The Lost Wife (33 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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But I did not wait for her to contact me. I continued to come back week after week, every Wednesday at noon. The regularity of the visits made me feel that I wasn’t giving up. I never missed my weekly appointment.
Month after month.
Soon it became a year.
“Every day, the list of survivors grows,” I was told. “We’re constantly receiving new names. So there is hope.”
Over the course of the first year, I came to know nearly every person working in the office. Geraldine Dobrow became my assigned caseworker.
One afternoon in February, we began what had evolved into our typical weekly meeting. “Mr. Kohn . . .”
“Josef,” I said. “Please call me Josef.”
“Mr. Kohn,” she repeated.
I felt she wasn’t listening to me. I wanted to scream. I had been given the same answer every time I saw her.
“I NEED YOU TO HELP ME FIND HER.” My voice was louder than it should have been. Ms. Dobrow’s back straightened against her swivel chair. She wrote something on my file. I was sure she was going to recommend that I see a grief counselor, or worse, abandon my case altogether.
“Mr. Kohn,” she said firmly. “Please. You have to listen to what I’m telling you.”
“I’m listening.” I sighed and fell back into my chair.
“I understand your frustration,” she said. “I really do. We’re trying to find her.” She cleared her throat. She pointed outside the glass window of her office to the line that snaked down the corridor. “Everyone who comes here is looking for a loved one.”
“It’s just that I need to find her.”
“I know.”
“I
have
to find her.” I realized I sounded desperate, but could not help myself. “I made a promise to her.”
“Yes, I know. Many people made promises . . . But you have to believe me when I tell you we’re doing all we can to help you. To help all the others like you.”
I wanted to believe in the kindness of this woman. But I couldn’t help myself. She infuriated me.
She had no idea what it felt like to visit her office and be told no progress had been made. It was impossible for her to understand what I was going through—what those people she pointed to outside her window were going through. How could she fathom what it was like for us to search for someone who was an ocean away? Day after day, Americans were inundated with photographs of war-torn Europe. The piles of dead bodies. The mass graves. The stories emerging about what the Nazis had done to the Jews.
So, yes, on more than one occasion, I sat across from Ms. Dobrow and simply put my head in my hands. Or pounded my fist against her desk. Or swore out of frustration that her office wasn’t doing enough to help me.
And most of the time, she sat quietly across from me, her hands resting on a large stack of manila folders.
“I told you from the beginning, Mr. Kohn, that it could take a long time, a very long time, to locate your wife.”
She took a deep breath.
“Europe is in a shambles right now. We are relying on the few Jewish organizations over there that are in the middle of registering the living, accounting for the dead. Millions of people have been moved around in displaced persons camps. It’s complete mayhem over there.” She cleared her throat. “You will need to brace yourself for what might be a very long search. As I keep saying, you’re going to need to be patient.”
She looked me straight in the eyes.
“And you need to be prepared to find that she did not survive.”
I shuddered.
“She is alive,” I told Ms. Dobrow. “She is alive.”
She did not answer me. It was the only time I remember she lowered her eyes.
 
I remained undeterred. For six years, once a week, I went to that office. The tracing center continued to receive new lists from Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau, as well as from other smaller camps like Sobibor and Ravensbrück. Lists of both the living and the dead.
Ms. Dobrow was replaced by a Mrs. Goldstein, then by a Ms. Markovitz. And then, one day, I was told they had found Lenka’s name on a list from Auschwitz, which by then was well known as the most dreaded of the camps. Hers, along with her sister’s and her parents’. There was no mention of any child.
“We believe they were all gassed the day of their arrival,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Dr. Kohn.”
She handed me a copy of the transport list.
Lenka Maizel Kohn
, it said in typed letters. I pressed it to my lips.
“If you need to be alone,” Ms. Markovitz said, touching my shoulder. “We have a special room . . .”
I don’t remember much after that, except for a small room with several other shocked people sitting on plastic seats around me. I remember hearing two young girls reciting the kaddish. I remember seeing some people holding each other and weeping. But there were a few like me. Alone, and too stunned even to cry.
CHAPTER 43
 
