Recovering a lost identity

Some 60,000 people were crammed together in an area little more than a square kilometre in size - industrialists and manufacturers…

Some 60,000 people were crammed together in an area little more than a square kilometre in size - industrialists and manufacturers, lawyers and doctors, rabbis and university professors, singers and composers, bank managers, businessmen, shorthand typists, housewives, farmers, labourers and millionaires, people from Prague and the rest of the Protectorate, from Slovakia, from Denmark and Holland, from Vienna and Munich, Cologne and Berlin, from the Palatinate, from Lower Franconia and Westphalia - each of whom had to make do with about two square metres of space in which to exist and all of them, in so far as they were in any condition to do so or until they were loaded into trucks and sent on east, obliged to work entirely without remuneration in one of the primitive factories set up, with a view to generating actual profit, by the External Trade Section, assigned to the bandage-weaving workshop, to the handbag and satchel assembly line, the production of horn buttons and other haberdashery items, the manufacturing of wooden soles for footwear and of cowhide galoshes, to the charcoal yard, the making of such board games as Nine Men's Morris and Catch the Hat, the splitting of mica, the shearing of rabbit fur, the bottling of ink dust, the silkworm-breeding station run under the aegis of the SS or, alternatively, employed in one of the operations serving the ghetto's internal economy in the clothing store, for instance, in one of the precinct mending and darning rooms, the shredding section, the rag depot, the book reception and sorting unit, the kitchen brigade, the potato-peeling platoon, the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant or the mattress department, as medical and nursing auxiliaries, in the disinfestation and rodent control service, the floor space allocation office, the central registration bureau, the self-administration housed in barrack block BV, known as "The Castle", or in the transport of goods maintained within the walls of the fortress by means of a medley of carts of every conceivable kind and four dozen ancient hearses brought from the now defunct Jewish communities in the Bohemian countryside to Terez∅n, where they moved along the crowded streets with two men harnessed between the shafts and four to eight pushing or putting their weight against the spokes of the wheels of these oddly swaying conveyances, which were covered by ulcerations of peeling black varnish and from which, before long, the rickety superstructures, high-built coach-boxes and silver-bronzed canopies resting on turned columns had been roughly sawn away, so that the lower parts, on the sides of which rows of coarse letters and numbers were painted in lime-wash, scarcely betrayed their former function, a function, said Austerlitz, for which they were still frequently employed even now; since much of the load carted round Theresienstadt every day was made up by the dead, of whom there were always a great many because the high population density and poor diet rendered it impossible for the course of such infectious diseases as scarlet fever, enteritis, diphtheria, jaundice and tuberculosis to be stemmed, and because the average age of those brought from all regions of the German Reich to the ghetto was over 70, and these people, who before they were sent away had been led to believe some tale about a pleasant resort in Bohemia called Theresienbad, with beautiful gardens, promenades, hoarding houses and villas, and many of whom had been persuaded or forced to sign contracts, so-called HeimeinkaufsvertrΣge, said Austerlitz, offering them, against deposits of up to 80,000 Reichsmarks, the right of residence in what was described to them as a most salubrious place, these people, Austerlitz continued, had come to Theresienstadt, completely misled by the illusions implanted in their minds, carrying in their luggage all manner of personal items and mementoes which could be of no conceivable use in the life that awaited them in the ghetto, often arriving already ravaged in body and spirit, no longer in their right minds, delirious, frequently unable to remember their own names, surviving the procedure of being sluiced in, as it was termed, either not at all or only by a few days, in which latter case, on account of the extreme psychopathic personality changes which they had undergone and which genera1ly resulted in a kind of infantilism divorcing them from reality and entailing an almost total loss of the ability to speak and act, they were immediately sectioned in the casemate of the Cavalier Barracks, which served as a psychiatric ward and where they usually perished within a week under the dreadful conditions prevailing there, so that although there was no shortage of doctors and surgeons in Theresienstadt who cared for their fellow prisoners as best they could, and in spite of the steam disinfection boiler installed in the malting kiln of the former brewery, the hydrogen cyanide chamber and other hygienic measures introduced by the Kommandantur in an all-out campaign against infestation with lice, the number of the dead - entirely in line, said Austerlitz, with the