The Book of Dirt Read online

  There was no apology, no contrition. Just the stench of cheap spirits.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, steadying himself against the wall.

  ‘We waited—’

  ‘It was my mother’s dream, Františka, not ours.’

  She stood her ground, would not let him pass.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, let them go like everyone else. I will speak with Jiří tomorrow, have the boy escort them. Now I must sleep.’

  8

  Black scuffs streaked the linoleum. From beyond the stairwell, he could hear laughter echoing through the halls. Jakub R could smell the children, their food, their dirt, the rich scent of their new leather shoes. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the envelope and glanced at the words. Yes, this was definitely the place. Where it had all led. Jáchymova Street. Number three.

  Jakub climbed the stairs to the second floor. Someone was pulling on his arm, dragging him through a door; he could not see who. Piles of books reached to the roof. The watermarks on their spine hinted at far-off lands. He was in a metropolis, a city of paper skyscrapers. Jakub R turned to look at his escort but his face was obscured in shadow. ‘Remember this place,’ said the man. Was it a man? The voice gave no clue. ‘It will one day save your life.’ Jakub was pushed through the endless alleys of books until they reached the door. He spun around one last time, but there was nothing. A janitor’s closet, a storeroom. His escort was gone.

  Jakub continued down the corridor until he reached a door with a plaque that read ‘Staff Only’. He pushed the door open. Two men sat at a fold-up table, their bodies hunched over a chessboard, a canopy for the opposing armies beneath them. The man playing black glanced up at Jakub. ‘Ah, just in time, Herr Doctor,’ he said, lifting himself out of the chair. ‘We can leave the good Doctor Glanzberg here to play on his own. He will find himself a more satisfactory adversary, no doubt.’ The man walked over to Jakub R, patting down wisps of hair on his skull with sweaty palms. ‘Jiří Langer,’ he said. ‘Head teacher, lamentably inadequate player of chess.’ Jakub took Langer’s hand. ‘Jakub R. I’m new here. From—’ ‘Yes, I am well aware,’ Langer interrupted. ‘Your reputation precedes you. Welcome. It’s good to have a young man such as yourself here at Jáchymova.’

  As Langer explained the day-to-day workings of the Jewish school, Jakub R looked at Doctor Glanzberg, who continued playing as if his opponent had never left. He bit his nails, squinted, every imaginable sign of concentration. He looked about the same age as Jakub, but he had the slimness and pallor of a man who spent his life in deep thought. His suit was dark, tailored and yet somehow ill-fitting. There was something oddly familiar about his face. Jakub knew that look of general desperation and anguish. Of genius, challenged. His severe widow’s peak swept upwards and to the right, as if escaping in panic.

  ‘These are your most important instruments,’ concluded Langer, as he handed Jakub R a thick stick of chalk, a cloth and a long wooden ruler. ‘And also your weapons. Your first class will be on Sunday. I am sorry we cannot offer you more, but prove yourself and we’ll see. I have told the children about you. The new teacher from the country. They are excited. I am sure you will not disappoint them.’

  ‘Checkmate!’ Glanzberg stood up, scraping his chair. ‘Looks like you’ve won, Doctor Langer.’

  Langer turned to Jakub R with glee. ‘You see. He claws back victory for me. I am a far better player when I am not at the table. Do you play, Doctor?’

  Jakub R shook his head. No. His father had not approved of it.

  ‘Never mind. A month at this school and Doctor Glanzberg here will have you playing like a professional. He has gambits even the greatest champions haven’t thought of.’

  9

  The tram came to a halt at Náměstí Republiky. Daša had been to this part of the city before, helping her mother buy materials for her hats, but today she was lost in a sea of shoulders and satchels. Bohuš grabbed Irena’s arm, dragging her off the tram. ‘Hurry up!’ he said, snatching her bag. ‘We’ll be late.’ The three of them made their way into the town square, up Pařížská Street to Jáchymova Street, towards the sound of the school bell.

