Prague astounds him. He knows it well from business trips. The lovely old city looks as though the war has never happened, as though the past four years recorded in his mind have been a long bad dream. The swastika flags flapping noisily in a high wind were all too visible in Prague in peacetime, when the Nazis were agitating for the return of the Sudetenland. Just as always the people crowd the streets in the afternoon sunshine, for it is just about quitting time. Well-dressed, looking stolidly content with things as they are, they fill the sidewalk cafés. If anything, Prague is more serene now than in the turbulent days when Hitler was breathing fire against Beneš. In the sidewalk crowds Berel sees not one Jewish face. That is new. That is the one clear sign in Prague that the war is no dream.
His memorized instructions give him an alternate address if the bookshop should be gone; but there it is, in a crooked alley of the Mala Strana, the Little Town.
N. MASTNY
BOOKS
NEW AND SECOND-HAND
The opening door jangles a bell. The place is packed with old books on shelves, in piles on the floor, and the smell is very musty. A white-haired woman in a gray smock sits at a desk heaped with books, marking catalogue cards. She looks up benignly, with a smile that is more like a twitch, and says something in Czech.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Ja.”
“Do you have, in your second-hand section, any books on philosophy?”
“Yes, quite a number.”
“Do you have Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?”
“I’m not sure.” She blinks at him. “Forgive me, but you do not look like a man whom such a book would interest.”
“It is for my son Eric. He is writing his doctoral thesis.”
After a long appraising stare, she gets up. “Let me ask my husband.”
She goes out through a curtain in the back. Soon a short, stooped, bald man in a torn sweater, wearing a green eyeshade, emerges sipping from a cup. “Excuse me, I just made my tea and it is still hot.”
Unlike the other dialogue, this is not a signal. Berel makes no reply. The man potters about among the shelves, noisily drinking. He takes down a worn volume, blowing off dust, and hands it to Berel, open to the flyleaf, on which a name and address are inked. “People should never write in books.” The volume is about travels in Persia, and the author’s name is meaningless. “It is such a desecration.”
“Thank you, but that is not what I had in mind.”
The man shrugs, murmurs a blank-faced apology, and vanishes behind the curtain with the book.
The address is on the other side of town. Berel takes a trolleybus there, and walks several blocks through a shabby section of four-story houses. On the ground-floor entrance of the house he seeks, there is a dentist’s sign. A buzzer admits him. Two doleful elderly men sit waiting on a bench in the foyer. A housewifely woman in a dirty uniform comes out of the dentist’s office, from which groans and the noise of a drill can be heard.
“I’m sorry, the doctor can see no more patients today.”
“It’s an emergency, madam, a very bad abscess.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn, then.”
He waits almost an hour. The doctor, his white coat spattered with blood, is washing his hands at a sink when Berel comes into the office. “Sit down, I’ll be right with you,” he says over his shoulder.
“I come from Mastny, the bookseller.”
The doctor straightens and turns: bushy sandy hair, a heavy square face, a hard big jaw. He scans Berel with narrowed eyes, and says words in Czech. Berel gives the memorized reply.
“Who are you?” asks the dentist.
“I come from Oswiecim.”
“Oswiecim? With films?”
“Yes.”
“My God. We’ve long since given you fellows up for dead.” The doctor is tremendously excited. He laughs. He seizes Berel by the shoulders. “We expected two of you.”
“The other man is dead. Here are the films.”
With a sense of solemn exaltation, Berel hands the aluminum cylinders to the dentist.
That night, in the kitchen on the second floor of the house, he sits with the dentist and his wife at a supper of boiled potatoes, prunes, bread, and tea. His voice is giving out, for he has been talking so much, recounting his long journey and his adventures along the way. He is dwelling on his week in Levine’s camp, and the great moment when he learned that his son was alive.
The wife, bringing glasses and a bottle of slivovitz to the table, casually says to her husband, “It’s an odd name, at that. Didn’t someone at the last committee meeting tell about a Jastrow they’ve got in Theresienstadt now? One of the Prominente?”
“That’s an American.” The dentist makes a gesture of dismissal. “Some rich Jewish writer who got himself caught in France, the damn fool.” He says to Berel, “What route did you take to get over the border? Did you go through Turka?”
Berel does not reply.
The two men look at each other.
“What’s the matter?” asks the dentist.
“Aaron Jastrow? In Theresienstadt?”
“I think his name is Aaron,” says the dentist. “Why?”
PART SIX
The Paradise Ghetto
69
UNLIKE Auschwitz there is really nothing secret about Theresienstadt. The German government has even been at some pains to publicize, with news stories and photographs, the “Paradise Ghetto” in the Czech fortress town of Terezin near Prague, where Berel now hears his cousin is immured.
