The Book of Dirt Read online

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  In the Beginning an Exodus

  One

  Arrivals

  Two

  Occupation

  Three

  Numbers

  Epilogue

  A Guide to Czech Pronunciation

  Glossary

  A Note on Historical Sources

  Map of Theresienstadt (Terezín)

  Map of Birkenau (Auschwitz II)

  List of Images

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright page

  For Debbie and Dari

  We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth…

  Thomas Bernhard, Correction

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  BISKUPSKÁ STREET

  Jakub Rand—a teacher, my grandfather

  Rabbi Aharon Rand—his father

  Gusta Randová—his mother

  Růženka Randová—his sister

  Hermann Rand—his brother

  Shmuel Rand—his brother

  BISKUPCOVA STREET

  Františka Roubíčková—a milliner

  Ludvík Roubíček—her husband

  Daša (Dagmar) Roubíčková—their daughter, my grandmother

  Irena Roubíčková—their daughter

  Marcela Roubíčková—their daughter

  Hana Roubíčková—their daughter

  Papa Roubíček—Ludvík’s father

  Mama Roubíčková—Ludvík’s mother

  Emílie—Františka’s sister

  Jiří B—a businessman

  Ottla B—his wife

  Bohuš B—their son

  Žofie Sláviková—a shopkeeper

  Štěpánka Tičková—a tattletale

  Jáchym Nemec—a busybody

  Marie Moravcová—a Red Cross volunteer

  Alois Moravec—her husband

  Ata Moravec—their son

  WORKERS OF THE PRAGUE JEWISH COMMUNITY

  Jiří Langer—a teacher and writer

  Otto Muneles—an undertaker, head of the Jewish Burial Society (Chevra Kadisha)

  Georg Glanzberg—a teacher, Jakub’s friend

  Professor Leopold Glanzberg—his father

  Berta Glanzbergová—his mother

  Tobias Jakobovits—Jewish community librarian, school principal and wartime Specialist Head of the Central Jewish Museum

  Dr Emil Kafka—head of the Jewish Religious Council of Prague

  Gonda Redlich—a youth leader

  Fredy Hirsch—a youth leader

  STUDENTS OF THE JÁCHYMOVA JEWISH SCHOOL

  Arnošt Flusser

  Hana Ginzová

  František Brichta

  Kurt Herschmann

  Kurt Diamant

  Markéta Fischerová

  Frederick Fantl

  Marta Kleinová

  OTHER CHARACTERS

  Pan Durák—a businessman

  Paní Duráková—his wife

  Anděl Richter—a canny restaurateur

  Gisela Diamontová—a seamstress

  Otakar Svoboda—a school photographer

  Avram Becher—an art dealer

  Yitzik Berenhauer—an artist

  Magda—a block warden in Theresienstadt

  Benjamin Murmelstein—the last camp elder in Theresienstadt

  Isaac Leo Seeligman—a scholar

  Rabbi František Gottschal—a scholar

  Josef Eckstein—a scholar

  Franz Weiss—a carpenter and labourer

  Michal—a prisoner in Birkenau

  Arno Böhm—a criminal and camp elder in Birkenau

  Büntrock—a Kapo in Birkenau

  Tadeusz—a Kapo in Birkenau

  PRESENT DAY CHARACTERS

  Ludvík K—Hana’s son, my mother’s cousin

  Uncle Pavel—Irena’s husband, my great-uncle

  Věra Obler—a survivor and archivist at Beit Terezín

  Ruti—an archivist at Yad Vashem

  Maria—a resident of the town of Terezín

  Ze’ev Shek—survivor, founder of Beit Terezin, diplomat

  Alisa Shek—survivor, archivist

  Within a few generations almost all of us will have been forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

  In the Beginning an Exodus

  In the region of T, not far from the city of U, there once stood a village that had been in Poland, then Hungary, then Subcarpathian Ruthenia, then Czechoslovakia, then Slovakia, then Hungary again, then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then the Ukraine and now cannot be found on any map. This village, satellite to a satellite, changed hands like a crumbling heirloom, each time losing a part of its essence, until one day it ceased to exist. Even its name is forgotten, for nobody is left to lament it. In its place now there might be a field, or forest, although no animal would dare roam there. Or perhaps God, in His infinite wisdom, erased that tract of land, so the world might be smaller and less full of sorrow.

  In the beginning, God etched a natural border along the outskirts of what would become this village: a wide river that flowed gently for most of the year, until Elul and Tishrei, as its people would know those months, when it raged with what they took to be righteous anger. For centuries the river served to keep the village-folk to themselves. They did not look across the water, nor did they wonder what lay beyond the trees on the opposite bank. God had given them their land and it was enough. But the natural order was destroyed when the king, drunk on hubris, commanded his stonemasons to cross the river so that his empire might expand. The most skilled men in the land came from the forest with their horses and carts and tools and set about their work.

  The village-folk watched on in awe, thanking the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the creation unfolding before them. When the bridge was finished, the village-folk sent out a party to see what lay on the other side. The three men walked across the cobbled deck and through the line of trees that had once marked the end of their world, only to find another village.

