What World is Left (2 page)

Transport. Just thinking the word makes me shiver and scrub harder. I didn't have to be in Theresienstadt long to understand that what everyone here fears most—more even than death itself—is finding a thin strip of paper with your name and number, and the word
Included!
on it—the sign that you are being sent on a transport. All I know for certain about the transports is that they are headed east. “To other ghettos like this one. Only better,” the Czech gendarmes assure us. But something about the way the gendarmes refuse to look us in the eye when they talk about transports makes me suspect they are lying, trying to keep the lambs quiet before we are sent to slaughter.

Besides, if Frau Davidels' son was still alive, wouldn't he have written by now to tell her so?

The one goal—the only goal—at Theresienstadt is to keep your name, and the names of those you love, off the transport lists. But transports are as much a part of life here as bedbugs and latrines.

Father told Theo and me how Emperor Joseph II built Terezin in honor of his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. How the old empress would turn in her grave if she knew what had become of her son's gift to her! It was the Nazis who renamed this place Theresienstadt.
Now it stinks of sweat and human waste. It is so crowded with prisoners there is no room to move about freely. And because trainloads of Jews keep arriving, others have to be shipped out.

I scrub at the crusty patch of black until it comes loose from the side of the cauldron and falls to the bottom. Considering the watery broth we get for lunch and dinner, it is a wonder the cauldrons get dirty at all. I look down at the little pile near my feet. Nothing but burnt crusts. I tried eating some on my first day in the diet kitchen, but the crusts tasted bitter, and they didn't make the hollowness in my belly go away.

“We're the lucky ones,” Father told Theo and me when they pushed us out of the train at Buhosovice near Theresienstadt. “We're going to the model city.”

Some model city! I shake out my arm to make the cramping go away. It is Father and Mother's fault we ended up here! How could they have been so foolish? Why hadn't we left Holland when it was still possible for Jews to leave the country? Parents were supposed to look after their children, but Father and Mother haven't done a very good job of it, have they?

Something inside my stomach does a flip. Only this time, it isn't hunger.

No, it's like the feeling I had at home when I went into Father's studio and opened one of his precious jars of paint. I dipped the tip of my finger into the thick red liquid and took a deep whiff of the paint. It smelled like chalk. Father seldom loses his temper, but he is very
particular when it comes to his studio—and especially his precious art supplies.

“Who touched the magenta?” he called down in a booming voice. By then, Theo and I were at the kitchen table. Mother was at the stove, stirring a little sugar into the red cabbage and onions she was making for our lunch.

Theo shrugged. Mother pretended not to hear. At first I didn't say a word. But then I came up with an idea. The one person who wouldn't stand up for herself if I put the blame on her.

“It must have been Sara!” I called upstairs. At that point, Sara had been with us for about four months. She was Jewish and her parents had sent her from Germany when they felt the political situation there was becoming dangerous. They were sure she'd be safe in Holland. And Father and Mother had agreed to let her stay so long as she helped with the housework.

I knew it wasn't nice of me to blame Sara, but I did it anyhow.

“Sara!” Father's voice boomed even louder now. “I've told you before: never ever touch my paints!”

Sara must have been upstairs, changing the sheets on one of our beds. From downstairs, I couldn't make out her reply to Father. All I could hear was the sound of her voice as she apologized for something she hadn't done. At the time, I felt relieved. Better for Father to get upset with Sara than me. But now, scrubbing the cauldron, I wished I hadn't put the blame on Sara.

“Here's the scrubber, Hannelore. Make sure you get the cauldron perfectly clean. It's a matter of hygiene.” Frau Davidels' voice takes me away from my memories of Sara: the way her fingers sometimes trembled when she dusted Father's books and how carefully she folded the laundry, rolling each pair of socks into a neat ball.

Who in the world is Hannelore? By now, I know everyone who works in the diet kitchen, but I've never met a Hannelore. I want to see her, to find out whether she is my age, but of course I can't see anything from inside my cauldron. And so my friendship with Hannelore begins before I even lay eyes on her.

“Hannelore,” I whisper when I hear Frau Davidels' steps disappear down the tiled corridor.

