By that time Deiml had been appointed health commissioner for the whole camp, with responsibility for inspecting kitchens and testing water and food. Earlier in the war, a person of such prestige could easily have avoided being sent away. No longer.
But was the summons really bad news? Council elders were convinced that the Nazis meant what they were saying about the new transports. As the passengers boarded, an official statement was read advising the inmates not to be concerned, that the food would be better and the work a source of satisfaction. Unlike earlier leave-takings, the mood was expectant. Perhaps even Milena and Grandmother Olga were reassured. When, a few days later, the Nazis announced that relatives would be allowed to follow, several hundred volunteered. A feeling had begun to take root that a critical corner had been turned, the war was nearing an end and the Nazis—now desperately short of manpower—really did need their help.
The transport designated “Ek” left Terezín on September 28 with 2,500 men on board. Rudolf Deiml was among them, as was his friend Jiří Barbier, the carpenter. Shortly after departure, they were given postcards to send to their loved ones saying that all was well. When the train reached Dresden, it stopped so the guards could collect and mail the cards, then continued on its way. “As far as Dresden,” Barbier recalled, “no one had any doubts, but after leaving in the direction of the East (toward Auschwitz), we realized what was happening to us.”
The journey consumed two days and nights. Barbier and Deiml sat together, sharing bread and tinned meat, reflecting quietly. They promised that if one survived and the other did not, to get word to each other’s families. On September 30, at five in the morning, the train reached its destination. According to Barbier:
We had to get out without baggage and wait for further orders. Meanwhile prisoners came and began to unload our things. They told us to give the valuables we had to them, but we didn’t feel we could trust them. They told us during inspections to deny being ill and to say that we were workers.
There on the platform Barbier urged Deiml not to admit his profession but to say that he was a carpenter, too, and that the pair of them worked together. Deiml was noncommittal. The inspection was conducted by Mengele and by a second doctor, Schwarz. Each of the prisoners was asked the same questions. Deiml went ahead of Barbier.
“How is your health?” asked Schwarz.
“Good,” replied Deiml.
“What is your job?”
“I am a doctor.”
Deiml was sent to the left, toward the gas chambers; Barbier, the carpenter, to the right. “With that we parted,” wrote Barbier of his friend. “His last look will remain forever in my memory.”
IN EARLY OCTOBER 1944, the camp received welcome news: there would be no more transports. A memo was posted to this effect and must have caused celebration. However, the Nazis were beginning to panic. Some officials wanted to refrain from more crimes in order to avoid future punishment; others sought to achieve the same goal by killing witnesses. Thus the decision to suspend transports was soon reversed. Within days a new round began, and before month’s end eight more trains would leave, carrying a majority of the camp’s remaining population and all of its senior Jewish leadership. The Nazis still insisted that the transports were going to a new work facility, a lie buttressed by receipt of the postcards from Dresden. Many who boarded the trains in October—including Jiří Barbier’s wife and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, the art teacher—expected to be greeted by family members who had left previously. Still, the October transports did not go as smoothly as those in September. The Nazis had taken over the job of selection, and it soon became evident that many of those summoned were too old, young, or sick to perform physical labor.
The surge in deportations and the accompanying chaos disrupted all other aspects of camp life. It seemed that everyone was going, waiting to go, or helping others to pack. There was no way to obtain an exemption from the Jewish elders. The sole means of appeal was to the mercurial camp commandant, Karl Rahm, who had a well-deserved reputation for brutality but who sometimes granted reprieves even while the boarding process was under way.
Finally, again, the summons came. Sixty-six-year-old Olga and twelve-year-old Milena were required to report in two days to the assembly point, called the sluice gate, in the Hamburg barracks. The date of departure was Sunday, October 23. Many girls from L-410 were among those slated to go; the group was a mixture of young and old.
For each transport, a team of healthy inmates was assigned to help the ill and elderly board the train. One such aide, Alice Ehrmann, recorded the scene:
October 23, 1944: Night time in the sluice-gate. At nine-thirty getting people into the cars. The sick, the sick, the sick, stretchers without end. And all this, including loading luggage, is done by forty people with white caps. Luggage everywhere. Luggage in front of the sluice-gate, luggage in the sluice-gate, on the platforms, in the cars. And everyone has so ridiculously little, and even that will probably be taken from them. . . .
Small children, three to ten. Screaming. Each has a little backpack. . . . There is not a person here whose history is not a tragedy; all have been abandoned. . . . One stares peculiarly at those with cried-out eyes. One is brave. Those who walk have turned to stone; those who remain swallow their tears. In the end, the luggage remained; there was no space.
The train made poor time, stopping frequently to allow other, higher-priority trains to chug past. A survivor reported that it arrived at its destination in the middle of the following night, the passengers greeted by barking dogs, shouted orders, and powerful flashlights shining in their faces. Ordered to abandon whatever belongings they had, the prisoners tumbled out of the carriages and lined up in the yard. Of the 1,714 on board, 200 women and 51 men were put onto trucks and driven to a labor camp. The rest, including Olga and Milena, were condemned to the gas chamber.
