by Dita Kraus
Toward the end of the street, before the tram turned left, there used to be Cinema Vesna. Otto used to go there on Sunday mornings, together with Mirek and other neighborhood boys, to see Westerns. At that time, films were still silent; the sound was provided by a man who sat under the screen and accompanied the action on the piano. He played marches or gallops when there was a chase and romantic schmaltz music when the lovers kissed. His repertoire was limited, and the boys knew exactly what melody he would play next.
Where the tram end-station depot used to be, there is now a modern office building. Not far from there was the baby-wellness clinic where I used to take baby Peter every week to be weighed and examined. Dr. Březovská would give him special attention, both because I was an eighteen-year-old mother and also because her husband, Bohuslav, the well-known writer, was a member of the same circle of authors to which Otto also belonged.
When the tram rounded the corner, I saw a low building with a gable and a wide wooden door. Before the war this was a movers’ business, which belonged to a Jewish family whose daughter Hana was a classmate of Otto’s. In those times moving was still done by horses and carts, and the wide door led into the yard with stables and sheds for the vehicles. The owners perished in the concentration camps.
After the war, when there was a catastrophic shortage of housing, the house with the gable is where we found the small attic room for my grandmother. The room could be reached only from the yard by a rickety staircase, but the landlady, Mrs. Adamová, was a very kind soul and made Grandmother as comfortable as she could. Every day Grandmother would climb down the stairs and walk to the Kraus house to help me with the baby. For her the little great-grandson was a consolation for the loss of her entire family.
Each time I had visited Prague after the Velvet Revolution, I passed the house and was sad to see it neglected and peeling. But this time I found it quite nicely renovated, with a new restaurant on the ground floor.
The next tram stop was near the Hagibor sports ground. The little iron gate is hidden by bushes, and from the tram window one can barely discern the name Hagibor over it. In the years of the Nazi occupation, it was the only place where the Jewish youths and children could gather to play and do sports. In the summer before our deportation, a kind of summer camp was held there. We children would walk to Hagibor from all over the town, as we were already forbidden to use public transportation, and some, like myself, had to walk an hour each way. But it was a wonderful and unforgettable time. We were divided into groups, each with a trainer or instructor. There were tents one could rest in; there were games and shows. Borghini the magician appeared and entertained the several hundred kids. The legendary Fredy Hirsch organized races and competitions. But at seven in the evening we had to start walking home, because the curfew was at eight and we wore the yellow Star of David identifying us as Jews. Hagibor was a world in itself, and we few who returned from the Holocaust remember it with fondness.
Almost adjoining the sports ground is the new Jewish cemetery. After the war my grandmother had the names of my parents and my grandfather engraved on the gravestone of my father’s brother, Fritz. I always visit the place to honor my family and grandmother, who herself is interred in her hometown, Brno.
By now I was almost at the end of my detour. I got off the tram and started walking, leaving the past behind and starting to make plans for tomorrow.
The weather forecast had said it wouldn’t rain, so I would be able to take another walk, but hopefully only in the present.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Peter / Shimon
Each of our three children was born while we were living in a different place. Peter Martin (Shimon) in Prague, Michaela in Kibbutz Givat Chaim, and Ronny in Hadassim, though Ronny and Michaela were born in the same hospital. Ronny was to be our solace when we learned that Michaela would not live. Indeed, he gave us only joy; there was never any problem with him. He was a cheerful and charming child and has remained perhaps a bit less cheerful but certainly just as charming in his adulthood.
Unfortunately things did not go so well for Shimon. At school he was a good student and joined the army like all boys and girls in Israel. At that time Otto and I already started noticing some unusual behavior patterns. He would tell us how his commander persecuted him; he had bouts of paranoia or hyperactivity. But he did finish his army service and then moved to Jerusalem to study sociology at the Hebrew University.
