“The lower Waldsteins were your grandfather’s brother and his family. Their house was at the bottom of the hill, which is why we called them the lower Waldsteins. Their son Erich and I were best buddies. The two of us were motorcycle mad. We used to spend every spare moment repairing and riding the machines we cobbled together from old parts that nobody wanted.”
I stood dumbstruck. My grandfather had had a brother, right here in this village. My father had had an uncle and an aunt and cousins and had grown up with them in this very place, yet he had never spoken of them.
Now it was Alois who was eager for information.
“Do you know what happened to Erich? Is he alive? What about his brother Walter?”
Alois (right) talks to a villager in Strobnitz
His questions drove home the enormity of all that had been lost. I knew so little of my father’s family, and what little I knew came from the letters. Cousins and an uncle and aunt living in the very same village! I was eager to learn more and agreed to join the group at a coffee shop in the next town.
Unlike the welcoming places I had enjoyed in Austria and Germany, the Kaffeehaus was nothing but a rundown roadside tavern. It was a shabby structure whose dark interior reeked of stale smoke. Seated on uncomfortable wooden chairs, we gathered around tables too small for our numbers. The menu featured only one item: Palatschinka . Many in our group were already digging into plates of the jam-filled pancakes. We did have a choice of beverage: beer or coffee.
Alois suggested that beer would be a better choice. Beer is plentiful and good in this part of the world that gave birth to Pilsner and Budweiser. However, the combination of lukewarm beer and cloyingly sweet Palatschinka, especially in the crowded, smoke-filled room closed up my gullet. I sat pushing the rubbery roll from side to side, listening to the din of voices in a culture where everyone talks at once. I had so much to think about, yet so much still to ask.
We agreed to meet up again with the group for dinner in Austria. Alois told us to follow him as he wove along country roads, stopping only at a border crossing manned by a single guard whom he seemed to know well, and then continuing directly to a picturesque Bavarian-style restaurant. We were back in Austria. Flowers cascaded voluminously from boxes and balconies. Rich cooking smells greeted us, along with the cheerful sounds of an accordion. There were even red-checked cloths on all the tables, as well as the usual assortment of cuckoo clocks and stag heads between the alpine scenes that covered every inch of the log walls. A welcoming place, or so it seemed initially.
At first, a number of individuals came by our table to speak to me. One man introduced himself as “the village chronicler,” and asked if I would like him to send me a copy of his history of Strobnitz. I said I would be delighted. Still, I felt uneasy. Jumbled thoughts filled my mind.
Where were these people when my family was taken away? Were some of these people the looters Tini had described? I remembered her words: “They all came, the people from the village of Strobnitz, even the people to whom your grandfather had been kind, the people to whom he had given credit when they couldn’t pay their accounts. Now they came to steal whatever they could lay their hands on.”
Certainly, no one in this festive group wanted to remember the Jews and what had happened to them. I sensed a shrinking back as I continued to ask questions. These people had attended the same village school as Martha and Elsa and Arnold and Otto and my father. They had played together and had grown up side by side. Had they also been among the neighbours who came to fill their arms with towels and sheets, with pots and pans, with whatever had been left behind? Had one of these grey-haired women raided my grandmother’s kitchen? Had someone stirred his morning coffee with one of our spoons? At the very least, each person here had pretended not to know.
I looked at Tracey and saw that she understood.
“We’ll go whenever you like,” she said softly.
Alois saw us rise, and bustled over.
“You cannot leave now. You have not even eaten yet. Did you order?”
“No. Our server has been busy bringing steins of beer. We haven’t even seen a menu.”
“But where will you go? To a hotel? Everything for miles around is filled with our group. You will not find a bed anywhere. You must stay at my house. Come to the mill. I will phone my wife and tell her to expect you.”
“But that would be an imposition. Would you even have room for three?”
Someone snickered.
“We have lots of space at the mill. Besides, I want to show you some of the pictures in my photo album tomorrow. You must do this, because I cannot leave now and I want to tell you more about the past.”
