The Lost Wife (43 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
“Your mother and I were friends . . .” My voice began to choke as I tried to explain myself. “You are named after my mother,” I said through falling tears.
The girl nodded and ushered me into their small living room. On the mantel, I could see the wedding portrait of Lucie and Petr. There were small, hand-painted plates on a dresser and a little wooden crucifix on one of the walls.
Eliška offered me some tea while I waited for her mother, and I accepted. I could not stop myself from staring at her as she lit the stove and pulled some biscuits from a tin box. While we had spent the war dying in concentration camps, she had grown from a toddler to a little girl on the verge of adolescence. I was not bitter, but I was amazed at the transformation all the same.
It wasn’t until an hour later, when Lucie walked through the door, that I realized how changed I was myself. Lucie stood in the threshold of her living room and looked at me as though she were seeing someone who had just risen from the dead.
“Lenka? Lenka?” she repeated as if she could not believe her eyes. She placed her hands over her face and I could hear her trying to stifle her weeping.
“Yes, Lucie, it’s me,” I said as I rose to greet her.
I walked up to her and pulled her palms from her face, grasping her hands. The skin was that of an older woman, though her face was still like my old Lucie, the sharp-cut angles even more pronounced.
“I prayed every night that you and your family would return safely,” she said through her tears. “You must believe me. I hope you received the packages that I sent to Terezín.”
I did not doubt that she had tried to send us provisions, though truth be told, these packages were often stolen, and we had not received a single one.
“Your mother and father and Marta?” she asked. “Please tell me they are safe and well . . .”
I shook my head and she gasped. “No. No. No,” she said over and over again. “Tell me it isn’t so.”
We sat down next to each other and held each other’s hands. I asked about Petr, her parents, and her siblings, and she told me that they had struggled during the war, but everyone was alive and well.
“I have never forgotten my promise to your family,” she said. She stood up and went into her bedroom; when she came back she was carrying the basket in which she had so carefully placed mother’s jewels years before. “I still have your mother’s things . . . and your things, too, Lenka. They are yours now,” she said, placing them in my hands.
Lucie’s little girl came and sat beside her as I unwrapped the pieces one by one. My mother’s beautiful wedding band and choker, the cameo from Josef’s mother, and my own wedding band, golden and inscribed to me within.
“Thank you, Lucie,” I said, embracing her. I never thought I’d ever have anything of my mother’s again.
She could not bear to speak and I kept seeing her glance over to her daughter.
“You are named after Lenka’s mother,” she finally told her. “You will give up your bed for tonight and let Lenka sleep in your room, Eliška.”
The little girl seemed confused by my presence. She clearly had no memory of who I was, much less how, only a few years ago, I watched her take her first steps.
“It is an honor to have you here, Lenka, and I want you to stay as long as you need to.”
I stayed for a week, and in that time learned that the young man, Willy Groag, who had worked alongside my mother, had been liberated from Terezín. He had returned to the city with two suitcases full of children’s drawings that mother’s colleague Friedl had entrusted to another colleague, Rosa, on the night before she was sent to Auschwitz. There were forty-five hundred drawings.
Leo Haas had also survived Auschwitz and returned to Terezín to unbrick his drawings from their hiding places. He, along with the engineer Jíří, who had also survived the war, went to the farmyard where Fritta’s drawings were buried and dug with shovels until they reached the tin canister that contained all of Fritta’s work.
Years later, I met up with Haas and learned how he and his wife had adopted Fritta’s son, who had been left an orphan after the war. Haas appeared softer than he had been in Terezín. Gone were the dismissive tones that I remembered; he now spoke as if we were equals, as if we had become such just by surviving. Over tea, he told me how he’d carried Fritta, sick and frail from dysentery, out of their cattle car as it arrived in Auschwitz and how he and another colleague tried to nurse him back to health. “Fritta lasted only eight days, hidden in a barracks,” he said “A doctor friend of ours tried to administer fluids to him with an eyedropper, but he died in my arms.”
