The Lost Wife (39 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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Real coffee flows in our “Jewish café.” Our children suddenly have a real school, more than enough nourishment, and adequate medical care.
We are ordered to cheer when one of the soccer teams scores a goal. Our plates are laden with food, gravy, and fresh bread, all served on tables with clean cloths and cutlery.
As the Red Cross walks through the camp, a German film crew continues to document their visit.
We curtsy in our new clothes and new shoes, our faces clean and hair neatly braided, as we have been given access to showers and handed brushes and combs. We sleep in barracks with half the normal amount of people, the other half already on their way east. We are allowed to sing and dance. Men line up at the post office to receive fake packages that are filled with nothing. The children perform
Brundibár
and the members of the Red Cross clap with wild approval, not understanding the political implications of the production.
But after their departure a week later, all of the luxuries and added liberties are taken away as abruptly as they had been given. Within twenty-four hours, the extra bunks are put back in the barracks, the stadium is dismantled, and the fence reappears in the central square. The food vanishes, as does the coffee in the makeshift café. The tables with the clean cloth and cutlery end up on a truck headed back to Berlin.
CHAPTER 51
 
LENKA
 
Shortly after the Red Cross’s departure, the technical department is turned upside down. Commandant Rahm storms into our studio with two other SS officers. He screams insults at Fritta and Haas. He demands to see what they have been working on. But Haas does not flinch. He lifts a sign that he has been painting for the ghetto. There is an illustration of a garbage bin and below it the words PICK UP YOUR TRASH. I notice Fritta’s hands are shaking as he pulls a booklet of drafting illustrations from his desk.
The two SS officers walk around the room peering over our shoulders.
Rahm stands in the doorway and yells his insults at all of us. He screams that we better not be drawing anything that is offensive to the Reich. On the way out, he takes his crop and smashes a table covered with ink bottles. For the rest of the afternoon, I remain badly shaken. The shattered glass is swept up, but the puddle of black ink seeps into the tile floor. Even after several washings, the stain remains, the shape and color of a storm cloud.
 
The SS makes more surprise visits to the
Zeichenstube
, as the technical department is called in German. We all continue to work with our heads down and our eyes averted, not even looking at each other. During one inspection, an SS soldier tears a sketchpad from the hands of one of the artists and I feel my heart stop, so afraid for him that a personal sketch might fall out from its pages.
The next week we are each randomly summoned out to the hallway and searched. When my name is called, I feel sick. Faint.
“I said
you
!” the SS officer barks at me. I stumble from my chair and follow him out.
“Arms up and legs apart,” he says.
I place my palms against the wall. My knees are shaking as I spread my legs.
“Am I going to find a pencil here?” he asks, moving his hand between my thighs. His touch is sickening. His breath smells like kerosene. Again he touches me, and I believe I’m seconds away from being raped.
And then I turn my head to face him. He seems taken aback, as though the sight of my eyes has somehow jostled him from his viciousness.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” He shoves me again, but this time I am thrown toward the door. I don’t look back. He is now shouting at some other people in the hallway. I run toward the door of the technical department.
Once inside, I rush to my chair and desk. I feel as though I might vomit up what little is in my stomach.
I try to steady myself. I look at the faces of the people around me who have not yet been called. Everyone is shaking with fear. If I had the courage to depict the scene around me in a painting, all of our faces would be colored a sick, ghastly green.
 
