THE HOUSE ON PRAGUE STREET

                  By

HANA DEMETZ

Translated from the German

by the author



             Copyright 1980

by Hana Demetz


      Translation Copyright 1980

by Hana Demetz.

All rights reserved. For information, write:

St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth

Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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    The House on Prague Street

        BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

    The House On Prague Street

is a story told with translucent

simplicity and freshness. It is a story of

haunting innocence and terrible devastation, of lost

love, of survival. It has an impact

we have not felt since The Diary of Anne

Frank and John Hersey's The Wall.

In pre-World War II

Czechoslovakia, Helene Richter's

childhood glows with an idyllic richness and

grace. Summers are spent in grandfather's great

house on Prague Street, tranquil,

shimmering days, strung together like shining jewels.

Until the war. As the half-Jewish Helene

reaches adolescence, her serene existence

becomes a holocaust of disintegration and death.

Her uncles, aunts, cousins are gone--to a

place called Theresienstadt, from which they send

postcards once a month with the same message:

we are well we are healthy thinking of you how

are you. As the war comes inexorably closer

to her German father and her Jewish mother, Helene

falls in love. But the war will close in on that

love too. ...

Hana Demetz has written a novel that

will take its place among the classics of

World War II literature.

The author of several successful novels

published in Germany, HANA DEMETZ was

born in Czechoslovakia in 1928 and was

educated in Prague. She lived through the

Holocaust and in 1949 became an editor for

Radio Free Europe in Germany. Ms.

Demetz now lives in Connecticut and is a

Lector in Czech at Yale University.

    "The House on Prague Street is

a lovely, poignant jewel. The book's

warmth and compassion linger; the voice of the young

girl who tells this tale of bewildered suffering

continues to echo. I am grateful to you for

bringing the book to my attention and wish you and

Hana Demetz much success with its

publication."

--Chaim Potok

The House on Prague Street     v












              For Ruth Hein





















     The House on Prague Street     1

    I still have dreams about the old house. I can

see everything quite clearly: the three steps leading

to the glass veranda, the yellow front door with

its brass trim, the hallway where every step

resounded even if I walked on tiptoe. In

every dream I walk up the stairs. Between the first

and second floors the stairs are covered in

red-and-yellow plush, and there is a flowerpot

on every step: asparagus fern, umbrella

trees, and cactus. The red-and-yellow plush

carpet runs to the bedroom doors of the second

floor, but I, in my dream, climb on.

Now the stairs are no longer carpeted, the

windows are smaller, and the door to which I am

drawn is narrow and made of iron. In my

dream I open it. Hot dry attic air

presses on me, my eyes have not yet

penetrated the semidarkness. It takes a

while before I can make out the familiar shapes:

the old steamer trunks and the rocking horse, the

armoire with the yellowed photographs, the

four-poster with red velvet cushions, my

great-great-grandfather's rickety handcart, the

old-fashioned bicycle. It is very quiet

here; only far below somewhere in the street, there is

the rattle of a car. The world is far away. I

snuggle into the friendly semidarkness, smell the

fragrance of the dry brick floor and of the roof

beams, see the light blue squares of the

skylights above me. And in my dream I am

happy.

My mother and her two sisters grew up in the

old house. My mother was the eldest. Zdena, the

middle sister, had been a twin, but her little

brother was born dead. It took my grandfather a

long time before he forgave my grandmother this dead

son. As if it had been her fault! But my

grandfather was a very strict man. The youngest

daughter, Ella, was born many years later.

The old house stood at the edge of the

public park. It had a huge garden, and its

rear wall was painted black. Two crossed

hammers were painted in white on the black

surface above the lettering, also in white: Max

Lówy, Coal and Transport. Why my

grandfather had decided to display the sign on the

back of his house I do not know; perhaps he

believed in subtle advertising. The offices

The House on Prague Street     3

and the wholesale coal firm were closer to town,

behind the old garden, and my grandfather only had

to stroll through the grounds and through the garden gate

to get to his office. But usually he preferred

going around the house in order to be seen on his

walk to work and to be greeted by all his

acquaintances and friends. He liked to be seen and

acknowledged.

My mother and her sisters did not have a long

walk to school; the local high school was at

the other side of the park. My mother often told

me how she had envied her classmates who

lived far away and were permitted to stay in the

classroom at lunchtime and drink lukewarm

coffee from soda bottles. But my grandfather would

never have allowed his daughters to bring lukewarm

coffee in soda bottles for their lunch, even

if they had lived a long way away from

school.

The business had been founded by my grandfather's

grandfather. He had come to the small town from

Prague shortly after the Austrian Emperor

signed the law permitting Jews to move out of the

ghettos. He had arrived with his wife and with his

son and with a small handcart: a stooped, shy man

with a long beard, wearing a black coat and

hat. His only other possession was his good name;

he was one of the many grandsons of the famous Rabbi

Lów and therefore belonged to one of the most

illustrious Jewish families in central

Europe. The handcart he had brought from

Prague to the small town became the first

transport van. Still wearing his black coat

and hat, he would drag the cart to a farm, from the

farm to the flour mill, from the flour mill to the

shop, and back to the farm again. For many years he

wandered, his eyes lowered and his arms crossed behind

his back, the strap of the cart slung over his

shoulder. His back grew even more bent and his

face became gray with the dust of many country

roads. But when he died, his son could afford

to buy a horse and a second-hand carriage, and

there was even money enough for a respectable plot in

the small Jewish cemetery.

This son, my great-grandfather, did not have

to breathe the dust of the country roads. He did

not even drive the carriage himself for long, because

he understood about business. Soon he

employed one driver, then two, and by the time he

The House on Prague Street     5

took a wife and his son, my grandfather, was

born, there were three pairs of horses in the

stable and a shop sign.

As the years went by, my great-grandfather had

five more sons and three daughters, and as his

family grew, the reputation of his business

grew as well. The stables and the storage rooms

were enlarged every year, and more land was bought. My

great-grandfather built the house on Prague

Street, a two-story structure with a huge

kitchen and many rooms and thick walls intended

to shelter many generations. My great-grandfather was

proud of his name and dreamed of an important

future for his family. He became one of the

most respectable citizens of the town. He

died of a heart attack at sixty, after he

had slapped one of his drivers who had not been

polite enough with a customer. The very same driver

then bore my great-grandfather's coffin to the

family gravesite, with the mayor, the

doctor, and the town councilor as the

pallbearers.

My grandfather, the oldest son, inherited the

business. He also inherited his father's temper,

his bushy black eyebrows, and the high forehead that

turned red at every angry outburst. Across his

waistcoat he wore the thick gold

watch-chain his father had worn; he did not like the

heavy watch, however, and always left it lying on

his night table. Whenever my grandmother engaged a

new maid, she always remembered to mention that the

watch, fully wound, must remain in one

particular spot on the marble tabletop any time

of day or night.

When my grandfather took over the business, he

paid off his brothers and told them where to settle

and whom to marry. He found proper husbands for

his sisters and took care to give them good

dowries. He built a new warehouse and

started coal deliveries, bringing new

prosperity to the business. He laid out the big

garden. His father's interests had still been limited

to business and family; my grandfather was ready

to think of the town where he was at home, and of his own

place in it. He built a hostel for his

drivers in the square; later it became the

town's first hotel. He started a choral

society, and when they performed operas, he would

always take the bass role. He had the park

The House on Prague Street     7

laid out between the old house and the town school.

And he had himself, his wife, and his daughters

taken off the roster of the Israelite

congregation. "We belong here, to this town," said

my grandfather. "What good can it do us to be Jews

here?"

My grandmother was a gentle, quiet woman.

My grandfather had married her for her gentle,

quiet ways, since he had no need to marry

for money. She had not been an advantageous

match. In the little mountain village that was her

home she had eight brothers and sisters, and her

father, the village tailor, did more patching

than tailoring. But my grandmother's kindness

made up a hundredfold for her lack of a

dowry. She ran the large house with a friendly

hand, often accomplishing more with a gentle word than

her husband could with his rages. The maids and the

drivers all adored her. She was tall, not

beautiful, with large blue eyes that were always

serious, even when she smiled. She always wore

a black velvet ribbon around her slender

neck.

When the First World War came it shook the

peaceful life of the town a little. One of the

drivers became a soldier in Serbia and was

never heard of again. In the mornings there were lines

in front of the bakery, and when the bread was finally

doled out, it was black and seeded with corn

kernels. One of my grandmother's brothers died

in a burning airplane somewhere over the

Vosges Mountains, giving his life for his

Kaiser and his fatherland.

But the four years passed like a bad dream,

and in the fall my grandfather took the train

to Prague to represent the town at the arrival

of the president of the new republic. He

came back with enthusiasm in his eyes and a red,

white, and blue button in the lapel of his

Sunday suit. A portrait of President

Masaryk hung in the hall from that day on--a

kindly, clever man with a white beard.

My grandfather was proud of his ability to move

with the times. He was first in town to acquire a

radio, and for months the town's prominent

citizens would sit in his parlor night after

night, earphones over their heads, arms folded

across their stomachs, listening to the new sounds. His

car was admired by all the residents long before the

The House on Prague Street     9

noise of all the others began to fill the

streets. And when my mother and her younger sister

Zdena finished school, they were sent to Prague

to live with their uncle the banker. He was to let

them work in his bank; my grandfather had decided that

his two daughters should earn their own living instead

of sitting at home busying themselves with parties and

frivolities.

But the two girls did not lead a life of

self-denial, filled only with office work.

Prague in the twenties was a shining

metropolis, and the photographs of my mother from

those days showed a beautiful girl in party

dress and dance gowns, with ropes of pearls that

dangled amusingly almost to her knees, her

pretty legs in silk stockings crossed just a

bit teasingly.

My grandfather surely could not have liked the

frivolous life his daughters were leading in the

big city. But it had been his idea to send them

to Prague, and he was not a man to go back on

his own plans. He began to communicate

extensively with a certain family in

Königgrätz, and he watched the son of that

family thoroughly and critically. Would he be

good enough to marry his eldest daughter and later

take over the business?

The people from Königgrätz did their best

to make the decision easy for him--of course it

would be an honor to marry into the family of the

Lówys, an honor all around. And after

grandfather had made his decision, he informed his

daughter. He broke the news to her gently,

because he loved his firstborn. He was gentle, but

he was firm. Then the unexpected happened.

For the first time in his life my grandfather found himself

facing opposition. His oldest daughter did not

agree with him. His oldest daughter barely

knew the young man from Königgrätz. In

any case, she would not let anyone tell her

whom to marry. Never.

My grandfather did not believe his ears. But

because he loved his firstborn, he proceeded with

caution. Of course she would do what her father

expected of her, he thought. The good life in

Prague had made her headstrong, that's all.

But when it came right down to it, she was his

daughter, and he himself had never been one to give

blind obedience. You really could not blame a girl

The House on Prague Street    11

for wanting to know her future husband: times had

changed; we were living in a republic now;

girls wanted to have their say, too. He was not

a savage. He would not stand in the way of two

young people wanting to meet each other. He invited

the family from Königgrätz to come for coffee

on Sunday afternoon.

But his daughter refused to do the honors.

She locked herself in her room--let the company

come and go--and said again: never! My grandfather's

patience finally gave out, and the house cringed under

the load of his anger. These modern ideas! These

whims! Such rudeness! Who did the girl think

she was? Was she trying to turn him into a

laughingstock?

As always, my grandmother tried to smooth

matters over. Gently she talked to my

grandfather about the patience required in dealing with

unreasonable children. Softly she reminded my mother

of filial obedience. But neither grandfather's anger

nor my grandmother's gentle admonitions could

convince my mother. She only said, over and over:

never!

Then frightful news reached my grandfather. The

uncle from Prague reported that a certain

lawyer, Prochaska, was one of my mother's most

devoted admirers and that he might very well be

the reason for all this upset. Again the house

shook with the force of my grandfather's rage.

Grandfather ordered my mother's things to be brought from

Prague, and he swore that never again would he

let his daughters out of his sight. What did his

daughter need young Prague lawyers for? A

dutiful son from the Bohemian provinces was

not good enough for her?

Poor grandfather--he still did not know the whole

truth. He did not know that reality would

surpass even the uncle's hints. Lawyer

Prochaska was Czech at least, and he had his

own law firm. But my mother, she was in love with

his clerk, a young man with five semesters of

law, she was in love with a German student whose

knowledge of Czech barely sufficed to let him

pronounce her name. My mother was determined

to marry this young German student, that one and no

one else, even if she had to wait for him to the

end of her days.

Poor grandfather. His world collapsed. His

forehead paled, and he covered himself with his anger

The House on Prague Street    13

like a heavy cloak. For days he did not leave

his room. Everyone began to worry about his

health. They remembered the angry blow that had

already caused one death. And they reminded each

other how much my grandfather was like his own father.

Nobody dared to speak aloud, the drivers

cursed only in whispers, the maids stopped

singing. My grandfather and my mother did not speak

to each other. Grief lay over the house like a

heavy shadow. Grandmother wept for days, for

weeks. Then my mother packed her things again and

left for Prague, without saying goodbye.

Grandfather gave up the fight. The following

autumn he allowed his wife and his younger

daughters to attend my mother's wedding in

Prague. He himself did not come, and he did

not forgive my mother until I was born. When

I was three years old, he met my father for the

first time.

My father was tall, slim, blond, and

blue-eyed, and photographs of him in

lieutenant's uniform always delighted my

girlfriends because he looked cool and proud and

still a bit dreamy.

His own people also cut all ties with him when they

heard whom he was planning to marry. A Czech

girl, a wealthy Jewess for a

daughter-in-law, must have been even harder

to bear for the family of a small official in the

German part of Bohemia than the German

son-in-law for my grandfather. But in contrast

to my grandfather, whose heart began to melt when I

made my arrival, the family in the

Sudetenland remained hard. No grandchild could

soften their feelings. For many years my father's people

would pretend that they had no son and no brother.

Only much later, when they had already sided with the

mighty, did they remember the lost son and

try to convince him that a divorce was

essential.

In the beginning my grandmother sent money every

month, in secret, because my father was still at the

university and earned almost nothing. When he

married he had to abandon his dream of a law

office of his own. After taking his bar exams,

he joined the civil service.

My parents spent the early years of their

married life in many furnished rooms in many

Bohemian small towns. Young government

The House on Prague Street    15

officials were transferred almost every quarter and

had to go where the state sent them. Only after I

was born did the civil service take pity.

My father was transferred to eastern

Czechoslovakia and could set up housekeeping

there.

We lived in a brown house on School

Street. The house was the only two-story

building far and wide, not counting the school

building itself, which had three stories. Behind our

backyard there was another row of small houses

and then the brook, which ran mud-colored and

swift and which would sometimes, in the spring, creep

all the way up to the back doors. On the

other bank stood the town washhouse, which

usually served as a hiding place for children's

games, and behind it there were only meadows. The first

floor of our house was occupied by the two

elderly Paskud sisters, Miss Anna and

Miss Sidonie. They were both teachers, and

neither had ever grown to full size; everything about

them was tiny. A slightly rancid smell

always hovered in the hallway in front of their

apartment and clung to the ladies themselves.

Our apartment was on the second floor; it

had a dining room, a bedroom, a nursery,

and a kitchen. Every night the folding cot would be

set up for Franziska in the kitchen.

Franziska, the maid, had been sent by my

grandmother, also in secret, to make my mother's

life easier. She came from a mountain

village in northern Bohemia, and our

Moravian small town, where everyone spoke

a dialect she did not understand, must have seemed

like wicked Babylon to her. In the brownish

photographs that showed her pushing my pram,

she always looked round-cheeked and slightly

baffled.

I was a thin, sickly child, floating between

mysterious fevers and assorted childhood

diseases. My mother's face was always bent

anxiously over my white metal crib.

Once, returning from a Sunday picnic, my

father carried me home on his back. I clung

to his neck and cried and moaned because all at

once I could no longer move my head. I was

not quite three years old; with each of his steps there

was a horrible pounding inside me, unbearably

hot. It was polio.

The House on Prague Street    17

After that, I was burning up with fever, the

white metal crib turned into a prison, I

screamed because I could not see my mother, I could

feel her hands, but I could not see her.

Six months later I was able to get out of

bed, but I had forgotten how to walk, and my right

leg had forgotten how to grow. It was shorter.

My mother's eyes filled with tears, she held

me tight and said, "Maybe this is the

punishment." But then my grandfather arrived, and he

was not angry any more. He kissed my father, and

my father kissed his hand, and both acted

embarrassed and shy.

My grandfather had brought two doctors with

him, and he brought in every doctor in town. They

measured me and had me do exercises. I had

to drag myself across parquet floors on my

knees, twenty times around the room every day; I

had to lie on a table with my back up in the

air and do sit-ups, twenty times in a row,

mornings and evenings; I had to sleep in a

plaster-cast cradle, to keep my spine

straight. I screamed and fought and had

nosebleeds all the time, but my right leg started

to grow again. It grew and caught up with the left

except for two-tenths of an inch, and I did

not become a cripple.

The time came when I had had every single one

of the childhood diseases; there were no more to get.

I began to blossom. I made friends and gave

orders through the fence at the back of the garden.

First there was the pale Georgie Kirchner from

next door, then the grubby girl Ernestine,

who constantly wiped her runny nose on her

coat sleeve. And there was even wild Rudi,

ignoring my orders but nevertheless trying to drag

me into the darkness of the washhouse. Even before I

entered first grade I had my faithful

following, I reigned with an iron hand near the

brook and in the meadows, and even Rudi sometimes

succumbed to my tyranny. Franziska the

maid would shake her head in disapproval as she

bleached our sheets in the meadow. She preferred

me to go to the park with her; I would have to wear white

cotton gloves and walk obediently along the

pebbled paths. The military band in green

uniforms would play in the circular pavilion,

and poor Franziska could not take her eyes

off the trumpet player who blew his horn so

The House on Prague Street    19

soulfully.

I always spent my summer vacations with my

grandparents in the old house on Prague

Street. The train trip to Bohemia took

a whole day. Usually Franziska and I

went ahead right after school finished. My

parents had a vacation of their own and followed

later.

Grandfather usually rode several train stops

ahead to meet us, and I could spend the last leg

of the long journey sitting on his knees,

pulling at his bushy eyebrows and examining the

golden chain which held little golden cigar

clippers instead of a watch. At the final

station, where cheerful baskets full of begonias

hung over the platforms, there waited grandfather's

gleaming %Skoda car which had once been the first

car in town, and old Wenzel, whose face was

equally shiny. Then we drove at parade

speed through the town, my grandfather waving and

greeting everyone, pointing to me. It was

important for the whole town to know that the

Lówys' grandchild had come to stay that summer.

My grandmother waited in front of the house,

her hands shaking as she reached for me. Grandfather

grumbled, "Here we are, just don't squeeze

the child too hard!" and on a table in the veranda

stood a glass dish with grandfather's

strawberries, the early harvest, with sugar and

cream.

Then I had to inspect the gardens. Roses

and phlox spread their perfume in front of the

house, and peas were in bloom at the back fence.

The three-cornered, veined leaves of

strawberries rested on the moist earth, and at

the black-painted back wall, underneath the

inscription Max Lówy, Coal and

Transport, apricots and peaches grew.

Wenzel had brought the old-fashioned lawn

swing down from the attic and had repaired the

seats and painted them gree. There I found it,

between the bed of rhubarb and the currant bushes,

waiting just for me, and the small weathervane on

its roof turned in the evening breeze. Grandfather

lighted another cigar and said, "Just watch. When

this one begins to glimmer, supper will be ready."

We swung slowly, and grandfather was right: when the

cigar in his hand began to glimmer red, grandmother

stepped out onto the veranda, her cheeks rosy from

The House on Prague Street    21

the stove as she called us in for supper.

Franziska was sitting in the kitchen. She

had not stopped talking since our arrival, and

she let old Emma wait on her, because she was

a guest here who wanted to be honored on her

first night. In the dining room the lights were already

lit, the carved flowers and fruits in the doors

of the sideboard glowed bright and dark, light and

shadow, and above the red plush sofa hung the

portrait depicting grandfather in the

matchmaker's costume from The Bartered

Bride. Old Emma served my favorite

dish, Wiener schnitzel with browned

potatoes, and grandfather fed me especially

tasty bites of his special salad. Only

grandmother did not eat much, she smiled and patted

my hand. Then we had meringues with wine sauce,

but I could not manage any more food. I fell

asleep and had to be carried to bed.

In the morning I helped grandfather water the

currant bushes and the silver firs at the

garden gate, and sometimes even the beds of

carnations. The only plants I was not allowed

to touch were the strawberries, because there, grandfather

said, every droplet of water had to be considered.

Then grandmother took me to the office to be

weighed. It was a yearly ritual: she weighed

me on the first day of every vacation, because to her mind

I was always too skinny and was supposed to put

on weight. The figure was recorded on the

office calendar, so that on the last vacation day

it could be compared with another reading of the scales.

And the few grams that had collected on me

during the course of the summer--there was never more

than that, because I was a thin child--they always made

grandmother very happy. When I became older and more

crafty, I would borrow small kitchen

weights from old Emma, and on the last day of

vacation I would hang them on a string around my

waist, under my dress. I meant well and

liked to see grandmother happy.

For our midmorning snack, Sonia and I

and all our dolls would be served farmer's

cheese mixed with sugar and egg yolks and

raisins on the sunny lawn behind the house.

Sonia, who was two years younger than I,

lived next door. My grandfather had given her

parents the land for a wedding present, because

Sonia's mother was my grandfather's niece.

