by Alison Pick
“Hasn’t he already won without firing a shot?”
Marta realized that Anneliese was right. But Pavel would not be baited.
“We’ll stay,” he said. “You have to trust me. Everything will be fine.”
Three days later Marta carried a telegram over to Pavel to open. The Bauer factory would be occupied by the Nazis.
Český Krumlov, 1 March 1939
My dear son Pavel,
Where are you? Have you arrived?
I posted a letter to you via Ernst Anselm, but as yet have heard nothing. I also asked him to send a telegram on my behalf.
Did you not receive it?
I hope that Anneliese is happy to be in the city of her birth. Have you settled into Max and Alžběta’s flat? And how is your new job? Is the factory continuing to run despite XXXXXXXXXX?
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. I am very eager to discuss this. I fear I made a grave mistake by staying behind. I have tried to contact you, but to no avail. I wonder why I’ve received no response and I wonder if XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Please, send a letter or a cable as quickly as possible. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX phone lines, so it is better to write. I look forward to hearing from you and trust you will help me join you and that we will all be happily reunited.
Please give my love to Anneliese and little Pepik.
Your forever loving,
Mother
(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Rosa. Died Birkenau, 1943)
SOMETIMES I’LL BE WALKING.
Say it’s dusk, and the end of October. The buses leaving the university are lit up like bright aquariums, the buses themselves swimming through the dark element of the evening. The ducks have forgotten to fly south, and huddle dimly together at the edge of the pond. Say there’s a chill in the air; I’ve been resisting my winter jacket, and now the wind slips a cool hand down my back, the first touch I’ve felt in . . . forever. It comes over me then. I’ve had a good day at my desk but still I get the sense that I’m missing, or that something within me is missing, some crucial piece of me that used to make my whole self run. I’ve been taken apart one too many times, and the little cog at the centre of my chest has slipped into the gutter and been lost.
It’s hard to imagine anyone ever finding it.
It’s too hidden, too covered in leaves.
It would take a small person, someone curious, someone low to the ground.
It would take a child—and of course it’s far too late for that.
The children suffered the most. This is what my research has led me to believe. Some would say otherwise, but the children did know. Even the little ones—perhaps the little ones especially—soaked it all up. They absorbed it directly, a straight hit to the bloodstream. All of the stress, the incredible tension, the relentless, insidious day-to-day: encroaching hunger, restricted living quarters, the edicts marching forward, a row of shiny boots and polished guns. They took in their parents’ fear like black milk—that’s Celan, of course—from the breast. They were raised on it, fed on fear, until fear itself was in their bones, in their visible skeletons, where baby fat should have been. When the children at Auschwitz were sent towards the gas chambers, on the most basic level they knew what was coming.
Tell me, how should I have faith in the world when I know the things that I know?
The children I’ve dedicated my life’s work to—they got out. But it wasn’t easy for them either. They were sent away from their families, from houses full of fighting they could not understand, and they blamed themselves. They were given away as Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland. They thought they had done something terrible to merit this. Even when they were reassured otherwise.
Sometimes, walking in the evening, a toque pulled low over my thin white hair, I try to summon up the child I myself must have been. All I get are flashes: shoes with brass buckles, a curl against my forehead, a sliver of female laughter and a back that turns and disappears.
There is a feeling that I could have done something. Shame that I couldn’t save her.
Beneath the shame: fear. Beneath the fear: grief. Alone in my small rooms, so late in life, the knocking from the centre of my ribs. Someone is locked inside there. Has been for years. I roll onto my side, pull the pillow over my ears. And still the little voice, the pleading. Mama.
I’ve lived almost my whole life without her. There is no reason I should expect to be walking late in November, my hands in my pockets, and turn a corner and see her, her thin coat, no scarf. Her cheeks hollow, the way I last remember her, in the winter of 1945. There is no reason I should still hope to find her, to take her home to my apartment and heap blankets over her, to spoon hot soup into her mouth and whisper her to sleep.
I will never sing to her—some old Yiddish folk song—while the snow sifts silently down.
It’s shameful really, the weakness of my longing. And yet the heart continues. There’s the fluttering in the ribs. The hope that all the loss might somehow be redeemed.
Ach—that’s the phone. Probably the new department secretary. Mara? Marsha? Excuse me for a minute. No, don’t. I’ll just let it ring.
What was I saying? Yes, the children. There were, of course, among the children whom I study, situations that worked out well. There were the people we now call “righteous Gentiles,” Christians who risked their lives. There were families in England who gave up everything they had, and often what they did not have, to offer a tiny traveller some kind of home. There are stories of love and heartbreaking humanity—but these are not the bulk of the stories.
What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children who were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war, battling tensions about its own role in the conflict brewing across the Channel. The children arrived in homes where money was scarce, to foster parents who had been shamed into taking them. At what we would now call a “critical developmental stage,” everything solid was pulled out from under them. Children do not forget that. It stays with them, a wall that goes up at the first hint of intimacy.
We academics are told to frame the world in objective terms, but I am speaking now, as you’ve guessed, from my particular experience.
There are things I remember about my mother.
The growling of her stomach late at night.
