Letters From the Lost (29 page)

But here, as always, the human spirit, the capacity for thought, the ability to keep the benefits of experience in one’s brain prevailed. At least in the short run, we mastered these infestations, even if sometimes with difficulty and at the cost of gassing entire barracks or house blocks. Vermin preoccupied us incessantly.

Laundry, for example, was a serious problem. Some gifted experts kept the small facility that had once served as a military laundry operational without a break, day and night, raising its capacity to an unbelievable 1000 kg a day. Still, what was that compared to the needs of a town of 60,000 people?

This meant no more than 2 kg per three-month period for the ghetto inmates, which is not even one change of underwear a month, and it includes no bedding, etc. It was impossible to do laundry at home. We barely had enough soap for washing our bodies.

Now I will close this report. In the meanwhile, it is already July 18 and Otto and I are going on holidays. Even though I have only been working for six weeks, I have two weeks off and Otto has been demobilized. We are going to Trebitsch to see Martha, the only one of our relatives to have been saved. Otto wants to go from there to Strobnitz, Vienna, and to Linz to check into what can be learned e verywhere.

Assuming that the experiences I have delineated and the descriptions will really be of interest to you, I will continue my reports when we get back. For today, my dear ones, sincerest regards, hugs and kisses from your faithful old Arnold.

————

F
OURTH
L
ETTER

Prague, August 5, 1945
New Address—XII, Manesova 32

My dear ones,

Now we are safely back from our holidays and I want to continue my description. It was very nice in Trebitsch. Martha looked after us in a touching way, as if she needed to replace both our mother and our sisters. She cooked the very finest foods, all the things that we had dreamt about and talked about while we ate the wretched watery soup as Hunger rolled about in our intestines. Here once again were schnitzel, apricot dumplings, white coffee with cake, and all the things that by unanimous consent used to occupy the place of honour in our incessant talks about food.

In other ways too, our dear relatives ensured that we felt completely at home and that we found a replacement under their roof for the homeland and for the parental home that we had lost.

We also enjoyed the pleasures of life in the country. We took long walks, we went swimming, and we wandered in the woods. I regained the feeling and the consciousness of being a free human being and not one of the debased, the hated, the ones who had been cast out. It did me good to see that my very presence could bring pleasure to my relatives.

Unfortunately, the few days passed all too quickly and I had to go back to work in Prague. Perhaps I have not yet told you that hardly a week after my arrival in Prague, I went back to work at Parik’s, my old firm. I did this even though I was still a convalescent and I could have used the time to accomplish a thousand errands that remain, including going to all the different offices to cut through the red tape needed to get lodgings. However, I went on the assumption that work would be the best remedy for my pain and for my solitude, and I was not mistaken. I have a good job, and every day, I have a mountain of work that I very much enjoy.
At least filling that position in the factory gives me the feeling that my presence has some purpose.

Otto wanted to go to Vienna but only got as far as Bratislava when he had to turn around again. There is still no connection to Vienna and above all, there are no bridges over the Danube. Monday he wants to go to Strobnitz with Walter Waldstein’s widow whom we accidentally met on the street the other day. So poor Walter is also dead, even though when we were together in Auschwitz, he was still a strong young man.

Now we have an apartment again. Our old one is occupied, so I had to tread the thorny path of acquiring a new one, a path that required endless patience and was entangled with hundreds of disappointments and countless difficulties. I had begun to despair, but Otto was a trusty companion at my right hand. He ran countless errands for me with military precision, tasks for which of course his British military uniform came in very handy.

The new apartment is not nearly as nice as our old one. It only has three rooms, and the furniture is modest and old, but it is quite well located and my requirements these days are not very great. The apartment (the furniture, the dishes, etc.) are gratis, of course, a replacement for our old things, which the Germans stole from us.

I live in the new apartment with Vera’s mother who at age 71 is still active and energetic. She will run the household without even a maid, since this kind of work no longer exists here since the overthrow. Otto wants to stay with us for two or three weeks and then he will travel on to Paris.

