Letters From the Lost

by Helen Waldstein Wilkes

  Vera was with me every day. We saw each other whenever we had the chance, sometimes several times a day. Whenever we had something to say to each other, we just approached and talked because keeping to the exact number of hours of work was not an issue, especially at the higher ranks.

  We spent very nice evenings in our own inner circle, usually with my roommate Fischer and his mother. She used to make our food more palatable with small ingredients, and sometimes she made holiday meals for us with food acquired by stealing or by spending a sinful amount of money. The black market flourished in Theresienstadt. There were people who smoked their ten to twenty cigarettes a day even though smoking was strictly forbidden. A cigarette usually cost 35 Kr and in bad times as much as 100 Kr. Although there were severe penalties for the possession of money, nevertheless, almost everyone took a chance. The often unexpected searches by our own female S.S. columns or by the gentlemen of the S.S. themselves were nightmares that haunted our being as well as our dreams.

  Morality did not exist in Theresienstadt. Flirtation and the breaking of marital vows was common currency. The woman who could be had for a slice of bread and butter actually became a reality here, with the one difference that one had to substitute margarine for butter. Every woman who cared about her appearance had a man in as nourishing as possible a profession, preferably a baker, a butcher, or a worker in the central warehouse. She would justify this with the excuse that she was only doing it for the sake of her family.

  I was one of the few, totally unmodern men who remained faithful to his wife. Vera and I were always together, and when Vera later moved to a room for female doctors that she shared with six colleagues, we struck a gentleman’s agreement that allowed each of us to have a day to spend an undisturbed hour or two together with a wife or a girlfriend.

  In November 1942, Vera got extremely sick. In the practice of her profession, she had been infected with scarlet fever. Then she got diphtheria and jaundice on top of that, so that she had to spend eleven weeks in isolation. This was a sad and a terrible time for us both, and we couldn’t even celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary except by my sending her a few little gifts and a letter that, in its sincere acknowledgement of her and in its thanks for ten so happy years, made such a deep impression on her that she wanted to keep it to the end of her life.

  I could only see her in the hospital, from behind a glass window, so we communicated by sign language as if we were deaf-mutes. However, this bad time also ended, and all was well again.

  A ghoulish apparition, a perennial nightmare hovered steadily above us in the form of the transports to the East. Transports to the Unknown. Transports to Perdition. Every conceivable kind of offering was brought forth in order to safeguard against being transported away, but all safeguards were usually problematic. As a doctor, Vera shielded me, and I, in my position as Master shielded her, but this only succeeded as long as normal circumstances prevailed.

  Our dear parents were assigned to a transport to the East in the fall of 1942 and twice Vera’s parents were assigned to a transport. You can certainly image how awful was the thought of simply allowing our parents to be dragged off alone to their destruction. Thus, we set all the gears in motion, ran from one office to another, asked, begged, went every which way, intervened and asked our influential friends to speak up in the right places until we succeeded in exempting my parents as well as Vera’s from the transport.

  Thus, the fact that we missed getting passage to a safe haven at least served the one purpose: that we saved both our parents from destruction and from a dreadful lonely death in foreign parts.

  Unfortunately, Elsa and her family fared worse. One day in October 1942 when a transport from Prague arrived in Theresien-stadt, it was, as always, placed under strict quarantine in a barrack to which no one had access.

  As luck would have it, it was my job as Head of Division to take ten men over there in the middle of the night because the complete transport was to continue on to Poland. My people were supposed to help carry the sick and the luggage to the barrack that had been readied for their departure.

  Here, in the midst of this unparalleled chaos of bodies and baggage, I found our dear Elsa with Marianne. Emil had been quartered amid the sick. I promised Elsa my very best help and my most energetic efforts to get her out of the transport, even though time was short and the hurdles seemed endless. However, she did not want out. She had no idea what was meant by “the East,” and she would not allow herself to be talked out of it. On the one hand, she feared that Emil would then be sent off alone, or that their luggage would get lost. As if any luggage could be saved anyway! How often in all the years have I forfeited our poor bit of belongings! How often did we stand there with only the clothes we wore! Since Elsa did not want to stay and since even Mama’s illness could not persuade her, I went against her wishes and tried by every means at my disposal to get her and her family out of the transport.

  It was a hard and painful piece of work, almost hopeless and beyond feasibility. I sacrificed the night and ran from office to office. In Theresienstadt, there was no limit to the working hours. During the arrival of transports, offices were open day and night. Sleep only became a possibility once the transport had left.

  And so, I succeeded in the difficult task. All that was needed to free Elsa was the signature of a doctor. Because I did not dare awaken him in the middle of the night, I got the signature first thing in the morning, and I ran at full tilt to the departure barrack. The departing transport was at a full roll, and our dear, good Elsa was gone. Gone forever and ever.

  There I stood in the barrack courtyard, the liberating, life-promising piece of paper in my hand, and I howled like a beaten dog. Never in my life will I forget this so dreadful, so bitter hour, nor will the wound left by this experience ever heal completely.

