She also wondered whether her father had frequented the Café Demin.
I tied myself to her as if with a shoelace. I was interested in everything about her and my interest grew stronger every day, until I realized that she had erected a barrier beyond which I was not allowed to venture.
We had all received a one-off financial subsidy, but treated ourselves to five meals a day by eating at the free restaurants. We had our private topography of Prague.
Sometimes Skinny would close her eyes in order to sense from a person’s voice whether he or she was lying to her. What she liked about Adler was that he was a good friend and undemanding. I was afraid that I wouldn’t seem so undemanding; but perhaps she didn’t see me that way. I gobbled her up with my eyes; carefully weighing every expression. When she’d slept well she had big, clear green eyes.
Skinny and I left Prague to spend a week at the Jewish Community’s convalescent home in Ostravice in Moravia. It was an eight-hour train journey. Through the window she watched the landscape slipping past – woods, fields and factories as at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We didn’t have to speak; we were all in the same situation. The train, the rails; telegraph posts along the track. Villages with people living their own lives, not caring what was happening in the world. The kind of people we used to be envious of when they moved us from one camp to another. For the repatriated, the railway had abolished the distinction between second and third class. We were sitting in second class on worn green-upholstered seats, with a compartment to ourselves. We were travelling like lords, we knew where we were going and, more importantly, we knew that nothing bad was going to happen to us when we got there.
Skinny looked at me and I knew what she was going to say: “I’ve not been on a train like this before.”
It was beginning to get dark. I tried to touch her, not only like a friend, though also like a friend. I dreamed of holding her intimately. I wanted to kiss her.
“We’re here on our own,” I said.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t manage it.”
I looked at her close up. That was all she would let me do. Her eyes were gazing at me like two green gates to a fortress I could not capture. I was looking into her eyes; my glance slid down over her face, down to her hands which lay folded in her lap. Suddenly it was difficult, almost impossible, to take her hands into mine. She was looking at me.
Two things merged in me: my longing to touch her body and the recognition that she was afraid of me. I was filled with tenderness. I gathered all my strength and courage. Suddenly I didn’t care what happened or what I might wreck.
“I love you,” I said. “If I were Ervin Adler,” I went on, hearing the awkwardness in my voice, “I would put it differently, but it would still be the truth.”
“I don’t know what Ervin is supposed to have said to me. He’s said rather a lot.”
“You should know.”
“I don’t know.” She was hiding behind those little words.
“I could live with you, not just for this moment but for always.”
She was silent for a while. Something had calmed her.
“That makes two of you,” she smiled.
She looked at me and then dropped her eyes. It was nearly nightfall and I was glad the guard had not turned on the lights. We were immersed in darkness. It was a fleeting moment, then she looked at me from the half-shadows and behind me she must have seen the dimming landscape, the telegraph posts and the sky. These seemed to carry her back to where she didn’t want to go.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“What should have happened?”
“The way you’re looking at me.”
“How should I look at you?”
“Are you afraid of me?”
She remained silent.
“Are you afraid of… something?”
“Perhaps.”
She was 16,1 was 18.
“I know what you’re afraid of.”
I don’t know if she turned pale or blushed, because it was too dark, but she didn’t say anything. Suddenly she was vulnerable: there was an ocean of shame in her. She did not know the saying: If we want to keep a secret we must not tell it even to our closest friend.
“I don’t want to rush anything. I’m happy as things are.”
“We can draw a line under everything that’s been and start afresh, together,” I said.
This was what she had wanted to hear. In her eyes was the darkness that was falling outside. A white expanse and a quarry deep in snow. For the first time since I’d met her, there was irritation or impatience or fear alternating with gentleness in her gaze. She was looking at me as never before.
“I love you,” I said again. I knew that it was true – more than true, the words seemed inadequate. But I said it because there are no other words to describe how I felt, and she must have known from my eyes that it was the truth. I heard a trembling in my voice that I had never heard before. I hardly recognized myself, the colour of those three little words.
“I’m not as mature as you think,” she said.
“I would do anything for you,” I said.
“Perhaps it’ll happen if you don’t hurry things.”
“You think I’m in a hurry?”
“I need you to be patient.”
“I am patient.”
“No, you’re not. Not as much as you think or as much as I need.”
I did not know what to say.
Wasn’t it enough for her that I loved her? If love includes respect, then I respected her, and if it includes anguish, then I felt that too. Surely she realized what it cost me to say those words.
“What I’m telling you is the truth.”
“You should give me time,” she said.
“Surely there are things you don’t have to explain,” I said.
She didn’t seem to understand what I meant; she was clearly alarmed at what she could not explain to me.
“I’m not a rabbi,” I said. “But I could do with a rabbi for what I need.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” she said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said weakly.
She remained silent for several minutes. All I could do was repeat to myself a hundred times that I loved her, that some things could not be invented because they were more true than truth itself. I saw her as half of my own being, but there was nothing I could do unless she felt the same.
