War and Remembrance (137 page)

Terezin was a pretty town; not, like Auschwitz, an expanse of horse stalls in a sandy marsh. The stone houses and long nineteenth-century barracks set along rectilinear streets pleased the eye, if one did not look inside at the crowds of sick and hungry inhabitants driven out of sight whenever visitors came. Including the soldiers quartered in the barracks, Terezin in normal times could house four or five thousand people. The ghetto averaged fifty or sixty thousand souls. It was like a town on the edge of a flood or earthquake area, overrun with disaster survivors; except that the disaster kept mounting and the survivors piling in, their numbers relieved only by the enormous mortality rate and by the sluice gate “to the east.”

The lectures, the concerts, the plays, the operas, did actually go on. The talented inmates were permitted by the Germans to forget the hunger, the sickness, the crowding, the fear, in these paradisal activities. The cafés and the nightclub existed. There was nothing to eat or drink, but musicians abounded, and the Jews could go through the ghostly motions of peacetime pleasure till their turn came to be shipped off. The library in which Aaron Jastrow worked was a fine one, for the books were all looted from the arriving Jews. There were even shop façades, with windows full of goods stolen from the half-dead throngs drifting by. Naturally, nothing was for sale.

For a while only German Red Cross commissioners were allowed into Theresienstadt. No great effort was needed by the SS to elicit favorable reports from them. However, the very success of the hoax put the Germans in an unanticipated fix. A very pressing demand developed for a visit to the Paradise Ghetto
by neutral Red Cross observers.
This led to the most bizarre episode in Theresienstadt’s bizarre history, the
Verschönerungsaktion,
or Great Beautification. On this Natalie’s fate turned.

N
ATALIE
is unrecognizable at work because a handkerchief masks her face below the eyes. The mica dust drifts from trimming and grinding machines over rows of long tables where women sit all day splitting the laminated mineral into sheets. Natalie is one more bent back in this large shabby array. The work takes dexterity and it is very boring, but not hard.

What the Germans use the stuff for she is not sure. Something to do with electrical equipment. It is evidently a rare material, for scraps and table sweepings go to the grinder, and the powder is crated and shipped to Germany like the trimmed sheets. Her job is to take a block or “book” and split the laminations into thinner, more transparent sheets until the tool will not wedge off another layer; and in the process to avoid tearing a sheet and getting clubbed by the armbanded French-Jewish harridan who patrols her section. Simple enough.

In this long low crowded shed of rough wood she spends eleven hours a day. Dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs hanging on long black wires, unheated and almost as cold as the snowy outdoors, damper because of the muck underfoot and the breath of the close-packed women, stinking from one loathsomely overflowing latrine, which is cleaned out only once a week by the pitiful squad of yellow-starred college professors, writers, composers, and scientists whom the Germans delight to put at hauling ordure; malodorous too from the body smells of the crowded ragged unwashed females who can scarcely get water to drink, let alone to bathe in or to launder their clothes — to a visitor from the outside this shed would seem a very hell. Natalie is used to it.

Most of the women are of refined background like hers. They are Czech, Austrian, German, Dutch, Polish, French, Danish. Terezin is a true melting pot. Many were once wealthy, many are as highly educated as Natalie. The mica factory is for favored women in the ghetto. The grisly ill-defined menace of “transport to the east” hangs over Terezin, much as death haunts normal life. The transport toll is spasmodic, cutting deep wide sudden swaths like a plague; but mica workers and their families do not go. As yet, anyway, they have not.

Most of the women doing this easy handwork are elderly, and Natalie’s assignment to the mica factory suggests some veiled
“protectsia.”
So does
Aaron’s library job. Their chute into Theresienstadt, though baffling and terrible, is not a random mischance. Something is behind it. They do not know what. Meantime, from day to day they endure.

The six o’clock bell.

The machines stop. The bent women get up, store their tools, and shuffle outside in a mob, clutching shawls, sweaters, rags around them. They move stiffly but fast, to get to the food queues while the slops are still warm. Outside, Natalie pulls the handkerchief off an almost unchanged face: sharper, paler, still beautiful, the mouth thinner, the jaw set harder. A brisk wind has swept from these straight snowy streets the prevailing Theresienstadt stench of clogged sewers, random excretions, rotting garbage, and sick filthy people; a slum smell with added gruesome whiffs of the dead from hand-pulled hearses that roll night and day, and of the crematorium beyond the wall that disposes of them; Jews dead of “natural” causes, not murder, at a mortality rate that extermination camps do not greatly surpass.