This anomalous Nazi-sponsored haven for Jews, also called Theresienbad (“Terezin Spa”), is almost a byword in Europe. Jews of influence or means desperately try to get sent there. The Gestapo collects enormous fees for selling them commodious Terezin apartments with guaranteed lifetime medical care, hotel service, and food allotments. Jewish leaders of some large cities are shipped there, once disease, hunger, and transportation “to the east” have erased their communities. Half-Jews, deserving old people, distinguished artists and scholars, decorated Jewish war veterans, dwell in this town with their families. Privileged Jews of the Netherlands and Denmark also end up there.
News pictures in European journals show these fortunate Jews, some recognizable by name or face, all wearing yellow stars, sitting at their ease in small cafés, attending lectures and concerts, happily at work in factories or shops, strolling in a flowery park, rehearsing an opera or a play, watching a local soccer game, wrapped in their prayer shawls and worshipping in a well-appointed synagogue, and even dancing in crowded little nightclubs. Outside Nazi Europe information about the place is distorted and sparse, but its existence is known through favorable Red Cross reports. European Jews who have not yet gone “east” would joyously trade places with Aaron Jastrow, and throw into the bargain all they possessed.
Such a comfortable resort for Jews in the midst of a Europe swamped in anti-Semitic propaganda and wartime hardships has naturally caused resentment. Dr. Goebbels has given voice to this in a speech:
…While the Jews in Terezin are sitting in the café, drinking coffee, eating cake, and dancing, our soldiers have to bear all the miseries and deprivations, to defend their homeland…
Hints are not lacking in neutral and Allied countries, to be sure, that Theresienstadt is just a Potemkin village, a cynical show staged by the Nazis; so German Red Cross representatives have been invited to come and see for themselves, and have publicly confirmed the existence of this curious sanctuary. The Germans claim that Jewish camps in “the east” are all like Theresienstadt, just not quite so luxurious. For this the Red Cross and the world has to take their word.
There are few American Jews in Theresienstadt, or indeed anywhere in Nazi Europe. Most of them fled before the war. As for the scattering that remain, some are surviving by dint of influence, reputation, wealth, or luck, like Berenson and Gertrude Stein; some have gone into hiding and are making it through the war that way; some have already bee
n gassed in Auschwitz, their American citizenship a useless mockery. Natalie, her uncle, and her baby have landed in the Paradise Ghetto.
National Socialist Germany seems to have been something new in human affairs. Its roots were old, and the soil was old, but it was a mutant. In the ancient world, Sparta and Plato’s imaginary Republic were but the dimmest foreshadowings. Despite Hitler’s copious borrowings from Lenin and Mussolini, no modern political comparisons hold. No philosopher from Aristotle to Marx and Nietzsche ever foresaw such a thing, and none gave an account of human nature that could accommodate it. The Third Reich erupted into history as a surprise. It lasted a mere dozen years. It is gone. Historians, social scientists, political analysts, still stammer and grope in the mountainous ruins of unprecedented facts about human nature and society that it left behind.
Ordinary people prefer to forget it: a nasty twelve-year episode in Europe’s decline, best swept under the rug. Scholars force it into one or another academic pigeonhole: populism plus terror, capitalist counterrevolution, recrudescence of Bonapartism, dictatorship of the right, triumph of a demagogue; bookish labels without end, developed into long heavy tomes. None really accounts for the Third Reich. The still-spreading, still-baffling, sinister red stain on all mankind of National Socialist Germany — more than the population explosion, nuclear bombs, and the exhaustion of the environment — is the radical though shunned question in present human affairs.
Theresienstadt sheds light on it, because unlike Auschwitz, the Paradise Ghetto is not unfathomable. It was a National Socialist deed; but by an effort of the imagination, because it had a trace of recognizable sense, we can grasp it. It was just a hoax. The resources of a great government went into it, and so it worked. Natalie Henry’s best hope for survival with her child lay, strangely enough, in this enormous fake painstakingly staged by the Germans.
The intention to kill every Jew in Europe — and every Jew in the world, as German domination expanded — was, for Hitler and his trusted few, probably never in doubt. It crystallized in deeds and documents early in the war. The paper trail remains exiguous, and Hitler apparently never signed anything; but that the order came down from him to execute his threats in Mein Kampf appears self-evident.
However, old-fashioned notions in the world outside Germany presented difficulties: mercy, justice, the right of all human beings to life and safety, horror of killing women and children, and so forth. But for the National Socialists, killing was the nature of war; German women and children were dying under bombs; the definition of enemy was a matter of government decision. That the Jews were Germany’s greatest enemy was an article at the core of National Socialist policy. This was why, even as Germany in 1944 began to crumple, crucial war resources continued to go to murdering Jews. To the critical military mind this made no sense. To the leaders whom the German nation passionately followed to the last it made total sense. In the last will and testament that Adolf Hitler wrote, before blowing his brains out in his Berlin bunker, he boasted of his “humane” massacre of the Jews — he used that word — and exhorted the defeated German people to go on killing them.
