Our small supply of weapons was nearly gone when word came from a Resistance group operating near the railway station that we could have more if two volunteers, possibly Red Cross nurses, would come and pick them up. There had been a large cache of weapons hidden under the railway station ever since the Nazis had occupied Czechoslovakia. Now the railway men, many of whom were active members of the Resistance, were managing to smuggle the guns out of the station right under the noses of the Germans.
I offered to go and someone handed me a nurse’s cap and pinned a band with a red cross around my sleeve.
“We need another person,” said the Colonel.
After a few moments of embarrassed silence, an elderly woman in a nurse’s uniform stepped forward. “I’m coming,” she said.
The fighting in the streets was heavy. We had to run from doorway to doorway and sprint across several intersections. The old woman was breathless but did not slow down.
As we approached the station, we saw the station master chatting with two heavily-armed German soldiers who were standing guard. On the pavement in front of them stood a huge oval laundry basket. It had a handle on each end and was covered with a white sheet on which someone had painted a large, crooked red cross. We each grasped a handle, lifted the basket and walked away. As soon as we were out of sight, though, we stopped in a doorway and looked under the sheet. The weapons on the bottom of the basket were covered with a layer of small boxes, packs of cotton wool, and rolls of bandages.
The way back proved rather difficult. We could not run with the heavy basket between us and had to stay close to the sides of buildings from which bullets ricocheted in short spurts like hail. We had turned the last corner back to headquarters when we almost bumped into a very young German soldier with an automatic rifle. We stopped dead and the nurse, startled, dropped her handle. The basket tilted, hit the ground, and something inside made a sharp clink. The soldier jumped back, crouched behind his rifle and, pointing it first at her, then at me, started shouting. I looked at my partner. Her face under the white cap was as gray as her hair. She’s going to faint, I thought. But at that moment she began to speak in a soothing hospital voice.
“We’re just bringing back some medical supplies for the wounded,” she said in good German. “Would you like to have a roll of gauze for yourself? It might come in handy, you know.”
She uncovered the basket and held out one of the packages. The young boy in the soldier’s uniform took it from her obediently, staring, with his mouth slightly open. We grabbed our handles and walked as fast as we could the few hundred yards that remained between us and the shelter.
I shall always remember that woman with love. If courage is the capacity to conquer one’s fear, she was the most courageous person I have ever met.
Among the volunteers who had come to pluck a bit of cheap glory for themselves in the Red Cross center was a former schoolmate of mine, well-groomed and elegant. You could see that she had taken good care of herself during the war and had avoided any trouble; even now, she was careful to remain in the background. But, as the situation in the streets worsened, our first-aid station filled up, and we all had our hands full. It was then that she saw me giving a glass of water to a dying German soldier and said, “If I didn’t know you had been in a concentration camp, I’d make sure you paid for this. Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? Take care of the Czechs and let the Germans go to hell!”
That was my first frightening glimpse of the devastation, the deep corrosion that the war had inflicted upon us. It had divided people like the slash of a knife, and that wound would take a long time to heal.
Although their war was lost and the Russian armies were hard on their heels, the German troops, the Gestapo, and the SS men put up a ferocious fight in Prague. The SS, especially, were determined to make the most of their last days in power. Even while fleeing the city, they took the time to jump out of their cars in the relatively quiet suburbs, break into basements where women, children, and old people were hiding, and shoot them all. More SS troops in heavy armor descended daily on the city. The shortage of guns and ammunition became critical.
On the fifth day of the uprising, when the fighting on our side was no more than a desperate effort to gain time, a column of tanks marked with red stars suddenly rolled into the torn-up streets. Out jumped weather-beaten, fair-haired men with machine guns. It took them but a few hours to put the stubborn Germans to flight.
People streamed into the streets to cheer, to welcome, to embrace their liberators, asking them into their homes, offering them every good thing they had. Pretty girls covered the tanks with flowers and climbed onto the armored trucks. The Russians laughed good-naturedly and took out their accordions. The world was full of fragrance and music and joy.
When the Germans finally withdrew, I could go outside for the first time in years without fear. The day before, a bullet had grazed my leg, and I could not walk without difficulty. Slowly I limped out of the house down along a narrow footpath we called the “mouse hole” that had been worn down through the lilac bushes to the riverbank. The air was quiet, sweet with the scent of lilac, and only now and then did a shot ring out as people combing parks and attics discovered the last Germans in hiding.
I walked out onto Klarov, into the open space before the bridge. There was not a living soul anywhere, only Prague spread out above and around me in an embrace. It was that moment just before sunset, when outlines briefly become sharp and clear and colors more brilliant, reminding us that the night is short, that darkness comes and then goes again. I walked a few steps farther and saw, down by the bridge, a man in the black uniform of the SS, lying in a puddle of black blood. Prague glowed and arched above that black puddle and the black, now harmless, thing lying in it and I said to myself, “Now, at this moment and on this spot, the war is over, because he is dead and I am alive.”
