Letters From the Lost
Page 18
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THERE ARE OTHER SCENES AND conversations that live in my head. Else standing in the doorway of her home in Prague, graciously receiving visitors:
Gently, Else closes the door and reaches for the tray of Brötchen, the little open-faced sandwiches that she had placed on the sideboard. She proffers the tray to her guests as she moves smoothly about the room. Sometimes she stops to listen thoughtfully, her dark head cocked to one side.
She has been stockpiling happy memories and fills the silences with tidbits from better times. Her stories are fragrant flowers grown in her garden, redolent of a world that her guests long to inhale. She invites friends, she invites family, and she invites visitors passing through town. Every Sunday afternoon in Prague, people gather at her table for “Jause.” For Kaffee und Kuchen. The coffee is rich and dark, and there are sugar cubes and slender silver tongs on a tray. The tray also holds a bowl of Schlag, the wonderfully sweet whipped cream popular far beyond the confines of Vienna. Else serves Hefenteig, its fresh yeasty smell still lingering faintly, or Apfelstrudel, its tender crust still warm from the oven, or Mürbteig, its buttery crust topped with fresh fruit or a chocolate glaze.
Der Tisch biegt sich. Delicacies abound. In the early days, there are no shortages. Elsa’s home is a welcoming place, and the worse things get, the more often people seek comfort in her presence. They enjoy her baking, but mostly, they come to bask in her company. They drink of her good cheer. For brief moments, it is still possible to let food and companionship sweeten the circumstances.
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EMIL FRäNKEL OFTEN intrudes upon my thoughts. His frustration flows like lava over the obstacles in his way:
I must do something. But do what? They keep changing the rules. “Juden raus! Jews, get out!” But where can we go? No country will have us. How can we get out? It’s crazy making.
At first, moving in with Martha’s sister Else and her family seemed like a good idea. I’ve joked often enough that it was fated, or why else would my brother-in-law and I have the same first name?
Now my jokes about the two Emils are wearing thin. Besides, humour is not my brother-in-law’s strong suit. He has always left the social niceties to Elsa. She is gracious to a fault, but ever since they stripped the Herr Doktor Urbach of the right to practice medicine, our Emil is not an easy man to live with.
True, the apartment is spacious, but it was not built to accommodate eight people. Four Urbachs and four Fränkels. Frictions are inevitable. I know I should count my blessings, but it’s hard, especially when Martha seems so frail. All this uncertainty is too much for her, especially following so closely upon a risky pregnancy. She tries to hide her tears from Ilserl and from me, but she’s a poor actress.
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OFTEN, IT IS MARTHA herself who takes centre stage in my thoughts. As she picks up her pen and stares at the blank page, her inner monologue seldom varies:
How can I write when my emotions are so close to the surface? I must not start crying again. It upsets Ilserl to see me in tears. She’s such a good little girl. Almost an adult at seven. What a shame that her childhood has been cut so short. But what else could we have done? There have been too many decisions to make, each one more disabling than the last. How can I not weep for all that is lost?
Home in Linz is the past, and I must learn to live in the present. Prague is home now, and yet I feel homeless. I long for the familiar. For the home that Emil and I furnished together. For the nursery that we had painted after Ilserl agreed to move to her first “grown-up” bed. For the hand-embroidered linens that were part of my trousseau. For the cheerful blue and white cups that I used to fill each morning with hot milk and sugar and fresh-brewed coffee. Small things that I miss as much as the friends who used to gather at our table. Will we ever go home again? Is all this lost forever?
Here I sit, writing at a table that is not ours, under a roof that is not ours, in a city that is not ours. Only for my brother Arnold and his wife Vera can Prague be called home. They are the magnet that drew us here, and they have been incredibly kind. They are always so positive, so optimistic about everything. Perhaps it is Arnold’s training as an engineer that has given him this reliance on reason. I always fall into an emotional swamp. Vera too has this calm air of being able to cope with whatever life brings. When they are around, I actually believe for a while that my world has not come to an end.
