THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 45
portion “just to even it out a little,” I’d
say, and so it never lasted the three and
a half days it was supposed to. When
we had an extra potato, we passed it
from one family member to anoth-
er—“you have it”—in what we called
Jewish Ping-Pong.
Although the Nazis referred to
Terezín as a “model ghetto,” nearly one
of every four people confined in the
camp died there. Among the prisoners
were some of the best doctors from
Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, and
Holland. But, given the lack of medi-
cines and of nutritious food, there was
little they could do to combat the dis-
eases that ravaged the place. The pre-
war population of Terezín, a garrison
town dominated by barracks and sur-
rounded by ramparts, was about seven
thousand, both soldiers and civilians.
After it was converted into the camp,
at times it housed between fifty and
sixty thousand people, its streets so
jammed that I found it hard to walk
without bumping into someone. We
lived under the constant threat of trans-
port east, and our fears of deportation
were justified: most of Terezín’s pris-
oners were eventually transported to
Auschwitz. Few returned.
The morning my mother was ar-
rested, two men from the Jewish ad-
ministration came to take her away. She
had a few minutes to get ready; on the
advice of one of our neighbors, she put
on as many layers of clothing as she
could. When the three of them left, I
followed. I waited outside the Magde-
burg barracks, the seat of the Jewish ad-
ministration, where they spent about
an hour, then I followed them, at a safe
distance, to S.S. headquarters. I had to
stop at the barricade that separated the
prison from the rest of the camp, and I
waited there for many hours, hoping to
see my mother come out again. In my
haste to dress, I had forgotten to put
on socks. It was very cold, and the back
of my heels became frostbitten. I finally
had to leave in order to get back to my
quarters by the eight-o’clock curfew.
What was left of our family was scat-
tered. My father had been assigned to
the men’s barracks. Bobby, then eigh-
teen, had contracted polio and was in
one of the camp hospitals, partially par-
alyzed. Once my mother was gone from
our quarters in the attic, I got up early
every morning and ran to my father’s
barracks to make sure that during the
night he, too, had not been arrested. A
few days after my mother’s arrest, a kind
Czech gendarme brought us a message
from her. It instructed me to come to
the barricade near the prison at two
o’clock in the afternoon and chat with
the Jewish Ghettowachmann—a ghetto
policeman—standing guard there. Using
a chain that hung from the narrow win-
dow at the top of her cell, she planned
to hoist herself up and try to catch a
glimpse of me. I went to the barricade
every afternoon; it was very cold, and
I stood there talking with the guard,
never knowing whether my mother
could see me. I later learned that she
could see me, and that it gave her a tre-
mendous boost.
We knew that only a few people
had ever come out of the S.S. prison
alive, and we were willing to try any-
thing to get my mother released. Her
lover, Herbert Langer, was powerless to
help (he had fainted when he learned of
her arrest), even though he sat on the
Aeltestenrat. In our desperation, my fa-
ther and I went to František Weidmann,
the former chairman of the Prague Jew-
ish Community. He was a fat man with
whom my father used to play bridge in
Prague; he had lost a lot of weight in
the camp, but he was still fat. Like Her-
bert, Weidmann was now an influen-
tial figure in Terezín. He told us that he
could not intercede, but he suggested
that the three of us—my father, Bobby,
and I—volunteer for a transport that
was scheduled to leave in two days, on
the chance that the S.S. would let my
mother join us. We were aware that the
transport was going east, to an unknown
destination, and also that relatives and
friends who had left in previous trans-
ports had never been heard from again.
We were not aware that it was going
directly to Auschwitz. I will never know
whether Weidmann knew where he
was sending us, since he perished in
October, 1944, after being sent to Ausch-
witz himself. According to revelations
in postwar studies, it is possible that at
that time he had information about the
gas chambers.
Faced with an impossible decision,
my father turned to me and, perhaps
momentarily forgetting that I was only
twelve, asked me what I thought weshould do. Since our arrival in Terezín,
he had changed. In Prague, he had been
the undisputed head of our family. I
adored him and thought him infinitely
wise. My mother, who had married him
when she was nineteen and he was thirty,
never questioned his decisions. Com-
ing to Terezín was, of course, a shock
to all of us, but it was my father who
found it most difficult to adjust. He had
run his family’s chemical factories; now
he had no control over his own life or
that of his family. He once said, “What-
ever choice we make, it is the wrong
one.” I think that, unlike many Terezín
inmates, he saw the Nazis’ intentions
clearly. And after twenty years his mar-
riage was about to end, because my
mother was in love with another man.I
had grown up in a safe, solid world,
secure in the knowledge that my par-
ents were devoted to Bobby and me
and to each other. Unlike most Euro-
pean Jews who survived the war, I have
family photographs. My nanny hid and
saved our family albums—laughing
adults and children in bathing suits at
an Austrian lake resort, or in ski clothes
in Špindl, in the Czech Krkonoše
Mountains.
By today’s standards, my parents’
marriage was not a conventional one.
But it never occurred to me that they
wouldn’t stay together. My father was
loving and affectionate with my mother.
Though he was not monogamous, she
didn’t seem to object. He clearly liked
beautiful women, some of them well
known, and not necessarily in a good
way. Before he married my mother,
he had had a relationship with Leni
Riefenstahl, who went on to achieve
fame first as an actress and then for the
Nazi propaganda films she directed. I
grew up wanting to be a dancer, and
when I leaped around our apartment
it was the family joke that I had inher-
ited my desire to dance from Leni, who
had started off as a dancer. Another of
my father’s mistresses was the great
beauty Susanne Renzetti, the grand-
daughter of a Silesian rabbi and by then
the wife of an Italian government offi-
cial. I was supposedly named after Susi.
My mother did not mind her staying
with us on her occasional visits to
Prague, but I did, because I had to cede
to her my beautiful room, decorated in