  They descend like locusts, hundreds of children pouring into the cobbled stretch that runs between two of the Old City’s grandest parades. Paní Klarfeldová leans her ample body against the school’s pale peach brick cladding, trying to move out of harm’s way. She waves the solid brass bell above her head as the seemingly endless column hurtles past.

  Here we lose sight of Daša, Irena and the boy. They have been swallowed by the crowd of children.

  Wait. There they are.

  Irena, still holding on to Bohuš. Daša two steps behind. Or is it? I can no longer see her. The Jewish school on Jáchymova Street is wedged between identical buildings. Irena is grasping at her bag. No, we have lost her too. The whole image is fading. Where is Daša? Bohuš? Now I see nothing, can be sure of nothing.

  Sometime later, a photograph will be sent home to her mother:

  10

  The staffroom fills with teachers. They drop their books on the central table, some in triumph, others in defeat. Most huddle around the new arrival. In this chaos of shaking hands, questions and answers, it seems I have also lost sight of Jakub R. Can this be? This whole story, for nothing? Wait. There! The corner of his head. A pant leg. Shoes not yet polished, scratched and dusty from his travels.

  Lunch will come and go and Jakub R will roam the halls, preparing to teach the Hebrew language, or religious studies, or history. But for now, I pull back. The staffroom, the corridor, the stairs, the door, the pale facade of the school, Jáchymova Street itself, Pařísžká, the Old City, Prague…

  If only I could know him now, when it is too late/

  that would be enough.

  I KEPT ONLY ONE thing of his…

  It is a book that is a man that is a life. A book like many others, mass-produced, published in 1953 and purchased soon afterwards in Melbourne for two pounds by a Czechoslovakian refugee who must have been pleased and surprised to discover it had found its way to these distant shores. Unabridged. In a new world. Maybe it was the first English book he purchased, a tool with which he would try to master this new language, his last. Czech, Latin, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Polish, French, Russian and now, to confuse things once again, this mocking tongue, or a dialect thereof, that relied on linguistic contortions. A subversive language, English.

  It was a flag on a shelf of almost identical flags. Orange, white, and orange again. Two words on the spine would have caught his attention. The name of an author he had long admired, who was here in this foreign land, clinging to the raft of substandard translation. My grandfather must have pulled the book from the shelf and looked at the cover. What to make of the impudent bird gazing up in bewilderment, perhaps at the jumble of letters that might fall on its head? Or was it looking forward, stupefied by the tattoo it could see above the hand that held it? A-1821.

  Now, forty years later, the spine is no longer intact: glue, marrow, sparkling on its lower third. The whole book is rotten, the former feasting ground of some creature. A beetle, perhaps.

  I have cradled it countless times. It has kept me company through this lonely journey. And yet I only found the courage to take it down from the shelf ten years ago, long after my grandfather had given up on life, after that comfortable mirage that was his past had dissolved. Since then it has found a new home wherever I go. Fiction, it says on the cover. But is it fiction? To me it signifies death, but this book is his life. All the words he never said, the experiences he could not speak about. I hid it away for years, but now it sits beside me as I type, as I try to understand the bridge it formed between us.

  I open it a fraction, and close it again. There is a cut on the top right-hand corner of the cover and behind it the raggedy-eared pages. All over there are specks of mould consuming it from within. In this book, he is here again. One of the many faces drifting away with time. Someone must have been telling l
ies about Jan Randa. But who?

  He was not the type to draw attention to himself, preferring instead that his story be subsumed into the greater whole, audible only as a minute fraction of the testimonial cacophony. Perhaps it was a function of survivor’s guilt, a common enough response, but in his case compounded by the knowledge that he had not fully shared in his people’s suffering. While his family and friends were being shot or gassed or starved to death, he was tucked away in a museum, sitting at a desk, living in relative comfort. By rights he should have died first. He was the weakest, the least cut out for survival. And yet he had survived, like a dog. As if the shame of it would outlive him. So, as much as he could, he kept it to himself, allowing fantasies to swirl in the minds of those who knew him.