AT TEREZÍN, THE Nazis were determined to leave as little evidence as they could. The final transport to Auschwitz left on October 28, 1944, five days after the train that had carried Olga and Milena. Two weeks later, the commandant ordered the disposal of urns from the crematory. The job consumed four days. The work was done primarily by women and children, who were paid in sardines. Beginning at the mausoleum, long lines formed and inmates passed the wood and cardboard containers along like water buckets in the manner of an old-fashioned fire brigade. Each bore a label with a name (such as Arnošt Körbel or Greta Deimlová) and the dates of birth and death. The makeshift urns were loaded into trucks, transported, then unloaded—again hand to hand—before being turned upside down, their contents dumped into the Ohře River. An acre of ash floated along the surface.
The prisoners suspected that the disposal was but the first phase of a strategy to bury the truth of what had transpired at Terezín. They were right. In subsequent weeks, the Germans ordered Jewish engineers to build a vegetable storehouse and an enlarged poultry farm. Construction teams began work, but the engineers soon grew suspicious. Why design a storehouse without ventilation and with doors that could not be opened from the inside? Why surround a poultry farm with a wall eighteen feet high or build an enclosure big enough to hold the entire camp population? Why hoard the supply of toxic chemicals ordinarily used to kill bedbugs? As the prisoners speculated, they also asked: why, at this point in the war, should we do what the Nazis ask? The engineers decided to confront Rahm. We quit, they announced. Angrily, the commandant hit their spokesman several times with a pistol but�
�to their surprise—did not order the men shot. Instead, he retreated to Prague the next day for consultations. By that time, the Red Army had begun to come across German death camps and gas chambers. The horrible truth had reached every front page. Eichmann reportedly told subordinates, “I’ve had enough.” Plans to kill the 15,000 prisoners who remained at Terezín were scrapped.
BETWEEN 1942 AND 1944, at least twenty-five members of my family were sent to Terezín; none survived. On the side of my paternal grandparents—in addition to their daughter, Greta, son-in-law, Rudolf, and granddaughter, Milena—the toll includes three of Arnošt’s six siblings, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, two of his nieces, and a nephew. On the maternal side, my grandmother, Růžena, her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew perished, as did Grandfather Alfred’s brother, sister-in-law, two nephews, and a niece, her husband, and two children. Some, such as Růžena’s brother-in-law, Gustav, died in the ghetto, but most were sent to the east; Gustav’s wife, Augusta, their children, and a grandchild lived for a time in the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My relatives had been among the first to arrive at Terezín and the last to leave; Arnošt’s brother Karel and his wife were on the final transport. At the time, their son Gert, twenty-six, was in a labor camp near Auschwitz. Early in 1945, when the camp was evacuated, he was sent on a forced march back to Czechoslovakia. Enfeebled by malnutrition and typhoid fever, he died in a barn just a few days before liberation. Like that of so many others, our family tree had been stripped bare.
The author’s paternal grandfather, Arnošt Körbel (back row, left), with his parents and siblings. Marta (back, middle), Irma (front, left), and Karel (front, second from left), also died in the Holocaust.
Pedro Mahler
I THINK SOMETIMES that there are really only two kinds of stories, one ending in hope, the other despair, although it is not always obvious which is which. There is no deeper cause for despair than malicious hope (Hitler proved that), and few traits more valuable than sadness and anger at suffering. The distinction that matters is not whether a story concludes happily but whether there is at its core an affirmation that life has meaning. That is why this book of remembrance and war will end in hope—as does this particular story:
One morning in the middle of June 1942, thirty men climbed into the back of a battered green truck and stood crammed together. Tools were piled on, then two barrels of lime. The truck and its cargo lumbered past a succession of towns and farmyards with ducks and geese running this way and that, little ponds with children splashing, and old people sitting peacefully in front of their cottages. The passengers crowded into the back of the truck could derive little pleasure from such bucolic scenes, for they were inmates at Terezín. Suddenly, up ahead, they were startled to see shoots of flame accompanied by plumes of thick black smoke.
A few minutes later, the vehicle drove by a half-fallen yellow signpost bearing the name “Lidice.” The truck groaned to a halt; the men jumped out and glanced around. What remained of the village was still burning. Bullet-riddled bodies were piled haphazardly in front of the execution wall of stacked mattresses and pallets. Using the silver handle of his whip, the German commander gouged into the ground a rectangle. “Twelve meters long, nine meters wide, and four meters deep! You understand, you sons of bitches from Jericho, you pig eaters, you criminals?” The workers began to dig. The hours passed, the heavens darkened, the guards lit torches. Sweating and half naked, the men wielded their shovels throughout the night. Around dawn, Lidice’s smoldering church broke apart, the walls collapsing as the tower bell plunged, ringing and echoing for the last time. One of the workers was, by trade, a composer; when the church crumbled, he began quietly to sing. The melody was that of Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem; the words Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla (The day of wrath, that day, will dissolve the world in ashes) and Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi (O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world). Hours later, their digging complete, the men were ordered to strip the corpses of money and identification papers, then drag the bodies into the grave and cover it with dirt, all 432 cubic meters.