Shimon was an exceptionally good-looking young man. Tall, with a well-proportioned body like a classical Greek statue. Indeed, one of our friends called him “a real Adonis.” He himself didn’t seem to be aware of his looks. He was intelligent, amusing, and friendly. He chose his friends among boys with some misfortune: one had a withered arm; another had just lost his father.
Shimon was already fourteen years old when his little brother, Ronny, was born. At that time I was taking driving lessons in the nearby town of Netanya. Otto would drive me there at six in the morning so that I would be back in time for school. Shimon was a competent and willing babysitter. He even didn’t mind changing the baby’s diapers when he cried.
Michaela was sick, and as the disease worsened, she often needed to be hospitalized. Watching her suffering became unbearable, and one day Otto had a heart attack. (Incidentally, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt had his heart attack the same night. Later Otto would joke: “Nasser came out feet first, and I came out on my feet.”)
In Jerusalem Shimon studied during the day and worked nights in a psychiatric hospital. There he met Miriam, a nurse who became his girlfriend. Their relationship was very unbalanced; he told us that he wasn’t in love with her, but Miriam was very much in love with him. When she discovered that she was pregnant, he agreed to marry her. But he begged us not to come to the wedding. We were puzzled and insulted, but we respected his wish.
It was not until eleven months later that she gave birth. They named the sweet little boy Ehud. Shimon stopped studying sociology and switched to a two-year hotel management course. He found employment in a youth hostel, where he was successful and well liked. But he had personal problems with the staff and after some time was fired. The same happened at the next hotel. Time after time, he was readily accepted, only to find himself unemployed again. It was as if he were driven to sabotage his position, not letting himself succeed. The young family was constantly overdrawn, couldn’t pay the rent, and owed at the grocer’s. We kept saving them from catastrophe.
It was clear that Shimon needed psychiatric help. He started treatment with a very expensive professor of psychiatry, which went on for many years. Fortunately, at that time, Otto and I began receiving an allowance from the Germans as compensation for the years we spent in their concentration camps. With that we could pay the professor, who worked so hard that he would usually fall asleep while Shimon was talking. The professor was of no help. Nor was the next psychiatrist, to whom Shimon had to travel twice a week from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Psychology didn’t help; what he needed was medication. Meanwhile they had a second child, again a boy, named Assaf.
The marriage was growing unbearable, the atmosphere explosive. Shimon wanted a divorce. It was a bad time, full of hatred and accusations. They both claimed that we were inciting one against the other, and we had sleepless nights with worry.
After the separation Shimon left Jerusalem and moved to our vacation house in Rosh Pina. The boys stayed with their mother. To do her justice, it must be said that she was an exemplary mother. She worked two shifts, took night work with private patients, did all she could to provide for her children. Shimon tried to find work here and there and, in the end, landed in Netanya. We were able to buy him an apartment just a short walk from our place. For a number of years he worked as a caregiver for elderly men. Yet from time to time he had to be hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. He stopped working when he was about sixty, lived on a minuscule invalid allowance, and actually was almost completely dependent on us. He was taking a great amount of me
dication, which I would prepare weekly for him.
When Ehud was getting married, he came to Netanya to buy Shimon an elegant suit. He wanted him to look his best at the wedding. In the photo both parents are present, one on each side of the couple.
Then came the time when not only Shimon’s mental but also his physical health deteriorated. He was unable to care for himself, too weak to walk, his back bent, his mind befuddled. He no longer enjoyed music, showed no happiness, even when his first grandchild was born.
I was glad that Otto was no longer alive to see Shimon’s sad deterioration. I found a caregiver who lived with him, cooked, washed him, and took him out in a wheelchair. His sons were by now grown men. They loved him, and each in turn came to visit him from Jerusalem as often as he could. Of course they would also drop in to say hello to me, but after seeing Shimon, they would feel sad and depressed.
