Mendelssohn is on the Roof (20 page)

The oldest of them said: ‘Line up two by two. I’ll stand behind you.’

They did not try to talk him out of it.

The pairs were bound together and the hangman led them away to the gallows. As he was hanging the last pair, the rope broke and one of the prisoners fell to the ground. When this happened the hangman called out a phrase he had learned from the Prague hangman: ‘I beg to report that the judgement has been carried out according to the law.’

The commandant of the ghetto turned to him angrily: ‘Shut up!’ and he waved his whip: ‘String him up!’

The prisoner was hanged again. But the dignitaries were no longer enjoying themselves. It wasn’t pleasant to stand in the cold for so long, even though they were wearing fur jackets and high boots. The show was not as amusing as they had expected – nobody begged for mercy, and each one repeated the phrase the first one had called out: ‘You’ll never win the war!’ There was such certainty in the voices of the prisoners as they said those words that the confident and arrogant sneers faded from the dignitaries’ faces. They grew nervous and had to make an effort not to betray their feelings in front of the crowd of slaves witnessing the execution. Only the head of the Central Bureau remained calm. In the East he had seen so many killings carried out in so many various ways that this execution of nine people left him quite indifferent.

One of the hanged men gave several jerks. This disturbed the SS chauffeur. He pulled out his revolver and shot five bullets one after another into the dead body. The hangman smiled. What do these SS people know about executions? They hadn’t even taught them that such things happen frequently, that these are the movements of a person from whom life has fled long before.

The shots diverted the SS dignitaries. They calmed the magistrate from Kladno somewhat, as well as the ghetto commandant. They were used to shootings. The execution had already lasted two hours and the SS people would have liked to leave, but they couldn’t allow themselves to do so since there were witnesses here. Meanwhile, the witnesses were in far worse shape. They weren’t dressed warmly and they were shivering with cold. They weren’t able to move about, for they had been ordered to stand still. They were afraid of frostbite, because they were wearing ordinary shoes.

Richard Reisinger watched the execution along with the others. He paled and gasped with horror along with the others. He heard their song and repeated it soundlessly under his breath along with the others. He saw the way they hanged them, the way they died bravely, he heard the way each of them said, ‘You’ll never win the war!’ Of course, they’d never win it, they couldn’t win it. But all of those forced to watch the execution here would probably be dead before it was over. It would be awkward for the SS to allow such witnesses to stay alive. Nevertheless, the world would find out about this execution somehow. It wasn’t possible to get rid of all the witnesses. Surely
someone
would remain to tell the tale.

The hangman dragged the last of the prisoners to the gallows. He was so frozen that he could no longer walk. He was alone – all the others were dead. As they left for the gallows they had waved to him with their bound hands in farewell and caressed him with their eyes. They knew his lot was the worst. He tried to call out, but his frozen mouth wouldn’t emit a sound. And then in the complete silence a single word was suddenly heard and it resounded
throughout the execution grounds: ‘Stalingrad.’ A word of victory and hope. The last prisoner walked to the gallows proudly with such a word. The crows cawed above the gallows and they seemed to be repeating the word, making it carry over the entire ghetto and the Small Fortress, too. The eyes of the Council of Elders, the building managers and the ghetto guards suddenly lit up. The faces of the SS dignitaries tightened into hateful grimaces. It even affected the head of the Central Bureau, because that word meant defeat, cold, hunger, dirt, captivity and death.

That was why the last prisoner could go calmly to his death, that was why the witnesses could reconcile
themselves
to their humiliation, and that was why, at least for a while, fear overcame the SS dignitaries.

The execution was over. The tired hangman was leaving with his helper. The nine dead bodies remained on the frozen ground. The commander of the ghetto guards told his ten men to throw the bodies without coffins into the common grave. Those twenty-five coffins made overnight by the carpentry workshop had been a cruel trick. When the grave was half filled the dignitaries departed. The Jewish Council of Elders and the building managers staggered back to the Magdeburg barracks to pray for the dead there. Only the ghetto guards remained on the execution grounds, to finish their work. Just then the troopers came back to the execution grounds, all of their own free will. They stood at the graveside beside the ghetto guards. The grave was already covered. At the graveside the sergeant-major of the troopers, their boss, called them to attention.

