by Dita Kraus
When Metek Blum, Otto’s best friend from Terezín, heard that I was pregnant, he became full of envy. He did not want to fall behind in achievements, and the result was that his daughter Sonia was born to him and his wife, Věra (née Joklová), six weeks after our first son, Peter Martin.
* * *
During the Nazi occupation, the Czech army had been dissolved. After the war all the men, even twenty-five-year-olds, were drafted for a shortened stint. As a high school graduate, Otto was placed in an officers’ course. The huge military barracks was in Prague, near our Vršovice flat. Otto completed his six months of military service in May 1947.
While Otto was in the army, I lodged in his room in the Vršovice flat that he shared with Honza and Ruth. There were two rooms and a tiny cubicle behind the kitchen, where Ruth’s sister Ditinka lived. Ruth and Honza were alternately absent for longer periods; still, for the five of us there was little privacy. We hoped that Otto would soon become manager of his father’s factory, so we could at least live in a part of the Kraus villa. Soon after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Otto’s parents had been forced to sell their factory to a German for a ridiculous sum, but they never received their money, because Jewish accounts were blocked in the banks. The new German owner, by the name of Meyer, allowed the Kraus family to stay on in their villa until their deportation. When Otto returned after the war, he began the long process of claiming his father’s property. It was a complicated procedure. The Czech authorities were in no hurry to restore properties to the Jewish owners; they dragged their feet and demanded endless documents.
Preparations for the wedding were not elaborate. I had my mother’s blue suit, which Aunt Manya had stored during the war and which only needed a few alterations. I acquired a white blouse and a matching hat. One of Otto’s few remaining distant cousins from Vlašim, who owned a shoe factory, provided blue shoes without the necessary coupons. I asked him to make me a pair with low heels; I didn’t want to look taller than Otto.
Aunt Vala, a relative of Otto’s, came two days early to cook and bake for the guests we invited for dinner. Otto managed to buy some beef on the black market, and Aunt Vala brought the provisions for several cakes. For two days before the wedding, I helped her, although I didn’t know how to cook and bake. Before kneading the dough, as I was instructed by Vala, I took off the ring from my finger.
The ring was antique, a thick golden circle with a topaz set deep in the middle where the ring was wider. It had been Grandmother’s gift on my twelfth birthday. She got it from her own grandmother. Before we were sent on the transport, I’d asked Zdenka to keep it for me. After the war, the first thing Zdenka did was pull the ring from her finger and hand it back to me.
When we finished baking the cakes and cleaning up the kitchen, I could not find the ring. Aunt Vala, Otto, and I looked everywhere; we even sorted the garbage. Nothing. We decided that it must have somehow got into one of the cakes.
Next morning, we took a taxi to the Clam-Gallas Palace, where civil marriages were conducted. A wide staircase led to the first floor, and, on the landing, several brides and grooms stood with their families. Each ceremony took fifteen or twenty minutes. It was like an assembly line.
On the stairs there was a great crowd of guests, many in uniform from Otto’s officers’ course. One of his old-time friends was Paťa. As we descended the stairs, new husband and wife, he pronounced philosophically, with suitably theatrical pathos: “From now on you will be even more alone than you were before.”
Back at home, we had the festive meal with our guests. They were, of course, Metek and Vera, my aunts Lori and Manya, Grandmother, Otto’s cousins Eva and Hanka Kraus, Aunt Vala, Margit, and Father Barnai. The cakes were cut, and everybody was warned to chew carefully, because my golden ring would be in one of the slices. But it wasn’t. It just disappeared mysteriously and was never found again.
Otto consoled me: “The old ring was your maiden symbol. Now you have a new ring, the ring of a married woman.”
In the afternoon we received a note advising us that we would receive a call from America. Uncle Otto Strass, the brother of Otto’s mother, had decided to congratulate us on our wedding. Strangely, Uncle Otto’s wife was also called Dita. There was no telephone in the Vršovice flat. The call would come to the office of the Kraus factory. In those times, overseas calls were a rarity and had to be mediated by the international telephone exchange.
