What World is Left (6 page)

“Did you kiss him?” I wanted to know.

Hannelore flushed.

“I suppose that means yes,” I said, and we both laughed.

A group of Nazis is marching down the middle of the square, headed toward us. The buckles on their boots gleam in the afternoon sun. They march in perfect
unison as if they are listening to the beat of some faraway drum.

“We'll say I helped you use the latrine. That you're ill, and I'm taking you back to the barracks before I return to the diet kitchen.” Hannelore's voice is shaking.

“We haven't done anything wrong,” I tell her.

Hannelore stops walking. For a moment, she looks me in the eye. “Who of us here has done anything wrong?”

But the Nazis pay no attention to us. They have other business to attend to. From the corner of the street where our barrack is, we watch as they continue their march.

“Please, please. No!” we hear a man wail.

And then the familiar “
Raus
!
Raus
!”

My stomach clenches.

Soon, there are more pleading voices and what sounds like a gunshot. My whole body stiffens with fear. So does Hannelore's. But still, we are curious. Holding onto each other tightly, Hannelore and I cross the street so we can get a better look. In the distance, we can see the Nazi soldiers we spotted earlier. Only now they've stopped marching. They have rounded up three men and are leading them down one of the side streets. Three Jews. One of them is bald. Like Father.

Things start to look blurry to me again, the way they did in the morning when I got down from my bunk. It's as if I can feel my heart beating in my throat.
“Are they taking them to the
Kleine Festung
?” I manage to ask Hannelore. The
Kleine Festung
, or Little Fortress, is located just outside of Theresienstadt. It is where prisoners are taken when they break the camp rules. But Father hasn't broken any rules. At least none that I know of.

“I don't think so,” Hannelore says.

“What if that bald man is my father?” I whisper. My forehead feels even hotter than it did when I got up this morning.

Hannelore doesn't lift her eyes from the scene ahead of us. “Of course they don't have your father. Your father's a famous artist. He's on the list of prominent prisoners. They're protected—for now at least.”

I feel the tension begin to drain out of me. Hannelore is right. The man with the bald head can't be my father.

“Look, look!” Hannelore says. I gasp as I watch and listen. There is shouting, muffled cries and then an eerie silence. Two of the Nazis hoist the three prisoners onto a plywood platform. I can hardly breathe.

“They're hanging them!” Hannelore is nearly shouting. Her dark eyes look like they're about to pop out of her head.

I turn my head away. I've seen the wooden gallows on one of the smaller squares near the main one. But I have never seen it in use, always believing it was just another way of frightening us prisoners, of making sure we followed orders.

I try to concentrate on the dust motes floating near my knees. I am afraid to look up. There are so many
dust motes. I try counting them. Eighteen, nineteen... Where do dust motes come from? My head feels heavy from so much leaning down. Count the dust motes, I tell myself. Don't look up.

“One man's tongue is hanging out of his mouth. It's purple. Like a dog's,” Hannelore says. Her voice is quieter now, but I can tell she's angry.

I still refuse to look up. “You can't possibly see that from here,” I whisper.

It is not until nighttime that we learn why the three men were hanged. One did not tip his hat when a Nazi officer passed. One tried to smuggle a letter to his wife. And one stole a potato. I wonder whether he was the one with the bald head—and the purple tongue.

If only I could cry. I'd cry for those three dead men, and also for myself and for Hannelore who watched them die.

But my throat hurts too much. It's as if the tears I cannot cry have settled at the bottom of my throat and are making it throb.

It is a sticky August afternoon. Even the flies are struggling in the heat, buzzing with less vigor than usual. By now, after four months in the camp, I've almost stopped thinking about our claw-foot bathtub in Broek. The closest I've come to a bath is the occasional pail of gray water and a waxy piece of soap that doesn't lather when I use it. The smell of sweat—mine and everyone else's—permeates the air. And like all the other indignities, after a while, I hardly notice it anymore.

