The Book of Dirt Read online

  ‘Before you go, there is one place I take you.’ Ludvík and I were sitting at the kitchen table in his mother’s old apartment at 13 Biskupcova Street. It was almost exactly as I remembered it from when I had visited as a child. More than anything, it struck me as a shrine to Babička Františka. In the twenty-odd years that Hana had lived there, she did almost nothing to make it her own. Even the table, formica-topped with streaked aluminium legs, was the same. It was here that my mother walked in and caught me smoking. I was five years old. Babička Františka, unable to otherwise communicate with me, saw it as something we could do together. Ludvík shook me from the cloud of memory. ‘Come. We go now.’

  The radio blasted Euro-pop as we headed into Nové Město, Ludvík mounting kerbs and jumping traffic lights. We pulled into a spot opposite a grand, pale-yellow building. I stepped out of the car and peered across the street. Flowers—red, blue and white—lay in bunches beneath a pockmarked slab of large cement bricks. On top of a single rectangular window, its frosted glass covered in dust, there was a plaque, guarded on one side by a soldier, the other by a priest, cast iron sentries with their heads lowered in a show of respect.

  ‘Is important church,’ said Ludvík. ‘Saint Cyril and Methodius. Here is Czech story for Nazis. After operation to kill Heydrich, paratroopers hide here. Bastard traitor betray them. There was big fight. Nazis pour in gas and water but men don’t give up. Finally, Nazis break inside. Men are brave. Shoot themselves. This is Czech man. Now we go look.’

  I followed Ludvík across the road and into the church. He was almost running, the patter of his feet echoing back up the stairway that led into the crypt. Inside, it was dark and musty. Along the walls were stone inlets, like hives, where coffins once lay. There was an eerie silence, broken only by the odd snatch of wind that sounded disconcertingly like a voice. I tried to imagine the paratroopers, knowing they were surrounded, wading through the water that was being pumped in from the window above. I wondered if they knew, when they first heard the sirens, and the German orders barked from outside, that it was hopeless. Did they count their bullets, calculating how many they could spare before turning their guns on themselves? Ludvík walked slowly along the gravelled corridor. He stopped at each bronze bust that marked where one or another of the paratroopers had died. He caught up with me at the other end, near the door leading into the main body of the church, the door the Nazis finally breached. ‘This one is my story,’ he said, his soft voice reverberating through the crypt.

  I returned to the vestry, where the story of Operation Anthropoid is told on a series of posters, the tone sombre but with an undercurrent of pride. I read each poster in turn. The Nazi occupation. Heydrich’s rise to power. The training of paratroopers in England. The planning. The fateful attack. Heydrich’s survival. Then, soon after, his death. I stared at a photo of him lying in state—his thin, angular, insect-like face—and turned to the next poster:

  [The] resistance group, together with several members of the former Masaryk Resistance League Against Tuberculosis, provided the paratroopers with safe housing in Prague and all the necessary assistance…The paratroopers’ main bases were the flats of the Zelenka and Moravec family in Biskupcova Street in the district of Žižkov. The paratroopers’ most selfless helpers included at first sight ordinary, inconspicuous Czechs who refused to reconcile themselves with the reality of Nazi occupation and were prepared to risk not only their own lives but also those of their closest relatives…Without a single exception, their members were either executed or chose suicide.

  ‘Ludvík!’ I gasped. Across the room, he looked up from an installation recreating the bicycle and overcoat that had been displayed in the window of the Baťa department store immediately following the attack. I pointed at the poster, at the words. Biskupcova Street in the district of Žižkov. ‘Is it…?’

  ‘Same Biskupcova Street? Daša. Yes,’ he motioned around the room. ‘Here, it is your story, too.’

  Back in Australia, I floated on a paper lake, trapped in a gorge of boxes. One small storage container in a building full of them. A vast hall of souls, memories that people could not cast off, but probably don’t ever visit. We are all hoarders when it comes to the lives of those we loved. The room was two metres by two metres, smaller for the encroaching mountains of cardboard. Files shifted like tectonic plates around me. When I rolled up the door, I expected to see their house in miniature. I wanted my grandfather’s leather recliner, with its extendable footrest. I wanted my grandmother’s card table, on which she always kept boiled lollies hidden under a tea towel. Most of all, I wanted my grandparents back.