After the last guest had gone, we washed the dishes, arranged the chairs and table, swept the carpet, and carried out the garbage. Then we dressed warmly, because in the office it would be cold, and went to wait for Uncle Otto’s phone call. It was very exciting to think that we would actually be talking across these vast distances, as far as America.
It was announced for eight o’clock in the evening. But time passed; it was nine and then ten. The phone didn’t ring. We sat on the uncomfortable office chairs and shivered. We couldn’t just go home and let the uncle down. In the end, the call came at two o’clock in the morning. It went like this:
“Hello, is that you, Otto?”
“Hello, hello, Otto. Yes, it is Otto and Dita here.”
“Congratulations on your wedding. We all wish you much happiness.”
“Thank you. How are you, Uncle Otto? And how is Aunt Dita?”
“We are fine, all right. The girls also want to congratulate you.”
A thin girl’s voice said something incomprehensible in an American accent. After a while, another thin voice piped a few words, too. Uncle Otto continued:
“Why don’t you come to America? Leave everything, take your toothbrush, and come to America.”
“Thank you, Uncle Otto, but we would like to live here in Prague. This is our home.”
“Okay. So bye-bye. And write. I will send you a parcel again soon.”
And this is how we spent our wedding night.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Kraus Factory
In the summer of 1947, Otto was at long last named proprietor of his parents’ factory—not its owner however. This allowed us to move into the villa. The Treuhänder Meyer was expelled, together with all the Germans, from Czechoslovakia. The state appointed a manageress to run the factory. Most of the other employees remained from the time when it was still owned by the Kraus family. The villa was used as offices.
We turned two of the connecting rooms into our new home and moved in. There was a huge kitchen with an old-fashioned coal stove from the time before the war, when the family had employed a cook. This was no longer practical; we had it dismantled and bought an electric oven. The little cubicle behind the kitchen, where the cook had slept, became Otto’s study. He had a desk, a chair, and a lamp there and could write undisturbed. His first book was Země bez Boha—Land Without God. When it was published to great acclaim, Otto was considered a promising young author.
As a published author, Otto was accepted in the circle of young Czech literary people. Thanks to the poet Kamil Bednář, who worked for Václav Petr, the publisher of Otto’s first novel, Otto met Zdeněk Urbánek, Karel Nový, Bohuslav Březovský (his wife, Dr. Březovská, was our pediatrician at the baby clinic), Ivan Diviš, Jiří Kolář, and others. They would meet in a wine cellar on Malostranské náměstí, discuss or read from their latest works, and drink wine. Otto wasn’t a wine drinker—he would rather have had a cup of coffee—but those discussions were somehow inspiring. I once went with Otto, sat there like a decoration, listened to them, and felt privileged to be in the company of geniuses.
Ivan Diviš became a close friend. He often came to visit Otto in our cramped dwelling, and the two held long philosophical conversations. Once when we came to fetch him from his parents’ flat, where he lived, Ivan’s mother said to Otto, “I am glad he is going with you. With you he doesn’t drink.”
* * *
When Otto returned from the camps, he had no close family. His father had been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. His brother, Harry, was all
egedly shot when he tried to escape during the evacuation of his camp. And Marie, Otto’s mother, had died after the liberation, in a German hospital, like my mother, Liesl. Marie’s sister, Ella, lived in London, and her brother, Otto Strass, in America.
But there was his mother’s cousin, Aunt Vala, in the small town of Náchod, and she, her husband, Uncle Véna, and the children, Věra and Pavel, nicknamed Papen, were now Otto’s closest, loving relatives. Before we were married, Otto took me to Náchod to introduce me and also to get their approval of his choice. Apparently, I passed muster.
We visited them frequently, and on one of our visits, we purchased two dozen tins of horsemeat. Food was still scarce, and most was available only with ration cards. Horsemeat was generally scorned, considered suitable only for the poorest of the poor, but the tinned horse goulash of Náchod could be bought without ration cards.