Mother and I are packing our satchels. I haven't told Hannelore about our new living arrangements. I feel too guilty about leaving her behind in the barracks. After all my good fortune, for that's what it feels like, all has to do with my father. Hannelore's father died before the war. “It's just as well he didn't live to see what happened to his beloved Germany,” Hannelore told me when she spoke about him. Now it is just her and her mother and a frail uncle, who is housed in one of the men's barracks.

We are moving to our own quarters on Jagergasse, a narrow alley three blocks behind the main square. Best of all, Father and Theo are coming too.

When we meet them at the front door of our new home on Jagergasse, I feel as if I might fall over from happiness. Father's face is thin and Theo's skin is sallow, but we are together again.

For a moment, I think of Hannelore and the spot in the barracks where she sleeps. Tonight, some other girl will lie in my old spot. The women's tongues will wag when they realize Mother and I are gone. When they learn we have moved to Jagergasse and are together with Father and Theo, the women will wonder how we managed to secure such an arrangement.

No doubt some of them will say we should have stayed in the barracks with them to show our solidarity. Part of me wonders how things would be different had Father refused the Council of Elders' offer of the quarters on Jagergasse.

The Council of Elders is the group of prisoners who help govern Theresienstadt. They are Jews, most of them professors or medical doctors from places like Prague, Berlin or Amsterdam. The council oversees such things as the allocation of living quarters, the division of labor, the division of rations, the water supply system and the bogus bank. They are also responsible for compiling the transport lists.

If we refused to leave our barracks, the other prisoners might have taken us for heroes.

But when I see Father and Mother kiss on the lips, I feel sure we are doing the right thing. Besides, I tell myself, had any of the gossiping women in the barracks been given a similar offer, surely they would have packed their satchels and left straightaway for Jagergasse.

The four of us open the door to our room. Though it is dark and stinks of mildew, we all know how lucky we are to have it. A room to ourselves! The artists' studio is two floors up. Our new quarters, allocated by the Council of Elders, are a reward for Father's hard work. He has been working himself to the bone.

While Mother keeps count of who gets soup, and Theo stokes the fires in one of the workshops, and I scrub in the diet kitchen, Father works long days in the artists' studio. Mostly, he tells us, he restores old paintings, ones the Nazis have looted from Jewish homes. Sometimes he draws charts or makes signs.

Though Father's work is less dirty than cleaning latrines or stoking fires, it's far from easy. He cannot make mistakes or waste paper. And he must face the same kinds of humiliation as the rest of us.

Last week, Father made signs for the bathrooms in the Nazis' new mess hall:
herren
and
damen
, the German words for men and women. He told us how he was on a ladder in the mess hall, hanging his signs when two Nazis and their families came in. It was one of the children's birthdays, and the others were carrying gifts.

“It was a strange experience,” Father told us on our Sunday visit, “to see those officers with their wives and
children, behaving like normal men. But then, one of the women spotted me on the ladder. ‘What's that ugly Jew doing here?' she asked, pointing her finger at me. ‘Get him out at once or he'll ruin our party!' And I skulked out of the mess hall, like a dog with his tail between his legs.”

Father looked crestfallen when he told us the story. For a moment, I wished I could scoop him up in my arms and comfort him. But then he'd turned to me and said, “All that matters is that we are still together.” Though my heart was breaking for him, I knew he was right.

Mother pushes open the window at the back of the apartment. It looks out on a pile of rubble. Across the way is the supplies barracks. Not that it has much to offer in the way of supplies. The barracks is stocked with discards from the
Schleuse
. But if someone needs a cane or a piece of rotting wood, this is the place to find it.

Theo runs in circles around the apartment. “Stop!” Mother cries out, grabbing him from behind. “You're making me dizzy.” Then she covers his head with kisses. “My Theo,” she says, rumpling his hair. “How I've missed you.”

The apartment is only one room, but Mother has found a tattered cotton sheet in the supplies barrack, and soon it is hanging across the middle of the room. “This will be your's and Theo's side,” she explains. “This will be mine and Father's. That way we can have some privacy.”

There is an electric hot plate and a bathroom, though it has no running water. But there are just as many bedbugs and fleas as there were in the barracks. Before bedtime, the four of us work hard to tear the bedbugs' bodies from our blankets. Theo and I crush them on the floor. But now that it is dark, the bugs are back in full force.