At first, Hannelore does not answer. So I try again, only a little louder. “Hannelore, how old are you?” I ask.

When Hannelore finally speaks, she has a tiny voice that makes me think of a mouse. I wonder whether Hannelore has small dark eyes and a pointy chin. I hope she doesn't have a tail! And if she has one, I wonder how she manages to hide it under her clothes or what she does with it when goes to sleep.

“I'm fourteen,” Hannelore answers from inside her cauldron.

“Me too!” I tell her, unable to hide my excitement. What were the chances we would be the very same age? It has been so long since I've had a friend to open
my heart to. And if Hannelore is my age and works in the diet kitchen, we will certainly become friends. Best friends even. I imagine us lining up for soup together, huddling to keep warm. The guards will never let us link arms, but we can stand close to each other and exchange stories about the boys we like. I can tell her all about Franticek Halop. How handsome he is and how sometimes, when I pass him in the street, he smiles at me.

“My arm is tired,” Hannelore says. Then she makes a sniffling sound.

“We're lucky to be here.” My voice is sharper than I intend, but what surprises me most is how much I sound like Father. It could be him speaking from inside my cauldron. It's odd, because I hate Father's habit of turning everything into a lesson, and now I'm doing it myself. “They could have made us clean latrines,” I tell Hannelore. “Scrubbing cauldrons is a pleasure compared to that.”

Hannelore sniffles again. I'm not sure I can be friends with such a crybaby.

For a little while, all I do is scrub. I can feel my lips turning to a pout. This Hannelore has already disappointed me. She is the one to pick up our conversation. “Where do you come from?” she wants to know.

“Broek,” I tell her, but then I realize she might not know where that is. I can tell from her accent that Hannelore is German. Perhaps she's never visited Holland. “Broek is in Holland,” I tell her. “Not far from Amsterdam.”

“I'm from Hamburg.” Hannelore's voice sounds less tiny. “How did you end up in this place?”

“Girls!” Frau Davidels is back. I can hear someone else's footsteps too. It must be a Nazi supervisor. “No chatting!” Frau Davidels says. “Concentrate on your cleaning! Or else!”

I hear Hannelore sniffle. I imagine she isn't used to adults being stern with her. She must be a pampered girl. Maybe she is an only child, the long-awaited offspring of older parents. I can see them in my head. The mother is mousy. The father listens to Bach and smokes a pipe. They never raise their voices when they speak to her. No, Hannelore is their princess.

The way my mind works almost makes me laugh. “That Anneke is always inventing stories in her head,” Opa, who is my father's father, used to say about me when he knew I was listening. He was teasing, but I know that in some way, he had paid me a compliment. I cannot paint like Father, but I can invent stories. And certainly that is something.

Hannelore's question gets me thinking: How
did
we end up in this place?

I reach up with the brush and scrub at a troublesome bit of crust. We've been in Theresienstadt for only a month, and already it is getting harder to remember our old life. What brought us here, to this so-called model city?

Of course they sent us here because we are Jews. In my case, though, that seems particularly unfair. Judaism means nothing to me. It's true I'm a Jew, but I'm a Dutch girl, a Hollander first. I've never stepped foot inside a synagogue, unless you count one visit to the old, gray stone synagogue in Zutphen where my opa lives. Theo and I only went there to see the stone outside, the one that was laid by Isaac Van Raalte, Opa's father, our great-grandfather. He was the last of the religious Van Raaltes.

When Mother and I sometimes ran errands in Waterlooplein, the part of Amsterdam where the Orthodox Jews live, I felt as distant from them—with
their prayer shawls draped over their shoulders, the men with long side locks—as if they lived on Mars.

That is about all Judaism means to me. That and the dry crackers Mother sometimes offered us in springtime. “Matzoh,” she called them. All I knew was that the crackers tasted awful until they were slathered with a thick layer of sweet butter and sprinkled with sugar.

Judaism is a subject I never thought much about before the war. I was too busy living my life, going to school, meeting up with friends and reading poetry. As for God—what need had I for Him?