intentions of the masters of the ghetto - rose to well above 20,000 in the 10 months between August, 1942, and May, 1943, alone, as a result of which the joiner's workshop in the former riding school could no longer make enough deal coffins, there were sometimes more than 5,000 dead bodies stacked in layers on top of each other in the central morgue in the casemate by the gateway to the Bohusevice road, and the four naphtha-fired incinerators of the crematorium, kept going day and night in cycles of 40 minutes at a time, were stretched to the utmost limits of their capacity, said Austerlitz, and this comprehensive system of internment and forced labour which, in Theresienstadt as elsewhere, was ultimately directed, so he continued, solely at the extinction of life and was built on an organisational plan regulating all functions and responsibilities, with a crazed administrative zeal - from the use of whole troops of workers in building the branch railway line from Bohusevice to the fort, to the solitary man whose job it was to keep the clock mechanism in the closed Catholic church in order - this system had to be constantly supervised and statistically accounted for, particularly with respect to the total number of inmates of the ghetto, an uncommonly time-consuming business going far beyond civilian requirements when you remember that new transports were arriving all the time, and people were regularly weeded out to be sent elsewhere with their files marked R.N.E. for Rⁿckkehr Nicht Erwⁿnscht, Return Not Desired, a purpose for which the SS men responsible, who regarded numerical accuracy as one of their highest principles, had a census taken several times, on one occasion, said Austerlitz, on 10 November, 1943, outside the gates in the open fields of the Bohusevice basin, when the entire population of the ghetto - children, old people and any of the sick at all able to walk not excepted marched out after assembling in the barracks yards at dawn to be drawn up in block formation behind numbered wooden boards, and there, throughout the whole of this cold and damp day, as the fog drifted over the fields, they were forced to wait, guarded by armed police, and not permitted to step out of line even for a minute, for the SS men to arrive, as they eventually did on their motorbikes at three o'clock, to carry out the count of heads and then repeat it twice before they could feel convinced that the final result, including those few still within the walls, did in fact tally with the envisaged number of 40,145, whereupon they rode away again in some haste, entirely forgetting to give any orders for the inmates' return, so that this great crowd of many thousands stood out in the Bohusevice basin on that grey 10th of November drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until well after dark, bowed and swaying like reeds in the showers that now swept over the countryside, before finally, driven to it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town from which most of them had never emerged except for this one time since their transfer to Theresienstadt, where soon after the beginning of the new year, said Austerlitz, what was described as a Versch÷nerungsaktion, or general improvement campaign was undertaken, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organise the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up programme: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over 1,000 rose-bushes were planted, a children's nursery and crΦche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations, were adorned with fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandboxes, paddling pools and merry-go-rounds, whilst the former OREL cinema, which until now had served as a dumping ground for the oldest inmates of the ghetto and where a huge chandelier still hung from the ceiling in the dark space inside, was converted within a few weeks into a concert hall and theatre, and elsewhere shops stocked with goods from the SS storehouses were opened for the sale of food and household utensils, ladies' and gentlemen's clothing, shoes, underwear, travel requisites and suitcases; there were also a convalescent home, a chapel, a lending library, a gymnasium, a post office, a bank where the manager's office was furnished with a sort of field marshal's desk and a suite of easy chairs, not to mention a coffee-house with sun umbrellas and folding chairs outside it to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passers by to linger for a while, and indeed there was no end to the improvements and embellishments, with much sawing, hammering and painting until the time of the visit itself approached and Theresienstadt, after another 7,500 of the less presentable inmates had been sent east amidst all this busy activity, to thin out the population, so to speak, became a Potemkin village or sham Eldorado which may have dazzled even some of the inhabitants themselves and where, when the appointed day came, the commission of two Danes and one Swiss official, having been guided, in conformity with a precise plan and a timetable drawn up by the Kommandant's office, through the streets and over the spotless pavements, scrubbed with soap early that morning, could see for themselves the friendly happy folk who had been spared