“It was just last week,” Jonas began, breaking the croissant-scented silence that had again descended over the kitchen. “Out of the blue, Marek called—Agata called for him, of course—and asked me to have a full-color poster-size blow-up of a map made for him. He had the map in his desk at the museum, he said. It was an original official map of Nazi-occupied Prague, once actually in use by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The Office ran crews that went around the city emptying the apartments of the Jews who had been deported. They employed local drivers and porters, of course, but this was, Marek insisted, the ‘official’ map, used by the Nazi overseers who would ride along. In theory, the crews were supposed to bring all property collected to the Treuhandstelle, the trustee committee of the museum, who would register, sort and appraise it. In practice, many items got ‘lost’ along the way. It was a good business for them, the Nazis. Although there were many middle class apartments with just furniture and appliances, there were also plenty of luxury flats, owned by people with art collections, antiques, things that couldn’t be quickly converted into cash like jewelry, or easily transported. Most of that property was abandoned by its owners, and then resold. The proceeds partially funded the Office’s activities, but mostly filled the pockets of the Nazis involved, along with a whole line of shady middlemen.”
Jonas paused here, gauging Vanesa’s reaction. Her face remained impassive, her eyes focused on the steam rising from the coffee, and he continued. “Marek insisted that the idea was a whim, and that nothing would likely come of it. I indulged him, of course. It took me several days to organize, and I… I… I am such an idiot!”
He sprang from the table suddenly, as if bitten, and knocked over his coffee cup. He raced from the room and down the narrow hallway.
Vanesa saw him round the corner and enter the small room in which she had slept, which also served as his office. She grabbed the nearest kitchen towel and mopped at the mess to the sound of scrabbling, of objects being moved, of papers being shuffled.
Jonas called apologetically, “Sorry! I am such an idiot. I made a copy of the map for myself. I completely forgot. One minute. Let me just… find… it…. Aha!”
He began speaking excitedly even before he reentered the kitchen. “Found it! I can’t believe I didn’t think if this yesterday night!” He spread a map the size of a small poster on the table, and continued.
“I remember thinking that the cartographer who created this thing was obviously color blind and dyslexic, not to mention completely lacking an understanding of scale. The coloring is odd, too, don’t you think? Look at this dark orange background, the roads outlined in blood red, the parks and town squares colored a kind of sickly green. And it is so crudely drawn, with the handwritten street names. Some of the names have been ‘Germanized,’ like this street where three of the sites of the Jewish Museum are located. The name of the street is ‘Old Cemetery Street,’ because of the Jewish cemetery located there, but the Nazis changed it to ‘Luython Street.’ Apparently, even a reference to dead Jews was offensive.”
He smiled wryly and fell silent. The silence blanketed the kitchen for several minutes, growing heavier as they both stared intently at the map spread out before them. Jonas got up to turn on the electric kettle, and continued speaking with his back turned.
“The area you’re looking at is, of course, my neighborhood, Josefov. This is the very heart of what was once the Jewish ghetto of Prague. I’m sure you know the history. We are located….” He turned and reached over Vanesa’s shoulder, intending to point out the location of his apartment on the map. The view down Vanesa’s thin t-shirt from above stopped him in mid-sentence. “…uh… we’re located… uh… right here. Yes.”
He recovered, went back to his tea-making, and continued. “So, I tacked the map up on the ceiling above Marek’s bed. Agata helped. Then he had me mark with thumbtacks the five buildings that made up, and still do make up, the core facilities of our museum: the Maisel Synagogue, the Pinkas Synagogue, the Klausen Synagogue, the Prague Burial Society Building—next to the cemetery—and the Spanish Synagogue.”
He paused, and the kettle boiled and shut itself off. Leaving the two cups of tea on the small kitchen counter, he stepped out of the room wordlessly. He came back with a box of thumbtacks, which he set on the table. Without further comment, he searched the map carefully, and marked five locations with tacks, apparently unconcerned by the holes he was making in the rough kitchen table.
