What World is Left (10 page)

Theo laughs and makes a whinnying sound. “Tell me more about your palomino,” he says.

But a Nazi soldier hears Theo's laughter. “Shut up, you useless stinking Jews!” the soldier barks.

Theo freezes in his spot. I am so used to their insults, I don't flinch.

“Twenty-five thousand, four hundred.” There are three more Nazis: the one who is counting and
two others with clipboards, who are recording information.

I turn to look behind us. The rows extend so far I can't see all the way to the end. I knew the camp was full, but to see so many prisoners all together makes my breath catch in my throat. To think there could be so much misery in one small place!

“I have to pee,” I tell Mother.

She sighs. “Can you hold it in?”

“I'll try.”

But I have already been holding it in. When I can't manage any longer, I know I have to find a latrine. Only there aren't any on the field. I press my thighs together to make the discomfort go away. But the cold air and the rain only increase my sense of urgency.

Mother notices. “People are going there,” she says, pointing to her right. “Shall I come with you?”

I shake my head no.

Mother is right. In the direction she has pointed I see people squatting on the muddy ground as they relieve themselves. I cringe at the sight of them. What have the Nazis reduced us to?

I rush to join the group. When I pull down my pants, the cold air shoots up against my naked buttocks. For the first time, I'm grateful Franticek is no longer in Theresienstadt. If he could see me now, I think, he might never want to kiss me again.

The pee I make takes so long I think it will never end. I lower my face and let my cheeks warm up a
little in the steam my pee produces as it hits the cold earth. There is nothing I detest more than the latrines at Theresienstadt, yet now I long for them and for the little squares of magazine we use for toilet paper.

“Can't we go home yet?” Theo asks.

“Soon,” Mother tells him.

But Mother is wrong. Just when we think the Nazis have finished their count, we learn they have decided to start all over again. Their numbers have not tallied. “Why couldn't they get it right the first time?” people wonder out loud.

“Shh,” a voice says. “Don't let them hear you say that.”

“It's not about the count,” someone else calls out, “it's about torturing us.”

Theo leans heavily against my side. Had he been better fed in Theresienstadt, he might be taller than me by now.

I push Theo away. He's hurting me, leaning on me this way. “Stop it,” I mutter.

I can't let out my anger against the Nazis—for keeping us here in the camp, and now for forcing us to line up and be counted like animals—but at least I can be angry with Theo.

Just when I think I can't take the waiting and the damp cold any longer, Mother hands me a lump of sugar.
There is one for each of us, and one left over for Frau Davidels. Now I have to make a decision: whether to bite down on the lump or let it dissolve on my tongue. Biting down will be best flavor-wise, but in the end, I decide to let it dissolve on my tongue. The taste will be less intense, but the pleasure will last longer.

Soon the sweetness begins to fill my mouth, making its way to the back of my throat. Anything good, any bit of pleasure, makes me think of Franticek. “People have to take what they can get,” he told me.

I can hear Theo crunch down on his lump of sugar.

“You're wasting it,” I tell him.

Theo's eyes are closed, but at least he's stopped hanging on me. The sugar gives him a little energy, as it does to me. My body feels as if it's coming back to life. But the feeling doesn't last long. And when I grow tired again, I am even more tired than before.

Someone in front of us moans. About two hundred meters ahead, a woman collapses. Her neighbors try to pull her to her feet. But they don't get to her in time. The entire field seems to grow suddenly still as a Nazi soldier rushes toward the fallen woman, his hand on the pistol in his pocket. The rest of us watch in horror as he takes out his gun, cocks it and shoots the woman in the head.

The sound of the shot rings through the air even after blood begins to seep from her ear. No one dares cry out for fear we might be next.

Just when I think things cannot get any worse, I hear a loud whirring in the air. “German airplanes!” someone shouts. “Bombers!”

Bombers? Why would the Nazis send bombers now?

We crouch together on the wet ground, crying and shaking. The fear eats at my insides like a parasite, hollowing me out until it feels as if there is nothing left of me. Except pure fear. Pure cold fear.