  In time, the two villages—one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Jew-fearing—came to share a common market, crucial to both for their survival. Depending on where the greater power lay—royal families, landed gentry or municipal councils—the market shifted from one side of the bridge to the other, so that the lowest monthly tithes could be paid when the collectors rode in to take what by rights was not theirs. And so it was that the village-folk would hesitantly welcome the traders from the other side of the bridge, and at other times those traders would begrudgingly welcome the village-folk, and they would put their differences aside, if only for the morning.

  ‘It is because God sighed on our village,’ said Mottel D, who would later choke on poisonous gas, the jagged fingernails of those desperate to climb over him digging into his back, but who is, for now, a teacher of schoolchildren. He was pointing at the sagging thatched roof of the shtibl where older men went to pray when called by the shammas. The children giggled, savouring the thought that God might take time out of His busy schedule to check on their insignificant home. How could He not be moved, Mottel wondered, by the devotion of these people in their simple clothes, who spent as much time praising Him as they did trying
to feed their families?

  Mottel liked to tell stories and the children liked to listen. ‘Beware the bridge,’ he would say when the border shifted to the other shore. ‘Under it lies a dybbuk, who would just as soon eat you as one of Reb Shlomo’s sweet buns.’ Many in the village believed in the dybbuk under the bridge and blamed it for the misfortunes that befell them. Crop failures. Stillbirths. Disappearances. Those who doubted came to believe when Lazar V, who was only trying to take his wares to the market on the other side, was swept over the railing in a freak storm, never to be seen again. Which is why each year for tashlich, as the village-folk went to cast their sins into the water, they would make sure to do so downstream lest the dybbuk find in their time of melancholy and repentance a reason to rejoice.

  Across the bridge, it was the same. ‘They hide there and will snatch you and use your blood to bake their bread,’ said Karel T, who would later stand guard on a concentration camp watchtower, but for now was also a teacher of schoolchildren. He had read a case in which there was incontrovertible proof that a young Christian child had been killed and her blood used for their dirty ritual. And what a great shame it was that their esteemed President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, had besmirched his reputation defending these heathen murderers. Sure, thought Karel, it was fine to trade with them, and for the most part they kept to themselves, but it was still best to warn the children not to go near the bridge alone because no matter how nice they might seem at the market, you never really could trust a Jew.

  Back in the Jewish village, the women gathered around the well to listen to the wet nurse Barbora D, who would later die standing over a ditch, staring down at her shrivelled breasts, embarrassed, counting the bodies of the children she had suckled, but who was, for now, the source of all gossip. She was welcome in most homes on this side of the river and knew their secrets. ‘They say dybbuk, but I know better.’ Barbora had not forgotten a certain child brought into this world, a boy, who was not right and who, according to his parents, failed to come home one day. Nor did she fail to notice that at tashlich these parents would stand at the very end of the line, upstream from the bridge, and empty their pockets, which contained, unlike the crumbs that fell from the pockets of most other people, large chunks of bread and, if Barbora was not mistaken, meat and sweets.

  ‘Let’s see what horrors our people have caused this week,’ said Jakub R, the rabbi’s son, who will die peacefully, hours after sucking on a wet ball of cotton, but who is now making mischief. He opened the paper and showed the article to his brother Hermann, of unknown fate, pointing at the smudged ink. It was unusual for boys on this side of the bridge to read the papers brought in on the back of Mikuláš K’s cart. They were expected to devote their time to studying the Torah in cheder or learning a trade, not wasting it on the frivolities of an irrelevant world. As Reb Shimon T, the blacksmith who would die covered in blood and shit in the back of a cattle train, liked to say, ‘A horse doesn’t shoe itself.’ However, young Jakub was different. Each fortnight, when the pedlar passed through the market, Jakub would secretly buy a copy of the city newspaper with the few coins his mother had given him to buy bread and cheese for lunch because, he reasoned, an empty stomach might grumble but an empty head will most certainly scream. Then he would gather his brother and two friends and read the paper to them on the lower riverbank, by the bridge. ‘Knowledge is their dybbuk,’ he would often say.

  Of the outsiders who regularly passed through the village, Mikuláš K was the best known and the least liked. Destined one day to swing from the gallows for treason, although it is not altogether clear against whom, he would arrive in the village each time from the north-west, walking beside his poor donkey as it dragged an overloaded cart, on which one or the other wheel was broken. He would demand a drink from the first villager he encountered, as if he had walked all the way from B, or another city. Among the village-folk it was rumoured that he was rich, that he stocked his cart with odds and ends from the backs of trucks that had dumped their loads in the forest. His books, often missing pages, or not matching the titles printed on their jackets, were always sold for a premium, as were his other assorted wares. He knew the wants of his customers, and brought for each what he was sure he could sell and nothing more. Pity the poor donkey, who would carry a greater weight on departure, for coins weigh more than paper and tin, particularly when the pedlar demanded so many for each worthless item.