His second in command broke the dead silence: ‘Let us honour the dead!’

Then the ten men of the ghetto guards left with their
captain, and the troopers with their sergeant-major. And when they looked up at the cruel and heartless sky, filled with black clouds, they saw that even the crows had returned to their homes. Perhaps they had left with the SS dignitaries.

They all looked back for the last time at the execution grounds. They were enveloped in fog. Only the gallows in the shape of a T reached to the skies, as if it would stand there for all eternity.

T
HE TRANSPORTS ARRIVED at the fortress town and then departed again. But the SS men had a problem with the road to the station. They wanted everything to proceed smoothly and secretly, yet all sorts of things went wrong: people dragged along too slowly, old folks and children fell by the wayside, and the efforts of the troopers and ghetto guards to hurry them along didn’t help. What’s more, the station lay outside the fortress town, and though the transports arrived and departed at night, they ran into occasional witnesses – because of the conscription, many people had to work night shifts.

It wasn’t possible to walk in the pitch dark; the blackout rules had to be ignored. Like will-o’-the-wisps, the glowing torches and flares wound their way along the roads. Like a procession of ghosts the transports moved along, accompanied by moans and cries. They had to walk past darkened cottages where sleeping people were awakened by the shouts of the guards and the weeping of children.

The SS men didn’t like this. They preferred to do their dark deeds without witnesses.

They decided to build a special line from the station directly to the fortress town, so that the only witnesses besides the ghetto guards would be the troopers. They knew how to deal with them. After wiping out the Jews, they’d wipe out the troopers now guarding them.

The commandant of the ghetto ordered the Jewish Council of Elders to pick out engineers and workers – there were several railway engineers in the ghetto. One of
them had actually built a railway in the South American jungle. They promised the workers a bonus of one potato each.

And so the construction began. The engineers drew up the plans and made calculations. The work was divided up into segments and work teams were established. Oddly enough, people worked quite cheerfully, though they surely realised that the special line was meant to make things easier for the SS. When a person holds a good tool in his hand, a pickaxe or a hoe, sometimes he forgets.

Above the town, where the only sounds once heard had been muffled footsteps, buzzing saws in the timberyard and the creaking wheels of funeral wagons dragged along by people, now the clinking of pickaxes and the clanging of railway tracks could be heard. The work groups started out at opposite ends, one from the station and the other from the fortress town. Finally they met in the middle.

One day the old locomotive – the one they used to call ‘the coffee mill’ – clattered right into the centre of town. The children all screamed joyfully, ‘A choo-choo!’ They thought it would take them home. But the grownups did not rejoice. They knew that now they’d be taken away on rails hammered in by their own hands. The whistle of the locomotive had the sound of a death knell to their ears.

The town was enclosed by battlements and gates which were guarded night and day. Forcibly extracted from the countryside and closed off from the world, the once sleepy garrison town had been turned into a massive prison. Nobody was allowed to look down from the ramparts. One time only – just before a visit of the Red Cross commission – they permitted small children to go for walks on the ramparts; the commission might notice that
the children were too pale. After the commission’s visit, the children were no longer allowed there, but long
afterwards
they continued to draw pictures of what they had seen outside: the enchanting countryside with its tall bluish foothills, green meadows and orchards (real apricots and peaches hung from the branches of trees and looked quite different from the fruit they had seen in picture books), roads with signs telling how many miles to the capital. Beyond the battlements people walked more freely and everything was different: children sat at tables set for dinner in rooms with curtains, waiting for their mothers to bring them their food. Or they played outside their little suburban houses; they went to school, they flew kites, they skated on ponds, they went sledding, in the summer they swam in the river and bought ice-cream, they rode on merry-go-rounds and played ball. Cars of all sorts went tearing along the roads, buses stopped at railway crossings, trams rolled out of stations, and aeroplanes flew over cities. Cats warmed themselves on windowsills, dogs barked beside their kennels, cows grazed in pastures, while horses drew carts along the roads. Here in the fortress town there were no animals. Even butterflies avoided it.

