Holocaust (50 page)

On May 11, 1945, I rode into Theresienstadt with a Czech brigade. Many of the soldiers were Jews. There
was even a man from Helena’s street in Prague, who had known her, and known her parents. He told me they were long dead; he didn’t know the details. In turn, I told him very little about Helena. Yes, we had been married. My silence told him something about me—an odd duck, this Berliner, ex-partisan.

I still did not cry. I tried not to think of her. I had loved her too much, too intensely. In danger all the time, we had clung to one another. We had lived several lifetimes in our years together. Now she was gone. I was isolated, cold. I had trouble listening to people talk. They wore me out with their stories. There had been too much suffering, too much misery. I found that I wanted to sit alone, lapse into silences, make no attachments.

On my way back to Czechoslovakia, I wandered through Auschwitz and learned from some survivors that both my parents and my brother had died there. Of course there was no trace of them.

Later, at a camp called Gross-Rosen, I ran into this man Hirsch Weinberg, the tailor who had known Karl in Buchenwald and had seen him again when he was dying in Auschwitz. Weinberg told me about the last picture Karl ever drew. That strange, crude thing—the hand reaching out of a swamp. Weinberg told me he also had reason to believe that my sister-in-law Inga was still in the camp.

I came into Theresienstadt on a sunny spring morning. It was amazing. The town had just been liberated, Jews were still dying of hunger and disease—and the original Czech inhabitants who had been expelled by the Nazis to create the camp were moving back in, as if nothing at all had happened.

The Red Cross was there, taking care of the ill, feeding people.

And so was an organization called the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which had set up an office and appeared to be registering former prisoners. I walked down the street—it was an attractive place, despite the hideous things done to people there—and wondered if I would find Inga.

In my mind I kept keeping a list of the dead. I tried to blot it out, but the names and circumstances kept recurring, and soon I was feeling guilty that I had been lucky enough, tough enough, cunning enough, to be alive, when all of my family had been lost.

My grandparents, the Palitzes, suicides in Berlin …

My parents, gassed in Auschwitz …

My sister Anna, killed, God knows where, and for unknown reasons …

My brother Karl, dead of starvation in Auschwitz …

My Uncle Moses, shot to death in the Warsaw ghetto …

It was hard to believe that I was now twenty-seven years old, and that I had spent the last six years of my life as a wanderer. And I wondered why I had come there. Even more, where I would go.

In a muddy field outside the building marked with the Jewish Agency sign, some young boys were kicking a soccer ball. I glanced at them. I thought of the hundreds of games I’d played in, and the professional career people said I’d have, and the day they kicked me off the semi-pro team. It seemed to be another life I’d lived. On another planet, centuries before.

A stocky man in a khaki uniform came out of the Jewish Agency building and stared at me a moment. He was talking to another man, smaller, older. Were they looking at me?

I moved on. I saw the fake shops, the false bank, all the trappings of a city, with which the Nazis had foisted upon the world the notion that the Jews were living in a community of their own. This, while twelve thousand a day were gassed at Auschwitz alone, not to mention Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor.

But at some time one must close one’s mind, or at least redirect it. But how? Where did I belong? Who wanted me?

I saw Inga.

She was carrying a small boy, perhaps ten months old. He wore a coat two sizes too big for him. He was a pink little boy with Karl’s somber eyes.

“Rudi,” she said. “I hoped you would come.”

We kissed each other.

“And kiss your nephew,” she said. “He is Karl’s son. I have named him Josef, for your father. People say he looks like Karl.”

I kissed the baby’s cheek. He smelled of sour milk, like most babies. “He looks more like Churchill,” I said.

“Oh, you are the same Rudi,” she said, smiling. “Come, sit down and talk to me.”

But what could we say? She knew of Karl’s death, of my parents’ death, of Uncle Moses in the Warsaw ghetto. And she told me the truth about Anna. She had learned about Hadamar and the “mercy killings,” and she blamed herself for taking Anna there at the advice of the doctor.

“I remember the day you left Berlin,” she said. “Alone, you against the world.”

“I was lucky.”

The baby whimpered. I tickled his cheek. “Smile, Churchill. I’m your uncle.”

She told me about Karl and the artists, how the Germans tortured him, how he refused to tell them about the hidden paintings, or inform on the other artists. He was courageous to the end.

“And they’ll get away with it,” I said. “Because no one will believe a crime that big. People will say, ‘Impossible, they could not kill that many, torture that many, be so cruel.’ People will say that there are limits, that human beings stop at some point. But they didn’t stop.”

Inga said, “You can hate me if you wish. I am one of them.”

“No. I don’t hate you. I’m a blank, empty. No hate, no love, no hopes. I’ll just keep going. Like one of the Mussulmen, the walking dead in the camps.”

“No, Rudi. Not you. Never.”

I told her about Helena, and how much we had loved each other. God knows what they did with her body. I would not go back to look for it. Probably buried in some pit, burned by the Germans.

“But you had each other for a while,” Inga said, “and you loved each other.”

“Yes. I know.” I sighed, stared at her. “Where are you going?”

“Back to Germany. But I won’t stay. I won’t raise Karl’s son there. Perhaps America. And you?”

“I don’t know. I’ll wander.”

“Alone? With no money?”

“I got by for a long time.”

She asked me to come to the studio, where Karl had worked, where he had done the secret pictures that had so enraged the Germans, and that had led to his death.

We got up. There was a lot of activity in the camp—outdoor kitchens, first-aid units, people moving belongings on carts, Czech army people, the few Jews who were left, the Czech Christians moving in.

We walked the cobbled streets. I pinched my nephew’s cheek.