The House on Prague Street    23

However, grandfather had hardly expected the young

couple to build a glass monstrosity, as he

called it, instead of a house. It was a very

modern house, with a flat roof and a huge

terrace, with a winter garden and a living room

into which--horrors!--one had to step down; there was

also a swimmming pool in the garden.

Grandfather immediately planted a hedge around his

own garden, so that he would not have to look at the

glass monstrosity. From that time on, he was not

very kindly disposed toward Aunt Klara. But

I enjoyed the neighbors and the swimming pool,

and even grandmother would sometimes slip through the hedge

to watch us and to pay Aunt Klara a little

visit. The two women would sit under the lawn

umbrella, grandmother erect in her dark

dress, the black velvet ribbon around her

neck, her hair smooth and white; Aunt

Klara in long white linen pants--thank

heavens grandfather could not see those--with her hair

fashionably tousled and with the current issue of

Harper's Bazaar on her lap. Sometimes the

baby nurse in her white uniform also sat on

the lawn, and Sonia's little brother would kick

his little suntanned legs and rock his baby

carriage this way and that.

The summer days were full of sunshine,

strung together like shiny beads. When rain

threatened, there was always the hope that we might be

permitted to play in the attic; this promise

made us both, Sonia and me,

unbelievably obedient. Of course we could

only play there if we had first earned such an

honor.

When the time finally came, old Emma would

climb cautiously ahead of us, first over

red-and-yellow plush, between the flowerpots. On

the second-floor landing she had to stop and catch

her breath. We poked one another and giggled,

because going up we had caught a glimpse of her

old legs in their thick black stockings,

causing us to forget the great moment for a while. But

we caught ourselves when Emma shook her head,

annoyed, and then we stepped gingerly over the

uncarpeted stairs, holding our breath. When

Emma had taken the key out of her apron

pocket and unlocked the narrow iron door,

we held hands, our hearts beating all the way

up in our throats.

The House on Prague Street    25

The door made a soft creaking sound as it was

opened, the air came blowing toward us, hot and

dry, before Emma lifted the sky lights to let

in the breeze. Then she said, "Don't do

anything foolish up here." Mumbling something more,

she turned to go.

For a while we could hear her heavy steps on

the stairs, and then we were alone in the semidark.

Sonia held my hand tightly and whispered,

"Aren't you even a little bit afraid?" And of

course I was not afraid, I was two years

older than she. So I led her to the rocking

horse, which had yellow glass eyes and a real

black mane, and she forgot all about being

afraid.

Next we tried out the rickety high chair

and the red velvet cushions on the seats of the

sleigh. Of course I had to sit in the

driver's seat, and Sonia was the princess who

rode with me over the seven mountains. The roof

beams turned into a dark forest and the armoires

turned into rocks and caves where we hid from the

bad magician. We rode until we

arrived at the enchanted castle, where we

released the dolls who had been banished there.

The four-poster with the golden tassels turned

into a ballroom where we celebrated our

victories, and the old baby buggy became a

state coach.

At ten o'clock grandmother came and brought us our

snack. She was out of breath after climbing the many

stairs, and she had to sit down for a while.

Quietly she watched us, her small hands

folded in her lap. And then, when we begged her

a lot, she carefully opened one of the chests under

the eaves and showed us the treasures it held:

tiny dresses that my mother and her sisters had

worn, and button shoes made of black

patent, and pantaloons, and yellowed lace

aprons with tiers of ruffles. Another chest

sheltered great-grandmother's wedding gown with its tiny

waist and many satin buttons. Hanging in the

armoire was grandfather's hussar uniform, complete

with red trousers and shiny sabre.

Great-grandmother's trousseau chest stood to one

side, trimmed with strips of black iron.

And behind the chests, where the roof reached all the

way to the floor, rested great-great-grandfather's

handcart, the shaft broken and held together with

The House on Prague Street    27

wire.

Grandmother slowly moved her hand across the worn

strap of the handcart as she said, "All the things

stand here together peacefully, Helenka, you see.

And when your own grandchildren come up here to play, you

will have to show them everything too." Her eyes were

thoughtful as she spoke.

Then grandmother carefully closed the skylights

because rain had begun to drum against the slanted

roof, first in solitary droplets and then more and

more heavily, until the attic was filled with the

sound of streaming water. It ran over the roof,

down it ran into the gutters, along the walls

of the house it ran downward to the earth, and then,

divided into many tiny streams, away,

someplace, somewhere, away.

Aunt Zdena, my mother's pretty younger

sister, also defied grandfather's wishes when she

married. Grandfather had to accept the fact that the

family from Königgrätz was not for her either.

She married an executive in the bank of my

uncle in Prague, and, like my mother before her,

she did not worry much about grandfather's business

needing a young man one day to take it over.

Grandfather took this blow with more composure than

the disappointment which my mother had once caused

him. He was angry for only a few days, then

he allowed himself to be persuaded to attend

Zdena's wedding without much protest.

Finally he concentrated all his hopes on

Ella, his youngest. He was careful not to repeat

the mistake that had let both his older

daughters grow beyond his control. Ella was sent

not to a finishing school, but to a commercial

college. She was not allowed to breathe the heady

air of Prague; instead, grandfather sent her

to Aussig, to one of his sisters, for her

practical training. Ella, the baby of the

family, took it all in stride. She put

on black sleeve-guards and cheerfully worked

in the bookkeeping rooms. She rebelled

only once: when grandfather invited the people from

Königgrätz for the third time, she coolly

declared that she would find her own husband, should she

ever decide that she needed one. The people from

Königgrätz were never mentioned again, and

grandfather did not even get angry.

In July, grandfather's birthday was

celebrated in the old house. For weeks before,

The House on Prague Street    29

the house would be scrubbed and

cleaned--secretly, because my grandfather could not stand

housecleaning and the disorder it caused. Usually

Franziska had to stand guard at the garden

gate. As soon as grandfather turned the corner,

all the pails, brooms, ladders, and even the

comfortable vacuum cleaner had to disappear into the

storage room. They were all pulled out again after

grandfather had finished his lunchtime nap and had gone

back to the office.

When the cleaning was done and the old house was

polished and sparkling from top to bottom, the

baking would begin. Old Emma stood her ground

like a general, and the kitchen maids,

Franziska, and sometimes even grandmother would be

directed, instructed, and commandeered, until the

fruits of all these labors began to fill the

pantry shelves: cakes and tortes, breads

and pastries, butter cream and apricot

purée, nut crescents and chocolate

fingers. The whole house was fragrant with them,

and all the unsightly end pieces, crusts, and

rinds found their way into Sonia's and my

apron pockets and were enjoyed down to the last

crumb on the sunny lawn behind the house.

Then the family began to gather; old

Wenzel had to drive to the railroad station

two, even three times a day. He muttered

quietly to himself, because he considered it his duty

to take the %Skoda apart and wash it thoroughly

after every trip, and on the days preceding the

birthday he did not have nearly enough time.

Only the people from Warnsdorf, grandfather's two

brothers and their families, arrived in their own

cars, giving poor old Wenzel a chance

to rest. The two brothers from Warnsdorf were

mentioned often and with respect in the old house.

They had added international luster to the good

family name: their textile mills hummed not

only in Warnsdorf but also in faraway

Bucarest. My great-grandfather certainly had not

dreamed that his sons would spread the name so far

afield.

When the cars from Warnsdorf arrived, half

of the town population would assemble in front of the

old house. The two Humbers alone

warranted admiration. They were a far cry from

old Wenzel and grandfather's %Skoda. Old

Wenzel did not even wear a uniform, he had

The House on Prague Street    31

only the tattered cap with a visor. But the two

chauffeurs who jumped out of the Humbers wore

dashing navy blue suits adorned with double

rows of silver buttons.

And the ladies! Uncle Rudolf's wife

seemed to calculate each gesture as she

descended from the soft leather cushions of the car.

She inspected the bystanders through her lorgnette

and then called for lukewarm water for her

Pekinese and a glass of sherry for herself. Both

were made of delicate stuff, and such a long

trip did not become them at all. A large

pink fan of egret feathers emerged from Uncle

Fritz's car, followed by Aunt Elsa. A

murmur went through the crowd every time they caught

sight of the pink fan.

Once my mother caught me among the gaping

crowd. My mouth stood as open as everyone

else's, and my mother neatly aimed a slap on

it, saying, "Don't you ever act like a poor

relation!"

It was one of the rare moments when my cheerful

mother seemed genuinely upset. Since that time

I took care not to be present at another

arrival. I could not understand what had made her

so angry.

The arrival of the Warnsdorfers always brought

new life to the old house. The bells Emma

had fetched from the attic the day before took

turns ringing from morning to night, and the Pekinese

barked hoarsely all day. The two lady's

maids in black dresses and tiny white

aprons, who had arrived with their masters,

tripped through the old house diligently and found

neither Emma nor Franziska to their taste, not

to mention the kitchen maids. From time to time grandfather

would look very angry and would slam the doors.

The three aunts from Aussig--"the three

girls," as grandmother called them--were

entirely different. They would sit on the veranda

with grandmother over coffee, the spoons tinkling

softly in the Rosenthal cups as the aunts

took turns talking. Sometimes they talked

all at once, and sometimes they would giggle as

if they really were young girls and not old ladies

at all. Even grandmother looked very young as she

sat with them. Only her eyes remained

serious.

The banker uncle came from Prague with his

The House on Prague Street    33

family, but he had to stay in Aunt Klara's

father's house on the square because all the

bedrooms in the old house were occupied. Aunt

Ella had to give up her own room and move

into one of the attic bedrooms. I envied her with

all my heart for being allowed to sleep so

close to the attic storeroom.

Only grandfather's youngest brother, Alfred,

never came. When they spoke of him, it was in

whispers, with a small bourgeois shiver. He

had gone all the way to Berlin with his money, had

lived a wild life, had written poems and

lighted his cigarettes with banknotes. In the

end he had shot himself because of an actress, they

said. His Portrait hung in the parlor. He

had without doubt been the best-looking member of the

family, with dark curls and a slightly

haughty expression in his blue eyes, a

cigarette clasped between overly thin fingers.

On the morning of the birthday itself, the

well-wishers called. The mayor of the town would

come first, because he was an early riser, and would be

served breakfast coffee. Then the director

of the school came: he stayed a long time,

drinking his glass of wine, and sighed, "Oh

yes, how our youth has flown by, my dear

Max!" Then the head of the hospital came for a

short chat, and the gentlemen of the singing group

brought a bouquet of red roses. The

Councilor from the District Office kissed

all the ladies' hands before he expressed his

congratulations to grandfather, and grandfather would reply:

"But you are not coming for my sake, my dear

Joseph." The Councilor usually blushed a

bright red; he was a bachelor.

The aroma of the large birthday goose came

wafting in from the kitchen, the dining room table had

to be pulled out to its full length, and Emma

grumbled while she set it because the dinner

service for twenty-four had one cracked

plate, and the set of half-moon-shaped bone

dishes was missing one dish entirely. Dinner

was served at twelve o'clock sharp, and even the

ladies from Warnsdorf were on time, although

Aunt Irma looked peeved behind her

lorgnette: the Pekinese was banned from the

dining room on grandfather's orders. The soup with

liver dumplings was a poem, said the Prague

banker uncle every year, and the goose with

The House on Prague Street    35

sweet-sour red cabbage and dumplings was a

true symphony. The heavy red wine served with

it was a masterpiece which had been kissed by every

single Muse.

Between the last bite of goose and the serving of the

birthday cake I had to recite the birthday

poem; the relatives clapped a lot and

kissed me, and then I was allowed to blow out the

birthday candles.

The gentlemen retired to the living room for

coffee, and my father was questioned extensively about the

frightening events that were taking place in Germany.

Everyone nodded gravely and worriedly, they

did not relax until grandfather passed around his

cigar box saying, "Such things would be utterly

impossible in this country." Then they settled

back into their blue clouds of smoke.

Afternoon coffee was served in the garden. The

treasures were brought from the pantry and praised,

and even Aunt Irma consulted grandmother about a

recipe. Only the Pekinese looked miffed

and turned up his nose full of disgust when

Sonia offered him a piece of vanilla

crescent. For that I pinched his fat behind, and he

began to bark hoarsely, and grandfather said, "My

dear Irma, I cannot bear this animal out of

doors either!" Aunt Irma quickly rang for

her maid and demanded a glass of sherry. The

Pekinese had to be taken upstairs. Aunt

Elsa said nothing but closed her eyes and sighed

meaningfully behind her pink egret feathers.

At night there were lanterns on Aunt

Klara's terrace, red and blue and white,

grandfather's favorite colors. The older

generation stayed in the garden which was full of evening

fragrance, and the young people sneaked through the hedge to the

terrace, where champagne corks began to pop.

The man at the piano played and sang

"Ramona." Sonia and I sat hidden in the

bushes; they had forgotten all about us in the

dark, and we were careful not to attract attention.

The sky was already studded with stars, so many of them;

only a very thin light line remained in the west,

but even that disappeared soon. Only the stars

remained and the lanterns, red and blue and white,

and some hesitant fireflies. My father danced

with my mother, holding her as if he never wanted

to let her go, and I was slightly jealous and very

happy at the same time.

The House on Prague Street    37

    After the summer the brown house in School

Street always waited for us like an old friend. As

soon as the taxi stopped in front of the house,

Franziska would dash upstairs to unlock the

door and open the shutters. We had to undergo the

welcoming ceremony of the Misses Paskud.

Both ladies came out of their slightly

rancid-smelling doorway. Little Mis

Sidonie held on to my mother's hand and was

amazed at how much I had grown over the

summer. Little Miss Anna ran into the apartment

and came back with four liqueur glasses.

Each time I wondered whether the sliwowitz, which

was offered to my parents to celebrate our

return, also had that faint rancid smell.

After supper--grandmother's ham rolls, left

over from the journey--I absolutely had to go

out again to see my friends. There was Ernestine,

grubbier than ever, this time with a handkerchief because

her summery dress had short sleeves. There

was wild Rudi, his knees and elbows scraped

almost beyond recognition. He knew how to spit

through his teeth like a pro now, and in my absence

he had counted all his freckles; there were two

hundred and eighty-seven of them, including those

nobody could see.

I admired Rudi tremendously: not

everybody could spit through his teeth like that, not

everybody could count all his freckles. But how

did freckles get to places where nobody

could see them? I asked my mother about that, and she

laughed and said that Rudi was up to no good, and that

I would not be allowed to play alone with him in the

washhouse anymore. I did not understand what

Rudi's freckles had to do with the washhouse, and

I was mad at my mother because she did not understand.

I loved Rudi and did not want him

humiliated.

Water rats lived in the brook, and sometimes

when Ernestine and Rudi and I would lie on the

bank and keep absolutely still, we would see

them moving along the riverbed like long dark

shadows. The water ran swiftly, and wherever the

sun touched it, the bottom sparkled with the shards

of glass that littered the bed. The water rats

and the quick stream would not have prevented us from bathing in

the brook on hot summer days; it was only the

shiny pieces of glass that made us keep a

The House on Prague Street    39

respectful distance. We did not need

Franziska's warnings; we knew for ourselves that

the mysterious glimmer and glow was not from shards and

garbage: these were the treasures of the water

sprite, which no mortal was ever allowed to touch.

In the fall my father went hunting, and I could

go with him as far as the forester's house. Walking

through the meadows and then the forest, I held his hand

and listened. He knew many stories about the

woods and could show me exactly how to count rings

on the tree trunks, and where they would be

planting a nursery, and where they would be cutting

trees next spring. From time to time I looked

up at him: he was wearing a green hunting

suit and a green hat with a chamois bristle.

His gun was slung over his shoulder, the barrel

pointing downward. I was very proud of him. No

one in the whole wide world had a father as handsome and

clever as mine.

In the forester's garden we drank a glass

of buttermilk, and then we parted. My father and the

forester went deeper into the woods, where they would

spend the night in a hay barn before going to the blind

at dawn. I waited until the forester's

maid could lead me back through the forest to the edge

of town. Old Mr. Alois was just lighting the

gas lights on School Street, and it felt

good to come back to the protective warmth of the

house.

The buck and the hares, sometimes a pheasant,

would be brought to the kitchen later, cold and still and

covered with pine branches. My mother and

Franziska would be kept very busy. In the

fall, company came almost every day. My father

liked to be among people, he had friends everywhere, and

he extended invitations to them, as he did

everything, with infectious enthusiasm. It

happened quite often that his friends who had come for dinner

would still be sitting more or less upright in the dining

room when Franziska got up in the morning

to light the kitchen fire.

My father had become proficient in Czech

since his marriage. When I was little, he still could

not distinguish between the masculine and feminine endings

of Czech verbs and, probably to amuse me,

referred to himself in the feminine form. Later he

spoke fluently, even though his accent made

my mother laugh and shake her head.

When my parents had first come to the town in

The House on Prague Street    41

eastern Czechoslovakia, my father was looked

upon with mistrust for a while. A German who

had a Czech wife--and Jewish to boot--who

clearly adored her, who spoke Czech with his

associates and who liked to be instructed in the

intricacies of Czech grammar--wasn't he

a strange mixture? Should one not be on guard

here, should one not exercise the utmost caution?

The man clearly belonged neither to the German

camp nor to the Czechs; surely that was reason

enough to be suspicious.

As time went by, the people became reconciled

to the situation, understanding that my father was not intent on

provoking anyone. He was such a pleasant

man, a cheerful companion--no spoilsport.

And what made them like him best was the fact that

he never tried to push his way into either of the

groups.

My father was aware of his peculiar position.

Sometimes, when he got to talking in Mr.

Pavlista's wine cellar, he called himself a

man who sat between two stools. "But don't

think that I ever feel unhappy about that," he

went on to say. "Sitting between your stools I

might be able to be a bridge from one to the other."

That was something they liked to hear. The exception

was the school principal, who had known from the very

beginning on which stool he was going to be sitting and

who wore white kneesocks on

Czechoslovak patriotic occasions, thus

demonstrating his allegiance to the Nazis. He

tolerated my father with a mocking smile and

acknowledged my mother's existence only very

grudgingly.

When I turned six and was supposed to start

school, the whole town watched; would I be sent

to the German elementary school? But my parents

had decided on that question even before I had been

born: I would be brought up in the language of

my mother. The wearers of the white kneesocks

waited in vain for a sign that my father was begging

to join their group.

In first grade I discovered my great liking

for numbers. The number four especially

intrigued me; I covered whole pages in my

copybooks with these number fours; the sharp

angle and the decisive line through the figure I

drew over and over and could not get enough. When

election time came in the spring of that year and

The House on Prague Street    43

various political parties were represented

by numbers, I was very delighted to find that even

grownups had a weakness for numerals. "Vote

1" the posters said, and "Vote 5" was painted

on all the sidewalks. Just for me, they also

wrote "Vote 4."

Secretly I bought a piece of chalk and

set out to decorate the house on School

Street according to my preference. I wrote

"Vote 4" on all the stairs, on the brown

front door, on all the walls as high as

I could reach, even on the black and white

tiles in the halls. I was very proud of the

beautiful angles and lines. But my father did

not think them beautiful at all. With

Franziska's help I had to hurry to wash

off everything I had written, and Franziska

even slapped me for it. That year number 4 was

the party of the white kneesocks, and my father said,

"They're making far too much noise even without

your help!" Then he inquired whether anybody

had instructed me to decorate the house in that

manner. Upset at this further humiliation,

I yelled that I did not need anyone to write

such beautiful numbers for me, I could

certainly do it all by myself!

My parents looked at each other, and all

of a sudden they seemed to find the situation very

funny. My mother laughed out loud, and my father

turned away so that I would not see his laughter.

I was furious at both of them and sulked for a

whole evening.

Georgie Kitchner, the pale boy who

lived next door, was sick for a long time.

He did not come outside to play, was not allowed

to run, and would stare at us with sad eyes as we

sprinted off toward the brook. Once, on a

sunny day in late fall, he stepped out of his

house with a handful of raspberry candies. He

held them in the palm of his hand into the sunshine and

smiled. The raspberry candies threw reddish

glints onto his hand. Then Rudi came

running, he hit Georgie's hand from below, and

all the beautiful red raspberry candies flew

into the air. Rudi threw himself down to collect

them, and Ernestine and I, too, did what we

could. Georgie began to cry quietly and went

back inside. We ran to the brook with our

loot. There we fell into the grass and could not

The House on Prague Street    45

stop laughing at all. We sucked the red

candies until the soft filling stuck to our

tongues and to our teeth before it melted. Our

tongues turned red, and we were so thrilled by that

discovery that we started howling all over again.

After that we did not see Georgie for a long

time. He did not come outside. His mother always

looked at me so sadly when I met her that

I never dared to ask after him. I ran away

instead.

In early spring he died. A

black-bordered announcement with his name on it was

put up in the classroom. I stared at it, and

suddenly I had a disgusting taste of raspberry

candies in my mouth. I mumbled something and ran

out of the room to wash out my mouth. But even then the

taste would not leave. At lunchtime I threw

up.

In the afternoon our whole class went to look

at Georgie Kitchner in his coffin. He

lay on a white satin pillow, a candle in his

hands. This was not the real Georgie Kitchner,

but a strange yellow face above Georgie

Kitchner's Sunday suit. I ran home as

if someone was chasing me, broke open my piggy

bank, ran to the candy store, and bought a bagful

of red raspberry candies. Clutching them, I

hurried back to Georgie Kitchner's

coffin. The schoolchildren had left already, an old

woman was the only person kneeling there. I

sneaked closer and put the bag on the white

satin pillow, next to the strange yellow

face.

