THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 47
Herbert Langer, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.
COURTESY THE AUTHOR
job in the Putzkolonne, the cleaning bri-
gade, scrubbing office floors on her
knees at night, and, although she was
not accustomed to physical labor and
her hands were red and swollen, she
handled the job well and was liked by
her fellow-workers.
To my eyes, my parents still treated
each other with affection, as they al-
ways had. My father seemed to go along
with Herbert’s presence in our lives,
but I could only imagine how he felt.
Though he never lost his biting sense
of humor, it turned dark, his witty puns
becoming more sad than funny. He did
not look well; he had lost a lot of weight,
and his face had an un-
healthy color. I used to
watch him and worry
about him, but I could not
tell what, exactly, was
wrong with him. Bobby
thought he was suffering
from cancer.
W
hen my father asked
me, after my moth-
er’s arrest and our visit to
Weidmann, whether I
thought we should volun-
teer for a transport, I was
shocked that he wanted to
include me in such an im-
portant decision. I knew
that leaving for the un-
known would be danger-
ous. But what frightened
me most was the thought
that it would be up to me
to pack all our possessions.
They were mostly stored
in a suitcase under my
mother’s bed. In her ab-
sence, I had frequently
rushed to retrieve various items from
it, and what was left of the flour we
had brought with us from Prague six
months earlier had spilled onto our
clothes. The result was a mess that I
couldn’t cope with. Without mention-
ing the reason, I told my father that we
shouldn’t volunteer.
I have often wondered whether he
took my opinion into account, and I
have felt ashamed that I let such a triv-
ial and selfish motive guide me in a de-
cision that might have resulted in my
mother’s release from prison. In the
end, whatever his reasons, my father
decided against signing us up for the
transport. In doing so, he saved our
lives—I know now that we would not
have passed the Auschwitz selection
process. My mother was sick and weak
after her imprisonment in a freezing
cell, Bobby was paralyzed, and I was
small for my age. We would have been
deemed unfit for work and sent to the
gas chambers.
I
n my memory, it seems as though
my mother remained in prison for
months. But according to my diary she
“was away from us for three weeks.”
Against all reason, we never gave up
hope that she would be released. Late
one afternoon, my father came to the
attic and sat on my bed, as he always
used to do after work, while I toasted
him a piece of precious rye bread on
the communal stove. (In the evening,
most of the women who lived in the
attic would push and shove one an-
other to get close to the stove, and,
since they towered over me and I was
not strong enough to squeeze by them,
I always “cooked” in the afternoon.)
While I was standing at the stove, my
mother appeared at the attic entrance.
Her beautiful face was thin and pale
and looked incongruous atop her body,
made bulky by the many layers of cloth-
ing she had managed to put on when
she was arrested.
In fact, she later told me, when they
let her go she did not return directly
to the attic. “Two ghetto policewomen
took me to Magdeburg”—the Magde-
burg barracks—“where I had to fill out
many papers,” she recalled. “Then I
asked to see Herbert. He was sitting
at his desk with his head in his hands.
He turned around and saw me. He
cried so much! I looked terrible. I said
I had to go home. We ran all the way.
When we got there, I said, ‘You’d bet-
ter not go with me.’ He
agreed. I walked up to the
attic and stood in the door.
I said, ‘Viki’”—this was
one of my mother’s names
for my father—“and when
he saw me he also cried.”
It was only recently, when
I reread my mother’s rec-
ollections of her return,
that I realized they did not
include me.
For several days, she lay
in bed and hardly spoke.
Then she began to talk to
my father about what she
had seen and experienced.
She whispered the stories
so that I would not hear,
but still I overheard some.
When they first brought
her to the prison, she said,
“an S.S. man kicked me in
the ass, and I fell into the
cell.” Other than that, she
herself was not physically
abused, though she saw
some of the terrible things
that the S.S. did to the other prison-
ers. They interrogated her every day,
but she continued to deny any involve-
ment in the food-smuggling operation.
At one point, one of her jailers ques-
tioned her about her Terezín job. She
said that she scrubbed floors, and he
told her to show him her hands. When
he saw how red they were, he seemed
pleased, perhaps by the thought of how
far she had fallen. Miraculously, they
finally let her go. Why they did so re-
mains a mystery.
When she began to recover, she
complimented me on having managed