  Mikuláš K appeared to hate these Jews. He would rush across the bridge the moment he had done his business. But he liked Jakub R; the boy would meet him on the other side, away from the prying eyes of the village-folk. He liked bringing the latest newspaper, in which the Jews were invariably cast in a bad light, and selling it to the boy for so great a profit. Most of all he liked that Jakub was always grateful, never questioning the discrepancy between the price printed on the paper’s masthead and the one he was charged.

  Jakub knew that the paper could only have been popular among the city’s rabble. But from it he gained perspective on his place in the world. He also learned that he had friends out there, friends in high places, like this man Masaryk, who had risked his career to help Jakub’s people.

  ‘That Jakub is trouble,’ whispered Old Chava Z, who would not live to see what was to come but instead die in the drowning agony of consumption.

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Marta B. ‘He is friends with the dybbuk.’ She smiled crookedly, much as she would again when, only a few years later, she was packed into the back of a truck, where she felt the air slip away amid a symphony of crunching gravel and wretched sobs.

  ‘And to think, our poor rabbi…’ Old Chava Z trailed off into a wet cough, then nodded thoughtfully. ‘With a son like that, studying in cheder to take his father’s position…What will become of our children?’

  Old Chava Z was right. She foresaw the disaster, although it did not come to pass in the way that she anticipated. When the children died in hails of bullets, or in gas chambers, or were thrown into furnaces to burn alive, Jakub R was nowhere to be found. For on the night the holy judge from the Beth Din was to arrive so he could sit his final rabbinical examinations, Jakub had packed his bags and fled the village along its only road, in the direction from which he often saw Mikuláš K approaching.

  And so it was that he left behind those ever-changing borders, the river, the bridge, the dybbuk, his family and the hundred or so condemned souls whose paths were many but whose final destination was the same dark one.

  THIS IS A BOOK of memories, some my own, some acquired and some, I suppose, imagined.

  It begins with a warning: almost everyone you care about in this book is dead.

  Some disappeared up chimneys in plumes of smoke that, it will later be said, frightened away the birds. Some were shot like lame dogs, without so much as a thought, let alone a care. Some starved. Some froze. Some succumbed to disease. Some threw themselves at electric fences in the desperate hope of a quick end. Some died on the battlefield, believing to their last breath in the sacred cause. Some managed to live on, escaping to distant lands where they built new lives while being chased across daybreak by ghosts until death caught up to take the pain away.

  Only the scantest of details remain that might offer clues as to when or where most of these people died. Train schedules. Ship manifests. Names of places where we know some of them must have perished. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Dachau. There are, however, no dates. No graves.

  Truth be told, I know little about the fates of the people in this book except this:

  In the early hours of 12 December 1996, while I slept soundly at home, my grandfather, Dr Jan Randa, died at Cabrini Hospital in his adopted hometown of Melbourne, Australia. He had survived my grandmother by less than eight weeks.

  This is their story.

  My grandfather was born in 1911 in a village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. In the local parish register he is listed as Yaakov, son of Rabbi Aharon and Gusta Rand, the first of many names by wh
ich he would come to be known. As a boy, Yaakov was schooled in the rituals of the Jewish faith. He grew out his payes, donned tzitzis and would often hide beneath the billowing folds of his father’s tallis, listening to the swirling chorus of prayers and lamentations that tumbled from the old man’s lips. At nineteen, Yaakov turned his back on his family and fled the village for Prague. There, he immediately changed his name to Jakub and was soon accepted to Charles University in the Old City, where he attained a doctorate in law. It was an impressive feat for this country boy. Then, a fortnight after he graduated, the Nazis annexed the country and banned Jews from practising in the legal profession. His career was over before it had started. And so he was forced into the line of work that would come to save his life: he taught Jewish children. He taught them in Prague. He taught them in Theresienstadt. And he taught them in Auschwitz. It’s how he survived. When the war was over, and he came to Australia, it’s what he continued to do. He was a teacher and a survivor.

  For as long as he was with us, we knew this, or something like it, to be true. We had created this version of his life for ourselves and, when he died, committed it to the kiln of memory.

  To doubt is improper. That is the thing with survival: it cannot be challenged. It cannot be subjected to interrogation. And so we did not ask how a boy with no secular education, no Latin, no formal qualifications, could be accepted into Prague’s most prestigious university. We did not seek details of his time in the camps. We did not question the likelihood of a school for children operating in the shadows of the crematoria. Above all, we did not dare contemplate the depths to which he might have sunk in order to survive. Every survivor is a saint. Every survivor is a hero. No survivor is merely human.

  At his shloshim, the service to mark the thirtieth day after his death, I recounted a famous rabbinical tale that I thought best summed up my grandfather.

  Somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime in the late 1940s, a young student, fiery and rebellious, confronts his teacher. ‘Reb Yosef,’ he says, ‘you teach us of God and the goodness of our people. But I have lost my faith. Not in God, no. I have lost faith in my fellow man. Gone are the days of the tzaddikim, the righteous men. Pardon my impertinence, Reb Yosef. I mean you no disrespect. But everywhere I look there are ordinary people, unremarkable people. And beyond them, there are only frauds. I need to find a tzaddik. I need the guidance of a righteous man. If one cannot be found, then I see no reason to still believe.’