Then I ran out again, I ran to my mother as

if someone were after me, I threw myself at her and

cried and screamed and tried to scream the taste of

raspberries away. My mother hugged me and

put me to bed. The next morning I was well,

but I could never eat raspberry candies again.

And I never played with Rudi again.

At night my parents would often sit by the

radio and listen to a voice that threatened and

chided and yelped. But no one in the radio

audience seemed to mind. On the contrary, they

clapped and demanded that the voice go on and on

threatening and yelping, again and again, until it

turned hoarse and was finally drowned by martial

music and wild cries. Then my father would

turn the radio off abruptly and look very

The House on Prague Street    47

angry. My mother would sit there darning my

stockings. She worked very quickly and with great

concentration and did not look up. It was as if

she could not forgive the large holes and had

to punish them with all the might of her needle.

Then I saw my mother crying for the first time.

On a morning in September, my father had

finished shaving and turned on the radio. But the

radio did not play a trumpet-polka as

usual; a halting male voice announced that

President Masaryk had died during the

night. My father lowered his head and leaned on the

table as if all at once his strength had left

him. Franziska came running from the kitchen

and slowly folded her hands. I went to my mother,

wanting to be comforted. But she sat still and did not

see me; her eyes were very far away, looking

many years ahead, and two tears rolled slowly

down my mother's smooth cheeks until, very

quietly, they fell into her lap. Later I

often saw my mother cry, sadly and angrily and

in despair. But never again did I see that

endless look in her eyes, the look which showed that

she was resigned to her fate.

Black flags dangled from the staffs, and the

photograph in our classroom was framed in

black. For days people spoke only in whispers.

Grandmother wrote that grandfather had suddenly aged and

that he had begun talking of selling the business

and retiring. Nothing seemed to make him happy

any more, grandmother's letter said.

Little Miss Sidonie Paskud taught us

knitting and crocheting and embroidery. Between

cross-stitches and runaway needles she

liked to tell stories about mysterious and

spooky happenings, about travelers who had

lost their way and were led home by kind lights or

led astray by evil ones, about thunderstorms that

sent churning fireballs into people's houses. We

listened breathlessly and very often forgot all about

our stitches and loops.

Sometimes I was permitted to help Miss

Paskud with her storytelling, because, she said,

I had the wildest imagination. Then I would

frighten even myself, goose pimples would run

down my spine when I told about the water

sprite who sat under the old willow tree in

the brook and held drowned souls imprisoned

under little mugs, and about Death, who could sneak through

The House on Prague Street    49

doors even when they were tightly locked.

Miss Paskud nodded thoughtfully and bent her

head with its thinning hair over her knitting; after

she had held the needles for a while, they too

would have a slightly rancid smell.

None of us would ever have dared to leave the

classroom during these lessons. We sat

without moving and jumped when clumsy Ernestine

dropped her needle. The ringing of the school

bell broke the spell, we packed up our

workbaskets and cautiously stepped out into the

hallway. The boys coming from the gym made an

enormous racket; Rudi tried to trip me

and pulled Olga's pigtails.

Downstairs, near the janitor's apartment,

Barry the Saint Bernard lay on his

blanket. He raised his head when he saw us

coming and beat the floor with his tail. Then he

slowly rose, stretched and yawned, and went

to stand near the door. Barry belonged

to Antonia, whose father had an inn in the forest,

two hours away, and Barry brought Antonia

to school and home again, every day and in all kinds

of weather. During the day he slept on his

blanket, and the janitor fed him his lunch.

Rudi walked behind Miss Paskud making

faces. I took Miss Paskud's hand and

squeezed it. Miss Paskud was now smaller

than I, and I wanted to protect her, although

I knew that my hands would have the slightly

rancid smell later on. I hated Rudi.

The blossoms on the chestnut trees

quivered in the warm air. All the windows of the

high school were open and, in one of the

classrooms on the third floor, girls'

voices were heard to sing, "Spring is coming,

beautiful May ..."

"I wish I knew," said Ernestine,

walking next to me, "what the world looks like from

up there, high up on the third floor."

Ernestine, I thought, you really are dumb:

you've never been to a third floor in all your

life. Even our classroom, which is on a

perfectly ordinary second floor, made you

gape for weeks.

"That's nothing," I said and felt very

important. "My uncle who lives in

Prague lives on the fifth floor, and from

up there all the people in the street look just like

The House on Prague Street    51

ants."

Ernestine turned her face to me, grubby and

moist above the mouth, and sighed in adoration. An

uncle who lived in Prague, and on the fifth

floor besides, was as unfathomable to her as the

water sprites and the fireballs. A lark was

suspended over us in the blue sky, rejoicing.

I'll have to show Ernestine everything, I thought,

when we grow up. The world is full of

mysterious things, and Ernestine is so dumb.

She won't understand.

    Then came a summer at the grandparents' which

was unlike the others. The roses and the phlox were

in bloom as always, and grandfather's strawberries

tasted as they always had, warm and sweet. The

spreading rhubarb leaves provided blissful

shade on hot summer afternoons as always. When the

wind blew, the green weathervane on the roof

of the lawn swing turned this way and that as always.

On rainy days the attic smelled of

secrets and of sun-warmed wood as always.

But many things were different. Grandfather no longer

went to his office. The back garden gate which

led to the yards and to the warehouses, and which grandfather

had used so rarely because he liked to be seen in

the street--it had been walled in. The yards

and the warehouses and the office were no longer part of the

property: grandfather had sold the business. The

letters and newspapers that were brought to the house

by Mr. Maly, the mailman, were addressed not

to Max Lówy, Transports, but to Max

Lówy, pure and simple.

Aunt Ella had taken off her elbow

guards and had moved to Prague. She had

distanced herself from the family more than her two

sisters had ever dared. Instead of living with the

banker uncle, she lived completely alone in

an apartment in the New Quarter of Prague.

She even dared to write letters filled with

enthusiasm about her work with an export firm and

about her new independent life. My grandfather,

who in the beginning had had a great deal to say on

the subject of export firms and young girls

who lived in apartments completely alone, was

silent; only once in a while he shot a

grim look from under his bushy eyebrows.

That summer the villa next door housed not

only my friend Sonia and her little brother, but

The House on Prague Street    53

also two cousins from Vienna. Both cousins were

nearsighted and slightly older than we, and

all they ever wanted to play was civil war. In

the morning, in the afternoon, civil war all the time.

For a while we played civil war with them, but

we soon tired of being constantly beaten up and

wounded and even dead, and we returned to the

quiet lawn behind the house and to our dolls.

The cousins complained to Aunt Klara, and

Aunt Klara slapped Sonia and said something

about courtesy and hospitality to be shown to friends

in need. We did not quite understand, because the cousins

were cousins and not friends, and they were not in need because

they had many trunks and were on their way

to Australia. They were waiting for their parents

and for their visa, and we asked Mr. Maly the

mailman every morning if he was bringing it at

long last. A visa for the cousins seemed to us

to be the guarantee that things would be again as they had

been before. Mr. Maly let us look through his

mail pouch and said, "We will all be needing a

visa soon, children." But that was no real comfort.

The cousins' parents really did come from

Vienna for grandfather's birthday. They brought

even more trunks with them, and Aunt Klara had

the baby nurse moved to Sonia's room.

Sonia grew fiercely angry, she did not

want to have the baby nurse in her room, and

Aunt Klara said, "You are really spoiled

rotten." The cousins giggled with malice; they

did not have their own rooms any more either.

Over her afternoon coffee Aunt Marta, the

cousins' mother, talked in a quiet voice for a

long time. The others sat in silence and stared

into their coffee cups. Even Aunt Elsa

stopped fanning herself and sat still. Then one of the

cousins called out, "And what is Hitler

doing, Mama? Is he still crazy?" Sonia

and I began to laugh; it was the first funny thing

we had heard from the cousins all summer.

But Aunt Marta did not think it funny

at all, she jumped up and whispered, "Will you

be quiet? You'll make trouble for all of us

here!" She looked all around anxiously, as

if she were scared of us and even of the trees.

The visa finally arrived toward the end of the

summer. Mr. Maly waved the letter all the

way up the sidewalk, and the cousins and their

parents were leaving. We took them to the

The House on Prague Street    55

railroad station, and we kissed them, happy that

we would not have to play civil war any more.

Aunt Marta cried when she hugged my

grandfather and said, "Please be careful, all of

you." And grandfather patted her shoulder and said,

"Nothing will happen to us here, don't you worry.

We belong here."

The train began to move, and for a long time we

could see the four handkerchiefs like whirling white

dots moving with the train. Then they disappeared, but

the tracks continued their humming for a while

longer. Sonia got her room back, and we

did not play civil war any more. But nothing was

the same again.

    The following summer I turned eleven.

Before Franziska and I left to go to the

grandparents', my mother took me aside and showed

me the summer clothes she had bought for me: all

the bathing suits had tops. There was a pair of

shorts with a matching halter which one was supposed

to tie on the neck. There were white polo

shirts which I was expected to wear to cover my

chest. I was appalled at these new inventions.

That night I spent a long time examining

myself in the mirror. I was very thorough, but there was

nothing special to be seen. Only sometimes,

when I felt cold and my arms had goose

pimples I would feel tickling, running almost

all the way up to my shoulders and under my

armpits, until it reached my nipples and

came to rest there for a while.

My grandmother shook her head when she saw my

new outfits. But since she did not say

anything about them, I remained silent also and

wore them with my teeth clenched, as if they were a

mark of shame. Only when Sonia turned out

to be madly envious of the halter was I finally

reconciled to my new situation. And when I

saw that my elegant Aunt Klara sometimes

wore the same kind of halter with her white

trousers, I even began to feel sorry for

poor Sonia, who was two years younger and was not

yet one of us, the ladies.

Sonia's little brother joined us that summer,

and we would put up with him as we sat on the

blanket in the sunny grass behind the house.

We made him babysit our dolls and wash

all the doll dishes. We also let him help

The House on Prague Street    57

us in the park across the road where, in a dark

hidden hedge near the fence, we had built a

small cemetery. We searched the

neighborhood for dead sparrows and beetles,

and every tiny corpse we found we buried with much

pomp and ceremony. After packing it into a

cardboard box, we would wheel it three times

around the park in a doll carriage before, moaning

and weeping copiously, we laid it to rest.

We decorated the small grave with grandfather's

most beautiful begonias and carnations, and we

made crosses from Emma's kindling wood.

The gravestones bore melancholy

inscriptions, written in ink and profusely

decorated with curlicues.

The area near the park fence was dark; the

smell of rotting blossoms, of dead leaves,

of moist earth was everywhere, and we knew that the

souls of the dead were pleased with our actions. When

matters became too threatening and we became

frightened of each other, we would run back

to Sonia's garden, where the swimming pool

twinkled in the sunshine and where the baby nurse

had our snacks ready under the polka-dotted

umbrella: slices of bananas and oranges

laced with raspberry syrup. The bananas had

a sweet scent, and the red umbrella and the red

raspberry syrup lent them a pink hue.

Sonia's little brother was a fussy eater.

He would still be sitting over his dish when Sonia

and I had long since finished our portions, and

he would drip big tears onto his banana

slices. Not until the baby nurse took

our plates back to the house--in order, as

she said, not to make a banquet for the

flies--could we reach for the little boy's portion and

relieve him of his suffering.

Aunt Klara did not spend much time in the

garden that summer. She had acquired something which

grandfather, with a frown, called "the new toy."

It was not a toy at all, but a small red car

with two seats and spoke wheels and without any

roof at all. It made a lot of noise when

Aunt Klara drove it out of the garage and around

the corner. Even after it had disappeared behind the

park hedges, and when we could no longer see

Aunt Klara's white scarf fluttering in the

breeze, we could still hear the humming of the

motor. The humming also announced Aunt

The House on Prague Street    59

Klara's return, then the white scarf above the

shiny red metal appeared among the trees, and

then Aunt Klara's happy face loomed up

behind the low windshield.

Once Aunt Klara took all three of

us for a drive. Sonia and I crouched on the

seat and clung to each other as best we could, and

little John held onto the tiny luggage

space behind the seats. The speed of Aunt

Klara's driving took our breath away, her

white scarf looked ready to fly off at any

moment. This was not grandfather's comfortable %Skoda with

old Wenzel at the wheel; it was something

entirely different. I adored my beautiful,

dashing Aunt Klara and determined to be just like

her when I grew up.

But when I came home out of breath and

reported on our outing, grandfather grew angry.

His bushy eyebrows twisted even more fiercely

than usual, and he sent Franziska to bring

Aunt Klara over.

When she arrived, she was still wearing her white

driving gloves. She sat in the drawing room

with her legs crossed and laughed when grandfather,

using his loudest voice, forbade her to take

any of us driving ever again. "You will break your

neck one day," grandfather said, and his forehead

purpled. I sat cuddled up in a rocking

chair and mourned Aunt Klara, who would break

her neck one day. But Aunt Klara did not

seem at all distraught. The little red car

whizzed around the park hedges with its usual

humming the very next morning, and the white scarf

went on fluttering cheerfully.

That summer was Franziska's last at the

grandparents' house. She was getting married in

the fall. But the groom was not the handsome

trumpet player in the military band who had

enchanted her in the music pavilion some years

ago. She was going to marry Aunt Klara's

factory driver, who owned a small house

on the outskirts of town and who came to help

out with the gardening some evenings. Franziska would

watch him from the hedge; he had black eyes and

was tall and thin, with many muscles, and

Franziska was up to her ears in love with him.

I was a bit disappointed about this development;

I had liked the trumpet player much better.

But Franziska said that I did not understand about

The House on Prague Street    61

those things and that I should just keep nice and

quiet.

She spent whole days in the sewing room

next to the attic working on her trousseau.

Grandmother had given her a bolt of linen and had

told her to do with it as she pleased. The sewing

machine rattled from morning to night, and when

Franziska came downstairs for her meals,

she had pinpricks on her fingertips and linen

threads on her skirt. But at night, when the

factory driver took off his shirt to mow the

lawn, she stood at the hedge and laughed a

lot, and her ears were bright red.

Before grandfather's birthday she finally abandoned

the sewing room to help with the baking. "What an

honor to see you in the kitchen," Emma said and

pushed a bowl of egg yolks toward

Franziska. "Beat those." The two kitchen

maids poked one another and giggled.

Then for a time everything was as it had always been.

The house was fragrant with vanilla and nuts,

Emma stood in the kitchen and gave orders that

had to be obeyed, and the pantry shelves filled

up. We had many parties on the sunny lawn

behind the house, and even little John, who did not

like banana salad, ate a lot of burned

cake crumbs and leftover lemon icing.

The three aunts from Aussig arrived in a

taxi that year, because grandfather's %Skoda had

been sold with the business and old Wenzel had

retired. I noticed for the first time that the hair

of all three aunts was almost white.

Johanna, the oldest, walked with a stoop, and

Regina and Theresa, the youngest of Grandfather's

sisters, no longer laughed and did not joke as

they used to; they embraced grandmother quietly.

And grandmother's face remained as serious as her

eyes had always been. At coffee time the

spoons and cups tinkled on the veranda as always.

But the laughter was missing. Aunt

Johanna's hands shook as she patted my

head, and later, during her yearly stroll through

the garden, she leaned heavily on grandfather, as

if she would never be able to walk upright again.

The banker uncle from Prague came alone

that summer. His wife, Aunt Olga, suffered

from a heavy mind, he said, and did not want

to travel. I did not know what suffering from a

heavy mind meant; when I asked old Emma

The House on Prague Street    63

in the kitchen, she said, "Go and play with

Sonia, little Helenka," and she quickly gave

me a piece of poppyseed cake. We

pretended that all our dolls suffered from heavy

minds. But after a while the game palled, because

we did not know the proper cure for heavy

minds--compresses or camomile tea--and

we sent little John to get us more poppyseed

cake.

Only the Warnsdorfers arrived with their

usual pomp. The two Humbers were shinier

than ever; glass and chrome reflected the

onlookers, the two chauffeurs were dressed in

pale blue with silver buttons, and Aunt

Elsa's fan took up the entire back

seat. The Pekinese in the other car had a

pale blue ribbon to match, and he yelped

angrily at everybody who approached.

Grandfather did not come out of the house to greet his

two brothers; he waited for them in the hall.

After he had kissed them both and kissed the

ladies' hands, he said, "You shouldn't show off

like this in these times--maybe a little modesty would be

more fitting." But Uncle Fritz laughed and

drank his glass of sherry in one gulp, and

Uncle Rudolf put his arm around grandfather's

shoulder and said, "Nobly shall we perish, my

dear Max!"

That night Aunt Irma was indisposed.

She and the Pekinese remained upstairs alone,

and the chambermaid brought them ice packs. In the

kitchen I waited for old Emma to sit down

on her window seat for a rest, and then I asked,

"Aunt Irma, is she suffering from a heavy

mind too?" But old Emma shook her head and

said, "Not her, little Helenka, not that one. And

who knows, maybe she's better off."

On the morning of grandfather's birthday I was

playing outside, under the drawing-room window.

The carnation beds there were bordered with bricks, which

I was decorating with pebbles from the path. In the

drawing room above me I heard voices. The

banker uncle was there, grandfather, Aunt

Klara's father, and the two uncles from

Warnsdorf--all the five brothers. Blue

mist wafted through the window. "They really do

smoke like factory chimneys," I said to myself

and giggled, and then I climbed the apricot

tree to listen.

The House on Prague Street    65

"I've already sold all the inland stocks,"

said Uncle Fritz, "and have traded them in for

good Swiss ones."

"To hell with the factories," said Uncle

Rudolf, and his voice sounded almost cheerful, as

it had sounded when he had said, "Nobly shall we

perish." "The ones in Bucarest," he continued,

"maybe we can still save those, but Warnsdorf

is as good as lost."

"I find it simply irresponsible," said

grandfather's voice, and it sounded angry;

surely grandfather's forehead would be red and the vein

in the middle of it visible. "If everybody

did what the two of you are doing, the market would

crash in a week, and that's exactly what

Hitler is waiting for! Where is your

solidarity? Aren't you patriots?"

"Solidarity?" said Uncle Fritz, and

I imagined how he moved his large head while

speaking. "Patriotism? We all should

leave, Max, with kith and kin, while we still

can!"

"Leave here? Where for?" That was the banker

uncle's voice. It sounded sad and hoarse.

Did he, too, suffer from a heavy mind?

"To France, to England, to America, what do

I know," said Uncle Fritz. "Away from

here, while we've still got the chance."

"But we belong here," said Aunt Klara's

father. "We were born here, our father is buried

here, our grandfather is buried here. Where are we

supposed to run to, damn it all?"

They were silent for a long time.

"As long as I am head of the family," my

grandfather said, and he must have walked over to the

window, because his voice sounded louder and more

threatening than usual. "As long as I live,

not one of us will run away, do you understand? This

country will need each one of us, very soon, and we

will all be here when it needs us. I will not

tolerate any talk about emigration in my

house. None. Do you understand?"

The drawing room became so still that I could

clearly hear Uncle Fritz pulling on his

pipe. Then someone pushed aside an ashtray,

and Aunt Klara's father coughed twice. The

blue mist moved out of the window and flew away.

My left leg had gone to sleep on the

branch of the apricot tree and began to ache.

The House on Prague Street    67

I jumped down, suppressing a whimper. As

I stomped along the pebbled path, little stones

pushed their way into my sandals and hurt; I

bent down, picked up a handful of them, and

threw them against the fir trees. Then I began

to cry.

Aunt Ella stayed on after all the other

guests had left. She was an entirely new

Aunt Ella. She wore narrow linen

dresses with large buttons and small hats

that revealed her forehead and covered the nape of

her neck. She always wore one of her hats

when she took me to the pastry shop in the afternoons,

and people would nod to her and say, "Look at little

Ella, she's a young lady now!"

I tried to keep step with Aunt Ella and

to eat pineapple tarts the way she did, but

my legs were too short and my fingers too

clumsy, and Aunt Ella laughed at me.

Her black eyes were shining, and she had the

darkest eyebrows I had ever seen: they were as

thick as grandfather's, except that his were bushy and

wild, while hers were as soft as velvet. My

greatest wish was to have long eyelashes and soft

eyebrows like Aunt Ella, but when I told

her, she laughed and said, "Don't wish that.

Then you would have all kinds of shaving problems, like

me. But don't breathe a word to grandfather."

Aunt Ella spent many hours sitting with

grandmother in the wicker chairs on the veranda. They

whispered a lot, and if I dared to come too

near, they always made some excuse to send me

away. Once Aunt Ella wept, she

blew her nose several times, and put her head

in grandmother's lap. Grandmother stroked her hair.

Her hands looked like fragile white flowers in

Aunt Ella's black curls.

Soon after, I heard grandfather's voice in

the drawing room. It was his angriest voice,

his forehead surely must have been red as he said,

"You are not going to marry a Jew! We have enough

Jews in the family, and I am tired of them

all! And he wants to go to America, Mr.

Smarty, of all places!" Then newspapers

rustled to announce that grandfather had spoken, and

after a while he added, somewhat more pleasantly,

"Besides, he is much too old for you. You are just

twenty-three, he could almost be your father." The

newspapers rustled again, grandfather cleared his

The House on Prague Street    69

throat, and all was quiet.

I went to hide in the kitchen and was very

angry. It seemed to me that never before that summer

had all the grown-ups had so many secrets.

The kitchen was empty, Emma's window seat was

deserted. The kitchen clock ticked and wheezed

softly. I sat down on the worn black

leather seat and felt very lonely.

My mother found me there and sat down with me, and

then I began to cry and to say angry things.

