Hans Guenther holstered his pistol and threw himself onto the stool by the workbench. He drew a metal stamp holder and small handful of dies from the back reaches of a bottom drawer. Each die was made up of needles approximately one centimeter in height, arranged on a small square of metal to form a number or letter. He hurriedly sorted through the dies while repeating the note’s contents under his breath, inserted the characters A-25379 into the handle, and locked them into place. He had already rolled up the sleeve on his left arm to the elbow, and poised the device on the outside of his forearm, when Jakub hurried in.
“Get me some ink,” he commanded, and Jakub hurriedly complied. Gritting his teeth, Hans plunged the stamp into his arm, removed it, and then wiped away the blood with his handkerchief. He took the proffered bottle from Jakub and poured it over the wound, massaging the liquid into the open cuts.
“Well,” he said, grunting in pain to Jakub. “There’s no turning back now, is there? Don’t you people have some kind of ceremony, welcoming me as one of your own? Or do I have to actually undergo circumcision to receive that honor?”
He gave a wry smirk, wiped the excess ink away with his handkerchief, and folded it to create a makeshift bandage, which he deftly tied using his right hand and his teeth. Then he turned back to Jakub.
“Now, listen to me, and sit down. Yes, yes, right there. Go ahead. It seems to me that we have quite a bit in common at this point, you and I. Primarily, we want to live, and we want to avoid any, shall we say, repercussions of our work here. Would you agree with this? Yes? Very well, I suggest that in light of the change in circumstances, it would be in our mutual interests to cooperate closely, at least for the time being. Do you concur? Yes? Then here’s what I propose….”
Prague, June 1992
In her conscious, deeply self-aware and oft over-examined mind, Vanesa had expected to find a museum-like gallery. She had expected to find paintings hung on walls with intricately-framed grace, statues on unobtrusive stands scattered dramatically throughout the hall’s open space, glass-topped display cases containing jewels or valuable Judaica. She had expected to be disgusted at the ostentation. She had expected to be indignant, yet not truly surprised, at the gall of displaying these invaluable works of art, these things of inherent beauty which had been paid for in such ugly currency.
What she discovered when the lights crashed on was nothing she had expected, and everything she had known.
She stood in the center of a vast oval hall of green marble, which was ringed by glass windows. She knew instantly—as would any child of a prominent taxidermist, who grew up with taxidermy journals and coffee-table books scattered around her living room—that it was an exact and seemingly full-scale reproduction of the famous Akeley Hall in the New York Museum of Natural History.
Immediately behind her, in the center of the hall, a large wood-paneled platform was ringed by benches. It was the display from which, in New York, Carl Akeley’s famous herd of angry-eyed African Elephants charged at visitors. Here, a group of ten or more tallit-clad orthodox Jews stood facing her, eyes upcast. They watched with obvious reverence as their rabbi, his back to her, held a Torah dramatically aloft—the traditional hagba’a after the reading of the scroll. The life-size figures stood in a highly detailed cutaway model of the interior of Prague’s inimitable Altneuschul.
From her place on the floor, she could clearly make out the worshippers. Their faces, each unique, were incredibly realistic, showing blemishes, scraggy beards, and acne scars. Their hands—some with clean nails, others with the permanent dirt of manual labor, some calloused and hairy, others smooth—held prayer books, fingered the fringe of prayer shawls, or rested lightly in pockets of coarse cloth trousers. Their presence was at once powerful and realistically mundane, giving the viewer the voyeuristic sense of intruding upon a real-life scene.
She swept her eyes around the room, counting the expected fourteen glass-windowed displays. Behind each, people went motionlessly about their vastly different business. To her left, a robed oriental carpet merchant with long sidelocks haggled with a customer over an intricately woven rug spread at their feet in a cramped shop, throughout which carpets hung. To her right, a housewife in a head scarf kneaded bread on a rough wood table in a dark one-room house. One lock of hair flopped down over her sweaty forehead. Her husband pored over a book by candlelight at the other end of the table, and three children played on the narrow bed in the background. In another window, a purple-robed bride, resplendent in what Vanesa recognized as a traditional Moroccan wedding headdress, sat in a red velvet chair, receiving her brightly dressed guests as her mother and father proudly looked on. Children with mischievous smiles, some clutching cookies, peeked out from behind the chairs. Beyond the wedding party, a group of men in grey wool suits debated around a polished conference table in a well-apportioned library.