Between the straight lines of the barrack roofs, as she strikes out across the town to the toddlers’ home, stars glitter overhead. A crescent moon hangs low over the fortress wall, beside a brilliant evening star. Rare clean sweet air rushes into her grateful lungs, and she thinks of Aaron’s wry remark that morning, “Do you know, my dear, that today is Thanksgiving? Take it all in all, we have things to be thankful for.”

She detours around the high wooden walls that shut Jews out of the main square, where she can hear the musicians playing at the SS café. At mealtime the streets are quiet and less crowded, though some of the feeble old people who poke in the rubbish heaps are still creeping around. The long food lines curl from some courtyards into the street. People stand scooping messes from tin dishes into their mouths, eyes popping with eagerness. It is one of the sadder sights of the ghetto, these cultured Europeans gulping slops like dogs.

A lean figure in a long ragged coat and cloth cap comes up beside her.
“Nu, wie gehts?”
(“So, how goes it?”) says the man called Udam.

In Yiddish intonations no longer self-conscious she replies, “How should it go?”

She is beginning to talk the language as readily as her grandmother did. Now and then a Dutch or French inmate will even take her for a Polish Jewess. When she uses English she switches back easily to her old American tones, but they sound odd here. She and Aaron often fall into Yiddish, for he too uses it a lot in the library and in his Talmud course, though he lectures in German and French.

“Jesselson’s string quartet is playing again tonight,” Udam says. “They want us afterward. I have some new material.”

“When can we rehearse?”

“Why not after we see the kids?”

“I teach an English class at seven.”

“It’s simple stuff. Won’t take long.”

“All right.”

Louis is waiting in the doorway of his dormitory room. With a yell of joy, he leaps into her embrace. Feeling his sturdy body in her arms, Natalie forgets mica, boredom, misery, fear. His high spirits flood her and cheer her. Whatever hell winds blow, this is not a flame destined to be snuffed out.

Since his birth, Louis has been the light of her life, but never so much as here. Separated from her in the toddlers’ home amid several hundred children, seeing her for only a few minutes most evenings, regimented by strange women in this damp dark old stone house, sleeping in a wooden box like a coffin, fed coarse scrappy food — though the children’s rations are the best in the ghetto — Louis is thriving like a weed. Other little children pine, sicken, fall into listlessness and stupor, weaken in uncontrollable fits of crying, starve, die. The mortality in this home is terrible. But whether his travels — with the ever-changing water, air, food, bedding, and company — have hardened him, or whether, as she often thinks, the crossbreeding of the tough Jastrows and the tough Henrys has produced a Darwinian super-survivor, Louis is blazing with vitality. He leads in his classes. Finger painting, dancing, singing, are all one to him. He excels without seeming to try. He leads in mischief, too. The house women love him, but he is their despair. More and more he looks like Byron, with his mother’s enormous eyes. His smile, at once enchanting and melancholy, is just his father’s.

This is where she eats, since she takes turns on the night-duty staff. Udam eats here, too. He usually manages to fix things his way, and this is how he spends extra time with his three-year-old daughter. His wife is gone, transported. Tonight the soup is thick with potatoes, spoiled by frost and rotten-tasting, but substantial. As they eat he runs through his new dialogue, while his daughter plays with Louis. The portable puppet theatre is folded away in the basement playroom, and afterward the two children come down to watch them rehearse. Natalie’s puppet show, a Punch and Judy which she got up to amuse the children, has become, with Udam’s corrosive dialogue, a sub-rosa ghetto hit. It has given her more distinction than her American identity, which was briefly a wonder and soon taken for granted. Unlucky or stupid, here she is, and that is that to the ghetto people.

Natalie can become happily and totally absorbed in this revival of a teenage pastime neglected for years: making the dolls, dressing them, manipulating them, working up comic gestures to match Udam’s words. Once she even put on a show in the SS café where he sings. She had to sit trembling through Udam’s salacious German songs at which the boisterous
SS men roared, and some sentimental ballads like “Lili Marlene” that had them all misty-eyed; and then her hands shook so that she could scarcely work the puppets. Happily the show wasn’t a success. Udam left out all his good material, and they weren’t asked again. There are other, far more masterly puppet shows in the ghetto that the SS can commandeer. Natalie’s little display is feeble without Udam’s bite.