My mother stroked my head just as grandmother had done

for Aunt Ella, and her eyes had a dreamy

look. "Aunt Ella wants to marry her

boss in Prague, and grandfather does not like

him," she explained. She looked out the window,

where grandfather's rose trees were waiting for the

breeze, and she smiled at something that seemed

far away. "She loves him and he must love

her, too. Otherwise he would have left for

America without her a long time ago."

I had stopped crying and was nodding with deep

understanding. My heart was beating wildly because my

mother was discussing matters of such importance with

me. Suddenly I was very proud of myself: I

knew about secrets and understood about them, and I

could wear a halter over my chest. I was grown

up.

Then it came time to say good-bye

to Franziska, and Franziska bawled so much

that her nose turned red and she did not want

to let go of me at all, until my mother said,

"You better stop right now, or I'll start

crying myself." The factory driver patted

Franziska's back, and she finally stopped

bawling, but her nose was still red when we drove

to the railroad station.

The train trip that year took much longer

than usual, the train was stopped on the

tracks for hours while one freight train after

another passed at full speed. The

railroad stations were filled with soldiers in

green uniforms, all waiting to go someplace.

At home the little Misses Paskud were

waiting for us as usual. Miss Sidonie

said, "My goodness, how the child has grown!" and

Miss Anna poured four glasses of

sliwowitz. They had had their apartment painted

during the summer, it did not smell as rancid

as before, but the two ladies still made worried

The House on Prague Street    71

faces and said, "God only knows what will

happen to all of us!"

The following day I sat by the brook with

grubby Ernestine, who wept fat tears and

wiped them off with her skirt because both her

sleeves were already soaked through. Her father, a

train conductor, had been called into military

service that very morning, and Ernestine, her eyes

big as saucers, said, "It's mobilization, you

know." I comforted her as well as I could

by telling her, "The most important thing is that

he has his health," as I had heard my mother

say so often. I had no idea what

"mobilization" meant, but I could not confess my

ignorance to Ernestine.

Wild Rudi ran past us, carrying a

branch to which he had attached a frayed piece

of rope. He was playing war. When he saw

us, he stopped to remark, "Listen, Ernestine,

you better not talk to that kid here, her father is a

German!"

Never before had I thought that the term could be an

insult, but Rudi's tone of voice told me

that it was one now. I jumped up and threw myself

at Rudi; I had grown taller than he and

all my hatred came pouring out now, the

raspberry candies and Georgie Kitchner.

I pummeled and scratched and bit, and Rudi

tried to defend himself, but finally he abandoned his

gun and ran away. Ernestine shouted bad words

at his departing back.

I limped home, my hands bleeding, my

back aching where Rudi's branch gun had hit

me, and my cheek swelling to cover my eye.

My mother said, "For heaven's sake, child," and

began to wash me. She questioned and inquired and

tried to find out what happened, but I would not

tell and I did not cry. When my father came

home, he asked no questions. Hugging me, he

said, "Don't forget, Helenka, whatever

happens now, we have to stick together."

Then came days when my parents did nothing

but sit by the radio. The screaming, bellowing

voice was often heard, and lots of military

bands, and then only time signals for hours and

hours. Once a halting voice listed names of

border towns that had been given up to Hitler

without a single shot, and my mother crossed them off

on a map and shook her head and said, "But we

The House on Prague Street    73

cannot exist without them."

Mrs. Bejlek, who owned the

tobacconist's shop across the street, came

running upstairs. She was also holding a map,

and she said to my father, "All they left us is a

little sausage, your honor, nothing but a little

sausage!" Then she stayed in the dining room,

irresolute, refusing to sit down, simply

weeping into a black-bordered handkerchief.

When school finally began again, the

photograph of the new president had been

installed above the blackboard. Nobody knew

anything about him; he looked old and tired, and

our teacher made a speech to tell us that this was the

man who would be taking care of our country, which

had been deserted by everyone.

The principal began to wear his white

kneesocks even on ordinary days, and he no

longer spoke to my mother. My father received letters from

his family in the Sudentenland, many letters each

week all of a sudden. He either did not read

them at all or he tore them up angrily.

The new wrinkle that had formed between his eyebrows

during the summer did not disappear.

That fall he did not go hunting. My mother

put mothballs into the pockets of the green

suit and stored it away with the summer clothes.

When my father's friends came to visit now, they were

not happy and noisy as they had been. Most

often they sat by the radio and spoke in excited

whispers. "They are talking politics," my

mother said. They no longer stayed until morning.

Aunt Ella's wedding took place that

fall in Prague. Grandfather had finally given

his consent. In the wedding photographs her

husband, Uncle Fred, looked nice, tall

and thin, with glasses and a secret smile.

Aunt Ella wore a gray flannel suit

trimmed with fur and one of her tiny hats. She

seemed even more elegant and more worthy of

imitation than Aunt Klara. "Will they go

to America soon now?" I asked my mother

breathlessly. America was far away, so far that

no one who went there ever came back.

"No, they won't," said my mother. She

shook her head and sighed. "Uncle Fred's

visa is invalid now. And he probably

won't get another, because there is something wrong

with his lungs. But grandfather must not know about that."

The House on Prague Street    75

I breathed a sigh of relief. Aunt

Ella would not be leaving; she would stay and be here

for me.

For Christmas that year I was given a pair

of skis, and after my first grim attempts I

had mastered the art of skiing. I lost all

interest in any other activity. As soon as

I came home from school I would begin

to change; first I put on the thick stockings,

then the sheepswool socks, then the navy wool

ski pants, and finally my pride and joy, the

beautiful ski boots, shiny, with two fancy

buckles each. Proudly I marched over the

bridge, across the bleaching meadow, all the way

to the firs, where a gentle hill rose behind the

little chapel. One part of the slope had been

smoothed by sleds: in spots the grass showed

through, but right below the chapel there was a beautiful

patch of powder where I could practice my stem

christies and my telemarks for as long as I

wanted.

Sometimes grubby Ernestine came along.

She would sit on her sled and watch me with

admiration until dusk began to fall on the

hill and the light in the chapel shone like a red

fire in the darkness. Only then did I undo

my bindings and load the skis on Ernestine's

sled. Ernestine sighed and pulled, and we

stomped off toward town. On the way we made

several angels: we lay flat on our

backs and carefully moved our arms and legs

until the imprint on the snow looked like a

figure with wings and a long skirt. It was a

real art to get up in such a way that the angel

figure was not smudged. Then we continued toward

home, two little dots in the endless white

meadow.

Then March came and the days grew longer,

snow-drops once more raised their pale bells

in the garden, and the snow was no longer powdery. It

quickly turned soft and gray on the sunny

slopes. One last time I came down the

hill like an expert, and the light in the chapel

formed a small reddish arch in the snow above me.

Ernestine waited patiently beside her sled,

and I sat down to undo my bindings. Then both

of us stiffened: something unusual was in the air.

We looked at each other, and for a while we

did not quite know what was the matter. Then we

The House on Prague Street    77

nodded in unison; we agreed on what we had

heard. The bells had been sounding for a while

already from the church tower. But it was not a single

bell that rang across the white meadow--all the

bells in the tower were tolling, the four small

ones along with the largest one that was rung only

on Sundays. Now all were clanging as if they

never intended to stop.

"Something horrible must have happened," I said

and grabbed Ernestine's sleeve. Abandoning the

sled and the skis in the snow, we started to run.

Never before did the way home seem so long.

We panted and fell down, the wet snow

sticking to our feet. My hands were freezing because

I had left my mittens alongside the

skis. And the bells: no longer sounding a death

toll, they clanged and clattered as if to burst

the church tower.

The gas lamps had not yet been lit, although

it was already dark. "Maybe Mr. Alois

died?" Ernestine wondered. No, no one would

ring all the bells for Mr. Alois; one would

be enough. It had to be something much worse.

We ran through School Street. No one was

in sight. Far below, where narrow School

Street led into the highway, there were lights, and the

lights were moving. A low roar rose--the roar

of many engines. The people standing down below were silent

as the engines passed noisily. No one said a

word. It took us a long time to push our way

through the crowd. The bells went on and on.

And then we saw the soldiers, on

motorcycles, on trucks, on tanks. But

they did not wear the well-known green uniforms,

and they did not smile at us, and they did not

wave at us as soldiers usually did. They were

all in gray, an endless column of gray

soldiers with gray helmets, all looking

straight ahead as if they still had a long way

to go. Only the men standing on trucks holding

machine guns--they looked at us. But they did

not smile; their guns were pointed at us.

There was no school the next day, and I went

back to the meadow to pick up my skis and my

mittens and Ernestine's sled. The bells had

fallen silent. During the night the snow had

begun to melt in earnest. Small rivulets

flowed downhill, and the round roof of the chapel was

dripping. Skiing was finished for the season. And the

The House on Prague Street    79

soldiers, my mother said, were now in Prague.

That evening we had a telephone call from

Prague. My father, clutching the receiver, was

made to wait a long time; the connection was bad,

strange voices kept breaking in. For a long

time he could not even make out who was calling. It

was Rose, the banker uncle's old

housekeeper. She was weeping and could not talk very

coherently. The banker uncle and Aunt

Olga, his wife, had jumped out of the window that

morning as the German soldiers were marching in.

Yes, they were both dead. Their apartment was on the

fifth floor. Then the censor interrupted the

conversation.

Since Franziska was no longer with us, I

was allowed to travel alone to visit my

grandparents the following summer. My father took

me as far as Ostrau and put me on the

express train. He hung my coat near the

window seat, lifted my suitcase onto the

rack, and set the basket holding ham

rolls, apricots, and paper napkins next

to me. Then he tipped the conductor. Before he

left, he gave me a present: a little red

leather notebook with a golden pencil. I should,

my father said, put down all the names of all the

stations the train went past.

This I did faithfully the whole long day.

I put down the Czech names and added the

German ones--names that I had never heard before

that now appeared ahead of the others everywhere. But the

ham rolls in the lunch basket remained

untouched. At noon, when the dining-car waiter

went through the train with his gong, I followed him

as I had always done with Franziska. And I

liked the meal they served in the dining-car so much that

I stayed for the second sitting.

Franziska's husband, who came to meet me

in Königgrätz, had to settle my dining-

car debts. He was still laughing when he

deposited me at my grandparents' house. I

was deeply offended; could it be that he did not

consider me almost grown up?

For the first time since it had been built the

old house had a roomer. Mr. Karasek

worked at the post office. He was young and his

face sported many pimples, and once I

heard old Emma complain that the pimples and the

creams he used were ruining her bed linens.

The House on Prague Street    81

Mr. Karasek left early in the morning and

returned late at night; he never spoke

to anybody in the house. I turned my eyes

away: he was an intruder, even though grandmother

explained patiently again and again that it was not

Mr. Karasek's fault that he had to live with

us in the old house.

"He was billeted here, you see," she would

say.

"But whose fault is it then, grandmother?" I

asked, feeling angry.

She sighed and patted my cheek, and I

knew exactly what she wanted to tell

me--"Times are very bad, child, you don't understand

that yet"--and I tore away, jumped down the

three steps of the veranda, and was gone before she could

speak.

Grandmother's eyes followed me. They were

sadder than they had ever been before, rimmed with

dark shadows. Grandfather, too, had aged. His

back, which had always been straight, was bent

now. His cane had become more than an

ornament; when he went for his afternoon walk, he

leaned on it heavily. He let old Emma

pick all his strawberries now. At the

beginning of the summer he stood beside her and told

her which ones were to be picked and which ones must be

allowed to ripen another day. But as the days

passed he no longer came outside, leaving the

decisions up to her.

In the hall, the photograph of the old

president was missing. The nail remained, as

if to hold the pale square visible on the

wall. The weathervane on the roof of the garden

swing was the only thing that seemed unaware of

change, turning merrily as the wind shifted.

The swing squeaked now because there was no one to oil

it since old Wenzel had retired.

The rear wall of the house had been painted

over. It was no longer black, and the white

inscription Max Lówy, Coal and

Transport and the two crossed hammers could

no longer be seen. The wall was now yellowish

brown to match the rest of the old house.

The swimming pool in Sonia's garden was

covered with a grate. Lonely leaves, left from

the fall, rustled along its bottom. Sonia

and little John spent a lot of time at the old

house. The baby nurse had left because she

The House on Prague Street    83

did not want to take care of Jew children.

Sonia had repeated the nurse's words and had

shrugged her shoulders the way the baby nurse

used to do.

Aunt Klara did not go out much. Her little

red car stood in the garage, no longer turning

corners with a great hum. The white scarf had

stopped fluttering. Aunt Klara's eyes were

restless, and sometimes she hugged Sonia and little

John so hard they almost cried. I avoided

Aunt Klara, her eyes frightened me.

Then there was a day that began like any other.

Dew dappled the leaves of the strawberry

plants, and the balsam firs nodded by the garden

gate. We had spread our blanket on the

sunny lawn behind the house and built a

sunshade from rhubarb leaves. We

judiciously berated little John, who was

late; as the designated kitchen maid, it was

his duty to wash the dolls' breakfast dishes.

A car stopped at Sonia's house. It was

a gray military car full of gray

soldiers. We left our dolls and tiptoed

to the hedge. The soldiers who jumped out all

had revolvers strapped to their belts, and they

had silver skulls above the visors of their

caps. Two of them took up a position at

the garden gate, two stood below the steps, and

two stepped up to Sonia's front door.

Then a second car arrived, it was big and shiny

and black; a soldier jumped out and opened the

rear door. I was suddenly reminded of the

Warnsdorf cars: they too had been big and

shiny--but no, this one was different. The man who

stepped out of the car was also in gray, but a lot of

silver glittered on his shoulders and on his cap

under the skull. Hooking his thumbs on his

belt, he stood still, his legs in riding boots

spread wide, examining Sonia's house as

if it were his. Then he slowly took off his

gloves. Slowly and deliberately he

pulled off one gray glove and then the other.

He tapped the gloves against his palm while

he walked up the steps to the front door. The

soldiers clicked their heels, and the man rang

the bell. The door opened and then closed behind

him.

One of the soldiers lit a cigarette.

Sonia and I, barely breathing, stood at the

The House on Prague Street    85

hedge. A ladybug came to rest in

Sonia's hair, but she did not notice. The

soldier at the wheel of the first car leaned back

and pushed his cap up his forehead. He began

to whistle.

A shot rang out inside the house, and then

another.

The soldiers raced toward the front door,

their revolvers suddenly in their hands. They

broke down the front door. The soldier who

had sat and whistled jumped over the car door,

tearing the revolver from his belt as he ran. And

in the house someone screamed, a man's voice

was screaming.

Then another shot was fired, and one more, and

grandmother came running toward us, her cheeks

bright red, and she threw herself at us near the

hedge and tried to turn our heads away, but she

was not able to--how could she have?--and we saw the

soldiers carrying the man with the riding boots out

of Sonia's house and into the car, and one of the

soldier's hands was all bloody. They put

him into the car, his legs in the riding boots were

much too long, they had to fold them in, and he

was still. Then they drove off, both cars swerved

as they turned the park corner, they drove so

fast. We heard the tires screeching, and then

they were gone.

The front door stayed open and the garden

gate also, and then little John came out. He

did not have his shoes on yet, he came toward

the hedge with tiny steps, his face all white,

and he said, "Mommy shot the man, and now she

is dead too."

Later many cars came, bringing many

soldiers. They carried a stretcher out of

Sonia's house and took it away. And in the

afternoon they picked up Sonia's father at his

factory, and that night they came and picked up

Sonia and little John. Then they placed

seals on Sonia's front door and on the

garage that housed the little red car. "Confiscated

for the German Reich," the seal read. The

dolls were left in the grass all night, and the

breakfast dishes remained unwashed, and I have

never seen Sonia and little John again.

I did not want to play outside any more.

I sat on the highest plush-covered step,

next to the ferns, and stared through the window at

The House on Prague Street    87

Sonia's house for hours. Nothing moved.

All the large windows, which had always been bright

into the small hours, were dark now. The grass

behind the house began to grow tall. Whenever people

walked past Sonia's house, they either looked

straight ahead or stared at the other side,

toward the park. When old Emma went marketing

in the morning, she avoided Sonia's house

altogether, making a detour to the right to get to the

market. She always returned the same way.

No one ever talked about what had happened,

except for the time when I heard grandfather say,

"She is at peace now, but she brought sorrow

to her family. And what good did it do?"

Grandfather's question remained unanswered. Perhaps he

had only been speaking to himself.

Then old Emma took pity and unlocked the

attic for me. I could play there even if it

didn't rain. The light blue squares of the

skylights watched over me, and the world's noise

was muted by the time it reached me. Everything was far

away. I forgot about Aunt Klara and everything

that had happened. I would not play with dolls

any more. The dry roof beams creaked now and then

as I sat in the rickety wicker rocking

chair, reading.

I read whatever I could find in the retired

bookcases--Jules Verne, Karl May,

Olga Tscharska--and after I had read them

all I would borrow Westerns from one of the

kitchen maids; she had a stack of them in her

room. They were unbound and worn from many a

kitchen maid's hands, but I did not mind.

Before the summer was over, I knew all there was

to know about the Wild West, the prairies and the

Rockies had become my home, and Wild

Bill Hickok had won my heart. The

brown rocking horse with the black mane and the

yellow eyes carried me faithfully for days

at a time, and as I rode I sang softly,

"Oh give me a home, where the buffalo

roam ..." When my parents arrived, I

greeted them by raising my left hand, and instead

of hugging them, I only said, "How." On that

particular day I was an Indian princess, and

my name was White Cloud.

Grandmother took my mother aside to remark,

"It will pass, just give her time. It was terrible

for all of us."

The House on Prague Street    89

Then Aunt Zdena, my mother's sister, died

in Prague. Her death was very sudden, the

result of pneumonia. Grandmother wept

loudly in the hall, and her weeping resounded from

the marble floor. Everyone said, "Maybe it was

a blessing. Who knows what is going to happen to us

all?"

Grandfather's birthday was celebrated very

quietly. That year, not all the people from

Warnsdorf (they lived in Prague now)

came. Uncle Rudolf and Uncle Fritz

were the only ones to come, and they both came

by train. Aunt Johanna, who was also living

in Prague now, did not feel strong enough

to travel. The two aunts from Aussig had

also moved to Prague, and they did not have the

slightest trace of laughter in their faces.

Aunt Theresa, the younger one, had become even

more white-haired since last summer. Coffee

was served in the dining room although it was a

beautiful day. All avoided going into the garden

and looking at Aunt Klara's house.

Nobody mentioned it or her.

At night all the curtains were drawn and

all the windows were closed before any lights were

turned on, as if the old house were a fortress

ringed by the enemy, and as if it were a matter of

life and death to keep secret from all eyes

what went on inside.

The well-wishers from town did not appear

until after dark in that year, and even then they

turned carefully at the garden gate and looked

over their shoulders before slipping inside.

Grandfather's eyebrows twitched as he shook the

visitors' hands, and he said, "You should not have

come, you could get into trouble. You never know who

may see you!" They sat in the drawing room,

drank a glass of wine, and said, "Well,

what can one do?" Then they took their leave, with

great ceremony. They did not make jokes, and

even Mr. Councilor, a bachelor, who had

always laughed about his embarrassment in the presence

of ladies, even he was hushed.

When the two gentlemen from the singing group

departed, I tiptoed out after them to see whether

they would look to their left and to their right again. They

did. They stood still in the shadow of the silver

firs, listening to the sound of footsteps somewhere

toward town. One of them, Mr. Stoklas, the

The House on Prague Street    91

tenor, shook his head and said, "You don't know

what to say to old Lówy any more. How can you

wish him many happy years with his family? He

doesn't even know what's going to happen to them

tomorrow."

The second visitor, Mr. Jenewein,

cleared his throat. "They can't even go to the park

any more," he said.

Mr. Stoklas said, "Many happy years,

damn it all!" and he spat. Then they started

walking; the steps that had sounded nearer to town had

gone. All was clear.

I had not known that my grandfather could not go to the

park. I had not noticed because I had spent the

summer reading in the attic. My grandfather had

founded the park. Why was he barred from it now?

The following morning I went to the park gate

to check whether the park rules made any mention

of my grandfather. The rules were there as always,

framed in green: we, the public, were not

permitted to pick flowers and were requested

to keep peace and order. But a new piece of

paper was attached to the green frame,

tentatively, as if it did not quite belong. It

read, "No Jews permitted to enter."

Slowly I went back to the old house.

Now I no longer wanted to go to the park. In the

kitchen, my mother and grandmother were canning. A row

of bottles filled with friendly round peach

halves was waiting its turn at the big pot.

Old Emma sat on the window seat peeling

fruit. Her legs did not seem to want

to serve her properly that summer, and she sat

down quite often. I hugged and kissed my

mother. Her hands and her apron and her face

smelled of peaches. She bent down, kissed

me back, and laughed. She understood that I had

stopped being Buffalo Bill and Princess

White Cloud: I was her Helenka. Grandmother

stroked my head with her peach-fragrant hands and

smiled though her eyes were serious. I said,

"Who wants to go to that stupid park, anyway.

Not us!"

On the morning of our departure my mother

took my hand as we walked through the old house

together. We began in the cellar that housed the shiny

mountains of coal and the pyramids of

firewood, before we visited the smaller

cellar with shelves full of grandmother's

The House on Prague Street    93

preserves and grandfather's red wine. Our steps

echoed loud and lonely in the hall because we were

already wearing our traveling shoes. We opened

each door and went inside every room, except

for Mr. Karasek's bedroom. It did not

belong to the house really.