And there were more… so many more.
She stood, taking in the vastness of the room. With a sudden gasp, her eyes focused on the American GI with the gold Star of David at his neck, sitting on the hood of his jeep. The name “Moe” rose to her lips unconsciously. Then she saw the sunburned young man riding a donkey in an olive grove and mouthed the name “Zvi.” More names came to her, on and on: Rivka, the housewife kneading bread; Moshe, the carpet merchant; Jakob, the Austrian Zionist leader.
She knew these people from her father’s stories. These were the people her father had met. In the horror of this place, even as his father had been working on his twisted “art,” young Michael had taken it upon himself to preserve, in his own way, their lives.
She’d known, of course. It had been the one explanation of her grandfather’s, her father’s, and Uncle Tomas’ mysterious past that she’d been unwilling to consciously consider all along, the one explanation that actually made sense. She’d understood immediately after the lights clicked on, because it was so obvious. She understood that behind these glass display cases, within these painstakingly realistic dioramas, were not wax or clay figures, not models of people, but rather perfectly preserved, meticulously mounted, and intricately displayed people. Actual people.
She recalled the symbol’s runic meaning, “life from death,” and the writing on the bunk in Terezin, Zachrana zivota. She should have known. Oh yes, the words had meant “preserving life,” but not as she, nor indeed any sane person, would have ever dreamt of interpreting them.
Tel Aviv, 1980
Fifteen-year-old Vanesa sat dejectedly on the building roof, her back to the solar water heater panels, her feet dangling precipitously over the littered courtyard two stories below. The presentation had gone poorly, to say the least. It was her fault, was it not? How could she have expected the other 9th-graders at Ironi Vav high school to look past the visceral and see the art—to pause, try to understand, try to respect what her father and grandfather did for a living?
Theirs was a respectable art, a science in fact, and not a bad living. Her father was one of the top taxidermists in Israel, sought after by the country’s universities, private collectors, and avid hunters alike.
Her father labored in the shop scraping hides, sculpting frames, or poring over heavy anatomy textbooks every day, sometimes until the early dawn hours. He could work for a week perfecting the malevolent snarl of a Rock Hyrax or the suspicious scowl of a Jackal. He was so sensitive to detail that a single feather out of place on the tail of a wide-eyed Osprey mount could drive him to distraction. What was not to respect?
“There are many things, Kotě, that people are not ready to hear or see,” Uncle Tomas had warned her when she told him of the class assignment to present her father’s profession. “There are things that we should not expect them to understand—about what we do, about what we’ve seen, about who we are.”
She’d had no choice. The assignment was what it was, and it had gone well in the beginning. She’d been confident as she stood in front of the class. Her new jeans—bought, if not especially for the occasion, then at least wit
h it in mind—flattered her budding figure, and her usually unruly hair had behaved marvelously that morning, newly tamed by a home perm. She’d carefully arranged the display on the table next to her, and covered it with a sheet she’d filched from the linen closet. She spoke clearly and passionately about the history of the art, and the other students paid attention, at first.
“Although taxidermy dates back to ancient times, its modern history began with Carl Akeley, who is considered the father of modern taxidermy. Akeley was born in 1864 and died in 1926. The years following his early death, from disease while on an expedition to Africa, are regarded as the true heyday of 20th-century museum taxidermy. Akeley perfected new techniques to ensure anatomical accuracy in mounts. By doing so, he helped raise taxidermy from a perversely-regarded preservation technique for hunters and collectors to an art of international prominence. His idea to display mounts in highly accurate habitat dioramas, instead of just glass case displays, became the standard of museum presentation worldwide. Toward the end of his life, his prestige was so great, and his work was so highly regarded, that he was given free rein to design and stock the massive Hall of African Mammals in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which still bears his name.”
