My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  I promised myself that even if everyone else collapsed, I would remain standing because they couldn’t possibly kill me just like that. But my little brother, who was cold and afraid, cried and kept asking to go home.

  The SS men ran about, shouting at those who had fallen, kicking them till they stood up again. They kept on counting but they seemed incapable of arriving at a final tally because, as Father said, they were trained to kill, not count. Late in the evening one of the SS officers in command gave the order to return. We all crowded in through the gates, eager to be back in our smelly flea-bitten holes. As bad as they were, they were our homes.

  Then something strange happened. Shops began to open in Terezín. The SS moved people out of select places and brought in goods to sell, mostly things taken from the suitcases of the deceased. In the town square they built a bandstand for a real orchestra to play, and in a little park below the ramparts they began to build a nursery school. We were also given paper money—not the real thing, merely bills printed for our ghetto. On the face of the bill was an engraving of a bearded man holding a stone tablet in his arms. Mother explained that this was Moses and that carved on the tablet were ten laws according to which people were meant to conduct their lives. They also moved everyone out of several dormitories and crammed these people into the attics of other barracks. Then they brought normal furniture into the emptied dwellings and moved in specially chosen tenants—not thirty to a room, as was common, but only two or three.

  By this time everyone was talking about how a delegation from the Red Cross was on its way to Terezín and that it was possible the Red Cross would take over the camp from the Germans and we would all be saved.

  A delegation did in fact visit, and to this day I remember that for lunch there was beef soup, veal with potatoes, cucumber salad, and finally a chocolate dessert, none of which we had ever seen or tasted before or since in Terezín. The delegation was shown around by several SS officers bearing the death’s-head insignia on their caps. We recognized some of them and knew they beat anyone who didn’t salute them or who didn’t have the yellow star fastened properly or whom they simply didn’t like. We stood up when they entered, but they smiled affably and gestured for us to sit down again.

  The Red Cross did not take over the ghetto. Quite the contrary: Shortly after their visit, the transports started leaving for Poland again, one every two or three days, usually with about a thousand people in each. When the thirteenth transport had left, everything suddenly became quiet, literally so because by now the barracks were half empty, and the entire ghetto seemed hollowed out. The lineups diminished, and there was almost no one on the streets, which had previously been full of people in the evenings.

  Around then Grandfather began to cough. He always had a cough because he’d smoked a lot before the war, but this cough sounded different. He began to perspire persistently and he had a fever. He was diagnosed with consumption and had to go to the infirmary, where the SS stockpiled those who were bedridden in an enormous room until they were dead. We couldn’t visit, lest we be infected ourselves, but Grandpa survived there until the beginning of 1945, the last year of the war, and he occasionally sent us encouraging little notes via some of the attendants. He predicted that we would live to see liberation. He believed we would all meet again and that life would treat us better than it had treated him.

  When he died, my mother couldn’t even light a candle because we no longer had any. Aunt Irena was still with us and, in addition to noodles, she occasionally brought us news about how the Russians and their Western allies had entered German territory, and now the war really was nearing the end. From time to time squadrons of heavy American bombers would pass overhead. The skies belonged entirely to them; not a single German aircraft put in an appearance. Whenever the air raid sirens wailed, my brother and I always ran into the courtyard, and as we looked up at the sky I tried to explain to him that those aircraft meant the war would soon be over and we would be able to go home. My brother began to cheer and wave at the planes with both hands, or using his shirt with the star sewn on it. We never left the courtyard, not even when, shortly after the aircraft had flown over our heads, we could hear bombs exploding in the distance.

  We survived, but the Germans took away all of my friends. I remember their names but I’ve forgotten their faces, and in any case they’d look different today.

  *

  Many years later an American reporter asked me a question that most people were reluctant to ask: How is it that we remained in Terezín and survived when practically all of our contemporaries did not?

  It’s a strange world when you are called upon to explain why you weren’t murdered as a child. But a similar question arises in relation to an utterly modern event: Why do the terrorists in Iraq release one prisoner and mercilessly behead another? Did someone pay ransom for the one they released? Was there a secret exchange of prisoners? Or was it merely the whim of those who claim the right to decide whether someone who falls into their hands should live or die?

  To the question of how I survived, I can reply with certainty that I cannot take the least credit for it. When the last transports left for Auschwitz, I had just turned thirteen. The only ones in Auschwitz who could survive at that age would have been the twins on whom Dr. Mengele performed his experiments. He—or someone else in his position—sent all the other children to the gas chambers. I owe my survival above all to my father. As I’ve said, he went to Terezín on the first transport, which consisted entirely of young men whose task it was to prepare the town for the subsequent internees. Until 1944, these men and their families were not included in any of the transports headed eastward.

  Why had they chosen him, of all people, to go on that first transport?

