In addition to looking after the electrical lighting, the motors, and various machines in Terezín, Father joined an underground cell of the Communist Party. As far as I know, the comrades were not preparing an armed uprising, but they certainly made an effort to maintain contact with the outside world, and they smuggled correspondence in and out, along with food, medicine, cigarettes, newspapers, and books.
At the time, of course, Father told me nothing about his secret activities, but he did talk to me about politics. What else could he have talked to me about? Practically speaking, I was not going to school. I read no books because none were available, and my friends didn’t interest him. So he talked to me about the situation at the battlefronts and about the importance of the allied invasion, which to his great disappointment seemed never to come. He also tried to explain the difference between life in the Soviet Union and the countries called capitalist. In the Soviet Union, in his telling, mankind’s ancient dream of a society governed by simple people, in which no one exploited anyone else and no one persecuted anyone on the grounds of his racial or ethnic origins, had come true. The Soviets persecuted only capitalists — the owners of factories or landowners — but that was a just thing to do because the capitalists had become wealthy from the labor of their serfs and led a profligate life, while those who worked for them went hungry. “Do you understand?” he would ask.
I did not understand why it was just to persecute anyone, but Father explained to me that although no one can help being born black or yellow or a Jew, a capitalist came by his property because either he or his forebears had exploited countless numbers of poor, enslaved workers and peasants. It was German capitalists, he added, clinching the argument, who had supported Hitler, and capitalists all around the world looked on passively because they believed that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union, the very country where the people ruled.
That was how my father had worked it out in his mind, even though, as I came to understand years later, none of this was a product of his own thinking. But his thoughts on these matters interested me very little; if anything excited me it was news from the front. Once Father took a piece of paper and drew Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and Stalingrad; then he sketched in a line to indicate the farthest extent the German army had penetrated and another to show where it was now. Then he added the city of Prague and, a short distance away, the fortress of Terezín. So you see, he said, how Hitler’s warriors have taken to their heels!
But I could tell from his sketch that the front was still a long way from Terezín, and I understood that freedom was therefore still far off and that a lot of terrible things could still happen before it came.
And sure enough, one summer day, they ordered Father to pack his things and appear the next morning in front of the Command Center.
We were all very upset. It never augured well when they unexpectedly summoned someone. Father was probably more terrified than the rest of us because he must have thought they’d found out about his underground activity and were going to take him to some torture chamber and try to extract from him the names of those he’d worked with to undermine the Reich. Even so, he reassured us that his good friends would remain behind and look out for us, and if we found ourselves in any kind of trouble we were to seek them out. He reminded my mother of the names of these friends, and she nodded, but I think she was unable to take in anything of what he was telling her.
We went along with Father and saw that he wasn’t the only one summoned; two other men also showed up at the Command Center. Father recognized them from a distance and remarked that they were engineers and acquaintances of his. Then an SS officer appeared, checked their identity papers, and, to our astonishment, ripped off their yellow stars and threw them onto the cobblestones. Might this be a good omen? Might it be that for some scarcely comprehensible reason these three men had ceased to be Jews? Or was this just another one of those sadistic jokes that those who ruled our lives sometimes liked to play on us?
Several weeks later, Mother was summoned to the Command Center. An SS officer showed her a postcard and asked how someone from the Gross-Rosen camp might have gotten our address. The postcard was from Father. He wrote that he was well and hoped that we were too and said that we should be happy where we were and that under no circumstances should we leave. The SS must have thought this message was pure insolence, since it was hardly up to us to decide where we stayed or where we ended up. Mother explained how Father knew our address, and to our surprise the SS officer handed her the postcard and nothing further happened to us.
In Gross-Rosen they placed Father in a special unit whose task was to develop some improved technology — perhaps a miracle weapon — to help the Germans win a war they had already lost. But why would they have used prisoners — difficult to properly monitor — to give the prisoners’ archenemies an advantage? Moreover, the Russians were not far off, and after several weeks the Germans abandoned the camp, and Father began a journey from concentration camp to concentration camp, and at the end of the war he was moved on foot in a mass exodus that came to be called the Death March.
It was only years later that Father discovered the reason for this strange journey. Sometime at the beginning of the war, when the Germans had begun their mass expulsion of the Jews from the Reich, one of Father’s German colleagues, who was not a Nazi, wrote a letter to the Reich Main Security Office saying that he knew of three exceptionally good non-Aryan specialists whose knowledge the Reich might profitably put to use, and that these men should be allowed to continue working in their fields.
At that early stage of the war, when the Germans seemed close to victory and thus had no need for specialists who, in any case, were earmarked for elimination, no one paid attention to the letter. But when the Germans began to see defeat looming in the distance, someone dug out the letter and issued an order to locate these specialists. Coincidentally all three of them were in Terezín. Naturally the Germans couldn’t reinstate them in their original positions, so they came up with the idea of creating a special unit in the concentration camps.
Shortly after Father’s mysterious departure from Terezín, the largest series of transports to Poland began. We understood that we were no longer protected and that our turn — which was highly probable — could come at any time. For several weeks we lived in expectation of the moment that had so far passed us by and would mean a journey into the unknown. All we knew was that those who set out on it seemed to vanish from this world forever — as indeed most of them did. All my playmates had departed, and certainly Father’s good friends and comrades had also gone, but we were still there. And we remained. We were still alive. Why?
When Father returned after the war, he was convinced that his comrades had saved us, as they had promised when he went away, and for the longest time, when I gave any thought to it all, I believed he was right. But now I’m not so sure. In a well-informed book about the Terezín ghetto, H. G. Adler claims that any person younger than sixty-five who remained in Terezín must have either been a member of a special group or had some personal relationship with the SS.