The New Yorker - 16.09.2019

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THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 49


Herbert’s list. However, during Sep­
tember and October of 1944, when
eighteen thousand Terezín prisoners
were shipped to Auschwitz in a se­
ries of eleven transports (which left
almost no men under the age of forty
in the camp), the Jews lost all control
over the lists. In the end, this task was
taken over by the S.S., and no pris­
oners were protected any longer. My
father was deported to Auschwitz
in the eighth transport, on October
16th, and died in the gas chambers.
My mother, Bobby, and I were spared,
owing not to Herbert’s protection but
to chance. The Nazis who drew up
the lists passed us by.
Herbert and his wife (they had no
children) left Terezín in the final trans­
port, the eleventh, with members of
the Council of Elders. Before leaving,
he gave my mother three small enve­
lopes marked with our names and told
her they contained a fast­working poi­
son “in case we needed it.” He planned
to use it himself on the train. He also
gave her a letter to deliver, if she sur­
vived, to his sister, who had emigrated
to the United States.
Here is Herbert’s letter:
Terezín, October 27, 1944
My dear Elly,
Our father was arrested on September 6,
1941, and on November 11, 1941, he died.
He was an honorable, good man. The last mes-
sage he sent me, saying that he was all right,
was delivered to me here last year by some-
one who had shared his suffering. Our tatinek
[daddy] lived up to his obligations, but his ac-
tions were not reciprocated.
Since 1939, filled with ideals, I have worked
hard to fulfill my obligations to those who,
like me, faced persecution and oppression. I
regret that I will never be able to describe
what I experienced and what I saw. I ask one
thing of you: do believe that everything you
will hear is true. Nothing that you will hear
can compare with what I knew about and wit-
nessed. My participation in these events has
always been impartial and honest.
Except for our father, up until today, thank
God, I was able to save our whole family from
the terrible fate that befell tens of thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe mil-
lions. Tomorrow, my family and the family of
my Gerta must begin the journey that was
taken by thousands before them. If God is
merciful, they may survive these terrible times.
Unfortunately, after tomorrow I will not be
able to watch over them or help them any-
more. I hope that there will be someone who
will look after them. I hope that the good I
have done in the past will be of some benefit
to them.


Tomorrow I will leave, separately from the
rest of my family. After tomorrow you will
never hear from me again. I will vanish into
the endless nothingness to join those who had
to pay for what they knew and witnessed, while
for many years the whole world watched with
folded arms. We are at war, we are the ene-
mies, and we have to know how to die like sol-
diers. In the next forty-eight hours, my fate
will be sealed, and my wife Gerta’s as well.
All I ask of you is to take care of our father’s
grave and, if you should find us, to bury us
next to him. Help our family and Gerta’s as
much as you can. Help them forget. They will
need your help.
Be well. I wish you and Max and Gretl
much happiness. And never forget that what
you will hear cannot be compared to the re-
ality of what people had to live through.
Your Herbert

When the eleventh transport ar­
rived in Auschwitz, the members of
the Council of Elders on it were exe­
cuted. The Nazis wanted no witnesses
to their actions to survive.

W


e had talked endlessly about the
moment “when it will end” and
dreamed of the return of those who
had left on transports into the un­
known. But the end of the war was
nothing like what we had envisioned.
For most of us, there were no reunions.
We learned what had happened to our
loved ones in late April of 1945, when
cattle cars filled with half­dead ex­pris­
oners and corpses began to arrive back
in Terezín. Among the survivors were
former Terezín inmates who told us
about Auschwitz. One friend, Karel
Gross, who had left Terezín on the
same transport as my father, told my
mother that he had seen Mengele send
my father to “the wrong side.” But,
since there was no proof of his death,
for many years I didn’t accept it. In the
early fifties, when I was a student at
Vassar, I fantasized that he would visit
me on campus.
My mother, Bobby, and I remained
in Terezín until May, 1945, when the
camp was liberated by the Soviet Army.
After the war, my mother always spoke
of Vikínek and Herbert in the same
loving manner. She had several oppor­
tunities to remarry, but she never did.
She told me, though, that she would
have married Herbert if he had lived.
I could never bring myself to ask her
why she preferred him to my father.
She was more than ten years older than

Herbert; perhaps he aroused protec­
tive, maternal feelings that my much
older father could not. It was unthink­
able for me to bring up the thorny ques­
tion of whether there had been an
element of calculation in their relation­
ship. Besides, if his position of author­
ity, his power to “protect” us from the
transports, had motivated her in any
way, I do not believe she would have
admitted it even to herself. I do think
she truly loved him. My mother died
in 1990, at the age of eighty­six.
Just before Herbert left for Ausch­
witz, he gave me his little red Czech­
English dictionary, which I still use.
When I recently looked up his date of
birth, I learned that he was only thirty
when he died.
Bobby inherited my father’s ex­
traordinary gift for humor and word­
play and, as J. R. Pick, became one
of Czechoslovakia’s leading satirical
writers. Despite his poor health, he
began to publish right after the war
and never stopped writing, even when
the Communists banned his work, in


  1. He never fully recovered from the
    tuberculosis he contracted in Terezín,
    and I continued to worry about his
    health until he died, at the age of fifty­
    seven, in 1983.
    When I was imprisoned in Terezín,
    I wanted to pour out my feelings in
    my diary, but I was unable to put them
    into words. I recorded some every­
    day events, but my deepest emotions
    and fears remained unspoken. The
    diary contains only hints of how un­
    happy I was.
    The thought that Bobby could die
    was so frightening to me that I could
    not bring myself to mention his ill­
    ness. As for my mother’s affair with
    Herbert, it so profoundly embarrassed
    and disturbed me that his name never
    appears in the diary. I was caught be­
    tween my love for my father and my
    need to learn to accept Herbert. These
    were confusing emotions that I was
    incapable of expressing then. More
    than that, I was unable to deal with
    the guilt and shame of being “pro­
    tected” by my mother’s lover while
    others were being sent on the trans­
    ports to die, and these feelings have
    remained with me to this day. They
    must be the reason it has taken me so
    long to tell this story. 

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