In dealing with the softhearted prejudices of the benighted outside world during the great slaughter, the essential National Socialist policy was hoax. Wartime secrecy made possible the job of covering up the actual killings. No reporters travelled with the Einsatzgruppen, or got into Auschwitz. It was a question first of counteracting the ever-growing flood of leaks and rumors about the slayings, and second of getting rid of the evidence. The corpse-burning squads of Paul Blobel, and the Paradise Ghetto of Terezin, were complementary aspects of the great hoax. Theresienstadt would show that the slaughter was not happening. The corpse-burning squads would erase any evidence that it had ever happened.
Today the notion of forever concealing the murder of many millions of people may seem utterly crazy. But the energy and ingenuity of the entire German nation were at Hitler’s disposal. The Germans were performing many other prodigious mad feats for him.
The most triumphant part of the hoax was directed at the Jews themselves. All through the four years of the giant slaughter, most of them never knew, few suspected, and fewer truly believed that the trains were taking them to their deaths. The Germans soothed them with the most diverse and elaborate lies about where they were going, and what they would do when they arrived. This faking lasted to the final seconds of their lives, when they were led naked into the “disinfection shower baths” which were asphyxiation dungeons.
Today, again, the millions of doomed Jews may seem crazily simpleminded to have swallowed the hoax and walked like oxen to the knife. But as the patient refuses to believe he has leukemia but grasps at any straws of reassurance, so the European Jews willed not to believe the ever-mounting rumors and reports that the Germans meant simply to kill them all.
To believe that, after all, they had to believe that the legal government of Germany was systematically and officially perpetrating a homicidal fraud gigantic beyond imagining. They had to believe that the function of the state itself, created by human society for its self-protection, had mutated in an advanced Western nation to the function of secretly executing multitudes of men, women, and children who had done nothing wrong, with no warning, no accusation, and no trial. This happened to be the truth, but to the last most of the Jews who died could not grasp it. Nor can we, even in hindsight, altogether blame them, since we ourselves still find this one stark fact absolutely incomprehensible.
The Theresienstadt part of the hoax was complex, and in the tangle of its cross-purposes lay Natalie’s chance of living.
The Paradise Ghetto was nothing but a transit camp, a way station to “the east.” The Jews there called it a “schleuse,” a sluice or floodgate. But it was a transit camp with a difference. The privileged Jews on arrival were cordially received, served a meal, and encouraged to fill out forms detailing what sort of hotel accommodations or apartments they preferred; also what possessions, jewelry, and currency they had brought with them. Then they were robbed down to their bare skins, and their bodily orifices searched for valuables. The cordial prelude of course facilitated the plundering. Thereafter they were treated exactly like the ordinary Jews who overflowed the houses and streets of the ghetto.
When large transports of Jews arrived the welcoming farce was sometimes omitted. The newcomers were simply herded into a hall, robbed en masse of whatever they had brought, issued cast-off clothing, and marched out into the crowded, verminous, disease-ridden town, to find shelter in four-tier bunks, in drafty attics already swarming with sick starving people, or in a room for four now housing a writhing mass of forty, or in a hallway or on a staircase just as jammed with wretched living bodies. Still, the arrivals were not asphyxiated straight off. To that extent it was a Paradise Ghetto.
Things unplanned by the Germans added to the paradisal façade. At the outset, the well-organized Jews of Prague had persuaded the SS to let them set up a Jewish municipality in the fortress town, a government half-joke and half-real; a joke, because it simply had to do whatever the Germans ordered, including drawing up lists for shipment “to the east”; yet real, since the departments did manage health, labor, food distribution, housing, and culture. The Germans cared only about tight security, their own comfort and pleasure, the production quotas of the factories, and the delivery of live bodies to fill up the trains. In other matters the Jews could look after themselves.
There was even a bank that printed special decorative Theresienstadt currency, with an astonishing engraving on all the bills, made by some anonymous artist, of a suffering Moses holding the tablets. The money was a ghetto jest, of course. One could buy nothing with it. But the Germans required the bankers and the Jewish workers to keep elaborate records of salaries, savings accounts, and disbursements, which also looked good to the casual eye of a casual Red Cross observer. The German effort in Terezin was a total hoax first to last; it never extended to raising the food ration above the starvation level, or
providing medicines, or keeping down the incoming torrents of Jews.
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.