“Like the one in the man’s leg in London?” I ventured.
He nodded. “Exactly. They can just shoot you when you are no longer useful. If they don’t like you, if they think you are a traitor, just like that, without process or trial, they just kill you. And the worst thing is, nobody would ever know.”
His words threw me. I inspected his leg again. The perfect dots, with fine red scratch lines around them, definitely looked like insect bites to me.
“But Papi, no one wants to kill you. Don’t they itch? Are you sure they aren’t mosquito bites?”
His evident fear unnerved me. I wanted it to go away, I longed to dispel it. I bent my elbow toward him and pointed at a scab of my own, which I had just scratched.
“Look, Papi! See, yours are the same.”
“You are right,” he said, his gaze still adrift.
Then, after a pause, he looked at me again and murmured affectionately a term that he had derived from the French word for mischievous and that he used for both my mother and me.
“Coquinita. That’s what they probably are.”
He looked away, but his laugh, intended to reassure me, sounded wrong. He was nervous still, I could tell. It was obvious to me then that he did not think he had been the victim of a biting insect. It was as if he had forgotten that I was his young daughter and just wanted me to be a witness to these strange wounds on his leg. He passed me the comics, opened a paper, and hid behind it.
It did not make sense. My father was not fearful, he was resolute and strong. He personified security, success. Yet he seemed frightened. Why would he think that anyone wanted to kill him? But I did not say anything more, and neither did he.
When I went into my mother’s room that morning, I told her about my father’s bites. My mother repeatedly maintained that children must never be lied to. I knew this and found it reassuring. It did mean that she was uncommonly candid with her explanations and opinions.
“It’s probably that he’s concerned about malaria… there used to be lots of cases here. But no longer.”
I countered that was not it at all, that he was not afraid of mosquitoes or malaria. He thought someone was trying to kill him, as they had the Bulgarian.
“Don’t pay attention, he is like that at times,” she replied casually. “It doesn’t happen usually, but sometimes he is a little afraid.”
Then she told me about a similar incident during their last skiing trip. On those journeys, my parents usually flew direct from Caracas to Zurich while I stayed at home and went to school. They traveled regularly, and I particularly liked their trips to Switzerland because they returned home laden with giant boxes of chocolates for me.
My mother explained that when it was nearly time to land, the pilot announced that due to bad weather, the plane might have to be diverted to Vienna or Stuttgart. My father’s reaction had been striking. He clutched the metal hand rests and started to shake and sweat, she said, so much that just patting his forehead had soaked his handkerchief completely.
“Was it the turbulence? Were there thunderstorms?”
“Oh no, he wasn’t scared of the weather,” she said. Hoping to reassure me, she continued: “It just happens sometimes, he is afraid. He has not been back to Central Europe since he left all those years ago. I just told him to stay calm, reminded him that as a Venezuelan, he had nothing to worry about. And in the end the storm cleared, and we landed in Zurich after all. There was no reason to be anxious.”
“So things to do with some countries in Europe make him nervous?”
“Not often, but they sometimes do,” she said. “He is very far away from Europe now. And you, my little mouse, certainly should not spend any time worrying about it.”
I did not understand at all but left the issue there.
Why had the murder of a man at a bus stop in Europe made my father uneasy at home in Caracas? How was Switzerland different from Austria or Germany? Why would being Venezuelan have made a difference? Why would my father be scared for no reason? Who were they, those people who could just kill you? And what did all of that have to do with red dots on your shins? I had no clue how mosquitoes, nationality, poison, spies, and turbulence could be connected. I did not understand why any of these things made my formidable father afraid.
There were no immediate answers, but if my mother thought it was fine that my father was nervous at times, then that meant I must do the same. She evidently was not remotely worried about anyone trying to poison him. Like her, I would try to not give the matter further thought.
Anyone observing us then wouldn’t have noticed that anything was out of kilter at all. Our lives carried on as normal, the usual routines unaltered. My father’s bites healed, and no one mentioned poison again. For a while, I forgot about it too. My father’s days continued to pass in Venezuela, replete with work, philanthropy, hobbies, friends, and family. Seemingly, he had no real worries at all.
* * *
Could my family in the Czechoslovakia of the late 1930s possibly have imagined what was coming? If you look at the letters and photographs of the time, everything suggests that life for them during the mid-1930s retained a sense of normality. And yet, behind the smiles in the pictures, concealed within the words that filled their letters and emphasized the positive and the mundane, doubtless there must have been intimations of fear.
As Otto read the papers and oversaw production at the Montana factory, as Hans and Lotar continued with their studies, pranks, poems, and boyish romances, it must have been there. Silent, ever present, but just out of sight.
Perhaps Hans was a bit too immature, but Lotar was more thoughtful. Otto was anything but a fantasist; he must have been apprehensive, even perhaps foreseen it. He must have discussed it with his brothers. By the middle of the decade, Victor, one of his brothers, had already asked the family to join him in America, and the youngest, Richard, had been arranging to emigrate. Surely, Ella’s every instinct, even with her perpetually optimistic disposition, would have been to protect her brood. Perhaps during her walks along the Vltava, when the noise of everyday life quieted and she allowed her thoughts to wander, she had some presentiment, felt some anxiety at the impending threat.
Czechoslovakia was surrounded, landlocked by Romania, Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Germany. There was no escape to the sea, just the 430-kilometer river that starts in the west and runs southeast with gathering strength along the hem of the Bohemian Forest before turning north to cross the heart of Bohemia through Prague itself. Both its Czech and German names, Vltava and Moldau, come from the Old German words for wild waters.
I have a photograph of Lotar and Zdenka taken on a spring or summer day in 1937. They stand next to each other dressed in matching exercise clothing with the emblem of their local YMCA. It looks as if they have just shared a joke, and they are smiling. They are in the garden at Libčice, probably coming back from canoeing in the waters of the Vltava. Lotar holds her proudly, and Zdenka laughs with raised eyebrows. They do not appear to have a care in the world.
Zdenka and Lotar in the garden at Libčice, 1937
Yet with every passing week came new laws, fresh restrictions for Jews in Europe. Between 1933 and 1939, fourteen hundred anti-Jewish laws were passed in neighboring Germany. In 1933, Jews were banned from state-sector jobs in government, law, farming, publishing, journalism, and the arts. On April 11, 1933, anyone with one Jewish parent or grandparent was officially defined by German decree as non-Aryan. In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed. In 1935 Poland modeled its own laws regarding Jews on Germany’s. Jews and political refugees arrived by the thousands in Prague in the mid- to late 1930s, escaping open hatred in Germany, Austria, and farther east. Czechoslovakia was then seen as a safe haven, a bastion of democracy in Central Europe. As anti-Semitism metastasized across the continent, Czechoslovakia remained relatively politically progressive and stable. Many prominent Jews held positions in the Social Democrat government, which was adamantly opposed to Nazi ideology. Czechoslovakia was more receptive to migration than Holland, and unlike in France, one could get by speaking German.