Freud's Sister Read online

  Rosa and Marie protested, but I cracked open my small suitcase and stuffed in two photo albums.

  “Your suitcase is so full it’s going to fall apart,” said Marie, and she was right. We were walking down our street when the suitcase split open, spilling all my things to the ground, including the photo albums. From the albums I took a single old photo—one of all of us, sisters, brothers, parents—and tucked it by my right breast. From the torn suitcase I took the one thing that was not mine and tucked it by my left breast.

  “What’s that baby bonnet to you?” Marie said with reproach.

  “Baby bonnet?” asked Paulina.

  “Yes,” Marie explained to her. “She pulled a baby bonnet out of her things—it is half fallen apart—and placed it by her heart.”

  “Her heart?” Paulina wondered.

  “Between her left breast and brassiere,” Marie clarified for her.

  “Give us your things—we’ll divide them among our suitcases,” Rosa suggested. Their suitcases were already overstuffed.

  “We need to be at the station soon,” I said. “And the photograph and the bonnet are sufficient.”

  “I don’t know why you have that bonnet,” said Marie. “But you’re leaving behind so many things that you will need.”

  “I have already said that I have taken what I need.”

  We continued toward the train station, and along the streets everything seemed ghostly. Every image spoke of life—an umbrella leaning against a bench, flowers on balconies, a multicolored ball on the sidewalk—but everything was emptied of human presence, as if no one had ever lived here. From one part of the quarter, though, life was audible, and we headed toward those sounds. We reached a long column of people, walking as quickly as possible, as fast as their heavy suitcases allowed. Behind some of them ran their children.

  I watched the people with their suitcases held tightly in their hands. Some held them in their arms, pressing them tightly to their chests; they hugged them firmly, as if they had packed their entire lives inside and now they only hoped that by clutching the suitcases to their chests they would preserve life, they would survive. We knew they were going to the railway station. We stepped in among these people and continued with them.

  At the train station there were soldiers who looked over our documents and then ordered us to board the freight train that was waiting for us.

  I do not know how far we traveled. When we got off the train, soldiers were waiting for us; they brought us to a small fortified town. They gave us bread and water, and lined us up in a row to examine our documents, to write down our names, the years of our birth, where we had lived, and to determine where to put us. They put Rosa, Marie, Paulina, and me with a group of twenty other women our age, and they led us—hunchbacked, walking unsteadily with canes, our glances attempting to discern something more, something beyond several feet away—to the nearby barracks. They brought us inside one of them, where, in the long dark room, hundreds of beds were arranged along the walls in two rows. Old women were lying on most of them. Some of the women turned to look as we entered; others continued looking where they had been looking—at the ceiling, toward the floor—or kept their eyes closed.

  The soldiers told us to pick out a bed that was still empty, and they left the room. My sisters and I looked for four free beds side by side. We found only three unoccupied beds together; I took the closest free bed. All of us new arrivals put our belongings under the beds we had selected; I had nothing to put under my bed. Then we lay down on the beds: boards with old blankets spread on them. I felt fleas biting me. Occasionally, a rat ran across the floor.

  It slowly grew dark in the room. The light outside the barracks, near the window above my bed, illuminated the space around me. The rest was swallowed by the darkness. I tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep. I rubbed my roughened skin where the fleas had bitten, listened to the groans of some women. The bed to the left of mine was empty. At some point during the night, in the darkness, the door to the room creaked open, and I heard footsteps. A woman lay down on the empty bed. She did not belong with us—she was too young, about fifty years old. I slowly moved to the edge of my bed, and in a whisper I crossed the distance between her bed and mine.

  “Where are we?”

  She opened her eyes and said, “In Terezín.”

  I asked nothing further.

  When I awoke the next morning, the bed to my left was empty. Soldiers arrived and led us to the dining room, in another part of the barracks. We sat down on the long, narrow benches, at the tables stretching from one side of the room to the other. We ate a breakfast of bread and tea, then stepped out in front of the barracks. The summer sun could not warm our bones—we shivered and rubbed our palms together and along our legs, from our thighs down to our knees. When we went again to the dining room, the woman who had slept in the bed next to mine appeared. She sat down beside me.

  “The menu is always the same.” She smiled. “For breakfast: bread and tea. For lunch: bread and lentil soup. And for dinner: bread and lentil soup once again.”

  I nodded. I listened to the women around us talking about themselves. They all spoke about their lives—about their husbands, their children, their grandchildren. The old woman sitting across the table from us, whose name I later learned was Johanna Broch, spoke about her son, Hermann. The old woman beside her, Mia Krauss, who had traveled with us from Vienna, spoke about her grandchildren. The woman sitting next to me noticed that I was listening to the others’ conversations, and that I was trying not to.

  “This is how they protect themselves from the here and now. They talk about what was there and then,” she said. Then she asked, “Is your whole family here?”

  “I am here with my sisters,” I said, and with a glance to the right I indicated where my sisters Paulina, Marie, and Rosa were sitting. “And you?” I asked.