  His own explanation was that some decent comrades had arranged for all of us to be quickly whisked away to Terezín because Mother’s brothers were members of the illegal Central Committee of the Communist Party and had been exposed and arrested. It was to be expected that the gestapo would come after their relatives as well. I found this explanation unlikely because those in the Jewish community who, on orders from the occupiers, drew up the lists of people to go on those transports to Terezín wouldn’t have taken any interest in Mother’s relatives, and it’s unlikely they knew of either their arrest or their execution. It seems far more probable that Father’s name had simply come up by chance or because those in charge of the future operation of the ghetto understood that a specialist such as my father would be needed in Terezín from the beginning.

  In addition to looking after the electrical lighting, the motors, and various machines in Terezín, Father joined an underground cell of the Communist Party. As far as I know, the comrades were not preparing an armed uprising, but they certainly made an effort to maintain contact with the outside world, and they smuggled correspondence in and out, along with food, medicine, cigarettes, newspapers, and books.

  At the time, of course, Father told me nothing about his secret activities, but he did talk to me about politics. What else could he have talked to me about? Practically speaking, I was not going to school. I read no books because none were available, and my friends didn’t interest him. So he talked to me about the situation at the battlefronts and about the importance of the allied invasion, which to his great disappointment seemed never to come. He also tried to explain the difference between life in the Soviet Union and the countries called capitalist. In the Soviet Union, in his telling, mankind’s ancient dream of a society governed by simple people, in which no one exploited anyone else and no one persecuted anyone on the grounds of his racial or ethnic origins, had come true. The Soviets persecuted only capitalists—the owners of factories or landowners—but that was a just thing to do because the capitalists had become wealthy from the labor of their serfs and led a profligate life, while those who worked for them went hungry. “Do you understand?” he would ask.

  I did not understand why it was just to persecute anyone, but Father ex
plained to me that although no one can help being born black or yellow or a Jew, a capitalist came by his property because either he or his forebears had exploited countless numbers of poor, enslaved workers and peasants. It was German capitalists, he added, clinching the argument, who had supported Hitler, and capitalists all around the world looked on passively because they believed that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union, the very country where the people ruled.

  That was how my father had worked it out in his mind, even though, as I came to understand years later, none of this was a product of his own thinking. But his thoughts on these matters interested me very little; if anything excited me it was news from the front. Once Father took a piece of paper and drew Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad; then he sketched in a line to indicate the farthest extent the German army had penetrated and another to show where it was now. Then he added the city of Prague and, a short distance away, the fortress of Terezín. So you see, he said, how Hitler’s warriors have taken to their heels!

  But I could tell from his sketch that the front was still a long way from Terezín, and I understood that freedom was therefore still far off and that a lot of terrible things could still happen before it came.

  And sure enough, one summer day, they ordered Father to pack his things and appear the next morning in front of the Command Center.

  We were all very upset. It never augured well when they unexpectedly summoned someone. Father was probably more terrified than the rest of us because he must have thought they’d found out about his underground activity and were going to take him to some torture chamber and try to extract from him the names of those he’d worked with to undermine the Reich. Even so, he reassured us that his good friends would remain behind and look out for us, and if we found ourselves in any kind of trouble we were to seek them out. He reminded my mother of the names of these friends, and she nodded, but I think she was unable to take in anything of what he was telling her.

  We went along with Father and saw that he wasn’t the only one summoned; two other men also showed up at the Command Center. Father recognized them from a distance and remarked that they were engineers and acquaintances of his. Then an SS officer appeared, checked their identity papers, and, to our astonishment, ripped off their yellow stars and threw them onto the cobblestones. Might this be a good omen? Might it be that for some scarcely comprehensible reason these three men had ceased to be Jews? Or was this just another one of those sadistic jokes that those who ruled our lives sometimes liked to play on us?

  Several weeks later, Mother was summoned to the Command Center. An SS officer showed her a postcard and asked how someone from the Gross-Rosen camp might have gotten our address. The postcard was from Father. He wrote that he was well and hoped that we were too and said that we should be happy where we were and that under no circumstances should we leave. The SS must have thought this message was pure insolence, since it was hardly up to us to decide where we stayed or where we ended up. Mother explained how Father knew our address, and to our surprise the SS officer handed her the postcard and nothing further happened to us.

  In Gross-Rosen they placed Father in a special unit whose task was to develop some improved technology—perhaps a miracle weapon —to help the Germans win a war they had already lost. But why would they have used prisoners—difficult to properly monitor—to give the prisoners’ archenemies an advantage? Moreover, the Russians were not far off, and after several weeks the Germans abandoned the camp, and Father began a journey from concentration camp to concentration camp, and at the end of the war he was moved on foot in a mass exodus that came to be called the Death March.