  The air was dead, a low hum of fluorescent lights echoing in my head. Alone there for two days, I sifted through it all. My grandfather was a prolific correspondent, but any order in which his papers were once kept had been lost in the rush of the clean-out. It was all there. Letters to doctors about my grandmother’s treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Letters to the German government, fighting over every cent they refused to give. Letters to former employers about monies owed and copyright infringed. And then, between some letters to the local council about a proposed halfway house and some legal documents relating to his property investments in Surfers Paradise, I found it. A bushel of papers with letterheads I recognised. Beit Terezín and Yad Vashem. He had written, and they had written back, just like Věra Obler had said. It wasn’t a journalist’s act of ventriloquism. It was his own voice.

  For the first time I would be hearing my grandfather’s side of the story.

  On 11 January 1983, my grandfather sat down at his desk, took fresh sheets of paper from the pile in his top drawer and typed out the same letter twice. One was addressed to Yad Vashem, the other to Beit Terezín. It was the first time he had contacted either institution. Despite going to Israel on a number of occasions, he had never visited either place, an omission that he explained in an almost offhand way: ‘I freely confess to having tried as much as possible to avoid it,’ he wrote, ‘so as not to resurrect the past in my mind, in my conscious mind at least.’ There is a certain humility in the sentences that follow, a desire to contribute to history and, perhaps more importantly, a palpable need for their author to understand his place in the wider Holocaust survival narrative. The letter is less than a page long and sums up three years of unimaginable suffering in a single matter-of-fact paragraph. ‘My personal data and my experience,’ he wrote, ‘are of no particular significance.’ At that stage the modesty was genuine. The lid was still shut on the box of his memory, the lock still in place. My grandfather was, for the first time in his life, daring to whisper out through the keyhole. It had taken him thirty-eight years.

  I scanned the letter for any mention of the Museum of the Extinct Race but there was nothing. Instead, this: ‘While my memory still serves me I should like to find out whether your documentation files contain the title TALMUDKOMMANDO and if not, does Murmelstein mention this group in his book about Theresienstadt?’ I read over that word, sounded each syllable out loud: TALMUDKOMMANDO. ‘I was a member of that small group of Rabbis and Hebraists selected by Murmelstein, our object was to catalogue and comment on all books and manuscripts that were stolen from all over Europe.’ The letter concludes with a few lines about his movement between camps and his arrival in Australia. Then, his signature in shaky script.

  My grandfather received almost identical replies from both institutions, albeit some five months apart. No files could be found on the Talmudkommando. The work of cataloguing Hebraica in Theresienstadt was documented, although not in any detail. Yes, there was mention of some sort of ghetto library in Murmelstein’s memoir, but it was only in passing, a mere paragraph. ‘We would appreciate it very much,’ wrote Esther Aran of Yad Vashem, ‘if you write to us and give us more details about this work.’ The head archivist of Beit Terezín at that time, Pinda Shefa, was more effusive in his reply, but it amounted to the same thing. He knew nothing of this Talmudkommando, was sorry that he could be of no
real assistance, but was keen, nonetheless, to learn more.

  And so my grandfather’s first attempt at entering the wider discourse of Holocaust survival was, at least in his mind, a failure. The institutions he had finally gathered the courage to approach saw him as just another voice in an ever-growing crowd. He refused to sit in his office writing it all down, only to have it disappear into some bottomless pit of paper, where it would never be read.

  Turning away from the keyhole of memory, my grandfather retreated into daily life, where mundane concerns served to suppress his demons. He still had a full-time job. He could still revel in the time he spent with his family. His health was still relatively good. He was still actively involved in the community. He could still enjoy his operas and action movies. Yad Vashem and Beit Terezín didn’t need him and he did not need them.

  That all changed in 1989. Completely unprepared for retirement, my grandfather was desperate to find new ways to fill his days. He was bored and angry. His body was starting to fail him. It was time to pick up the trail he had abandoned six years earlier.