Her fingers combing gently through my hair.
The first notes of—what?—a lullaby? No. Something less certain, less solid.
I remember a dim street, late fall, and my mother at the end of it, a kerchief knotted under her chin. She was looking back at me already then, as though across a great gulf of time. I tried to move towards her but the street was so long, and there were people blocking my path. When I caught another glimpse, she had taken off her scarf. It was crumpled in a ball in her hand, which she held against her chest. A bit of wind played with the hair around her face. She held my gaze—there was something she was telling me, something she needed me to know. The whole history of our family was contained in that look. Then she turned a corner and was gone.
I’ve spent years going back to this memory. It is so clear, so real. And yet. What was she doing leaving such a very young child alone in the street? The first flakes were already falling.
Time is a snow globe; you shake it and everything changes. A thin coat of white and the world disappears. This memory I have of the look on her face: it must be something I made up.
The mind plays tricks, inventing what wasn’t there.
Of my father, I remember absolutely nothing.
Chapter Two
PAVEL BAUER WAS ON HIS WAY OUT when the telegram arrived. He read it. He read it a second time. He slipped it inside his coat pocket.
“I’m off.”
“Where to?” Anneliese asked.
“Where do you th
ink?”
He spoke as though the answer should be obvious to his wife, but Marta had no idea where he might be going either. He was now forbidden by the Nazis to set foot in his own factory. Although she did not want to admit it, this unnerved Marta. That someone else had this authority over Pavel—Pavel, whom she had only ever seen as being in charge. She found herself uncertain about exactly how to speak to him now. She couldn’t help but feel that some sort of imposter had snuck in and taken his place.
Anneliese was acting oddly too, Marta thought, although perhaps this was more to be expected. The town square was overrun with Hitlerjugend and Wehrmacht, after all; with rifles and polished boots and tanks. The Goldstein Tailor Shop was still closed. There was no question of Pepik’s going outside to play. All the good citizens were cooped up like rabbits in holes, Anneliese told Marta, and all the hooligans were parading about like they owned the town. Still, this didn’t stop Anneliese from leaving in the middle of the morning—once she was sure Pavel was gone—with her large Greta Garbo sunglasses and fresh red lipstick. She whispered to Marta that she was going to look in on the Hoffmans. She said she’d be gone several hours, but she returned twenty minutes later. The unpasteurized milk was boiling over on the stove; Sophie was on the patio playing with her Ouija board. The pointer made sweeping sounds, whooshing across the cardboard.
“Sophie!” Marta called. “Mrs. Bauer is back.”
“And?”
Marta winced at the teenager’s insolence; she was finding Sophie harder to bear these days. In light of everything that was going on, though, in light of the occupation, Marta’s earlier grudge against Anneliese was forgotten. It was like that with Anneliese—one minute Marta resented her, the next she adored her. Well, that’s the way it went with family, she supposed. It was the way a daughter might feel about her mother, or a mother about her child. And it was true, she felt almost protective now as she watched Anneliese trying to undo the knot on her kerchief. Anneliese’s fingers were trembling, and it took her several attempts. Finally she succeeded, smoothing down the triangle of bright silk, only to crumple it up again and shove it back in her purse.
“The Hoffmans are gone,” she announced to Marta. She dug around for her silver cigarette case, which she laid on top of the glass-topped cigar box. She dug through her purse some more.
Marta saw a thin film of perspiration on Anneliese’s brow. She offered her the tortoiseshell lighter off the mantel, shielding the flame with her cupped hand. “Mrs. Bauer?”
Anneliese looked up, her cigarette dangling from her lower lip, like a heroine in a romance novel. “Oh, yes, thank you, Marta.” She leaned over and sucked until the tip of the cigarette glowed red. Then she leaned back and let out a long, slow exhale. Her fingers fluttered at her throat. “They left the door unlocked,” she said. “But everything is gone. That beautiful chandelier.”
“Hanna Hoffman?”
Marta had thought that Anneliese was going to look in on Gerta Hoffman. Hanna was lower down on her priority list. She was someone Mrs. Bauer thought of when all the most important dinner guests had already been invited.
“The breakfront is still there, and the armoire, but the sideboard is gone and the Persian carpet. I looked in her wardrobe. In both of them. Empty.”
Anneliese seemed hesitant to convey this last bit of information—that she had gone upstairs and looked through her friend’s closets—but Marta nodded encouragingly to show she understood the circumstance. That Anneliese was acting in accordance with the dire times.
“I suppose they left the door unlocked to prevent the windows from being smashed. They must have figured the hooligans would get in one way or another if they wanted to.” Anneliese shrugged. “There was a steamer trunk left behind too. Several dresses hung on the wardrobe side. As though they left in a hurry.”
Marta heard Sophie slip back into the kitchen and begin banging pots and pans together loudly. It sounded like she was making the noise on purpose, like a child’s imitation of cooking. Marta wished Mrs. Bauer would scold Sophie, show her that, despite the chaos of the occupation, the Bauer household would continue to run unchanged. But Anneliese only grimaced in the direction of the kitchen and said she was going to go take something for her nerves and lie down and should not be disturbed.
