Weiszl dropped his calm façade and motioned Garlic over. He whispered urgently into the latter’s ear.
Vanesa caught the phrase: “…do it now. I don’t care what time it is there!”
Garlic scurried off to do his master’s bidding.
Just a bit more, Vanesa thought, and she’d have her chance. She took a cautious step toward Weiszl, not enough to threaten him, but enough to accentuate the impact of her words.
“Who do you usually give tours to, anyhow? Is this place some kind of underground neo-Nazi shrine? Do you have reunions here? Bachelor parties? Inductions with secret handshakes? Do you sit around and sing the Horst Wessel Lied, drink beer, and get all teary-eyed for your lost Reich? Or do you meet here and plot how you’ll reestablish it, you and your storm troopers there?” She gestured to Vodka, and continued with sarcasm. “I suppose you could’ve had a chance, if only peeing on the enemy was lethal.”
Now, finally, her expertise in the goading and nagging arts came to practical use.
Weiszl whirled on her, his face livid. He leaned forward, one hand heavily on his cane, the other pointing directly at her face, and snarled, “You listen to me, you little bitch….”
Before he could continue, Vanesa lunged forward and again kicked the cane out from under him.
Again, he crumpled to the floor, and again Vodka rushed to assist him. Only this time, Vodka encountered her outstretched foot as he passed, and went sprawling, nearly landing on top of Weiszl.
Still not enough time to make it to the duct, she thought, nor any chance of taking on the prone Vodka directly. He was too strong, and was already getting to his feet. She had to outwit him to gain control of the situation. But how?
Jumping at the next idea that popped into her head, Vanesa darted around Vodka to Weiszl, and began viciously kicking his inert form, as if enraged.
Weiszl curled into a fetal ball, trying to protect himself.
Vodka, now on his feet and clearly distraught at having failed to protect his charge, grabbed Vanesa, flung her away, and bent to help Weiszl.
She let herself be thrown aside, careful to retain her balance. As soon as Vodka’s back was turned, she pounced on him from behind and deftly removed the gun he’d left causally tucked in his belt. Before either was aware of what was happening, she had cocked the pistol loudly and trained it with a steady hand on Weiszl and Garlic, who both stared in dumb shock at her audacity. Keeping the gun on them, she began backing toward the duct cover, some twenty meters away.
“Move or make noise, and I may not get you both, but I was a very good shot in the army.” Vanesa’s cold eyes, steady hand, and matter-of-fact tone left little doubt of her willingness to follow through on this threat.
Weiszl looked up at her from the floor, and said simply, “Do what you will, Dr. Neuman. There is no way out except through that door, which is still guarded.” He jerked his head in the direction opposite her current path.
“Perhaps,” she said simply, crossing the stretch of floor to the grill in just seconds. It blessedly came free with just a tug, clattering to the hard floor with a noise that echoed loudly in the empty hall.
Weiszl quickly straightened up, and seemed to immediately understand her intention and its apparent chance of success. Mustering his lost dignity, he brought a hand with affected nonchalance up to his forehead, and smoothed his comb over back in place. He fixed her eyes, and said, almost with amusement, “You won’t get me, and the legacy of this place will live on, in any case.”
Vanesa sunk to her knees, ready to back into the duct without lowering the gun. She met Weiszl’s gaze, unblinking. She took in his pathetic insouciance, no longer convincing in any way, and the snarling hatred plastered on Vodka’s face. She took a final look at her grandfather’s warped legacy—this Galerie which would soon, she hoped, be a sick secret no longer.
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with one step, Herr Oberscharfuhrer,” she said simply, and backed into the darkness of the duct.
The graphic designer calmly working on the new logo for Prague Telekomunikace had never considered herself the screaming type, but when a foot came through the plasterboard wall to the right of her desk, she let out a shriek that would have put Fay Wray to shame. Cowering in the corner of her cubicle, she watched as the rest of Vanesa’s gun-toting, white-dusted body broke through the hole, vowing to herself to never, ever mix cocaine and alcohol again.