Udam is a Polish cantor’s son, a cadaverous crane of a man with burning eyes and a red mop of curly hair. A composer and singer of racy, even obscene songs, he nevertheless conducted the Yom Kippur service in the synagogue. He came to Theresienstadt with the early shipments from Prague, in the Zionist crowd that organized and ran the shadowy Jewish municipality. Berlin and Vienna types are now edging them out, for the SS favors the German Jews. Udam works in the farcical Theresienstadt bank, though it is a fief of these latecoming Jews, who still cling to their sense of superiority and tend to exclude others. Udam knows more about ghetto politics and angles than Natalie can absorb. His name is Josef Smulovitz, but everyone calls him “Udam.” She has even heard the SS address him so.

Tonight he is adding new jokes to their most popular sketch,
The King of Frost-Cuckoo Land.

Natalie puts a crown on Punch, and a very long red nose edged with icicles, and that is the king. Frost-Cuckoo Land is losing a war. The king keeps blaming the reported disasters on the Eskimos in the country. “Kill the Eskimos! Kill them all,” he rages and rages. The comedy lies in the rushing in and out of a minister puppet in a vague uniform, also with an icicle-draped red nose, alternately announcing shortages, rebellions, and defeats, which make the king weep and bellow, and reports of more Eskimos killed at which he jumps with glee. At the end the minister bounces in to declare that all Eskimos have at last been liquidated. The king starts to rejoice, then abruptly roars, “Wait, wait! Now who can I blame? How will I run my war? This is terrible! Rush a plane to Alaska for more Eskimos! Eskimos! I need lots and lots of Eskimos!” Curtain.

Strange to say, the Jews find this crude macabre parallel extremely funny. The disasters resemble the latest news about Germany. The minister reports them in the orotund double-talk of Nazi propaganda. This sort of risky underground humor is a great relief to ghetto life; there is a lot of it, and nobody seems to inform, because it goes on and on.

Natalie works the puppets with bitter zest. She is no more an American Jewess terrified of falling into German talons, and hugging the talisman of her passport for safety. The talisman has failed. The worst has happened. In a strange way she feels freer at heart, and clearer in her mind. Her whole being has a single focus now: to make it through with Louis, and live.

Udam’s new dialogue refers to recent ghetto rumors: Hitler has cancer,
the Germans are running out of oil to fight the war, the Americans will make a surprise landing in France on Christmas Day; the sort of wishful thinking that abounds in Theresienstadt. Natalie works up puppet business to match Udam’s jokes, while his daughter and Louis, to whom the words mean nothing, chortle at the red-nosed dolls. Rehearsal done, she hugs Louis, feeling an invigorating electricity in the embrace, and goes on to her English class.

At the teenage boys’ house lessons proceed day and night. Education of Jewish children is officially forbidden, but there is nothing else for them to do. The Germans do not really check, knowing what the ultimate destiny of the children is, and not caring what noises they make in the slaughter pen. These big-eyed scrawny boys put out a small newspaper, learn languages and instruments, work up theatricals, debate Zionism, sing Hebrew songs. On the other hand, they are for the most part cynical, accomplished scroungers and liars, believe in nothing, know their way around the ghetto like rats, and are sexually very precocious. Their greeting glances sometimes make Natalie uneasy, though in her baggy brown yellow-starred wool suit she considers herself a sexless, not to say a revolting, female object.

But once the boys get down to the lesson they are all sharp attention. They are bright volunteers, beginners, a mere nine of them, who want to know English “to go to America after the war.” Two are missing tonight, off at a rehearsal
of Abduction from the Seraglio.
This ambitious Mozart opera is being undertaken to follow up on the big hit of the ghetto,
The Bartered Bride,
which even the SS enjoyed. Natalie saw a weak performance of this favorite because the cast had just been decimated by a transport. She has even heard that Verdi’s
Requiem
is being rehearsed somewhere in a barracks cellar, though that seems fantastic. The class over, she hurries through the windy starry night to the loft where she will perform.