by Dita Kraus
“But where is your mother?”
“Mother died two days ago.”
“But that cannot be.… She wrote a letter.… She wrote that you both survived and that you were coming back soon.…”
And then she pulled me in and embraced me, and we cried together.
Incongruously, she said, “You are lucky to find me at home. I was just about to go out.” As if I had come on a casual visit.
Suddenly she stopped and said, “You are not alone—your grandmother is alive! I wrote you at Bergen-Belsen, but I see you didn’t get the letter. She survived in Terezín, and your Uncle Leo fetched her. She is staying with him, here in Prague.”
Now I was stunned. Grandmother alive! Mother and I had mourned for her in Auschwitz when we learned from a woman who came in the May transport that Grandmother was on her deathbed. So she had recovered and was alive! She had survived three years in the ghetto.
* * *
Next day I went to retrieve the two bundles, mine and Mausi’s, because Manya said I could stay with her. It seemed to her the most natural and obvious thing, and I was still too befuddled to think about the inconvenience I might be causing her.
Aunt Manya had been recently nominated principal of a special school for children with hearing problems. Thus this summer she wasn’t on vacation like the teachers but worked through July and August. She lived in a one-room flat, but as the kitchen was quite large, she had turned it into a kind of living room with a spare bed.
Zdenka, Manya’s sister, was delegated to visit Grandmother and prepare her for the news. “Slowly,” Manya warned. “We mustn’t overwhelm her. She is old and frail, and she is expecting Dita and her mother.”
Zdenka told Grandmother only that Liesl was very ill. And so, in stages, the old woman was informed, and three days later, Manya, Zdenka, and I went to see her at last.
She was sitting in Uncle Leo and Aunt Verica’s living room, her hands folded in her lap. Her gray hair was fastened with hairpins on her nape, her large, brown, somewhat protruding eyes filled with her great sorrow.
I told her how Father died, what Mother and I had suffered in Auschwitz and Hamburg and then in Bergen-Belsen. She wanted to know everything. She didn’t cry; she just held my hand and stroked my head, and I felt her great, warming love. Her pain was enormous and unspeakable, yet I was numb. I spoke about people dying and going “into the gas” as a matter of fact. I knew that one was supposed to cry and mourn for the dead; I tried to feel sorrow but was unable to stir up any emotion at all. All I could feel was an icy wall around my heart. In later years I read articles by psychologists about the emotional damage the Holocaust caused the survivors and began to understand what had happened to me. I sensed this blunting of my emotions for many years, and I am not sure if I ever recovered completely.
* * *
For the time being I stayed with Aunt Manya, and Grandmother remained at Uncle Leo’s. We would look for a flat and move in together, we hoped.
In the first days and weeks after our return from the concentration camps, survivors were searching for their families and friends. No one knew whether a dear one was dead, had not yet returned, or was perhaps hospitalized somewhere in Germany. If you met some acquaintance, you started asking, have you seen X, or have you met Y, or do you know anything about Z? People usually knew about their campmates, but there were so many different camps where we had been dispersed after Terezín and Auschwitz! On the walls of the Jewish Community Office there were lists with names of survivors and requests for information. Notices were stuck at railway stations and billboards with pleas for contact. Every day the radio broadcast more names, and one day I heard my mother’s name. Searching for her was Mother’s best friend, Edith, after whom I was named. I remembered her from a visit when I was about six. She took me to a toy shop and let me choose not one but three toys. She was sad to learn that Liesl was dead, but I never heard from her again.
Adjusting to normal life wasn’t easy. I had no plans; it didn’t even occur to me to think what I should do with myself. I owned nothing … had no income. Till then I’d never had to make any decisions; before the deportation I was a child and my parents took care of everything. In the camps we were sent here and there; the Germans were the masters of our lives, and we had to obey orders. I never thought that now I had to take responsibility for my life.
I was a guest in Manya’s tiny flat, and I wanted to have a good time. I would eat all day long, but as much as I ate, I still remained hungry. The feeling of hunger went on for years after the war. It was not hunger in my mouth or my stomach, it was hunger in my head. It drove me to eat everything that was in the house; I never felt sated. I had already gained weight after the liberation and was now getting quite plump. In a photo from July 1945, my face looks really bloated. Much of my hair had fallen out after the typhus.
Food was still available only with ration cards, and there was a shortage of everything. Manya made sure to have at least enough bread in the house, because I was able to eat half a loaf at a time. I had nothing to wear. It was summer, and I wanted a swimsuit and a light dress.
Manya took me to several charity places, where I could choose a few items of used clothing and, most important, a pair of secondhand shoes. They were not my size, but I liked them. So what if they pinched my feet!
Before we were deported, my mother had given Manya some things for safekeeping. There were a few pillowcases with her monogram, which she had stitched for her dowry, one of her two coats, a tailored blue suit that she would not need in the ghetto, a few kitchen utensils, and, above all, the complete twelve-person set of china.
I remember the day when a salesman sat with Mother at the round table in the dining room and she leafed through a catalogue. She chose a white set with a silver stripe. I was still a small girl, but Mother said it was for my wedding. Manya arranged with some friends to keep our crate with the carefully packed china in their garden shed.