“I’m losing you in the dark. And do you know why?”
“Because it is dark.”
I see the estate from an icy height. The two bridges over the River San, the circle of the quarry, khaki figures in bulky greatcoats, and trucks in the yard. The long low building of the brothel, the army kitchen, the vehicle parks. I am with Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, that first Friday in December, when she feels like the flesh of an exotic fruit from which strange hands pluck the kernel twelve times a day, sometimes 14 or even 15 times. I can hear Oberführer S chimmelpfennig shouting that in other brothels the girls were serving as many as 50 men. I have Skinny’s dark circles under my eyes. I am standing there, with no clothes on, for hours, in front of the bored S S men.
I am in Terezin with her parents; they are still alive. Her mother is splitting mica for the cockpits of Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Fokkers on Bastion III or on South Hill. Later she works with Skinny in the tailor’s shop, adapting German uniforms destined for the eastern front by spraying their backs with white camouflage paint. Skinny’s father is working in K-Produktion (Kistenproduktion), assembling diesel engines for U-boats in a large circus tent in the square outside the Catholic Church. Ramon is attending the so-called substitute school and helping out in the carpenter’s shop in the former riding school.
In September 1943 the Dienststelle allowed the children to do gymnastics in preparation for the Makabi Games on Bastion III. A Protectorate Newsreel team came out to film them at it. After their exercises the children were packed off
to Auschwitz-Birkenau by Transport DL.
I see her again on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where soon her brother will be cremated. What amazes her father is that somebody has had to think all this up, to plan it, put it on paper, convert it into a thousand memos and instructions and orders, all worked out to the last detail. Do any of these people, as they shuffle forward in single file, suspect that one and a half million people have already passed in front of the doctors on this ramp?
The new arrivals were greeted by the prisoners’ band playing a French musical hit in German. Come back to me, I’ll wait for you, you are my happiness. “J’attendrai”. The band also played it for those who had tried to escape as they were being hanged. No-one could say that there wasn’t a sense ofhumour at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Come back to me before I’ve searched the world for you. For the first time in her life Skinny encountered a force for which she had no name, a force stronger than any individual. Until then, evil had been a sweet offered by a stranger, which might be poisoned. She was on a boundary line, among the dead even if they were still alive. Suddenly happiness lay in becoming a slave, a whore. The crematoria looked like brick kilns or baking houses. Where was that virgin soil, still untilled, which, allegedly, they had come to settle? They had been promised that families would not be separated.
Now I see before me the night when S S men are using their whips to drive onto a train some Aryan girls chosen to work in field brothels. Skinny knows by then that there are worse things than a whipping, but she clambers onto the train as fast as she can to avoid further lashes. An S S man slams the wagon door. They have an escort – 60-year-old Scharführer Franz Ordentlich, who never utters a word.
I am standing in front of Madam Kulikowa at a roll-call taken by Oberführer Schimmelpfennig. Madam Kulikowa is preparing the girls for tomorrow’s batch of soldiers, men exhausted from their withdrawal under fire. The troops come here shaken by the battering they’ve received, confused by defeats for which nothing has prepared them. They no longer look like the flower of Germany, as they had after defeating Poland and France. They no longer believe that nothing would stop them until they had reached the foot of the Urals. Now they were a master race with sore bottoms, inflamed foreskins and swollen feet, with water on their knees, with prominent varicose veins. Their eyes are bloodshot with fatigue. They come to the brothel as if to a field hospital. The members of the Waffen-S S do not seem so crushed by the retreat. They have the same uniforms as the Wehrmacht, field grey, except that on the right sides of their helmet they have a white shield marked with the S S insignia and on the left side a swastika in a white circle on a red background.
I can see Skinny, feeling like a piece of raw meat on a butcher’s slab after the first time she has intercourse. I see them cross the threshold twelve times a day. Faces, bodies, boots, trousers, puttees. Every day except Sunday, and sometimes even on Sunday.
I am gazing into the wasteland through her eyes. I see a roan horse struggling through the snow, jerking its head around, terrified of the wolves. Scharführer Wolfgang Strupp drives the leader of the pack away by firing at him. The silver wolf, his tail up, is clever. He will not let himself be shot. Scharführer Strupp calms his mount by lightly patting its flank. He slips his rifle back under the saddle.
Even when compared to the British and French servicemen the Americans were well dressed and well fed. They got as far as Plzen -the Russians would not let them advance further. At that time we did not yet understand why, we were in favour of anyone who drove the Germans out. The Allies had behind them an unquestionable victory. No-one spat on them. They didn’t have to beg favours from anyone. But they also had some costly operations behind them. For every mistake, for every underestimation of the Germans, as at the bridge of Remagen, they had paid heavily. They had truth on their side, and honour, and the kind of humour and lightness that we associated with America. Now they were on leave in Prague. People were a little envious of them, perhaps because America was so rich and also because it was so far away. They had been in Normandy, in Alsace and in Berlin, and on their side of the Elbe. They seemed self-assured, whether they were looking out for a taxi or asking the number of a tram, the name of a street, a tavern or a nightclub.
