*
We heard that some people had gone missing from Terezín, but the population could be counted only with great difficulty because so many were dying every day. The Germans were uncertain how many people actually lived in our closely guarded town, so they decided to count us. Early one rainy morning on a gloomy autumn day — probably in 1943 because Father was still with us — they herded everyone out of the town and onto a huge meadow. We were each given a piece of bread, margarine, and liver paste, and they kept arranging and rearranging us in lines while the ghetto police trained their guns on us. People were constantly running up and down the lines, and then some SS officers appeared. I had never seen them before. Perhaps they’d come to reinforce the ghetto police — people were saying things were not looking good.
We stood for the whole day while the rain kept getting heavier; the light started to fade, and we had to remain there all that time without moving. The women were wailing that this was the last day of our lives, that they would shoot us or toss a bomb into our midst. And as if to confirm their fears, a plane with a black cross on its wings passed overhead. Some could no longer stand by themselves, so others held them up, and some, mostly the very old, simply toppled into the mud and stayed, though others warned them that the SS officers would shoot anyone who collapsed.
I promised myself that even if everyone else collapsed, I would remain standing because they couldn’t possibly kill me just like that. But my little brother, who was cold and afraid, cried and kept asking to go home.
The SS men ran about, shouting at those who had fallen, kicking them till they stood up again. They kept on counting but they seemed incapable of arriving at a final tally because, as Father said, they were trained to kill, not count. Late in the evening one of the SS officers in command gave the order to return. We all crowded in through the gates, eager to be back in our smelly flea-bitten holes. As bad as they were, they were our homes.
Then something strange happened. Shops began to open in Terezín. The SS moved people out of select places and brought in goods to sell, mostly things taken from the suitcases of the deceased. In the town square they built a bandstand for a real orchestra to play, and in a little park below the ramparts they began to build a nursery school. We were also given paper money — not the real thing, merely bills printed for our ghetto. On the face of the bill was an engraving of a bearded man holding a stone tablet in his arms. Mother explained that this was Moses and that carved on the tablet were ten laws according to which people were meant to conduct their lives. They also moved everyone out of several dormitories and crammed these people into the attics of other barracks. Then they brought normal furniture into the emptied dwellings and moved in specially chosen tenants — not thirty to a room, as was common, but only two or three.
By this time everyone was talking about how a delegation from the Red Cross was on its way to Terezín and that it was possible the Red Cross would take over the camp from the Germans and we would all be saved.
A delegation did in fact visit, and to this day I remember that for lunch there was beef soup, veal with potatoes, cucumber salad, and finally a chocolate dessert, none of which we had ever seen or tasted before or since in Terezín. The delegation was shown around by several SS officers bearing the death’s-head insignia on their caps. We recognized some of them and knew they beat anyone who didn’t salute them or who didn’t have the yellow star fastened properly or whom they simply didn’t like. We stood up when they entered, but they smiled affably and gestured for us to sit down again.
The Red Cross did not take over the ghetto. Quite the contrary: Shortly after their visit, the transports started leaving for Poland again, one every two or three days, usually with about a thousand people in each. When the thirteenth transport had left, everything suddenly became quiet, literally so because by now the barracks were half empty, and the entire ghetto seemed hollowed out. The lineups diminished, and there was almost no one on the streets, which had previously been full of people in the evenings.
Around then Grandfather began to cough. He always had a cough because he’d smoked a lot before the war, but this cough sounded different. He began to perspire persistently and he had a fever. He was diagnosed with consumption and had to go to the infirmary, where the SS stockpiled those who were bedridden in an enormous room until they were dead. We couldn’t visit, lest we be infected ourselves, but Grandpa survived there until the beginning of 1945, the last year of the war, and he occasionally sent us encouraging little notes via some of the attendants. He predicted that we would live to see liberation. He believed we would all meet again and that life would treat us better than it had treated him.
When he died, my mother couldn’t even light a candle because we no longer had any. Aunt Irena was still with us and, in addition to noodles, she occasionally brought us news about how the Russians and their Western allies had entered German territory, and now the war really was nearing the end. From time to time squadrons of heavy American bombers would pass overhead. The skies belonged entirely to them; not a single German aircraft put in an appearance. Whenever the air raid sirens wailed, my brother and I always ran into the courtyard, and as we looked up at the sky I tried to explain to him that those aircraft meant the war would soon be over and we would be able to go home. My brother began to cheer and wave at the planes with both hands, or using his shirt with the star sewn on it. We never left the courtyard, not even when, shortly after the aircraft had flown over our heads, we could hear bombs exploding in the distance.
We survived, but the Germans took away all of my friends. I remember their names but I’ve forgotten their faces, and in any case they’d look different today.
*
Many years later an American reporter asked me a question that most people were reluctant to ask: How is it that we remained in Terezín and survived when practically all of our contemporaries did not?
It’s a strange world when you are called upon to explain why you weren’t murdered as a child. But a similar question arises in relation to an utterly modern event: Why do the terrorists in Iraq release one prisoner and mercilessly behead another? Did someone pay ransom for the one they released? Was there a secret exchange of prisoners? Or was it merely the whim of those who claim the right to decide whether someone who falls into their hands should live or die?
To the question of how I survived, I can reply with certainty that I cannot take the least credit for it. When the last transports left for Auschwitz, I had just turned thirteen. The only ones in Auschwitz who could survive at that age would have been the twins on whom Dr. Mengele performed his experiments. He — or someone else in his position — sent all the other children to the gas chambers. I owe my survival above all to my father. As I’ve said, he went to Terezín on the first transport, which consisted entirely of young men whose task it was to prepare the town for the subsequent internees. Until 1944, these men and their families were not included in any of the transports headed eastward.
Why had they chosen him, of all people, to go on that first transport?
His own explanation was that some decent comrades had arranged for all of us to be quickly whisked away to Terezín because Mother’s brothers were members of the illegal Central Committee of the Communist Party and had been exposed and arrested. It was to be expected that the gestapo would come after their relatives as well. I found this explanation unlikely because those in the Jewish community who, on orders from the occupiers, drew up the lists of people to go on those transports to Terezín wouldn’t have taken any interest in Mother’s relatives, and it’s unlikely they knew of either their arrest or their execution. It seems far more probable that Father’s name had simply come up by chance or because those in charge of the future operation of the ghetto understood that a specialist such as my father would be needed in Terezín from the beginning.