The Book of Dirt Read online

  ‘This is interesting,’ Ruti said. ‘You can see here that he was taken from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on transport EB in May 1944. That was a special transport, to the so-called Czech Family Camp.’ I had not heard of it, but I kept silent. It felt now as if she was in a trance, oblivious to my presence beside her, lost in a story she seldom had the chance to tell. ‘For the Nazis it was Plan B. They had invited the Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt to see how wonderful life was for their Jews. They were confident it would work but there was a risk the inspectors would ask to see another camp. Word had already leaked out about the dreaded Auschwitz. Maybe they would want to go there too. So the Nazis made this Czech Family Camp in a corner of Birkenau, with its own entrance, its own rules. There were no striped pyjamas, no shaved heads. Conditions were atrocious, disease killed off many of the prisoners, but it was a paradise compared with what was happening only a few metres away. A small society of the damned, living in an outer ring of Hell. This is how your grandfather experienced Auschwitz.’ She pointed to the next line, 15.7.44 KZ Schwarzheide, and said, ‘When the ruse was no longer needed, the camp was liquidated and the few prisoners still deemed strong enough moved on. The rest…straight to the gas.’

  I had always thought that my grandfather was liberated from Auschwitz. It is where the family story ends, before picking up again in Prague. It is also the last place he is listed in the Theresienstadt Memorial Book, the massive tome charting the fates of all who were sent to the fortress town. In my mind, my grandfather’s survival at Auschwitz had been the very essence of his Holocaust experience. Looking at the index card, however, I could see that he was there for just over six weeks, scarcely long enough for the tattooed skin on his forearm to blister, scab and heal. Then he was gone.

  ‘Oh…’ Ruti’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. She tapped at the screen. ‘Look here. I took the liberty of cross-checking the address. Four people lived with your grandfather in Biskupská Street before the occupation. At a guess his mother, a sister and two brothers. They were all included in the Community Register. But see—’ She brought up two cards. ‘For these two, Hermann and Růženka, there are no transport records. And no exit permits issued in their names either. Which means they died in Prague or—’

  ‘I knew Hermann. He came to my bar mitzvah. I visited him in Austria a few years ago and then we lost contact. He just disappeared. When he escaped from Prague he managed to reach Palestine. His boat was scuttled as it neared the harbour. Most of the passengers drowned. He survived, joined the Irgun and, when the war was over, made his way back to Europe. Růženka, I can’t say. She fled to America. I never met her.’ I looked away, unable to tell her the whole story: that my grandfather fell out with his sister after the war; that her husband, a tailor, made him a suit that did not quite fit and he refused to pay; that she cursed him across the ocean and he cursed her back. That something so petty was enough to sever the bond of survival.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can find,’ Ruti said as we watched the printer spit out a copy of the card. ‘The Tracing Service doesn’t have all the answers. For most it’s a start, nothing more.’ She scribbled an address on the bottom of the page before handing it to me. ‘About the library, the museum… Maybe you should also try here.’

  Located less than an hour north of Tel Aviv, in the grounds of Kibbutz Givat Chayim Ichud, Beit Terezín is the only research and memorial facility specifically dedicated to the Nazis’ ‘model ghetto’. That it exists at all is the consequence of a particular historical condition: in the 1950s, the Czech Communist regime was recasting the Holocaust to exclude Jews as the primary targets of Nazi barbarism. It was, therefore, left to those Jews who had fled Czechoslovakia after the war to set the record straight.

  The building that houses Beit Terezín is in every way unexceptional: a plain beige brick structure, a testament to the era in which it was built. The kibbutz’s socialist enterprise had given birth to precisely the sort of buildings that were simultaneously popping up behind the Iron Curtain. If Beit Terezín had been created to give back a voice silenced by Communist Czechoslovakia, it was a ham-fisted aesthetic homage.

  ‘Do you know what it meant to be a Privileged Jew?’

  Věra Obler is the last of the survivor archivists. She is ethereal, a wisp escaped through a crack in the dark space of history. Her silver hair is in a bob that, when she flicks it to the side, reveals the nape of her neck—impossibly smooth for someone well into her eighties. A red, knitted cardigan clings to her slight frame.

