Somehow, on the back of the note that Pišta had written to him, Otto managed to scribble a message to his boys and get it out of Bubny on November 19:
So far all is well. We have loaded our luggage onto the train now and will depart tomorrow. I have managed to identify someone in Terezín who will help. It will be another sleepless night as it is simply impossible to sleep here. I hope it will be better in Terezín. Please don’t worry at all about me, I will adjust to everything. I kiss you with all my heart.
Otto was transported from Bubny to Terezín the next morning.
* * *
As my own research was drawing to a close, I decided that I had to go to Terezín. Initially, I felt I should go alone but was grateful when my husband and children insisted that they would accompany me for support. My mother, who lives in New York, announced that she had to be there for her grandchildren. Her sister, my aunt, who had worked with me on the family letters and knew as much about Otto and Ella as I did, clearly had to come as well. Dr. Anna Hájková, a professor at Warwick University and an expert on Terezín who had helped me with my investigations, offered to guide us so we could find the places where my grandparents lived. Her partner, an architect who had never visited Terezín, joined for good measure.
This disparate band of French, Venezuelan, American, British, and Czech travelers, ranging in age from twelve to seventy-six, assembled in Prague early on a foggy Sunday morning in October 2018. We drove out of Prague to Terezín, each of us a little sleepy but apprehensive for our own differing reasons.
After just under an hour on the motorway, we followed the country roads that lead to Terezín. We passed along an access road over the old moat and through one of the entrances built into the redbrick-fortified walls. The early mist had cleared, and an unseasonal sunlight poured onto the caramel stone of the eighteenth-century buildings. We pulled up and set off down a quiet street on foot, with Dr. Hájková leading the way.
At first, Terezín seemed like any one of the countless historic towns that dot Central Europe, with a formal square outlined by rather grand buildings arrayed around a church, complete with bell tower, and a town hall. The square was covered in lawns, a little dry after a long summer, but well tended. As we adjusted to the scene, it became clear that we were almost alone. The streets were empty and the windows dark. Apart from the occasional passerby and the few patrons of the only small café open, which offered a lunch of stew or fried cheese, the town was more or less deserted.
When Terezín was a detention camp, the church was locked and its bell silent but the town was far from quiet. It was obscenely swollen with people, every room and attic crammed with confined humanity. This square had been hemmed with barbed wire and tented in canvas to provide an additional roofed area as a workplace for the prisoners, who hammered, sawed, scrubbed, and sewed within. These perfectly perpendicular and silent streets were thronged, and the metal bars on every darkened window would have framed the faces that craned for a view of life beyond the stifling rooms.
In the stillness, we walked as Dr. Hájková spoke and my children took turns holding my hand. Overcrowding, disease, hunger, and misery were most of the factors that led to death. Originally a garrison town built to accommodate 4,000 people, by September 1942, Terezín housed nearly 60,000 souls. More than 140,000 Jews were sent to Terezín throughout the war. Over half of them were from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the rest from Germany, Austria, and other parts of Central and Northern Europe. Only one of every ten survived the war.
As one ventures around the perimeter of the town toward its cream-and-gray crematorium or the area known as Small Fortress, which housed a Gestapo prison, there are sculptures commemorating the victims, a stone menorah, a field of graves around a Star of David, stark reminders of the many who died there or passed through on their way to death camps farther east.
Two of the buildings now serve as museums, and here the visitor can view re-created barrack rooms, with crude bunks tightly serried as they would have been. Photographs and examples of the deft artworks produced by Terezín inmates are on display in glass cases. Each charcoal sketch evokes the events that took place there and that left the streets deserted for all these decades after the war. The works invariably portray a teeming, overwhelming desperation. And yet all this is punctuated by incongruous notes of solace, the musicians still playing, even composing, the poets somehow still finding inspiration, and the artists drawing and painting it all. The human spirit fought on and continued to produce poignant works in a place that was designed to numb, silence and dehumanize. Norbert Frýd, a Czech theater director who was deported to Terezín in August 1943 and survived the war, wrote: If Terezín was not hell itself, like Auschwitz, it was the anteroom to hell. But culture was still possible, and for many this frenetic clinging to an almost hypertrophy of culture was the final assurance. We are human beings and we remain human beings, despite everything!
It is unsurprising that many of the local families who had made Terezín their home before the war went elsewhere and that no others replaced them. Official figures suggest that there are a few thousand residents left today, yet when we visited, it felt emptier. All but a handful of the buildings are uninhabited and neglected. The place feels mostly soulless, depleted. And yet as I walked the gravel paths between the buildings where my grandparents were housed, I could almost hear them utter the words in their letters. They were not mutterings of despair. What survived and resonated were their dreams, the descriptions of moments of happy respite or mundane frustration, tidbits that seeped through enough to give me a glimpse of who they were, of how they lived, of how, despite all, they still hoped and loved.
That day in Terezín, as I looked up at the unwavering stone buildings, it seemed to me that I saw silhouettes, delineations of their figures looking back from the depths of the windows, behind the bars. I maintained the gaze for a yearning second before reminding myself that the light plays games and creates shadows, especially as it finds its way through years of accumulated dirt on the glass.
Terezín was a concentration camp, another tier in the carefully constructed Nazi strategy. The first tier had been to exclude the Jews from society, the second to concentrate them as a segregated temporary workforce in places like Terezín, and then, finally, to deport them to extermination camps farther east. Terezín was not itself a death camp, like Auschwitz or Dachau. Sometimes it is also referred to as a ghetto, but this word fails to convey the heinous crimes committed there. It had no gas chambers, although thirty-four thousand people perished from disease and starvation within its overcrowded confines. It is referred to as the “model” camp, because Terezín was used for Nazi propaganda. It incorporated a bank and a post office, and it had a working hospital. Nevertheless, the inmates were malnourished and frail. This, together with the overcrowded and unhygienic conditions, meant that illnesses proliferated. The hospital functioned and was staffed by superb doctors from all over Europe who had themselves been deported there. The bank and post office, on the other hand, were mostly a charade. Inmates nominally had bank accounts and were paid for their labor, but Terezín banknotes, complete with an image of Moses, had almost no value other than for buying tickets to concerts or plays put on by inmates. The post office could be used to receive some letters and small packages that were checked but only postcards could be sent, and they were read by the SS and censored. Solely letters that were sneaked out of the camp by illegal methods told the truth about the conditions there.