“That wouldn’t be fair…” she murmurs.
She’s fourteen years old. Her life is just beginning; everything is ahead of her. She recalls the words her mother has been repeating insistently over the years whenever Dita grumbles about her fate: “It’s the war, Edita … it’s the war.”
She is so young that she barely remembers anymore what the world was like when there was no war. In the same way that she hides the books from the Nazis, she keeps secret the memories in her head. She closes her eyes and tries to recall what the world was like when there was no fear.
*
She pictures herself in early 1939, aged nine, standing in front of the astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Hall square. She’s sneaking a peek at the old skeleton. It keeps watch over the rooftops of the city with huge empty eye sockets.
They’d told them at school that the clock was a piece of mechanical ingenuity, invented by Maestro Hanu? more than five hundred years ago. But Dita’s grandmothers told her a darker story. The king ordered Hanu? to construct a clock with figures, automatons that paraded on the stroke of every hour. When it was completed, the king ordered his bailiffs to blind the clockmaker so that he could never make another wonder like it. But the clockmaker took revenge, putting his hand into the mechanism to disable it. The cogs shredded his hand, the mechanism jammed, and the clock was broken, unfixable for years. Sometimes Dita had nightmares about that amputated hand snaking its way around the serrated wheels of the mechanism.
Dita, hanging on to the books that may take her to the gas chamber, looks back with nostalgia at the happy child she used to be. Whenever she accompanied her mother downtown on shopping expeditions, she loved to stop in front of the astronomical clock, not to watch the mechanical show—the skeleton in fact disturbed her more than she was prepared to admit—but to watch the passersby, many of them foreigners visiting the capital. She had difficulty concealing her laughter at the astonished faces and silly giggles of those watching. She made up names for them. One of her favorite pastimes was giving everyone nicknames, especially her neighbors and her parents’ friends. She called snooty Mrs. Gottlieb “Mrs. Giraffe” because she used to stretch her neck to give herself airs. And she named the Christian upholsterer in the shop downstairs “Mr. Bowling-Pin-Head” because he was skinny and completely bald. She remembers chasing the tram as, its little bell ringing, it turned the corner at the Old Town Square and snaked its way into the distance through the Josefov neighborhood. Then she would run in the direction of the store, where she knew her mother would be, buying material to make Dita’s winter coats and skirts. She hasn’t forgotten how much she liked that store, with its neon sign in the door, colored spools of thread lighting up one by one from the bottom to the top and then back down again.
If she hadn’t been one of those girls insulated by that happiness typical of children, then perhaps as she passed by the newspaper kiosk she would have noticed that there was a long queue of people waiting to buy the paper. The stack of copies of Lidové Noviny that day carried a headline on the front page four columns wide and in an unusually large type. It screamed rather than stated GOVERNMENT AGREES TO GERMAN ARMY’S ENTRY INTO PRAGUE.
*
Dita briefly opens her eyes and sees the SS guards sniffing around the back of the hut. They leave no stone unturned, even checking behind the drawings that hang on the wall from makeshift barbed wire nails. No one says a word; there is only the sound of the guards rummaging around in the hut. It smells of dampness and mildew. Of fear, too. It’s the smell of war.
From the little she remembers of her childhood, Dita recalls that peace smelled of chicken soup left cooking on the stove all night every Friday. It tasted of well-roasted lamb, and pastry made with nuts and eggs. It was long school days, and afternoons spent playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek with Margit and other classmates, now fading in her memory …
The changes were gradual, but Dita remembers the day her childhood ended forever. She doesn’t recall the date, but it was March 15, 1939. Prague awoke shaking.
The crystal chandelier in the living room was vibrating, but she knew it wasn’t an earthquake, because nobody was running around or worried. Her father was drinking his breakfast cup of coffee and reading the paper as if nothing were happening.
When Dita and her mother went out, the city was shuddering. She began to hear the noise as they headed toward Wenceslas Square. The ground was vibrating so strongly that it tickled the soles of her feet. The muffled sounds grew more noticeable as they got closer to the square, and Dita was intrigued. When they reached the square, they couldn’t cross the street, which was blocked off by people, or see anything other than a wall of shoulders, coats, necks, and hats.
Her mother came to a dead stop. Her face was strained and suddenly aged. She grabbed her daughter’s hand to turn back, but Dita’s curiosity was strong. She yanked herself free of the hand that was holding on to her. Because she was small and skinny, she had no trouble wiggling her way through the crowd of people on the sidewalk to the front where the city police were lined up, their arms linked.
The noise was deafening: Gray motorcycles with sidecars led the way one after another. Each carried soldiers in gleaming leather jackets and shining helmets, with goggles dangling from their necks. They were followed by combat trucks, bristling with enormous machine guns, and then tanks thundering slowly down the avenue like a herd of menacing elephants.
She remembers thinking that the people filing past looked like the mechanical figures from the astronomical clock, that after a few seconds, a door would close behind them, and they would disappear, and the trembling would stop. But they weren’t automatons; they were men. She would learn that the difference between the two is not always significant.
She was only nine years old, but she felt fear. There were no bands playing, no loud laughter or commotion.… The procession was being watched in total silence. Why were those uniformed men here? Why was nobody laughing? Suddenly, it reminded her of a funeral.
With an iron grip, her mother caught her again and dragged her out from the crowd. They headed off in the opposite direction, and Prague became itself again. It was like waking up from a bad dream and discovering that everything was back to normal.
But the ground was still shaking under her feet. The city was still trembling. Her mother was trembling, too. She was desperately pulling Dita along, trying to leave the procession behind, taking hurried little steps in her smart patent-leather shoes.