And so, we found ourselves once again following Alois’ directions, along the road to a turn-off through the woods. We wove among the trees, the lights of Martin’s Mini barely illuminating the long, deeply rutted path.
A dog barked. The car rumbled over a wooden bridge and rolled to a stop. A door opened and a grey-haired woman stood framed in the light. She descended the stairs and approached, still drying her hands on an apron as she walked. She opened my door and I saw a radiant face framed with grey hair swept back into a knot. A mature face, wise and welcoming.
This was Lotte. She sensed my emotional exhaustion and took us directly to our quarters, a converted mill opposite the main house. We mounted the stone stairs and entered a high-beamed living room with deep comfortable sofas lit by the warm glow of reading lamps. Open doors led to several bedrooms. In the centre was a table with a thermos and carafes and covered plates of food.
“I thought you’d be tired and might like privacy tonight. Tomorrow at breakfast, I will welcome you properly in the main house. Then we can talk.”
I looked again at her beautiful face and remembered the portrait of an angel on my bedroom wall back in Canada.
We slept soundly and wakened to warm sunshine and the susurrus of water running over the dam almost below our floorboards. Lotte was already in her garden, watching for us as she plucked and snipped. In the main house, our coffee awaited, along with platters of cheese and Wurst and real rye bread and butter. The aroma of a freshly baked coffeecake wafted invitingly from the sideboard. Alois was already at the round table with its crisp blue and white cloth, waiting impatiently as he leafed through photo albums and papers.
He hovered restlessly as we got acquainted with Lotte, who had her own tale to tell. Many years before, she had fled from the former Yugoslavia, eager to leave both communism and the centuries of hatred between groups barely held together by the magnetism of a single charismatic dictator. Croatia, Kosovo. Serbia. Even as we spoke, “the Allies” were bombing bridges and killing innocent civilians in an effort to oust Milosevic, the latest dictator. Lotte’s own sons were being asked to kill people who had once been their neighbours, people with whom they had gone to school, people who had been their soccer mates and friends. History was being written not in abstract concepts but in blood not far away
At last, Alois got his turn. He had found memorabilia of himself and my cousin Erich. Again he told us that they had been motorcycle buddies, and that as teens, they had spent every spare moment repairing bent wheels and discarded parts in order to create the roaring machines that were their passion. Martin and Tracey asked all the right questions while I pondered the fact that I once had had cousins named Erich and Walter and that I had not even known it.
Alois led us back out to the mill and showed us his own private motorcycle collection. He was particularly proud of one that he said was exactly like the one that had been Eric’s proudest possession. I could but wonder when and how Alois acquired this machine.
Alois kept saying “Ich war nur ein Bub. I was just a kid.”
I was terribly uncomfortable. Later, Alois confided that he had been in the Hitlerjugend . “We all were,” he said. “It was the norm. Everyone my age was in the Hitlerjugend.”
I reflected once again upon the dangers of doing what everyone else is doing. Is i
t reasonable to expect a boy of thirteen to wonder what had happened to his friend rather than to rejoice at the acquisition of a new motorcycle? Is it reasonable to ask anyone to swim against the tide of mainstream opinion? Walking in his shoes, would I have had the courage to stand alone?
My thoughts made me restless. Despite my interest in every word and every detail, I was also eager to leave. Fortunately, I had a train to catch.
————
THE TRAIN I HAD PLANNED to catch would take me from Budweis to Prague. For most people, Budweis is simply the name of a popular beer. For me, it had always been just the specific place of my birth. On this Sunday afternoon, it seemed no more than a convenient place for Tracey and Martin to drop me off. I would take the train to Prague where I had agreed to meet Steve, and they would return to Linz to prepare for the working week.
My conscious mind had not registered the fact that my parents and I had taken that same train in 1938. Besides, I was still trying to digest the encounter in Strobnitz plus all that Alois had told me. My mind was elsewhere as Martin found his way through a maze of lanes with small industrial buildings, all uniformly grey and flat on this cloudy day. He parked near the railway station and we decided to use the remaining time to walk to the town square.
