Headstones

What are you doing crossing borders with a dead body in your car?

  
Dorothea and Zvi, my great-great-grandparents, long dead, couldn’t ride the train, shuddered at the prospect. Instead, I rented a car, a stick shift, a small Peugeot van, one that I could hardly maneuver. I had only seen people drive stick in the movies. I thought: It can’t be that hard. But it was. In the trunk, we had Marja Süss, my second cousin once removed, fully dead, stiff and rotting. Were I pulled over, it would spell bad news. Question: What are you doing crossing borders with a dead body in your car? Answer: Well, officer, my great-great-grandparents thought it was a good idea. Doro and Zvi sat in the backseat, in their burial clothes, in better shape than they were when they died, telling me how to drive—this way and that. They’d been cooped up for so long that I felt I could forgive them for this, for their incessant nagging. Nevertheless, I didn’t trust their directions. Had they ever even driven these streets? Probably not. Roads had been built and destroyed and built again since they’d been alive, rewriting the topography.

“We’ll help you find Franz,” Zvi had said. “We’d know where our grandson is. We understand what he means to you.” By virtue of being out of time, Dorothea and Zvi, my most distant speaking relatives, seemed to know both more and less than they should know.

“Do you promise?” I said. If my grandfather was like Dorothea and Zvi, he’d be able to tell me the location of his papers—straight from his mouth to my ears—the circumstances of his death. Franz was better, in fact, than any death certificate I could procure.

“Where exactly are we going?” I turned my head away from the road, causing the two of them to cringe, anticipating a crash. But what could we hit? Corn fields? Slow, rolling hills?

“We’re getting close,” said Zvi, leaning over the passenger’s seat, putting his face close to mine. I could almost feel his skin.

“Yes,” said Dorothea. She shook her head and gave Zvi a puzzled look. “Where are we? Where are we?”

I pulled to the shoulder of the road, and together we inspected a map. We stood in a semicircle and pointed at the folded and refolded paper, all of it in a language I didn’t understand.

Dorothea gasped. “This,” she said, “is Theresienstadt. Terezín. Why are we here? Did you know it has a dirty past?”

“An evil past,” corrected Zvi. He rubbed his hands together, picked at the calluses that had formed from years of hard labor—making paper one sheet at a time: beating down the fibers, mixing the chemicals, pressing his mould into a vat of pulp, couching the excess water, cutting to size. “Don’t you remember it?”

“We’ll find Franz here?” I said. Dust sputtered around us, masking us from the passing cars.

“In a sense,” said Zvi. If Zvi wondered what happened to his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, he didn’t ask. “We won’t not find him in Terezín. Don’t worry. Our grandson isn’t going anywhere. We’ll get to him as soon as we can.”

“Let’s make it fast,” I said and glanced toward Marja in the Peugeot’s trunk. I didn’t grasp the extent to which Zvi wanted to permanently leave our world behind. Did I have any choice? No. Without them, I’d be lost, I’d be no one, I’d have nothing.

We drove to the city’s edge and looked into the former concentration camp. Before that, Doro explained, it was a rural town in which people worked and lived, survived and died. Before that, it was a fortified city built to protect Prague (and the Austrian-Hapsburgs) from the Prussians.

“I thought it no longer existed,” said Zvi. “I thought it was wiped off the map.” When, in 1941, they’d first been taken to Terezín, Zvi told me, later that day, they had never been there before. Why would they have? So far from home. They’d had good lives in Breslau, making paper, farming wheat, living at a distance from the rest of the world.

“It’s not the real one,” Doro speculated. “Isn’t this what they call a reproduction?”

“No,” I said. “We’re looking at it. This is the actual city, the real place.” Returned in a half-hearted way to its pre-Shoah days, Terezín was, according to a billboard with recent census data, slowly growing, and we could make out a handful of pedestrians crossing the road ahead. How, I wondered, could you ever make this a happy place, a livable place? When hurt lingers everywhere—in the cracked-up streets, in the yellowing trees that lined Terezín’s central courtyard? How could a Jew bear to live in Terezín?

At the outskirts of the city, at a shop with a view of its skyline, I bought a Coke and asked for a local map—one that showed regional landmarks and points of interest.

“You might not want to go into this town,” the clerk coughed. “For people like you,” and I was not sure if he was speaking of me or Doro and Zvi or the three of us, “it is not safe.”

“Perhaps,” Doro said, “he’s right. Perhaps, we should keep driving. Perhaps, we shouldn’t stop here.”