In July 2016, Shimon fell into a coma. At first he was in the Netanya hospital, where I visited him daily, although he didn’t know it. Later his sons had him moved to a special facility in Jerusalem to have him closer to them. Ehud came almost daily to sit with him, talk to him, and stroke his hand, believing he could feel and hear him. Assaf also came, but for him the sight of his father’s body without a sign of life was unbearable. Miriam, who had overcome her anger at Shimon long ago, was also helpful and kind. Being a nurse herself, she knew the doctors in Jerusalem, and through her connections Shimon was made as comfortable as possible in the hospice. After being in a coma for almost half a year, Shimon died on December 8, 2016, at 8:15 P.M., just a few days short of his sixty-ninth birthday. He is buried in Har HaMenuchot Cemetery in Jerusalem.
A year later, Assaf’s daughter was born. It was December 8, 2017, at 8:15 P.M. in the same hospital where Shimon died.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ronny
Ronny, my youngest and only remaining child, lives with his family just a few minutes’ walk from my place. He is thirteen years younger than Shimon. He and Michaela were both born in the same hospital and, in fact, on the same bed, but ten years apart. He was a lovely, happy child. When he walked to the kindergarten in the morning, he would sing aloud to himself. It was safe to let him go alone, because on the Hadassim campus, there was no traffic or other danger.
Our friend Paťa, the former actor turned psychologist, would ask in later years, “What teenage symptoms did you observe in Ronny?” And Otto and I would look at each other and shake our heads. “None.”
Actually, while Ronny avoided a phase of teenage rebellion, a rebellion of sorts came much later. When he finished the army, he bought himself a motorcycle, despite the protests of his father. Neither persuasion nor threats could change his mind. He himself claimed, “If I don’t have the expected stage of teenage rebellion against my parents now, when will I?”
Otto was desperate; he was in a panic whenever Ronny returned late. In the end he solved it, at least partially, by buying Ronny a secondhand car. Even then Otto couldn’t fall asleep until he heard the car returning.
Ronny served in the army for three years, becoming an officer and tank commander. He participated in the war of Lebanon and fortunately survived it without harm. Here is his description:
The war started on June 6, 1982. Two days before that, I was recalled back to base from my vacation. We organized during Friday night and drove to the border Saturday night, June 5. On Sunday, June 6, we crossed the border into Lebanon north of Nahariya.
We advanced on the Lebanese coastal road through the cities Tsor, Sidon, and Damour. Truce was declared at noon on Thursday, but we were still targeted and bombed with Katyusha rockets a few more times, until calm came at around 1:30.
We took positions on the hills southeast of Beirut, allowed hundreds of thousands to flee the sieged city, and prepared to invade, but fortunately the order never came. We returned to base twenty-eight days after the war started.
Since boyhood he wanted to study psychology. His school friends used to discuss their personal problems with him, and he felt that this was his calling. First he studied sociology and practiced for two years. He had a girlfriend, Orna, and he would visit her kibbutz every weekend. But then he went to the United States to continue his studies in psychology, and they separated. A year later, he came home for the summer vacation and decided to meet Orna. She was studying dance in Jerusalem. Otto was giving a lecture in Jerusalem on that day, so we traveled together. Since Otto would be busy for several hours, I was free to drive Ronny to the university. He went to find the dance department, and I stayed on a bench under a tree. After a while I saw them walking toward me with arms around each other, smiling happily.
That was almost thirty years ago, but they are still as tightly attached now as on that day.
That same year Orna joined him in New Jersey in the States. She switched from dance and studied physiotherapy instead. Both of them are now doctors, she in her profession, and he in his.
Ronny started playing the trumpet as a youth in Hadassim. For several years, he was a member of the Tel Aviv Youth Orchestra. In America he joined a group of retired doctors who played jazz for their own pleasure. After some time he decided, “It’s a waste to play without an audience,” and together with them, he founded a real jazz band. They called themselves the Jazz Doctors and played for many years, several evenings a week, at Café Angelique in Tenafly.