The town square of Budweis is enormous. It may not compare in actual size to the Place de la Concorde or to Saint Peter’s square in Rome, but for a town the size of Budweis, it struck me as disproportionately large. No café tables with bright umbrellas lined its sides, and no pedestrians crossed that vast cobblestone stretch on this sunless Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, I imagined that I heard the sound of marching feet and saw the flash of polished black boots. I knew that this square had once trembled to the click of Nazi goosesteps and resonated with shouts of “Heil Hitler!” I wanted neither a final coffee nor a beer.
“You two go home now,” I told Tracey and Martin. “Just get my suitcase out of the car and I’ll wait for the train while you head back to Linz. ” Fortunately, they chose to ignore my advice.
I am not a hysterical person. I consider myself a rational adult. I do not have panic attacks. Still, the moment I set foot inside that cavernous station with its high stone walls, I froze. I could not take a single step toward the dark tunnel that led to my track. What the mind did not remember, the body knew.
I began to weep. At first softly, and then hysterically. I could not breathe, I could not speak, I could not move. Just like my father must have done 60 years earlier, Martin scooped me in his arms and carried me to the track. I remember watching Tracey get on the train to find me a compartment. From the safety of Martin’s arms, I saw her put my bags up on a rack. Still, I could not move. Only after the conductor called his “All Aboard” did I feel arms lift me up the steps to the corridor where I clung to a bar at the window as the train pulled out. I clung to that bar for hours, all the way to Prague, urging that train to go faster, pushing it forward with my last ounce of strength.
————
I COULD NOT BEAR TO BE alone that first evening in Prague. Fortunately, Rick’s brother Fred had already arrived so that for a few hours, I was able to pretend that we were normal tourists. We wandered through the maze of narrow streets to the old town with its celebrated clock tower where the puppet Death chases the unwary with each chime of the hour. We checked out the restaurants and cafés, we ate a good meal and talked of our families safely at home in Canada.
The next morning, Rick and his partner joined us along with his cousin and her father. For several days, we played tourist, crossing the ancient Charles Bridge that spans the Vltava River, visiting the Hrad any Castle on the hill, checking out the souvenirs and pretending that Prague for us was merely an exquisite medieval city, a beautiful not-to-be-missed spot on the tourist trail.
One of the many must-see destinations in Prague is the old Jewish quarter. Because Jews had no Civil Rights until 1848 and because for centuries they had been confined to the ghetto and not allowed to live amongst their Christian neighbours, some 20,000 bodies had to be buried, body upon body in the tiny walled cemetery.
I watched as tour buses disgorged visitors to gape at the hodgepodge of leaning stone markers. I listened as tour guides described the strange and quaint customs of the Jews. I felt like a member of an extinct species. I shuddered as several tour guides brushed away the past as natural resentment because “the Jews were rich.” I thought of my family who had huddled a few blocks away with only the contents of a suitcase.
It was time for me to stop playing tourist. The next day, I went in search of an address I had brought with me. Number 32 Manesova, the address on the last letter from my father’s brother, Arnold.
————
NUMBER 32 MANESOVA is an unmodernized apartment block with a heavy front door and neither nameplates nor a buzzer system. My only option was to sit on the step and wait. In due time, someone with a dog came home, and I unceremoniously inserted my foot before the door closed in my face. The man spoke neither English nor German nor French and my Czech is nil. I managed to convey the message that I was not going to leave. Eventually, he sighed, knocked on a downstairs door where he excitedly conferred with someone before stomping up the stairs to knock on another door. Soon, a woman descended and somewhat warily, approached.
She was the answer to my prayers. She had a degree from the Sorbonne as do I. French became for us the universal language it had once been for so many of the world’s educated. She invited me upstairs to her apartment where I apologized for my brazen behaviour. I explained why I had seen no other option.