  It was only years later that Father discovered the reason for this strange journey. Sometime at the beginning of the war, when the Germans had begun their mass expulsion of the Jews from the Reich, one of Father’s German colleagues, who was not a Nazi, wrote a letter to the Reich Main Security Office saying that he knew of three exceptionally good non-Aryan specialists whose knowledge the Reich might profitably put to use, and that these men should be allowed to continue working in their fields.

  At that early stage of the war, when the Germans seemed close to victory and thus had no need for specialists who, in any case, were earmarked for elimination, no one paid attention to the letter. But when the Germans began to see defeat looming in the distance, someone dug out the letter and issued an order to locate these specialists. Coincidentally all three of them were in Terezín. Naturally the Germans couldn’t reinstate them in their original positions, so they came up with the idea of creating a special unit in the concentration camps.

  Shortly after Father’s mysterious departure from Terezín, the largest series of transports to Poland began. We understood that we were no longer protected and that our turn—which was highly probable —could come at any time. For several weeks we lived in expectation of the moment that had so far passed us by and would mean a journey into the unknown. All we knew was that those who set out on it seemed to vanish from this world forever—as indeed most of them did. All my playmates had departed, and certainly Father’s good friends and comrades had also gone, but we were still there. And we remained. We were still alive. Why?

  When Father returned after the war, he was convinced that his comrades had saved us, as they had promised when he went away, and for the longest time, when I gave any thought to it all, I believed he was right. But now I’m not so sure. In a well-informed book about the Terezín ghetto, H. G. Adler claims that any person younger than sixty-five who remained in Terezín must have either been a member of a special group or had some personal relationship with the SS.

  The special groups included the Danes, the Dutch, women who were working in the mica factory, and VIPs—members of the existing Council of Elders (earlier council members had all been murdered). None of those categories applied to us. The transport lists were drawn up by a group of people called the Jewish self-administration. The Germans in charge of the camp, however, provided them with lists of those to be included in a given transport as punishment (the final transports were assembled by the SS itself) and a list of those who, because they were useful to the Germans in some way, were not to be included. It’s possible that when the German camp leaders received notice that Father was a highly qualified specialist whose skills were obviously recognized by their superiors (and the opinion of superior officers had the authority of law for every member of the SS), they put us on the list of those who were not yet to be sent to the gas chamber.

  This is merely speculation, but whatever the reason for my survival, I can take neither credit nor blame for it. In this abominable lottery, I had drawn one of the few lucky numbers, and perhaps it had been slipped to me by Father or one of his comrades, or, paradoxically, by the very people whose primary aim was to eliminate me. And thus I survived the war.

  Essay: Ideological Murders, p. 419

  2

  Finally it was peacetime.

  We ripped off our yellow stars and threw them into the oven. Jan and I received a box full of goodies from the International Red Cross.

  I assumed that we were free, another train would come, and we’d hop aboard and leave for Prague. But an epidemic of typhoid and spotted fever broke out in Terezín, and the town was placed under quarantine. Mother was desperate. Now that the long-awaited moment had arrived and we’d made it to freedom, they wanted to let us die?

  But a few days later a light-haired, freckle-faced young fellow entered our quarters from another world. He embraced Mother and shook my hand. It was my cousin Jirka Hruška, who, thanks to his mother’s decision not to declare herself a Jew, survived the war without a scratch. He had traveled to Terezín in a truck that was waiting a little outside of town to take us to Prague. Mother protested that this was against the rules, but my cousin said we’d go ahead and try anyway. Who was going to try to stop us? It was true: The SS men had disappeared; the policemen who had been guarding the fortress gates were nowhere to be seen; the higher-ups had most l
ikely cleared out and found someplace to hide or fled altogether. And the rest probably thought it awkward to continue guarding innocent prisoners.

  Mother wanted to start packing our things, but my cousin talked her out of it. We wouldn’t be needing them just now, and we would have an opportunity to come back for them. It would be best to pretend we were simply going on a stroll.

  From the window of our quarters you could see clearly the gate that I’d known for years was impossible to pass through and beyond which lay another world, a world where you could walk freely, where rivers flowed and forests grew, where cities spread in all directions, circumscribed by neither ramparts nor moats.

  My cousin Jirka led us toward that gate. A Soviet soldier carrying a submachine gun was at that very moment walking through the gate, but when we passed him he didn’t even glance up. And that’s how we went through—we strolled through the “gate to freedom,” as my cousin put it. He led us to the truck, which had a Czechoslovak flag flying from its bed, and on the side was written CONCENTRATION CAMP REPATRIATES! Several other escapees joined us.

  Then we took off. The truck was an old clunker—the Germans had commandeered most of the decent vehicles for military purposes. Instead of gasoline it ran on wood fuel, which made the journey extremely slow, and at every little incline we had to stop and wait for the wood to produce a little more fuel. On the side of the road lay old, broken-down hulks of cars, yet every house and cottage was decorated with flags, and strangers would run out and wave to us.