Her being a counselor-in-training, a junior staff member, made her fair game for the returning senior staff, who were more than eager to try out what had until recently been off limits. She had convinced her father to allow her to return for the summer, I happily learned in one of the many tightly-packed aerogrammes she sent during the course of the year. I sent many letters myself, and our correspondence became the type of fluid, considered, and revealing written conversation now incongruous with the shoot-from-the-hip speed of emails and instant messages.
Even years later, as I looked over these letters in her loopy, girlish, gawkily endearing handwriting, they inevitably made me smile. Reading them alone in my dorm room at night all those years ago, I discovered the true power of a young man’s yearning.
When I saw her again that summer, my yearning had not diminished.
Our first touches were hesitant, much like the way she’d revealed what she knew of her mother’s life and history, to which she made only passing references. These were separated by interregnum banter, home updates, and—largely—news and politics.
As we became more familiar with each other, our hands sought out the right places intuitively, with an erotic fluidity that was—to my chagrin—chaste by strict definition. Her virginity was not one of the things Vanesa shared with me that summer. In our correspondence, however, she freely gave the details of her efforts to breach the gaps in her mother’s life story.
“I could never ask my father about the war,” she wrote to me in February of 1982. “It’s just not something we talk about, something we could ever talk about. And my mother is gone, so it’s too late to ask her. I could possibly ask Uncle Tomas, but… well, I’ve decided to take a different route. Don’t tell my father—ha-ha—but I’ve been spending time in the Yad V’Shem archive in Jerusalem. I mean, he knows I go there, but he thinks it’s for school. In fact, I’m researching my mother, and him, and Uncle Tomas.”
My Vanesa had found her mother quite easily, and had reconstructed her story in the strictly historical sense. Yet people made up the stream of history—it burbled with their actions, flowed over the rocks of their emotions and fears, was sullied by their weaknesses, and rushed by their small triumphs.
No matter how many times she went back to Yad V’Shem, there were details my Vanesa could never find.
She could know that her mother, grandmother, and Uncle Niklas had arrived in Thereisenstadt on February 22, 1942 on Transport Y from Kladno. She could know that the train was owned and operated for the Nazis by the Bohmisch-Mahrische Bahnen company, and she could know the exact stops the train made on the way. She could know that her Uncle Niklas had died of typhus on December 13, 1942, several months after he was ripped from the care of his parents, who left Terezin on Transport Bk to Maly Trostenets on September 9, 1942 with 1000 other Jews, only two of whom survived, neither of them Vanesa Sr.’s parents.
She could know that Vanesa Sr. lived as an orphan, together with hundreds of other girls, in the building designated L410, next to the Catholic Church on Hauptstrasse, the ghetto’s main street, for two terrible years after her parent’s deportation. And she knew that Vanesa Sr. had been sent, together with 2498 other people, to Auschwitz on Transport Ek, which left Terezin on September 28, 1944. And she knew, of course, for certain that Vanesa Sr. was among the “lucky” 20% that were not sent immediately on arrival to the gas chambers, and that she was one of the only 51 people from Transport Ek that ultimately survived the war.
She could know these facts, but that left much more that she could never know.
“I’ll never know how she felt, walking to Terezin in the cold from Buhosovice, being parted from my grandparents, hearing that her brother had died, getting on a train alone to Auschwitz,” she wrote. “I can see the scenes like postcards in my head, accurate down to the most minute details, because I’ve learned all I can know. But the visceral depth of her horrors will always escape me. She carried them, and I’ll never be able to share, never ease her suffering, never lighten her burden even just a little.”
That regret only grew over time. It was regret satiated neither by meetings with Terezin survivors, nor by lengthy visits to the Beit Terezin Museum in Kibbutz Givat Haim. Her regret drove her, sometimes manically. It shaped her. It came to define her, and eventually surrounded and engulfed her. Her regret drove my Vanesa to subsume her very identity, to take her mother’s name as her own—as if by carrying the name she could somehow assume at least some of her mother’s pain, the pain she could never feel.
