The principal left and the teacher showed me where to sit. Then he continued his explanation about something, which I almost immediately stopped listening to because it didn’t make any sense. During recess, one of my classmates told me we had just sat through physics.
The worst thing for me was that this wasn’t the end. We still had three more classes to go, and tomorrow six more, and in most of them I had no idea what they were talking and writing about.
It was clear that it would be pointless to test me on anything, except perhaps history and geography, and then only on the material that had been covered in the previous lesson. The teachers agreed that at the end of the year I would be given a certificate so I could apply to a high school. Fortunately, there were only a few days until vacation.
*
We waited to see if Father and our relatives, who had disappeared one by one, would return. I was also waiting to see if any of my friends would come back. I refused to accept that they were dead. They couldn’t have killed everyone, all those they had carted off by the thousands to the East, could they?
Every day the radio broadcast lists of freed prisoners who had reported they were still alive. We sat waiting and listening to the invisible convoy of the rescued and anticipated hearing a name we knew.
Father’s sister Ilonka reported in. Just before the war she had managed to escape to Canada, and Mother’s sister Hedvika had fled to the Soviet Union, where she had lived a few years earlier. Two of Father’s cousins returned, one of whom had survived Auschwitz; and Aunt Eliška’s husband, Leopold, who had escaped via Egypt to England, where he joined our army abroad. Leopold, a former postman, had never, he assured us, even fired an air rifle, but he had achieved the rank of staff sergeant. He was shot in the leg at the Battle of Aachen and had a limp, though the way he described it, the war seemed to be nothing more than one thrilling adventure after another.
Finally we found Father’s name on a list of rescued prisoners. He arrived on a flatbed truck with several other prisoners and was so emaciated we barely recognized him.
Once again we were sitting down together to a celebratory dinner, everyone in the family who had survived. Father, surprisingly full of energy, told us about his travels through the concentration camps and how they had marched from the camp in Sachsenhausen nearly all the way to the sea, thirty kilometers a day without food and almost without rest. When they had stopped for a minute by a farmhouse, a Pole who was being forced to work there gave him a piece of bread with lard, which had most likely saved his life.
Why did he give it to you, of all people?
“Because I was the closest,” explained Father. “Life hung precisely on such threads. And on willpower. Your feet were chafed bloody and you didn’t think you could raise your foot, but you went on nevertheless, and every step you thought would be your last. It would rain at night, and there was nowhere to take cover, so I took the single blanket I had and made a tent so I wouldn’t get completely soaked. And the next day I just went on,” he told us, and none of us uttered a word. “If I didn’t get up or if I’d merely stopped, they would have shot me, and right now I’d be rotting God knows where in the ground.”
Then Father began talking about the future. After everything he’d gone through, he realized our society was corrupt, that it bred inequality, injustice, poverty, millions of unemployed, who then put their faith in a madman. But the future belonged to socialism and finally communism, which would put an end to poverty and exploitation.
“You make it sound like a fairy tale,” protested Uncle Pops, and he wondered if we too were going to found collective farms and nationalize factories, shops, trades, and finally even wives.
This question provoked Father, and he warned Uncle not to believe the Nazi propaganda. The only things that would be nationalized were large factories, mines, and banks. Uncle wouldn’t have to worry about his measly cosmetics shop.
A few days later, Aunt Hedvika and her husband came to visit. She told us she had worked for a radio station in Moscow, but when the German army was getting close, everyone volunteered with picks and shovels to dig trenches on the outskirts of the city. Then she was evacuated to a town called Kamensk-Uralsky. Meters of snow would fall there, so they had to dig passages in the drifts, but there were some days when the temperature sank to forty degrees below zero, and no one went outside if he could help it. During the last year of the war, when she was back in Moscow, she saw Stalin up close. Stalin in the flesh.
I kept waiting to see if any of my friends would return, my cousins, my aunts, if the Hermanns and their daughters who lived below us would come back.
But no one at all returned.
*
From the beginning of the postwar days, Mother was doing poorly. She was always weak, and now she complained of fatigue and chest pains. Father took her to see a renowned Prague cardiologist, who pronounced a devastating diagnosis. Mother’s heart was so bad that it wouldn’t bear any strain, not even walking uphill or climbing steps. No excitement, not even a fever. (At the time we didn’t know that this was a false diagnosis, and she lived another fifty years.)
Since we had miraculously survived everything, I was looking forward to setting off on vacation as we did before the war, but because of Mother’s weak heart, this was off the table. Father decided, however, that at least my brother and I needed to get outside the city, and right away he took us to a camp on the outskirts of Prague, which was operated by a new organization that bore an unpoetic name, the Czechoslovak Union of Youth.
The fact that we had all just been reunited and now we had to part again depressed me so much that to this day I remember that vacation as a sort of exile. Jan took it even harder, and he asked Father to take him back home. He didn’t want to stay in the camp. Father promised he would return to check on us soon, and it was my task to take care of my brother.
The camp comprised several wooden cabins and a sheltered communal kitchen. I didn’t know any of the leaders or even any of my squad members. I also didn’t know any of the things that all the other kids knew about: war games, rituals such as raising the flag or singing the national anthem. I never sat around the campfire, I didn’t play any instrument, and my singing was awful. Nevertheless, I tried to somehow get acquainted with the others. I attempted to curry favor with three of my roommates by telling them about some of my wartime experiences, but they weren’t the least bit interested. They were interested only in girls and wanted to know how it was with the girls in Terezín. This seemed indecent, even crude, because the girls I had gotten to know there were now dead. So in the evenings I visited my brother, who slept with kids his own age at the other end of the camp. I would go to their cabin, sit on a bunk, and think up a continuation to my fairy tale about a wacky poodle. During this time, Jan was kind of sad or maybe just a little frightened, but the word “poodle” for some reason always made him laugh.
Since we were in the early postwar period, there was a shortage of food. The supervisors obviously had not managed to obtain any extra allotments or any of the food brought by the UN, so we were always hungry. I was accustomed to going without food, but the other members of my squad were constantly grumbling. One evening when I was already in my bunk, they pulled me out of the cabin and asked me to help them procure some food.
We went to see the director. He let us in, heard us out, and then told us that he was hungry too, perhaps even hungrier than we were because he was bigger and received the same amount of food as we did. We had just gone through a war, and there were people starving more than we were, and we’d had supper today. Then he instructed us to follow him to one of the cabins that served as a warehouse. He told us that whatever he gave us would be at the expense of the others, and we certainly didn’t want that. Then he took a handful of sugar cubes from a cardboard box and gave each of us two.