  She said she was from Prague. She had daughters; she was divorced. She said she was lucky that her daughters at least, thanks to their father’s blood, were secure in Prague. I mentioned my sister Anna, who had moved to America right after she married; I also spoke of my brothers, Sigmund and Alexander.

  “We are three sisters,” she said, “Elli, Valli, and I. We are all here. We also had a brother, Franz.” We fell silent again. I sipped my lentil soup. She set her spoon down in her empty bowl and said, “I always eat quickly. I have to. I help out in the barracks where they house children from the orphanages in Prague and Vienna. I’m going there now.” She stood up and placed her hand on my shoulder. “My name is Ottla,” she said, “Ottla Kafka.”

  “I am Adolfina,” I said.

  She pressed my shoulder with her fingers, smiled, then drew her hand away, turned, and left the room.

  THAT EVENING, Ottla was in the dining room again. I slowly chewed the lentils. She asked me, “Have you gotten used to being here?”

  I did not know what to say. I said that for a person to get used to “here,” one needed to know what “here” was, and I did not.

  Ottla said, “This is a camp, you know that. Until last winter, it was a small town; then they expelled all the residents so they could bring us here. People younger than sixty work twelve hours a day. They build barracks for new groups who will be brought here, or else they work in the gardens so we can have food. After those twelve hours, those who aren’t dead-tired can engage in whatever it is they did before being brought here. There are musicians and painters, actors and ballerinas, writers and sculptors. During the day they mix mortar, carry sand, nail down boards, or dig in the fields. But at night they prepare concerts or ballet performances. Or they compose, paint, write…. You should go to one of the concerts, or to a performance.”

  “I have not been to a concert or performance in a long time,” I said. I broke off a piece of bread, put it in my mouth, and chewed.

  “It is best if you do something here,” she said. “They put me in the barracks where you are so the older women can find me at night if they get sick. Dur
ing the day, several other women and I teach the younger children to read and write, and the older ones the basics of mathematics, geography, and history. The children help us clean the barracks, and we prepare food together. It is best to do something here.”

  The following day, Ottla brought me to one of the barracks where the children were housed. We entered a room where dozens of children were divided into several groups, and there was a woman with each group, explaining something. Ottla noticed that even though I was trying to hear what the women were telling the children, their words went past me.

  “Let’s go out,” she said to me.

  We sat on one of the benches near the neighboring barracks.

  “This is where they put the women who are in their last weeks of pregnancy. They stay here for a few days after they give birth, then they are sent back to the barracks where they were placed when they arrived in Terezín, and they begin working immediately. There is one barracks where several women take care of the newborns.” She put her hand in her pocket; I thought she would pull out a drawing of a woman perched on the edge of an abyss. In her hand she held two photographs. “These are my daughters, and these—my sisters, my brother, and I.” She ran her fingers over the surface of the photographs. “This is all I have from my former life.” She put the photographs back in her pocket. “My brother has been dead for so long that it is becoming harder and harder for me to remember his face.” She ran her hand across the pocket of her dress. “I remember only one of his stories: ‘The Bachelor’s Misfortune.’ I might not remember it exactly right, but I repeat it to myself sometimes.” Looking at her pocket, she began to tell the story:

  “It seems simply dreadful to remain a bachelor when you are old and struggling to preserve your dignity, to have to beg for an invitation whenever you wish to spend an evening in company, to be ill and look out from your bed in the corner at an empty room for weeks on end, always to say farewell at the front door, never to dash up the stairs alongside your wife, to have in your room only side doors that lead into the dwellings of others, to carry home your supper in a sack, to ooh and aah at others’ children and not be able to say, ‘I haven’t any,’ to cultivate your appearance and bearing on the basis of one or two bachelors you remember from your youth. That is how it will be, except in reality, you will stand there with a body and an honest-to-goodness head, and hence also a forehead for smiting with your hand.”

  Then she turned to me and said, “It is as if all that is left of him is contained in these words. But where are all those moments, days, and years, and everything that was in them? It is as if he never existed.”

  Two women came out of the barracks and sat on the bench next to ours. They put their hands on their bellies, as if to protect their unborn children. We introduced ourselves—their names were Lina and Eva. We struck up a conversation, but then Ottla told me that it was bath time, and we headed to our barracks.

  Half an hour later, a group of young people carried several large empty basins and vats of water into the room where we slept. They set the basins in the middle of the room, between the two rows of beds, and the vats of water beside them. Then they left.

  Ottla said, “Now hurry while there’s water.”

  I saw all the old people undress as quickly as possible. With half-stiff fingers, we removed our clothing; we stood there naked, with only our sagging flesh, our drooping breasts and stomachs, our legs covered with purple veins, our twisted hands, and our rank breath that mixed with the stringent smell of our bodies. An old woman said something, but her words were lost among the sounds we made in our attempts to get to the basin first, to scoop up water from the vat with a bowl, and to pour water over our bodies, to start rubbing and to keep rubbing to clean ourselves of as much of the filth as possible. This lasted no more than a few minutes; there was water enough just to rinse off the filth, not wash it completely away. We dried ourselves with blankets and sheets, and then we got dressed. Ottla said, “Be happy that you came here in summer, so you can get used to this kind of bathing little by little. When I first washed up like this here, everything outside was frozen.”