And so, when I kissed Vanesa Neuman that moonlit night on the dock where we’d sat platonically the previous year, I was attempting to approach the unapproachable. In retrospect, it marked the beginning of the end for us, or maybe the end which came at the beginning. It was the first of my infinite yet futile attempts to fix the unfixable.
But that night, she still tasted like the peanut butter she’d used—I found out later—as glue to stick chocolate chip cookies all over my just-washed white car, in response to some private joke that I can’t for the life of me recall today. It seemed funny then. And her smug look, the way her mouth, still moist from our kiss, held a mock serious pose while her eyes silently laughed as I peeled the cookies one by one from my prize Ford—it was this memory of that summer of discovery that never left me, and likely never will.
Prague, December 1991
After the call with Uncle Tomas, Vanesa did not call me. Instead, she returned to her room, stopping briefly at the desk to request laundry service for her soiled clothes. The bespectacled clerk gave her his best tortured intellectual glare, resenting her imposition on his creative process, and jotted a note to himself. He then lowered his eyes to indicate the completion of their conversation, giving her mute leave to go.
Back in her room, the smell of urine still seeping under the crack in the bathroom door, Vanesa paced, trying to dispel thoughts best left unconsidered from her head. Yet they returned persistently, like little rivulets of water running under the door that prefaced the flood to come. She shouldn’t have come. She didn’t need to be here. She was, in the kindly yet crass words of her high school drama teacher, “pissing down her leg.”
To my Vanesa, and to many Israeli children of survivors, Europe forever remained a dead world, a graveyard, a purgatory or nether-land whose inhabitants existed as if unaware of their undead status. They continued to eat, to breathe, to screw, and to love—but how could they be truly alive in a place that Vanesa’s father had referred to, since she was a little girl, as “that desolate, soulless place”?
As a girl, this had conjured the frightening image of ghost cities. “Papa, how did they lose their souls?” she asked more than once.
“They didn’t lose them, my sweet. They gave them away,” he inevitably answered. “At least, many, many of them did.”
Thus she had been on some level surprised to find so many souls in the streets of Prague, even under latently Communist-grey clouds, rusty scaffolding and neglect, two years after the Velvet Revolution that had brought the Iron Curtain down. She realized with surprise that the undead were very much alive, very much in possession of their souls, to all appearances. Had they regained them, she wondered, little girl-like, or had they actually never left?
After some generous assistance from the room’s sparse mini-bar, my Vanesa slept fitfully, and dreamt a dream she’d had since she was a little girl.
It was not a good one.
It was a bright, beautiful morning. She was on her way to school. Allenby Street in downtown Tel Aviv buzzed with noise and chaos, everyone hurrying somewhere to do something important. The old Dan Cooperative bus pulled up to the concrete bus stop, belching black smoke from a sooty tailpipe. She climbed the grimy bus stairs and walked between the cracked plastic seats lining the dingy interior. Cigarette butts and crushed sunflower seed shells carpeted the floor. The dusty sliding windows let in only miserable slurps of tepid air in the summer, but behaved quite magnanimously when it came to w
inter rain.
A ticket seller at the rear-door entrance seemed to operate on auto-pilot, taking change and resignedly raising a pudgy eyebrow when a patron passed him a bill instead of exact change in coins. To passenger after passenger, he dispensed the flimsy paper tickets which, from Vanesa’s experience, inevitably fell to the floor when it rained or flew out the window—and always just prior to the roaming conductor calling, “Tickets, please. Tickets!”
The door shut behind her, and as it closed the universe shifted perceptibly. Her sense of well-being, false in hindsight, evaporated. She was pulled, as if on an inexorable conveyor belt, into a new, terrifying yet amorphous world. Everywhere she looked, forms shifted malevolently. The ticket taker became a leering, pitchfork-bearing devil, and then a slathering, bristling monster. The old lady with the wheeled, plaid-basket shopping cart transformed into a green-faced, claw-handed witch. The hand straps dangling from the bar above became snakes looped around red-hot iron.