My dear ones, in the last few days we have received three parcels from you, for which I must express my sincerest thanks. The first one contained mostly chocolate and sweets, the second and third ones that had Anny as sender contained cheese and honey, sugar, flour, and little tins of meat and cocoa. As you can well imagine, for me all these things are treats that I have not known for a long time, and they represent a very welcome addition to the still rather limited foods that are available here. So again, please accept my
sincerest thanks for these gifts and be assured that I will never forget this loving deed.

Nor can I fail to appreciate the spiritual impulse, the consoling awareness that even if I am separated from you by an ocean, still, I have in you next of kin who are concerned for me and who care for me because I am family.

Now I want to continue my description of Theresienstadt. As time passed, we got fairly used to this degrading dog’s life. With the deadening of the senses and the habituation that occurred, we did not even perceive the unpleasant circumstances as being so terrible. Later, from the perspective of Auschwitz, we looked back on There-sienstadt as paradise. In time, the conditions also improved a bit.

Above all, there was no shortage of distractions of every kind. There were numerous lectures by renowned professors, courses, concerts by first-class virtuosos, several improvised cabaret groups, even a top-notch theatre and an opera ensemble of a quality unsurpassed on any big-city stage. Even if it was with stomach growling with hunger, with underwear stiffened by dirt, and seated next to a neighbour crawling with lice, we could sit in a theatre, concert, or open-air cabaret just as we did in the best of times at home.

There was also a valuable library that enabled us to enrich our knowledge. There were even holidays of a sort, since those of us in the Bureau of Labour assigned people who had been doing hard labour for over a year to light agricultural work. Later, I advanced to a higher and more respected position as Master for Care and Control in the central Division of Labour. I had a large, bright office in the Magdeburger barrack that housed all the bureaucratic offices, a secretary, an assistant, and lots of business traffic the whole day through. I visited all the industrial enterprises and workshops, received all the requests of supervisors and workers, and played the role of the generous uncle from America who fulfills the wishes of his 5400 children to the best of his ability.

Vera was with me every day. We saw each other whenever we
had the chance, sometimes several times a day. Whenever we had something to say to each other, we just approached and talked because keeping to the exact number of hours of work was not an issue, especially at the higher ranks.

We spent very nice evenings in our own inner circle, usually with my roommate Fischer and his mother. She used to make our food more palatable with small ingredients, and sometimes she made holiday meals for us with food acquired by stealing or by spending a sinful amount of money. The black market flourished in Theresienstadt. There were people who smoked their ten to twenty cigarettes a day even though smoking was strictly forbidden. A cigarette usually cost 35 Kr and in bad times as much as 100 Kr. Although there were severe penalties for the possession of money, nevertheless, almost everyone took a chance. The often unexpected searches by our own female S.S. columns or by the gentlemen of the S.S. themselves were nightmares that haunted our being as well as our dreams.

Morality did not exist in Theresienstadt. Flirtation and the breaking of marital vows was common currency. The woman who could be had for a slice of bread and butter actually became a reality here, with the one difference that one had to substitute margarine for butter. Every woman who cared about her appearance had a man in as nourishing as possible a profession, preferably a baker, a butcher, or a worker in the central warehouse. She would justify this with the excuse that she was only doing it for the sake of her family.

I was one of the few, totally unmodern men who remained faithful to his wife. Vera and I were always together, and when Vera later moved to a room for female doctors that she shared with six colleagues, we struck a gentleman’s agreement that allowed each of us to have a day to spend an undisturbed hour or two together with a wife or a girlfriend.

In November 1942, Vera got extremely sick. In the practice of her profession, she had been infected with scarlet fever. Then she got
diphtheria and jaundice on top of that, so that she had to spend eleven weeks in isolation. This was a sad and a terrible time for us both, and we couldn’t even celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary except by my sending her a few little gifts and a letter that, in its sincere acknowledgement of her and in its thanks for ten so happy years, made such a deep impression on her that she wanted to keep it to the end of her life.