Now that I'm in Theresienstadt, I've decided it's a good thing I was never a believer. Otherwise I'd have lost my faith in God. What kind of God would make the skin on an ordinary girl's fingers burn from scrubbing? What kind of God would invent latrines and guards with guns? No, I'm glad I have no faith to lose.

When we learned from Sara's family about the mistreatment of German Jews, we thought it was disgraceful, but we never worried for ourselves. Holland was far from Germany, and besides, wouldn't the many dikes on the coast of our little country keep us safe?

When we were younger, before Theo was old enough for school, the two of us would play in Father's studio while Mother prepared dinner. Father said he liked our company—as long as we didn't fight or meddle with his art supplies. Sometimes as a special treat, he let me change the water where he dipped his brushes. I'd walk down the hallway, carrying the little jar of water turned
to blackish brown soup from the combination of all the colors Father had used. I remember feeling as important as if I were carrying the Holy Grail. What Jewish girl thinks such a thing? Not a religious one, that's for sure.

Sometimes, when Father's pen stopped making its scratching sounds and he laid his paint brushes aside, lining them up from shortest to tallest, Father would show us what he'd drawn that afternoon. Of course, it was really me he wanted to show his work to. Theo was too young to appreciate it.

The memory of one drawing comes to me now: a drawing that changed our lives. In it, a scowling man with a dark mustache climbs a stepladder. He is holding a paintbrush, and there is a can of paint by his feet. Underneath, in Father's tidy black script, are the words:
If only he'd stayed a housepainter
.

“The man's mustache is funny,” Theo said when Father showed us the drawing.

“Who is he?” I asked Father. Father's drawings appeared from Monday through Friday on page three of the
Telegraaf
, the Amsterdam newspaper. His work was almost always funny, but this time, I didn't see the joke.

It was dusk, and a shadow crossed Father's face. “It's Adolf Hitler,” Father explained.

“Hitler?”

“A madman who's come to power in Germany,” was all Father said as he arranged his jars of paint in a neat row.

In the end, our dikes did not keep us safe. In May of 1940, the Nazis, hungry to swallow up more of Europe, invaded Holland. The
moffen
—that's what we called the Germans because of the furry muffs they wore to keep their hands warm in winter—came rolling in on their big gray tanks like a herd of angry elephants. I was almost too afraid to look. My knees shook when I heard the rumble of the tanks. How could this be happening in Holland? I'd studied wars in history class, but somehow, I never dreamt I'd see one up close. Five days later, Holland capitulated.

That was when Sara disappeared. Packed up her little suitcase and left early one morning without even bothering to say good-bye. She knew better than any of us what the Nazis were capable of. Did she somehow manage to escape from Holland? We never received word from her, but I like to think she found a way out of the country. I imagined her in London. I'd been to Paris on holiday with my parents and Theo, but never to London. Perhaps Sara had found work there as a housemaid, or fallen in love with a handsome widower who spoke with a British accent. She loved his children as if they were her own, and they called her Mama, nearly forgetting their own mother who'd perished from some terrible disease. Consumption, yes, it was consumption. Such a tragedy.

There I went...inventing stories again.

Once the Nazis took power, life in Holland got worse and worse for us Jews. We were forbidden to enter public parks or visit Christian homes. I'll never forget the night we were turned away when we went for dinner to the Port van Cleef in Amsterdam.

“I'm so sorry, Meneer Van Raalte,” Jan, the head waiter, told us, pointing to a sheet of paper tacked onto the restaurant's wooden door. A lump formed in my throat when I read the words on the sheet:
No Jews allowed
.

Jan refused to meet Father's eye. “Rules are rules,” Jan said softly.

Mother turned her back and began marching down the street toward Central Station. “I'd prefer to eat beef steak at home anyhow,” she called out.

“Yes!” I raised my voice so Jan would hear me. “And Mother's won't be dry like the ones you serve at the Port van Cleef.”

Later, we would not be able to ride cars or trams, or even swim in the canal behind our house. Not being allowed to swim felt even more unfair than being turned away from the Port van Cleef. On hot summer afternoons, Theo and I listened from behind the curtains as the neighbor children splashed in the canal outside.