What World is Left (21 page)

What World is Left
was inspired by the experiences of the author's mother, who was taken from Holland to the concentration camp, Theresienstadt, where this portrait was drawn by the Czech artist, Petr Kien.

A half-hour's drive north of Prague in the Czech Republic is an old, dreary-looking town called Terezin. It has a café on its main square and one small bed-and-breakfast.

But this place is haunted by ghosts. During the Second World War, when Germany occupied what was then Czechoslovakia, Terezin was known by its German name, Theresienstadt. Originally built as a garrison town in 1780 by Emperor Joseph II, and named for his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, it was used as a concentration camp during the Nazi regime. Many prominent Jewish European artists and musicians were among those imprisoned here.

Terezin was designed to house seven thousand soldiers. But during the Holocaust, the town had nearly ten times as many inhabitants. It is estimated that at its most crowded, there were four prisoners per square meter.

And yet, seen from a certain perspective, the prisoners who were sent here—mostly Jews, but also
political prisoners—were the lucky ones. Though more than thirty thousand prisoners died in Theresienstadt, most of malnutrition and typhus, the camp was not a death camp like Sobibor or Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were no gas chambers.

In those bleak days, the trick was to find some way—any way—to remain in Terezin. This despite the watery broth prisoners lined up for at lunch and supper; the bedbugs and the lice; and the inhuman hours spent at tedious, often backbreaking, work. That was because Theresienstadt's inhabitants suspected— rightly—that to be sent on one of the frequent train transports east was worse.

Theresienstadt was also the scene of an elaborate hoax. In 1943, after the Danish Red Cross announced its plan to send a commission to visit the camp, the Nazi high command decided to gussy up the place. The work, known as the Embellishment, was carried out by prisoners, who built false storefronts, erected a monument and planted sapling poplars in the main square.

The Danish Red Cross commission was duped. As for the Nazis, they were so pleased with the success of their plan that, in 1944, they made a propaganda movie about the camp. Directed by Jewish German filmmaker Kurt Geron, the movie was called
The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews
. Its goal was to convince the world that Jews were prospering in the concentration camps.

My mother spent a little over two years in Theresienstadt. She, her two siblings and their parents
survived thanks to my grandfather, Jo Spier, a Dutch artist who, among other tasks, made propaganda drawings for the Nazis. My mother was fourteen when she was sent to Theresienstadt; she was sixteen when the camp was liberated in 1945.

Until the winter of 2007, my mother never shared the story of her experience in Theresienstadt. But when the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec awarded me a grant to write a book based on my mother's wartime experience, my mother courageously agreed to revisit her past and share it with me—and by extension, you.

What World is Left
is a work of fiction inspired by true events. Several of the scenes in this book are based on stories my mother told me. Others were inspired by an illustrated book my grandfather published in Dutch shortly before his death, entitled
Dat Alles Heeft Mijn Oog Gezien
[
All This My Eyes Have Seen
] (Elsevier, 1978).

I have made every effort to be historically accurate throughout
What World is Left
, but the central characters and their inner struggles are entirely imagined. For me, both as a reader and a writer, fiction is a way to help me make sense of the world and the people in it.

Montreal, March, 2008

The Artists of Terezin
. By Gerald Green. Hawthorne Books, 1969.

Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry.
By J. Presser. Trans. by Arnold Pomerans. Wayne State University Press, 1988.

Ghetto Theresienstadt
. By Zdenek Lederer. Edward Goldston & Son Ltd., 1953.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Theresienstadt Concentration Camp 1942-1944
. Edited by Hana Volavkova. Schocken Books, 1993.

In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin
. Edited by Cara DeSilva. Trans. by Bianca Steiner Brown and David Stern. Jason Aronson, 1996.

Music in Terezin
. By Joza Karas. Beaufort Books, 1985.

One Man's Valor: Leo Baeck and the Holocaust
. By Anne E. Neimark. E.P. Dutton, 1986.

Seeing Through “Paradise”: Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp.
Massachusetts College of Art, 1991.

The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich
. Translated by Laurence Kutler. Edited by Saul S. Friedman. University of Kentucky Press, 1992.

Theresienstadt: Hitler's Gift to the Jews.
Translated by Susan E. Cornyak-Spatz. Edited by Joel Shatzky. University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

University Over the Abyss: Lectures in Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942-1944.
Verba Publishers, 2004.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/ aa012599g.htm
(A virtual tour of modern-day Terezin.)

www.holocaust-trc.org

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
/jsource/vjw/netherlands (A virtual tour of Jewish history in the Netherlands.)

www.mhmc.ca
(Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre)

www.pamatnik-terezin.cz
(The website for the Terezin Memorial established in Terezin in 1947.)

www.ushmm.org
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In addition to writing novels for young adults, Monique Polak teaches English and Humanities at Marianopolis College in Montreal and is a frequent contributor to the Montreal
Gazette
and other Canwest publications across the country. Monique, who has a grown daughter, lives in Montreal with her husband. Visit her website at
www.moniquepolak.com
.