In the studio, I met Maria Kalova, who had worked in the studio with Karl.

She and Inga spread dozens of drawings and sketches on the tables. Karl and other men had created them. They were the truthful story of the horrors of the camp—hangings, beatings, starvation, degradation. They were the artists’ answer to the Nazis.

“Your brother was a talented man, and a good one,” Maria Kalova said. “All of the paintings will go to a museum in Prague, so the world can see them.”

“They killed him for these?” I asked.

Inga began to cry. “Rudi, if you could have seen him, with his hands smashed, those beautiful hands …”

And of course there was his last picture. The hand rising from the swamp, reaching for the sky.

I looked at the drawings, and I saw Karl and myself, as kids, playing in the street in front of Groningstrasse. Sometimes we played cowboys and Red Indians. Karl always hated to make believe he was firing a gun.

But I could not cry. I only said stupidly, “Poor Karl. Skinny, afraid. But he wasn’t afraid of them. Braver than I was. I had a gun most of the time.”

And then I had a flashing mental image of my father in his white coat, the stethoscope in his pocket. His kind, tired face at the window. He is rapping to us, signaling to us to come in for dinner. It is early fall in Berlin. Leaves are falling. Karl and I wrestle each other playfully, race for the steps to the house. I always win.

I looked at the baby, wondering what kind of life he would have. Within me, old memories stirred. A loving mother. A kind father. Brother, sister—a family who shared things, laughed, got angry, found beauty in music, joy in sport, all of us quietly admiring our harassed father, that physician always with his thoughts on an ill person, a patient lost. And all of us a bit fearful of our mother, so dignified, lovely, intelligent.

All destroyed. Burned, the ashes scattered to the winds. And how many millions of other families they had destroyed, without a sign of pity, without reason, in a monstrous outburst of murder and hate that I still did not understand. I saw it coming. I saw the irrational hate in their eyes early, and I ran. But I still cannot comprehend what motivated them.

“He looks like good boy,” I said. And choked back the first emotion I had felt in months.

“He is, Rudi.”

Inga was weeping, holding my hand. “God blessed me letting me be part of your family. I am filled with guilt and shame that I am still alive. I have no right to be.”

I shook my head. “Maybe we loved each other too much. Maybe that’s what ruined us.”

“No, Rudi. You must never believe that, or even say it.”

I said goodbye to Maria Kalova. Inga, holding her son, walked with me to the square. “Where will you go?” she asked.

“I have no idea. I’m nobody. No family, no country, no papers.”

“Come to Berlin with me and little Josef. Until you decide.”

“No. I’ll never go back there.”

She kissed me. “Goodbye, little brother.”

The coldness was still in me. I barely felt her kiss. “Goodbye, Inga,” I said. And I pointed to my nephew. “Teach him not to be afraid.”

And I walked away. There were some friends I’d made in the Czech brigade I wanted to talk to. Men who had known Helena’s family; maybe they had some advice.

Once more I passed the field where the boys were kicking the soccer ball. They were strange-looking kids, very dark, shaved heads, skinny. Their clothes were ragged. Yet a few of them knew how to play well, move the ball, head it.

I stopped to watch. As I did, the stocky man I had seen earlier came out of the doorway. He was smoking a cigar.

“Some of those kids aren’t bad,” I said to him. “Who are they?”

“Greek Jews. Their families were massacred in Salonika. A parting gift from the Germans.”

A look of anger, the old desire to
kill
someone in revenge, must have changed my expression. All I could think of was—where are the bastards who killed their parents? Why are they not shot? Why does the world let them get away with this?

“You’re Rudi Weiss,” the man said.

“How do you know?”

“There are no secrets in a liberated camp. Not among the Jews, anyway.” He extended a strong hand. “My name’s Levin. I’m with the Jewish Agency for Palestine. I’m an American.”

“So?”

“I know a few things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you were a partisan for a long time. They say you broke out of Sobibor.”

“What else do you know?”

“Forgive me, Weiss. Your parents and your brother
died in Auschwitz. Your wife was killed in the Ukraine.”

“You know a lot.”

I was vaguely annoyed with Levin. I wanted to be left alone, to make my own way, to bury the past. I started to walk away.

“Hold it, Weiss,” Levin said.

“What for?”

“You want a job?”

I smiled. “If you know so much about me, you must know I never finished high school.”

“For this job I think you’re qualified.”

He took my arm and led me closer to the wet field, around which the Greek children were kicking the ball.

“See those kids?” Levin asked. “They need a shepherd.”

“Shepherd?”

“Someone to sneak them into Palestine. There are forty of them—no parents. Someone’s got to take them. You interested?”

“I don’t speak Greek. Or Hebrew. I’m not sure I’m much of a Jew.”

Levin smiled. “You’ll do.”

I remembered Helena with her dreams of Zion, the warm sea, the farms in the hills and the desert.

“It won’t be as dangerous as the partisans, Weiss, but it won’t be a Purim party either. No guns, but plenty of action. How about it?”

I thought no more, and responded, “Why not?”

Then I dropped my knapsack and ran to the soccer field.

“We’ll get you a passport,” Levin called.

Two kids had collided, and one went down. He got up swinging. I separated them. “You want to play soccer, stop fighting,” I said. “Give me the ball.”

I started babying the ball down the field, using all the old moves, nudging it between players, passing off, heading it, directing the attack.

They raced around me, laughing, shouting in a language I could not understand.

Someone had placed two empty oil drums at the
edge of the field to mark the goal. I nudged the ball to one side, feinted, and then kicked it through the space.

When I retrieved the ball and came back to the shaven-headed kids, they already knew my name. They clung to my legs, grabbed my hand, and one of them kissed me.