Maybe it is simply easier for Arnold and Vera to be cheerful because they have not experienced flight. My sister Elsa and her husband Emil don’t want to live here either, but they had had no choice either when Hitler crossed into the Sudetenland. Things were a little easier when Edi and Gretl and Helly were here. Helly was a godsend, especially when we found out that Ilserl would not be allowed to go to school with other children.
Would things be different if I had not gotten pregnant at the worst possible time? It was just before Hitler’s tumultuous welcome to Austria that the doctor confirmed my pregnancy and advised against travel. I cannot bear to remember those months after the Anschluss. All along, Emil had been certain that Austria would invite Hitler to come and fatten the nation’s coffers. Emil kept saying that the good citizens of Austria would no more worry about the fate of a few million Jews than had the Germans. Greed would win the day because people always support politicians who promise to make them rich.
It’s hard to feel settled while Emil continues to fret. He sings only one refrain: Somewhere, anywhere. Somewhere far from Europe.
Emil and I have spent hours discussing the options. We don’t have many. We worry, especially for the children. At least as the youngest of five siblings, I had the good fortune of growing up loved by everyone. Arnold stepped into the role of the wise older brother ready to advise me at every turn. Sister Elsa has been my little mother since childhood. Smooth, sweet-talking brother Otto taught me how to deflect the discipline Mama often promised but rarely delivered. And until now, dear, soft-hearted Edi has always been there to dry my tears. Will Ilserl and baby Dorly know what it is to grow up surrounded by a loving family?
Poor Dorly! Born at a time of such great turmoil in the world. While the Austrians cheered Hitler as the new saviour, while Hitler ranted about creating an economic miracle by ridding the country of its Jews, I was in labour, giving birth to one more Jewish child. No one cares that our family is not religious. Now they lump all Jews together.
What lies ahead for Dorly? And Ilserl? She was so happy during those months when everyone was in Prague. She and Helly grew as close as sisters. Now Helly has gone to Canada and Ilserl rarely smiles. Emil will not let up on the idea that we must go to Canada too. Perhaps if we can find someone to teach Ilserl English, Canada will not seem so far away.
After the War
Beginnings are always bitter, and there is much that you will find hard and even painful.
THESE WORDS, WRITTEN IN 1939 in Arnold’s own hand, cast a long shadow. In 1945, the words are poignant, prescient, and painful beyond belief.
There is no easy bridge between his last letter dated March 10,1941 and his first letter from Prague after Victory in Europe Day, May 8,1945. This time, it was Arnold’s turn to make a new beginning. I cannot imagine how bitter, how hard, or how unbearably painful that beginning must have been. Auschwitz, where Arnold spent the final years of the war, was liberated on January 27,1945, but it is almost six months before he takes pen in hand.
FIRST LETTER
Prague, July 10, 1945
My Dear Ones,
Dearest Edmund and Gretl, my most beloved little Helen, dear Anny and Ludwig, I embrace you and kiss you all with heart and soul as one of the unfortunately few who have stood at the precipice of death and have suffered the torments of the Underworld and yet who, at God’s decree, have returned alive to the old homeland.
Often when in my loneliness, I think back to the recent years with their gruesomeness that surpasses all human measure, indeed surpasses all human imaginings, when I think back to
the hundredfold dangers and superhuman deprivations, the countless ravaging diseases and the hundreds of other possibilities for death, when I think of the thousands of my fallen, or rather, my shamefully slaughtered comrades, and the millions of my co-religionists who went to ground in equally obscene ways, when I hold before my eyes the gruesome images of need and desperation that I passed through, then it seems even to me to be unfathomable that a person can endure all this, can withstand all this, and I can do no other than to attribute it to God’s will and to God’s wonder, and not just a wonder, but a chain of wonders whose links reach into one another according to God’s wish and will.
