46 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
my favorite shade of blue. Susi’s hus-
band, Giuseppe Renzetti, later became
the pro-Nazi Italian consul-general in
Berlin, where he and Susi socialized
with high-level Nazis, including Hit-
ler. I told myself that my father could
not possibly have foreseen the two
women’s involvement with the Nazis;
sometimes I wondered, but did not
dare ask, why he had not asked either
of them for help.
I do not believe my mother was ever
in love with my father in a romantic
sense. Although she always had admir-
ers and a busy social life of her own,
before the war she did not have affairs.
The youngest of six children, adored
by her parents and by her four older
brothers (not by her older sister, who
was jealous of her), she was the most
outgoing person I have ever known, al-
ways surrounded by people who were
attracted to her energy and her warmth.
Her habit of speaking her mind got her
into trouble, but usually her friends for-
gave her. Like her own mother, my gen-
tle babička Karolínka, she was pretty,
always elegantly dressed and impecca-
bly groomed. But, while she was brought
up to take great care with her appear-
ance, she was not vain. Much later, she
would tell me, “People were always say-
ing I was beautiful; I was not beauti-
ful, but I was fun to be with.”
Being fun was valued in my family.
Before the war, we ate lunch together
in a formal dining room, and if my par-
ents and Bobby were in the right mood
they would take turns topping one an-
other with funny stories. I would laugh
so hard I had trouble eating. For birth-
days and other special occasions, we
wrote comic poems. I still have one that
Bobby wrote for me in Terezín for my
thirteenth birthday, filled with intricate
(and untranslatable) puns and rhymes.
My own attempts at humor were at
times rather crude. One friend at Tere-
zín, before he left on a transport to
Auschwitz, gave me his prize posses-
sion, a booklet containing the phrase
“Kiss my ass” in many languages. I mem-
orized the German, the Dutch, and the
Danish, all of which were spoken in
Terezín, and when I visited Bobby at
the hospital, with its patients of vari-
ous nationalities, I would go up to one,
shout the phrase in his language, and
run out of the room as fast as I could.
My favorite victim was a Danish priest
who liked to correct my pronunciation.
Before Hitler (as we used to say),
my mother had few responsibilities.
Our cook, Boženka, ran the household,
and Bobby and I each had a govern-
ess. Bobby’s was German-speaking; my
nanny, Fridolína, spoke Czech, or, rather,
a Moravian dialect that I loved to im-
itate. Her real name was Lenka. “Fri-
dolína” was Bobby’s invention, based
on Fridolín, the imaginary hero of the
stories our father used to tell us. I was
attached to Fridolína and, in fact, saw
more of her than of my mother. She
came from a tiny Moravian village called
Želetava, and every year I put up a fight
to spend the summer with her there.
My mother’s minimal involvement in
her children’s daily lives was custom-
ary among Prague women of her class
in those days, but after more than eighty
years I still remember how hurt I was
by her detachment. I tried hard to in-
terest her in my activities and to win
her approval, but I mostly failed to
please her. Luckily, my father and Fri-
dolína always admired my dance per-
formances, found great promise in my
drawings, and praised and encouraged
me with abandon.
My mother was content with an ex-
istence that consisted of seeing friends
and having dress fittings during the day
and going to night clubs and parties in
the evening. But, once the Germans
occupied Czechoslovakia and every-
thing changed, so did she. She was as-
signed a job sorting confiscated prop-
erty at the Prague Jewish Community
warehouse, and she discovered that she
enjoyed working and was good at it.
She was quick and efficient. When the
deportations began, friends and rela-
tives leaving in transports would ask
her to do their packing; she had devel-
oped a knack for fitting as much cloth-
ing and food as possible into the knap-
sacks and rolled-up blankets that they
were allowed to carry. She discovered
that she liked being useful.
By then, my father must have real-
ized that his decision not to emigrate
had been a fatal error. In 1938, when
my parents finally applied for a visa to
Colombia, we were required to convert
to Catholicism. Mr. Ješátko, the fam-
ily chauffeur, drove the four of us to
Hradec Králové, a town about sixtymiles from Prague, where a friendly
priest was willing to baptize us. The
next day, we had to receive Commu-
nion, and my father choked on the wafer.
Even though my parents regarded con-
version as a necessary formality, it made
them extremely uneasy. While they
were not observant Jews, they had al-
ways frowned on converts.
As for me, I happily embraced my
new religion. For years, I had enjoyed
my secret visits to the nearby Church
of Cyril and Methodius with Fridolína,
and I threw myself enthusiastically into
the weekly religion classes at the pub-
lic school, where I was in the second
grade. We had to go to confession, and
when the young woman who was our
teacher (and whom I liked and always
tried to please) gave us a list of sins I
could not find anything to confess to.
So I chose an unfamiliar word on the
list, figuring that it was possibly some-
thing I had done. It was “adultery.”
But despite the conversion we did
not emigrate. I don’t know whether we
were unable to obtain an exit permit,
or whether my father was perhaps re-
luctant to leave his mother, my grand-
mother Tina, behind. She later perished
in Treblinka. At any rate, by the time
it became clear that emigration was our
only hope, it was too late.I
t was during the German occupa-
tion, when we were still in Prague,
that my mother fell in love with Her-
bert Langer. He was part of my par-
ents’ new, all-Jewish social circle.
(Though they were secretly in touch
with many of their old Gentile friends,
Jews and Gentiles had been forbidden
to associate.) Apparently, Herbert had
met and admired my mother at the
Špindl ski resort before the war. She
did not remember him, but she knew
that years earlier his father and my pa-
ternal grandfather had founded an or-
phanage together. Even though Her-
bert was married by the time of the
German occupation, he was besotted
with my mother, and when he and his
wife, Gerta, arrived in Terezín, two days
after we did, he began to visit us in the
attic almost every day.
My mother responded to the stresses
of life in Terezín better than my father
did. She was now the stronger of the
two. She had a physically demanding