When they finally arrived, Abbot and Costello, the two Prague police detectives, were incredulous both at Vanesa’s ghostly appearance and her story. They were also experienced enough to thoroughly check it out.
Thus Vanesa Neuman found herself at the center of three murder investigations and a very public scandal surrounding the existence of Galerie, a Nazi shrine created by none other than Adolf Eichmann and run by a prominent SS war criminal in the very heart of Prague, right under the noses of the Czech police and intelligence services. Galerie was known, it turned out, to nearly everyone except law enforcement. Throughout Europe, a visit to Galerie had for decades been a mandatory part of initiation rites into numerous right-wing nationalist and neo-Nazi groups.
Vanesa was stuck in Prague for several long months as the wheels of the Czech justice system creaked forward at geological speed. She lived in Jonas’s apartment with the gracious permission of his family, who had semi-adopted her in their grief over the loss of their son, and worked from Marek’s old office under the auspices of the Jewish Museum.
I spoke to her infrequently, and saw her only when she finally returned to Tel Aviv.
Did she allow herself to grieve for Jonas, I wondered. In his apartment, surrounded by his things? What about Marek? What about her father, whom she was finally able to understand and forgive? What about her grandfather and Tomas?
I never asked her about Jonas, not really wanting to know. For Marek I know she had felt deep friendship. As for her grandfather and Tomas, she soon made her feelings about them abundantly clear, both in word and in deed.
Neither Czech nor Romanian intelligence, nor investigators from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, ever caught up with Weiszl, who apparently had a well-prepared contingency plan in case of discovery. They never found Vodka and Garlic, either, despite Vanesa’s best efforts working with a sketch artist to create an accurate portrait of each. Apparently, two neo-Nazis with poor personal hygiene and a single first name between them was not enough information for the Czech police to go on. Ultimately, they shut down the investigation.
Galerie was taken apart, its subjects returned to their respective families or communities for burial in accordance with Jewish law.
Vanesa never told anyone about Uncle Tomas’ true identity, nor his role in Galerie.
One winter evening in early 1993, Vanesa Neuman walked back through the door of our Tel Aviv flat, a very different Vanesa than the girl whose fragrant, smooth, white neck I had first tasted by the Wisconsin lake shore eleven years previously.
I asked her several months later, the night before we were due to make our first appearance at the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to start divorce proceedings, if she was happier now that she knew. Did she think her life was better, would be better, knowing what she knew about her father and grandfather? How could it possibly be easier for her to consider her future, having been so deeply betrayed, and now forced to carry the burden of her grandfather’s unforgivable crimes? Wasn’t she sorry—I simply couldn’t stop myself from asking this—that she’d ever even started down the road that led her to Galerie?
She looked at me sideways with the Vanesa Eye, a sardonic, almost sassy half-smile on her face. The Marlboro Light dangling from the corner of her mouth danced rhythmically as she spoke, and she squinted against its smoke. “Honey, you’ve got it backwards. For once, I’m carrying nothing—not betrayal, not hatred, nothing. My father was a child, who was faultless but forced to carry my grandfather’s guilt. How can I blame him? My grandfather was despicable, from any perspective, and he paid—yes, we al
l paid, but he paid more dearly—for his crimes with a miserable life, a life lived in half-truths and constant dark silence. He clearly, desperately needed love, but could never reach far enough to receive it – from me or anyone. He was despised by his son, whose existence he poisoned despite having chosen to work on Galerie for my father’s benefit in the first place. He carried the burden of my grandmother’s death. I realize now that in his frailty, my grandfather betrayed only himself and his humanity, not me. He did inhuman things, yet I was a witness to his inhuman life. Was his inner prison any worse than a Czech or Israeli prison would have been? Was he truly better off alive than dead?”
That’s when I understood, because even in the shadow of the horrors she’d seen and to which her family had been party—for the first time in Vanesa Neuman’s twenty-seven-year existence, there were no questions.