My mother touched the great-grandparents' heavy

double bed, and she touched the blue-flowered bowl

and the soap-pot in the dry sink that had been

great-grandfather's.

Next we climbed the iron steps to the

third floor, where my mother peeked into each of the

maids' rooms. Finally we opened the small

iron door leading to the attic. We sat for a

while on one of the trousseau chests underneath the

slanting wall, breathing the hot-dry attic

air spiced with the fragrance of wood. My mother

did not speak. Much later I understood: she

had been saying good-bye to the house of her

family.

    Then there was war. All the papers wrote about

it, but this time the headlines did not say

Barcelona and Madrid, but Warsaw and

Amsterdam and Brussels. Some nights the

window panes rattled when military columns

drove down the broad road to the east.

That winter my father received a fat letter from the

District Office in the capital. He must

appear in person, and the honorable District

Officer himself informed him that he must choose between

divorcing his wife or immediate retirement. The

District Office could no longer tolerate

employees who were related to Jews.

My father thanked the District Officer. He

picked up his pipe in his office, and he never

went there again. His weeping secretary later

brought him his law books, his office towel,

and a farewell letter from his colleagues.

My father spent days sitting alone at the

dining-room table playing chess; from morning

'til night he played one single game. He

would leave the black and white figures in

place overnight and continued playing the following

morning. The game seemed to be without end. When

my father finally finished it, I noticed that a

new wrinkle had grown above his eyebrows.

Several weeks later he went to Prague

to look for a new job; his pension was not enough for us

The House on Prague Street    95

to live on. When he came back, my mother

told me that we would all be moving to Prague

soon.

I cried and did not want to move

to Prague. The city was much too big, there was

no brook there and no bleaching meadow, and what

would grubby Ernestine do without me? Who would show

her the world, who would give her orders, whom would

she obey? My mother patted my head. "I

know, it is very difficult," she said. "But

maybe Ernestine could come and visit you one day?

Her father works for the railroad, it won't cost

her anything to come. Imagine all the things you could

show her in Prague!"

That sounded all right. Slowly I got used

to the idea and even began to look forward to living

in a big city.

Aunt Ella had taken over the job of

finding an apartment for us. Soon she had a

prospect in a new suburban high-rise:

three rooms and a kitchen. The building had just

been completed. There were gardens in front and a

meadow in back, and the Number Four streetcar

went right past. The factory where my father had

found a job as legal counsel was not too far

away.

When my parents returned from Prague, they

seemed pleased. They had liked what Aunt

Ella had found for us. Then my mother ordered

boxes and started packing. The apartment in

School Street began to look inhospitable.

Ernestine crouched in her seat and sobbed, and

tears rolled slowly down the scratched green

surface of her school bench.

    We moved in February. The Misses

Paskud stood weeping in the hallway, their

noses reddened by emotion. They made me a

parting gift of a yellow straw hat trimmed with

shiny red cherries. As we left the small

town in eastern Moravia, the stationmaster

raised his signal and waved with his other hand.

My father's blue eyes looked back for a long

time. Each telegraph pole startled them.

Then he straightened up, patted my mother's

hand, and said, "There, that part of our lives is

behind us."

The new apartment was on the third floor in a

row of brand-new apartment houses. Because the

The House on Prague Street    97

tenants had been in a hurry to move in, the

building had not even been left to settle over

the winter. Everyone tried to get as comfortable as

possible as quickly as possible. Times were too

uncertain, my mother said, and a damp spot on the

wall did not mean much nowadays. Workmen were still

going in and out, a door stuck, the bathroom

window would not close properly, the railings were

not yet installed, the elevator had not been

put in. Behind the houses where, according to the

janitor, a lawn would grow one day, there were

big piles of debris.

Every night I wept secretly in my bed

because I missed my nice room in School

Street. My new room had no curtains as

yet, and my own belongings looked strange in the

alien room. The rattling of the Number Four

streetcar gave me nightmares. The crunch of

sand underfoot, which persisted no matter how much

we swept, hurt my ears. Though I was

desperately unhappy, I could not say a word

to my parents. The three of us had to stick together,

my father had said; to complain now would have been

betrayal. I pulled my blanket over my

head and let my tears soak my pillow.

I carried my unhappiness with me like an

unmentionable secret, but my mother must have noticed

something. One day she said, "Aunt Annel would

like to have you stay with her for a while. She has a

room free now." I almost shouted with joy. I

had always wanted to spend some time with Aunt

Annel.

Aunt Annel really was my great-aunt.

She was my father's favorite, the only

relative on my father's side whom I

knew. She was the only one who had not turned

from him when he married, the only one who had

lovingly accepted my mother. My father had lived

with her as a young student and later as a young

lawyer, because Aunt Annel had a big

apartment right behind the National Museum. She

rented rooms, furnished, breakfast included.

She herself lived only in the kitchen, where she

could move along narrow paths between the stove and the

cupboard and between her bed and the table. Every

available inch was filled with objects, food

packages and old newspapers and

photograph albums and dishes and boxes of

all kinds. Aunt Annel had never in her

The House on Prague Street    99

life thrown out a thing, she had kept them all,

because it could happen that one might need something at

some point; she knew the exact location of each

spool of thread. Her kitchen was full of

secrets, just like the attic in the house of my

grandparents.

Aunt Annel had never married, and my father

often teased her, saying, "No wonder, Aunt

Annel--what man would like to live in a kitchen

like yours?" Aunt Annel usually patted his

hand and replied, "Never you mind, you fresh

boy. There were several who would have liked to!"

Then she laughed and blushed. She had been a

real beauty in her day, my father told me.

She still had a cheerful little nose and cheeks like

velvet, and a thick brown knot of hair. But

her feet in the black button shoes were

sometimes tired now and her hands shook.

I moved in with Aunt Annel. The corner

room with the Biedermeier furniture was free:

a lady who had lived there for ten years was

getting married, and the new tenant would not be

arriving until the following month. Aunt

Annel received me with open arms. She made a

cup of hot chocolate at once; the stove was

still warm.

We made ourselves comfortable on the worn

black leather sofa. First I had to talk, and

Aunt Annel said, "I'm not at all

surprised, I can't stand those modern houses

either!" I nodded and felt better immediately. It

was not a betrayal to confess my unhappiness

to Aunt Annel because she loved my parents,

too.

Then Aunt Annel began to talk, and her

blue eyes grew young again. She talked about the

theatre and operettas, her passion. She was an

operetta fanatic. She knew all of

Strauss and all of Lehár by heart, down

to the last note, and I listened attentively

to the stories of the Duke of Luxembourg and of the

Gypsy Baron and of Friederike. As I

drank my hot chocolate I nodded with deep

understanding when Aunt Annel sighed and said,

"Yes, my whole youth is in those waltzes,

child."

Later the two other tenants joined us.

Aunt Annel put some more coals on and

made some more hot chocolate. The coals

The House on Prague Street   101

crackled in the kitchen stove, and the two

ladies had to sit on Aunt Annel's bed

because there was no room elsewhere, and they said,

"Thank heaven for Miss Annel and her

operettas!"

When I returned home some days later, the

apartment looked less cold and strange. My

room had curtains now--the familiar

curtains from School Street--and I was content

and stopped crying in the night.

Then I had to start in my new school. It

was in the Weinberg section of Prague, but I

had to take the streetcar to get there. I was very

proud of my student pass in a blue-framed

plastic case; what would grubby Ernestine

say to all that?

Boys and girls sat together in the same

classroom, a change that took some getting

used to. The very first morning one of the Blaha

twins tripped me so that I fell on my way

to the blackboard. He was given detention, but that

did not help me much.

The girl who shared the last row with me because we

two were the tallest did not seem to have much

compassion for my anger. Beet-red in the face,

she sat motionless, refusing to answer my questions.

Only when noon approached and she realized that

she would soon have to get up did she show me

what had happened. Her light blue skirt was

stained with blood in the back. Terrified, I

helped her with her coat so that no one would see

her disgrace. Then I walked her to her

streetcar and tried to steady her; I was worried

that she might faint any minute. But she was very

cheerful, and we decided to be friends. Irene

Dvo%rak had a much bigger bosom than I.

I envied her.

While I waited for my streetcar the

loudspeaker in the lamp post above me coughed in

anticipation. Then a triumphant voice

announced that a heroic U-boat had sunk

thirteen thousand tons in the Atlantic during

the night. Then drums and fifes rendered "We

shall bring England to her knees." But I no

longer listened since my streetcar was rattling

down the Weinberg Hill with me on board. The

young conductor winked at me when I showed him

my student pass. I quickly turned away and

looked out the window, because I was not quite sure why

The House on Prague Street   103

he was laughing. Was it because I was a girl of

almost thirteen, or because he needed some solace

after the loudspeaker announcement? In any

case, it was not proper to return his laugh.

Slowly I grew used to life in

Prague. I stopped being scared of cars, and

I even learned to jump off a moving streetcar

without falling. It was not hard at all--one just

had to lean back as far as possible when jumping.

In those early Prague days streetcars were a

special joy for me. I spent many afternoons

riding from one terminal to the other in order to go for a

walk in completely unknown neighborhoods.

Only when I began to feel really lonely would

I hurry home to give my mother a breathless

account of my adventures.

Once I persuaded Irene to come with me because

we were friends. But Irene was much more interested in the

young men in the streetcar than in walking around

terminal stations, and we almost had a fight.

Irene said that my journeys were childish, and I

told her that she should pull her skirt down

over her knees. "Now you're talking just like my

mother," Irene said and laughed and made a face.

An old lady across the aisle looked at us

sternly. Irene started poking me until I

too had to laugh.

Irene lived in Straschnitz, another

suburb, in a small room behind a tavern

owned by her uncle. Irene's mother lived with her;

she was divorced and had crippled legs. She

sat alone in the room all day, holding an

orange-colored guinea pig on her lap.

When I came to visit Irene, I would sit

with her mother and keep her company. But conversation was

difficult; Irene's mother had a whiney voice

and the guinea pig constantly dropped little

pellets which Irene's mother picked up with her

fingers to throw into the wastebasket.

When I tried discussing her mother with Irene,

she just shrugged her shoulders. She much preferred

helping her uncle in the taproom, where she could

joke with the customers and let her skirts fly.

Her legs were round and firm. I looked down

at my own body. It was all angles, and my

bosom was barely visible, even when I pushed

my chest out and held my breath. I was very

unhappy with myself.

Our apartment turned out to be quite cozy. After

The House on Prague Street   105

checking all the doors and windows, the workmen had

departed. The janitor had cleared away the

rubble in the backyard and had sowed grass. For the

time being the meadow behind the fence looked much greener

than his pampered square. Primroses and tiny

daisies bloomed in the meadow in profusion, and

sometimes toward evening a shepherd brought his

flock.

The Giacomelli family had the apartment

next to ours. My parents and they became friends.

Mr. Giacomelli was an engineer. He was

tall, dark, and a bit aloof. He came from the

South Tyrol, "That's why he has an

Italian name," my mother explained. "And

please don't stare at him when he comes

to visit!" I blushed and had a coughing fit.

Mr. Giacomelli looked like a beautiful

young god to me, and I had hoped that nobody would

notice. Mrs. Giacomelli was a pretty

redhead; she had green eyes and many

freckles.

On the sixth floor an efficiency apartment

with a terrace housed the Kuchlers. Hilde

Kuchler, a distant cousin of my father's, was

only nineteen; she was blond and liked

to laugh. Her husband, Emil, was not much

older. They had only been married since

fall, and they always hugged each other as they

came down the stairs. Sometimes it sounded as if

only one person was descending; they

coordinated their steps perfectly.

Above us, on the fourth floor, lived Dr.

Rechlitz and his wife. They had also been

married only a short time. Dr. Rechlitz

worked in the hospital in the suburb of

Bohnitz. He left very early in the morning

and sometimes came home very late. Mrs.

Rechlitz would visit my mother often--because she was

a lonely young thing, my mother said. She was cheerful

and her mouth was always very red, and her long lashes

made pretty shadows on her cheeks. Whenever

she spoke of their yearning to have children, she grew

sad and said, "All those years we waited because

Ludwig was studying, and now we don't have the

courage. God knows what will happen to us

all." My mother quickly looked in my direction

and offered Mrs. Rechlitz some coffee.

Sometimes, when he was off duty, Dr.

Rechlitz came along on these visits. His

The House on Prague Street   107

glasses gleamed in a friendly way, he looked

me over, and said to my mother, "For heavens sake,

what do you feed the girl? She's grown three

inches since I last saw her!" Then he would

laugh and quickly pull out his pad to prescribe

some vitamins for me.

On Sundays Aunt Ella and her husband

also came to visit. Aunt Ella was learning

English because there was hope again that they might get

another visa. Uncle Fred's export

business had been taken over by a German

manager, who permitted Uncle Fred to work in

his own firm as a typist, and that was a great

honor, Uncle Fred said. I did not think

it was fair, but Uncle Fred patted my

shoulder saying, "This is how things are, for the

present." There was nothing I could say about that;

"for the present" was Uncle Fred's favorite

phrase.

    The following summer I could not go visit my

grandparents because an order had come to vacate the

old house on Prague Street within a

week; a room had been assigned to them in

town. My father took some days off and went

to help them move. When he came back, he

brought my mother a box filled with yellowed

family photographs. She sat over it for a

long time, crying. It was all that remained of the

attic in the old house.

Jews had been issued stars--two black

triangles inscribed at the center with the word

JUDE printed on yellow fabric. These were

to be worn visibly at all times, attached

to the left side of the chest. Some had sewn theirs

carefully and neatly onto their coats, using

many tiny stitches, as if the stars were to remain

fixed on the coats for years and years.

Others, like Emil Kuchler, attached them

sloppily, with safety pins. My mother had

sewn her star slightly lower, below her chest, so

that when she went out with me or with my father she could

hold her handbag over it. Jews and

non-Jews were not permitted to walk together.

Once I heard my father laugh angrily as

he said, "Maybe you should leave your handbag at

home, and I should put on my Iron

Cross. That would be funny!" I grew

frightened. Surely it would not be funny at all

The House on Prague Street   109

but terribly dangerous. What would the Germans

say? But it had only been a joke; the

Iron Cross First Class stayed in its

box, and my mother continued holding her handbag

over her star when they next went for a walk.

The maneuver did not seem at all

strange to me, it was a common practice.

Mrs. Giacomelli's star was also sewn below

her chest. Dr. Rechlitz's was sewn almost

under his sleeve; he began to carry his

briefcase under his arm even when he was not going

to the hospital. Mrs. Rechlitz carried her

handbag in her hand as always, because she was an

Aryan. She balanced along on spike

heels.

Only the Kuchlers from the sixth floor no

longer descended the stairs in unison. Emil

Kuchler ran to work in the morning as if wild

men were chasing him, and once when Hilde

Kuchler came to visit her eyes were

red-rimmed. My father had a long talk with her

in the living room. The door was shut tight, and

my mother sent me to my room and closed the door

behind me, so that I would not hear a sound. Much

later, when they came out again, I heard my father

say to Hilde, "In that case it will be better

if you don't come to see us again." His voice was

very cold and strict. Hilde Kuchler did not

speak. I listened at the keyhole and wanted

to hear more, but the apartment door closed and my father

did not say another word.

I felt sorry for Hilde Kuchler; she

had pretty dimples when she laughed, and such

pretty blond hair with curls above her

forehead. I did not see her for a long time after

that, and I was secretly angry with my father; I

thought that he had not been very polite; she was his

cousin, after all.

Emil Kuchler continued running to work. He

did not answer when one said hello to him. His

pants were shabby, his shirt collars were grimy,

and he never wore a tie. My mother said that

Hilde Kuchler was no longer living with him,

she was getting a divorce, and that was the reason

why Emil Kuchler's clothes were so untidy.

And then one morning there was a commotion on the

sixth floor. The janitor rang and knocked

and hammered at Emil Kuchler's door, all

the while holding a damp handkerchief to his

The House on Prague Street   111

nose. The hallway smelled of gas. Then the

janitor went and got the pass-key and

unlocked Emil Kuchler's door. The whole

house smelled of gas. The previous night

Emil Kuchler had sat down in his

kitchenette and had turned on all the

burners.

He was buried in the Jewish cemetery.

Only my mother and Mrs. Giacomelli and

Dr. Rechlitz were there, because Emil Kuchler

had come from Germany and had no family of his own.

Aryans were not permitted to attend funerals of

Jews.

Hilde Kuchler later returned to the

efficiency apartment. Her name was Hilde

Leidel now, and the apartment had been freshly

repainted. The smell of gas, the janitor

had said, you could not get it out with fresh air

alone, paint was what you had to have. Hilde

Kuchler worked at the Reich Protection

Ministry. Sometimes in the morning, when we sat

at the breakfast table, I would hear her running

down the stairs. I knew her step, and my father

must have known it, too. He always frowned and

pushed away his coffee cup.

One evening when I went to get my father's

beer, I saw a gray military car stopping

in fron of our house. I froze, because a

military car could not mean anything but danger.

I crept under the stairs, pressing the jug

against my chest; my heartbeats sounded even

louder against the porcelain. Then I could see that

there was no danger: Hilde Kuchler was coming up

the steps, moving toward the elevator, with a

German officer. He was young and very happy. His

arm around her hips, he said, "Who would want

to be that fussy?" Hilde Kuchler laughed as

she opened the elevator door. Before the door

fell shut and the elevator slowly began

to move, the ceiling light fell on her blond

curls and on the officer's silvery shoulders.

I waited for the elevator to arrive on the

sixth floor. Doors were opened and shut, and

then the elevator came down again, empty and

dark. It stopped with a shudder, and everything was

quiet. I went across the street to get the

beer; I never told my parents what I had

seen.

Then Ernestine came to visit me. She was

The House on Prague Street   113

freshly scrubbed and was wearing a new dress which

did not have any spots on the sleeve, and she

had a dozen new handkerchiefs in her

suitcase. But otherwise she was still dumb old

Ernestine. She gaped because we lived on the

third floor and because she had never seen a house

with so many people in it and because she had never seen a

streetcar before and never so many cars and never an

elevator and never a mother who wore a star on

her coat and held her handbag over it.

For a while Ernestine's gaping was fun. I

took her to the castle and pulled her up the

five hundred and sixty-seven steps to the

bell tower of the Cathedral. I took her on

the streetcar from one terminal to another.

Eventually, however, Ernestine was just too

dumb. All she ever did was gape; she

understood nothing. By the time Irene Dvo%rak

wrinkled her nose and said that Ernestine's hair

was too stringy and that she did not smell too

nice besides--by then I had already given up on

Ernestine.

My mother was cordial to Ernestine as always.

She took me aside and said, "Ernestine is

our guest, and you behave accordingly, no matter

what Irene Dvo%rak tells you." I

grumbled a lot and was mad at my mother because she

did not want to understand that I was grown up now and

had no patience with grubby children. The laughter in

my mother's eyes faded. "If you're as grown

up as you think, then you must be polite." I

sighed and went to show Ernestine the Old Town

clock, which made her gape for the rest of the afternoon.

It was true that she did not smell as nice as

Irene.

But the week Ernestine was to spend with us

passed quickly. In her dumb state she did not

even notice that I could not wait to be rid of

her. In the railroad station she kept

embracing me and promised again and again to write

to me every day. I had not even asked her to, she

was that dumb.

Walking home from the station I felt alone and

misunderstood. But my mother came and hugged me and

said, "Here comes my heroine who handles herself so

well!" I could see that she had understood me

all week long, and I was quite pleased.

Nevertheless I made a mad face.

"I am going to tell Papa on you," I

The House on Prague Street   115

said, "and he will not let you have any butter for

breakfast!"

Then we both giggled and hugged one another.

The breakfast butter was our family joke.

My mother received Jewish ration cards. JUDE

JUDE JUDE was printed all over them in

big black letters. She had to sign her name on

them, Marie Sara Richter, although Sara was not

her name at all. The Germans had ordered that

every Jewish woman had to call herself Sara.

All my mother received in exchange for these ration

cards was some margarine. And we shared our Aryan

butter with her every morning.

Aunt Ella did not come very often now, but

I went to see her almost every day. Since she no

longer worked in an office, she had learned

pastry-making. "We'll certainly have more use

for something of that kind in America than for

accounting," she said. There was hope again that they

might get another visa. She spent every

morning standing in one of the lines at the American

Embassy.

But in the afternoons Aunt Ella practiced

what she had learned from her chef patissier;

she made tiny cream rolls and

cornucopias, and light green and

pink-colored fondant, and I watched her

nimbly mix almond paste from the black

market and move the tip of her tongue from one

corner of her mouth to the other. I sat very still as

I watched, quietly handing Aunt Ella

pans and spoons. Sometimes I was allowed

to grate hazelnuts from the black market or

put chocolate from the black market into the double

boiler. I would not have gone away for anything in

the world, although watching and helping was torture;

we were not permitted to taste a single one of the

pastries, not a single one of the bonbons. The

baker weighed all the ingredients twice before

giving them to Aunt Ella, and she had to bring

back exactly the same weight in finished

pieces. Sometimes, when the sugar did not melt

properly, she would be beside herself. She would have

tears in her eyes and call out in a tearful

voice, "Please come and help me, Daddy!"

And Daddy--Uncle Fred--would get up from his

solitaire, take off his glasses, sniff,

and pretend that he understood a lot about how

pastries were made. But he did not really

The House on Prague Street   117

understand much, I knew, because usually he only

said, "You have to wait and be calm, child, for the

present." Then he would kiss Aunt Ella

and go back to his solitaire game.