Zvi avoided eye contact, pretended he didn’t hear. But the clerk was speaking of the past. Wasn’t he? He meant: It wouldn’t have been safe for us. He meant: In 1941, it would have been deadly for us to be in Theresienstadt. “No, no, no,” said Zvi. “We’d know better than him, right? We’ll take in the sights. We’ll show you around.”

I was the one driving, and it was my decision to stay or to go. But this was only nominally true. Between me and Franz, everyone stood in the middle, blocking my way. For my own sake, I wondered if their final hours, the exacting details of their deaths, held the key, if this was why their children, and grandchildren, and so on, wherever they were, were so unhappy. “Is there a museum here?” I asked, accepting Zvi’s instruction. “A memorial?”

“If you really need to know,” said the clerk, “there’s a museum at the center of the city, on the far end of the central courtyard. You can’t miss it.”

I held my breath—and held it—and held it—until my great-great-grandparents were but outlines of themselves, and the screen went black.

I aimed us toward Terezín’s Museum of Memory. Above us, as we entered the city-proper, printed in big, black lettering: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. In recent years, I later learned from the director of the Institute for Holocaust Studies in Amsterdam, as Terezín became once again filled by villagers, escaping a city life, pushing back the nature that had taken hold of the former camp, they’d identified an issue with rats spoiling the monuments and memorials, shitting on the stone, and chewing up the flowers left in remembrance. In response, residents had taken to a semi-annual culling of the rats, recruiting volunteers to round them up and drown them, as is common practice, and to burning an effigy of the rodents each spring. In the front, I struggled to find us a parking space. As I shifted gears, the Peugeot sputtered. “Pull the clutch,” Zvi yelled. “Pull it!” Marja’s body tumbled about the trunk. After driving around in larger and larger concentric circles, we found a tight spot outside a construction project, seemingly abandoned, half-finished, missing windows, floors, a roof, the wood soggy and rotted.

Inside the Museum of Memory, I purchased a ticket. Our cashier spoke only Czech, and I only English, and we communicated in hand gestures, pulling fingertips, cracking knuckles, snapping thumbs. Because she didn’t want to see the dead, or because she was familiar with Doro and Zvi’s relationship to this place, she didn’t charge them for their admission.

I opened my palms to the sky and Doro and Zvi ran their hands through their hair. Passing a handful of tourists, we entered a dark, windowless theater to watch a documentary film on Terezín’s history—of which, at the time, I knew only the most rudimentary details, whatever Doro and Zvi happened to let out. I had low, if not hopeful, expectations. Previously, in Berlin, I’d noticed a tendency among those my age to disassociate themselves from the past—in order to shake a creeping feeling of guilt or responsibility for their predecessors’ violence, and I anticipated a similar sidestepping in the Museum of Memory’s documentary. It would be hard, I rationalized, to live your life like that, and I wondered if there had been any resulting suicides. Some—perhaps many—of the visiting tourists, taking photographs and following docents and tour guides with unsure accents, were Jewish, on excursions that charged exorbitant amounts to show them the locations where their families had died. This is your heritage, the guides seemed to say, this is who you are. But inside the theater, when I expected it to be full, a bald man standing guard at the entrance, his head oily and round, we were the only ones. “Is this normal?” I sputtered. “Where is everyone else?”

Once we were seated, the bald man stepped outside and let the door swing shut, a loud, hollow thud, cutting off any light slipping in from the outside. I felt immediately trapped, feared the possibility that the door, the only way in or out of the theater, was locked. I had the sense that It would happen to us—to them again. When the film began to roll, I swallowed my spit. In the documentary, made, according to the opening credits, by Nazis (during a period of increasing international pressure) to impress foreign ambassadors and to convince the world that nothing bad, nothing evil, could possibly have been going on, Theresienstadt’s Jewish “residents” had been “cast” (ordered at gun point) to play soccer, to dance in the rain, to plant gardens. Dorothea and Zvi had participated, they squealed from their front row seats, had helped in the construction of a kind of set: a faux-bank, a faux-general store, a faux-café, the central courtyard, a quaint fountain (now neglected) in the middle—“That’s what they want you to think,” said Zvi—under the blue sun, and a music pavilion. In fact, they’d stood for hours, watching from afar, as their fellow inmates, prominent Jewish statesmen, creative and cultural thinkers, presented a veneer of civilization over the underbelly of horror. Diplomats from Switzerland and England with puffy red cheeks and sun umbrellas poked at the fountain’s cement, at the grass recently plugged into the earth, still finding its roots, all of them fooled.