“As you probably know, these buildings were purposely preserved by the Reich, whereas such grand synagogues in other major cities were systematically destroyed.” Jonas slipped unconsciously into lecture mode. “These buildings were slated to house the exhibitions of the Central Jewish Museum—what Hans Guenther considered his ‘Museum of an Extinct Race.’ They still do exactly that—minus, of course, the ‘extinct’ part. How ironic.”
Jonas smiled again, but Vanesa paid little attention. She was staring intently at the points on the map, her eyes far away, trying to focus on what she’d seen on Marek’s ceiling.
Jonas kept speaking, unaware. “That’s all we know. Marek told me he just wanted to look at the map, wouldn’t say what he was looking for. I guess he found it, in the end. Now we’ll never know….”
Vanesa remained silent, still picturing Marek’s ceiling. He’d apparently had Agata wind red string around the thumbtacks, turning the five points into an amorphous shape. She closed her eyes, focusing on the shape, manipulating it in her mind until, with banality greater than any literary anti-climax she’d ever experienced, and with blatancy worse than the most overt deus ex machina plot twist, the answer presented itself.
It was so simple that her first inclination was to dismiss it altogether.
How could the key to something that has confounded me for over a decade be so trivial? She opened her eyes to gaze at the map on the table, and upon realizing what she was looking at, felt neither relief nor catharsis, but rather profound embarrassment. Am I really that stupid?
“Yes, we will,” she said, the energy drained from her voice. “We will know.”
“What makes you say that?” Jonas countered.
Vanesa put her cold coffee cup on the kitchen table. “Because the answer is right here in front of us. All we have to do is figure out what it means, and why it was important enough that someone killed Marek for discovering it. Then, we have to make sure they don’t do the same to us.”
Jonas stared at her for a moment, appearing taken aback by her bluntness. He recovered and turned back to the map. “I’m sorry. I don’t see it. What are you talking about?”
She smiled indulgently, the kind of smile typically reserved for a child in need of explanation about something self-evident to adults. Catching herself, she turned businesslike, and said simply, “Connect the dots.”
Still Jonas stared, uncomprehending.
“Connect the dots,” Vanesa repeated, more insistently. She grabbed a pencil from the nearby counter, and quickly sketched four lines on the map.
“What if, beyond its inherent runic meanings, the symbol was a key, created to fit this particular map? Each of the five buildings of the museum represents one endpoint of the symbol. And the sixth… taking into account that this map is not exactly to scale, and leaving a little room for creative interpretation, the sixth point should be right… about… here.”
She reached over and added a fifth line to the map.
“So, we need to find out what is here, on the corner of Usergasse and Geistgasse. Any idea where that corner is, what was there during the war, or what is there today?”
Jonas shook his head, yet unable to make the short hop from understanding to action. “But there is no sixth site,” he protested. “There’s no historical record of a sixth museum site!”
Vanesa smiled her rueful smile again, this time making no attempt to check herself. “To that, my Ph.D advisor Professor Ben-Artzi would have said, ’history, my dear, is nothing but an endless process of
factual revision.’ Apparently, it is time we revise what we know of the Jewish Museum of Prague.”
Prague, September 1943
Josef Polak walked hurriedly down Parizska Street, dodging puddles from the previous night’s rain, his head bent forward as if either in deep thought or extreme haste. The citizens of Prague had come to wryly refer to this as the ‘Occupation Walk.’ In sharp contrast to delightfully circuitous pre-war strolls, which would eventually lead Praguers to their destinations, one now engaged in the Occupation Walk to get from one place to another as quickly and innocuously as possible. Life under the Nazis, as Praguers of all walks of life had quickly learned, necessitated the art of calling as little attention as possible to oneself.
