Born Survivors (13 page)

SS
Obersturmbannführer
Adolf Eichmann set himself up in a requisitioned Jewish house in Prague to oversee the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He demanded multiple transportations (to the Dachau concentration camp) by 1940 and if the community elders didn’t comply, he threatened to have his troops clear Prague of three hundred Jews a day.

The world they had once known was changing beyond all recognition.

Deeply in love, the newlyweds moved into Bernd’s airy apartment high in the eaves above a synagogue in U Staré Školy or Old Synagogue Street. It had a cupola and along one wall was a curved glass window – like in an artist’s studio – that was impossible to black out for night-time safety. Without a curtain, they’d sit by candlelight after curfew and listen to their favourite music on a phonograph, or enjoy the harmonies wafting up from the prayer ceremonies below.

Snuggling up in the roof was, Anka said, ‘terribly romantic’. With his flair for interior design, Bernd had decorated the apartment beautifully. They were surrounded by furniture he’d made, including a clock with a lovely chime and a pretty carved face. He’d also hung some pale apple green silk curtains, which Anka considered wonderfully indulgent.

Thanks to her allowance, she had a housemaid who made ‘marvellous’ doughnuts that Bernd especially enjoyed, and whenever they went out she had a choice of good clothes plus her pick of hats from her aunt’s shop.

Having been prevented from leaving the city without a special permit, Anka hadn’t seen her family in more than a year when in June 1941 she received the news that her much-loved older brother Tonda had died of a brain aneurism. He was thirty-three and had suffered a stroke two weeks earlier. Praying that no one would ask to see her documents, she travelled by train to attend his funeral and console her grieving parents, especially her mother, who had sat like a sentinel by Tonda’s bedside for two weeks and was devastated at the loss of a second son.

‘[My brother] was the first dead person I’d seen and looking at my mother was unforgettable – how she had to watch him die. That I don’t wish on anybody.’ As they sat quietly in the family home after the burial, the atmosphere was deeply melancholy. Anka’s father Stanislav was even quieter than usual. Her older sisters Zdena and Ruzena were there, along with Zdena’s husband Herbert Isidor and Ruzena’s son Peter, but there was no joy in their reunion.

All of a sudden German soldiers banged on the door and then flung it back against its hinges before marching in uninvited. A neighbour had tipped them off that Jews lived there, so they started ransacking the place and opening cupboards and drawers. Anka’s mother Ida had an ample bosom, just like her youngest daughter, and she quietly stuffed the family cash into her brassiere when the Germans’ backs were turned. Then, quite calmly, the grieving woman asked her unexpected guests if they’d like some coffee and cake. Surprised, they said yes, sat down, and had a perfectly polite conversation with the family they were supposed to be terrorising.

Flirting with Anka, the young soldiers asked why she spoke such good German, so she confessed that she was married to an architect from Berlin living in Prague. They joked that they should drive her home and dump her in his bed. Their faces suddenly serious, they warned her never to risk coming to see her family without a permit again and then they left – without arresting her. It was another lucky escape.

Back in Prague, people were increasingly wary of what might
happen next. Hitler had declared that all Jews must be eliminated from the Protectorate. Faced with the threat of deportation, they learned to trust nobody and keep their own counsel. People hid or hoarded as many valuables as they could and many still tried to get out of the country, though rumours abounded that those who’d fled were now living unhappily in strange lands where they had no funds, couldn’t speak the language, and felt unwanted.

Yet again, Anka had a chance to escape. She and Bernd heard through friends that it was possible to get out by train across Siberia to Shanghai, where the occupying Japanese had unexpectedly welcomed 23,000 Jews from across Europe and given them sanctuary in a ghetto. Still the couple hesitated before finally electing not to go. When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, they lost their chance but were again relieved.

The people who’d offered to help them weren’t the only ones who went out of their way to save Jews. An international group of multi-racial sympathisers had already helped entire families, and especially young children to escape to safer Great Britain in what became known as the
Kindertransports
. A similar programme entitled The One Thousand Children transported some 1,400 children to the United States between 1934 and 1945. An estimated 10,000 Jewish and other children from across Europe were rescued in this way when the transports were stopped. For those who could no longer be helped, the future looked increasingly bleak.