I hear the soft murmur of Mother and Father's voices from behind the curtain. “Stupid bugs!” Theo curses. “Goddamn Jew bugs!”

“Stop it, Theo,” I tell him. “We need to sleep.” How could I have forgotten how annoying Theo is? And to think that he is calling the bugs “Jew bugs”!

“Don't argue,” Father says from behind the curtain. “All that matters is that we are still together.”

When I wake up the next morning, Theo is gone. I nearly cry out until I hear the familiar sound of his breathing.

Theo has gone to sleep in the bathtub.

“Hardly any bedbugs there,” he announces as if he is Christopher Columbus and has discovered some exotic foreign land.

“Are you upset with me?” I ask Hannelore.

Our faces are pressed against the shop window. One of the streets behind the center square is lined with small stores, though in reality they are more storefronts than
actual stores. The grocery store, for example, stocks nothing but mustard. Jars and jars of it line the wooden shelves inside. Who wants to eat mustard without a sausage to dip in it?

But from the outside, to a casual visitor—one who doesn't step inside the stores or climb the barracks to the upper levels where the old people live, looking more like cadavers than human beings—Theresienstadt could pass for an ordinary little town. A bit down on its luck, overcrowded and smelling of sewage and sweat...but still a town.

Hannelore hasn't said anything about the fact that Mother and I no longer live in the barracks.

“I'm not upset,” Hannelore says. “I'm glad for you. That's what I told my mother when she said your father is working for the Naz—” Hannelore blushes and covers her mouth with one hand.

“That isn't fair,” I say. The air between us feels as if it's been charged by lightning. How dare her mother say something like that? This is the closest Hannelore and I have ever come to an argument. “When you and I scrub cauldrons, we're working for the Nazis too,” I tell her.

Hannelore nods. “Of course, you're right. That's what I told my mother.”

A moment later Hannelore seems to forget our quarrel. “Look!” she cries out, tapping on the window. “Do you see that black velvet skirt? That one...at the back.”

“Yes, I see it.”

“I believe it's mine!” Hannelore's voice quivers with excitement. “I wonder how much they want for it.”

Hannelore and I walk into the clothing shop. A Czech prisoner sits at a desk, writing in a ledger book. Sometimes it seems to me the inhabitants of Theresienstadt spend more time keeping records of things than doing anything else. I can't see the point of all these records. Father's meticulously drawn charts are also a form of record keeping. He draws charts indicating the cost of maintaining each inmate: four pence a day, up from three pence in 1942; the number of inmates able to work versus those who are too infirm; charts of those who qualify for an extra ration of sugar; charts of those who have been sent on the latest transport.

Father's charts, he explained, are submitted every Friday to the Nazi high command in Berlin. “I don't see much point either, Anneke,” he confided to me, “but if it keeps my family alive, I'll happily do it. I'd do anything to ensure your survival,” he added, his voice growing husky. “Anything.”

When Father said that, mostly I felt comforted. Father would do anything—risk anything—to keep us alive. Surely that means we have a chance of getting through all this. But something about the fierce way Father said, “I'd do anything. Anything,” frightens me a little too. I hope Father will never have to hurt anyone else to protect himself—and us.

“It
is
my skirt! I remember the day Mother brought it home for me!” Hannelore says as she lifts the skirt off the rack. “They took it from me at the
Schleuse
.”

For a moment, I remember my golden brooch and wonder where it might be and who is wearing it. The daughter of some Nazi officer, no doubt. My pulse quickens. I can imagine her delight on the evening her father brought it home. “It's so delicate,” she'd have said, “and twenty-four-karat gold.” She'd have gazed at her own reflection in the tiny mirror, just as I'd done when it was mine. Did that girl really believe her father had purchased the brooch for her? Had he perhaps put it in a small velvet box before he'd presented his gift? Or did she suspect the brooch was stolen from another girl? And if she did, did she ever wonder about me, what I was like and what kind of life I lived?