And so ended that horrible long war that refuses to be forgotten. Life went on. It went on despite both the dead and the living, because this was a war that no one had quite survived. Something very important and precious had been killed by it or, perhaps, it had just died of horror, of starvation, or simply of disgust – who knows? We tried to bury it quickly, the earth settled over it, and we turned our backs on it impatiently. After all, our real life was now beginning and what to make of it was up to us.
People came crawling out of their hide-outs. They came back from the forests, from the prisons, and from the concentration camps, and all they could think was, “It’s over; it’s all over.” I remember a boy whose wooden clogs had to be surgically removed from his feet because his soles had grown into them. I remember Eliska who had passed through Auschwitz twice, twice escaped the gas chambers, and then walked all the way back to Prague. There she sat down before the statue of St. Wenceslas, kissed the ground, and fainted. The ambulance took her to a hospital, where she died within a week because she had no lungs left. And Mr. Lustig who spent the entire war hidden in a closet and almost lost his eyesight. But he was lucky; he survived. Then, during the uprising, he walked out into the daylight for the first time and, after barely a few steps, he was shot right through the head.
Some people came back silent, and some talked incessantly as though talking about a thing would make it vanish. Actually, just the opposite is true: once things and thoughts are expressed and described they acquire a new reality, as though by giving them words we give them part of ourselves. After that, they will not allow us to leave them behind.
While some voices spoke of death and flames, of blood and gallows, in the background, a chorus of thousands repeated tirelessly, “You know, we also suffered... Nothing but skimmed milk... No butter on our bread...”
Sometimes a bedraggled and barefoot concentration camp survivor plucked up his courage and knocked on the door of prewar friends to ask, “Excuse me, do you by any chance still have some of the stuff we left with you for safekeeping?” And the friends would say, “You must be mistaken, you didn’t leave a
nything with us, but come in anyway!” And they would seat him in their parlor where his carpet lay on the floor and pour herb tea into antique cups that had belonged to his grandmother. The survivor would thank them, sip his tea, and look at the walls where his paintings hung. He would say to himself, “What does it matter? As long as we’re alive? What does it matter?”
At other times, it would not turn out so nicely. The prewar friends would not make tea, would not suggest any mistake. They would just laugh and say in astonishment, “Come on now, do you really believe we would store your stuff all through the war, exposing ourselves to all that risk just to give it back to you now?” And the survivor would laugh too, amazed at his own stupidity, would apologize politely and leave. Once downstairs he would laugh again, happily, because it was spring and the sun was shining down on him.
It would also happen that a survivor might need a lawyer to retrieve lost documents and he would remember the name of one who had once represented large Jewish companies. He would go to see him and sit in an empire chair in a corner of an elegant waiting room, enjoying all that good taste and luxury, watching pretty secretaries rushing about. Until one of the pretty girls forgot to close a door behind her, and the lawyer’s sonorous voice would boom through the crack, “You would have thought we’d be rid of them finally, but no, they’re impossible to kill off – not even Hitler could manage it. Every day there’re more of them crawling back, like rats...” And the survivor would quietly get up from his chair and slip out of the waiting room, this time not laughing. On his way down the stairs his eyes would mist over as if with the smoke of the furnaces at Auschwitz.
Friends from the country would send an invitation: Come see us! We want to feed you. We have plenty of everything! The survivor would arrive at the village, unable to believe his eyes. The farmhouse would be twice its prewar size. A refrigerator would be standing in the kitchen, a washing machine in the hall. There would be Oriental carpets on the floor and original paintings on the walls. The sausage would be served on silver platters and the beer in cut glass. The old farmer would stroke his whiskers and worry, “No sense denying it – we did very well during the war. People had to eat, you know, and with a little thinking... But now things are different... Just as long as the Communists don’t take over...”
It took me some time to muster up the courage for a trip to the village of Hut where we used to spend our vacations. Our country house there was as much of a home to me as our apartment in Prague had been, maybe even more so for all the happy memories it held. To return there all alone, the only one of my family who was left, was hard. On the way out the train seemed to be moving too fast, the air was hot and stifling, my head throbbed, and my stomach ached. In Beroun, where I had to change trains, I was seized with such anxiety that I almost returned to Prague. At last I reached Hut and made my way haltingly from the station to the village, glimpsing from far away those windows where I used to see my mother looking out, alive and happy.
The trees in our orchard were past their bloom and no one seemed to be about. The door of our house was locked. I rang the bell and, after a while, a fat unshaven man opened the door, stared at me for a moment, and then yelled, “So you’ve come back! Oh no! That’s all we needed!”
I turned around and walked into the woods. I spent the three hours until the next train back to Prague strolling on the mossy ground under the fir trees, listening to the birds.