But then again, when I think of my aloneness, of my dear, so inexpressibly good Vera, without whom I do not wish to live and cannot live, when I think that with each passing day, the chances dwindle for her blessed return, then desperation seizes me and I wrestle with God and ask myself and Him why, of all the many millions, it is precisely me that He chose to rescue and for what purpose I may have been selected according to His will. What task is still incumbent upon me and still hangs over my head on this earth?
My dear ones, aside from the fact of my fortunate return from those believed-to-be-dead, you will experience little joy from me. What I can and will report to you is anything but joyful. I myself am long and far from being the old Arnold. Such years and such experiences do not pass over a person without leaving their mark. I have become tender-hearted and sad in my demeanour and in my soul, and I have aged beyond my years. Perhaps here too, time will work its healing wonders. That remains to be seen.
There are hundreds and thousands of questions I’d like to ask you, each one of you: how you spent all the years since our last written connection, how you have fared, what joys and sorrows you have experienced, how your farm and your domestic life have developed and expanded, and thousands of other questions. You must answer all of them even if I do not ask them, and preferably in the form of a thorough description of all your accomplishments and impressions during this time. I will try to do the same, although I do not know whether I will succeed, or whether all that I have experienced and suffered can even be portrayed in words.
First, I want to give you as accurate as possible but unfortunately an excessively sad accounting of the state of our immediate and extended family. However, I must acknowledge that nothing is final. Due to the precarious conditions in Germany, one or another of the missing may yet return. Still, the likelihood is slim.
Our dear, good parents are no longer alive. Sadly, it was not granted to them to witness the victory of the forces of justice and the fall of Hitler and his Reich. It is a victory that from the beginning we all were convinced would happen.
Our dear, good mother died of the devastating diarrhoea that raged in Theresienstadt and led to total loss of weight and strength. She died an easy death, and at least she died like a human being in a sickbed in the presence of Papa, Vera, and myself on October 29, 1942. A short time before, she was still able to say goodbye to Elsa who stopped for a few hours in Theresien-stadt while en route to the East.
Dear Mama Resl likewise succumbed in Theresienstadt in August 1942, so that she was spared all the tortures and adversities of the later period, and above all, the inhuman obscenity of the concentration camps of the East.
It was worse for our good father. He maintained his courage in the midst of all the wretchedness and deprivation in Theresien-stadt. He was full of good spirits and confidence. He remained jovial despite all the hunger and filth in which we lived, and he served as a role model for others in these surrounding for seventeen long months.
However, when we were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in mid-December 1943, when he saw the raw animalistic way we were treated there, he crumbled spiritually. He could not bear to see it. He refused all food; he could not swallow the dry bread and he died within three weeks of our arrival, on January 12, 1944. A few days earlier, in tears, he had taken farewell of me and of life.
A very small number of Jews had the good fortune of being allowed to stay in Theresienstadt and thus were rescued. Numbered among these are Martha Fried with Viktor and her son and Uncle Semi who lived with them. More distantly, Vera’s mother who overcame her illness (internal haemorrhaging) and got well again. Vera gave her own blood so that her mother slowly got better and is still alive today. Sadly, so far, none of her three children has come back.
Papa Grünhut is missing and presumed dead. For a long time (until 1944), he kept himself in Theresienstadt where he had a very nice, influential position as head of the household division of a large barrack. Unfortunately, he did not know how to use the job to our advantage, as was common practice. Then, like most others, he too had to set out on the thorny road to the East. It is not impossible that he will still report in. It is rumoured that there are still convalescents in the Crimea, but sadly, one cannot count on it.
Of the remaining family, the following died in Theresienstadt:
Uncle Sigmund Vogel and his wife.
Uncle Heinrich Vogel.
Uncle Gustav Waldstein succumbed to acute pneumonia within three days in Unterkralowitz where he had fled from Strobnitz.