“Petr and Otto?” I said their names tentatively, as if my memories of them were about to shatter in my hands.
“Petr and his wife were gassed a few days after their arrival.”
“And Otto?” My voice was cracking.
“Otto . . .” He shook his head. “He was last seen alive in Buchenwald, but he died days before liberation.” Haas, never one to show emotion, struggled to compose himself.
“The last image someone claimed to have seen of Otto was of him crouching on the side of the road with a lump of charcoal in his left hand, the other hand limp at his side. He was trying to sketch the corpses around him on a piece of scrap paper no bigger than this . . .” Haas drew a circle around the center of his palm.
I held my hand up to my mouth.
Haas just stood there shaking his head.
As we had never been close, I did not tell him my own story. The story of how I returned to Terezín a few months after liberation.
After bidding good-bye to Lucie, I took a train that followed the same route that I had taken with my family to Bohušovice years before. Although I now carried no rucksack, only a small canvas handbag, the weight of my parents’ and sister’s ghosts was as heavy as a case of bricks strapped to my back.
I walked silently down the dirt path until I reached the ghetto’s gates. I felt as though I were returning to a strange dream, a recurrent dream about a stage play; in this version the set remains the same but the entire cast has vanished. There was no familiar sight of Petr walking down the street with his sketchpad and bottle of ink. Gone was the once-omnipresent sight of a hearse pulling a mountain of suitcases or a gaggle of elderly bodies that could no longer walk. On the contrary, there was hardly a person to be found in a place that was once teeming with people.
I had to blink several times to adjust to the sight of a vacant Terezín. The ghetto had turned into a ghost town.
The barracks, too, were completely empty and only a few Allied soldiers patrolled the streets.
“What are you doing here?” one of them asked me.
I stopped in my tracks, suddenly terrified, adrenaline coursing through my body. It would take me a lifetime to get over that fear. Even though I was now technically a free person, I did not yet believe it.
“I’ve left something here.” My voice was shaking. I reached into my purse to show him the identification card I had been given upon liberation. “I was a prisoner here and want to see if what I am looking for is still here.”
“Is it valuable?” the soldier asked. His smile was crooked and he was missing one of his bottom teeth.
“To me it is. It’s a painting I did.”
He shrugged his shoulders, clearly not interested. “Go ahead, but don’t take all day.”
I nodded and walked hurriedly to the Hamburg barracks.
If shadows had a smell, that was the scent of Terezín. I could still smell the wretched odor of packed bodies. The damp walls. The dirt floor. But as I walked down the steps of the basement in the barracks, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had heard the sound of my own footsteps while I was in Terezín. I suddenly felt cold, the very echo of my shoes reinforcing just how alone I really was.
I tried to think of Carl in order to soothe my nerves. I tried to hear his voice in my head telling me to keep my resolve. I would come here and find my painting. And once I had it in hand, I would leave this place forever.
I had entered an antechamber in the basement, just as Jíří had described. I stood there for a moment like a child in a house of mirrors, not knowing where to look or where to begin my excavation. I kicked the earthen floor with the toe of my shoe. The ground was hard and compact.
I reached into my canvas bag and removed a small spade that I had borrowed from Lucie. I pulled up my skirt and fell to my hands and knees, like an animal digging for something lost.
I told myself I would not stop digging until I found it. I would not stop for a moment. I would unearth the drawing of Rita and Adi, just as I had created it, with torn cuticles, weary hands, and cracked skin, my own blood soaking into the earth.
It took me nearly two hours to find my painting. There it was, just as Jíří had promised, placed within a slender metal pipe.
CHAPTER 56
I was married to my second husband at the American consulate in Paris. A dozen other couples, all GIs and their European brides, waited outside. On the way there, we bought some flowers on the Rue du Bac and stumbled over cobblestone streets, my feet unused to shoes that fit as they should. I wore a navy suit and did my hair without any artistry, a simple brown barrette tucked above my ear.
After the ceremony, Carl asked me where I wanted to go to celebrate.
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