She paused, though, before climbing the stairs. “Hanna isn’t even Jewish!” she said. “But Francek is enough for them, it seems.” She hesitated again. “And who knows about Hanka. Maybe she has an illegal grandfather in her past.”
At the word past a silence rose up between the two women. Marta liked to pretend that nobody knew the depravity she came from, but that of course was not the case. Anneliese knew. Maybe not everything, but she knew enough. And was kind enough to pretend she did not. What if things were otherwise? What if she weren’t so gracious? Anneliese exhaled cigarette smoke and fanned above her head as though trying to clear the air of what had suddenly materialized. The ghosts seemed to respect what Mrs. Bauer wished; the moment passed and Anneliese crushed out her cigarette, climbing the stairs to her room.
Pavel was gone for hours, returning only in the middle of the afternoon, with Ernst. They came in the door mid-conversation. “It might be wise,” Ernst was saying.
“All the accounts?”
“Just as a precautionary measure. To have them in a Gentile’s name.”
Marta looked up. What was Ernst up to? She tried to catch his eye, but the men took the stairs to the study without even removing their overcoats. She heard the heavy door closing behind them. By the time they came downstairs again the sun had slunk from the square like an old stray tabby. Anneliese had still not reappeared, and Marta was feeding Pepik an early meal of knedlíky cut into bite-sized pieces.
The men had obviously concluded whatever business they’d been discussing. The conversation had moved on to lighter things. In the front hall she saw Pavel pass Ernst his hat. “What’s the definition of the perfect Aryan?” Ernst asked.
Pavel made a face to show he didn’t know.
“Number one,” Ernst said, raising his forefinger, “he’s as slim as the fatso Goering. Number two, he’s eagle-eyed as the bespectacled Himmler.” He paused. “Number three? Swift and stealthy as the club-footed Goebbels. And number four, he’s as blond as the dark-haired Hitler!”
Pavel laughed, then the two men lowered their voices, speaking for several minutes in hushed tones. “There’s something else,” she heard Ernst say to Pavel.
“What’s this?”
“Put it on your lapel.”
“But they must know I’m—”
Marta peeked into the hall and saw the small flash of the swastika Ernst was pinning to Pavel’s breast. He looked up as he did it, catching and holding Marta’s eye. He winked. She felt, for a brief moment, like she was going to be sick.
“It can’t hurt,” Ernst said to Pavel.
“Are you sure?” Pavel asked.
“Just don’t forget to take it off if you cross into France!”
Pavel clapped Ernst on the back. “Good man,” he said. “Thank you.”
Marta turned back to give Pepik another bite. She heard the sound of the door opening and closing, of Pavel turning the lock.
Pavel Bauer was a thin man; Marta would even use the word small. And now as he sat at the table, he seemed, she thought, like a lost little boy. His shoulders were narrow and the skin at the back of his neck where the barber had shaved looked as pink and exposed as a newborn’s. She could barely stand to look at him, so vulnerable, so unaware of his friend Ernst’s shifting allegiances.
Pavel Bauer sat for along time with his hands folded in front of him.
He slowly lowered his head into his hands.
Now that the factory had been occupied, there was nowhere for Pavel to go during the days. He took Pepik across town to visit his Baba and brought him back home in time for dinner.
“I feel all cooped up,” Anneliese said at the table. “Like a rabbit in a hole.” She held
her silver cutlery to her head like long ears. It was an analogy she had grown fond of in the past several days, an analogy she thought was particularly apt. But Pavel said, “Things will change. I just need to make myself indispensable.”
He tucked his linen napkin into his shirt. “Pepik,” he said. “Stop that.”
Pepik had massed his mashed potatoes like mountain ranges and was—with his fingers—placing individual peas in a row behind them. The peas were soldiers taking refuge behind the potato peaks. “Those are the bad guys,” Marta whispered in his ear. “You’d better eat them all up!”
Sophie had left the house earlier that afternoon and was still not home by five o’clock, so Marta had taken it upon herself to braise a small red cabbage from the root cellar. Cooking was not her job, nor her strength, but she was willing, these days, to help in whatever way possible. Pavel was distracted and Anneliese kept repeating that her nerves were shot; Marta felt that it fell to her to preserve some semblance of normalcy. Along with the cabbage she’d prepared chicken with butter and seasoning salt, the way she knew Mrs. Bauer liked it. It was now 7:05 and there was still no sign of the young cook. Marta hoped there was still some strudel left over from last night that she could serve for dessert. She leaned over and moved Pepik’s hands away from his plate, showing him again how to properly hold his cutlery.
“But darling,” Anneliese was saying to her husband, “there’s no way for you to be indispensable.” She cleared her throat. “To the Germans,” she clarified. “Of course you’re indispensable—to me!” She laughed. “But there’s no way they will see that.”
“You’re right,” Pavel said. “Why can’t they see it? They need flax. They need cloth. If they convert the factory . . . Think of the area we supply. Think of all the smaller factories that will grind to a halt. Lipna and Trebelice and Marsponova and . . .”
He stabbed at a piece of chicken with his fork. “Pepik, I said stop.”
“Not to mention Krumlov,” added Anneliese.