Galerie Page 6

  He looked up at her with borderline malice, picked up the phone, and slowly dialed. He jerked his head in the direction of the same phone booth from which she’d spoken to Uncle Tomas the previous night, indicating that she should wait for the call there.

  After being transferred with Soviet efficiency between four or five different departments, she finally reached the desk of Jonas Jakobovits, to whom she’d been introduced by the kindly Professor Ben-Artzi, her advisor in Tel Aviv University’s Department of History. She’d written to Jakobovits only two weeks prior, when the details of her nascent trip were still vague, introducing herself and letting him know that she’d likely be visiting the museum in the coming months. She’d had no reply, and couldn’t even be sure her letter had arrived.

  “Ahoy, this is Jonas Jakobovits,” a surprisingly young voice answered on the first ring, pronouncing the J’s in his name as Y’s in his soft Czech.

  Upon hearing her own lightly-accented Czech, he quickly switched to thick-tongued English, but then politely reverted to Czech when she persisted. He sounded quite pleased to hear from her, and chatted as if he lacked frequent contact with anyone from the outside world.

  “Yes, I received your letter, Dr. Neuman. Of course I would be pleased to assist you in any way I can. I’m actually free later this morning, if you would like to meet me at the museum’s administrative offices on Jachymova Street. I can arrange for a cab, if you’d prefer. Where are you staying?”

  She told him.

  “Ah, then it’s really only a block’s walk, and the weather is thankfully clement, is it not? Oh… and how is Professor Ben-Artzi?”

  She extricated herself gently from the eager young man’s enquiries, promising to meet him within the hour. She gave a nod and a wave to the desk clerk as she walked toward the stairs, in faint hope of breaking the ice.

  He glanced up at her briefly, wrinkled his nose as if smelling something vaguely unpleasant, and lowered his eyes to his book.

  She headed up to her room, lugging the heavy briefcase.

  Humans possess five senses, as a rule. From a strictly scientific point of view, Vanesa should have had no inkling of danger as she crested the stairs and turned down the narrow, dimly-lit hallway that led to her room. There was no physical reason that the hair on the back of her neck should have stood up even before she came to her door, which stood ajar. There was no actual cause for her to turn to look behind so rapidly that her long hair still swung backwards even as she returned her gaze to the front. There was no reason that the clomping footsteps receding down the stairs behind her should have even caught her attention, as there were, after all, other guests in the hotel. There were no reasons, she told me, yet she knew exactly in what state she’d find her room even before she swung the door open.

  They had not been very thorough, she noticed, but then again, the spartan three-star room possessed few hiding places. They’d hit all the obvious nooks: under the mattress, behind the bureau, in her suitcase, in the desk drawers. They hadn’t even made much of a mess, considering how Hollywood generally depicted such scenes.

  Vanesa never spoke more about the incident. Did it scare her? How could it not have? At that point, she must have realized that her attack the night before had not been random. Did she even care? Was she so mission-focused that danger never occurred to her? Did she hope to irretrievably file the incident in her internal iron box, permanently archiving it?

  The administrative headquarters of the Jewish Museum of Prague at 3 Jachymova Street was nondescript in the extreme by Prague standards, sandwiched as it was between two more distinctive buildings in the center of a narrow and short cobblestoned street. Vanesa recalled the words of museum historian Hana Volavkova, who spent most of the war years there and was the only surviving Jewish member of the museum staff. Volavkova described it as a strange, bland building. “Nowhere was there a tree or a bird, and even the highest floors of the building offered only a view of the neighboring roofs,” she wrote.

  Vanesa rang the bell of the wooden door set in a tall arched doorway and topped forebodingly by barred windows. She could see Volavkova’s point. Waiting for someone to answer her ring, she recalled what she knew of the museum’s rich history.