The synagogue above which Anka and Bernd had lived so cosily was closed, so they were forced to vacate their apartment and move to another in an old house in the district of Jindřišská. Still, Anka made the most of their two unheated rooms with a little kitchenette. ‘The anti-Jewish rules meant we weren’t allowed to do this or that, but it was all bearable,’ she said, describing the restrictions as ‘pinpricks’ on their happiness. The regulations tightened ‘very cleverly’ but they continued to endure the changes. ‘People took it and kept on saying, “If it doesn’t get any worse …” We had to give up radios and that was bad, but one could still read the
newspapers … you found something else … You never know how far you can go – lower and lower.’

When all Czech Jews over the age of six were instructed to sew a yellow Star of David to each of their outer garments in September 1941, everyone was apprehensive about how non-Jews might react to them in the street. There had already been numerous incidents of Jews being randomly picked on, arrested or beaten, and with a star marking them as social outcasts there would be no chance to hide.

The first time Anka donned her star she deliberately chose her smartest outfit – a dark green tartan skirt and a rust-coloured suede jacket – to set it off as an accessory. She said that of all the anti-Jewish measures, the star worried her least of all. ‘I felt very proud of my yellow star and thought, “If they want to mark me, they can mark me.” I couldn’t care less. I put on my best clothes. I did my hair, and I went out proudly with my head up and not crawling about. That was my attitude.’ The people she met ignored her new emblem. Nobody spat at her or was rude to a young woman full of self-confidence who refused to be bowed or cowed by it.

So much so that when she met a friend one day, bent over double and ‘creeping along the pavement’ trying to hide her star, she told her crossly, ‘Why give them such satisfaction? … Stand up straight! Be proud to be Jewish. So, we have to wear a star? So what? Don’t let them grind you down.’

Once when Bernd had an Gentile friend called Otto visiting from Germany, he decided to show him the sights of Prague after curfew. He removed his star and told Anka to do the same, so that they could all go out together. ‘If anyone stops us, keep quiet and let us do the talking,’ he said, because he and Otto both spoke
Hochdeutsch
(High German), the equivalent of BBC English. They were never challenged, but the experience frightened them too much to ever try it again.

By then, most of the city’s Jews had been forced out of the best areas and into tenements. They were banned from working in the
arts, the theatre or the film industry and Bernd could no longer risk making furniture for the Germans. Unemployed and trapped in Prague, the couple lived on Anka’s allowance and whatever her aunt could pay her for making hats.

In September 1941, SS
Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo, was named acting
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia and the atmosphere changed almost overnight. Within less than a month 5,000 men, women and children under his ‘protection’ had been rounded up and sent to the Łódź ghetto. Among them were Anka’s aunt and her family, none of whom ever returned. ‘That is when we started to get ready and prepare ourselves for something we couldn’t define – something nobody reckoned with … We thought people were just panicking … We didn’t know they were sending people to their death on a conveyor belt.’

After a lull of a few weeks, Bernd received a notification from the Nazi-appointed
Judische Gemeinde
(Jewish Community) in Prague assigning him a number and informing him to report two days later to an assembly point in the
Veletržni Palác
or old Trade Fair Palace building, renamed by the Germans the
Messepalast
. It was in the district of Holešovice, not far from the mainline Praha-Bubny railway station.

It was November 1941.

His time had come.

Anka’s beloved Bernd was among a thousand young men who were to be transported away from his wife and their happiness. It was hopeless to resist.

Those who arranged the
Umsiedlung
(resettlement) assured this latest consignment that they were ‘pioneers’ being sent north to set up a ‘model ghetto’ in the Czech garrison town of Terezín, a short train ride away. Built by Emperor Joseph II and named after his mother Maria Theresa, Terezín comprised two impregnable fortresses surrounded by high walls, ramparts and a moat. Designed – prophetically – in a shape similar to the Star of David
and covering a little over one square kilometre, it would be a perfect holding pen. The Germans, who’d already set up a Gestapo prison in the town inside what was known as the
Kleine Festung
(Small Fortress), reinstated Terezín’s Austrian name of Theresienstadt.

