Dita recalls the sadness of that morning when they had to put their entire lives into two suitcases and drag them to the assembly point near Stromovka park. The Czech police escorted the whole column of deportees to a special train that took them to Terezín.
She sorts through her mental album for a photograph from November 1942. Her father is helping her grandfather, the old senator, get off the train at Bohu?ovice station. Her grandmother is in the background, carefully watching. The expression on Dita’s face now is one of anger and irritation at the biological deterioration that attacks even the most upright and energetic people. Her grandfather had been a stone fortress, and now he was a mere sandcastle. In the background of that frozen image, she can also see her mother with that stubbornly neutral expression of hers, pretending that nothing bad is happening and trying not to attract anyone’s attention. She can see herself, too, aged thirteen, more of a girl and outlandishly fat. Her mother had made her wear several sweaters one on top of the other, not because of the cold, but because they were allowed only fifty kilos per person in the suitcases, and layering clothes meant they could bring more. Her father is standing behind her. It’s not the first time I’ve told you not to eat so much pheasant, Edita, he said in that serious way he had when he was joking.
The first image her eyes had stored in the Terezín album—after they walked past the guard post at the entrance to the precinct and under the archway bearing the phrase ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work makes you free—was of a dynamic city. It was a place with avenues full of people. It had a hospital, a fire station, kitchens, workshops, a day care center. Terezín even had its own Jewish police, the Ghettowache, who wandered about in their jackets and dark caps like any other police in the world. But if you looked more carefully at the hustle and bustle in the streets, you realized that people were carrying baskets with missing handles, threadbare blankets, watches without hands.… The inhabitants rushed to and fro as if they were in a hurry, but Dita understood that no matter how fast you walked, you’d always end up bumping into a wall. That was the deception.
Terezín was a city where the streets led nowhere.
That was where she saw Fredy Hirsch again, although her initial memory is of a sound, not an image. It’s of the thunderous clatter of a buffalo stampede like the ones in Karl May’s adventure novels set in the American prairies. It was during one of her first days in the ghetto, and she was still feeling stunned. She was returning from her assigned work—the vegetable gardens that had been planted at the foot of the walls to provide supplies for the SS garrison.
She was heading back to her small cubicle when she heard a galloping sound coming toward her along a nearby street. She pressed herself against the wall of an apartment block to avoid being mowed down by what she assumed were horses, but what finally came running around the corner was a large group of boys and girls. Their leader was an athletic man with impeccably slicked-back hair and a smooth, elastic stride. He greeted her with a slight nod of his head as he went past. It was Fredy Hirsch, unmistakable, even elegant, in his shorts and T-shirt.
It would be a while before she saw him again. And it would be a stack of books that would lead to their next encounter.
It all started when Dita discovered that, among the sheets, clothing, underwear, and other belongings her mother had stuffed into the suitcases, her father had hidden a book. Fortunately, her mother didn’t know, or she would have hit the ceiling over such a waste of allowable weight. When her mother unpacked the suitcase that first night, she was surprised by the thick volume and glared at Dita’s father.
“We could have brought three more pairs of shoes, given what this weighs.”
“Why would we want so many shoes, Liesl? We can’t go anywhere.”
Her mother didn’t answer, but Dita thought she lowered her head so they wouldn’t see she was smiling. Dita’s mother sometimes scolded her father for being such a dreamer, but deep down, she adored him because of it.
Papa was right. That book took me much further than any pair of shoes.
Lying on the edge of her bunk in Auschwitz, she smiles as she recalls that moment when she opened the cover of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).
Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.
The Magic Mountain tells how Hans Castorp travels from Hamburg to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin Joachim, who is undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at an elegant health spa. At first Dita didn’t know if she identified with the cheerful Hans, who has just arrived at the spa for a few days’ holiday, or with the chivalrous and ill Joachim.
A year is very important at our age. It brings so many changes with it and so much progress down there in the real world! But I have to stay inside this place like a bat; yes, as if I were inside a putrid hole, and I assure you that the comparison is not an exaggeration.
Dita recalls how she unconsciously nodded in agreement as she read this, and she’s still nodding now as she lies awake on her bunk in Auschwitz. She felt that the characters in that book understood her better than her own parents, because whenever she complained about all the misfortunes they were experiencing in Terezín—her parents having to sleep in separate quarters, her work in the vegetable gardens, the sense of suffocation from living in a walled city, the monotonous diet—they’d tell her to be patient; it would all be over soon. Maybe by next year the war will be finished, they’d say to her as if they were passing on a magnificent piece of news. For the grown-ups, a year was nothing more than a small segment of a large apple. Her parents would give her a smile, and she’d bite her tongue in frustration because they didn’t understand anything. When you’re young, a year is almost your entire life, the whole apple.
There were afternoons when her parents would be chatting with other married couples in the inner courtyard of her building, and she’d lie on her bed, cover herself with her blanket, and feel a little like Joachim taking his obligatory rest on the chaise longue in the spa. Or perhaps more like Hans Castorp, who decides to have a few more days of holiday, taking advantage of the rest sessions, but in the more relaxed manner of a tourist rather than a patient.
In Terezín, Dita lay on her bed waiting for night to fall, just like the two cousins in the book, though her dinner—barely more than bread and cheese—was much more sparse than the five courses served in the Berghof International Spa.