a hundred feet long. Everyone’s feet make strange, soft echoes inside it. For some reason no one says a word. When we reach the end of the passageway and find ourselves opposite a large, wide, almost-yellow building, I ask Mother, “Terezin?”

  She closes her eyes and nods her head.

  * * *

  “How old are you?” a Jewish man, this one with a lot of stubble on his face, asks me. He’s sitting on a low stool behind a wooden table that has a thick crack down the middle. The table and his low stool are the only furniture inside his windowless office, which we entered off the passageway itself, meaning the whole thing is inside the wall of the fortress. People, including kids, are walking in and out all the time. I have no idea why.

  “Twelve,” I say.

  “Twelve?” he asks Mother, raising one of his bushy eyebrows.

  “Yes,” she says. “He’s twelve. His birth date is August twenty-third, 1930.”

  The man doesn’t respond, just opens a notebook to a page containing a chart with lots of numbers and what might be abbreviations. He studies the chart for a minute or so, tapping the tip of his pencil inside a few different boxes and humming to himself the whole time. Then he shakes his head and maybe laughs, too. “Pavel!” the man shouts.

  A boy a few inches taller than me appears. “Yeah,” he says, exposing a gap between his two front teeth.

  “Take this imposing young man to L417, room—”

  “Excuse me,” Mother interrupts, shaking her head back and forth very quickly. “L-4-1-what?”

  “L417,” the man says slowly. “One of the buildings here, the Children’s Home. For boys. He’ll be in Room Seven. One of the boys’ rooms.”

  “Children’s Home? One of the what?” Mother asks, and then her mouth just sort of hangs open.

  “What’s a boys’ room?” I ask Marietta.

  “Pavel,” the man says, “would you like to explain?”

  Pavel scratches his arm. “Kids live with kids here, not with—”

  “What do you mean?” Mother closes her mouth, but her top lip keeps doing something really strange.

  “I’m in Room Seven too,” Pavel says, like it’s all no big deal.

  “But he . . . ,” Mother starts saying. And I want to say something too, because suddenly my chest hurts really badly. But I keep quiet.

  “Pavel,” the man says, taking a deep breath and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, “how often do you see your father?”

  Pavel shrugs one of his shoulders. “I don’t know. Pretty much every day. If I want. Depends.”

  “What about your mother?” I ask.

  “Pretty much?” Mother asks.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” Pavel answers.

  Mother is silent. There’s a little tear in her right eye, but it’s just sitting there. I look at Marietta, whose face suddenly looks kind of gray, like it was carved out of an old rock or something. My chest really hurts. For some reason I turn back to Mother and tell her, “It’ll be okay, right?” So maybe I ask her. She hugs me so hard that the pain in my chest sort of breaks all apart, which feels horrible and good at the same time.

  The next thing I know, I’m outside, following Pavel, who says “C’mon, hurry up” a few times, until he stops, turns around, and asks, “Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”

  * * *

  We walk past one big, wide building after another, each separated by a small street. It kind of looks like we’re just wandering around some small city.

  “What is this place?” I ask Pavel.

  “What do you mean?” he asks. “It’s Terezin. What else would it be?”

  “No, but, I mean . . .”

  “The Nazis call it Theresienstadt. Whatever. Same thing.”

  We turn a corner. Instead of another building, we pass by a big square, with what sort of looks like a circus tent in the middle. At the far end of the square is an old church. Tons of people wearing stars are walking around all over the place. All ages, including lots and lots of old people. Even more are just sitting on benches or standing by the entrances to all these buildings. “I mean, did they build it just for us?”

  “Nah,” Pavel says. “It’s been here for a while. Over a hundred years. Used to be an army fort, I guess. But now it’s ours. Well, not exactly ours. It’s the Nazis’, obviously. But we run it. The Jews, I mean. Well, sort of, because mostly the Nazis just tell the Jews who run it what they have to do. But still, at least this way you barely ever have to see actual Nazis. Just Jews pretty much. And there’s a lot of us here. Way too many, if you ask me.”

  We get to a pale yellow building with a brown roof. Pavel hops up a couple of stairs. “L417. C’mon.”

  * * *

  It kind of sounds like a school inside, the way a school sounds when all the classroom doors are shut, but you can hear everyone making a racket, anyway. We go down a hallway and then up some stairs. Then down another hallway, until Pavel stops and opens a door.

  A ton of noise spills out. “Room Seven,” he says. I peek my head inside, but don’t enter.

  The room is probably the same size as a classroom. A small classroom. But instead of desks and chairs, there are bunk beds everywhere. Triple-decker bunk beds built out of plain wood, with wooden ladders leaning against each one. The bunks are all jammed together, so I can barely see even halfway to the back of the room. Plus there’s all kinds of stuff hanging off the beds. Shirts, pants, jackets, shoes, blankets, bags—you name it.