Losing Bernd to the unknown was a horrifying prospect but at least Terezín was still in Czechoslovakia and not ‘East’, which they all dreaded without being certain why. ‘It was only fifty miles from Prague so it was still “home” … and that was better than being sent out of the country,’ Anka said. ‘I didn’t want him to go and I didn’t want to go but they could do with us what they wanted.’

Heydrich had originally conceived the idea of setting up a ghetto for Czech Jews in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in order to placate growing international concern that Jews were being mistreated at the hands of the Germans. In September more than 33,000 Jews had been lined up and shot dead by the Nazis in Kiev, and in Auschwitz doctors had tested the gas chambers for the first time. News of these developments was kept strictly secret, but rumours were harder to control.

In the coming months Heydrich was to announce that Terezín would be open to the ‘
Prominenten
’ – wealthy German and Austrian Jews over sixty-five, including any disabled or decorated war veterans, and anyone of sufficient social standing to encourage outside scrutiny. Hailed ‘as a gift’ from the Führer to the Jews ‘to prepare them for a life in Palestine’, the new ghetto was sited in a pretty pastoral landscape against a backdrop of the purple Bohemian mountains. It was designed to be largely autonomous, with SS supervision – for as long as it suited them.

But first, the ghetto had to be made ready for the expected arrivals. The Nazis demanded that 3,000 able-bodied men and women aged between eighteen and thirty-five report for
Aufbaukommando
(construction detail). Sent in three batches of 1,000 each, they were to help transform the run-down garrison designed to house 7,000 men into a camp that could hold an expected
100,000 Jews. The Nazis promised that if these first few pioneers did a good job, they would never be sent on anywhere else.

Bernd, as a skilled carpenter, was ideal material for the pioneer list. He and his wife knew that there was no way of escaping the summons. ‘One simply obeyed,’ she said. When he was told that in his allotted fifty kilograms of luggage he could take pots, pans and warm clothing, they both hoped that this meant he’d be labouring outdoors and could cook for himself. Swallowing her tears, Anka helped him pack. What to take though? Should he use up the limited baggage allowance with luxuries, books and his tools, or would it be better to take canned food or medicines? Would he need a bedroll, and how about some of their favourite records?

After a last bittersweet night together, Anka eventually waved her husband goodbye, quietly confident that she’d see him again soon. Bernd Nathan left Prague on the second of two transports of the construction detail from Praha-Bubny railway station on Friday, 28 November 1941. Soon afterwards, his young wife received a similar notification to report for transportation. ‘I was delighted I was going and I was sure that I would see him. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t.’

On a frosty December morning, with her best handbag, hat, and a small suitcase, she handed over the keys to their flat to her maid and asked her to keep their most precious belongings safe there. These included all her family photographs, their furniture, curtains, and Bernd’s clock. Then she joined the disorderly progression of Jews heading for the
Veletržni Palác
. Instead of taking something ‘necessary and useful’ like tinned fish or packet soup, Anka carried a large hatbox tied with string. In it were three dozen of her maid’s delicious sugar-coated doughnuts, Bernd’s favourite treat.

Before long, she found herself inside the dilapidated six-storey building that had once housed trade fairs. Each floor was crammed with hundreds of men, women and children, all jostling each other and vying for space on the dirty floor. There were limited and already stinking lavatories and only a little food and water, which
was served in mess tins. Czech marshals with armbands shepherded them into groups and handed out lettered transport numbers that had to be written on suitcases, pinned or sewn to bedrolls and clothing, and hung from a string around each transportee’s neck.

Everyone seemed fascinated by Anka, who – amidst the chaos, noise and heat – was beautifully dressed in her finest green suit and a hat. As people around her became neglectful of their appearance in a place where it was impossible to look after themselves, the young bride kept brushing her hair and reapplying her make-up. They were even more intrigued when she knelt on the floor in her fine stockings to use her eyelash curlers. ‘I just wanted to look my best for the man I loved.’