The following dear relatives and family members had to go down the awful road to Poland, to the Concentration Camps that, internally among the Germans, were called Extermination Camps, whereas for the general public, they bore the name of Work Camps:
Elsa with her whole family in October 1942. No news since. Martha with Emil and the two little girls in August 1944. No
news.
My sister-in-law Edith and her husband, also in August 1944.
Last news from Stettin in 1945.
My brother-in-law Eduard in February 1943. No news since.
Uncle Fritz and Aunt Hilde in the fall of 1943. No news.
Vally Roth with her husband and sons in September 1943.
Deda Glückauf in the summer of 1943 with her husband and sons.
Marenka Pick and her incredibly cute daughter Vera on the same transport as Papa, Vera, and myself.
Uncle Max Waldstein with his wife and their incredibly lovely seventeen-year-old daughter.
Uncle Emanuel Eisler with Aunt Bertha.
Aunt Theresa of Linz.
All of the above were with me in both Theresienstadt and in the accursed extermination camp Oswieczin (Auschwitz) with its dreaded gas chambers and with its four crematoria steadily spewing thick smoke.
And yet, wonders do occur. After five years in the infamous Buchenwald, Alfred Pick, Marenka’s husband is supposed to have sent news recently. Poor Erika, a blossomingly beautiful young woman of twenty-two years, Martha and Viktor’s pride and joy, went with her young husband in front of my own eyes into the gas. Does this fact alone not scream to the heavens? Do you believe that one can stay sane in the face of such things?
Lost and gone are more distant relatives:
Cousin Hermann Vogel and his sister Lina.
Hermann Bloch and Emmy.
Aunt Bertha from Strobnitz along with Erich and Walter. It is possible that the latter will still report because he was still alive in Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the end was the worst time, those last days when the wild beast of National Socialism thrashed about in its death throes, exacting that hundreds of thousands of humans be sacrificed.
These are the dreadful statistics that I have counted up for you, my dear ones, knowing that you will hardly be reading them dry-eyed.
And now, consider that I live, that I must live in this world that I have just portrayed, surrounded by the shades of all these dead relatives and by my memories of them and of the gruesome conditions in which I was last with them, so that all thoughts and memories of that time of my deepest abasement and human degradation rise up again before me and I have nothing that I can put up in defence except for my work and one person.
That one person, a golden person, my comfort and my joy is our brother Otto who as always is there when my need is greatest, who consoles and helps and lightens and beautifi
es my life as best he can. Of course, I came back sick and poor as a beggar, dependent upon the good will of people and of the Red Cross. Along came Otto at the right moment, my knight in shining armour. The reunion was so gripping and so unexpected for me that for a long time, I could not restrain my tears.
I embrace you and kiss you with all my heart
Arnold
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SECOND LETTER
Prague, July 11, 1945
My Dear Ones,
I want to number my letters and send you another of these reports in a few days. To be on the safe side I will make a copy so that I can send it to you right away if one of the letters gets lost.
Of course, the sad list of our deceased relatives can make no claim to completeness, especially since the fate of more distant relatives remains unknown to me. In addition to this list, there is another equally sad and gruesome one, that of our good friends and acquaintances.
Many a dear person is included whose name will never again be spoken, many a dear person who will no longer exist. It would be senseless, and indeed, it would not even be possible to count them all up for you, and so I only want to name the few that you also knew.
Included among them is my dear friend and teammate Bruno Skutetzki. Along with his exquisitely beautiful young wife, he had to die so tragically in Oswieczin. He lasted for three weeks in that hell, she for only a single week. Her mother, a woman who is still stately at age fifty, is beyond herself at this loss. She stands alone and bereft in this world. I visit her every week and we usually cry together for an hour or so.
The next in line is Schiff who was your former colleague at the bank, dear Edi. His wife found her way back here after an adventurous flight. Two years ago, she was still a radiant woman. Today, she is an old hag.
And now, my dear ones, I will try to describe for you in as much detail as possible the events as they unfolded, starting with those that pertain to the family.