  The Jewish Museum of Prague had been founded in 1906 to preserve the heritage of Prague’s Old Jewish Town, called ‘Josefov’ after Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor who emancipated Jews with his Toleration Edict of 1781. The Josefov quarter was completely razed between 1893 and 1913, surprisingly not for reasons of punitive anti-Semitism, but for public health reasons—although there was certainly no shortage of anti-Semitism in the thousand years of Jewish history in Prague. The quarter was simply terribly unsanitary and unsafe, with a maze of winding alleys, no sewage system or adequate water supply, and wooden structures that housed more rats than people. After the razing, only six synagogues and the old Jewish Town Hall remained from the original Josefov quarter. Five of these structures formed the core of the museum, and six remained under its care until today.

  The door opened abruptly, and Vanesa was soon following a receptionist in a grey skirt, her hair pulled into a bun so severe that it resembled a helmet. As they wound through the narrow hallways, Vanesa mused on the museum’s infamous wartime “notoriety.” Closed to the public in 1939 by order of the Nazi occupiers, the Jewish Museum of Prague was re-commissioned in 1942 with a far darker mission.

  When they arrived at the small, cramped office, Jonas Jakobovits rose to greet her. Vanesa’s first thought was that Jonas was far better looking than a historian should be. His thoughtful eyes were utterly engaging, his brown pupils flecked with green. They drew listeners in, helping them make his passion for whatever he was discussing their own.

  She accepted the folding chair he gracefully offered, and he squeezed back behind his cluttered desk. His tall frame, only partially visible over piles of books, manila folders, and binders, made the cheap wooden desk chair on which he sat again look flimsy. She sat, and mentioned her ruminations about the museum’s wartime history.

  His heavy brows momentarily furrowed. “We’ve never found any record of the museum actually being called ‘The Museum of an Extinct Race,’ as it became popularly known.”

  Vanesa looked cursorily around the high-ceilinged room. Her eyes lit on a group of paper-tagged candelabra on a dusty shelf. They caught the morning sun, which had finally emerged from behind thick clouds. Their tarnished silver threw sepia reflections haphazardly around the room.

  “But, I must admit that I agree with you,” Jakobovits continued decisively. “In retrospect, it’s quite clear that the very preservation of the museum’s facilities by the Nazis, not to mention the actual conservation and display work that they directed here during the occupation, indicate a greater plan. The directives for the preservation of tens of thousands of items of Judaica looted from Bohemia and Moravia, and the orders to create themed exhibitions—for example, Jewish life cycle events—all these came from the Nazis. It was an initiative of the head of what was originally called the Zentralamt fur die Regelung der Judenfrage in Bohmen und Mahren, The Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia. This office was headed by SS Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Guenther, who reported to none other than Adolf Eichmann—a name with which I’m sure you’re familiar.”

  Vanesa found herself engaged, and not just by Jakobovits’ deep and fiery eyes. She believed the “Museum of an Extinct Race” theory. To her mind, it perfectly suited the audacity of the Nazis, and was aligned with the malignant vision of Guenther’s superiors, both his direct superior Eichmann and the senior Reich figure in Prague in the early war years, Reinhard Heydrich. Until his assassination, Heydrich had been Acting Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, which the Nazi leadership rubber-stamped at his behest in the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942.

  She nodded vigorously, silently agreeing with Jakobovits. How like Heydrich to c
reate such a monument to his crowning achievement—the destruction of Czechoslovakian Jewry, perhaps of European Jewry at large. How like Heydrich to have Jews build this monument themselves, and then destroy them after its completion. How like Heydrich to ensure that the project was kept secret, even after his assassination in 1942. Despite the fact that it was fully staffed and active throughout most of the war, the Jewish Museum of Prague remained closed to the public even after the first exhibition was opened to Guenther and his staff in 1943.

  As if reading her thoughts, Jakobovits nodded back at her so enthusiastically that his glasses flew off their loose perch on his nose. They skittered off the desk and landed in a large wooden crate filled with hundreds of sets of black leather tefilin, phylacteries.

  It was a mute testament to hundreds of fathers who had used them daily, thought Vanesa, and to hundreds of mothers and children that had likely followed them to their own nameless, numbered deaths. She wasn’t sure how Jakobovits could work in the place, thinking it must be like coming to a cemetery every day.

