Of course it all went quite differently, and on the large map, the vast Soviet Union got smaller each day as the Germans advanced. Father said it couldn’t possibly be true. The Germans must be lying; they lied about almost everything. But it turned out that the news from Hitler’s main headquarters was mostly true. Whenever they advanced, they posted large V’s everywhere, which stood for “victory,” while at the same time they issued more and more bans that eventually made our lives unbearable. I was no longer allowed out on the street at night; I couldn’t travel anywhere by train; Mother could shop only at designated hours. We were living in complete isolation.
Father’s beautiful sister, Ilonka, managed to immigrate to Canada at the last minute. We were not permitted to visit Mother’s eldest sister, Eliška, or even mention her name, since she had decided to conceal her origins and try to survive the war as an Aryan. Father thought she would have a hard time succeeding, but in this, once again, he was wrong. Mother’s youngest sister fled to the Soviet Union, and her Communist brothers went into hiding for a while before they too fled. When the party recalled them to work in the underground here, the Germans quickly tracked them down, arrested them, and shortly thereafter put them to death. Mother’s other sister, Irena, moved in with us. She was divorced, but it was only for show, since her husband, who was not Jewish, owned a shop and a small cosmetics factory that, had they not divorced, the Germans would have confiscated. The family had no idea, since very few people had any such ideas then, that they had offered my aunt’s life for a cosmetics business.
In our apartment building there were two other families wearing the stars — one on the ground floor and the second on the top floor. In September 1941, the family living on the ground floor, the Hermanns, were ordered to leave for Poland, apparently for Łódź, in what was called a transport.
I remember their departure. They had two daughters slightly older than I was, and both girls were dragging enormous suitcases on which they had to write their names and the number of their transport. As the Hermanns left, people in our building peered out from behind their doors, and the more courageous of them said goodbye and reassured them that the war would soon be over and they’d be able to return. But in this, everyone was wrong.
My parents rushed about trying to find suitcases and mess tins, and they bought medicines and fructose in a recently opened pharmacy. They couldn’t lay in any other supplies because everything had to be purchased with ration coupons, and we had been allotted scarcely half of what those not wearing stars were given. Less than two months after the Hermanns were taken away, Father received a summons to a transport. He didn’t go to Poland, though, but rather went to Terezín, a town not far from Prague built long ago as a fortress to protect our country from the Germans, which, Father said, had never been used for that purpose. His was the first transport to Terezín. Father also had to write his name and number on his suitcase. Mother was distraught. What would become of us now? she sobbed. How were we going make ends meet and would we ever be together again? Father tried to console her and said that although the Soviets might be retreating, they were doing it only to lure the Germans into the depths of their enormous land, as they had lured Napoleon. The terrible Russian winter was about to begin, and that would destroy the Germans. In this he was not wrong; it just took longer than he’d imagined.
Several days later, we too were assigned to a transport. The very same day, America entered the war against Japan, and the insane Hitler immediately declared war against the United States. Our neighbors, who helped us hastily pack, assured us that Hitler had now signed his own death warrant, and in this they were not wrong.
In the Terezín ghetto, they put us in a building called the Dresden Barracks. In a small room they referred to as our “quarters,” they crammed thirty-five people, all of them women except for my brother and me.
The fact that so many of us had to live in a single room and that we all had to sleep on the floor depressed most of the women. We had been allowed to bring our mattresses from home, but there was so little space here that they could be laid down only end to end. The first evening I remember hearing a woman sobbing, and someone was walking through the room and few of them could sleep. But even though I didn’t like going to sleep, I managed to sleep pretty well that first night on the floor. The next morning they announced breakfast, and so I went with my mess kit, wondering what I would get. It wasn’t good: bitter black ersatz coffee and bread. I don’t remember our first midday meal, but lunch was almost always the same: soup with a little caraway seed and a piece of turnip or a couple of strands of sauerkraut and, for the main course, several unpeeled potatoes in a sauce. The sauce was made from paprika, mustard, caraway seeds, and sometimes also powdered soup, and once in a while there was even a mouthful of meat floating in it.
Perhaps my memory is deceiving me by driving out unpleasant recollections, but today it seems to me that I was not aware of any particularly cruel suffering. I accepted whatever happened as an interesting change. I had lived apart from other people for a long time; now this isolation was broken. Several children my age also stayed in the barracks, and I was able to get together with them. Foremost in my memory is a moment of one of my greatest achievements in life until that point. In the courtyard, the only place where we were allowed out during the day, several boys were playing soccer. I didn’t know them and it never occurred to them to invite me to play. I stood some distance away and waited. Finally the ball came in my direction and I stopped it and dribbled it into the game. I kept possession of the ball for almost a minute before they were able to take it away from me. They stopped the game, divided the players again, and let me play.
After a week, Father showed up in our room, but he said he’d dropped in only to repair the electricity. The lights were always going off and it was around Christmastime and the days were very short, so we either groped about in the dark or burned the last of our candles that we’d brought from home. He embraced Mother and us and then quickly shared news that the Germans were fleeing Moscow and that the entire German army had frozen to death. The war would soon end and we could return home. He was talking to Mother, but the other women in the room were listening, and I felt a sense of relief and hope fill the air. The mood in our living quarters improved, and sometimes in the evenings — when the windows were shut and blacked out — the women would sing. I didn’t know most of their songs and I didn’t know how to sing, but I liked listening to them. But right after the New Year they started handing out orders to join transports that were going somewhere in Poland.
Some of the women cried, and those who were stronger — or perhaps it was just that they had less imagination — reassured them that nothing could be worse than this place. Those whose names were on the list packed their few belongings and got ready for a new journey, which for most of them would be their last, though of course they could not have known that. Over the course of a few days our room was all but emptied, but it wasn’t long before fresh transports arrived in Terezín, and the living quarters began to fill up again. I understood that from now on, the people around me would come and then leave again and that it made no sense to try to remember their names.
For the time being we didn’t go on a transport because Father had been among the first to be sent to Terezín in a group that was assigned to build the camp, and the Germans had promised that these men and their families would remain in Terezín. I accepted this promise as ironclad, not yet comprehending how foolish it was to believe promises made by your jailers.