Pardesiya, February 1993
This time, she strode the two kilometers from the bus stop with neither worry nor pain, but with single-minded purpose. The winter wind slapped the dark, dripping Eucalyptus trees in angry gusts, ripping loose and carrying away leaves both live and dead in a gusty tantrum. Vanesa’s long hair, left loose in her urgent haste, was similarly whipped by the wind. She brushed it angrily from her eyes for the umpteenth time, set her teeth, and walked on.
There was only one alternative, she’d reasoned over the long months in Prague. Tomas would never be brought to justice, not in his current state. There would be no actual trial for this half-dead defendant, and even if there was, there could be no true punishment. Any public exposure of the horrendous crimes of this senior SS officer who had lived as a taxpaying, normative Israeli for fifty years, would serve no purpose other than to unnecessarily blacken her father’s name and pointlessly inflame public opinion. It would all be another superfluous exercise in national self-justification, she thought angrily.
Israel had undergone its Holocaust catharsis and had moved on. Today, while the few remaining elderly Holocaust survivors went hungry in squalid flats, living on insufficient state pensions, tens of members of parliament and tens of thousands of Israeli high school students paraded tearfully at Auschwitz every year, wrapped in Israeli flags and watching Israeli Air Force fly-overs. A fraction of the expense of these symbolically important yet undeniably photogenic visits could easily ensure the comfort and safety of the few remaining survivors.
This, thought Vanesa as she rounded the corner and walked through the gate into the Lev HaSharon Holocaust Survivors Hostel, does not happen. Why?
When facing the horror of the Holocaust, it was still easier to strip it of corporeality. It was simpler to regard its inanimate symbols rather than its fading, yet still living, human face. One could look at the remains of Auschwitz, and see the piles of shoes and eyeglasses—tangible, horrifying, yet less emotionally threatening than Moshe, the ninety-year-old Auschwitz survivor, with his liver-spotted hands, creaking walker, ratty slippers, and empty refrigerator.
Dehumanizing the horror made it more palatable, simpler to explain. Yet it also empowered the horror with symbolic anonymity. A symbol lacked the frailties and subtleties of a person, and was as such more malleable. It was far more difficult to use Moshe to justify actions or ideas. Auschwitz, as a symbol, was far more effective.
That is exactly what we do, thought Vanesa, pushing open the screeching aluminum door, and wincing at the acrid stench that burst from the building, as if eager to escape its own potency. We use Auschwitz to both cynical and positive ends, and in ignominious self-interest we choose to abandon Moshe because his actual usefulness is, after all, limited.
There was, as usual, no attendant in reception. The chipped Formica covering the reception counter had begun to peel in grey flesh-like strips from the floor up. Notably absent was the formerly ubiquitous voice of Henya, calling her lost son home for dinner. A thick silence now hung over the facility, with only distant voices and a vague clatter of dishes audible from the direction of the common room. Lunchtime.
Her shoes squeaked on the just-washed floor, the smell of disinfectant struggling vainly to overcome that of excrement. Neither of Tomas’ two roommates were in the room—Hans’ roommates, she reminded herself, gritting her teeth. One bed was neatly made, apparently unoccupied. On the second, a wad of sheets with a clearly yellow tint moped on one corner of the grey-striped mattress.
Tomas lay in his usual place, sagging bedsprings visible over the dusty floor, catheter bag bulging with dark urine, rumpled pajamas clearly unlaundered. Hearing the squeak of her shoes, his eyes turned in her direction. A look of joyous recognition flashed through them, but was quickly replaced by confusion and then fear when he met her cold glare.
Vanesa checked the hallway in both directions, found it still deserted, and moved toward his bed. As she passed the unoccupied bed next to his, she took its pillow, clutching its edges so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
There was truly only one logical course of action, she had decided—one way of obtaining a semblance of justice for her father, for her mother, for all the subjects of Galerie and their families, for the entire Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia, for that matter, over which this sick man had wielded the power of death. She would exploit that which he had taken from her family—literally the only remaining possession this poor excuse for a human being had to give.
