The Lost Wife (22 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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I was craning my neck to watch them as they headed down the path to the Schleusse, when Marta tapped me on the shoulder. “Have we underdressed?” It was the first time I had laughed in several days, and I wanted to reach out and hug her. Our whole lives it was I, the older sister, who had tried to be strong and make Marta smile, so it was a strange feeling to see her trying to be so brave when inside I knew she was just as afraid as I was. “If we have, it will be the first time,” I answered her.
Our parents had not heard us. They were walking solemnly in front of us like two people who were already resigned to following orders. Their pace slackened when the others in front of them slowed down. They did not talk between themselves. They looked not at each other, but straight ahead.
We had already been told that the men would live separately, so Marta, Mother, and I did our best to give Father a brave good-bye when the group stopped in front of our assigned barracks.
Papa kissed each of us on the forehead. He had been carrying Mother’s rucksack, and I could see him inwardly struggle as he handed it over to her. It pained him not to be able to help her anymore.
“It’s fine,” I heard Mother whisper. She extended her arm to take the bag from him. “It’s not heavy,” she said.
Father’s arm was shaking. A strong arm trembling through a woolen coat sleeve.
“I will look for my girls at the curfew tonight.” He touched Mother’s wrist.
Mother nodded.
“Yes, Papa,” we both said as we reached to help our mother with her bag. We saw Mother look back one more time at Father, her face straining to remain composed.
 
We climbed the stairs, our hearts sinking as we were greeted immediately by a gut-wrenching stench. The smell of dirty latrines and unwashed bodies laced the air. Marta had walked ahead of Mother and me. She turned to us with a frightened look in her eyes.
“Lenka,” she whispered. “Where have they taken us?”
I quietly mouthed, “It will be fine . . . just don’t stop . . . keep moving.”
Eventually, we got to our room. Imagine hundreds of people crammed into a space the size of a small classroom. With three-tiered bunk beds laid out in blocks. With dimensions so narrow and small that one could not have turned over in the night without touching another person in the next bed. The people in the lower and middle bunks could not sit up on their straw mattresses without hitting their heads. Even though it was midafternoon, the room was cast in an eerie twilight. A small incandescent light dangled from the ceiling, a single lightbulb on a crooked wire.
Suitcases were stacked either in an available corner or on a shelf above a bunk. Clothes were strung everywhere, and the foul smell that had initially greeted us had grown even more intense. It was freezing cold, as the only source of heat was a small stove with a coal scuttle. There was a single sink and one latrine for every hundred people.
Standing in what now would be our room, Mother turned to Marta and me, tears rolling down her cheeks. Both Marta and I were rendered speechless. Our always proud mother, her mouth frozen for a second from the shock, touched my arm and I heard her whisper the words “Children, I’m so sorry.”
The thought that she felt the need to apologize to us still makes me want to cry. That and the image of my sister trying to sleep that night—spreading the pillowcase that Lucie had embroidered for her so many years ago over a “pillow” made of hay.
 
“Education?” he asked me. I stood in front of a desk at the office of the Council of Elders, and nervously informed the man with the gray-stubbled head that I had been a student at the Art Academy in Prague.
The Council of Elders was a group of elected Jewish representatives who worked out of the Magdeburg barracks and oversaw every branch of activity of the ghetto. Terezín, we would all later learn, was an experiment within the Reich. A “model ghetto” that was created to show the world that the Jews were not being exterminated and that in fact was largely run by the Jews. There were Czech gendarmes and SS officers within Terezín, but the Council of Elders oversaw the logistics of daily life. Like a small government, it organized the housing and work assignments, the water and power of the ghetto, the welfare programs for children, the running of the infirmary, and was even responsible for maintaining the amount of people who were on the next transport “east.”
I stood in front of the men who were in charge of deciding my work assignment. Two bald men, whose eyes barely glanced over me, before one of them asked my age, my education, and any particular talents I might have.
“I’m Lenka Maizel Kohn,” I said strongly, as if I already needed to remind myself who I was. Behind me, there was the rustle of a mother trying to soothe her fussing baby.
“Two and half years at the Prague Academy of Arts,” I said. “I studied life drawing and painting.”
The older of the two men raised his head and now squinted at me. Something I said had piqued his interest.
“You’re an artist?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“You have a good, steady hand?”
“Yes, I do.”
The man whispered to his colleague who then nodded.
He then reached for a small piece of paper from his desk on which he scribbled the words
Lautscher Werkstatte
.
The room number was marked at the bottom. He didn’t bother to look up from his desk, he just told me to go and report there at once.
 
