Vanesa barely managed to keep up. She exited behind Jonas, and while she was still blinking in the blinding morning sunshine that flooded the narrow street, he stopped so abruptly that she collided with him.
He apologized and turned to steady her, concern on his face. “Wait a second. I mean, there probably is one thing we should resolve before we run off exploring, as it were. What exactly are we looking for? I mean, what’s our exact working theory here?”
Vanesa recovered her balance and gestured that they should start walking. They fell into a comfortable stride next to each other.
She took a breath, and began. “Fair enough. I’d suggest we review the evidence, what little there is, and our suppositions. Stop me if I miss something.”
Jonas nodded his assent, and they walked slowly toward the surmised sixth site of the Jewish Museum of Prague, and whatever shared fate it would presage.
Vanesa said, “One: I surmise, but don’t yet have any proof, that my grandfather, father, and Uncle Tomas—none necessarily by choice—were involved in a Nazi endeavor that was somehow under the auspices of the Jewish Museum. The symbol in my father’s diary, which we also saw in Terezin—presumably carved there by him prior to his return to Prague—and on the objects Marek showed us, can be considered direct evidence of this.”
They walked along Siroka Street until they came to the Church of the Holy Ghost, just across from the ornate Spanish Synagogue, also part of the Jewish Museum. Jonas waved to the woman at the ticket window of the synagogue, who was barely visible through the line of tourists already queued to enter the facility, and received a smile of recognition in return.
Vanesa continued. “Two: given the extreme paucity of evidence found, I believe this organization operated in secret. This is supported by the fact that no records exist of my grandfather and father leaving Terezin in early 1943, and that the record of their transport to Auschwitz is incorrect, not to mention the number on Uncle Tomas’ arm, which is exactly one number higher than the last number issued at Auschwitz. This type of record falsification is certainly conceivable, but could only be accomplished with support from the highest levels of the Nazi government.”
They crossed to the small, sunny square across from the entrance to the Spanish Synagogue, and sat together on one of the wooden benches.
She immediately stood back up, pacing circuitously around the bench, as she ticked off the items she was discussing on her fingers. “Three: it seems the importance of this secrecy has not diminished, assuming that what happened to Marek and I was not coincidence. The fact that my father, grandfather and Uncle Tomas never revealed anything about their involvement supports this. This means that whatever the secret is, it retains its value until today, and….”
She sat back down heavily next to Jonas, and rested her head on his shoulder for some momentary comfort. “Four: based on our findings at Terezin, it is clear that the organization had to do with the preservation of life, or so my father believed at the time he carved the slogan into the bunk. This theme made a deep enough impression on him that he became semi-obsessed with the symbol.
“Five: from his diary, we know that my father met and interacted with a very diverse set of people, all Jews, from a large geographic area. I surmise that these people must have been connected with the secret endeavor, and thus the endeavor itself had to involve multiple individuals.
“Six, and lastly: we know that, despite official Nazi policy to the contrary, wealthy Jews were able to buy their way out of the Reich even late in the war years.”
Vanesa stood, took another pensive lap around the bench, and finally turned to Jonas. She crossed her arms across her chest and looked down at him. When she spoke, her voice betrayed a modicum of self-appreciation, yet trembled as she realized the true scale of what she was saying.
“Conclusion: my original theory is correct. The organization in which my father, grandfather, and Uncle Tomas were involved was a conduit for Jews to buy their way out of the Reich, which needed to operate in secret because of the change in Nazi emigration policy after October 1941. The people that my father met and wrote about were on their way to freedom. This organization was like a Nazi-run underground railroad, on which Prague was the final stop before Istanbul. The primary goal of this organization, from the Nazis’ point of view, was to systematically strip Jews of their property and get them out of the Reich. More likely than not, the personal pockets of the Nazi officials involved were filled far more rapidly than the Reich’s coffers.”
