The tracks trace the same path out of Prague as they did in 1943. To my surprise, as the train finally left the suburbs behind and curled along the wooded banks of the Vltava River to my right, I passed through the town of Libčice. From the large carriage windows, I could clearly see the roof, balcony, and casements of my grandparents’ country house. The train then headed north, weaving along the course of the river, and came within a kilometer of Terezín itself before crossing the former Czech border and pushing on to Dresden. Then, finally, it reached Berlin. Just as my father had done, I followed my father’s route, seventy-five years after his journey, almost to the day, clutching copies of the papers that he had left me.
As I made that pilgrimage, I hoped that the night on which my father traveled was moonless and that, in his fear, he did not notice his parents’ house, unlit, as the train rolled onward. That he did not know how very close he was to them in the blackness, just south of Terezín. I hoped that he felt me cradling him, holding his hand, across the worlds of time and experience that then and now lay between us.
This is what my father wrote about that journey:
The train did not illuminate the tracks. The carriages were dark. The dim light of the aisles only allowed you to see the coming shadows, the delineations of figures moving, the shells of bodies slumped. I could hear the sound of the train incessantly rumbling and churning. There were five others in my compartment, their faces hidden, like mine. The darkness is why I chose this train, this hour. It must have been close to dawn, four hours since we had left Prague. Passengers sitting and swaying with the movement of the train, our faces shrouded by our coats that hung from bronze hooks. The others might have slept, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid.
We were close to the German border now. I checked my documents again: the ticket, identity card, and the passport. I had destroyed my old false identity card under the name Jan Rubeš. I kept the picture but ripped it up in the smallest shreds and burned every one. I still could not believe I was here, outside that room at Montana, on this train. I touched the passport in my left pocket, the one with the permit to cross the border that Zdenka sourced. In my other, I had the identity card that Míla gave me. We had used a chemical to carefully erase the names and mixed the inks to match the color of the rest of the text. It now read “Jan Šebesta, Chemist, born in Alt Bunzlau on March 11, 1921.” Only the passport had the name Zdeněk Tůma.
I could still see Míla, her intensely gray eyes that looked at me without tears. I felt her brush her lips against my chin as she hugged me awkwardly and turned away to look at me no more. I knew she had not wanted me to see her anguish.
I sat in a first-class carriage. In front of me a sign read “Official Personnel Only.” There was nothing official about me, but people see what they expect, and seated here I hoped they would think me trustworthy. I tried to look important, unfazed, as I boarded the train.
I prayed the identity check would be quick in this compartment—a swift formality. I owed Míla the passport also. She was the one who finally convinced Zdeněk. Things were awful enough, no one wanted to take unnecessary risks, so to have this passport was a miracle. On arrival, I was to post the passport back to Prague so that Zdeněk could use it to travel back to Berlin in three days. Helping me meant that they were both risking their lives. Zdeněk had not wanted to let me down but he was terrified for his sake and mine. He was scared that I couldn’t pull it off. My main worry was the photo in Zdeněk’s passport.
Zdeněk’s face was much thinner and more angular than mine. His eyes, like clever piercing darts, were unlike my large green ones. “You have the dreamy eyes of an artist,” my mother had always said.
The train stopped.
I heard voices that I assumed to be the conductor and the border police. I took the thin glass vial covered in brown rubber from my pocket and placed it at the back of my mouth. I held it between the lower back left molars and the side of my mouth. I was told it would take only a few seconds, a minute at most. Cyanide poisons your nerves so the brain dies first, then the heart. Would death be easy, or would I feel unspeakable pain? “Passports,” a German voice said. They were not asking for other papers, just passports. Not the papers with the other name. I took a breath. In the darkened carriage, the handheld beam lit up each passport held by every extended hand. Three men had the light flash in their faces, two remained obscured under their hanging coats. I pretended to be asleep. The guard shook me. I kept my face hidden beneath the coat, my eyes half-closed. My hand moved the coat a few centimeters to show deference and offered him the passport. He looked at it for a few seconds. I was certain that he must be able to see my heart pounding in my chest.
“Danke schoen, mein herr,” he muttered as he closed it and handed it back. I waited a few minutes to make sure they were gone. The train heaved forward and I was able to breathe again. I coughed and spat the ampoule into my hand. I placed it carefully back in my pocket. I could need it again.
I slept until we pulled into the station in Berlin. It was midmorning. I placed the passport in an envelope which I addressed to Zdeněk at the Central Post Office in Prague and sent it through the Reichpost. If I was caught now there would be no more danger to Zdeněk. The warming sunlight shone in between the buildings as I stepped outside. Suddenly my briefcase felt very light. It was a beautiful spring day in Berlin in May 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War.
Berlin. There I was, now Jan Šebesta, a Czech chemist looking for a job and a room to rent.
Jan Šebesta never would have existed without his friend Zdeněk. As the name Zdeněk Tůma is not uncommon, it was difficult for me to find his family. There are thousands of Tůmas in the Czech phone books. On Facebook alone, there are more than ninety Zdeněk Tůmas. When I started my research, I was not even sure of what he looked like. There were a few photographs in the box that I felt might be of him, but they are old and tiny, and the faces are hard to make out clearly. Luckily, one had his first name scribbled in pencil on the back and looked nothing like my father’s first cousin also called Zdeněk. I knew from the Czech archives that my father’s friend had moved to the region of Opava after the war. Eventually, I found online a hip young woman with blue hair who worked for an NGO in Indonesia, who had the traditional Czech feminine version of Tůma’s last name and hailed from Opava. In Barbora Tůmova’s picture on LinkedIn, her eyes and smile bore a remarkable resemblance to Zdeněk’s.
I emailed her. She wrote that she was traveling in Asia and confirmed that her grandfather was named Zdeněk and had indeed been friends with a man in Venezuela called Hans Neumann. By chance, she was stopping by London on her way to Prague. We met at a coffee shop and chatted for hours. Her uncle, also named Zdeněk, had shared stories about her grandfather and Hans. He too had written down his memories and saved pictures spanning over fifty years of friendship.
I discovered that Zdeněk had made the journey to visit my father in Venezuela three times in the 1960s. My father, who by then had a pilot’s license, had flown Zdeněk to the archipelago of Los Roques and let him take the controls. They had also ventured together out to a Yanomami Indian reserve in the Amazon jungle and slept in hammocks in the communal huts known as shabanos. The Bohemian pranksters had reunited briefly in a Latin America that must have seemed a lifetime away from the European past that they shared.