The imagery had changed as she grew older, but the feeling never did—abject, inexplicable terror, a sense of impending, unspeakable pain. Stomach-dropping fear that all was lost, that somehow she’d never get back to that bright day outside. Then came the paralysis, coming partly awake, only to find that she was trapped in the dream—unable to run, unable to wake. The terror pressed down, smothering her, blanketing her until finally, no longer caring that her mother or father would hear her, she screamed the primal scream of the tortured and damned, and awoke sweating—always to find that her scream, like her terror, remained internal and silent.
Using her newly-discovered research skills, Vanesa wrote me in March of 1982, she began also clandestinely researching her father and grandfather. Here, she confided, “Things got a little confusing.” Although she had at least gained factual insight about her mother, records regarding her father were “less complete, to say the least.”
She found a record of Michael Neuman arriving in Terezin with his mother and father on Transport AAt from Prague on July 23, 1942. She uncovered a record of her great-grandparents leaving Terezin for Auschwitz on Transport Dr, on December 12, 1943, and found proof of their deaths – both having been sent upon arrival to Auschwitz straight to the gas chambers with the other 2504 people on the transport. She also found a record of her grandmother Alena’s death from Typhus, still in Terezin, shortly thereafter.
But my Vanesa uncovered only one record—a single instance in the masses of documents, testimonies, and personal accounts that she examined that year and in future years—as to what had happened to Michael and his father Jakub between their arrival in Terezin and the end of the war.
And this record made no sense.
“If nothing else, the Nazis were talented bureaucrats, especially in Terezin. Their record-keeping was meticulous, bordering on the obsessive. They kept records of the number of times each prisoner had been checked for lice, and how many lice, of what sizes, they found in each check. Very few of their victims actually fell through the cracks,” Vanesa wrote me. “That’s what makes it odd that, from the point of view of the Nazi records, my grandfather and father should not exist.”
Prague, December 1991
“A good historian always has a backup research plan,” one of Vanesa’s undergraduate history professors once said in a crowded lecture hall half-full of bored freshmen. Still a fresh-faced ex-army radio reporter, she’d chuckled internally at the man’s audacity. After all, he was speaking of history. What Raiders of the Lost Ark had done for archaeologists, no one had yet imagined for historians.
He’d been right, in retrospect. Now that she was a historian, she’d made a backup plan before going to the trouble of getting a visa to Czechoslovakia, and before paying the widely-despised Foreign Travel Tax levied on Israelis traveling outside the borders of the small country at that time. She’d made a plan and now prepared to put it in motion.
It was a fitful night, passing slowly as Vanesa replayed over and over the events of the evening, including the oddly comforting conversation with Uncle Tomas, who had so adamantly opposed this trip. She had never seen him so upset, red-faced and literally blustering on the day before her departure. She had been frankly afraid for his heart, and tried to calm him with a little girl hug, which had always softened him up for whatever she intended to ask, laying her head on his broad chest so he could stroke her hair with his large hands.
He would have none of it. “Tell me why, Kotě. Explain to an old man so that I can understand. It makes no sense to me. We’ve always talked about things rationally. We’ve always thought out our courses of action, have we not? Why can you not now take a breath and explain to me what you hope to accomplish with this trip? Can you please try?”
So, she’d tried to explain that the diary was the key to something—something possibly good, something of which she’d never really even hoped to scratch the surface, and now found dangling enticingly in front of her face like the proverbial carrot in front of the donkey. Hungry for knowledge, how could she not pull the cart forward in an attempt to reach the carrot, no matter how heavy the load?
He was unswayed. “What is this ‘know more about him’ nonsense? What more do you need to know? I’ve told you everything you need to know. I knew your father from when he was eleven, remember?”