  The young people who had brought the basins and vats came in and carried them away. Only then did I notice that Paulina had been sitting on the edge of her bed the whole time. I sat down beside her. She recognized me by my breathing, and she said to me, “I didn’t get to wash up.”

  Ottla left the barracks and returned when most of the women were already asleep. When she had lain down on her bed, I quietly asked her, “How long will we remain here?”

  “The longer the better,” Ottla replied. “This is not a true camp but a transit camp, a way station. Trains, each holding a thousand people, occasionally depart from here for the other camps. It is different there. The work there is more severe, severe to the point of death. That is what people who have found out something more about those camps say. They say that people are sometimes brought into rooms where, they are told, they are going to shower. And there really are showers there, but only as a guise. Poisonous gas is then released, and they suffocate. Other horrors are spoken of as well, but it is better that I not tell you. So it is best for us to remain here as long as possible. Until this evil subsides. Then we will all go home.” And she shut her eyes. With her eyes closed she said, “Do not tell the others what I have told you. There is enough suffering here, even without thoughts of the other camps. I should not have told you.” She was silent a moment, and then she murmured “Good night” before turning to the other side of the bed.

  Good night…I tried to fall asleep; for a long time I tossed in bed, thinking about what Ottla had told me.

  IN THE MORNING, after breakfast, I went to the front of the barracks for pregnant women. There, seated on one of the benches, were the two women I had met with Ottla the previous day, Lina and Eva, and two other women. I sat down on one of the benches a short distance from theirs, and when, a few minutes later, Lina and the other two women went into the barracks, Eva came over and asked whether she could sit beside me. We began to talk; we asked each other where we were from. She said she was born in Prague; her father was a merchant, and her mother worked in the Bureau for the Protection of Workers. She had fallen in love with a classmate just after finishing high school; they married several years later. She was pregnant when she and her husband received word that they would be transported.

  “Sometimes the most wonderful things happen at the most difficult times,” she said, and looked down at her belly. “They brought us here with the first group in the winter. They gave me light work, in the kitchen. I did not have a problem with hard work as others do here, nor did I ever feel hungry. And at least during the day I was warm beside the stove. Other than in the kitchens next to the cooking stoves, there was no heating anywhere. In the evenings I was afraid I would freeze, that my child would freeze. My husband gave me his blanket as well, but even that was not enough to keep me warm. During the night I would lay my hands on my belly to keep my baby warm. Then spring came. I did not measure time according to dates or months but according to which week of pregnancy I was in. Thirty-nine weeks have passed; I have just a few days left.” She placed her hands on her belly. “But a few days ago my husband was transported with hundreds of others to another camp,” she said. She lifted a hand from her belly and touched first one cheek, then the other, drying them. “Before they left, they were told it would be better for them there.”

  “Surely it is better for them,” I said.

  When I returned to our barracks, I went straight to the dining room, to breakfast. Ottla was not there. I raced through my lentil soup and went to the room with our beds. Ottla was the only one there. She was sitting beside her bed, arranging her suitcase. She put some of her clothes on my bed. She said, “I will not be needing these any longer, and I know that you came without your own things.”

  I thanked her and asked, “You are leaving?”

  “I am leaving,” she replied. “They are sending a railroad car wit
h a hundred children to another camp. The soldiers wanted an adult to go with them. I volunteered.” She took my hand between hers. “I told the children that I am taking them on a trip.”

  She hugged me, then took the small suitcase in her hands and left the room. I remembered the words she used to describe the executions in the other camps.

  I imagined her traveling with the children in the freight train and, with the children pressed together in the dark of the railroad car, telling them about the trip that awaits them, promising them the sea, games on the sand, and swimming. “But I don’t know how to swim,” says one of the children. “You will learn,” Ottla encourages him. I thought of them being unloaded at the camp and led to a room where they’re ordered to strip off their clothes. I heard Ottla tell the children they must shower first, and advise each of them to pay attention to exactly where they were leaving their clothes, because after the shower they would need to get dressed as quickly as possible so they could get to the beach. While I was imagining her, I saw her ashamed of her nakedness in front of the children, although a person feels least ashamed when he knows he is only a few steps from death. And they take those few steps; they enter the room with the showers. They look toward the showers, she and the children. They are laughing; they will finally wash up with warm water, with enough water. Some of them extend their arms, expecting jets of water. But then, instead of water from the showers, a poisonous gas spreads out from somewhere. Ottla looks at the children’s faces, sees the contortion of their faces, sees those faces turn green, sees their mouths gape open, searching for air, sees them fall to the floor, one on top of another, and feels her own weakness as well, her own gasping, and curses herself that her body is so tough, that she will die last, watching their deaths, and finally she falls, falls on the children’s bodies, sees their eyes roll back, blood flow from their mouths, and then she feels something breaking in her chest, her eyes roll back. She exhales her last breath.