On July 17, 1944, Fritta, Haas, and the artist Ferdinand Bloch are ordered to report to Commandant Rahm’s office. They also call my friend Otto.
No, not Otto
, I pray. My heart rises to my throat. I watch, my body trembling, as Otto rises from his chair. He is visibly shaking when they take him out by the arm, and I desperately want to cling to him, pull him back into his chair. My head is spinning.
His eyes lock with mine, which are wide as saucers. I know I must try to signal to him not to do anything that might anger the officers. I try to whisper to him to remain calm. I want to tell him everything is going to be fine, even though I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that something terrible is about to happen to all three of them.
An hour later another SS officer arrives at the studio and orders the young architect Norbert Troller to report to Rahm’s office as well.
Later that evening Petr tells me he spoke to a woman named Martha, a housekeeper in the VIP barracks where Rahm’s office is located. She overheard some of the interrogation of my friends. She is a friend of Petr’s, having bartered for some of his paintings. Three days before, she had hidden them in a hollowed-out door.
Commandant Rahm does not conduct the artists’ interrogation at first. He leaves the first round of questioning to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Haindl. Haindl accuses them of creating horror propaganda that undermines the Reich, and of being part of a Communist plot.
The artists deny everything. They say their only “crime” is doing a few harmless sketches. They are not Communists, nor are they involved in any plot.
Still, Haindl continues to attack them. He wants the names of their contacts on the outside. He throws down a newspaper from Switzerland and demands to know who painted the image that is reproduced on the front page.
“You ungrateful little shits! How dare you paint images of corpses!” He pounds his fist on the table. “We fucking feed you, house you. Half the fucking world is starving!”
The artists say they have no idea what he is talking about.
The SS interrogates them separately. They try to get each artist to inform on the others. They hold up one painting after another and demand to know who did it. Every question is answered the same way. The artists insist they “do not know.”
Haindl and Rahm’s tempers rise to a pitch of fury. The artists are beaten. Haas does not scream out as he is kicked over and over again. Fritta swears at his interrogators, but he is silenced with a boot to his mouth. The housekeeper, Martha, says the worst beating was given to Otto. After pummeling him with their fists, they smash his right hand with the butt of a rifle. His cry was so terrible, so gut-wrenching, she says, “I had to cover my ears . . . Even now, I can still hear the sound of him screaming in pain.”
At sunset, she sees them all being loaded into a jeep that is already filled with Fritta’s wife, Hansi, and his son Tommy; Haas’s wife, Ern; and Otto’s wife, Frída, and their young daughter, Zuzanna. The jeep heads to the
Kleine Festung
. The Small Fortress.
 
The Small Fortress is on the outskirts of the ghetto, on the right bank of the Ohře River.
We all knew terrible things happened in that place and that no one who was sent there ever returned. There were rumors that the SS made prisoners use their mouths to load wheelbarrows full of dirt, and people were routinely beaten to death or executed.
With our leaders gone, my colleagues and I are losing any confidence we once had.
“We will all be on the next transport,” someone says.
“They won’t waste the space on the trains,” says another. “They’ll just hang us all from the gallows.”
“Fucking idiots,” one of the newcomers says, referring to Fritta, Haas, Bloch, and Otto. “We’re all going to pay for what they did.”
“What did they do?” one of the younger girls says. “What did they do?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Petr slams his fist on his desk. “All of you just shut up and get to work!”
The technical department now turns into a place of despair.
Over the next couple of days I watched my friend Petr cease to be able to draw. His hands shook uncontrollably. I saw him take one hand and rest it on the other, to try to steady himself and appear as though he was working.
Everyone who works in the
Zeichenstube
finds their barracks have been searched. I watch as soldiers come and ransack our rooms. They turn over our beds, they throw our straw mattresses on the floor. They climb the ladder to the shelves where our suitcases are stored. They unlatch them and empty the contents onto the floor. When mine is opened, I see Mother close her eyes and bow her head to her chest, as if she is praying that I have not done anything foolish.
When my suitcase is opened, all that falls out is a spare pillowcase. She and Marta exhale as it sails silently to the floor.
 
I am not spared an interrogation, though. Everyone in my department is questioned by the Gestapo.
In a brown-walled room with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, we are each questioned. Drawings depicting the hardships of ghetto life are spread on the table.
Rahm stands over me and lifts one of the drawings. It is a pen-and-ink sketch of the inside of the infirmary. The figures, with sunken faces and hollow rib cages, are drawn in angry, black lines. There are several bodies lying on a single bed. The dead are piled on the floor.

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