Papen studied pharmacology in Prague. Uncle Véna had a pharmacy near the main square in Náchod and wanted his son to take it over one day. Papen studied without much enthusiasm and became a pharmacist, but he never worked in a pharmacy. He played the trumpet, had a jazz band, and became quite famous.
He and his girlfriend, Milena, often came to visit us. Papen loved food; his handsome face was always flushed and shiny, as if the fat were oozing from his plump body. Then Otto would say, “Go to the pantry and kill a horse.” And we would have a marvelous meal of horse goulash with potatoes.
Papen died on the stage as befitted his profession. He lifted his arms with the baton, fell over, and was dead. What a pity! He was still young, just fifty-two.
* * *
In the villa, I felt like a queen. I had a famous husband, two comfortable rooms, a small back garden, a large kitchen, and a car—an old, prewar box-shaped model Praga. In 1939, just before Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Otto’s parents had made preparations to emigrate to England. They sent ahead a large ship trunk with clothes for the whole family, including their fur coats and even bed linen. The trunk stayed all the war years at one of London’s train depots, undamaged by the heavy bombings. Now Aunt Ella sent it back to Prague. Oh, how wonderful that was! Suddenly we had blankets, sheets, towels, bathrobes; in short, everything we needed.
Our problem was Grandmother. She had no place to live. She was still staying with Uncle Leo and Verica. Their departure to America was delayed, and they were crowded in the Košíře flat. The shortage of housing had become even worse than in the first days after the war. One had to be on a waiting list at the Ministry of Housing, and people waited for years and years before they were offered a vacancy, which often turned out to be unfit for human habitation.
After much searching, Otto discovered a room for rent in the attic of an old house not far from us. Mrs. Adamová, the owner, was willing to let it to Grandmother. It was not a comfortable place; the entrance was from the backyard, the stairs were steep, and the heating inadequate. But there was no better solution. Mrs. Adamová was a kind woman, and she and Grandmother, who was so modest and adaptable, got along very well.
The baby was due in December, on Christmas day. But the twenty-fourth passed, and the next day, too. The first birth pangs started on the twenty-seventh. It was freezing, and Otto went out several times during the night to run the motor of the car, fearing it would not start when we had to rush to the hospital. The sturdy but ugly vehicle had remained standing without wheels on cinder blocks in the factory garage throughout the war. No fuel was available for private cars, not to mention tires or spare parts, so the German Treuhänder Meyer could not use it. When Otto was appointed manager of the factory, he found the car all dusty but in working condition. He purchased four secondhand tires on the black market. Such luxuries as new tires were nonexistent. He could, however, not find a fifth as a spare. Still, there were so few cars at the time that I felt proud and privileged to be seen in the stately six-seater.
In the small hours of the twenty-eighth, it was time to go to the hospital. Otto’s best friend, Metek, who was a bit of a snob, opined that Otto could not allow his wife to give birth in a public hospital; it had to be a private sanatorium.
There were many hours of great pain, but everything went normally for a first child, and I didn’t even need any stiches. The baby weighed 3.15 kilograms. Otto and Grandmother arrived shortly, and it was a great joy. The only shadow was when Otto told me that, as he was backing out from the yard into the street, he had run over our German shepherd puppy, Lump.
In those days, a mother used to stay in the hospital for three or four days after giving birth. But the next day I ran a fever, and it turned out that I had a furuncle in my right breast. Nursing became extremely painful. I was treated with the great new discovery, penicillin. It was administered by injection every three hours, day and night.
A week later I was pronounced cured and could go home with the baby. We had thought of a name a long time before its birth, not knowing, of course, whether it would be a boy or a girl. A girl would be named Michaela; that was certain. But for the boy we chose Peter Martin, the names of Viktor Fischl’s two charming sons. Viktor was the brother of Otto’s close friend Paťa.
Yet the furuncle returned and was extremely painful. Otto rushed me to a general practitioner on our street, an old acquaintance of the Kraus family. He did surgery immediately. The right breast was damaged and didn’t produce any more milk. The doctor told me that I would not be able to nurse my future children for more than a few short weeks.