  ‘Not just a Jew with privileges,’ she adds, ‘but to be designated a Privileged Jew? A Prominenten?’

  I had never really thought about the concept as anything more than colloquial, a way to describe those who, for one reason or another, were given a reprieve, so they could witness their people’s suffering for a little longer. The writer Bruno Schulz was a Privileged Jew. For such an honour he was shot dead in the street while returning home with a loaf of bread—because his Nazi protector, Felix Landau, had murdered another Nazi’s Privileged Jew. That is what it meant to be privileged: you were the currency in a malevolent system of exchange.

  ‘On this computer,’ Věra continued, pointing at the glowing green screen, ‘I have all the Nazi records at my fingertips. Gone are the days I would have to trawl through paper files.’ She tapped away for a few seconds then looked up. ‘See here. This file is mine. I worked on the camp’s outskirts, tilling the fields. Can you read it? Come closer. Obler, Věra. Garden detail. My point is, if you had a job, I have your record. Now, there weren’t many Privileged Jews. Most of them we knew already, by name. They were the Judenältesten, the organisers, those with special skills, who could help the Nazis achieve their aim. Vital cogs in the machine,’ she said before bringing his name up on the screen. ‘Your grandfather was not one of them.’

  Věra flicked a switch and I watched the words disappear. ‘His name is mentioned once, on a request for exemption from transport. Your grandfather and, by association, his mother and his brother. It came from the Jugendfürsorge, the Youth Welfare Department. I can see where the misunderstanding lies. He was, it appears, a teacher. For his work he was afforded some privilege, but that is quite different from being a Privileged Jew.’ She rummaged through some papers on the desk and handed me a sheet. I scanned the German until I found them:

  Rand Dr. Jakub 572/Ck Rand Gusta 571/Ck 1892 Mutter

  Rand Sam. 451/Bf 1923 Bruder

  Věra waited a moment before continuing. ‘He also sent some correspondence to us sometime in the late 1980s. He makes mention of this task, with the books, and he names a few people we know were involved with the Central Library at Theresienstadt. But if you want my opinion, these are just names dropped willy-nilly.’

  I wanted to protest. In her eyes I could see sympathy, pity even. She tried to explain: ‘I was there and I can tell you quite definitively it didn’t happen. I would have seen it or heard about it. We knew all the goings-on, we were a fully functioning society, an entire metropolis piled into a matchbox. We lived on each other’s shoulders, quite literally. Nobody kept secrets; to do so was pointless. There was a library, that much I know. We have lists of those that worked there. Jakub Rand was not one of them.’ She reached into a plastic pocket next to the computer and pulled out what appeared to be an earlier version of the newspaper article. It was in Yiddish, clipped from the Canadian Eagle in 1987. ‘This, I am sure, is what you were speaking about when you first contacted us. What can I say? It is a good story, but there is no truth to it. Murmelstein, Eppstein? Two of the most famous names in the camp. They were the Judenältesten, the Camp Elders. It’s impossible. They couldn’t have left Theresienstadt, couldn’t have gone to Prague. And Muneles? That was also an important name, but not until after the war. When the camp was liberated, while he was still there, he wrote some short reports but said nothing of any Museum of the Extinct Race. Once he returned to Prague he was one of the key figures who helped to establish the city�
�s new Jewish Museum. That’s why he is remembered. That’s why this article mentions his name. You want to see the true story about Theresienstadt? You want to know where your grandfather was? Be my guest. Head outside. The exhibition is just along the path.’

  I stood in the hall of Beit Terezín’s museum, reeling. The exhibition was just one room, cavernous but maze-like, intended to make visitors feel as if they were in a cramped ghetto. It was the exodus, in reverse, a peculiar miniature. It lacked both the grandeur of Yad Vashem and the power of visiting the camp itself. I couldn’t help but think this memorial redundant, a minor relic from a time in which the horrors it depicted were not accessible.