  And kids. Everywhere kids. All boys around my age. Lying on beds, sitting on beds, standing next to beds. Talking, drawing, writing, reading books, playing cards, setting up a chess board. A few more kids sit at these very narrow wooden d
esks set up between the rows of beds. And a couple of boys might be wrestling on the floor below one of the desks.

  “C’mon,” Pavel says, grabbing the edge of my coat. “Don’t just stand there.”

  I take about three steps inside. A few boys notice. “Hey, everyone!” Pavel screams. A few more kids look my way, but only a few. “This is Misha.” No one seems to care too much. “So, okay. That’s Kikina.” He points at some kid with light brown hair. “And that’s Shpulka”—though I can’t figure out who he means—“and Pajik and Gorila—”

  “Gorila?”

  “And Majoshek and Extraburt and Robin and him, huh, him I don’t remember, must be new, too, and I think that’s Petr, and, oh, forget it.”

  “How many kids live in this room?”

  Pavel takes off his jacket and tosses it on the top of one of the bunks. “About forty,” he says. “About.”

  I try to get my mouth to say something to someone else, or my feet to move somewhere, but I’m sort of frozen.

  “Hey,” Pavel finally says to no one in particular. “Anybody seen Franta?”

  * * *

  Jirka keeps snoring. Well, not exactly snoring. It’s more that every time he breathes in, he sort of gets stuck on something, in his nose I guess, right at the end of the breath.

  Actually, I’m not so sure his name is really Jirka. It might just be Jiri. I met so many kids today, I can’t keep any of their names straight. There was Paul and Martin, plus Erich, Jan, and Koko. And Hanus and Leo—there might be two Leos, maybe even three. There are definitely two Hanuses. And Mendel and Egon and Jila. And a bunch more I can’t remember now. Well, whoever this kid is who’s lying right next to me on our mattress, he keeps snoring.

  I can’t sleep. I guess I got used to how quiet the ghetto was by the time we left Prague. Somehow Marietta always slept like a rock back there. Where is she right now? And Mother? One of the boys, maybe it was Mendel, said that women sleep in some place called the Dresden Barracks, wherever that is, and that if Marietta is sixteen, she’s considered a woman here. So I guess they’re together. Lucky them.

  But not me. Nope, I’m sharing a room with forty other boys I barely even know. And about half of them seem like they’re having some really important conversation, even if it is in their sleep. One boy will murmur something, and a second later some other kid sort of answers him with a grunt. And they’ll go back and forth for a while until someone else joins in. Then all three of them will argue, until one gives up, at which point the two left take it from there. It’s been like that for the last hour at least.

  And where’s Franta? I’m pretty sure Kikina said that he has a bed in the corner over by Pavel’s, but I don’t think he’s there.

  Unlike everyone else, when Franta met me, he actually seemed to care.

  “Misha,” he said, and even shook my hand firmly. “Welcome to the Nesharim.”

  “Neshawhat?” I asked, still standing by the entrance to our room.

  “Nesharim,” some boy with wavy brown hair said, Kapr maybe. “It means ‘eagles.’ We’re the eagles. And Franta’s our madrich.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “It’s Hebrew,” Kapr said.

  “Yeah,” a new kid, short like me, said. Maybe it was Leo. “ ‘Nesharim’ is Hebrew for ‘eagles.’ ”

  “No,” I said, really confused. “The other word.” I looked to Franta for some help, but he just stood there with a little smile on his face.

  “What other word?” Kapr asked.

  “The other one . . . that you said Franta is.”

  “Hey.” Leo elbowed Kapr. “He means madrich.”

  “Right,” Kapr said. “It means counselor. Or teacher, or guide, or something like that.”

  “In Hebrew,” Leo added.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  Franta nodded quickly and rubbed his large chin for a few seconds, looking down at us. He wasn’t that tall for an adult, and not too old, either, like he almost could still be in high school. “Jila,” he said, pointing to a third boy who had put down some cards and walked over to us. “What should Misha know about being part of the Nesharim?”

  “Well,” Jila, who has a lot of light brown freckles on his cheeks, said, “twice a day . . . twice a day you’ve got to show Franta you’re clean. Hair, face, hands, nails. Stuff like that.”

  Franta lowered his eyebrows and nodded. His dark eyes darted over to me, which for some reason made me look away. It wasn’t that his eyes were mean or scary, but I couldn’t look at them when they were looking at me. At least not right then. “Good,” he said, “what else?”

  “You’ve got to make your bed,” Kapr said. “Every morning.”

  Franta nodded seriously, but didn’t say anything.

  “And bedbugs,” Leo said. “We check our beds for them every day.”

  “Plus for other insects,” Jila added.

  Franta nodded his head a few more times. “What about bathrooms?”

  “We clean those, too,” Kapr said.

  “And,” Leo said quickly, “if your hands and stuff aren’t clean, you have to clean the toilets!”