  This time, however, he had a new weapon in his arsenal. Evidence. The article about his role in the Museum of the Extinct Race—the same one I would discover when it was reproduced in translation in 2005, after he had died—was published in 1987 in the Yiddish supplement of the Australian Jewish News. Although it did not cause the international sensation my grandfather seems to have believed it did, it certainly created ripples. The article was republished in Yiddish newspapers around the world. America, Canada, Germany, Czechoslovakia. My grandfather figured that if he showed it to those who had previously dismissed him, they might now give him the credit he was due.

  ‘Dear Sirs,’ he wrote to Beit Terezín in 1989. ‘I refer to our previous correspondence…’ As if no time had passed at all. ‘I have been asked to shed more light on that little known Talmudkommando, of which I was a member from its inception in 1943 under Dr Murmelstein right to its liquidation in the spring of 1944.’ He was not averse to puffery, presenting them with a carrot of exclusivity. He would not talk to the press if Beit Terezín wanted to speak to him.

  The response was prompt and, for my grandfather, completely unexpected. Although it reiterated Pinda Shefa’s inability to shed further light, its sender was the new archivist, Alisah Shek, wife of Beit Terezín’s founder, the late Ze’ev Shek. According to Alisah, Ze’ev Shek had been the youngest member of the very group about which he was enquiring. ‘You might remember my late husband,’ Alisah wrote. Although there wasn’t documentary evidence as such, she did have some personal information that might assist. ‘All I know is what I remember vaguely from his stories about the place.’ After the war she travelled with Ze’ev to various castles in the north of Bohemia ‘where we found vast quantities of books, which the Germans dumped there in heaps and mountains, but I don’t even remember if some of them were marked by the Talmudkommando.’

  It was a promising development. My grandfather had found a reliable correspondent who didn’t dismiss him out of hand and who, thanks to a personal connection, had a special interest in his Talmudkommando. Any satisfaction he might have felt from Shek’s first letter, however, was soon shaken by her second, sent immediately afterwards. Being Czech, the archivist possessed only a rudimentary grasp of Yiddish and hadn’t actually read the article before her initial response. Now, having deciphered it, her curiosity turned to doubt. The tone of this second letter was completely different, terse and interrogative. It bordered on accusation. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she began, ‘but I would like to know the following facts.’ What came next was a series of pointed, suspicious questions, which cast doubt on everything from his knowledge of the Talmudkommando to his very identity. ‘Is the index card which is nearest your name really you?’ she asked. And then, twisting the knife, ‘We have no “Randa” matching you.’ The other questions sprang from her intimate knowledge of the group, which clearly did not accord with the facts as presented in the article. ‘When did you go to work in the Prague Museum? When did you get back to Terezín? You mention Dr Murmelstein, who was the last Judenältester and was in charge of the Talmudkommando, but you also mention Dr Eppstein, who was Judenältesten before and, to my knowledge, never worked there.’ In signing off, she threw down the gauntlet. ‘We shall be most grateful if you will answer our questions and until then we wish you all the best.’

  The gambit had failed. In bringing attention to this ‘little known’ group, and then relying on an article that he must have known took considerable liberties with the truth, my grandfather damaged his chances of being taken seriously by those in the know. I imagine that those two or three months in 1989 must have been both intellectually and emotionally tormenting. Only two years before, his story had become an interesting historical curiosity. People knew him as more than ‘that teacher’ at Mount Scopus College in Australia. He must have hoped against hope that he would never come across someone like Alisah Shek.

  When it came to Yad Vashem, my grandfather was much more frank. Already on the back foot, he realised that he had to flag what Shek already knew if there was any chance of him being believed. He enclosed the article, but this time with a caveat. ‘As the result of a series of conversations,’ he wrote, ‘an article was published in the Australian Jewish News on 6.2.1987, which unfortunately contained many inaccuracies.’ Perhaps most curious, however, was his pursuit of one aspect of the article that seems hardest to verify. ‘Would you have any clues who was that high ranking SS officer/ Hauptsturmbannführer/ who arrived in 1943 and put us though an examination over an open volume of Maimonides/?/ in order to select the final small group of Hebraists?’ Is it possible he felt a debt of gratitude, that he wanted to repay the man for saving his life? ‘Rumour had it that he was from the Preussische Staatsbibliothek or a professor of Semitology from Berlin.’ Unfortunately, his frankness was to no avail. A month after sending the letter, he received an even more curt reply from Yad Vashem. They thanked him for his letter and the article but could find nothing more than what they sent in 1983.