Only once did the children see live animals, emaciated, miserable sheep with singed wool. They were being herded through the town past the railway crossing where the SS authorities had their headquarters. It was evident that the sheep were exhausted, that they had come a long way. They had the same hopeless look in their eyes that people had as they placed their transport numbers around their necks.

The grownups avoided looking at the sheep; they were reminded of their own fate. The children heard that the sheep had come from a village that had been burned to the
ground. The children knew nothing about the village and didn’t remember its name. It must have been very far from the fortress town, because the sheep were so exhausted they could hardly move.

The children drew everything they saw. In their drawings the sheep resembled wooden sawhorses. But they drew the eyes more carefully.

The eyes were big and sad. Even though the town was carefully secured by battlements and guards, news of the world still managed to filter in somehow. It was passed along from mouth to mouth, filled in, distorted; sometimes it spoke of hope, sometimes it cried out in despair. How the news got into town nobody knew. To make it believable people said it came from the troopers.

Only a special few maintained a different connection with the world: a radio with transmitter and receiver that moved about from one chimney hiding place to another. It had been put together by skilled technicians out of various stolen components – they had even used part of a rubber heel. Those who guarded it in its small suitcase, the kind that is sold in chain stores, did not pass along any of the news they heard. Their purpose was to send word of the ghetto out into the world, and to listen for the signal bringing tidings of the end of the war.

But on occasion a few people from the outside world stole into the fortress town. They sewed on stars, and the troopers and ghetto guards allowed them to pass through the gate to meet their loved ones, if only for a moment. Some of these were caught, others got away. So it happened that a few managed to break through the iron circle and send greetings to friends and acquaintances, to bring in a little food and some books of poetry. These were exceptional beacons of
light in the darkness and despair, small rays of hope. Songs and poems have been written about these people who managed to overcome all obstacles.

Meanwhile, the countryside surrounding the fortress town was silent. Barbed wire twisted through the meadows, with the blue hills in the background. The road-sign
PRAGUE
shone with the same yellow colour as the stars bearing the ignominious inscription in a foreign language.

Now, however, the special line brought a new element into town the SS men had not counted on: railway men.

The SS men knew how to handle the troopers. But railway men were a different story.

The trains went back and forth; they had to keep going, bringing weapons to the East and plundered goods back to the Reich. Without the trains the army couldn’t fight and the robbers couldn’t pillage. Once, they had thought they could manage without the railway. A fat marshal screamed about it on the radio, boasting of his Panzers’
Blitzkrieg,
which would roll across the Caucasus, ever farther and farther, all the way to the Ganges, where they would join the armies of the eastern predators. But the Panzers’ glory ended in Stalingrad, and the army had to flee on foot in the Caucasus. Then the railway was all that was left. There were Dutch, Belgian, French, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian, Yugoslavian railway trucks all mixed up together. And they needed people to make repairs in various shops and engine rooms, to throw switches, to drive the engines.

You couldn’t just shoot railway men to create fear among them; you had to handle them carefully, especially at a time when the front stretched two thousand kilometres from the Reich and fuel was running low.

The Gestapo were well aware that the railway men were
enemies. The engineers who drove the trains were escorted by guards with drawn automatics. Still, trains collided, trains were derailed. Bridges and rails blew up in every occupied town. Lead seals disappeared from carriages, bills of lading were misplaced, and whole trucks full of ammunition and provisions were mysteriously lost on unused sidings or in out-of-the-way stations.

Thanks to the special line, a clever, tenacious and tough enemy found its way into the fortress town and with it letters, packages, newspapers and information. Now, in spite of the ramparts, gates and guards, they could no longer keep the fortress town so perfectly isolated.

In the centre of town they stuffed the living freight being shipped to the East into railway trucks: they unloaded goods for the SS men – food, wine, liquor and meat for their dogs, and they loaded furniture, ceramics and ornamental metal objects produced in the fortress town workshops. Also crates from the woodworking shop and split slabs of mica for the Wehrmacht armed forces.