  Jakobovits retrieved his glasses, examined and polished the lenses, and continued excitedly. “What’s more….” He leaned towards her with intended dramatic effect, but achieved more of a nerdy intensity. “I’m one of the ‘radicals’ here that believes that Heydrich and Eichmann had some plans up their sleeves that we still haven’t discovered. Even our sleepy Prague Jewish historical community has its intrigues, you see.”

  From the Diary of Michael Neuman, Prague, March 1943

  “You are such a product of your ghetto society. Look at you. You call yourself a Jew, yet you hide out in here like some skinny, sun-starved sewer rat. And here I am, stuck in here with you, instead of out there fighting and building a nation we can be proud of.”

  Zvi has angry storms like this, but they always pass, like the spring thunderstorms that show up so quickly over Prague. The black clouds appear suddenly from behind Prague Castle, and threaten the city with their voices of thunder. But the city always wins, and the storms, disappointed, slosh their buckets of water over the cobblestones, then race off to the east before the flow even makes it to the Vltava, as if hoping to catch the next city off guard.

  Sometimes Zvi is just plain mean. I understand, since he, of all the friends I’ve met here, is least suited to life inside. I think he lacks the imagination you need to stay in the same room, day after day, night after night. When I sneak down to see him, quietly removing and replacing the grill with the symbol in it and then unlocking his door, he’s usually pacing like a caged animal. It’s like he’s desperate to find a crack in the wall, just so he can satisfy his desire for action by scratching at it until his fingernails bleed. I admire this drive. It’s like he needs to escape the ghosts of his past by either creating or destroying—it doesn’t matter which.

  Zvi is a powerful figure in his dark trousers and dirty white shirt, his sleeves rolled up past the elbow to reveal powerful arms, which still show the Mediterranean sun, even though he’s been away from Eretz Yisrael for over three years. His curly hair is usually greasy, except after he bathes, when the dark ringlets stick to the sides of his head, making his heavy brows stand out even more.

  “The Jew grew into the parasite that he is today because he is stateless, ungrounded, floating through the countries of the world like some untethered balloon. He is despised and subjugated because he lost what other nations take for granted: his land. Once we return to the soil, regain the land, rebuild the land—then and only then will we be able to stand eye-to-eye with our persecutors, and slap their filthy hand down before it strikes us. You see….”

  He lowers his voice, points at me, looks me straight in the eye, and makes his point about personal sacrifice, the need to break free from the bonds imposed by society, or something equally likely to make me shiver with guilt and excitement. He embodies Zionist sacrifice, he says.

  He left his childhood behind at sixteen, when he fled with his Dror Zionist youth movement friends, leaving his parents’ poor home in Wraclow, Poland, for the fresh air of the “Kibbutz Kielce” Zionist training farm.

  His eyes grow softer when he speaks of Kielce. He shows me a creased photograph of twenty men and women in their late teens or early twenties, posing in front of a whitewashed shack. Excitement shines from their smiling eyes, as if they know they’re part of something greater than themselves. Zvi is holding a pitchfork, and not looking at the camera. His gaze is focused instead on one of the young women directly across from him.

  “Sofia.” He says her name softly, almost like a prayer. Then he turns back to me. “Do you know what it’s like to be part of something so great? Can you know how it feels to have a real, personal, tangible role in changing the world?”

  His rhetorical question hangs in the air, and then fades away, leaving an aftertaste of regret that I don’t understand but can’t escape.

  “No,” I tell him. “I cannot imagine.”

  He says he learned the true price of ideological commitment in Palestine. He and the ten members of his garin—that means “seed” in Hebrew, like the seed of a new settlement—were the lucky recipients of a “certificate” from the British Mandatory authorities. This gave them permission to emigrate to Palestine, which they did in early 1937. They joined their fellow Poles in Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon, founded only three years earlier just south of the swamps of Wadi Iskandurah, which they call Nahal Alexander in Hebrew.

  This was a turbulent time in Palestine, Zvi explained. The Arab revolt that had begun in 1936 grew worse in 1937. The violence that was initially directed against British forces now focused on Jewish settlements. Zvi had volunteered for the Haganah paramilitary organization almost immediately on his arrival. After a short basic training, he joined Yitzchak Sadeh’s famous strike force, Fosh. They assigned him to a small settlement some thirty minutes south of Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon, called Kadima.