A knock on the door, an official letter in the post, a rough accosting on a street corner—these were the stuff of nightmares. With the Occupation Walk, one felt momentarily above the rampant danger, as if invisible to evil, stepping lithely around it like a pothole or a pile of fresh dog shit. The Occupation Walk provided an illusion of control in a world spun far out of anyone’s hands, especially those of 57-year-old portly Jews like himself.
Josef Polak passed the unimposing façade of the steep-roofed Altneuschul—literally the Old-New Synagogue—barely glancing up at Europe’s oldest synagogue, its structure dating to the 1300’s. According to legend, the body of the famous Prague Golem still lay in a secret attic genizah—‘hiding place.’
This was not a morning to pause and contemplate the richness of Prague’s Jewish history, Josef thought, even though that was technically his job as curator of the city’s Jewish Museum.
No, he corrected himself, my job is to create an illusion for my overlords. I am to turn what is essentially cataloging Nazi booty into a coherent museological experience. It is my job to memorialize 1000 years of Jewish existence in Bohemia and Moravia—hundreds of thousands of lives—in museum exhibitions aimed at boors more tickled by the toot of the shofar than by the multifaceted, intellectually and spiritually rich society they’re in the process of destroying.
He could feel the eyes of the helmeted German soldiers on the corner of Siroka Street as he passed, and he unconsciously hunched further over in a vain attempt to make his bulky figure smaller. Just a yellow-starred Jew out for a morning stroll, nothing to concern yourselves about, he mentally projected.
No one stopped him.
He walked on, his thoughts now meandering to the opening of the Central Museum’s, as it was now called, first exhibition in the Klausen Synagogue, barely six months previously. He had guided Hans Guenther, his rosy-cheeked baby face incongruous with the icy dead eyes above it, and Karl Rahm, his deputy, whose bored gaze occasionally broke long enough to allow a coldly intellectual curiosity to peek through. They had been genuinely interested in the exhibition, and Guenther had even tried to show off some of the Hebrew he’d learned. But they had been interested much as children could gaze with open-mouthed wonder at a giant anthill, and later gleefully burn members of that same species alive with a magnifying glass.
He passed sparse shop windows on the shady street. He reflected on the colorless Prague he’d discovered upon returning from his years as director of the East Slovak Museum in Kosice. Grey, lifeless, hunched and labeled—this was occupied Prague, he thought, as if the Germans had opened some hidden valve and drained the city’s vivacity and color into the Vltava, where it dissolved like crematoria ash.
He rounded the corner of Jachymova Street, the maudlin thoughts still meandering aimlessly in his mind, and immediately dropped the Occupation Walk, coming to a shocked standstill.
Four swastika-flagged staff cars sat parked in front of his office at number 3 Jachymova. The short street was closed off at both ends by wooden barricades manned by jittery SS soldiers. It seemed the memory of Reinhard Heydrich’s recent assassination still irritated their fingers like a rash, as they nervously caressed the triggers of their MP40s.
“Papers!” a soldier barked, eyeing him suspiciously. He took Josef’s proffered identity card and consulted with his officer. The officer recognized his name and gestured with mock deference to let him through.
I am, after all, the personal pet of SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Guenther.
Josef passed the barricade, moving quickly but without self-importance. He had no illusions about his value to the Nazi regime, nor his life expectancy. He was already dead, as were all his staff. What he’d yet to learn was merely the exact date that should, but likely never would, be inscribed on their gravestones.
His footsteps echoed loudly in the empty street, and a sick feeling settled into his stomach. An early morning visit from the “smiling executioner” could not in any way bode well, especially when Guenther arrived before him. He did not worry for himself; he was too valuable to Guenther, for the moment. It was his staff that concerned him. Guenther could easily have any or all of them, with one exception, deported or summarily executed with the wave of a hand. Twenty-four years his junior at age 33, Guenther’s cherubic energy and snap early-morning inspections were no less renowned than his temper tantrums when displeased by their findings. And today, less than a month from the opening of the new exhibition dedicated to the incoming Reichsprotektor….