My mother’s brother Hugo from Brno came to Prague before we were deported and took our photo albums. His wife was a gentile, which had protected him from the Nazi persecution. I am fortunate to have our family albums, a treasure that many of the survivors consider a most painful loss.
My parents had also lent a few pieces of furniture to a friend of Aunt Lori when we were evicted from our flat and had to squeeze into one room. That good lady kept them in her apartment throughout the war and returned them in good order. I never met her and didn’t even know her name.
The matter of returning items to their owners was a painful and disappointing story. The experience of the Jews who returned was that the gentiles often claimed that the things were given to them as gifts, or that they had to sell them in order to pay for food parcels, which they sent to the ghetto, or even that they were lost in bombing attacks, although only a handful of buildings had been destroyed in Prague during the entire war. My experience was an exception; whatever my parents had hidden, although of little value, was returned to me without problems.
Manya would go out in the mornings, leaving me her ration card and some money to buy a few rolls and cheese. When she returned in the afternoon, she cooked a meal for us both. I didn’t dare go to the grocery; I was ashamed because I didn’t know how to shop. What did one say? “Give me” or “I want”? How much cheese should I buy? How much is one hundred grams, half a kilo? Too much, too little? Too shy to try, I stuck to the bread.
* * *
I spent many hours standing in queues at various offices. It was necessary to have documents. Without an identity card, one could not obtain a ration card. To get the identity card, one had to have a registration document from the police, who in turn wanted a document verifying my last address before the deportation. And so it went on and on. At the Jewish Community Office, I applied for support as an orphan. I had to get a document from the court to prove that my parents were dead. But there was no proof of their deaths, so they gave me a statement, which said only that they were allegedly de
ad. I needed copies of my school certificates to show the authorities that I was Czech and not German. It was an unending preoccupation.
But I also started to have a social life.
There were the two brothers Šabart, neighbors of my aunt Lori. They were a bit older than me, and both played the guitar. Lori invited Grandmother and me rather often for lunch, and then I would visit the two boys and sing with them the latest hits. I taught them the English words, which I had learned from the British soldiers at the dance events at Bergen-Belsen, and they eagerly wrote them down. I liked the younger brother; he was handsome, but he showed no interest in me as a girl.
Aunt Verica also tried to find company for me. The son of her friends who had just passed his matriculation exams at high school was going camping over the weekend with a group of his schoolmates, boys and girls. When Grandmother heard that I was going to be in a tent overnight with some complete strangers, she put her foot down. I mean literally. Poor Granny, she stamped her foot so hard on the floor that it must have hurt. I insisted stubbornly that I was going. She was so angry that she became quite exhausted. She could not educate me any longer; she had lost her authority over me. Her well-meant reasoning was of no avail. I’d had enough of being told what I could or couldn’t do.
The youngsters were all paired; I was the only single. The boy who had invited me was very kind and attentive. But I was an outsider, and they had been schoolmates for years. We traveled by train for about half an hour, and they talked of things I knew nothing about, while what I could tell them about was from another planet.
We put up our camp near the river Sázava. The girls slept in one tent, the boys in another. During the night we had visitors: two Russian soldiers. The Russian “liberators” were still stationed in the country, and these two apparently had to patrol the nearby rail tracks.
The boys tried to make conversation with them, but they wanted women, and we girls huddled together in our tent, trembling with fright. It took quite a time to get rid of them; they kept trying to open the flap of our tent. We were in a panic until the boys convinced them with the help of a few cigarettes to go away.
“You see? Nothing bad happened to me,” I told Grandmother the next morning, trying to appease her, but I felt her sadness at her realization that she was unable to guide me in place of my parents.
Another attempt by Aunt Verica happened when she arranged an outing with her next-door neighbor, a bachelor twice my age. He owned a car—an unusual luxury at that time—and invited Leo, Verica, and me to his native village, where he owned some property. Verica was immediately eager to accept, but I think she regretted it later.
We drove southward and after a while came to the outskirts of a small town, Budějovice. The man was the owner of a large country house and a mill but also, what is more, a large brewery. The beer is called Budvar pivo—in German, the name is Budweiser. The man seemed very keen on me, and it became so obvious that Verica insisted she and I share a room for the night.
Frustrated, the man shortened our stay and drove us back to Prague. And so I didn’t become the girlfriend of the owner of the Budweiser beer brewery.
But Grandmother and also Aunt Manya talked to me about my future. I should learn, go to school again. In one sense, I was more mature than girls my age. I had seen torture and death; I’d learned to make myself inconspicuous so as not to draw the attention of the SS men. I had been surrounded by adult women who spoke freely about intimate matters, yet in some respects I was like a child, immature and naive.