  I stood against the wall, next to a picture of Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the most maligned of the Judenältesten, and tried to work out how long I was obliged to wait before I could leave without appearing rude or ungrateful. Murmelstein’s smug, swine-like face stared out across the room to pictures of filthy streetscapes on the opposite wall. Legions of emaciated ghetto folk craned from the windows of their overcrowded rooms. As the hall spun around me, their heads moved from side to side like ceramic carnival clowns.

  I steadied myself and looked into Murmelstein’s eyes, hoping for some clue, but instead Věra’s words echoed in my head. I was there. She had lost interest in my quest and offered to look up other family members as a consolation. For the next half an hour I listened to the scraping of a dot-matrix printer. When she had finished, Věra stood up triumphantly, tore the tooth-holed strips from the side of the paper, and handed me the printed index cards of the rest of my family. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted but it wasn’t a complete waste.’ I thanked her and said that she had been very helpful. She walked me out to my car.

  I had already started the engine when she tapped on the window. She waited until I had rolled it all the way down before leaning in close, as if to whisper, but her voice resonated in the small space: ‘It is, I suppose, the great danger of exhuming someone you love. You must first displace the dirt. And even then, when you lift the lid on their coffin, you won’t always find a familiar face.’

  Who was I to question Věra’s experience? I could hardly challenge her, say that she was merely a gardener, while my grandfather was a highly regarded intellectual specifically tasked with overseeing one aspect of a top secret project. Perhaps my mistake was semantic, a belief in his status as a Privileged Jew when all available evidence clearly suggested he was not. Věra seemed to think in absolutes: because my premise was wrong, so, too, was the rest of my story. Especially considering that it conflicted with her own. I would not have expected her to know of these few individuals, locked away sorting through crates of stolen Judaica while she plucked potatoes from the ground. My grandfather and Věra had survived two different Theresienstadts, on parallel but competing plains in the multiverse that was the Holocaust. No matter what evidence I brought forward, his experience would always seem fanciful to her. And so here, on this kibbutz dedicated to the commemoration of the camp in which my grandfather briefly disappeared from history’s view, I found myself up against the great Perspex wall of Holocaust ownership, the barrier encountered by every member of the second and third generation who tries to make sense of what happened to their family.

  What arrogance, to say that we, not those who survived, know better. How can we claim to stand back objectively and collect evidence like police poring over a crime scene? How can we claim that there is an objective narrative, floating above individual experience? Who are we, the ones reaping the benefit of their sacrifice, to dare suggest that their view was obscured by the plumes of smoke wafting skywards with the souls of their children?

  And yet…it is our duty to confront the silences, to break open the cracks that have thus far only allowed flashes of light to pass. With the luxury of time, distance and technology we can deconstruct those we loved, in order to try to set the record straight. But in doing so we risk inadvertently fanning the flames of Holocaust denial, that horrid beast that feeds on the doubt we might create. Such is the historiographical tightrope we walk.

  So we search, we sift, we question, we beg, we scream, we suffer, we smash at doors with our shoulders, until we hold those pieces of evidence in our clenched fists. But even then we are left to wonder: whose stories are they; who owns the experience; to what end can it all be used? And still there are the schisms when—like the man who comes before the law in the parable told to Josef K by the kindly priest—we reach the door meant only for us and confront a guard who will not allow us to pass. We cannot wait there forever until the door is closed. Neither can we just barge through. Such was the impasse I had reached with Věra. I couldn’t bring myself to say that perhaps she was wrong. For in the end, as I drove away, I knew that the truth of my grandfather’s story was not more important than the peace she had found in her own survival.

  I returned home via Prague, to visit my mother’s cousin Ludvík and search for what my grandfather might have left behind. It had been almost thirty years since my last visit, when Communism still cast its pall over the city’s majestic beauty, when I stood in line, holding my great-grandmother’s hand, waiting an hour to buy the lukewarm carcass of a chicken that would become our dinner. She did not live to see the city reborn. A year before the regime fell, she took ill and died. Her ashes were scattered in the forest around her holiday home in Sudoměřice. Within months my cousins began to write of new landmarks, fast food chains, international brands. Of freedom and excess. The Czech people had a new hero, the poet and playwright Václav Havel, a resurrected Christ, a modern day Tomáš Masaryk. He had brought light to the city, chased away the forty-year night. It was in this new Prague that I could at last hope to find traces of my grandfather, in the streets, in books, in the recesses of untapped memories. And, of course, in the labyrinthine corridors of the Prague Museum.