Here Vanesa paused and looked around the classroom. All eyes were still upon her as she smoothed her blouse demurely, made sure to keep her chin up, and continued.
“The Prague Museum of Natural History commissioned hundreds of mounts in the early 1930s. Many of these mounts were prepared by a particularly renowned Prague taxidermist—my grandfather, Jakub Neuman. His shop was in a courtyard just off Wencelas Square, only a block away from the museum building.
“From the late 1920s until his deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942, my grandfather’s shop, Neuman Taxidermy, served as a Mecca for Prague’s hunting and naturalist community. It may sound funny today, but in those days, naturalists firmly believed that killing and mounting wildlife was a legitimate act of conservation. This was the ideal that Akeley and his students brought to taxidermy—a true love of life, a deep respect for the natural world, and a powerful drive to capture its beauty.”
A few students had begun to look out the window, seeking something to occupy their increasingly bored minds.
Vanesa continued, now more philosophically. “You see, this was a time of domination—of man over nature, and later, of man over man—as the Nazis took over Europe. The fact that preservation came only after destruction, and was actually impossible without it, was not something that would have occurred to my grandfather and his contemporaries. At that time, man was master over nature—it was a given.”
More than half the class was now fidgeting, or passing notes, and even the teacher looked distracted.
Vanesa shuffled her note cards nervously, and decided to skip her review of ancient taxidermy and Egyptian mummification. She dropped the curiosities of Victorian taxidermy—anthropomorphic mounted kittens playing croquet; Herrmann Ploucquet’s unabashedly grotesque taxidermic adaptation of Goethe’s fable Reinecke the Fox; and of course, “El Negro,” the African man who had been preserved and displayed in the 1830s by two French taxidermists.
She skipped, in fact, the entire remainder of her presentation. Instead, in what seemed a good way to regain the attention of the class, she simply stepped away from the table and tugged the sheet off with a circus master flourish. The effect was, to say the least, dramatic.
A collective gasp rose as the students took in the display, which showed the mounting process from carcass to finished mount. When the first whiffs of decay from the still-curing hedgehog pelt, which comprised the display’s first stage, reached the first row of students, the gasp turned into a collective groan of revulsion. A chorus of “Ewwww!”—begun by the girl in the second row and picked up by the other girls—grew as they took in the inside-out, cleanly-scraped pelt with its blankly inquisitive empty eye sockets. The boys in the third row began mock retching, and the whole class followed suit. One boy ran dramatically over to open all the classroom windows, holding his nose. Another affected falling off his chair, clutching his throat. Someone called out, “It smells like a dead Wookie!”
That’s when the laughter swelled, the blood rushed to Vanesa’s face, and the tears welled up in her eyes.
She had never considered her father’s profession different in any way. Taxidermy was just something he did, no different than a plumber, or a cloth merchant. The fact that her stuffed animals, since she was a little girl, had actually been stuffed animals, had never seemed odd to her.
At some point, every child first glimpses her father’s flawed humanity, first wipes away the stardust to reveal scratches in the paternal veneer. As the surprise dissipates, this glimpse ultimately grows into either empathy or rancor.
For Vanesa, squinting into the sun’s last rays as they caressed the crumbling concrete of the Tel Aviv rooftops, with the echoes of her classmates’ laughter still ringing in her ears, this discovery gave rise to something altogether different. As thoughts of her father swirled through her brain, she felt neither love nor hate, neither respect nor derision.
Rather, she was consumed, inexplicably yet unquestionably, by overwhelming shame.
Prague, June 1992
It was not shame that Vanesa felt as the shock subsided, however. It was rage. The blasphemy of Galerie was a betrayal of everything the triumvirate of men in her life—Jakub, Michael, and Tomas—had ever done on her behalf. Every touch, every word, every kindness—all were tainted, negated, scorched beyond recognition.