Grandmother reminded me that I had almost no formal schooling, just the five elementary classes, and that my parents would have wanted me to study. I dreamed of becoming an artist but didn’t think that one needed to study for that. Grandmother was helpless; I waved my hand at her suggestions. I painted my lips a bright vermilion, which I found gorgeous but which shocked everyone else. I went and enrolled at a course for tap dancing, because I wanted to be like Ginger Rogers. The first lesson was spent with a photographer, who took pictures of the girls in various positions, and I was delighted when I saw my photo displayed on the poster at the entrance of the dancing school.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Meeting Otto
One morning, when I was standing in a queue at the Ministry of the Interior, I recognized Otto Kraus, one of the educators on the Kinderblock in Auschwitz. It was he whom Sonia Shultz had pointed out to me in Terezín as the brother of Harry, the boy she fancied. And I had seen him daily in the Kinderblock. He was quite a good-looking man but a bit short, just my own height.
He recognized me, too, smiled, and said, “I remember you, the girl with the thin legs, sitting there with your books next to the chimney. I am glad you returned.”
That was what we always said whenever we met someone who survived the camps. There were very few of us who came back, and none of them were children. I was among the youngest to survive Auschwitz, and only because at the “selection” I had lied about my age. With a few exceptions, none of the Prague Jews who returned were younger than fifteen or older than forty-two or -three.
We started talking, and Otto invited me to come with him to the theater on Tuesday; he had two tickets. It was six or seven weeks after my return to Prague. During that time I had not seen a film or a play; it just hadn’t occurred to me that I could again go wherever I wanted, that there were no longer any restrictions against Jews.
“Where are you going after you finish here?” Otto asked.
“To the kille to apply for an orphan’s pension.”
“I also have something to do there, let’s walk together.”
The Jewish Community Office was not far, and on the way we talked. We spoke about ourselves, and I was surprised and more and more astonished at how Otto described so well what I also felt: the hollowness of emotions, the lack of inner warmth, and the icy wall around the heart. His ability to put into words what I felt but could not express attracted and impressed me. I was glad that we would go to see a play together.
The play we saw was called Nasredin’s Escapades; it was fun and not serious and stuffy as I had feared. During the play, Otto held my hand, and I felt flattered that this intelligent man thought me worthy of his attention. Much later he admitted that the second ticket was actually meant for another girl, whom he had been dating at the time.
It turned out that Otto was living in a flat that he shared with Honza, his friend and campmate, and Honza’s wife, Ruth—the same Ruth to whom I had to deliver Mausi’s bundle.
Otto was fortunate enough to be among the first to arrive back in Prague after the war. He knew that his father hadn’t survived but was hopeful that his mother and brother would return from the camps. He therefore obtained the keys of a two-room flat in a quite presentable building. The flat had been abandoned by a German woman in such a hurry that she even left behind her clothes and food on the table. Flats were distributed by the housing committee according to the size of the family. But sad to say, none of Otto’s family returned, and so he invited his campmate Honza Brammer and his wife to share the flat, in order not to lose the right to it.
Now I knew her address, I could bring her Mausi’s bundle for safekeeping.
But things turned out differently. Otto suggested he would fetch it himself. He came the next afternoon to my aunt’s place, and from that day on, we started dating. We went for long walks, spoke about the camps and about our feelings of loss and loneliness. Another time he told me that at the beginning of the war, before the deportations of Jews, he was on a farm with a group of young men and women to learn about agriculture. They were Zionists and wanted to go to Palestine to become farmers and build the land.
He mentioned casually that both Ruth and Mausi were in the same group.
“Oh,” I said, “you know Mausi?”
“I know Mausi more than well,” he answered. “She was my girlfriend on the farm, and I almost married her.”
I was taken aback and didn’t know if I should feel jealou
s or be glad that he was now my boyfriend.
“Why didn’t you marry her, then?”
“Because of my father. He said that only over his dead body would a son of his marry the daughter of a woman from Bielsko-Biala on the Polish border, practically an Eastern Jew.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mausi
Mausi and her mother stayed in Sweden even after their recuperation period. Later they moved to Scotland. Perhaps Mausi still kept her ties with Sean, the Scottish doctor—I don’t know. What happened was that she met a nice Jewish gentleman, a mohel (a man who does circumcisions) named Jack Grant, and married him. Otto jokingly called him Jack the Ripper. Only out of their earshot, of course.
They lived in Glasgow and had three children, a daughter and twins, boy and girl. Mausi was an exemplary mother and wife. Her mother lived with them until her death at a respectable age.
When Otto was on a summer course for English teachers in London in the 1960s, he was invited to Glasgow to visit the Grants. They welcomed him warmly, drove him around to see the sights, such as Robert Burns’s cottage (Mausi knew that Otto also wrote poetry) and the lochs.
Once Otto asked casually whether Mausi was doing much painting. She was a bit flustered, became evasive, but Jack sat up, surprised.
“What painting?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing.” Mausi waved her hand. “That was in the past.”
Indeed, since their marriage she had not painted, and her husband never saw her pictures. He was a religious functionary, and she, being the “reverend’s wife,” felt that it was unbecoming for her to paint.
Yet, as the secret was now revealed, she went up to the loft and took down her collection of pictures. Not only were they very good and professional, but many of them were historical documents.
A few years later, the city of Glasgow honored her with an extensive exhibition and a catalogue with her biography. It was a great success, and Jack was extremely proud of his talented wife.