He had always been reservedly open with her, as if recognizing her sincere need to know, and sharing what he knew of her father’s wartime experience despite the obvious discomfort it caused him. They’d been in Terezin, he said. He’d befriended Jakub, her grandfather, because they shared the same profession. He’d helped the man look out for Michael until they—Jakub and Michael, not himself—were sent to Auschwitz in 1944.
He’d told her, and she’d believed. In the world of silence in which she grew up, Uncle Tomas’ sparse information was an earsplitting drum roll, a golden revelation of the past. It had been enough for her for many years, and even when it wasn’t enough, she’d been unable to ask him. She told herself that it would be cruel, that the memories were clearly painful to the man, leaving him visibly relieved when her questions stopped. Allowing him his privacy seemed the only fair and humane thing to do.
She knew her reticence to push Uncle Tomas derived as much from fear—not just of what she might discover, but of the man himself—as from mercy. Whatever her true motive, she beat back the questions, locked them away, until the day that they just erupted out of her like a flock of hungry bats from an inky cave mouth. There were too many of them, and she had to find some matching answers.
That’s when she started her trips to Yad V’Shem. Before long, she found the references to her father and grandfather. When she found no record of anyone named Tomas Marle with Uncle Tomas’ birth date, having been either in the ghetto or in Auschwitz, it felt almost a relief—it meant that there were answers to be found, that there was more to know. The menace of eternal, blissless ignorance, at least, was lifted.
She wasn’t angry—not at him, nor her father, nor her grandfather—that she had apparently been deceived about who Uncle Tomas really was. Nor would she ever confront either him or her father.
Yet she had decided to find out, that overcast day in Jerusalem, as she clutched the grey photostat of her grandfather’s transport orders printed from microfiche.
She had decided to find out because, according to Terezin transport records, Jakub and Michael had been among the 18 deportees sent on October 27, 1944 from Prague to Theresienstadt on Transport Eu. This would have surprised her less, if not for a single historical discrepancy, as Professor Ben-Artzi would say, “of proportion that is historical itself.”
It was clear that, if her grandfather and father had been transported from Prague to Theresienstadt in 1942, and then again from Prague in 1944, they must have returned to Prague in the interim. Of this, there was no record.
Yet even more importantly, the deportees of Transport Eu never made it to Theresienstadt. Their train car stood for a full day in Bohusovice, the rail station nearest Ter
ezin. The next day, the Nazis coupled the car to another train, transport Ev. This transport—the very last to leave Terezin before the end of the war—went directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The eighteen members of Transport Eu, her father and grandfather listed among them, were all murdered immediately upon their arrival on October 29, 1944.
Yes, she had decided right then, smoking a cigarette on Yad V’Shem’s Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations under an unforgiving Jerusalem winter sky. Yes, she decided that if notoriously accurate Nazi transport records negated her grandfather’s, her father’s, and by obvious extension her very own, existence, she would someday have to make her father’s story, like she had made her mother’s name, her own.
By the time the sunless morning’s street sounds started to filter up to her room, Vanesa had safely locked the attack away, but she certainly hadn’t forgotten. The reeking clothes that still graced the floor of the hotel bathroom, awaiting the morning’s maid service, remained unimpeachable evidence. Yet Vanesa had grown up in a family where locking away bad things had been honed to an art. Her internal iron box bulged, strained its seals and leaked toxic fumes, as had her father’s and mother’s iron boxes before her.
But it held.
So she remained composed as she packed her research notes and the diary into her briefcase, then lugged it down to the dining room, where she picked unenthusiastically at a bland continental breakfast at least as grey as the morning sky.
“No one goes to Prague for the food, Kotě. The beer, yes, but not the food,” Uncle Tomas had told her, and he was right.
She left the dining room and approached the desk clerk, a different but equally reticent young man—as if the hotel’s human resources department had specified “standoffish” as a key hiring criterion. Vanesa extracted a phone number from her briefcase and asked the clerk to please connect her to the offices of the Jewish Museum of Prague.
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