Lidice, June 10, 1942
CTK PHOTO
There followed the long drive back to Terezín. Before surrendering to sleep, the exhausted men took time to join other inmates in singing Kaddish. Among those who had endured the ordeal was a barrel-chested thirty-seven-year-old journalist named František R. Kraus. Years later, he recalled his emotions at the conclusion of those two miserable days:
I sink back. . . . Outside the night is of deepest black. And beneath me, on the lower bunks, the composer sings quietly: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” (Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them.) A spray of tiny stars glitters outside beyond the bars of the barrack windows.
The Nazis had tried to destroy the Czech spirit by obliterating a village and by forcing inmates from Terezín—also an instrument of destruction—to participate in that unspeakable crime. They had sought, in so doing, to deprive their enemies of a future. But the story does not end so simply.
Two and a half years earlier, František Kraus had been on the first train from Prague to Terezín; he was one of those whose hard labor had helped prepare the ghetto for its new and terrible role. In the fall of 1944, he was sent to Auschwitz but was again selected for a work detail and survived to raise a family—fully Jewish and fully Czech. Since 1993, František’s son Tomáš has been head of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic. In 1997, he helped me learn about the fate of my own family, including that of my grandmother Růžena, who was transported east during the very hours that František Kraus and his fellow prisoners were burying the victims of Lidice and singing softly of perpetual light.
21
Doodlebugs and Gooney Birds
In 1943, my parents, Kathy, and I moved from our apartment on Kensington Park Road to Walton-on-Thames, a picturesque town in northwest Surrey about thirty miles south of London. There, at 22 Stompond Lane, we shared a redbrick four-bedroom house with a Czech couple, the Goldstückers. Out back was a garden, in front a strange prickly plant called a monkey puzzle tree. Each weekday morning, my father and Mr. Goldstücker walked half a mile to the newly electrified train line on which they commuted to London. The Ingomar School, where I was enrolled in the first grade, was en route, so I pedaled along beside the men on my bicycle. Like my father, Eduard Goldstücker had attended Charles University. He was a scholar with a specialty in German literature who worked in the Education Department of the government in exile. He was, I later learned, a Communist, but quite a nice one—I never heard him argue with my parents about politics.
At school, I felt a proper little English girl in my brown-and-white uniform, which included a tie and a straw hat with striped headband. For lunch every day I ate cold meat and bubble and squeak (a mixture of leftover potatoes and cabbage all fried up, so named because of the sound it made in one’s stomach after being consumed). I loved going to Ingomar because it made me feel grown up and because I have always been eager to learn. According to my report cards, I possessed “the ability to do well, but must try to be a little more steady.” In arithmetic, I was admonished to avoid “careless slips” and in drawing “not to rush” my work. Even for students of my tender age, the arts were not neglected. Little Madlen apparently had “an excellent sense of rhythm” and was “full of enthusiasm” when letting loose on such classics as “Camptown Races” and “The Lass of Richmond Hill.” The school offered instruction in piano, to which I
readily took, falling in love with an old Austrian (not German) named Mozart. In geography, my first-term grade was D minus, which did not bode well for a career in world affairs, but the next semester I improved to B, so there was a chance after all.
I was just six years old, but impressing my parents was already a preoccupation. As was typical of an English public school, the student body was divided into teams and one scored points by succeeding in various activities. When I first earned credits for my team, my father indicated approval. Wanting more, I began to make up exploits for which additional marks were awarded, including, as I recall, pulling my teacher out of a rosebush. Before long, I had tallied so many imaginary points that I decided to invent a special award, telling my parents that I had won the “Egyptian Cup.” They asked to see the trophy, which obviously wasn’t going to happen. Instead I devised a whole new set of fibs about how awful everyone was being to me. “They even make me sit on needles!” I exclaimed. My mother insisted on going to school to find out what was happening to her poor child. As Hus had predicted long before, truth prevailed, and I was duly punished. In later years, whenever a story I was telling seemed at odds with the facts, my parents had only to murmur, “Egyptian Cup,” and I stopped.
Dáša was usually away at school in Wales or else staying in Berkhamstead with our aunt and uncle. That made me the big sister. There was a small grocery store four blocks down and across a bustling street to which I pushed Kathy in her green pram. I brought along the shopping list and ration book, but there was little in the way of fresh meat or fruit and a strict limit on purchases of milk. This didn’t seem unusual because it was the only reality I had ever known. I was also entrusted with the task of giving water to the noisy chickens we kept out back. The first time I just grabbed an empty milk bottle and filled it about halfway. My mother suggested that a bowl might be a better strategy and asked, “How did you expect the poor chickens to drink?” I gave the matter some thought: “They have long necks.”
Prague Winter Page 28