  Thank you for your email. I can of course meet you but since I am quite sure that your grandfather did not work in the museum during the war I am afraid that I will not be able to help you with any new information.

  MARTA HAVLÍKOVÁ

  DIRECTOR

  I didn’t write back.

  ‘Maybe visit for nothing,’ Ludvík said in his strained English. ‘Or maybe this interests you.’

  Had Ludvík’s mother been taken to Theresienstadt like her sisters, she too, might have fled to the furthest corner of the world and made a home in Australia. But fate played a cruel trick on Hana Rubíčková. She was spared the horrors of the Holocaust only to have her son—the boy she named after her father—cast into the jaws of another vengeful God, Communism. He would not know childhood as his cousins knew it. He would not be free to play the same games, learn the same lessons, make the same mistakes. And yet Ludvík was a cheerful boy, adventurous and cheeky, making do with what little he was given. In some ways he was also lucky; the bureaucratic wheels turned in his favour. When his classmates were sent off to train for menial jobs in the greater party machine, Ludvík was singled out to study engineering. It guaranteed him a steady income, enough to help his mother get by, enough to make a start on a family of his own. Throughout it all Hana remained his one constant, and he repaid her sacrifice with absolute devotion. Her death a few months before my visit had left him bereft. He had not ever imagined a world without her.

  ‘At the back of cupboard in Biskupcova house I see box for shoes my mother kept. Inside is this.’ Ludvík reached into his front pocket and pulled out an envelope. ‘It is not grandfather so maybe not important for you.’ He unfolded the paper, flattening it against the metal table. The pencil strokes had faded, and were almost invisible. ‘Letters. From grandmother of you, Daša. It is from the camp. Maybe Oświęcim. You know? Auschwitz?’ Ludvík bent down to examine the pages, his finger scanning each line before coming to a stop. ‘Here. I try with translate. We have escaped with our lives…I tell you gas is used on large scale. If you want, maybe I make copy.’

  All this time I have fixated on him, h
is story. Daša has been there too, but only in the background, as a subplot. When the article about my grandfather was published in the Jewish News, it did nothing to displace her from within the comfortable narrative our family had come to accept. The eldest daughter of a convert, she and her sister Irena were sent to Theresienstadt then Auschwitz. Somehow they managed to stay together. Somehow they survived. We built stories around her strength—she laid train tracks, dug ditches—and around her Aryan beauty. We tried not to imagine all that the latter might imply. In the camps, she carried a gold ring—in her hand, her mouth, wherever it could be hidden—waiting for the moment when she would have to trade it for her life. The moment never came.

  Not once had I considered her mother and two youngest sisters waiting for Daša and Irena in Prague, praying for their safe return. I certainly hadn’t thought they stayed in contact. The very idea seemed impossible. I knew of postcards that were sent from the camps, usually to further the ruse of resettlement, but full letters, uncensored, untouched?

  ‘You don’t know?’ Ludvík said. ‘Babička Františka visited them in Terezín. Together they made Christmas.’

  I wander the streets of the Old City hoping to find them. Could it be that, in walking where they, too, once walked, I might feel them again, in a warm gust of air, a tightening of the hand, a familiar scent drifting from a nearby restaurant? I stand outside 3 Jáchymova Street, then make my way east towards my grandfather’s home in Biskupská Street. How many times did he make this same journey? I reach the corner where there is a large church fenced in by iron spikes. I loiter outside number five. A shopkeeper comes out and stares at me. I wait; the air is still. My grandfather will not come. As I head back to my hotel, I am taken by the strange similarity in the names: Biskupská, Biskupcova. As if Jakub and Daša had almost lived as one.