  “What’s here to protect?” he asked Sofia, who had been assigned with him to organize the community’s defense, as their donkeys trudged the sandy kilometers between the main road and the center of the poor settlement. Kadima had been founded only five years before on sandy land, purchased from the Arabs of the neighboring village of Kalansua by a Ukrainian land baron called Yehoshua Henkin. The Arabs were incredulous that someone would pay good money for such a place, but had been helpful and friendly to the new settlers. The early settlers bought their 15-dunam parcels in advance from Henkin, sight-unseen, and then showed up with their heavy German furniture, electrical appliances, and total lack of farming skills. What they found was a collection of widely-spaced wooden shacks standing in the middle of dry sand dunes, broken by swamps and scrub oak trees, far from the lovely European-style village they had imagined.

  But they had not given up, these settlers. In half a decade, they built the beginnings of a community that was worth protecting, and it became Zvi’s job to protect it.

  He, Sofia, and their three Haganah compatriots quickly established themselves in a rough, sandbagged outpost on the roof of the Pomer family home. One of only two brick houses in Kadima at the time, it offered a clear view of the fields to the north, from where the raids had been coming. They fell into a “six-six” guard duty rotation—six hours on, six hours off. The late summer days quickly shortened into cool evenings, the gentle song of the breeze in the oaks broken only by the never-ending ear-buzz of mosquitoes.

  “They are not coming from Kalansua, they are coming through Kalansua,” insisted Nabil in pidgin Hebrew. He fell back into Arabic sometimes, especially when his dark eyes flashed with excitement. They sat together around the fire pit, the finjan in which they’d made their coffee already cooling on a nearby rock. “I know my village. We sold the land for Kadima. We have always helped the settlers. Why would we harm them now? The raiders are coming through Kalansua, from Tul Karem. I see them many evenings, groups of them, young shabaab sitting for hours in the coffee shop, waiting for full darkness to head south, towards Kadima. They are not
our young men!”

  Nabil, a young father just past his 24th birthday, had been appointed by the village council as liaison to the previous Haganah commander, and continued to work with Zvi. His large dark eyes were set across a flat nose, which gave him a look of wide-eyed sincerity. His thick lips, topped by a fine moustache, added just a hint of a lisp to his gentle speech.

  “He may be lying through his teeth,” Zvi told Sofia in bed, one rare evening when neither had drawn guard duty, “but he does it so sweetly that you can’t help but believe him.”

  And, truth be told, Zvi did believe him. In fact, over the months that followed, into the chilly winter evenings, when they huddled close around the fire, they became friends.

  Nabil taught Zvi Arabic, and told him about his daughter Aisha, a toddler just learning to walk. Zvi helped Nabil with his Hebrew, and told him of the cold Polish winters that made the Kadima winter seem like spring. Zvi watched Sofia’s long dark hair and straight white teeth catch the firelight as she spoke to Nabil into the nights. They talked of the British, Nabil’s wife, and cooking with the local ingredients that were so different from what she knew from her mother’s Polish kitchen. She was curiosity incarnate, Zvi thought, his own beautiful and inquisitive little kitten.

  With its endless cups of strong and sweet Turkish coffee, the fire pit in the Pomer yard became the community parliament. Each evening, the new settlers would seek Zvi’s mediation with Nabil regarding problems of water rights and trade with Kalansua. Nabil and the new farmers would compare notes about working the rich sandy-red soil of the region, which after laying in swampy fallowness for centuries had been discovered ideal for citrus cultivation. They would share, angrily, news of the latest Arab attacks against neighboring Jewish settlements—news of property destroyed, of livestock killed, of fields burned, and of farmers slain with the reins of their plow donkeys still held in their calloused hands.

  Nabil would listen gravely, nod sympathetically, and offer encouragement. He would remind them every evening, when he finally rose to make his way into the darkness to rejoin his own family, of the Kalansua village council’s firm commitment to friendship with the settlers of Kadima.