  “Which are really, really gross,” Jila said, raised his shoulders, and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Is that all? Do we merely clean all day long here?” Franta asked.

  “It feels that way sometimes,” Leo said.

  “Nah,” Kapr said, “we have the Program a lot of the day.”

  “Program?” I asked.

  “It’s like classes,” Jila said, “like school. Well, sort of anyway. They call it that because we’re not allowed to have official school. But still, we have that in the morning and afternoon most days.”

  “Unless you have a job,” Kapr says. “Then you’re allowed to miss the Program.”

  And I was about to ask what he meant by a job, when I noticed Franta scanning the room slowly, rubbing his chin again. “Misha will sleep next to Jiri,” he finally said. Or was it Jirka? “Jila, go show him where that is.”

  And I took a step to follow Jila, only then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stopped and turned around. It was Franta’s hand. His fingers were lean and strong, which I bet are how Andrej Klapzubova’s fingers look. Franta squatted all the way down to my height and looked right at me. I wanted to turn away again, but this time I couldn’t, even though it felt like his dark eyes, just by looking at me, might knock me over. He looked back and forth at both my eyes. Maybe he was trying to figure out something really important about me. Then he squeezed the muscle that runs between my shoulder and my neck. He squeezed it pretty hard, but it didn’t really hurt. It sort of felt good actually, and for some reason made me stand up straighter.

  “Misha,” he said, like he was just trying out my name. Then he lowered his eyebrows. His eyebrows weren’t that thick, but the skin below them was, which is maybe what made his eyes do whatever they were doing when he looked at me. “Misha.” He said it again. Then he nodded, rubbed my back, and popped back up. “Welcome, Misha. Welcome to the Nesharim.”

  So that’s what I am now, one of the Nesharim. And the only one who can’t fall asleep.

  November 23, 1942

  “HEY, MISHA,” FELIX SAYS.

  I just finished lunch, if you can call it that. After I waited in line for twenty minutes (where I started to count numbers again, only to forget at around fifty each time), they gave me a hard roll, some awful soup, and a little bit of spinach. For the tenth time in the last ten minutes I check my pocket for my meal ticket, since Pavel said you definitely don’t want to lose that.

  “Yeah?”

  “You like soccer?” he asks.

  I nod my head. “Why?”

  “C’mon,” he says, and heads toward the barracks’ exit.

  “Wait,” I shout. “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?” he answers.

  I try to catch up. “But I thought . . . aren’t we supposed to . . . don’t we have rest period now?”

  W
e get outside, and Felix races over to Pedro, Brena, Koko, Erich, Pudlina, and Gida. Pedro’s holding an actual soccer ball in his hands, but I’ve never seen such a dirty one in my whole life. I swear the dirt looks about five times dirtier than regular dirt. But who cares? It’s definitely a soccer ball.

  “Hey, I didn’t know you played goalie,” Felix says to Pedro. “I don’t play goalie,” Pedro answers, like Felix just accused him of being a girl.

  Koko slaps the ball hard out of his hands and starts laughing, “So then why are you holding the ball with your hands?”

  Koko starts dribbling it down the street, with the other kids right behind him, all shouting for him to pass. I open my mouth to ask my question again, to double-check that it’s okay not to be in Room 7 during the rest period, which is where Franta told us to be, and to see if it’s okay to be going wherever it is we’re going instead. But then Pedro shouts, “Last one to the bashta is the odd man!” So I sprint to catch up.

  Bashta? What’s the bashta?

  We reach the end of the street, cross over onto some grass, and then run up a small hill. Next thing I know, we’re standing on top of the fortress’s inner wall, which is covered in half-yellow grass and sort of looks like a small field. I guess this is the bashta. A few more kids I don’t know are already waiting for us.

  I barely beat Brena up here, which I can’t believe, since I know I used to be way faster than I am now. But that’s what you get living in the Prague Ghetto and eating small portions of pretend food for the last two years.

  “Lucky for you, Brena,” Felix says, and kicks the ball of dirt to him, “there’s ten of us.”

  The kids start passing the ball around to each other, but I’m so winded I can barely stand up straight. I act like my shoes need retying. The truth is my shoes need reshoeing, but there’s no way that’s happening. The grass is still a little damp from the rain yesterday, and my knees get pretty wet when I kneel down.

  Pedro and some other kid toss their jackets down by one end of the field and measure the distance between them by taking tiny steps where your toe touches your heel, which is how we used to make goals sometimes back in Prague. “Sixteen!” Pedro shouts toward the other end of the field, where Pudlina and Felix are doing the same thing. Then Felix and Gida walk off a bit from everyone and start whispering and pointing, including at me. Someone kicks the ball my way, and I try juggling it a few times on my knees, but I keep messing up, maybe because the ball could use some air. I give up and just kick it over to one of the kids I don’t know.