But not me! I could see through the film’s grainy, black-and-white façade, its upbeat music, its sanguine subtitles—a documentary in name only. If the Museum of Memory was presenting the film as an artifact of history, the byproduct of atrocity, I could not understand why they would show this without explicit critique or basic context. For the most part, I later gathered, this was the result of an administrative deference to the Museum’s wealthiest donors and Terezín’s government officials, all of whom desired to present the town in the cleanest possible light. Thus, generally speaking, the Museum took the “make of it what you will” curatorial (if you can call it that) strategy that flickered on the screen before us. Even, I saw, in their exhibits, they worked exclusively in the same innuendo of the film—favoring the passive tense over the active, the past over the present. I imagined the man who sold me the Coke at the store at the edge of town in my position—taking an evening after his shift to drive to the museum, accompanied, perhaps, by his girlfriend or his parents, using their local discount to buy tickets, entering this theater, laughing at the bald guard’s irregular head, sitting in my same seat in the back or in Doro and Zvi’s at the front, relaxing in the chair’s red velvet, viewing this film, and believing it to be, at every second, at every frame, a declaration of fact rather than what it is: a fiction.

“I can’t believe this!” I stammered. I found my feet, gasped for air. Out of disgust or fear, I needed to leave. But the door—the only door, the one we’d entered—was locked. “Please,” I whispered through the keyhole. I could see the wet flesh of the bald man’s head. “Why are you doing this to us?”

“I can’t,” said the guard. “You paid for this, and it’s my obligation—and my job—to give you your money’s worth, the experience of what it was like.”

I reached back for the doorknob, hoping for different results, and it felt hot to the touch, as if a fire was running on the other side. On the screen, the film showed a group of prisoners put on sketches—a barber trying to shave a client with a large saw, everyone, even the guards in the corners of the lens, pasting on a smile, knowing the consequences if they didn’t. I looked to Doro and Zvi, and they pointed to two small figures sitting in the corner of the screen, their faces cut out of the frame. “Won’t you look at that,” Zvi whispered to Dorothea. “That’s us!”

“What are you doing?” I said to the guard. As I spoke, I could feel my throat tighten, and I noticed, strangely, the smell of raw almonds in the air.

“We’re not going to kill you,” whispered the bald man, sounding momentarily sympathetic. “Just give you the experience of death, just let you feel what it was like.” How much could I believe this neo-Nazi-looking motherfucker? Would he do this to the man who sold me the Coke at the store at the edge of town? “I’m an actor,” he claimed, wiping the sweat from his brow, and while this could have pacified my anxiety, it didn’t.

Dorothea and Zvi turned to check on me, rotating their heads on their shoulders 180 degrees, smiled carefully, showing their gums, and then went back to watching the film. “Did you know about this?” Zvi said, laughing to himself, to Doro. “Did you have any idea?”

“Of course,” Dorothea said. “Look who you’re talking to. We were there. We made it out… when so many didn’t.”

Smoke (“Dry ice,” the guard whispered, “nothing to worry about”) dropped from the ceiling. If this was one of the “immersive experiences” that the director of the Institute for Holocaust Studies—hounding me to return to Amsterdam—was pioneering, it was a terrible success. I thought: I will die here—in the same place that my great-great-grandmother, and a day later, my great-great-grandfather, died. I held my breath—and held it—and held it—until my great-great-grandparents were but outlines of themselves, and the screen went black.

As if on cue, Doro and Zvi stood up, sarcastically clapping their hands, and the door to the theater opened.

Terezín was now a different city—one where people lived—the prisoner barracks now rental units, cheap apartments, bars still on the windows. Outside, we shooed off the wasps and mosquitoes, turning on our sweet blood, and I tried to breathe. I couldn’t. What did this have to do with Franz? What did it have to do with me?

“What did you think of that?” Zvi said. He grinned—a forced smile. “What a rollercoaster! Would you like to see where we died?”