  But the nightmares had a way of sneaking out, just like his screams, which kept my mother awake throughout her childhood. My grandfather didn’t like to talk about the war, but every whisper, every confession left a trace. The fanciful nature of the article that appeared in the Jewish News made sense in the context of its telling. The journalist hadn’t sat down and interviewed my grandfather, but he did sit next to him in Caulfield Synagogue every Sabbath for over thirty years. He probably didn’t realise that the ramblings of his friend would amount to anything until the last piece of the puzzle had slipped out in conversation. Only then did he know he had an important story. But he had to go back and reconstruct it from scratch, filling in details he couldn’t fully remember. My grandfather wasn’t someone who invited questions. He controlled the flow of information. So this man did the best he could with the little knowledge of Theresienstadt he had, making the mistake of using well-known names, which he thought added credibility to his article, but which in fact did the opposite.

  While there might not have been an Eppstein, Muneles or Murmelstein involved in whatever it was my grandfather was doing in this Museum of the Extinct Race, there were others. One of them must have talked. And what of the mantra that has, for seventy years, congealed in our throats with its phlegm of indignant admiration:

  They were the exemplars of order.

  They kept meticulous records.

  It is to them I must turn.

  Nobody could have foreseen the important role the Red Cross International Tracing Service (ITS) would come to play in documenting the Holocaust. It was, as originally conceived in 1943, a way for Jews outside the Nazi net to find displaced or missing family members. In its early days, it moved from London to Versailles to Frankfurt am Main, before finally settling in the German town of Bad Arolsen. Easily accessible to the Allied victors, it became the main storage location for all original Nazi documents, of which there were legion. When it became apparent that the war was lost, the Nazis tried to burn the evidence, but not even their best accelerated efforts could make a dint in the mountains of paper. Whatever the Allies recovered they sent to be stored in the vast underground hangars of the ITS, which now comprises some 26,000 linear metres of original documents as well as 225,000 metres of microfilm and over 100,000 microfiches.

  For fifty years the International Red Cross sat on this incredible resource, claiming that any disclosure would breach German privacy laws. It was an ill-conceived argument. Most of the enquiries came from survivors desperate to learn what became of their loved ones or who were attempting to piece back together their own trajectory through the war years. For those seeking solace or some sort of resolution, it must have been excruciating to know that the documents existed but that the gatekeepers had no intention of granting them access. In January 2000, all eleven governments that are party to the ITS endorsed the Stockholm International Forum Declaration, which demanded the opening of the archive. Again the Red Cross sat on its hands, resisting countless attempts by international Holocaust remembrance centres to get copies of the files into their own archives or, more importantly, online. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a scathing press release in March 2006, accusing the ITS and its governing body of persistent recalcitrance. Three months later the ITS board voted to open the archives, albeit mainly for research purposes, and relinquished its administration to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. Two more years passed before the records were made available to the general public.

  I would finally be able to learn what information the Nazis had on my grandfather, sixty-three years after the war had ended.

  For all the promise of the road leading into Yad Vashem—spectacular train tracks re-imagined as the Red Sea split skywards—the museum’s research centre was a surprisingly small, cramped room tucked away in its administrative wing. A few outdated computers sat on communal desks. At one, a visibly frustrated fellow traveller was biting the nails of one hand while speedily tapping the keyboard with the other. I dumped my backpack on a nearby chair and settled in, trying to make sense of the clunky search system. I clicked on the most obvious icon, the Yad Vashem Shoah Names Database and typed in ‘Jakub Rand’.