Skinny examined the faces of passers-by as we walked. Suppose Ramon hadn’t died in the gas chamber but had got lost? What if her father had lost his memory and was now trying to find out who he was? Maybe he had lost his sense of time and place? Imagine if it wasn’t true that her father had flung himself against the wire in Birkenau? The people who said they saw him die could have been mistaken, and by some miracle he might have survived. She almost forgot that she’d seen him herself. Was her memory playing tricks? The same might be true of her mother. If she was still alive three days before the end of the war, then perhaps she was now walking about, searching, as so many others were.
We had one advantage: we did not pity one another, we had everything still ahead of us. All of us lost practically everybody to the murderers – nine out of every ten people. Pity for the fate of others only came a lot later. At that time, the band in the café, a decent meal and a clean bed were worth a lot.
“Tabula rasa” she said to Adler one day.
“What’s that?” he wanted to know.
“A clean slate.”
“That I am not,” Adler said. “Are you?”
In the kosher restaurant at 18 Maislova Street we met an American officer.
“Eighteen is my lucky number,” Skinny said to the doorman as we entered.
“Why?”
“I was in Block 18 in Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
“Eighteen is the Jewish number of life,” the doorman told her.
“What does that mean?”
“That you’re still alive,” said the doorman, who had lost his daughter. “Run along and eat, Number 18. You’re luckier than you know.”
Just then the American arrived. The next table was occupied, so he asked whether we minded if he joined us.
“Not as yet,” Adler joked.
We frequented Maislova 18 because it was free for us. The American had come from Subcarpathian Ruthenia. He was trying to trace his parents. He had seen Germany on its knees. Anyone in Berlin wishing to buy a coat, a pair of trousers or a pullover needed a special permit, and as a rule they were turned down. One Chesterfield cigarette cost ioo marks, one-third of a worker’s monthly wage. For a bar of chocolate the Germans were offering young girls or their mothers. They were searching the refuse bins for unfinished American, British or New Zealand tins of food. Everything was in ruins. The black market was flourishing. He had been looking for his father’s brother, his three sisters, his grandfather on his father’s side, the first Jew to receive the German Iron Cross for heroism in World War I. He had found no-one, not a single member of his extended family.
The American was looking at Skinny. To him she was a person who had come back from that secret German-Jewish war, in which only one side was armed and the other not at all. Within World War II there was another war, an even greater one, concealed.
The American believed that Europe needed re-education. Skinny laughed. Was he going to send Europe to school? Adler, holding up his soup spoon like a pointer, said that he had attended a re-education lecture in the Buchenwald camp near Weimar. He tried to explain to the American that we had jettisoned the old morality and acquired a new one as early as in the first form of our primary schools. It was a more accurate and certainly a more flexible one. Higher was lower, nearer was further away, black was white and right was wrong. The only things that remained unchanged were day and night; because those were difficult to exchange. Our education had continued in the east. There, no-one complained any longer, as the people in Lodz still did when they had to eat rats.
The American was silent. There was decency in him, as well as sadness and an echo of something that he couldn’t grasp. He was clearly searching for a key to us and did not find it. His name was Rex Weiner; he was married, lived somew
here near Chicago and had a small daughter by his American wife. He was an airforce colonel. We guessed that the rank of colonel was not dealt out in the US forces like a hand of cards. He watched us finish our soup and we realized that he hadn’t touched his and that it must be quite cold by now. He noticed that all three of us were looking at his plate. If we were not offended, would we allow him to order for us? All courses – starters, main course, dessert. Fruit and lemonade. We did allow him.
Skinny, unexpectedly, was all smiles. Rex Weiner’s story pleased her. He questioned his own motivations; he didn’t interrogate us. She would have liked to help him to understand. There was nothing worse than mistaken beliefs. Her wish was a wish for justice tempered by retribution, and for retribution tempered by justice.
Colonel Weiner’s war philosophy was simple: kill anyone who tries to kill you. Adler identified with it enthusiastically. He omitted to say that he was rather glad that so far he hadn’t had to kill. When the time came he would not hesitate. And never again would he get on a transport so obediently.
A moment later the smile disappeared from Skinny’s face. On one of the Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific, a young man whom the colonel knew had tried to escape from a prison camp. The Japanese guards forced him to drink one glass of water after another, until his stomach was inflated and rigid and he couldn’t get another drop of water down. Then, with drawn swords and threatening to cut off the heads of anyone who didn’t obey, they ordered the other prisoners to kick the young man in his stomach. They were allowed to stop only when the man’s stomach burst and he died.
Rex Weiner spoke almost in a whisper. Infamy, though it had no name and seemed inconceivable, nevertheless existed.
Were we not alone? Was it not ridiculous that men should invent a hell with everlasting fire in which sinners would burn until Judgement Day? You didn’t have to see it. Imagination was enough.
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