I nodded. Quickly, he pushed us forward, directing us through the town, careful (but not that careful) to not intrude on its new inhabitants, passing a fleet of the Museum of Memory’s official tour guides, each with a group in tow and a binder with the names of those who’d died in Terezín—worked and starved to death—which, Zvi said, was what happened to them and also not what happened to them, Dorothea dying on 21 October or on 22 October, he wasn’t sure, he wasn’t there, and there were multiple testimonials about her death, multiple certificates, that conflicted on the date but agreed on other facts—her place of birth, the spelling of her name—“I didn’t die,” Doro said, her skin catching the sunlight through the clouds, “I’m not dead”—and Zvi dying days later in a different cell, separate from Doro’s, since the sexes were kept apart, as they do, too, in the Orthodox synagogues, for different reasons, and the two rarely saw one another in those final days, other than from a far distance, both, due to the deterioration of their eyesight, squinting against the sun, trying their best to make out one another’s shapes, shapes that were rapidly changing, though they knew, too, their shapes had always been changing, would never stay stable, and they’d grown used to it, attending or trying to attend to the distinguishing marks that for whatever reason remained fixed throughout the years—freckles or moles across the edges of Zvi’s cheeks, the length of Doro’s arms, one shorter, one longer, both perched, elbows splayed from her hips—and this is what they looked for when staring across the desert of dirt between them, and they’d felt a certain gratitude that these had not, not yet at least, been taken from them, that these would be theirs until the end. Nevertheless, Zvi had not known, not right away, when it was Dorothea, had not figured it out, had seen someone else on the other side of the courtyard and mistaken that woman for his wife, had misread Doro’s marks onto someone else, their shapes not, perhaps, unique to them, not in the end, and it hurt him to know that he could have to go on for a time—even if this would be limited—without her, and that he could not see anything after this, no vision of a future that did not include a life in this place, and it hurt, in the end, that it took so long for word of her death to get to him, from one end of the town to the other, just a few long blocks, the same ones we were walking, and that when it reached him it was treated casually, off-handedly, forgetfully, its emissaries having it seemed already known for too long, keeping it to themselves, prolonging his grief, causing him another, second pain, one of betrayal, of distrust, their words drooping off their tongues, slack and apathetic, claiming, Zvi said, that this was the best way for it to happen, not uncommon, not unexpected, that it would be easier, he said, they said, to move forward, to forget. But he did not want to move forward. Did not want to forget. Ultimately, it was under these circumstances, he explained, he soon after died, the rest being, as you know, he said, rushing his words, wanting to be done with this place, history.

“Do you smell something?” I said. I touched my nose—inhaling the fragrance of metal, of bleach.

“We’re very close,” said Zvi, “you’ll see.” But their graves, just where the buildings dwindled, were unmarked, and Zvi and Doro disagreed about their exact location, could not find them in the settling light.

“Let’s go. Let’s find Franz,” said Dorothea, turning away from us and running as fast as she could, splaying her arms—and tripping on a rock that sent her hurtling toward the dirt. If she could cry, I saw a tear swell in the angle of her eye.

Zvi walked back to her, took his time. He shook his head. Sat down. Patted her knee. Though her skirt should have been soaked with blood, it was clean and untarnished. We were at the far edge of a cemetery—where the earth had been unsettled and re-potted, unsettled and re-potted, the soil wet and fresh. Otherwise, there was no evidence that this was a cemetery—full of bodies. “This was us,” Zvi said—as much to me as to his wife.

Later, when we were driving to Gdańsk by moonlight—where Zvi swore that we’d find Franz—and Dorothea was asleep in the back seat, he revealed to me that he hadn’t been sure that that had been their graves, but that he’d been ready to step back into the ground, to call this “second life” quits, to take Marja’s body from the Peugeot’s trunk, lay her on top of him, arm over arm, leg over leg, and let the permanence of her death rub off on him, sink him into the soil, weigh him down. However, in the end, as much as he wanted to, he would not go without Dorothea, couldn’t bear to leave her behind.

If there had been headstones, Zvi suspected, while sitting on the dirt beside his wife, they’d been taken and replaced and taken again, most likely, by the same thief who reportedly took the Kafkas’ headstones from the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague—where the writer was buried with his sisters and parents. Like the Kafkas, Doro and Zvi’s headstones, placed only in the years following the war in a half-hearted attempt to recognize the past, had been removed to be added to the collections of private collectors in America and Britain and Iceland—where these artifacts of even the most unknown victims were considered valuable treasure. At first, replacement headstones had been fashioned—made of the heaviest and ugliest materials available to dissuade theft—and CCTV cameras installed. Nevertheless, the replacements (and their replacements) had been taken, disappeared in the night, no evidence recorded on the cameras. Now, rather than invite more invasion with another headstone, it was easiest to let them be. Doro looked around, momentarily meeting my eyes, and said: “This was our home.”