Perhaps everything would have turned out differently if the war had ended in autumn instead of in spring. The rain and mud would have forced people to keep their eyes on the ground. But the spring of 1945 was so beautiful, Prague in the splendor of her gardens was so dazzling, that we became blind to the ominous shadows, to the warning signs of an uneasy future.
I spent whole days wandering through Prague, stumbling over broken cobblestones. Sometimes I ran into people who turned their backs on me but others took me home with them, fed me, and asked concerned, thoughtful questions. Once I met my mother’s dressmaker, who burst into tears, took me by the hand, and led me to her workroom. There she made a dress for me on the spot from all kinds of remnants she had saved during the war and, through it all, she never stopped crying.
Every day I listened to the radio, anxious to hear news of liberated prisoners. Occasionally there would be a familiar name. Then, once, the voice on the air said, “Brother Ervin Bloch has arrived in Prague and is organizing the return of other prisoners...”
Ervin Bloch was my father’s name. His emaciated white face flashed before my eyes as I had seen him last, after we got off the train at the railway station in Auschwitz, among a group of people destined to die. His eyes said: Good-bye, take care of your mother. But my mother had been torn away from me a few minutes later and, when I ran after her, a soldier with a submachine gun grabbed my shoulder and knocked me to the ground. By that time the handsome Dr. Mengele had already beckoned, and my mother was swallowed by the thousand-headed serpent which was disappearing into a windowless building in the distance. I rose from the dirt, stunned. I glimpsed only my mother’s arms reaching out toward me as if she were drowning. That soldier with the submachine gun was still standing there and I shouted at him, “What’s going to happen to them? What are you going to do with them?” But he only grinned derisively. “Shut up! Nothing’s happening. You’ll see them again in a few hours.” Then a girl in a striped shift who had a shaven head brushed against me and whispered, “Don’t believe him. You’ll never see them again. They burn them all.” At that moment, the whole world exploded in fire and smoke and that fire burned my brain to ashes so that only one cell was left. That one cell flickered on and off like a signal light for weeks on end and, each time it lit up, it shone on my mother and father as they fell with outstretched arms into the flames.
Now my father was returning home! Was it possible that he was still alive? That by some miracle he had been saved at the last minute? I jumped up from my chair and, in an instant, was in the street, limping furiously downhill toward the radio station. Public transportation had not yet been restored in the shattered city, and I had quite a long way to go.
As far as two blocks away I saw that the street was packed with people trying to get inside the radio station, into the only center of information about those who were returning and those who had disappeared. I looked at that impenetrable wall of backs with despair; somehow, I had to get inside. Then suddenly, a couple of people looked at me and of their own accord stepped aside. One head after another started to turn and, slowly, a path opened up before me. Someone even gave me a little shove, so that I flew up to the front of the crowd like a bullet. Even the man standing watch at the door took just one look at me and opened it.
A while later I stood in a tiny office with the man charged with broadcasts for the liberated prisoners. He was terribly thin, his head was a skull covered with skin, and his eyes were half-closed with fatigue. He thought for a moment and said, “I don’t have a minute free in the whole broadcast. I get calls from hundreds of people begging me to include the briefest message. It’s impossible; there’s simply no time. But sit down. Wait. Maybe I’ll manage to squeeze in a few words here or there.”
I sat at the radio station hour after hour. Once in a while the voice on the monitor repeated my father’s name and asked him to call the station where his daughter was waiting for him. But no one called. The skinny man turned to me every so often and finally said, “Listen, there’s no reason to lose hope yet. I do a newscast late at night that all the prisoners listen to. I’ll mention your father’s name again and if he’s alive, I’m sure he’ll answer. Go home. I’ll call if I learn anything.”
I returned to the empty apartment in Dejvice where I still spent my nights and huddled in a chair by the radio listening to that voice summoning a father who had not been alive for a long time, who had only a name in common with the stranger who had returned home. But, two days later, the telephone rang.
“Unfortunately, we could not find your father
,” the kind voice said, “but today we got a letter from a Rudolf Margolius. He escaped from Dachau and the Americans have named him commander of a camp for former prisoners in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in charge of repatriation. He heard my newscast, and sent me a report about the situation in the camp. But mainly he asked about you. Your name is Heda right? Listen again tonight, and I’ll answer him.”
I sat there clutching the receiver, unable to utter a word. The kind man laughed a little and said, “Good luck.”
For months I had tried, not very successfully, to think of Rudolf as little as possible, to hope as little as possible, knowing how slim the chance was that both of us had survived and afraid that the disappointment of that hope would be too hard to bear.
And yet Rudolf was alive! Rudolf, the best man in the world, my man, the man with whom I would spend the rest of my life.
Wedding photograph of Rudolf and Heda Margolius, Prague.
I put down the receiver and, as always when my emotions overwhelmed me, went for a walk. I turned into a park and started ravaging a flower bed. Two children, a small boy and an older girl, stood on the path and watched me with disapproval.
Under a Cruel Star Page 5