Aunt Ella would weep and sigh a while

longer, but then the sugar usually did what she

wanted it to, dripping downward like a long

silvery thread. Aunt Ella would wipe her

nose with the back of her hand and cheer up.

Uncle Fred was always home now, the

German manager had learned everything from him and

no longer needed him. He sat around the apartment

playing solitaire. His elegant English

suits were hanging loosely on him, and the

collars of his silk shirts no longer hugged his

throat. When it rained, he always coughed a good

deal. Sometimes my mother sent him some milk because

she was on friendly terms with the lady from the dairy

shop. This always caused Uncle Fred

to remark, "Your mother should feed you, Helenka,

for the present." Then he would argue with Aunt

Ella for a long time, insisting that she drink some

of the milk. Aunt Ella was always reluctant

at first. Only when Uncle Fred stated,

"Then I will not have any either, child," would Aunt

Ella give in and drink a little. But she cheated

every time by taking tiny sips.

But then they did not get a visa after all.

Aunt Ella stopped going to the American

Embassy and began to make fondant candies

and marzipan mushrooms and chocolate cups

even in the mornings. Sugar dripped into the

iron pan, Aunt Ella's tongue wandered from

one corner of her mouth to the other, and Uncle

Fred coughed.

Once as I was coming home from school, the

loudspeaker above the streetcar stop rattled again

before the voice announced that our heroic

Japanese allies had destroyed Pearl

Harbor. I did not know where Pearl Harbor

was, but the voice said that Germany had declared war

on America; Pearl Harbor must be in

America, I thought. Thank heavens Aunt

Ella had not gone there, she might be dead now.

When the streetcar came the passengers did

not look as grouchy as usual after loudspeaker

announcements. The conductor laughed, bent

down to me, and whispered, "The Americans will

show them!" I nodded without quite knowing what the

The House on Prague Street   119

Americans were supposed to show and to whom:

Japan was at the other end of the world! But maybe

what had happened was a good thing after all.

Maybe it was too bad that Aunt Ella and

Uncle Fred had not gone to America.

    I returned to school after lunch for gym

three times a week. Once the streetcar was

stopped by four soldiers wearing skulls and

bones on their caps. They stormed inside,

each into one compartment, and demanded to see our

papers. The soldiers, who were holding guns in

their hands, omitted no one. A man wearing a

star stood on the outside platform--the only

place where Jews were allowed to ride. He was

eager to show his papers, but the soldiers slapped

and hit him and took him away. He looked

back once, very calmly, as if expecting that

someone would come to his defense. But all the people in

the streetcar looked straight ahead, each one

for himself, as if nothing had happened. Then the

conductor rang the bell and the streetcar rumbled

on.

That afternoon the gym class was canceled. We were

made to sit in the classroom for a long time.

Then Hlawitza, the German professor,

came in. He wore his black boots and he

was even paler than usual, and he shouted that they

would find the guilty person, the cowardly dog,

the Jew-Bolshevik, they would certainly find

the man who that very afternoon had shot

Reichsprotector Heydrich in the back and

killed him. Then we all went home.

I woke up in the middle of the night. There

were light and noise and heavy steps on the

stairs. Our doorbell rang and someone

shouted, "Open up!" I crept back into bed

and pulled my blanket over my head. I

heard my father go to the door. I pushed the

blanket away from my face: if my father was not

afraid, I could not be afraid either. Two

soldiers with guns and skulls came in, the

janitor running after them, wearing his nightgown

and shaking, and he said, "Dr. Richter lives

here!" But the soldiers did not want my father

at all, they did not want my mother either, and I

began to breathe again. They merely opened all the

doors and all the closets, and they looked under

each of the beds. One of them had dirt on his

The House on Prague Street   121

boots. The other one came into my room, he

smelled of sweat, and he looked under my bed and

picked up my blanket. I held it tight

around my neck. He looked at me, then he

turned away and said, "The hell with it all!"

Then they left. They rang the bell next

door, I heard the janitor say, "Mr.

Giacomelli lives here!" Then my mother

came in and said, "I'm going to make some

tea." She went into the kitchen.

My father patted my hand, which was still clutching the

blanket. Now I could let go. I asked,

"What did they want?"

My father looked at me as if he had just

woken up. His eyes were frightened now. He was

amazed that I did not understand. "They are looking

for the murderer," he said. "But come now, we'll

have some tea." We sat on our kitchen stools

and drank tea from the breakfast coffee cups.

My parents did not speak.

Two days later my mother's hands were shaking as

she told me that they had found the murderers.

They had come from England, she said, with

parachutes, and I should go to town and look at the

church where they had been hiding.

Irene and I went together. The front of the

church was scarred by many bullet holes, the

windows were all broken, and the doors were boarded

up. A soldier who was standing guard told us

to stop loitering and to keep moving. Irene made

eyes at him, but I took her arm and pulled

her away.

I admired Irene more than ever, because she was

in love now. In the mornings, before she went

to class, she would stand in the washroom for hours,

making faces and pulling at her hair. She

buckled her belt so tightly that it looked as

if instead of a waist she had an empty space

between her chest and her hips. She had bought herself

a small round box of makeup, and I had

to keep it for her in my satchel. Irene

moaned, "If my uncle finds it, he'll

give me a beating!" Since my mother never went

through my things, I could keep the makeup for

Irene. Every morning before school I brought it

to the washroom.

Irene was in love with Josef Nedoma.

He sat on the boys' bench in the back and I

liked him too, because he was tall and blond and

The House on Prague Street   123

had a deep voice, not a squeaky one like the

others. Marie Schneider sat two rows

further up. She had many pimples and did

Josef Nedoma's homework because she loved

him, too. But Josef Nedoma had chosen

Irene, although he continued to take his homework

off Marie. I did not think he was being fair,

but Irene only laughed. She wrote love

letters under her desk, rolled them into balls, and

threw them to Josef Nedoma. He wrote

too, and his ears turned red. As soon as

Professor Nemecek turned to the

blackboard, paper balls started flying back

and forth. I had to write Irene's papers because

she simply did not have the time.

Josef Nedoma did not have a father any more,

and his mother was working somewhere or other. One day

Irene told me that after gym we would be going

to visit Josef Nedoma in his apartment. He

lived in a row house in the Old Quarter, where

the stairs smelled of cabbage. Josef

Nedoma's apartment consisted only of a kitchen with

two sofas in it. Josef Nedoma and Irene

sat on one sofa and I sat on the other, right

next to the sink. Josef Nedoma pulled a

blanket over his and Irene's heads, and

Irene giggled under the blanket.

For a while I watched the blanket heaving

over their heads and hands, but then I grew bored

and went to stand at the window. Irene giggled.

Next door a woman was shaking out a thick

shag rug; dust tickled her nose and she

sneezed. Down in the yard little kids were playing

blind man's buff. The kitchen clock ticked

very slowly, the faucet dripped. I went over

to the sink and tightened the tap. Then I went

back to the window. The woman was still sneezing.

After a while Irene and Josef Nedoma

came out from under the blanket, both looking

disheveled; Josef Nedoma's ears were very

red. Irene combed her hair in front of the

mirror over the sink. Josef Nedoma

carefully folded the blanket. Then we

left. Irene's cheeks were hot. She hugged

me in the hallway and said, "Next time we'll

take Paul Kunert with us, then you'll have

fun, too." I shrugged. I didn't

especially like Paul Kunert. He had

crooked teeth.

The House on Prague Street   125

But I went with them the next time. The clock

again ticked slowly. Because there was only one

blanket, all of us had to fit on one sofa.

Josef Nedoma and Irene kissed like movie

stars and sighed a lot. Paul Kunert kissed

me, but his crooked teeth were in his way. I

let him kiss me because I was squeezed between him

and Irene and I did not want to be a

spoilsport. The blanket over our heads

stifled our breath, it was hot, and Paul

Kunert's crooked teeth were everywhere.

Then Josef Nedoma suggested that we, the

girls, should take off our dresses. His mother

would not be home for a long time. Irene giggled and

agreed. I said no, and Paul Kunert

turned red and said no. It was a tie, two

against two, and so Josef Nedoma folded the

blanket again and we went home.

Outside I told Irene that I would not come

to Josef Nedoma's apartment again. I still felt

the hot blanket on my face and Paul

Kunert's crooked teeth, and I was angry

at myself. Irene said, "All right, then I'll

take Marie Schneider with me!"

We did not speak to each other for a week after

that. In the morning I put the small round

makeup box on the sink without a word, and

Irene returned it without a word after she had

put the makeup on her cheeks. Eventually

both of us grew tired of the charade, and we

made up. Irene went alone to Josef

Nedoma's after that, and I continued doing her

papers for her.

Professor Hlawitza hated me, a

condition that caused me great suffering. I was not a

grind, but I liked my teachers to like me. Even

in first grade I had always felt good when old

Mrs. Dolezal patted my head as she

walked past my bench. At first I could not

understand why Hlawitza either looked at me

angrily or completely ignored me. I was

good in German, and I could have been his best

student if he had only let me. I

secretly learned grammar rules and parsed

sentences, but he very rarely called on me.

He would joke with the others once in a while, but

he only sneered at me. He had pale

cheeks under shifty eyes, and his hands were pale

and thin; his wife, Irene said, had a baby every

The House on Prague Street   127

year.

Once I stayed behind in the classroom

during the midmorning break to copy Irene's

algebra for her. At last all the examples

were done, and I hurried to get outside. In the

door I almost bumped into Hlawitza. He

looked down at me, his eyes were evil even

close up, and he reached up and pulled my

hair so hard that my head hit the doorframe.

He hissed, "Damn brat!" I mumbled an

apology and ran downstairs. In all my

life nobody had called me "damn brat."

When I told Irene she just shrugged. "Never

mind him," she said, "you know he's a Nazi!"

Her head was full of Josef Nedoma, and she

had little patience with me.

My mother wanted to know what had happened

to make me unhappy. When I told her, I

hoped she would be very angry about mean old

Hlawitza and would tell my father about him. I

had hoped that my father would go to my school at

once to defend me and punish Hlawitza. But

my mother only said, "Stay away from him if he

doesn't like you." That was all. My father also

acted as if nothing had happened, but I was

sure he knew; my mother always told him

everything.

So I continued sitting mute through all the

German lessons, deserted by everyone. I

knew all the answers and said them quietly

to myself. But I was rarely called on. When

Hlawitza did ask me something, his voice was

cutting and sarcastic, and the class dutifully

giggled.

Toward the end of the school year I was

returning some maps to the conference room after

geography class. It was not until I had

placed them all on the table and was turning

to leave that I noticed Hlawitza standing by the

paper supplies. He had not answered the

door. I ducked, thinking that he would hit me.

But Hlawitza lifted my chin with one finger and

said, "Oh, nice little Miss Richter, who

is always so good!" I tried to smile, but the

meanness in his voice made me tremble. He still

would not let me go, his eyes traveled from my

face downward to my thin checkered blouse with

pockets on my chest. He lifted one of the

pocket flaps with two fingers and said, "A

The House on Prague Street   129

pretty blouse--was but then his fingers were no

longer on my blouse but on my breast. I

stammered something, pushed him aside and ran out.

The conference room door slammed. Only when

I got to the end of the corridor did I

collect myself: I caught my breath and

returned to the classroom.

The episode was not at all like Paul

Kunert with his crooked teeth under Josef

Nedoma's blanket. Paul Kunert was a

pal, and he had meant well. What had

happened now was evil and mean and disgusting,

black riding boots and a baby every year.

I did not tell Irene. At lunch, when

I could not swallow a single bite, I told

my mother. She did not look at me. Then she

touched my head. I could not see her face.

She said, "I thought it would be something like this, from the

very beginning. I will tell Papa."

I expected my father to go to the principal's

office the very same day to destroy Hlawitza

with a single sentence. I hated Hlawitza now

the same way he hated me. A teacher was not

allowed to do a thing like that, that I knew, and I

wanted my father to avenge me. But my father did

not go to the principal's office. He acted as

if nothing had happened and played chess. He

did not do anything the next day, and he must have

known what had happened: my mother always told him

everything.

I felt humiliated and ashamed for him.

He had always been my hero, he had been a

proud man afraid of no one, he had been more

handsome and more intelligent than all the other

fathers. The three of us were supposed to stick together

no matter what happened. Why wasn't he

defending his daughter now? But my father did not

speak, and his eyes were afraid now, afraid as

they had been when we were leaving the small town in

Moravia. I had never seen so much fear in

my father's eyes. He had always been my hero.

Why was he a hero no longer?

Several days later my mother spoke to me.

"There's nothing we can do," she said. "You'll

simply have to avoid the man as best you can." But

by then my father had already ceased being a hero for me.

He had done nothing but play chess.

    We spent that summer in Prague. My mother

The House on Prague Street   131

was not permitted to ride the trains, and my father

did not feel like taking a vacation. Toward the

end of the summer I went with him to visit my

grandparents, just for one week. My mother stayed

home. She waved to us from the window for a long

time.

Grandfather met us at the station as always, and for a

fleeting moment everything was as it had been, the

begonia baskets above the platforms and the

framed sign, "Altitude: 582 meters

above sea level." But when I got a close

look at grandfather, I was startled. He was bent

over and looked tired, and the star on his coat was

like a mark of shame. He whispered to my father that

he would rather walk behind us. I didn't understand his

reasons: I turned and smiled and waved to him,

but grandfather did not wave back. His eyes were

fixed on the ground. And suddenly I

remembered: Jews and non-Jews were not

allowed to walk together, not even here. My grandfather

held his head low as he walked behind us, and he

did not speak to anyone. Some people we met

greeted him in a loud voice, and some looked

away as if they were ashamed.

This time we went to the town square because we were

to live in the hotel. It was the same hotel which

had once housed grandfather's drivers and which had

later been called Hotel Lówy. Now its

name was Post-Hotel. Grandfather waited

outside while we took our bags in because

Jews were not permitted to enter. My father held

my hand. The manager, Mr. Uher, gave us

our room key and whispered, "It's a rotten

shame, Dr. Richter, a rotten shame."

He looked through the window at grandfather's bent

back, and then he pulled out his handkerchief and

blew his nose for a long time. Following us to the

sidewalk, he said, "How are you, Mr.

Lówy?" But grandfather did not answer him.

My grandparents were rooming at the Weiners'.

Mr. Weiner had once been grandfather's

accountant, but he had retired a long time

ago. The apartment was narrow and dark. The

Weiners had given their best room to my

grandparents, although grandfather had not ever

associated with them much: Mr. Weiner had been

the Eldest in the Jewish Community, and I had

often heard my grandfather say that he himself did not

like all those people who thought of themselves as Jews rather

The House on Prague Street   133

than Czechs.

Grandmother and Mrs. Weiner now kept house

together. A year before, when my grandparents had

moved in, my father told me, they had tried

to cook separately. But the kitchen was much too

small for two families, there were not enough pans

for two separate meals, and Mrs. Weiner was

not fond of cooking, anyway. So grandmother had

taken over the cooking for all of them, and Mrs.

Weiner, sighing copiously, did all the

dishes. My grandmother still wore the black

velvet ribbon around her neck. Many tiny

wrinkles fanned out below her eyes, and the blue

eyes themselves held all the sadness. She wore

one of Emma's old aprons as she cooked.

She could have wrapped herself in it twice over.

For supper there still was my favorite dish,

Wiener schnitzel. Mr. Brichta, the

butcher, personally brought a small package

of meat every second night. He kept it hidden

under his coat and would not accept money. He

brought it, he said, for the sake of the good old

days. The egg lady also came frequently,

a bag over her arm. Sometimes a pound of

butter or a package of flour would be on the

doorstep, and grandmother would not know whom to thank for

it. Only the wine cream was missing, because all

the wine had remained in the cellar of the old

house. But I did not mention it, nor did

anyone else.

I was now old enough, even grandmother had

to agree, to be allowed to roam about on my own.

I went to the castle and in the opposite

direction, where the forest began. Sometimes I would

meet grandfather's friends. They said, "Look here,

the Lówy granddaughter!" Then they would

inquire after my grandparents. I told them that

grandmother spent a lot of time cooking and that

grandfather would not talk to anyone, not even to me.

Then they patted my shoulder, said, "Oh yes,

oh yes," and walked on quickly.

Once I went to visit Franziska.

She lived in a development behind the railroad

because her husband now worked for the sugar factory.

She had grown chubby and had twins. She

embraced me and bawled a bit and said, "You

are almost big enough now to get married!" I pinched

her arm as I had always done. The twins

crawled around in the grass and drooled a great

The House on Prague Street   135

deal.

Franziska sat down on the garden bench and

picked up one twin. But the other one began

to scream right away because he wanted to be picked

up too. Franziska was laughing again and

holding them both. Her lap was large enough.

Then she said, "Your grandmother gave me all her

linen to keep for you. You have to tell your mother that

everything is here. If she needs something, I will

send it."

I wanted to ask Franziska whether she still

thought of the handsome trumpet player. Then I

decided not to.

Franziska told me that old Emma had

died the previous winter. "She had a

beautiful death," she nodded, "she lay down

at night and was dead in the morning, all

peaceful, too. She never was quite right after she had

to leave the old house. She missed it a

lot." Franziska sighed and used her apron

to wipe away the twins' drool. Both

babies had black eyes just like

Franziska's husband.

I thought of old Emma, of her legs in the

thick woolen stockings walking ahead of me

toward the iron attic door, of the dry-hot

attic air ...

"I want to give you some sugar to take to your

grandmother," said Franziska. "Tell her she

only has to let me know when she needs more, we

have plenty of it." She put the twins down in the

grass again. They were drooling more than before. Then

she got up, straightened her apron, and went

inside.

Only on the last day of our stay did I

secretly go to see the old house. I had

overheard grandmother telling my father that it was still

standing empty, although they had been forced to move out

in a hurry one year ago. She thought standing

empty would damage the thick old walls for

sure.

The house looked strange. The shutters were

closed and the pebbled path leading to the three steps

under the glass veranda was overgrown with weeds.

Nothing moved. Grass stood knee-high, or

bent sadly to the side where rain had flattened

it. I could see the green lawn swing between the

trees, but the weathervane was no longer on its

roof. It had been loose last time already; the

The House on Prague Street   137

wind had probably torn it off. The silver

firs nodded at the garden gate, and in the large

bed, underneath the many weeds, there was an occasional

red shimmer: grandfather's strawberries.

Next door, in Sonia's garden, there were

voices. Someone was living in Sonia's

house. I looked carefully; three boys were

playing on the lawn. They wore black

corduroy shorts with little daggers at their

belts, swastikas were sewn on the sleeves

of their brown shirts, and swastikas decorated

the medals on their chests. The hedge between the two

gardens was high and thick: the narrow pass-through

had grown over.

That night we had to say goodbye to my

grandparents. Our train was to leave early in the

morning, and grandfather could not accompany us to the

station because Jews were not allowed out so early.

Grandmother held me for a long time. I felt her

pulse under the black velvet ribbon. She

said, "Please take good care of your mother." I

nodded, and over grandmother's shoulder I saw my

grandfather holding my father's hands. The bent

shoulders of my grandfather were shaking--he was crying.

I had never thought that my grandfather could cry,

tears were running down his cheeks. No, I could

not look at that. I tore myself away from

grandmother and ran outside.

In the morning we returned to Prague.

Nobody accompanied us. "It's as if they were

gone already," my father said. But the begonia

baskets above the platforms moved slightly as

always.

I was glad to be back in Prague, where

I did not have to live in a hotel which was no

longer named Hotel Lówy, where there was no

old house, and no strange boys in

Sonia's garden, and no grandmother in Emma's

old apron, and no grandfather who would not speak

any more and who had cried so terribly. I did

not talk about our visit and kept quiet no

matter how much they asked me.

"You should not have let her go," said Aunt

Ella to my mother on her next visit. "She

is barely fourteen, she has enough problems with

her own self." But my mother shook her head very

firmly. "Let her see it all," she said.

"Just let her see everything. Someone will have to know

about it later on."

The House on Prague Street   139

Aunt Ella looked at my mother for a long

time. Then she put her hand on my mother's hand,

looked in my direction, and whispered,

"Don't talk like that!"

Then my mother told me that Uncle

Fritz's family was in a transport. I

asked her where they were having themselves transported

to. I thought of a train of shiny Humbers, it

sounded like an adventure. But my mother said that

nobody knew, it would be one of the first

transports. And she added that I would have

to give little Paul my ski boots to wear because

it would be cold soon.

But I did not like Paul, Uncle

Fritz's oldest grandson. He had always

been sneering and conceited. Why should I have

to give him my beautiful ski boots? I

said, no, of course I would not, I still needed

my ski boots, even though I could not wear

thick socks with them any more and even though they

made my big toe hurt. But my mother said that

Paul would need the ski boots more than I.

I was angry. Did my mother really care more about

Paul's feet than about mine? But there was no

help for it. My mother insisted that I come with her

to deliver the ski boots and to say goodbye.

I shouted and carried on and told my mother that

I did not like her any more. The following afternoon

we went to Uncle Fritz's. Suitcases

and rucksacks were all over the apartment; instead

of the Warnsdorf Persian rugs, thin rags

covered the parquet floors.

Uncle Fritz said that they had traded all

they owned for provisions and warm clothing; and that

again made it sound as if they were setting out on

an adventure. But they all had numbers

sewn above their stars.

Stupid Paul put on my beautiful ski

boots, he had to put on two pairs of

thick socks first so that his feet would not slide

in them. He exclaimed, "They fit

perfectly!" and looked at me with a smirk.