The town lived in misery and hunger. People gasped for air in the multi-layered bunks of the overcrowded dormitories. The old were dying in the muck and dirt, and the helpless doctors didn’t know what to do with them. Colonies of slaves went off to labour each day. The smoke from the crematoria filled the town with its fumes. In the
Appellplatz
prisoners stood in rain and wet snow from dawn to dusk, while the sick were carried away on stretchers to die to the sounds of noisy roll calls.

Behind the gate stood a new building where the SS men lived. They called it Friendship House. They decorated it with hammered metal sconces and ornamental screens. They would meet in a large room on the ground floor,
where they would sit at tables covered with clean
tablecloths
and set with plates of Carlsbad porcelain. Wooden candelabra with burning candles hung from the ceiling. They ate and drank there and roared out their raucous songs. They drank to the health of the Leader and his Reich; they exchanged filthy anecdotes before collapsing on the floor in their own spittle.

The trains carried ammunition and new reserves to replace armies flattened by Soviet tanks and shattered by Soviet guns. The trains carried their suffocating and dying human freight to the East, where they were unloaded on to
platforms
in the extermination camps and herded with sticks into gas chambers.

Richard Reisinger was often on duty at the special-line station. From the day he had to witness the execution, his job was ever more hateful to him. But were he to quit he’d immediately find himself among those being sent to the East. He was thinking about running away – some people had tried it – but he had seen them brought back all bloody and beaten up, to be displayed in the
Appellplatz
before being taken off to the Small Fortress.

One day he was standing by the train with the old
locomotive
and the battered cattle trucks from all countries of Europe. The railway men were resting, looking around them at the queer streets with houses marked with letters, plaster cracked and falling off, at the broken-down
courtyards
and wooden animal sheds that now contained people. The train was surrounded by ghetto guards, troopers and SS men. They were waiting for a transport.

The SS men and the troopers guarded the outer circle. Only the ghetto guards stood directly next to the train. The day was just beginning, and darkness still lay on the
town. The ghetto was sleeping. Soon the procession of the condemned would appear, bowed down under the weight of their baggage. Suddenly, in the semi-darkness, someone crept out from under a railway carriage directly in front of Reisinger. Reisinger couldn’t make out the man’s face clearly, but from his uniform it was evident that he was a railway man.

He looked at Reisinger for a while, and he seemed
particularly
interested in his yellow belt and cap. Then he said slowly and quietly, ‘You wouldn’t know Reisinger, Richard Reisinger?’

‘That’s me. What do you want with me?’

‘I’ve got regards for you from someone called Franta. He’s sending you this.’

It was a box of Victoria cigarettes. As the cigarettes changed hands, the railway man’s movement was
imperceptible
in the half-darkness.

As long as the transport didn’t arrive and as long as it remained dark, they were able to talk together. The railway man told him about some Finnish huts built for the
Wehrmacht
that were supposed to be taken to the East but had mysteriously found their way to the Vranany station. With a fake bill of consignment it would be quite possible to get them to the fortress town if only there was someone to receive them.

Reisinger promised to inquire – maybe it could be arranged. Wood for crates arrived regularly at the
timberyard
. Neatly numbered sections of huts with ceilings of deck wood could easily vanish there, to be transformed into wood slivers, chips and slats. This was possible to arrange, for confusion was mounting in the midst of the perfect organisation.

They agreed to meet again. Reisinger had to work
carefully
, but he had an acquaintance in the timberyard. And so it happened that when the train finally arrived with a shipment for the fortress town, sections of Finnish huts managed to get in as well. From there they were sent to the timber yard and quickly processed. The wood was distributed to the dormitories in small bundles, and loaded into stoves, fireplaces, tin barrels. The children’s houses received the biggest load. The warmth brought colour to cheeks. It heated the soup made of bread crusts. It helped nurses sterilise hypodermic needles and doctors examine undressed patients.

A circle was completed that had started somewhere at a shunting station where a bill of consignment seemed to be lost; then a chain of signalmen, brakemen and dispatchers moved the train to a blind siding at Vranany so that it would end in the fortress town and give a little warmth.