“Polak, you are inexcusably late,” Guenther spat as Josef entered his office, hat in hand, having already removed it when he presented his papers to the guard at the building’s entrance. Guenther sat behind Polak’s desk, his feet up, his high black boots rhythmically bumping with demonstrative irreverence against a pile of leather-bound volumes with Hebrew titles. He stared at Josef, who now stood in front of his own desk with eyes downcast. Guenther leaned forward, picked up one of the Hebrew volumes, leafed through it, and tossed it aside.
“This type of slovenly behavior does not become a Jew of Polak’s elevated status, does it, Rahm?” Guenther addressed the officer at his right, SS-Obersturmfuhrer Karl Rahm, his deputy and next in line to be commandant of Theresienstadt.
Next to Guenther’s young, fresh visage, Rahm’s heavy-browed face seemed even more ominously brooding. “No, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, it does not.” Rahm’s curt reply accompanied a withering examination of Josef, like a gardener eyeing an intrusive weed.
“No, it does not, Polak,” Guenther repeated. “Especially not three weeks before we open our new exhibition—exhibitions, that is—for the honorable Wilhelm Frick, our new Reichsprotektor. But apparently we are in luck, since judging by your leisurely arrival, everything must already be in order. Therefore, we shall now proceed to inspect these exhibitions, Polak. You will take us there now.”
At this, Guenther sprung up from Josef’s rickety wooden desk chair. His tall athletic frame filled the cramped office briefly as he strode rapidly out the doorway, long black leather coat flowing cape-like behind him, Rahm in tow.
Josef Polak trailed them out onto the street, trying to get Guenther’s attention like a child pestering an irate parent. “But Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, these exhibitions are not yet complete! That is, they are of course in the very final stages of preparation, and will be ready well in advance of Herr Reichsprotektor Frick’s visit. But perhaps Herr Sturmbannfuhrer would prefer to see them at a later time, after the finishing touches have been applied?”
At this, Guenther stopped and turned to face Polak, the master facing his over-excitable slave. “But Polak, of course it will be completed. Of that I have no doubt, since you know the consequences to you and your staff’s families if it is not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need to closely monitor your progress. Now, let’s have a look at the Usergasse collection, first. Polak, call ahead and tell that Jew—what’s his name?—ah yes, Neuman. Please tell Jakub Neuman that we will be visiting his collection, then join us at the site. You can walk. It’s close.”
Guenther turned from Josef and climbed into the armored staff car, speaking to Rahm as he did so. “You’ll be quite impressed with this, an extraordinary collection and outstanding preservation efforts. This Jew is truly—”
The car pulled away, leaving Josef standing on the sidewalk, head downcast again, sweat stains dampening the underarms of his shirt. Yet when he looked up at the retreating Mercedes, he did so with eyes that blazed defiance, not shame.
Prague, June 1992
They took the short walk from Jonas’ flat to the small street the Nazis called Usergasse, which was now, according to the tourist map they’d consulted, named Bilkova Street. The spontaneous outing sprang primarily from Vanesa’s intense need to occupy her body in order to silence her mind.
She took into account that her map theory could be incorrect, but the discovery of the symbol’s possible meaning may have brought her light years closer to the source of the mystery—closer, perhaps, than she was yet comfortable with. She had never considered relenting in her search, nor would she now. But neither was she convinced, deep down, that truth would be her salvation. This approach-avoidance conflict made her jumpy, and when she got jumpy she needed to work.
Vanesa normally would have conducted thorough background research – learning the historical names of the street, discovering what had been located there and what was there now, contacting current and past property owners, reviewing building blueprints from municipal archives—before dreaming of initiating a field survey. This situation, however, was unique… and uniquely pressing.
Jonas assuaged the hesitancy she vocalized, explaining over his shoulder on their way down the narrow stairs of his building. “After all, it is close, and we are talking about a public street in the middle of a major European city, in broad daylight.” Reaching street level, he hurried through the heavy metal door.
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