She raised the pillow to her chest and moved toward the bed. All her anger at Weiszl and his henchmen, her grief over Jonas and Marek, her fury at her grandfather’s horrific choices, her pity for her father who never had the chance to choose, and her sorrow for her mother who had been unable to move forward from the horrors of her past—all this propelled her arms upward and forward toward the prone figure in the bed.
Hans’ eyes now registered mortal terror as he understood her intentions. His bowels let go, and the room filled with the potent smell of shit.
“I know who you are, and I know what you did,” she said simply, through clenched teeth.
As she positioned the pillow just above his face, already smelling his sour breath, the tears began to course down her cheeks. The muscles in her arms stood out as she pressed the pillow between her hands… and deftly positioned it behind his head.
Then, not with any semblance of forgiveness, but rather with a simple recognition of the frailties of human flesh that affect us all, Vanesa Neuman set to straightening the bedclothes.
–THE END–
1. Galerie tackles the emotional issues facing the children of Holocaust survivors. Would you call the relationship between Vanesa and her parents “loving”? Could Vanesa’s parents – and by extension other Holocaust survivors – be expected to have the skills to create a loving environment for their children, in light of the horrors they lived through? Could they be expected to have the capacity to love at all? Could their children hope to develop such capacity? Their children’s children?
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2. Were you surprised at the true nature of Galerie? At what point did you realize that Vanesa’s grandfather was not “preserving life” in the way that she had originally hoped? Do you think that a museum exhibit like Galerie is farfetched, given that the Museum of an Extinct Race was a historical reality? Why or why not?
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3. The secrets revealed in Galerie about Uncle Tomas’ wartime actions are shocking. At the same time, he played a sorely-lacking positive, kind, and truly human role in Vanesa’s childhood. Does this good offset the evil we discover about him? Was Vanesa’s kindness toward him in the book’s Epilogue – after she knew who he was and what he did - justified, in your opinion?
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4. Vanesa’s grandfather Jakub collaborated with the Nazis in the most horrific way imaginable, yet did so with the aim of saving his family. Were his actions morally defensible in any way? Why or why not?
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5. Vanesa’s father, Michael, was old enough to understand what Jakub and Tomas were doing in Prague, and clearly knew that Tomas was actually Hans G
uenther. Despite this, he kept his silence over the years, never revealing the secret to the authorities after the war. Was he wrong to do this, even given the dire consequences it would have had for his own future had he done so?
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6. Galerie is uniquely narrated from Vanesa’s husband’s point of view. He is never named, and his perspective is simultaneously semi-omniscient yet blatantly subjective. Why do you think that author chose to tell the story from this perspective? Did you feel that this added or detracted from the novel’s engagement or emotional impact?
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7. Galerie probes the nature of filial relationships tainted by what we’d likely today refer to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Are there lessons we can learn from the Holocaust that could help us treat or relate to the children of modern-day PTSD victims?
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8. In human history, and certainly in the modern world, there is no shortage of tragedy and suffering – some of it on a terrifyingly massive scale. Is the Holocaust over-discussed? Should it be considered singular in scope and horror? Should it be a litmus test by which we measure other human tragedies, and if so, does this diminish its impact?
Everything in Galerie, with the very notable exception of Galerie itself and the Neuman family, is true or based on actual historical events and characters.
The Jewish Museum of Prague was indeed taken over by Adolf Eichmann’s “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” in 1941. The office in Prague was headed by Hans Guenther with the assistance of his deputy Josef Weiszl and others. Among Guenther’s responsibilities were the museum, which he ran with a large Jewish staff managed by Josef Polak and Tobias Jakobovitz. The entire staff, with the exception of Hana Volavkova (see below) was murdered in Auschwitz in late 1944.
Hans Guenther was ostensibly shot dead on May 5, 1945 by Czech partisans at a roadblock, as he was attempting to escape to Italy or Spain. There are claims that he actually got away, but no proof of this has been presented, to the best of my knowledge. For his prominent role in the destruction of Czech Jewry, Josef Weiszl did indeed serve five years in prison, and his whereabouts thereafter are unknown.
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