  They all jumped out at me at once, an explosion of Jakub Rands, as if I had released their souls from the dusty white box that whirred innocuously beside me. Jacob Rand, a merchant, born in 1908 to Moshe and Chaya in Gorlice in Poland, and who perished in Bełżec at the age of thirty-four. No. Yaakov Rand from Łódź in Poland, born in 1937, killed when he was only five, most probably during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. No. Yaakov Rand, another child, this one from Drohobycz in Poland, who was murdered the year before he would attain bar mitzvah. Two children who would never grow into their names, never have the chance to become anyone’s grandfather, let alone mine. Yaakov Rand, born 1872 in Lutowiska, Poland. A married teacher, details about whose ultimate fate are unknown, other than that he did not survive. A teacher, closer. But dead, so no. Yakov Rand, again a Hebrew teacher from Turka. Yes, finally. Turka. Born in 1880, married to Sara Meier and killed on 15 November 1942. So no. Yaakov Rand, from Carpathian Ruthenia (again, yes), date of birth unknown, killed at age eleven at place unknown (and again, no). Jakob Rand, another teacher, also married to a Sara, killed at Auschwitz in 1944. So many Rands, dead. Jakub. Dead. Jacob. Dead. Yaakov. Dead. All of them. Dead. The Holocaust had done away with many people who shared his name, but nobody on this list could have been my grandfather.

  I headed to the counter, where a woman was sorting papers. I explained that I wished to have my Dr Jakub Rand, teacher and lawyer, added to the museum’s database. ‘Do you know where he perished?’ she asked, without looking up. I launched into a garbled account of his survival, making sure to slip in the remarkable role that had been foisted upon him as literary curator of Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race. ‘I’m surprised you don’t have him on your lists,’ I said. ‘I suspect he contacted you sometime back in the eighties.’ She cut the papers like a deck of cards and placed the top pile across the rest. ‘And I’m surprised,’ she said with a smirk, ‘that you expected to find him listed among the dead.’ She shook her head and continued, ‘Young man, you were searching the wrong database. You want the Tracing Service.’

  The woman stepped out from behind the counter. ‘I’m Ruti,’ she said. ‘Come this way.’ Ruti escorted me back to the benches, humming under her breath. She looked to be in her late forties, a typical first-generation kibbutznik who had left the fields at the first opportunity and settled into the tedium of city life. ‘People come here expecting us to give full reports about their lost family members,’ she said. ‘But for the most part, the victims only existed as index cards. What did the Nazis care about particulars? These weren’t people. They were vermin to be exterminated.’

  I tried to disguise my disappointment. ‘But if he was a Privileged Jew, if he had been used for a special project, surely there would be documents. They might not have kept detailed records of every Jew, but in his case—’

  ‘You might think that. Yet we only know of this Museum of the Extinct Race from survivors, not the perpetrators. We cannot be sure exactly of the grand design. It was a peculiar charge, asking members of this doomed race to pr
epare exhibits of how they wished to be remembered. And to what end? They didn’t want to present a cultured people, a successful people.’

  I sat back at the computer. Ruti leaned over and clicked through several pages, typing in passwords or search phrases, all the while railing against the irrationality of Hitler’s great museum. ‘We have other Privileged Jews on file, but it is possible this was a secret privilege. Why give glory to the curators? Better the future generations come through the museum and think the Nazis themselves had documented this extinct race. Absurd. Ah.’ She paused. ‘This is the Jakub Rand you want.’

  And there he was. My Jakub Rand.

  His file fits on a single index card: International Tracing Service Master Index R18, T/D 450 723. A jumble of names and dates that claim to account for three years of his life. There is nothing to say what he did at any of those places, how he survived. No mention of teaching children, or sorting through books, or a designation as a Privileged Jew. By this card alone he should have died and yet there it is, on the last line: KZ Sachsenhausen d.d. Russen befr. He was liberated by the Red Army from Sachsenhausen, after spending almost eight months in Schwarzheide, a subcamp just south of Berlin that provided slave labour to the Braunkohlen Benzin AG (BRABAG) plant to make gasoline and diesel fuel from lignite coal. After liberation he lived in an unspecified displaced persons camp under Russian supervision before returning home to Prague.