The airplanes dip down over the field like hawks swooping in on their prey. One comes so close I can feel the wind of its wings and hear the screws on the wings rattle. The noise of the engines is almost too much to bear. A woman near me screams, but I can't hear her over the engines. I can only see her mouth open in terror.

I try to block the sound by covering my ears. But it doesn't help. Surely, they are going to kill us. Is this, I wonder, how my life will end? Just like that—without any final words or ceremony of any kind? I try to think of Franticek. I try to remember his kiss, but the fear is too big. It's swallowing me whole.

Now there is another plane coming toward me, headed right for where I am crouched on the ground. I flatten myself against the earth. Mother and Theo are with me, but all I can feel is my own heart beating.

Then, just like that, the airplanes take off, disappearing into the night sky as quickly as they came. My ears are still ringing. “It was just a way to frighten us,” Frau Davidels whispers.

The night grows even darker. But wherever I look, I see the dim outlines of people.

“I heard one of the Nazis say there are already three hundred dead,” a voice whispers. Some of the dead are elderly, too weak to last through the second census count. Some are trampled by the crowd. Some give up. The rest are shot.

When we file past the bodies, we turn our heads away. It is a sign of respect, but I know, too, that not to look at them is also a sign of cowardice. I don't have the courage to look at the corpses, to see their faces. It is too easy to imagine myself there with them on the wet grass.

At about four in the morning, an old man with a gray beard pushes his way through the crowd. “What do you want, old man?” someone asks. “Don't draw attention to yourself or they'll shoot you. Just like they did to that poor woman before.”

When the old man turns toward us, I notice his eyes are bright blue. “I'm not afraid of being shot. Besides, I have something to tell you...a message you need to pass on to the others waiting in line.”

“He's probably senile,” a woman's voice calls out. “What does he know?”

“Hush,” Fraulein Davidels tells the woman. “Don't you know who the old man is?”

“Why should I know him?” the woman answers.

“He's Rabbi Baeck—Leo Baeck—the chief rabbi of Berlin.”

“What do rabbis know?” the woman continues.
“It's because of them and their religion we're in this mess.”

“What is it you want to tell us, Rabbi Baeck?” Frau Davidels asks, raising her voice.

“Look up ahead,” he says. We all look at the mass of bodies milling in front of us. “Do you see the stars?”

I look up at the sky, but the rabbi is wrong, there are no stars. Not one. Perhaps the stars witnessed what went on here tonight and decided not to shine.

Other people look up. When Rabbi Baeck speaks again, his voice sounds less patient. “Not up in the sky. Ahead of you!”

And suddenly I understand what Rabbi Baeck is talking about. Up ahead, extending all the way to the horizon are row after row of stars. Yellow ones—the stars we are forced to wear on our shirts and jackets.

“The stars meant to humiliate us Jews provide illumination in the gloom. They're a sign,” Rabbi Baeck says.

“A sign of what?” the same woman who sounded so angry before asks.

“A sign we mustn't ever give up.”

It is dawn when the Nazis finally let us leave the field. My eyelids ache from tiredness. When Theo stumbles, I stop to help him up. I'm too tired now to be angry with him.

Frau Davidels and Mother hold each other by the arm. Now that our ordeal is over, I start to think more
clearly. That's when I realize I didn't see Hannelore during the census count. I hope she and her mother are all right.

When Frau Davidels yawns, I can see the gold crowns on her back teeth. Hannelore's mother told her that when prisoners die in Theresienstadt and are cremated, other prisoners are forced to scour the ashes in search of gold fillings. The thought makes me shiver.

A few strands of Frau Davidels' dark hair are stuck to her cheek. “It's nearly time to get to work,” she tells me when she catches me looking at her.

“Work? Do you really think we'll have to work after the night we've had?”

Frau Davidels shakes her head. “It's inhuman to make us work after such a night, and that's precisely why they'll make us do it.” She pats my shoulder. “Perhaps,” she adds, “you'll have a chance to doze a little in your cauldron.”