She sat back down and turned childishly to Jonas, seeking his support for her theory. To her disappointment, his dark eyes displayed only skepticism as his brow furrowed in thought.
Finally, he spoke. “Let’s say I accept your theory. There are a number of potential holes in it, but let’s say I accept it. If, as you say, the primary goal of this ‘underground railroad’ was the personal profit of the Nazis running it, then how does this ‘sixth site’ of the Jewish Museum come into play? Maybe this place we’re looking for wasn’t a ‘site’ after all. Maybe it was just a transit point, a generic way station in the railroad. Maybe there’s nothing left of the site, just like there was next-to-nothing left of the memorabilia belonging to the unit that ran it.”
Vanesa quickly countered, “I see your point, but I don’t think they would have gone to the trouble of incorporating the site so cleverly into the unit’s insignia if it was a simple way station. There had to have been, and must still be, something of significance located there—something of value, something worthy of boastful yet secret gloating, something that might warrant attacking curious historians, something that could… have to do… with….”
To Jonas’s enquiring look, she held up the Vanesa Finger—the finger she held up when in mid-revelation, the finger that said, “Hold on, I’m thinking.” When she was seventeen, the Vanesa Finger was inevitably followed by a sweet smile of understanding, but over time, the sweet smile had become a haughty smirk, a look of, “I figured out something that you should know. How is it that you don’t?”
Her eyes glazed in memory, and she suddenly recalled her night of terror, hidden in her chair fort in the shop. What was it that Michael had referred to with such bile, such venomous accusation?
She leaned back on the bench and looked up at the squat church tower across the street. Finally, she finished her sentence with a single word: “…art.”
“Art?” Jonas repeated, clearly puzzled. “Like literature or music?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. Just art. Listen….” She told Jonas the story of her father’s vicious attack on her grandfather.
“…so my father referred to my grandfather’s ‘art.’ He asked him how long he thought he could hide it. What if this organization that was helping Jews escape was also collecting the objets d’art they confiscated? The other sites of the museum collected and displayed Judaica. What if the sixth museum site was a display case for invaluable paintings and sculpture? We could be talking about a collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, possibly more. Wouldn’t this be worth keeping secret? Wouldn’t this be worth killing for?”
Vanesa now stood and gestured dramatically, almost desperately, to emphasize her point.
Jonas rose too, perhaps to calm her, or at least to more effectively engage her, and they stood in the center of the square, their backs to the traffic entering the small roundabout from Vezenska Street.
Vanesa’s voice rose another octave. “If you think about it, it fits perfectly with the ‘Museum of an Extinct Race’ theory. In the first five museum sites, we have what the Jews, with their quirky rituals and odd but clearly complex culture, had created. In the sixth site, we have the invaluable articles of mostly non-Jewish origin that they, in their ultimately pointless attempt to assimilate, attempted to possess, yet failed. It would be a testament to the Jewish race’s substantive inferiority, and a shot in the arm to Nazi superiority.”
She gave a small laugh, as if attempting to shrug off
the stunning cliché that she now recognized as the possible goal of her quest. She stared up at the tall stained-glass windows of the Church of the Holy Ghost, in which Prague’s Jews had once been forced to attend Catholic services. Here Jews had been coerced into publicly professing belief in another faith’s version of God, yet most had secretly clung to their true beliefs, as had countless generations before and after in similar circumstances. She had never understood this tenacity. What principle, lofty or assumed, could possibly trump pure self-preservation?
Self-preservation, she truly believed, was morally justifiable, and it would have been this which had driven her grandfather’s choices, whatever they had been. Lacking the faith that could engender real understanding, she turned from the sacred to the profane. And what could be more profane, she mused as she turned from the church back to Jonas, than to discover a motive as petty as money?
“To be honest, I can’t believe I’m even considering this. Stolen Nazi art troves are the stuff of cheap suspense novels and….” The questions continued to effervesce. Could their collaboration in mere art theft have been the source of her father’s shame, her grandfather’s toxic silence, Uncle Tomas’ mysterious misinformation? Would this not have been overshadowed by the pride of having preserved so many lives? Or was the shame of collaboration—she was becoming less averse to the word—sufficient in itself to silence them?