the horrors of war and were looking out of the windows, could see how smartly they were all dressed, how well the few sick people were cared for, how they were given proper meals served on plates, how the bread ration was handed out by people in white drill gloves, how posters advertising sporting events, cabarets, theatrical performances and concerts were being put up on every corner and how when the day's work was over, the residents of the town flocked out in their thousands on the ramparts and bastions to take the air; almost as if they were passengers enjoying an evening stroll on the deck of an ocean-going steamer, a most reassuring spectacle, all things considered, which the Germans, whether for propaganda purposes or in order to justify their actions and conduct to themselves, thought fit after the end of the Red Cross visit to record in a film, which Adler tells us, said Austerlitz, was given a sound track of Jewish folk music in March, 1945, when a considerable number of the people who had appeared in it were no longer alive, and a copy of which, again according to Adler, had apparently turned up in the British-occupied zone after the war, although he, Adler himself, said Austerlitz, never saw it, and thought it was now lost without trace. For months, said Austerlitz, I tried in vain, through the good offices of the Imperial War Museum and other agencies, to find any indication of the present location of that film, since although I had been to Theresienstadt before leaving Prague, and despite Adler's meticulous account (written between 1945 and 1947 and published in 1955), which I had read down to the last footnote with the greatest attention, I found myself unable to cast my mind back to the ghetto and picture my mother, Agβta, there at the time. I kept thinking that if only the film could be found I might perhaps be able to see or gain some inkling of what it was really like, and then I imagined recognising Agβta, beyond any possibility of doubt, a young woman as she would be by comparison with me today, perhaps among the guests outside the fake coffee-house, or a saleswoman in the haberdashery shop, just taking a fine pair of gloves carefully out of one of the drawers, or singing the part of Olympia in the Tales of Hoffman which, so Adler says, was staged in Theresienstadt in the course of the improvements campaign. I imagined seeing her walking down the street in a summer dress and lightweight gabardine coat, said Austerlitz: out of a group of ghetto residents out for a stroll, she alone seemed to make straight for me, coming closer with every step, until at last I thought I could sense her stepping out of the frame and passing over into me. It was wishful fantasies such as these which cast me into a state of great excitement when the Imperial War Museum finally succeeded, through the Federal Archives in Berlin, in obtaining a cassette copy of the film of Theresienstadt for which I had been searching. I remember very clearly, said Austerlitz, how I sat in one of the museum's video viewing rooms, placed the cassette in the black opening of the recorder with trembling hands, and then, although unable to take in any of it, watched various tasks being carried out at the anvil and forge of a smithy, in the pottery and wood-carving workshop, in the hand-bag-making and shoe-manufacturing sections - a constant, pointless to-do of hammering, metal-heating and welding, cutting, glueing and stitching; I saw an unbroken succession of strangers' faces emerge before me for a few seconds, I saw workers leaving the huts when the siren had sounded and crossing an empty field beneath a sky filled with motionless white clouds, a game of football in the inner court of one of the barrack buildings, with hundreds of cheerful spectators crowding the arcades and the galleries on the first and second floors, I saw men under the showers in the central bathhouse, books being borrowed from the library by gentlemen of soignΘ appearance, I saw a full-scale orchestral concert and, in the moat surrounding the fortified town, kitchen gardens neatly laid out where several dozen people were raking the vegetable beds, watering beans and tomatoes, searching brassica leaves for Cabbage White caterpillars, whilst at the end of the day others were sitting on benches outside the houses, apparently in perfect contentment, letting the children play a little longer, one man reading a book, a woman talking to her neighbour; many of them just taking their ease at their windows, arms folded, in a way once common at the onset of dusk. At first I could get none of these images into my head; they merely flickered before my eyes as the source of continual irritation or vexation, which was further reinforced when, to my horror, it turned out that the Berlin cassette inscribed with the original title of Der Fⁿhrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt had on it only a patchwork of scenes cobbled together and lasting some 14 minutes, scarcely more than an opening sequence in which, despite the hopes I had entertained, I could not see Agβta anywhere, however often I ran the tape and however hard I strained to make her out among those fleeting faces.

(c) W. G. Sebald 2001

The author has deliberately written this novel without a single paragraph break