I could only see her in the hospital, from behind a glass window, so we communicated by sign language as if we were deaf-mutes. However, this bad time also ended, and all was well again.

A ghoulish apparition, a perennial nightmare hovered steadily above us in the form of the transports to the East. Transports to the Unknown. Transports to Perdition. Every conceivable kind of offering was brought forth in order to safeguard against being transported away, but all safeguards were usually problematic. As a doctor, Vera shielded me, and I, in my position as Master shielded her, but this only succeeded as long as normal circumstances prevailed.

Our dear parents were assigned to a transport to the East in the fall of 1942 and twice Vera’s parents were assigned to a transport. You can certainly image how awful was the thought of simply allowing our parents to be dragged off alone to their destruction. Thus, we set all the gears in motion, ran from one office to another, asked, begged, went every which way, intervened and asked our influential friends to speak up in the right places until we succeeded in exempting my parents as well as Vera’s from the transport.

Thus, the fact that we missed getting passage to a safe haven at least served the one purpose: that we saved both our parents from destruction and from a dreadful lonely death in foreign parts.

Unfortunately, Elsa and her family fared worse. One day in October 1942 when a transport from Prague arrived in Theresien-stadt, it was, as always, placed under strict quarantine in a barrack to which no one had access.

As luck would have it, it was my job as Head of Division to take ten men over there in the middle of the night because the complete transport was to continue on to Poland. My people were supposed to help carry the sick and the luggage to the barrack that had been readied for their departure.

Here, in the midst of this unparalleled chaos of bodies and baggage, I found our dear Elsa with Marianne. Emil had been quartered amid the sick. I promised Elsa my very best help and my most energetic efforts to get her out of the transport, even though time was short and the hurdles seemed endless. However, she did not want out. She had no idea what was meant by “the East,” and she would not allow herself to be talked out of it. On the one hand, she feared that Emil would then be sent off alone, or that their luggage would get lost. As if any luggage could be saved anyway! How often in all the years have I forfeited our poor bit of belongings! How often did we stand there with only the clothes we wore! Since Elsa did not want to stay and since even Mama’s illness could not persuade her, I went against her wishes and tried by every means at my disposal to get her and her family out of the transport.

It was a hard and painful piece of work, almost hopeless and beyond feasibility. I sacrificed the night and ran from office to office. In Theresienstadt, there was no limit to the working hours. During the arrival of transports, offices were open day and night. Sleep only became a possibility once the transport had left.

And so, I succeeded in the difficult task. All that was needed to free Elsa was the signature of a doctor. Because I did not dare awaken him in the middle of the night, I got the signature first thing in the morning, and I ran at full tilt to the departure barrack. The departing transport was at a full roll, and our dear, good Elsa was gone. Gone forever and ever.

There I stood in the barrack courtyard, the liberating, life-promising piece of paper in my hand, and I howled like a beaten dog. Never in my life will I forget this so dreadful, so bitter hour, nor will the wound left by this experience ever heal completely.

Otto Urbach was not with them. At that time, he was staying at a large farm in Lipa where hundreds of young Jews were doing agricultural work under the supervision of the S.S. Later, he came to Theresienstadt. He was a strong, handsome, and high-spirited young man, but he has not come back to the homeland either.

With Vera and me as well, it was a tragic chain of events that brought us into the transport to Poland. We had been in There-sienstadt for sixteen months and we had seen many dozens of transports leaving during that time. One day in the middle of December 1943, the gruesome call befell us too. As I have already told you, we had been protected against being assigned to a transport, but this time they needed two hundred doctors in the East, and they selected the youngest ones. Dear Vera belonged in this category, and I belonged to Vera, for the governing rule was not to tear apart the immediate family.