When I uttered the name Arnold Waldstein, she seemed to blanch. Piling coincidence upon coincidence, she told me that she knew his wife who until very recently had lived in the apartment just across the hall. Mme Waldstein had only recently been taken by her nephew to an old-age home where she had died. The apartment was now occupied by a new tenant.
From deep in the recesses of memory came the sound of my parents discussing the new woman in Arnold’s life. Arnold must have married her. I explained to my hostess that when the letters from Arnold stopped, all my questions about him went unanswered. Neither of my parents ever spoke another word about him.
The silence grew. An ancient grandfather clock on the wall ticked hypnotically, its pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. At last, my hostess spoke:
“That was actually your uncle’s clock and this was actually his apartment. ”
I stared, dumbfounded.
“Mme Waldstein didn’t want to live here anymore after her husband died. She had this big place and my husband and I were living with our children in the much smaller apartment across the hall. During the Communist days, it was impossible to get another apartment, so we simply traded. That is why her name is still in the phone book. It used to take ten years to get a new phone, so people simply kept what was in place and gave their friends the number.”
As she rose to fetch the phone book, my thoughts skipped back to the letters I now knew by heart. After the war, Otto had gone back to Strobnitz and arranged for my parents’ furniture to be shipped to Arnold’s half-empty apartment. In his last letter, Arnold had written, “the big buffet, three large chests, table, and sofa now grace my new apartment where they remind me constantly of my dear brother and his good wife Gretl.”
I sat edgily on the sturdy sofa of the apartment at 32 Manesova. Had I once curled up on this cushion, listening to adult conversation? I stared at the heavy furniture that filled the room, but no memories surfaced. Perhaps my hostess knew what had happened to Arnold. Perhaps she could explain why there had been no more letters. I told her of my parents’ silence.
“So you don’t know the end of the story? I never met your uncle. He died before I moved into the building. Mme Waldstein told me that she was his second wife. She knew that he had suffered greatly, but it was not something we talked about.”
“Did Mme Waldstein ever say anything about when or how he died? I wonder if his body
was so weakened by what he went through in Auschwitz that he died soon after.”
“No, they had a number of years together. Happy years, according to Mme Waldstein. It’s another reason she didn’t want to live in this apartment any longer after what happened.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Your parents never told you? You really don’t know? Mme Waldstein found him.”
“Found him?”
“Yes. He had come home early from work one day. She was not home yet and he decided to have a bath. Something went wrong in the pipes. Terribly wrong. Nobody knows how it happened. Gas came out. She found him dead in this very bathtub. Come, I will show you where it happened.”
Gas. Auschwitz. They told people they were showers, but gas came out of the pipes. Numbly, I stared at the claw-footed tub, its enamel well worn in several spots. Several pipes ran up the wall and across the ceiling.
In silence, I followed my hostess back to the living room where she opened the glass door of a small china cabinet. There, she removed a very delicate cup and saucer and handed it to me.
“Mme Waldstein painted china as a hobby. She gave me this. I think it is now your turn to have it.”
————
THE NEXT DAY, I WENT BACK alone to the Jewish quarter. This time, my destination was the rather nondescript building that constitutes the Jewish Community Centre. A security guard checked my bag and I passed through a metal detector more sensitive than those at the airport. Inside, a few aging men were drinking coffee in the small restaurant. There appeared little here to warrant such scrupulous security.
Under the watchful eye of the guard, I mounted the stairs to an office where elderly women sat hunched over typewriters. The office was a warren of small cubicles, but soon, I found the right place. A kind woman directed me to a wall of drawers holding 4x6 file cards.
The cards bear the names of every Jew shipped from Prague to the concentration camps. As Arnold had written, every Jew remaining in Czechoslovakia was first sent to Prague before being dispatched to a concentration camp. Once the Jews were all assembled in one place, it had been easy to move them out, like shipments of goods. Indeed, each card bears a “transport” number along with the last known address of the person.
Letters From the Lost Page 23