  Otto Urbach was not with them. At that time, he was staying at a large farm in Lipa where hundreds of young Jews were doing agricultural work under the supervision of the S.S. Later, he came to Theresienstadt. He was a strong, handsome, and high-spirited young man, but he has not come back to the homeland either.

  With Vera and me as well, it was a tragic chain of events that brought us into the transport to Poland. We had been in There-sienstadt for sixteen months and we had seen many dozens of transports leaving during that time. One day in the middle of December 1943, the gruesome call befell us too. As I have already told you, we had been protected against being assigned to a transport, but this time they needed two hundred doctors in the East, and they selected the youngest ones. Dear Vera belonged in this category, and I belonged to Vera, for the governing rule was not to tear apart the immediate family.

  The central Office of Labour immediately set all gears in motion in order to exempt me and by automatic extension, to exempt Vera as well. And now, just imagine, my dear ones, their efforts were crowned with results, but the decision came one small half hour too late. When the clerk arrived at the train station with the exemption order, we were already sitting in the sealed freight car, and the train slowly rolled away to the Hell of Oswieczin.

  Another letter will follow in two or three weeks. Best regards and kisses from your faithful Arnold

  ————

  THERE WERE FIVE POST-WAR letters in the box, all from Arnold. There must have been more letters, but only these five were in the box when I opened it. I translated the first four quite quickly, but for a long time, the fifth letter lay untouched. Somehow, I continued to put off translating that last letter for a very long time, as if fearing to end my connection to family and to a past that had become my daily companion.

  FIFTH LETTER

  Sept. 11, 1945

  My Dear Ones,

  I received your letter dated August 1 on August 25, in about three weeks, which represents a very rapid delivery. Its contents moved me deeply, and I thank you very much for your kind words.

  Dear Gretl, I did not know that you could write such nice letters. I can instinctively tell
from them that your words come from the heart and that they are sincerely intended.

  Your concern for my inner as well as my bodily well-being is touching and in every way reassuring for me. Even if, thank God, I have recovered enough so that I am once again standing on my own two feet, even if I’ve been provided with adequate food and clothing, it is still a precious source of comfort to me and to my still raw inner wounds to know that I have total support from people who are close to me through the bonds of blood, who believe in me and will never abandon me.

  I was deeply touched when I read of the profound impression that my factual reports had made upon you.

  The awareness of all the horror that we had become accustomed to with the passage of years has suddenly descended upon you. Only now does that awareness step out of the shadows of the unconscious into the harsh light of reality. However, you can now take consolation from the fact that all this belongs to a gruesome but at least a vanquished past. Although we shudder to remember this past with all its horrendous experiences, its feelings and its nightmare visions, we are nonetheless trying to the best of our ability to obliterate them totally from our memory, the quicker the better. The future will make all this seem to be an evil spectre from the past, a grisly hallucination of wretchedness as we follow the eternal rule of life with its irresistibly powerful vitality that turns us always toward the future.

  What is impossible to forget, however, what cannot be extinguished from our thoughts and our hearts, is the awareness and the longing for all those dear ones who stood so close to us, those who were ripped away by that gruesome time and were swept into the abyss. They were torn away from our side with no regard for the fact that our hearts bleed and will bleed so long as we shall live.

  I thank you very much for your well-intended invitation to come to you, but this is out of the question. My place is here in the homeland. I have my job here, and numerous attachments, as well as my memories. Furthermore, I no longer feel young enough to start a whole new life. These days, I usually follow the path of least resistance.

  I am sorry to have to report to you that of the eleven packages you sent, only the five for which I had previously acknowledged receipt have thus far arrived. Since then, there has been a long pause.

  Dear Gretl, I will gladly give you the requested measurements, but I notice that I am well supplied in the suit department and that I even have enough underwear thanks to Otto’s help. Besides, I have learned to wear underwear somewhat longer than used to be the custom.

  On the other hand, I would be very grateful if you could get me some warm, knitted things for the winter: sweaters, vests and the like, shawls, gloves, and above all, spats. I will hardly be able to get these things here since there is not even wool to be worked yet, let alone wares made from wool.

  With food, things are not so bad today. As a worker, I get a supplemental ration card and an additional one on medical orders as a repatriate (former prisoner). Of course, it is not a matter of kilos but of decagrams, and certain things like meat, fat, fruit, and sweets are still very scarce.

  About my reports, I would still like to tell you the following. I have already sent you four reports in three letters, and I have reached all the way to the end of Theresienstadt and to the transport to Auschwitz. Now, however, my strength fails me, or rather my ability to render in graphic form those events and experiences. Words seem too weak and too petty to depict all that I lived to see and to witness. My thoughts entangle themselves. I would like to express everything simultaneously, and of course, that is impossible. I must therefore now put a period at the end of my sentence, or perhaps a pause. Maybe the time will come when I can depict everything in peace.

  About the demise of your mother, dear Gretl, sadly I cannot provide the exact details that you have requested. My memory has unfortunately suffered a lot, and sometimes, the memories do not surface until months later. I only know that dear Mama Resl felt mentally better in Theresienstadt. She showed promise of a complete recovery of her mind, but her body broke down as was the case with all of the elderly, and her weakened state hastened her martyrdom.