She shuddered as the truth sank in deeper. She had loved these men. She had trusted these men. She had admired, respected, and emulated these men.
Josef Weiszl’s voice broke her reverie. He stood there smiling, cane tucked under his arm, fingers tapping again. Tap up. Tap down. “So what do you think of our ‘tableaux morts,’ Dr. Neuman? I like to think of them thus, since they are the antithesis of ‘tableaux vivants,’ yes?” Weiszl stopped tapping suddenly, as if fatigued, and lowered his cane. He leaned heavily on it as he moved to her side to take in the hall, his gaze of reverence a counterpoint to hers of disbelief.
“Your grandfather was a talented man, was he not?” The old man’s eyes twinkled with evil merriment through his fatigue, and he even chuckled to himself. He was enjoying her stupefaction, and pleased at the efficacy of his dramatics. “Yes, it is amazing what you can elicit from an artisan, with the right persuasive tools. In this case, the lives of your father and grandmother proved a most powerful incentive. Oh yes, he was quite reluctant to work with us, in the beginning. A pity that your grandmother—Alena, was it?—paid the price for his reluctance. A nasty disease, Typhus, and so prevalent in Theresienstadt.”
Her anger suddenly softened. Of course, her grandfather had been forced to choose. What would she have had him do, watch his wife and son starve, be tortured, be murdered? Was this not the true nature of collaboration? Not choice, but coercion? He’d simply had no choice. Perhaps. Yet as she looked around at the intricacy of her grandfather’s art, the painstaking accuracy, the loving detail, she saw not mere artisanship but artistic pride. He had loved these creations, not for who they had been, but for what he had made of them.
Thus Jakub’s deal with the devil, even if signed under extreme duress, was not in pure self-preservation, and thus indelibly tainted everything it subsequently touched. Her father, her mother, herself? After all, Jakub had lived—lived to see a grandchild grow, lived to see countless sunsets over the Mediterranean, lived to build a business, to build a life in a strange new land where Jews were sovereign. He’d done it all on the ruins of these poor people, the subjects of these sick tableaux. How could he? Would death, even that of his family, not have been preferable? Was this not the essence of betrayal, she cried internally. On the other hand, would she herself have had the courage to act any differently?
Weiszl’s grating voice again interrupted her tortured musings. “At least you gained an ‘uncle,’
did you not? It is not every Israeli girl that can claim such an illustrious historical figure in her inner circle. But wait….” Weiszl paused, noting her uncomprehending look.
He was now close enough that she could smell his faint yet clearly expensive cologne.
“Surely a historian of your caliber has by now figured out who this ‘Tomas Marle,’ who played such a significant role in your young life, truly was, no? Certainly he was not—” He chuckled again, pointing to the third display case to Vanesa’s right. “– that young Czech Jew, the original Tomas Marle, who actually was a Czech partisan when we obtained him. No, not him, since he’s still here. Although his identity, not to mention his similarity in height and build, were of infinite assistance to my commanding officer, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Guenther, your ‘Uncle Tomas,’ on the last day of the war.”
He chuckled again, pleased with his own dramatics.
She cut short Weiszl’s levity, however, with a sudden and vicious kick at his cane.
He crumpled heavily to the floor.
Vodka, who had been lurking nearby, was on her in an instant, gun in hand. Assessing the situation with eyes that showed street smarts, if not outright intelligence, he quickly stuffed the gun back in his belt and grabbed her, pinioning her arms as she lunged toward the old man again.
Garlic emerged from the shadows to help Weiszl, who was unhurt, to his feet, brushing the old man’s suit off ineffectually as he did so.
“Bastard! You fucking bastard! You took them all from me! I loved them! You killed them all!” Vanesa’s incredulity had turned to rage with the old man’s goading, and she lost any semblance of restraint. Yelling incoherently and struggling mightily in Vodka’s powerful grip, she managed to butt him with the back of her head.
Galerie Page 21