A Delayed Life

by Dita Kraus

  In order to integrate the survivor orphans, the institution accepted an approximately equal number of Israeli students. They lived together, learned the new language, and formed friendships. In later years, when the first students graduated and left, Hadassim accepted many children of diplomats who didn’t want to drag their children from country to country. But there were also always a certain number of kids from broken homes or social cases.

  The directors, Yirmiyahu and Rachel Shapira, accepted Otto gladly. English teachers were a rare commodity, due to the fact that Israeli students still hated the language. When our two children, Shimon and Michaela, heard that their schedule would not be very different from that in the kibbutz, and that moreover they would live with us parents and have their own private room, they were thrilled. We were assigned a three-room bungalow, with a little garden around. As it happened, it was next door to Avi.

  But what would I do? I wasn’t a teacher. Not working wasn’t an option; a teacher’s salary is too small to keep a family, even if we didn’t have to pay rent. I accepted a job in the school dining room. My boss was Malvina, a Polish Holocaust survivor, who was gruff, unsmiling, and never pleased with me. But from my stint with Yaacov the cobbler, I was experienced in dealing with difficult bosses, so I avoided conflicts.

  After some time, however, I rose in status and became a tutor of students who needed help in English. In the middle of the school year, the headmaster asked me to substitute for a teacher who went on maternity leave. I was scared. I had never had enough self-confidence to stand in front of an audience, but Otto urged me to take it up. He promised to prepare me for each lesson. With trepidation, I started, but I found that it wasn’t so difficult, and by the end of the year I felt quite confident. During the next few years, I attended evening courses and intensive seminars during the school vacations and at the end passed the teachers’ college examinations and got my license.

  I was a conscientious but uninspiring teacher. In Otto’s classes one could hear bursts of laughter; he was amusing, and the students loved his lessons. Even now, when they are grandfathers and grandmothers and scattered over the continents, they remember him with nostalgia. He had the talent to make witty, humorous comments; he told jokes or acted out scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which was part of the curriculum. He took hold of a broom, quoted Caesar—Et tu, Brute?—and let the broom clatter to the floor.

  In one of the classes, he had a Persian student who would constantly interrupt the lesson, asking the meaning of this or that word. Once, when Otto had a cold and often sneezed, Farshit asked, “What in English does one wish someone who sneezes?” With a straight face Otto told him, “One says, ‘Drop dead.’” The class smiled but kept mum. Otto sneezed a few more times and each time Farshit wished him, “Drop dead, teacher.” Suddenly he stopped and cried, “But dead means ‘dead’!” Only then did the class burst into loud laughter. In private Otto later commented, “Better Farshit than near shit.”

  I envied Otto’s ability to be so interesting and popular in his classes. I was a teacher for twenty-eight years. In the later ones, I prepared the upper two grades for their matriculation exams. My students would pass their exams quite well, but in the commemorative brochure, with photos of all the graduate students and their teachers, they forgot to include my picture.

  * * *

  Not long after we came to live in Hadassim, there was an exhibition of the pictures painted by the children in Terezín, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I was invited to attend the opening ceremony. The organizers had located me, thanks to my signature on one of the pictures. I took the bus to Jerusalem. There were speeches by the Yad Vashem director, Dr. Arieh Kubovy, and other officials. As I walked along the walls of the exhibition hall, I recognized names of children I had known. They had painted what they saw around them, the three-tiered bunks, the funeral hearses drawn by men, transporting bread loaves to the barracks, gallows with hanged men. But there were also locomotives, airplanes, children playing, and butterflies on flowers. Under each picture was the name of the child, his or her age, and the words did not survive or perished. I knew many of them; some had been my friends. I felt like I was at a funeral.

  Suddenly I saw a drawing in black and white. It depicted a church and a row of roofs and was signed: Dita Polachová. I had forgotten it, but now I remembered what made me draw it. I was trying to depict the moment after sunset, when all the colors faded and the black roofs were sharply outlined against the luminous sky. In my picture, however, the contours are not sharp, since I drew it with black chalk, which easily smudges.

  It was a bad moment. I realized with distress that my picture was the only one in the exhibition without the word perished under it.

  * * *

  My admiration of Otto’s intellect—his ability to analyze difficult topics and express them clearly, his encyclopedic knowledge of so many subjects—began on the day we first met in Prague after the war. I was so inexperienced, so inadequate next to him! I still felt like a child, while he was an adult.

  Otto was blessed with a marvelous sense of humor. With his jokes and witty observations, he was always the center of the company. He once admitted to me that as a youth he was ashamed for being overweight and that his talent to amuse was a way to compensate for this flaw. When Otto and Paťa were together, their conversation was a firework display of brilliant witticisms and creative ideas; they inspired each other. Another of his talented, bright friends was Rejšík in Kibbutz Naot Mordechai. When the three were together, we wives only listened and laughed. I admired not only Otto’s sense of humor but his talent to observe global trends. He sensed developing political crises and economic changes. For example, when his graduating students asked him what he thought they should study, he advised them to learn Chinese. He’d already predicted in the seventies the rise of China as a world power.