I walked with my papers to the Lautscher Werkstatte, a small room in the Magdeburg barracks. When I arrived, the door was open and there were already ten artists working at a large table.
To my relief, I was greeted by the comforting smells and colors of my days at the Prague Academy: the piercing scent of turpentine, the oily perfume of linseed oil, and the rich, fatty smell of the blended pigments. Large canvases of Old Master paintings, created either as forgeries or as decorative copies, rested along the perimeter of the room. On a countertop, I could see small, postcard-size watercolors of cheery, pastoral scenes and a few of small children.
I was approached by a woman who looked close to my age. She was petite with short blond hair. Although she was wearing a Jewish star on her smock, she had the face of a Slav. Broad cheekbones, a small flat nose, and wide green eyes. She was razor thin.
“I’m Lenka,” I said, and showed her my work assignment. “I was told to come here and work.”
She smiled. “So I assume you have some artistic experience?”
“Yes, a little over two years at the Academy in Prague.”
“Good,” she said, and smiled again. “You can call me Rita. I think you’ll be happy to be here. We’re a bunch of painters, primarily unsupervised, save for an occasional German soldier who comes at the end of the week to give us our assignments and to ship off the works that we’ve completed.”
I looked around the room wide-eyed. I was confused by what I saw. Every surface was occupied with drying paintings. Some were landscapes, but others were copies of well-known paintings. “Who’s ordering all this?” I was incredulous.
“It’s all requests from the Reich. Some of the postcards are to be sold in Germany. The enamels and decorative pieces will most probably be given out as gifts within the SS, and the Old Masters will be sold for a lot of money because they’re flawless copies . . . Theresa over there is a genius.”
She pointed to a thin girl of no more then eighteen who was standing by an easel. She painted without a smock; her palette was nothing more than an old piece of cut plywood with the paint clustered around the edge.
“No one can do a Rembrandt as perfectly as Theresa. Perhaps not even Rembrandt himself.”
I looked over at the copy of
The Man with the Golden Helmet
that the girl was working on, and could not believe my eyes. The painting was an exact replica of the original. The tight, solemn-looking mouth, the downcast eyes. Even the figure’s armor was perfectly rendered—its heavy weight draping over his shoulders.
The embossed scrolling on the brass helmet was painted with such precision that it seemed to be bursting from the canvas. But it was the reflection of the metal itself that took my breath away.
“Are you given any gold leaf to work with?” I asked. I knew how rare and costly gold had been even before the war, and couldn’t believe that the artists working in Lautscher would have access to it.
“No, we aren’t,” Rita answered. “We have no idea how she does it.”
I walked closer to Theresa and studied the painting. How, I marveled, was she able to create the reflection in the helmet without gold leaf? The girl must have layered fifteen pigments to achieve such an effect. She used a tool to scrape some of the paint away, changing the surface and altering the play of light on the surface.
There were four other “Rembrandts” drying to the left of her, each an exact duplicate of the other. Every helmet, every feathered plume, every single line within the pensive face, was done with the same factorylike precision.
“Unless you have Theresa’s remarkable talent, you should probably start on postcards first.” Rita pointed to the central table. “They’re easy and fast to do. The Germans come and collect on Friday, and you should try to have a hundred done by then.” I raised an eyebrow. A hundred postcards in a week seemed like an impossible quota.
“Lenka, take this . . .” She handed me a book of landscapes. “Many of the girls like to work from this. Keep the colors light and cheerful. And try not to make mistakes. The less paper we waste with errors, the more we have to use ourselves for something else.”
She paused for a moment and squinted at me. “Do you have a child here with you?”
“No.” I went silent for a moment. “I have no children.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps that’s for the best, the heartache of seeing them crammed into such filthy barracks . . . can you even imagine?” She clicked her tongue with disgust. “I guess we all try our best under these conditions. A lot of the girls here have been saving our scrap supplies. We take a strip or two of paper, some paints, or whatever else we can find back to the children’s barracks so they can use them there . . . it makes them so happy, and there’s a wonderful teacher who appreciates whatever we can sneak out to give them.”
The memory and the wonder of my mother giving me my first set of paints and sketchpad came back to me. I could not help but smile that there were still people, even here, taking on great risk just so this magic could continue.

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