“How I miss him.”
It’s her turn at the window—time to resolve all her issues. That’s it. They are still two strangers. It’s the moment to wish each other luck and say good-bye. But Ota asks her where she’s going next. She tells him she’s off to the Jewish Community Office and asks if what they’ve told her is true: that she can request a small orphan pension.
Ota asks her if she’d mind if he accompanied her there.
“It’s on my way,” he says, so seriously that she doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.
It’s an excuse to stay with her, but it isn’t a lie. Dita’s way is already part of his path.
A few days later, in Teplice, some kilometers from Prague, Margit Barnai is sweeping the entrance to her building. As she sweeps, she daydreams about a young man who does deliveries on his bicycle and rings his bell merrily each time he cycles past her. She thinks that perhaps it’s time to start paying more attention to her hair in the mornings and putting a new ribbon in it. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the shadow of someone coming through the entrance.
“You’re very fat, girl!” the person shouts.
Her first impulse is to give a rude response to her rude neighbor. But then the broom almost falls out of her hand.
It’s Dita’s voice.
Margit is the older of the two girls, but she’s always felt like the younger sister. She throws herself into Dita’s arms in the way little children do—not worrying about the speed, not holding back.
“We’re going to fall!” says Dita, laughing.
“And what does that matter, as long as we’re together!”
It was true. Finally, something good was true. They were waiting for her.
EPILOGUE
Ota became a special friend who used to come on the train to see her on afternoons she had off from the occasional work she found. She combined the work with classes she attended in the school in Teplice, where she and Margit were making up for some of the time they had lost in schooling. If that were possible.
Teplice is an old spa city renowned for its waters. Dita had finally found her Berghof. There were no Alps as in The Magic Mountain, but the high country of Bohemia was close by. She liked to stroll along the streets with their geometric stone pavements, despite the fact that the war had severely punished this beautiful city with its stately buildings. She occasionally wondered what had become of the enigmatic Mme. Chauchat, who left the spa resort in search of new horizons. She would like to have asked her advice about what to do with her life.
The beautiful synagogue had burned down, and its scorched ruins were a reminder of those burned-out years. On Saturdays, Ota accompanied her on her walks. He talked to her about a thousand things. He was a young man with a voracious curiosity; everything interested him. He sometimes complained a little of having to take various combinations of trains and buses to travel the eighty kilometers between Prague and Teplice. But his complaints were more like the satisfied purr of a cat.
There were months of pleasant strolls through those squares, which little by little, regained their flowerpots and began to give Teplice back its charming air of a town of hot springs. During those walks, Ota and Dita gradually became entwined. A year after their meeting in the line at the documents office, Ota said something to Dita that changed everything:
“Why don’t you come to Prague? I can’t love you from a distance!”
They had already told each other their entire lives. It was the moment to start from scratch, to begin again.
Ota and Dita were married in Prague.
After a great amount of paperwork, Ota managed to take back his father’s business and get it going again. It was an exciting project, because in a way, Ota was able to recover the past. He couldn’t bring back those who were absent or erase the scars, but at least it was a way of returning to the Prague of 1939, even though Ota wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a businessman. He, like his father, preferred opera scores to balance sheets, and the language of poets to the language of lawyers.
But he didn’t have the time to be disillusioned. The footprints of the Nazi boots on the streets of Prague had not yet disappeared when the boots of the Soviets made their mark. With that delightful obstinacy history has of repeating itself, the factory was again confiscated. This time, it wasn’t in the name of the Third Reich but of the Communist Party.
Ota didn’t give in; neither did Dita. They were born to swim against the tide. Thanks to his mastery of English and knowledge of literature, Ota found work in the Ministry of Culture, choosing which new English-language publications were interesting enough to be translated into Czech. He was the only employee at his level who was not a Communist Party member. Many in that period spouted Leninist slogans, but no one was going to teach him anything. He knew more about Marxism than any of them; he had read more than any of them. He knew better than anyone that Communism was a beautiful path that ended at a precipice.
They accused him of being an enemy of the Party, and things started to get difficult. In 1949, the year their first child was born, Ota and Dita decided to emigrate to Israel, where they ran into another old inmate from Block 31, Avi Fischer, now called Avi Ofir, the man who had converted a modest barrack full of child prisoners into a cheerful glee club. He helped them find work at the Hadassim School near Netanya. There, Ota and Dita worked as English teachers at one of the most renowned schools in Israel. The school accepted many children who came in the wave of immigrants after the end of World War II. Later, the school took care of children from families with problems and students at risk of social exclusion. They always employed teachers who were particularly involved in those sorts of issues, but it was hard to find people more sensitive to the suffering of others than Ota and Dita.
The couple had three children and four grandchildren. Ota, the great storyteller from Block 31, wrote various books. One of them, The Painted Wall, fictionalized the lives of a series of people in the family camp, BIIb. Dita and Ota experienced life’s ups and downs together for fifty-five years. They never stopped loving and supporting each other. They shared books, an indestructible sense of humor, life in general.
They grew old together. Only death could break the iron bond forged in the most terrible times anyone could experience.
POSTSCRIPT
There are still some important things to tell about the librarian of Block 31, and about Fredy Hirsch.