After Peter Martin’s birth, I don’t know who was happier, me or my grandmother. She came every day, coddled the baby, and sang to him and would have held him in her arms all the time had we not forbidden it. It was the time of strict rules; everyone followed the advice of Dr. Spock’s popular books. A baby got fed every three hours on the clock, and not when he was crying. Grandmother was old-fashioned, Otto said, and we had to obey the pediatrician. The doctor maintained that babies had to cry; it was good for their developing lungs.
By the way, our actual doctor was Dr. Epstein, professor of pediatrics, and before the war one of his students had been Dr. Mengele.
Otto decided that our son would not be circumcised. He did not want him to be marked as a Jew for his whole life. In Auschwitz, he had witnessed a frightful scene, when one of his fellow prisoners had his foreskin cut off by the camp barber “to make him a Jew.” Otto himself had also not been circumcised because he’d been born prematurely. His parents delayed the procedure to wait until he gained weight and then just left it undone. For a Jew in Prague, it was an unimportant detail. But in Auschwitz he could have been the next victim of the barber with his blunt razor.
Peter was a very pretty baby, and I was a very proud mother. It also pleased me that I had him so young, and I planned how, when he grew up, I would dance with him. I was young but also silly and inexperienced.
One day I went to visit Ruth, our former flatmate, to show off my son. It was not far to go. I dressed the baby warmly, covered him in the pram with his downy quilt, and walked along the cold winter streets. When I returned an hour later, Otto and Grandmother were standing in the street with worried faces, turning this way and that, on the lookout for me. I probably hadn’t told them where I was going, suspecting they wouldn’t let me. What a dressing-down I got! How could you do such a thing, taking the baby out in the freezing cold, endangering him, he might get pneumonia, how irresponsible you are! And yes, I felt guilty, although I protested loudly, saying that I was mature enough to know what I was doing, and why didn’t they trust me?
We now lived quite an orderly life. Otto worked hard running the factory, making efforts to obtain orders for ladies’ lingerie and nighties. He would quote his father, who described his product as “work clothes for certain females.” Raw material was in short supply, and the bosses of the textile factories had to be bribed. Our friend Metek accepted Otto’s offer to become procurer at the Kraus factory. He was a wizard at the job. He himself had restored his father’s distillery and thus had access to a
ny number of bottles of brandy or whisky. No official at the Ministry of Commerce ever refused such a gift. And the rolls of chiffon, silk, and lace appeared regularly.
I tried to run the household with Grandmother’s help. Every week I took Peter to the well-baby clinic, where Dr. Březovská examined him and noted down his progress. In the afternoon, we often visited Metek, his wife, Vera, and baby Sonia, or they would come to us. There were other friends, and of course cousin Papen with his Milena. One of Otto’s former campmates, Zdeněk Eliáš (formerly Eckstein), would sit next to Peter and amuse him for hours. It was quite touching to see the two—the young man of twenty-four and the baby—giggling together.
Another friend, the poet Josef Hiršál, came to see us, too. But what he wanted was to have a look at the lingerie. In the evening after the seamstresses had gone home, Otto took him into the factory. When Hiršál saw the pile of ladies’ panties on the packing table, he pressed an armful of them to his chest and then threw them high up in the air. As they floated down on his head, he jubilated, “So many women, so many women…”
Sometimes Otto would give Metek a few items of ladies’ underwear. Some bureaucrats preferred them to Metek’s whisky. That made me terribly envious. Why should the wives of the officials get new nighties, while I got nothing? I still had barely anything to wear, and there they were giving things to people who surely had much more than I, and nothing was left for me. Even Metek took my side in the argument. But Otto insisted that the business had priority. The reason was not stinginess. Every roll of raw material was allocated by the Ministry of Commerce, and from each the factory was obliged to produce a fixed number of items. It was only thanks to the talented cutter, Mrs. Šandová, that one or two extra pieces were extracted from each roll.