“Forty thousand.” People are repeating the number, which is how many prisoners have been counted during the night. We knew the camp was overcrowded. But forty thousand prisoners crammed into a city built to house seven thousand! No wonder there is so little space and so little water! And though no one says it, we all know what the results of the census mean: Soon there will be another transport.

As Theo and I turn the corner onto Jagergasse, a woman with dark hair cranes her head to look at me. She holds a child in her arms, and another child, a little
boy, is tugging on her long skirt. Why does the woman seem familiar? And then, all at once, I place her. It is Franticek's girlfriend, the one with whom I'd seen him go into the cubbyhole. I want to turn away, but I can't. I am too curious. How did she and her children manage during the census count? Where is her husband? And does she miss Franticek as much as I do?

Perhaps it is my imagination, but I think I catch her eyeing my necklace. Franticek's necklace.

I raise one hand to my neck and let my fingers take hold of the worn leather. There. If she did not notice the necklace before, she will notice it now.

Franticek touched this necklace. But then I realize with a start that he touched her too. I burn with jealousy. And then I remind myself what Franticek told me: that what he and this woman did together were “animal things.” Those were his very words. There was nothing animal about
our
feelings for each other. It was different for Franticek and me.

To my surprise, the woman smiles at me. A small smile, but there is no question about it: she is smiling. I can't bring myself to smile back. In spite of what I've tried to tell myself, I am still jealous. She knows Franticek in a way I never did, in a way that perhaps I never shall.

When a few minutes later, Mother opens the door to our quarters and lets us in, I nearly weep. Not because I am sad. No, these are tears of joy. I am so relieved to be back in our miserable home. Eventually, every animal grows used to his cage.

An old woman said...”

“Did you hear what the old woman said?”

Theresienstadt is full of old women. Even the women who aren't old—Mother, Frau Davidels and Hannelore's mother—all look old. But when people discuss what an old woman has been saying, they aren't talking about any one old woman. No. “An old woman said...” is camp code. It means there is news.

So I prick up my ears one winter morning in 1944 when I hear two prisoners mention the old woman. There is a layer of hard-packed snow on the ground, and I am sipping coffee outside one of the kitchens near our quarters. Only it isn't really coffee. It is what we call ersatz, or make-believe, coffee. It is made of chicory and has a mild grainy flavor. But like everyone else, I've long forgotten the taste of real coffee. This at least warms my fingers. I take small sips; bigger ones hurt my throat.

As I look around I think how coffee isn't all that is make-believe at Theresienstadt. The whole camp is make-believe. The stores are make-believe. The bank is
make-believe. And sometimes, it seems to me, even our hope is make-believe. People continue to say the end of the war is coming soon, but when they speak, I have the feeling they are only pretending to be hopeful. Making believe for the good of young people like me, and also for themselves.

So what does the old woman have to say?

Commandant Rahm has met with the Council of Elders. The Nazis have decided to introduce a new program: the Embellishment. I am puzzled. Embellishment? There is nothing “belle” (I know the word “embellishment” comes from the French word for beauty) about this vile gray place. Perhaps Father will know more. He's been back home with us for nearly a month. He still wobbles a little when he walks and when he comes home from the studio, I notice his fingers sometimes tremble. But the main thing is, he is able to do his work, and he's no longer on reduced rations.

So that night, when we are pulling the bedbugs off our blankets, I ask Father about the Embellishment. I can tell from the way Mother shakes out Theo's blanket that she and Father have already discussed the news.

Father sits down on the edge of my mattress. “The Nazis are expecting important visitors—representatives from the Danish Red Cross. They want Theresienstadt to appear to be the model city they've boasted about.”

“That's crazy,” I say. “Some model city! It's more like a model of misery, is what it is.”

“There's good news,” says Father. “Commandant Rahm has promised to make a number of improvements to the camp. We're supposed to get a playground for the children.”

“With swing sets and a carousel?” Theo interrupts.