  For many years the relationship between me and Otto was unequal: he was the dominant male, and I the docile wife. Until one day in Hadassim, when I was about forty.

  We were on the way somewhere, and I was driving. I had been driving already for a number of years. I often did our shopping in Netanya, since in Hadassim there was just a small grocery store that wasn’t well stocked and was more expensive. As I shifted gears going uphill, there was a screeching sound, and Otto exclaimed, “Oy!” and closed his eyes like he was in pain. Up till then, I would have apologized or tried to justify my mistake. But this time I just blew up. “Stop criticizing me and teaching me all the time. When you drive uphill, it happens to you, too, and I don’t comment or correct you. I have been driving enough years and don’t need your advice any longer.”

  Otto was in shock; he couldn’t understand what was happening. This was the beginning of my growing up and becoming an adult. My outburst was childish, but the fact that I demanded to be treated as an equal … that was new. In the weeks that followed, our marriage was in crisis. Suddenly I had my own opinions and no longer uncritically accepted everything he said. Otto even thought we should part. But our bond was strong and survived the crisis.

  I think that in later years, he was quite glad that I had changed. Not long after his heart attack, he got cancer of the stomach. He was very ill, and for the last years of his life, he was grateful that I took over responsibilities and he could depend on me. It bothered him that I stayed with him all the time, never left him alone. He would tell me, “Go out, have a good time, and forget me.” He resented being a burden, certain that I would begin hating him if his dependence limited my freedom. I embraced him, but he insisted, “Go, go. I will be all right.”

  * * *

  The boarding students in Hadassim had a free weekend twice a month. They went home on Friday after school and came back Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Teachers who lived on the campus were expected to provide a substitute home for students who had nowhere to go. For a time we had Annie, a pretty girl of fifteen, whose mother was in a mental hospital and whose father was u
nable to care for his three children.

  For one school term, there was Shulamit from South Africa, who had just lost her mother; her father had sent her to our boarding school after he’d remarried. And we also had the Czech boy called Honza Rohan, who did have both parents, but they lived in Germany. All remained lifelong friends, although now they are scattered across different parts of the world.

  Parents would also come to Hadassim to visit their children or meet the teachers. New ones asked their way to the dormitories or classrooms. Often when a parent saw Otto walking, they would ask, “Do you also have a child here?” He would politely explain that he was a teacher. But one day it happened that a person asked him, “Do you have a grandchild here?”

  When Otto came home, he said to me, “As long as they thought I was one of the parents, that was all right. But to be considered a grandfather shows that the time has come for me to stop teaching. I will study graphology.”

  He enrolled at the Tel Aviv University, and within two years he became a graphologist. The university didn’t give diplomas to the graduates, just a certificate, acknowledging that the student had attended the graphology course. Otto could now join the Association of Graphologists, and after a short time he became a respected member.

  He stopped teaching, and soon the clients began arriving. Otto enjoyed his new profession enormously. He joked, saying, “If no one wants to read my writing, at least I can read theirs.” Who were the clients that wanted to have handwriting analyzed? For one, companies, before they accepted new employees; also kibbutzim, to screen potential new members; youngsters who couldn’t decide what to study or who wanted to know more about their new boyfriend or girlfriend; and also parents, who wanted to find out if the man their daughter was marrying was not a crook.

  Graphology was a lucky choice, not only because Otto loved it but also because he could continue working when he became ill with cancer of the stomach. Sometimes he would sit with his microscope over the piece of paper for hours and then exclaim, “Eureka, I have cracked the puzzle!” He explained that his work was much like that of a detective.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Rosh Pina

  Otto loved Galilee, because he could fish there in the river Jordan or in Lake Kinneret. Almost every time we had a longer holiday or in the summer vacations, we took our car and traveled north. At first we had a jeep. We bought it when we received money from the German government, compensation for the forced labor we’d had to do during the war. It was a battered vehicle, which had served in North Africa in World War II and didn’t want to start unless rolled down a hill.

  A few years later, we bought a better car. It was produced in Israel and was called a Susita, after a mountain on the Golan Heights. It was an ugly van without windows, but roomy and dependable. We used to drive it to the youth hostel in Rosh Pina.

  Rosh Pina is a picturesque village in the north of Israel, with a view of Mount Hermon, whose top half is covered in snow in winter. Above the village is a spring whose clear water cascades down, along the first houses, and then suddenly vanishes underground. Rosh Pina lies on the eastern slope of Mount Canaan; on the western side is the famous kabbalist town Safed.

  In Hebrew, rosh is “head” and pina is “corner.” But together they mean “foundation stone.” The village was established by Baron Edmond de Rothschild near the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, for the new Jewish settlers from Romania. The idea was that they would make a living producing silk. They planted mulberry trees and raised silkworms. The project, however, did not take off. The trees remained, but the settlers gradually left, and many of the quaint stone houses stayed empty.

  With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, a new wave of settlers arrived. The houses were soon filled again, and new ones had to be built in a hurry. Those were not as pretty as the first ones, which had thick stone walls and red roofs. The new ones were semidetached, and each unit consisted of a single room, a tiny kitchen, and a shower.