Either way, could Marek have died for something so… common as Nazi loot?
Tel Aviv, June 1992
I first truly grasped that Vanesa Neuman was beyond my reach when she didn’t respond to the increasingly urgent messages I left on Jonas’s answering machine. I’d left a message the previous evening, and another the morning before that. Now, at nine in the morning in Prague, according to my calculations—the brilliant June sun had long ago risen in Tel Aviv—Jonas’s calm and mild-mannered voice again suggested something in Czech, most likely that I leave a message.
The grumble of morning buses echoed between the Tel Aviv buildings like distant thunder. Sitting on our porch, I raised my voice to make sure I’d be clearly heard. “Please have her call me, just to let me know that….”
Until then, I’d still felt connected to—perhaps “responsible for” would be more accurate—this woman I’d loved for over a decade. It was already a tenuous connection, one whose thread was rapidly unravelling even as I hung from it over my lonely chasm, but I was not yet in free-fall.
Until then, I had believed I could maintain my grip on her by sheer force of will. Although her slippery pain would likely forever elude my understanding, in my over-confidence I clung until… until the thread finally snapped.
I replaced the receiver, shook my head, and stared down into my sludgy morning coffee. The lower portion of the teaspoon I’d left in the glass mug was invisible in the cloudy liquid, yet the top remained clearly defined. I rested my chin on my hands, staring from tabletop level into the cup, mesmerized by the optical illusion of the teaspoon handle floating in space. I suddenly understood that my Vanesa was the upper part of that teaspoon, untethered to the actual, the illusion of her love insubstantial ballast to weigh her down.
Vanesa’s depths could never be plumbed—she was bottomless, without foundation, with no real attachment to me, or anyone. The truly sad part was that it was not her fault. Her parents could not help her forge emotional bedrock, their own foundations having been so brutally uprooted. The deluge that had swept them away continued to toss her, and she would never, ever, find a foothold from which to grasp my outstretched hand. She was capable of continuing to thirstily receive as much of my offered love as I could deliver, but would never be able to return it.
At that moment, with Jonas’s voice still echoing in my ears, I accepted that not even the heaviest anchor could stave her unremitting drift. At that moment, Vanesa Neuman consciously became to me what she had perhaps always been—my lost love.
Prague, June 1992
“Well,” Vanesa said quietly. “This place, whatever it is and whatever it represents, is not going to present itself. Let’s get going.”
Jonas was all too happy to comply, and led them deftly between the parked cars choking the sides of Vazenska Street. They left the square behind and turned into a pedestrian alley that led them, just one short block farther, to Bilkova Street. They leaned against the rail of the raised garden at the street’s western end, as Jonas’s gaze swept the short stretch of archetypical Prague street facing them. Somewhere between Kozi Street behind them, and Dusni Street some 100 meters in front of them, they might find more answers, more questions, or—equally likely—more danger.
Anger rose silently in him. “I’m a PhD, a researcher in a museum, not some Indiana Jones wannabe!” Then he saw again the surprised look in Marek’s dead eyes, and he glanced at Vanesa.
Her own brow was furrowed introspectively, her eyes staring unfocused at the high-walled canyon of buildings in front of her.
Then he thought of another set of eyes, those of his Great Uncle, Tobias Jakobovits. His grandfather’s brother had been a nebulous character in Jonas’s childhood, revered by the few surviving Jakobovits family members, most of whom had returned to Prague after World War II, braving the grey and brutal decades of Soviet rule to remain in this land that had so clearly revoked their welcome. Although Tobias was larger than life, the family rarely discussed him. He remained a quiet source of family pride. Several books in Czech and Hebrew with his name on their spines sat on the family bookshelves, and a framed photograph of him hung on their wall, taken before the War. In it, a completely bald, full-cheeked man with a stern goatee half-smiled with a self-satisfied yet not conceited look, as if to say, “I think you understand, as I do. Now, prove it to me.”