Then he buckled the beautiful buckles which had

once been my whole pride. He did not

even say thank-you. I embraced Aunt

Elsa, wondering whether she had already packed the

pink fan of ostrich feathers. Later, when I

asked my mother, she looked at me in

astonishment. "I doubt it," she said.

The House on Prague Street   141

We did not have word from Uncle Rudolf for a

long time. One night two men in leather coats

had come to fetch him, for questioning, they had said.

Two days later an unknown boy had come

to Aunt Irma and had asked for Uncle

Rudolf's shaving kit and a change of underwear.

That was the last we heard. Aunt Irma fell

ill, she had always had a weak constitution, and

Uncle Rudolf remained absent. No one

mentioned him, and everyone acted as if he had

never existed. And then one day a postcard from him

arrived, it came from Prague, it came from the

Palais Petchek, and the Palais Petchek

was, as everyone knew, the headquarters of the

Gestapo. Uncle Rudolf asked my mother

to bring him a change of underwear.

My mother went to Aunt Irma to pick up the

underwear, and in the afternoon she took me with her to the

Palais Petchek.

The man stationed at the front entrance asked,

"What do you want?", and the skull on his cap

was grinning. My mother showed him Uncle

Rudolf's postcard and her papers, and I

showed him my monthly streetcar pass. He

looked at us with disgust and let us in. My mother

held my hand so tightly that it hurt as we

walked up some steps to another guard. He also

asked, "What do you want?" and we showed the

postcard and the papers and my streetcar pass.

Then we had to stand against a wall and wait for a

long time. My mother clutched my hand, and I

stroked the back of her wrist with my thumb. Shall

was holding onto the package with Uncle

Rudolf's underwear so tightly with her other hand

that her knuckles turned white. The star on

her coat moved up and down, up and down with her

heartbeats.

Then another skull came and impatiently

gestured to us to follow him. He said, "Get

moving!" We ran down the stairs after him. His

boots clattered on the stone steps--there were

hobnails in the soles. Next to us the

one-man elevator hummed, but it was only for

men in uniform. I loved to ride these

contraptions because they had no doors and you could

run in and out of them. But their operation had been

forbidden in ordinary houses in town: we had

to save electricity. Downstairs the skull

said to me, "You wait here, and don't move!"

He said to my mother, "You get in here!" My mother

let go of my hand and disappeared through the door behind

him.

My hand was hurting, why did my mother have

to press me so hard? Then another skull

came down the corridor, and behind him limped a

thin old man in striped pajamas. Both went

into the room where my mother had gone before.

I waited and did exercises with my hand.

The corridor was very quiet. I cracked my

knuckles the way one of the Blaha twins had

taught me. The sound echoed in the quiet

hall.

Then the second skull came out, and the thin

old man in striped pajamas followed him.

He was clutching the package now, and he

looked at me as he limped past. Would he

bring the package to Uncle Rudolf? Then

The House on Prague Street   145

our skull came out and my mother after him. The

skull said, "Get moving," and my mother again

started to press my hand. I thought, tonight I

won't be able to write, and I'm supposed to do

my English homework.

The guard upstairs returned the papers and

my streetcar pass. We went down to the

door, through the door, we were outside. My mother

took a deep breath, red spots glowed on

her cheeks and neck, and she was still holding onto

me. At the corner she halted and said, "Did

you see Uncle Rudolf?"

"No, where was he?"

Then we stared at each other. My mother

nodded. "Yes, that was Uncle Rudolf," she

said.

A man went past, and he whispered to us,

"Don't hang around here, do you want them

to lock you up?"

My mother took my hand again and pulled me

away. I was still staring at her, and she said,

"They wanted his signature because of the Bucarest

factories." Then we walked silently past

the municipal park. The previous night's

rain had left the leaves glistening. After a

while my mother said, "Remember that well."

I nodded, but my head was still spinning. How

could Uncle Rudolf look like that? Was it

really he? Then we waited for the streetcar.

When it came, I stood with my mother out on the

platform; Jews were not permitted to ride

inside. I saw the shiny Humber and the

chauffeur in his pale blue uniform, and I

saw Uncle Rudolf putting his arm around my

grandfather, saying, "Nobly shall we perish, my

dear Max!"

Some weeks later, during biology

class, the school principal came to our

classroom. I was writing as much as my

notebook would hold about the vertebrae of

tadpoles. The principal asked me

to collect my things and come to his office at

once. I looked at Irene and shrugged my

shoulders, and she whispered, "What did you do

now, you poor thing?" I shook my head; my

conscience was altogether clear. I packed my things;

my biology essay was not quite done, I had not

written all there was to write about tadpoles.

I would have to finish tomorrow. I closed my desk,

The House on Prague Street   147

winked at Irene, and went out.

The principal was waiting outside the door,

and that was very strange. He coughed and cleared his

throat before speaking. "We have received an

order," he said, "by which all Jewish mongrels

must leave school immediately. That concerns you,

Miss Richter. I am sorry." He took

off his glasses and began to polish them.

I said, "Yes, thank you."

I had to go back to the classroom one more time

because I had left my coat. While Irene

waved to me, all the others looked at me, a

question on their faces. They were still staring as I

quietly closed the door again. Slowly I

walked downstairs and out the big gate.

Leo Jelinek, from the eleventh grade, was

hanging around outside. He said, "I didn't

know that you were one, too." And I answered,

"Sure!" Then I began to run because I could

feel the tears rising; there was no need for Leo

Jelinek to see them.

My mother cut the star off her coat, put on

her hat, and went to find a school that would have

me--a private school. I sat crying in

my room and said that I would never, never go to any

school again if they treated me that way. My

father said that a private school might be rather

expensive, and, anyway, was it legal?

But my mother looked very determined. "When one

is fifteen," she said, "one has to go to school

every morning, expensive or not!"

When she came back home, she brought

booklets and folders. There were art schools,

fashion schools, language schools, and

schools for crafts. I wiped my tears and

began to take an interest. We decided that I

should attend a language school to perfect my

English.

That was how I came to be registered in the

Lawichka Language School. That same

night my mother sewed her star back on her

coat.

The Language School was on the fifth

floor of a house in the New Section of

Prague, not far from Wenceslas Square. The

elevator cage was made of wrought iron, and

all the doors had very shiny brass knobs.

There were three classrooms--French,

Italian, and English--a dark corridor,

The House on Prague Street   149

and the director's small office at the far end

of it. There Harry Lawichka sat under

pictures of horses, poring over racing forms

from morning to night. On Monday mornings we

could always tell exactly whether his horse had

done well at the track that weekend or whether

it had disappointed him. His face told the

whole story.

In the English room three students were

deeply immersed in passive verbs. Mr.

Kohler, the teacher, introduced me. To me he

said, "With your permission, I will continue to base

my teaching on German, Miss Richter." His

nose was just like Uncle Fred's, and his Czech

sounded abominable.

Right after the first lesson I questioned the girl

next to me about Mr. Kohler's family

tree. I had become very conscious of Aryan and

Jewish descent. The girl laughed a lot

before she said, "We're all mongrels here; I

bet Mr. Kohler is no exception. But he

won't tell us. I am half-Jewish, and

little Ilse over there is too. Are you?"

I nodded happily. The girl's name was

Susi Renner, and I liked her

tremendously. She had warm brown eyes and a

dimple in her chin. Suddenly I felt myself

belonging to the community of half-Jews. I had

been alone before. I had known that there must be more like

me, but I had never met them. Even Harry

Lawichka was half-Jewish, Susi said, and

so was the French teacher, next door. Mrs.

Zettler, who was pure American and who

practiced conversation with us from eleven to twelve,

was married to one. Suddenly the world was full of

us. I was delighted with the thought that I belonged

somewhere. At lunch, between bites of fruit

dumpling, I told my mother about my joy, and

she was happy for me.

I could barely wait for the next morning. I

wanted to see Susi Renner again and to hear her

cheerful voice. Right before the grammar lesson

I asked her if we could be friends. She winked

at me and said, "If you absolutely insist.

But watch out--I'm a dangerous woman!"

My laughter was so loud that Mr. Kohler said,

"Ladies, I beg your pardon!"

Susi Renner was sixteen. She was much more

intelligent than I, and she wrote poetry.

The House on Prague Street   151

And she was no longer a virgin. A year ago

she had been in love, she told me--actually

she still loved the man, she said--and he had told

her that it was old-fashioned to be a virgin. So

she had given up being one. She shrugged her

shoulders, smoothed her shiny brown hair, and

laughed. She had a pretty mouth, graceful

shoulders, and a way of walking which I tried in

vain to imitate by practicing at home. The

man with whom she was still in love was a captain in

the German Army.

This part of her confession upset me deeply.

For days I thought only about Susi. Until

now German uniforms had meant danger and

nothing else. Was it really possible to fall in

love with them?

Susi lived with her father, who was Jewish and

who had been a professor of Greek. They

lived in a one-room apartment in the Weinberg

section, having moved from a small town in the

north which they had had to leave a year ago.

Susi's mother was German, and she was still teaching

there because the authorities had not let her move

to Prague with her family. "If my Mom were

here, I bet I wouldn't be so immoral,"

Susi said.

Susi's father never left the house. He

read all day long. Twice a week a friend

brought him books from the university library.

A shy and absent-minded man, small of

stature, he was completely under Susi's

thumb. "My father melts when I make eyes

at him," she said, and I nodded in admiration.

My father had melted, too, when he met

Susi.

Only my mother was skeptical. She did not

like the way Susi walked, and she did not like the

way Susi batted her eyelashes. My mother

had always been honest with me, and she was honest this

time as well. But for the first time in my life I

objected vehemently. Secretly I thought,

"You'd be even more amazed, Mama, if you

knew! Susi still loves him, and he is a

captain in the German army!" I had never before

kept anything from my mother. Now I was glutted

with secrets.

Susi was a member of the Nazi Girls'

Union. "They forgot to throw me out," she said.

She had brought her uniform to Prague, and she

The House on Prague Street   153

continued going to meetings and ball games at the

Nazi gym. "You don't belong with them,

Susi, why do you go?" I asked, horrified.

Susi wore swastikas on her brown uniform

jacket; the boys who had played in Aunt

Klara's garden had worn them on their brown

shirts. But Susi answered, "Of course I

belong there. It's not our fault that we're

half-Jews, is it?" So I went with her to the

next meeting. I could not let her go alone:

we were friends.

But the meeting was not horrible at all.

Girls wearing white blouses sat around a

table, knitting and singing folk songs. The tiled

stove was warm and cozy. Since I did not know

many of the songs, I dutifully studied the

texts. When it was time to go, the leader announced

that instead of meeting in the rooms the following

week, we would go to a military hospital

to sing for our wounded soldiers.

That was the day my mother went to the Prague

fair grounds; my grandparents were there as part of a

transport that was being assembled, and she was

hoping that she could see them one more time. She

spent the entire day waiting before the gates. It

was very cold. Not until late afternoon did one

of the attendants pass on her message, which

brought grandmother to the gate. They could talk through the

bars. But after two minutes a policeman

sent my grandmother back again. She had looked

well, my mother said, and I saw that she was trying

to comfort herself as well as me. She was only

worried about grandfather, because he would not speak.

And the people with skulls always wanted the answers very

quickly.

I did not need a uniform to go singing in the

military hospital, only a dirndl

dress and white kneesocks. I did not have a

dirndl dress, but Susi had two. We

changed at her house. The dress was a bit

loose in the waist because I was still a skinny thing

and Susi was all curves. But I pulled the

apron strings tighter to conceal the sag. I

looked very Aryan and was pleased with myself.

Susi's father looked up from his book. His

eyes were a warm brown just like Susi's, and he

had a nice smile. He asked, "Where are you

going?" Susi kissed him and answered, "Oh,

just for a walk."

The House on Prague Street   155

Going down the stairs I looked at

Susi. I hoped that she would speak. But

Susi danced her way down. She smoothed her

shiny hair and said, "`He who has no house

now will not build ...` Oh, I just adore

Rilke! We're going to read his poems

together."

We met the others in front of the military

hospital. I held Susi's hand so

tightly that she shook me. "You'll squoosh

me, be careful!" I let go of her, startled:

for a moment I thought of my mother who had held on

to me the same way. But then I threw back

my head. Why should I be thinking of my mother now?

I had a right to belong.

We left our coats in a room full of

wheelchairs and crutches and wire cages. A

nurse led us into a large hall equally full

of wheelchairs and crutches. Men without legs

were sitting in the wheelchairs, and men with bandages

were leaning on the crutches. One had no face,

only bandages; he could not see us, and he could

not possibly hear us, and one of them had no

hands at all. We stood in a semicircle

and sang a song about our home in the green

mountains. We sang a song about a hazelnut

bush that bore brown fruit, and a song about a

cool mountain spring, and one of them had a face

that was all blue and had lost its nose, and all

of them were very young. We sang "Hollara," and the

ones who could still smile smiled, and the ones who still

had hands clapped. We sang "There by the

Village Fountain" and "My Beautiful

Homeland" in perfect harmony, and the nurses

blew their noses. Then we put our coats

back on and left. Outside, the leader

snapped her arm upward and said, "Heil

Hitler. Until next week," and she

walked off with long, self-assured steps.

Susi and I took the trolley. We both

wept all the way home because the soldiers had

been so young.

I changed into my own clothes at Susi's

house and folded the white kneesocks

carefully. At home my mother looked up from

her mending and asked, "Where did you go today?" and

I said, "Oh, just for a walk." Then I went

to my room and wept some more, because all the

soldiers had been so young. I wept also because

The House on Prague Street   157

I knew I had betrayed my mother. I had

felt compassion for the others--that was my betrayal.

The only girl in English class who was

Aryan was Ilse Wagner. She was

twenty-two and in deep mourning. Her hair was

brushed very smooth, and she wore two wedding

rings on one finger. We felt shy with her because

she was a widow and we were merely schoolgirls,

but she was always very nice to us and tried to help me

when I ran aground over the conditional tenses.

Mr. Kohler would then say, "Mrs.

Wagner, if I may beg your pardon--was and

Ilse Wagner would blush all the way to the

roots of her hair, and for a moment her eyes would

be full of laughter.

One day she told Susi what had happened

to her. Her husband went to the Russian front

one week after their wedding, and he died on the first

day, somewhere near Sevastopol. Nine months

later Ilse's child was born, dead. She told

the story in a very quiet voice, only her

hands shook as she spoke, Susi said. Then

she was sick for a long time, and then her parents

sent her to Prague to have a change. Her

husband had been a group leader. When I

asked what that meant, Susi's eyes grew

big as she explained that it made him a member

of the SS.

"How did he look?" I asked

breathlessly, "Did Ilse Wagner show you a

picture?" SS men were all terrible in the

Palais Petchek and in Aunt Klara's

house; surely Ilse Wagner's husband must

have been terrible too.

"Yes, she has one in her wallet,"

Susi said, "and I tell you, he was simply

dreamy."

For a while we looked at one another. Not

too many men were dreamy in our eyes. Hannes

Stelzer in one of his films was, and Horst

Caspar when he played Faust, and sometimes Will

Quadflieg would be dramy for a while in one of

his movie roles, and Mozart was dreamy ...

I told my mother about Ilse Wagner. "Just

imagine, Mama, one week after they were

married!" I was close to tears with compassion.

I did not say anything about his being dreamy.

And my mother answered, "It serves them right,

the trash!"

The House on Prague Street   159

I looked at her and I understood her

feelings. But I no longer belonged with her.

Ilse Wagner was no trash, she had

beautiful hands and was in deep mourning, and she

helped me when I got stuck with the conditional

tenses; though she knew that she was the only

Aryan far and wide, she was always nice to all

of us. My mother did not understand, she did not

understand anything about Ilse Wagner's terrible

sadness. My mother looked at me; then she

turned away.

There was another Ilse in our class. She

was not yet fifteen and very polite and

well-bred. She looked much more Jewish than

Susi and I. Mr. Kohler called her

Miss Ottenhausen, but that was not her full

name. This Ilse who looked so Jewish was

really Ilse Stephanie Angelica,

Countess von Ottenhausen, and her father was a

Count. She once told us all about it in the

break, speaking her full name between two bites

of her salami sandwich. She said it with such

nonchalance that it seemed the simplest thing in the

world for a mongrel to have such a name.

Susi and I gaped and asked, "How come?"

Ilse shrugged her shoulders. "My father married

my mother, she was very rich. But she died when I was

little." Then she calmly continued eating her

sandwich.

This Ilse came from Berlin. Her house had

gone boom there, she said, and her father was at the

Finnish front. The old housekeeper,

Mrs. Meikle, had simply moved Ilse,

and everything that was left in the shelter,

to Prague.

Ilse asked whether we wanted to come visit

her, and we both nodded: of course we wanted

to come. We had never before been guests of a

Countess. Usually we did not waste our time

with fifteen-year-olds, but Ilse would have to be

an exception. We asked whether it would be all

right with Mrs. Meikle, and Ilse laughed and

said yes, Mrs. Meikle loved company. But

we would have to speak up: ever since the night of the

bombs something was wrong with her ear, you really had

to scream at her.

On a Sunday afternoon we went to pay our

visit. The sign on the door read

"Ottenhausen-Meikle," and except for two

The House on Prague Street   161

Army cots the apartment was unfurnished, though

there were paintings and rugs--portraits without

frames, and large Oriental rugs. Several

suitcases piled on top of each other served

as a table in the middle of one room.

Ilse explained to us who the men and women in

the portraits were: they were all

Ottenhausens. It was a proper portrait

gallery. Mrs. Meikle, who had a thin

white pigtail hanging down her back,

waddled after us and nodded when Ilse pointed at

the pictures.

"You just have to talk a bit louder,

Ilseken," she shouted, "otherwise the young

ladies might not hear you! This one here is

Ilseken's great-great-aunt, von

Austerlitz was her maiden name. That one over

here was her husband; he was in good old

Frederick's regiment. Here are Ilseken's

grandparents, the kind folks. Your old Mrs.

Meikle worked for them as a young thing.

Ilseken's papa is over there, and his sister,

the Countess, God grant her eternal

peace. Did you say something, Ilseken?"

Mrs. Meikle turned to Ilse and her white

pigtail swung back and forth.

Ilse yelled, "No, I didn't."

Mrs. Meikle patted her cheek and

shouted, "So many folks, my goodness, and all

that's left now is a little Jew child. But don't

be sad, Ilseken, I will make you some cocoa

now, that will keep your blood warm." Mrs.

Meikle waddled across the Oriental rugs

toward the kitchen, and her pigtail swung like the

pendulum of a grandfather clock.

She served our cocoa in silver cups,

setting them on the table made of suitcases.

Then we played dominoes and Monopoly.

Mrs. Meikle sat on her cot knitting

heavy socks. "For the Count, he has it real

cold up there," she shouted and looked at us

approvingly through her glasses. "It's nice

that Ilseken has company," she shouted again,

nodding at us.

We went to see Ilse often because the

frameless portrait gallery and Mrs.

Meikle's endless supply of cocoa had

greatly impressed us. The fact that Ilse

did not yet know how to talk about men was a necessary

The House on Prague Street   163

evil we had to accept.

The dreamiest man we knew was Hannes

Stelzer, the movie actor. We kept

photographs of him in our purses

constantly. Every day we pored over all the

daily newspapers, hoping to find that one of his

old films was being shown in some suburb. We

saw his Mozart film seventeen times; every

single one of his gestures we knew by heart, and

we thought his melancholy face even more

beautiful under the powdered wig. We poked one

another mercilessly until we both had

bruises. Seventeen times we walked out of the

cinema holding hands and in tears, filled with

contempt for all humanity, people who did not

understand our lofty feelings and who were content with their

everyday blacked-out world.

Susi corresponded avidly with many men.

There was Walter, a former schoolmate, now

serving with a tank corps on the southern front.

There was a staff doctor at Lake

Lodoga. There was an Air Force corporal

in France. There was a U-boat mate somewhere.

She would smoothe her shiny hair and compose

love letters, and sometimes I was permitted to read

them.

"Of course I don't love any of them,"

she said, "these are just stylistic exercises. The

staff doctor needs a different style than the

sailor, and I need lots of practice."

Susi wanted to become a poet and an

actress--she was not quite sure yet which. But to be

a poet was simpler for a half-Jew: to get

into an acting school one had to prove that one was

Aryan.

Because of my admiration for Susi my friendship

with Irene suffered. At first I had tried to be

friends with both, but gradually I began to notice

that Irene was not really very intelligent and that her

uncle's tavern always smelled of stale beer.

Susi said that Irene's bosom was vulgar.

Irene was still going to Josef Nedoma's

apartment, and she had no idea who Hannes

Stelzer was, not to mention Mozart. I gave

up on Irene. When she realized, she was

miffed. "You just watch," she said, "Susi will

make a German out of you." I thought, Irene

is really dumb--that's not the point at all!

My mother looked at me and said, "Why do you

The House on Prague Street   165

always pick friends I don't like?" Sometimes I

felt sorry for my mother. She was all alone.

My father played chess and fiddled with the radio.

And they all were gone now with the transports, the

three aunts from Aussig and finally even

Aunt Ella and Uncle Fred.

They left on a day that was so cold that it

crackled, and Uncle Fred looked haggard and

bent under his rucksack, and he was coughing.

Aunt Ella gave my mother the key to their

apartment. We were to go there quickly once more, before the

apartment was to be sealed off, and take out everything

that was still of value. My father refused to go. It

made no sense anyway, he said, and it was

dangerous besides. What would happen, he said,

if they came to seal off the apartment while we were

still inside? But my mother shrugged her shoulders and

put on her most determined expression. I just

had to go with her; I could not let her go alone.