  There must be another letter, but it has been lost. It contained something that changed Alisah Shek’s mind. If I were to guess, I would say it was an admission, like the one my grandfather made to Yad Vashem, that much of the article was untrue. On 2 August 1989, Shek wrote to my grandfather one final time, a warm and detailed letter, mostly about her husband. It is clear from the tone that her suspicions had been allayed. As quickly as she had turned against him, she was now his friend. She thanked him for that missing letter. She didn’t really know much more but put him on to two other people who were involved in the Talmudkommando and who might have been able to help. Frau Kornelia Richter—‘who does research about it’ —and Dov Herschkowitz.

  He never followed up with either of them.

  I have tried to track down both Frau Richter and Dov Herschkowitz, but it is too late. Richter has disappeared and Herschkowitz died. The trail ends there, with them, in 1989. It is one of the great frustrations for family of those survivors who could not tell their stories. We, who have been entrusted to perpetuate their memory, to uphold the great refrain of ‘Never again’, who have stood by and watched in horror as it has happened again and again, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Former Yugoslavia, in Darfur, in the Middle East, are left impotent in their silence. We understand it. We cannot be angry. But it is there. And we have stood in its vacuum for too long. We didn’t question. We were too young to understand. We thought them immortal. We cannot ask them, our grandparents, our great-uncles and great-aunts, their friends, because, at the time, they chose not to speak and now they are gone. And we cannot find the pieces of the puzzle that make up those few years of their life, for they, too, are gone.

  So I will not meet those learned men who sat on either side of my grandfather, also sorting books, praying to God that there might be more collections to be plundered, so that this menial process might go on long enough for the Messiah—any Messiah—to come and
free them. I will not meet the people who slept next to him, infested with lice and covered in boils, on the wooden-slatted bunks of Auschwitz. I will not know the passengers on the cramped, shit-stained cattle trains, their feet burning on a carpet of quicklime, or the workers in the munitions factory, forced to carry gnarled shrapnel in their emaciated arms.

  All I shall ever know will be hearsay.

  I turn back to that line in the letter to Yad Vashem.

  ‘Unfortunately it contains many inaccuracies.’

  Occupation

  1

  ‘Arnošt Flusser!’ The teacher called out from the front of the room. ‘Hands on your head this instant. We do not wave at wasps.’

  The boy stood at the window, his right arm hoisted awkwardly in limp salute. It wasn’t clear to his classmates if he was welcoming the troops as they rolled in below or simply wiping clear the film of mist he created with each breath. Arnošt was that kind of boy. Everything he did seemed ambiguous. ‘A fine bed he makes…’ His teacher now spoke in a soft thrum. ‘Turning down the sheets so that the lice might be more comfortable.’ A pause. Some giggles, stifled. His teacher, louder: ‘He has yet to consider how he will sleep.’

  Arnošt Flusser stood still. Was it defiance, fear or boyish fascination? He knew the teacher was pointing at him, but could not turn around. With his nose pushed against the glass, he did not see wasps or lice or insects of any kind. He saw three-headed newts, like in the story his father had told him the night before: salamanders that slithered across the bridge in perfect formation, their sleek bodies hiding the mechanical movement of their feet. They made no sound. The snow swirled fairy dust dervishes around them, settling on the cobblestones or disappearing into the river, but never gathering on their leathery skin. The newts did not stop to feast on the slugs that had gathered on either side of their columns, enthusiastically extending their antennae. Little Arnošt glimpsed stuttered movement in the whiteness of Křižovnická Street. He turned to look in the direction of the university, and saw clusters of chameleons changing colour as they tumbled forward: one moment grey, then a fluttering white, and, as they came closer to their reptilian brethren, red and black. How strange nature can be, he thought. Another puff of mist. Again Arnošt wiped it away.