LENKA
 
I gave Rita the drawing of her and her baby as soon as I finished it. I placed it next to her small cot and hugged Oskar, who was now trembling in a tattered undershirt, his ribs rising beneath the threadbare cloth.
“Thank you, Lenka,” he said, trying to regain his composure. “We will treasure this until our last breath.”
I nodded, unable to speak. I looked at my friend, who was still clutching her now-lifeless baby.
I went over to squeeze Rita’s leg through the blanket. I still remember the sensation of touching her. That feeling that there was no flesh on her, only bone.
All I could do was embrace her, as gently as possible.
She did not look up at me. She did not even hear me. When I left, she was singing the Yiddish song “Eine Kinderen,” into the dead child’s ear.
 
I wish I could tell you that Rita was able to rebound after the death of her baby. But that would be lying. Who
can
ever recover from such a loss? I watched as my friend grew weaker. She was unable to paint. Her hands shook too much, and she was unable to concentrate. It was as if her will to live had died with Adi.
Terezín had no tolerance for such inefficiency. It allowed you to live—and perhaps even create—within its walls, as long as your work proved valuable to the Reich. Certainly you might die in the infirmary from typhus or on your cot from starvation, but your passing would be seen merely as an inconvenience. And when you were no longer needed, or when the barracks were too full and new space was required for the next arriving transport, you were simply sent east.
Within a few weeks of Adi’s death, Rita received notice of her transport. Oskar did not receive such a notice, but he volunteered to go anyway, not willing to remain in Terezín without her.
We were not permitted to walk with them as they were sent away, so I had to say my good-byes the night before.
Oskar had taken Rita to meet me outside my barracks just before curfew. He held her up with his arm. She looked the way Adi looked the first time I saw him. She was almost transparent except for the blue veins of her throat straining through her skin.
She was nothing more than a ghost now. Her pale green eyes were the milky color of apple jade, her blond hair the color of ash. She was little more than a tired, empty shroud containing sparrow-thin bones and a world of heartache. I hugged my friend. I whispered her name and told her we would see each other again after the war.
Her husband nodded to me and squeezed my hand. He reached under his shirt, where my drawing of Adi and Rita was rolled up and lodged against his waistband.
“Here,” he said. “We’re afraid to take it where we’re going.” He was choking on the words. “It is safer with you, where it won’t get lost.”
I took the drawing and told him I would keep it safe. “I will find you after the war and give it back to you then. I promise.”
Oskar placed a finger to his lips, signaling me that I needn’t say another word. He knew—just as I knew Lucie would do when I gave her my most treasured possessions before the transport—that I would do anything to keep it safe.
 
I hid the drawing between two pieces of cardboard under my mattress. But I began to worry that the weight of three women might harm it in some way. Then I placed it in my suitcase, but soon found myself racked with fear that someone might steal it.
But, I thought, who would steal a simple drawing of a mother and child? It couldn’t be used for bartering. It had no value except to me, Rita, and Oskar.
So the picture remained in my suitcase for some time, and I tried not to think of it too often. I considered myself only its temporary caretaker, whose job was to keep it safe until its rightful owners could reclaim it. Every now and then, though, I would climb the ladder in our barracks to make sure that it remained hidden and out of harm’s way.
 
Terezín had grown even more crowded. Later, in books, I would learn the exact population. By 1943 there were over fifty-eight thousand men, women, and children within the walls of a town that was built to hold seven thousand.
And with each newly arrived transport, hundreds, sometimes a thousand at a time, were sent away.
Girls with names that were foreign to me like Luiza, Annika, and Katya began to fill the beds in my barracks that were once occupied by girls with Czech names like Hanka, Eva, Flaska, and Anna.

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