  Once, when we came to the youth hostel in Rosh Pina, the manager asked, “How many youths are you bringing?”

  Otto said, “Just the two of us.”

  The man looked at Otto’s gray hair and remarked politely that we didn’t seem like youths.

  It was necessary to look for different accommodation. Tsippi, our Hadassim colleague, owned one of the new houses in Rosh Pina and generously let us stay there. At the same time she suggested that we could purchase one for ourselves; there were a few for sale.

  We drove to Safed, to the district office that managed the ownerless houses. They were very surprised to learn that someone wanted to buy such a poor hovel when, in the neighboring town of Hatzor, one could purchase a proper house with two rooms for almost the same price. They pointed at some rusty keys on the wall and said, “Help yourself.”

  We returned to Rosh Pina and tried to find the houses by the numbers on the keys. The streets had no names. The local people would tell us, “Oh, that would be the one below the school,” or “Probably opposite the Shlomoviches.” Then I spied an abandoned house—it had holes instead of a window and door, but it was nestled prettily under tall eucalyptus trees. I fell in love with it at first sight and only hoped that it belonged to one of the keys.

  On the porch of the second half of the house, we saw an old woman. “Yes,” she confirmed, “this is number sixteen B. I am Mrs. Ungar, and who are you?” She smiled happily when she heard that we might buy the other half.

  “Oh, then I will have pleasant neighbors,” she said. “The old cobbler died five years ago, and since then, I am here alone.”

  We peered inside. The room showed evidence not only of the late owner’s profession but also of his vice. The entire floor was covered with old shoes and empty bottles.

  When Tsippi heard that we were buying the house next to Mrs. Ungar and how much it cost, she said resolutely, “That’s not the way to do it. You must bargain. You must tell them that there is no window and no door, the doorstep is missing, the roof has a hole, in the shower is nothing but a pipe sticking out of the wall, and there is no sink in the kitchen.”

  In Safed, they nodded their heads and promised to send an estimator. A few weeks later, the verdict arrived, and the price was reduced by 25 percent.

  Each trip to Safed had to be carefully calculated, because we were only free on school holidays, but as everyone knows, offices also don’t work on holidays. From home to Safed, the distance is 150 kilometers, and with the narrow potholed roads of those times, it took three hours each way.

  Of course the ruin needed extensive repairs to make it habitable. We found a young, eager architect in Safed who had just finished his studies. We arranged to meet him halfway between Safed and Hadassim and discussed the plan over a table at a filling station. My dream was of a house with an enclosed yard, like they have in Greece, where grapes would hang overhead from a pergola. He sketched a plan on a piece of paper and offered to personally supervise the workers. We employed a builder, Shimon Azrad, who came from Safed in a suit and tie, with a briefcase under his arm to impress us. He knew very little about building, because he was actually a housepainter’s assistant. But we discovered that only a few weeks later. The architect couldn’t have supervised the work very diligently. There was a new entrance door, but it didn’t fit and couldn’t be locked; the additional room, designed by the architect, had a crooked wall, so the roof couldn’t be attached; and so on. In the end everything was somehow patched up, and we traveled to Rosh Pina to take over our new house. By then the school year had ended and we were on vacation.

  The architect smiled, but we could see that something was bothering him. After a while, he admitted sheepishly that he’d forgotten to design the drainage for the toilet. The result was that we had to hire the local plumber, who came with a helper, pickaxes, and shovels. They dug a deep hole in the rocky ground and a ditch for the pipe. The eucalyptus trees loved it. They sent thin tentacle roots boring into the pipe and d
idn’t even mind that the water came from the toilet.

  The final bill for the improvements exceeded the price of the house. But we didn’t regret it. We spent all our vacations and holidays there with our sons (sadly, Michaela was no longer alive) and later with our grandsons.

  People would ask us, “What is it that draws you to Rosh Pina? Do you have roots there?”

  And Otto would answer, “Yes, we do, and they clog up our sewer pipe.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  About Friends

  Some of the people with whom we had traveled to Israel were already friends or acquaintances; we also met a few new ones on the train. Paťa was the former: he was already friends with Otto from Terezín. At first he too lived in Kibbutz Givat Chaim, but he soon left to join a theater company, because he was an actor. In midlife, he decided to become a psychologist. He and his wife, Betty, went to America. When he finished his studies, they returned with their American-born son, Mike, and Paťa worked at the psychology clinic of the kibbutz movement in Tel Aviv. We visited each other frequently. Otto and Paťa died a few years apart, but Betty and I are still in contact.

  Annetta and her sister Stěpa are twins, and in Auschwitz they were among Mengele’s “experiment” subjects. Annetta and her husband, Jirka, also lived in Givat Chaim for a number of years but later moved to Australia. Annetta is now a very fit widow of ninetysomething, has three children and a lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Stěpa lives near her.

  Eva Weissová didn’t stay in Israel. She married Karel Gross, who was one of the children sent to England from Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the war. He loved England and didn’t want to live in Israel. She moved to London with him. They had two daughters and a son, and we visited them many times. Eva and I had been friends since Auschwitz. She died two years ago, and I miss and long for her very much.