Ronny and his family lived in America for twenty-five years, and their children, Gabriella—nicknamed Gabby—and Daniel, were born there.
A few years ago, they moved back to Israel. Ronny felt obliged to be near me in my old age and also wanted his children to know their grandparents: Orna’s parents and me. Sadly, Grandpa Otto saw only his two-year-old granddaughter, Gabby; Daniel had not yet been born when Otto passed away in 2000.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Michaela
When Otto and I were new lovers, he told me, “I dream of having a daughter who would be like you.”
Michaela came into the world a year after we joined the kibbutz. I had an easy pregnancy and felt almost no discomfort. Of course, this was at a time when mothers did not know if the baby they were carrying was a boy or a girl.
I had to register in advance at the hospital, which was in Hadera, about fifteen kilometers from Givat Chaim. No one owned a car in the kibbutz. To call an expensive ambulance just to convey a healthy mother to the maternity ward in order to give birth was inconceivable.
When my time came on September 17, 1951, at about four o’clock in the morning, Otto went to wake up the truck driver who had agreed to take me to the hospital. His name was Arnošt, a Czech from Náchod—a lovely man who had become our good friend. I climbed the tall step into the cabin and sat down next to him, and we were on our way. It was not yet the custom for fathers to be present at the birth of their babies. All the way, Arnošt was only concerned I should not give birth in the truck. Every few minutes, he glanced at me and asked, “Can you still hold on?”
The nurse at the delivery room looked at me doubtfully. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You don’t look ready to me.”
But I was, and at noon that day, Michaela slipped out with one push. She was small, weighing 2.6 kilograms, but was fully developed and quite pretty. Otto arrived in the afternoon and they let him have a look through the glass door to see the daughter he had been longing for.
Three days later, we were released from the hospital. Next to the exit was a little registry office where they asked me, “What will your daughter be called?”
Without hesitation, I told them, “Michaela.” It was the name I had chosen for my future daughter when I was thirteen years old.
It was in the Terezín ghetto, where my mother and I had lived for a short time in a room full of other women, one of whom had a girl of about five, Michaela, a sweet child whom she called Misha. If ever I have a daughter, I will name her Michaela, I’d decided then.
My little Misha had a special quality. She was so soft and cuddly and silky
smooth that when I held her, she somehow got fused to my body as if she were a part of it. She was extremely pliant, no elbows or knees that would get stuck in sleeves or trousers.
Misha was the favorite of Rachel, the nurse in charge of the six babies in the room. She was an enormously fat woman who loved children, and whenever I came to fetch the baby, she would be holding her and would not want to release her. She herself had two older children, but one day when she was absent, the nurse who substituted for her told us that Rachel had just given birth. No one had noticed that she was pregnant, and she was as obese after the birth as before it.
I nursed Misha for only six weeks; afterward I had no more milk. It was exactly what the surgeon had predicted after Shimon’s birth. He’d told me then that the ducts in my infected breast had been damaged by the surgery and that even the other breast would not produce enough milk for the next children.
But Misha thrived on the bottle, and the advantage was that Otto could replace me when I was too tired or when the weather was bad. He quite welcomed the opportunity to hold the baby while the other mothers suckled their babies with their backs to him. They liked him to be there, because he amused them with his jokes and funny stories.
From the baby house, Misha graduated to the toddlers’ home, again six to a room with one nursery teacher and a helper. There Misha fell in love with Amalia, the blond daughter of a dark-skinned Syrian mother and Hungarian father. The two little girls were constantly together, usually walking with arms around each other. Poor Amalia; some two or three years later, she had a bad accident, which left her face with terrible burn scars. Multiple operations improved her looks, but a few lesions were left for life.
Misha was a warmhearted child, and this became apparent when she was still very young. She loved to give presents to her friends. When she was older, she drew or made little gifts with much imagination and talent. She was heartbroken over her beloved Amalia’s accident.