  The description of your life and of the building up of the farm was of unusual interest, although I hope and expect that you, dear Edi will still write to me in much greater detail about it.

  Now, I want to tell you that Otto flew to Paris on August 3. He has since written that because of the inflationary prices there, he is not even thinking about reopening the factory. For now, he has gone to England for two or three weeks.

  Before that, he went to Strobnitz for the third time, and using the shipping agent Fröstl who now lives in Number 62, he personally shipped out the best pieces of your furniture to my half-empty apartment. The big buffet, three large chests, your table and sofa now grace my new apartment where I reside with Mama Schick, and where the furniture constantly reminds me of my dear brother Edi and his good wife Gretl.

  Now, be well, my precious and dear ones. Write soon and often and lots.

  Hugs and kisses from your faithful Arnold.

  For your birthday, dear Edi, my sincerest and very best wishes.

  Finding Home

  ONCE AGAIN, ABRUPTLY, THE LE TTERS ENDED.

  What happened to Arnold? Why were there no more letters from him in the box? True, he had declined my father’s invitation to resettle with us in Canada, but why was there no more correspondence? I was nine in 1945, old enough to have remembered the arrival of further letters.

  Otto immigrated to Canada a short time after the war, and he lived with us in Hamilton for some months. Then, he entered a business partnership with Ludwig, purchasing a small clothing store with him on Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal. Unfortunately, the partnership came to a sad end and created bad blood between Otto and my father. The years of working side by side with Ludwig on the farm had led my father to respect his brother-in-law deeply. My father probably sided with Ludwig, and the resulting rupture between the two brothers never quite healed. In 1991, thirty-three years after my father’s death, we were notified of Otto’s death.

  The mystery of Arnold could not be easily solved. Rightly or wrongly, I had put aside the post-war letters, unwilling to experience again the emotions that ripped through me when I first read them. Above all, I had not wanted my mother to re-experience the grief of her own dreadful loss.

  And then, my mother’s health declined. She did not linger long. On September 30,1999, as we sat stroking her hands—her beloved granddaughter on one side, I on the other—her breathing became ever more shallow until it stopped.

  There was no one left to ask.

  ————

  MONTHS LATER, IN THE spring of 2000, my friend Rick phoned me from Toronto. “What are you doing in September? How about meeting me in Prague for a ‘roots’ trip?” It was the second time that, unknowingly, Rick was to change the course of my life.

  The first time had been in November 1992, on a lazy Sunday morning as we sipped coffee in my kitchen in Vancouver. Rick and I share so much history. His mother Mimi was once my Aunt Anny’s best friend. When Mimi and Robert bought their first house, it was just a few streets away from our home in Hamilton. I was twelve years old when Rick was born, and proud that Mimi and Robert trusted me as his first babysitter.

  As adults, Rick and I have always been able to talk. Somewhere along the line, he began referring to me as his older sister, an honorific title that means much to me. As an only child, I have always yearned for siblings and for an extended family. Anny and Ludwig were all that I had. Unfortunately, Anny and my mother continued to play the game of good sister/bad sister that they had learned as children, thereby making my closeness to Anny an issue of divided loyalties. On the farm, there had always been jealousy and dissension between the two women, with my father and Ludwig alternately playing the role of peacemaker. When my father and then Ludwig died, my mother began to clutch me ever tighter while allowing the unresolved rivalry with her sister to fester.

  Rick does have h
is brother Fred, and their family dynamics are very different. Their father Robert was born in Prague, and he was only seventeen in 1939 when his well-to-do parents heard that there was a Gestapo official who accepted bribes. Unwilling to risk arrest themselves, Robert’s parents sent their only son on a mission to Gestapo headquarters. Riding in the back of the family’s chauffeur-driven Daimler, Robert held in his lap a briefcase stuffed with Czech Kronen. The rumour had been correct, and he returned with exit visas in the now empty briefcase.

  Robert never quite forgave his parents for making him the guinea pig. Family tensions were only exacerbated when Robert dropped out of university to marry Mimi, a struggling immigrant some ten years his senior. Neither her intelligence nor her charm could ever thaw the ice of her in-laws.

  Now, Rick struggled to understand his father just as I was striving to connect with my mother. At some level, they were unreachable. As we refilled our coffee cups, Rick wondered aloud whether our general sense of disconnection with the world might have something to do with our backgrounds. Despite having many friends, neither of us feels that we belong. We are always on the outside looking in, and we are both prone to a real but nameless discomfort.

  Still, I was taken aback by Rick’s question: “Helen, do you think that what our parents experienced in Europe has affected us?”

  In retrospect, Rick’s question seems naïve. What is astounding, however, is that neither of us had ever asked ourselves that question. Our parents’ silence about certain years of their life had been so total and their reluctance to talk about the past so manifest that it simply had not occurred to either of us that we’d been shaped by matters of which we knew very little.

  Rick’s question reminded me of an announcement in a Jewish newspaper passed to me by a neighbour. She had said, “I know that you’re not religious, but sometimes this paper has interesting articles.” And indeed, the words Second Generation Holocaust Survivor had caught my eye.