Tobias Jakobovits was fifty-one when the first Nazi soldiers crossed the Vltava into Old Prague, a prominent German-trained scholar and leader of the city’s Jewish community. As librarian of the Prague Jewish community, he had been a natural candidate to take joint charge of the Jewish Museum with Josef Polak, he responsible for cataloging the hundreds of thousands of looted books that poured in from the far corners of Bohemia and Moravia, Polak in charge of art and Judaica. Tobias had conceived, organized, and even written the guide for the fledging museum’s primary exhibit, first opened for a private showing to Hans Guenther and his deputy Karl Rahm in 1943.
Tobias Jakobovits was inseparable from the history of the Jewish Museum of Prague, had perhaps played a key role in this mysterious “sixth site,” had perhaps known Vanesa’s grandfather and father during the War.
Jonas had never revealed the connection to Vanesa, despite their growing intimacy. Perhaps she knew, he thought. Perhaps she simply assumed a familial connection, but was tactful enough not to mention it. He had never broached the subject for one simple reason: Tobias Jakobovits, unlike Vanesa’s relatives, had actually been on Transport EU from Prague to Auschwitz, yet had never returned. His great uncle had, like Vanesa’s grandfather, collaborated with the Nazis. But Tobias paid the price, he thought. His death redeemed him from the stain. Vanesa’s grandfather and father had lived. Comparing them, he felt—even mentioning them in the same context—sullied Tobias’s memory. Thus, he kept his silence.
Yet Jonas still felt the challenge of his Great Uncle’s eyes, daring him to push the limits of his comfort zone. He saw a similar challenge in Marek’s unseeing eyes, etched onto his mind, and he answered their silent challenge resolutely, willing himself to swallow his fear, determined to see the quest through.
As if sensing his reinvigorated resolve, Vanesa turned to him with a decisive nod, then turned back to survey the street. “Okay, here’s what I think. According to our map—assuming my entire theory isn’t just a case of wishful thinking—there’s no question that this is the block we’re looking for. But there are at least ten buildings here. The map would seem to indicate the far end of the street, at the corner with Dusni, but beyond that, we’re on our own. With the sheer number of floors, not to mention b
asements, sub-basements, attics, outbuildings in the courtyards, we could literally search here for months, if we could even get access to all these places. Not very practical. Suggestions?”
Jonas, decidedly ready to do something, anything, to put his new resolve to the test, adopted a pragmatic track. “Yes, legwork. I’m afraid I don’t see any way around pure legwork. I would suggest we go to the Prague municipality and retrieve the zoning maps of this street, and the building blueprints if possible—today, if you’d like. Then we go door to door, starting at the far end of the street. At each building, we ask for the building manager or caretaker. We can present my museum credentials—they will certainly agree to back me up on this—and explain that we’re conducting a historical survey of the street, and ask if we may look around the building. If they agree, we do so. If they don’t… well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it, as they say. I think we need to accept the fact, up front, that this could take not just months, but years.”
Vanesa was silent. It had not occurred to her that the answers she sought could be so physically close, yet possibly so inaccessible. Swallowing the rising sense that she was taking her first tentative steps on her own Yellow Brick Road, she considered his suggestion of knocking on doors. She was impressed with the audacity of the idea, and subsequently incredulous at its naiveté.
She couldn’t contain a chuckle. “Right. So, whatever we’re looking for has haunted two generations of my family, possibly resulted in Marek and Agata’s deaths, and was cause for me to be attacked twice. Now, you’re suggesting that we simply canvas the street for the next several years? Why not just stop passersby and ask for directions to the secret Nazi art trove?”
“That could work, I suppose,” Jonas deadpanned. “But I’d suggest we start my way.”
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