The apartment was strange and quiet. There was very

little left really except the furniture, and that

we could not take away. But, forgotten on the

highest pantry shelf, we found a small

tray wrapped in cellophane, tied with a pink

ribbon. Under the cellophane were Aunt

Ella's masterpieces: flowers made of

fondant, and cornucopias made of

marzipan, and chocolate truffles, and lace

cookies. She must have collected over a long

period of time, because the baker had always weighed

all the ingredients with such care. Not a single

gram could ever be missing, not once could we

taste a single piece. How long had Aunt

Ella hoarded this collection under cellophane

and pink ribbon, to have it ready to show to her first

customers in America?

My mother said that now I could eat it all. I

tore into the package impatiently. But the

candies were too stale, the chocolate was gray

and tasteless, the fillings were rancid, and the

fondant was hard as stone.

But I had not tasted any sweets for so

long, and besides, I could not throw the candies

away: they were Aunt Ella's collection.

So I chewed on them for days on end, and each

night my stomach ached.

I was sixteen and almost as tall as my mother.

During the summer I had suddenly acquired a

bosom. I looked down at me and could not

The House on Prague Street   167

recognize myself. Formerly there had only been

bones and hard edges; now there were curves. My

mother smiled and cut the star off her dress to go

to town and buy me some brassieres. I was too

embarrassed to do it myself. But there were no

brassieres to be had, the salesladies said,

maybe next month, we haven't had any

deliveries for weeks. My mother gave me

two of her own; they were mended and faded because my

mother received no clothing coupons. But they fit,

and my mother said, "Now you really belong with the

ladies!" At night she told my father, as

she always told him everything. My father laughed,

and I grew angry at my mother because she gave

away secrets.

Whenever it rained, I had to wear my mother's

shoes because my feet had grown two sizes in

three months and there was only one coupon for one

pair of shoes a year. My father said, "If

she goes on like this, I'll have to give up my

shoes, too." But I was not as unhappy with

myself as I had been. When one had a bosom,

one could forget about feet that were too large.

Only my face worried me. It was still

narrow and pale, my nose was too big, and I

had pimples on my forehead. Though I was able

to cover them up with my hair sometimes, they still

caused me a lot of sorrow. I envied

Susi, who had perfectly beautiful skin;

she could comb her hair whichever way she wanted.

Susi tried to comfort me. "It's because you're still

a virgin," she said, and I sighed. Susi's

captain had probably been right.

At bedtime I tried to make deals with

God. "Dear God," I said, "if you make

my skin look better, I will never talk

back to my mother again." But God did not want

any deals with me. My skin stayed

unsightly. So I decided to become a nun;

under their black habits nuns wore a white

cloth covering their foreheads. But Susi

refused to become a nun too, and that made me

mad: it certainly wouldn't be as much fun without

her. "Are you crazy?" Susi said. "Me in

a nunnery? Me giving up life because of your

pimples?"

Susi's eyes were happy now, and she was

even prettier than before. She walked around

singing Mozart arias about sweet longings, because

The House on Prague Street   169

she was in love again. She had given up her

captain and now she was in love with a cadet. Every

Sunday she went to Milowitz near Prague,

where the cadet was attending an officers' training

school. On Monday she would be back with dark

rings under her eyes and red spots on her

neck, and with no homework. Mr. Kohler shook

his head. "How can one forget all about

irregular verbs because of love?" He laughed

when he spoke. He was an elderly

gentleman, and of course he was under Susi's

spell, too. Tuesdays a letter would usually be

waiting for Susi in Harry Lawichka's

office, four whole pages, and Susi would

read it and then stare out the window and be lost to any

conjugating. After a while Mr. Kohler gave

up calling on Susi on Tuesdays altogether.

I sighed unhappily. Before going to bed I

stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for a long

time. My eyelashes were definitely not as long

and as thick as Susi's. Maybe that was why no

one loved me? On Sunday, when Susi was in

Milowitz, I would sit in my room and read

Rilke's Book of Hours. I would cry

because the poem was so beautiful and because no one

loved me. I cried because there was war everywhere and

because even Hannes Stelzer was at the front

now.

My mother put her head through the door and said,

"Would you like me to make you some tea?" I said

no. It was not real tea we drank now, but

artificial tea flavored with artificial

rum. I could not stand it, it burned my throat

so. My mother drank her tea all alone,

claiming that she did not mind the artificial

rum taste. Then she sat darning a black-out

curtain; it had become threadbare at the

place where I hooked it up every night. My

father did not want any tea either, he sat in his

usual chair in the living room and played

chess. He put on his glasses to play

chess now, and I felt irritation: why did

he need glasses to play chess?

People with cheerful voices were going up the

stairs: Hilde Kuchler was having another

party. "She's really living it up now," my

father said, looking angry. My mother bent even

lower over the black-out fabric. Hilde

Kuchler invariably entertained German

The House on Prague Street   171

officers. Sometimes they stayed all night.

Mrs. Mares, her neighbor on the sixth

floor, complained to the janitor about the noise.

But the janitor shrugged his shoulders. "I can't

do anything about that, Ma'am. War is war!"

What he meant was that it would not be very wise

to complain about Germans. Mrs. Mares

understood very well and did not say another word.

I was glad that Hilde Kuchler at least was

having a good time. The officers were always young and very

elegant, with soft leather boots and soft

caps. They always stepped aside very politely

when I met them on the stairs. Hilde

Kuchler always smiled at me: she did not

hold it against me that my father no longer spoke

to her.

Every night I went to the tavern across the

street to get my father's beer. Once a man

was standing at the fence fidgeting with his pants.

Wanting only to pass quickly, I politely

looked the other way. But he grabbed my hand and

said something vulgar. I slammed the beer jug

on his hand, hard, and he let go. Running

back, I heard him curse. Breathlessly I

came back upstairs.

My father said, "Where's the beer?"

I said, "I won't go there any more!"

My father said, "You'd better tell me why

not!" and I screamed, "That's none of your

business! I just won't go, that's all!"

My father slapped my face and said, "What

a brat!" Then he went back to his chess

game.

I sat in the kitchen clutching the beer jug

between my knees and shaking. My mother said,

"Please go get Papa's beer!"

I said, "I can't!"

My mother looked at me, her eyes full of

despair. "You know I can't go there with my

star," she said, "the tavern keeper would throw me

out. Please go." So once more I went across the

street, beer jug poised. But the man was already

gone.

The tavern keeper aimed the spigot and let

the beer flow slowly and thinly into the jug; the

foam had to settle first. I thought, "I'll

never forgive Papa for this. What a hero he

has turned into!"

The tavern keeper said, "As long as we've

The House on Prague Street   173

got our Czech beer, we can't complain!" He

had a mustache and wore a red bow tie.

I was very unhappy. Going back home, I

debated whether to throw myself under the tram. Then

they would surely be sorry for the way they had

treated me. But I decided against it. I

planned to be beautiful in death, just like

Anneliese Uhlig in her last movie.

With a tram, one could never be sure of how one

would look afterward. I waited until the tram

with the blue lights had passed before I went into the

house.

Some days later Susi said, "You can't go

on like this! You are getting more and more sour every day."

She told me she would ask her cadet to bring

a friend to their next date in Milowitz. I

needed male company now, Susi decided.

It was a beautiful fall Sunday when we

went to Milowitz. Wearing my best pleated

skirt, I felt very beautiful. The train was

filled with girls going to Milowitz.

Milowitz was a large training compound.

At the Milowitz railroad station all the

future officers were waiting. The platform was

gray with the many uniforms. I poked Susi.

"How are you going to find your Heinz among all

these people?"

She poked me in return. "Helene, you

are a goose."

That very moment a gray uniform dashed past

me, and Susi threw herself at it.

I looked around. Everywhere couples were

locked in greeting. I would have liked to watch

for a while, because the sight was even more interesting in

real life than it was in the movies. But

Susi was already pulling at my sleeve,

introducing her Heinz, who looked nice and

clicked his heels. Then Heinz introduced

someone named Wolfgang who also looked nice

and also clicked his heels. Then Susi said,

"I'll meet you back here for the six o'clock

train!" and ran off with her Heinz's arm around

her.

The railroad station had emptied. I

looked at the cadet named Wolfgang, who was

meant for me, and both of us laughed. For a

second my mother came to my mind, but I really

did not want to think of her.

"Shall we go for a walk?" Wolfgang asked.

The House on Prague Street   175

We went for a walk. We had a good time

walking and talking. His eyebrows were thick and

grew together above his nose. But he really was not

my type because his cheeks were softly rounded;

Hannes Stelzer had an altogether different

look. But the autumn sun was still warm, the sky

was still blue, and I laughed a lot and found myself

very amusing. I hoped that my pimples would not be

too visible. Why hadn't I gone

to Milowitz with Susi long ago?

We had reached the forest. Wolfgang put his

arm around my waist and said that I was

absolutely his type, what a shape. Then

he kissed my ear, and I laughed because I rather

liked being kissed on my ear. We stopped at

a clearing and kissed for a long time, it must have

been hours, because the sun made a small

half-circle around us. His ears were red like the

ears of Josef Nedoma under the blanket, and

I rather liked being kissed for a long time.

Then we went farther into the forest. I was

sorry to leave the pretty, sunny clearing, but

he wanted to go farther. We sat on the

moss-covered ground and continued kissing. It

occurred to me that one should not be sitting on the

ground in a month with an r in it; it was

September. But we continued kissing anyway.

Then I did not like it so much any more because I

saw that he was trying to put his hand inside my

jacket. That made me angry. I only

wanted to be kissed. He said, "Don't be

childish," and when he saw that there really was

nothing to be done under my jacket, he

abruptly tried to reach under my skirt. That

made me even angrier: I didn't know the

man at all; who did he think he was? I

tore myself away and told him so. "Don't be

so dumb," he said, laughing. "You only live

once." He wanted to pull me close again,

but I got up and slapped his face, just as I

had seen it done in the movies. Then I

turned, my pleated skirt twirling nicely

with me, and ran away.

I was lost in the forest a long time because we had

gone far from the main path. The underbrush

scratched my legs, and my skirt kept

getting caught in it. I was angry and

disappointed, and suddenly I thought of my mother

again: for heaven's sake, what was I doing in

The House on Prague Street   177

Milowitz?

Then I found the path again and ran as fast as

I could, all the way to the railroad station. It

wasn't quite five o'clock and there was the jerk,

sitting on a bench at the first platform, smoking

a cigarette.

I hid behind a pile of logs because I never

wanted to see the cadet again. I never wanted

to have anything to do with soldiers again. There I

stayed, hidden, until the six o'clock train

pulled into the station, when I had to leave my

hiding place and walk past his bench. He

called out to me, "Well, are you unharmed, little

girl?" I ignored him totally and boarded the

train. I was not going to hide from such a character.

My mother was right. They were trash.

Susi was still hanging around her Heinz's

neck. Only when the conductor blew his

whistle did she jump onto the steps. She

waved until the Milowitz train station

disappeared from view. The train was full of

girls again. Some had scratched legs just as I

did, and some looked disheveled and sleepy.

Sparks flew past the dark windows. Susi was

humming cheerfully, and then she asked me how I

had fared. I told her everything about the jerk.

Susi sighed.

"You are a hopeless case, Helene."

I became angry again. "And you," I said,

"You should comb the pine needles out of your hair

before you go home to your father!" We did not speak

again until we came to Prague Main Station.

In his letter on the following Tuesday

Susi's Heinz asked her to bring me again

next Sunday. Wolfgang was looking forward

to another afternoon with me. But I said that wild

horses could not drag me there. I had had it with

soldiers. So Susi continued to go to Milowitz

on her own.

Once I asked her, "Susi, how about your

Heinz? Does he know about your father?"

Susi answered, "Of course he knows!"

Astonished, I wanted to know, "And--?was

Susi only laughed. "He always wondered

about me being so sexy and all. So I told him

that half-Jews are sexier than normal people."

Once more I said, "And--?was

Susi continued, "What I don't know

won't hurt me. That's his philosophy!"

The House on Prague Street   179

I nodded. Something was not quite right, something or

somebody was somehow being betrayed. But perhaps it had

to be that way and could not be different. And why should

I be worrying about it? I had not thought it up in

the first place.

My mother received postcards now, postcards from

the concentration camp Theresienstadt. They were

written in printed letters and ech could only have

thirty words on it in order to make reading

easy for the censor. Once a month everybody

in Theresienstadt could send off thirty printed

words. "My dears," said the postcards, "We

are well we are healthy thinking of you how are

you." My mother carried the postcards in her

handbag as if they were love letters. She read them

often, but they did not tell her anything, those

postcards. How could thirty printed, censored

words tell her anything? And she wrote

postcards in return because everyone in the

concentration camp Theresienstadt could receive

thirty printed words a month. "My dears,"

my mother wrote, "We are well we are

healthy thinking of you how are you." My grandfather was

the only one who never sent a postcard. But my

mother wrote to him anyway. She wrote, "My

honored father, please stay well."

Toward the end of the winter a card came from

Aunt Ella. It did not contain even the

thirty permissible words. All it said was,

"Dear sister, Fred died yesterday."

Then they all began sending my mother their

stamps, because everyone in the concentration camp

Theresienstadt received one stamp and could have one

package sent to him with twenty kilograms of

food. They all sent their stamps to my mother because

she was the only one of them not in camp. And every

time a stamp arrived, my mother wept. She said,

"Where can I get so much food? We don't have

enough to eat ourselves!"

Then she wrote to Franziska to send all

the linen, one set after another. And then my mother

ran to the black marketeers, she pressed her

handbag over her star and exchanged my grandmother's

trousseau for potatoes and flour and sugar, no

matter what: the main thing was to get the twenty

kilograms together. She was possessed by the thought

of the many twenty-kilogram packages she had

to send. She made long lists: "Two

sheets, half a pound of margarine, to Aunt

The House on Prague Street   181

Regina."

My father said, "If they catch you, they'll

lock us all up."

My mother said, "I know, but I can't let them

down. They're relying on me, I'm all they

have." My father exchanged his wristwatch for two

pounds of bacon to be added to my grandfather's

package.

My mother rounded up three kilograms of

tomatoes; they were fresh and not too ripe.

For a long time she debated whether to include them

in Uncle Fritz's package. Finally she

did, because she had nothing else to complete the

twenty kilograms with. But Uncle Fritz

wrote on his next postcard, "Please not

to send tomatoes. They were ruined." "They were

ruined" had been crossed out by the censor. But

we could still decipher it under the pencil

scratches. My mother was in great anguish. That

night she could not sleep: she could not help

thinking how disappointed Uncle Fritz must have

been, and how the mashed tomatoes must have

spoiled the other things in the package.

Once a month Aunt Annel cme for a

visit. She brought us her butter rations.

All Germans in Prague received special

butter rations every month, and Aunt Annel

said, "I don't care for butter anyway, just

send it to them, child. And don't say another word

about it." Then she sat in our kitchen drinking

our artificial tea. She unbuttoned her

high shoes and said, "It surely is a day's

journey to get to you here, I had to change

trams twice!" I almost fell off my chair

laughing; Aunt Annel only lived behind the

Museum, and to get there didn't take more than

twenty minutes.

Aunt Annel shook her head and said,

"Don't you laugh at me. When I was young like

you, I could dance all night--for two nights in

a row! Oh, those were the days ..."

My mother laughed also. "Our tall Helene

does take a long time growing up."

At night my father took Aunt Annel

home. He offered her his arm to go down the

stairs, and Aunt Annel said, "A perfect

gentleman, my boy."

My parents spent a lot of time with the

Giacomellis from next door. Mr.

The House on Prague Street   183

Giacomelli came from the region of

Bolzano in the South Tyrol, exactly where

my father had been stationed as a young lieutenant

during the First World War. Both of them knew every

single hill and meadow there. I thought back with

amusement on those days when Mr.

Giacomelli had seemed so beautiful to me,

like a young god. He was, I admitted now,

rather handsome, but his hair was much too curly, and

he was not in the least like Hannes Stelzer.

Once I pointed him out to Susi, who said,

"Well--maybe he's half-dreamy?" I

nodded in agreement. How could I have been so

dumb?

Mrs. Giacomelli worked in the offices

of the Jewish Community. Sometimes, when there was a

lot of work to be done that kept her late at the

office, she had to walk home: Jews were not

permitted to travel on trams after five

o'clock. Mr. Giacomelli worked for a big

construction firm. He understood a lot about his

profession, my father said; otherwise he would not

be holding down such an important job any

more.

One night our doorbell rang around seven

o'clock when we were just having supper. My parents

looked at one another, startled. My father went

to answer the door; it was only a little man who

did not look dangerous at all. Hat in hand

he asked for Mrs. Giacomelli. But she

had not come home yet. "The poor thing, she will

be walking home again," my mother said and offered the

little man a chair. He did not want to talk

to us at all. All he wanted was to wait for

Mrs. Giacomelli.

Mrs. Giacomelli arrived at

seven-thirty. The little man looked at us and

said that he would like to talk to her alone. The door

closed behind them. My parents sat very still. They

had completely forgotten about their supper. My

mother folded her hands.

"Strange that he isn't home yet," she

said. "He usually gets here long before this."

They sat quietly again.

The door opened and closed in the apartment

next door. The little man was slowly going down

the stairs. On the second-floor landing he

blew his nose; it sounded like a drum beat in the

quiet hall. My parents sat without moving:

The House on Prague Street   185

they were waiting. Then the door opened once more,

and Mrs. Giacomelli knocked at ours very

slowly. She leaned against the frame, still wearing

her coat with the star. She was white under her

freckles as she said, "They arrested Andreas

today." Then she began to cry, without tears,

while sobs shook her small body. My mother

took her by the hand and led her into the living room

like a little girl.

The following evening Mrs. Giacomelli

knocked at our door again. She was not crying this

time. She had spent the day, she said, trying

to find out what had happened and where they had taken

her husband. But no one knew anything, or

else no one wanted to tell her. She asked

my father to go to the construction firm and find out.

They would surely say more to a man without a star.

My father took a day's leave and went.

By noon he was back. Mrs. Giacomelli

had been right, they did say more to a man without a

star. It seemed that Mr. Giacomelli had

slapped the man from the Gestapo who had tried

to interfere with his plan for a new bridge. The

man had supervised Mr. Giacomelli for

two years, and Mr. Giacomelli had

endured his treatment all that time. The man, a

carpenter by profession, did not understand the first thing

about bridges. But Mr. Giacomelli had

endured it until he simply could not bear it

any longer. He had lost control, and they had

taken him away. Nobody knew where.

Mrs. Giacomelli came to visit us

often after that. She never had any news, it was as

if her husband had never existed. Then someone

reported to the Germans that a Jewess was

living alone in a two-room apartment, and

Mrs. Giacomelli was put into a

transport. My mother exchanged pillow

cases for salami and gave it to Mrs.

Giacomelli to take with her. Mrs.

Giacomelli was quite cheerful. She said,

"Maybe it will be easier out there to find

Andreas."

But several weeks after Mrs.

Giacomelli had left, Mr. Swoboda,

the mailman, stopped in to see us. He had a

letter for Mrs. Giacomelli. He could not

deliver it because the apartment was sealed, he could not

have it sent back because there was no return

The House on Prague Street   187

address on it. He did not want to have it

destroyed. The letter came from Germany, the

address was printed with a blue pencil, it had

smudges, and the postmark said "Dachau."

Mr. Swoboda took off his mailman's

cap and scratched his head. "Maybe it says

something about Mr. Giacomelli--we can't just

give it to the paper drive!" he said. He

crossed himself, because he had never done anything like

that in his long mailman's life, and he handed the

letter to my mother.

My mother ripped open the envelope. There was

only a dirty piece of paper with the

pencil-printed words: "Esteemed lady, your

dear husband was shot on the 12th of January,

1943."

    Susi and I loved going to the movies. The

latest UFA films always played in the

Graben moviehouse. We read all the

movie magazines and knew exactly who

acted in what. There were no longer any new

movies with Hannes Stelzer, because Hannes

Stelzer was at the front. But there was the new

film about Mozart, and Hans Holt was rather

dreamy, too, in the leading role, especially

in the scene where he reached out to his leading lady

and asked her to come to his chateau with him.

We adored Mozart and the eighteenth century

altogether. I decided to become a fashion

designer or a stage designer. I wanted

to dream up costumes for Susi to wear on

stage. She would not be called Susi then, of

course, but Suzanne Renner. She had a

rococo figure, with smooth, round shoulders

and a tiny waist.

Our notebooks were filled with designs,

powdered wigs and ruffles and jabots on all

of them. Mr. Kohler said, "Dear ladies,

no matter how talented you might be to dance the

minuet--all I want from you are the personal

pronouns, nothing more!" We sighed deeply;

English seemed very banal. Who had ever

spoken English in the world of Wolfgang

Amadeus?

We continued dreaming our dreams in the theater:

it was Susi who was the romantic heroine on

stage, rather than the silly lady in the

spotlight. Susi was the one who suffered and

The House on Prague Street   189

died. I designed dramatic costumes for

her; all the other designers were poor devils

without a shred of imagination. We alone would

conquer the world, Suzanne Renner and I.

We were walking home from the theater one afternoon

after seeing a matinie of Schiller's

Bride of Messina. The day had brought the

first breath of spring into town, clear and windy.

The flower woman with the first snowdrops was seated

at her usual corner.

We walked arm in arm along the main

boulevard, still a bit tearful. Suddenly a

gust of wind tore off my hat, a navy

beret. As it rolled across the street like a

merry little wheel, a soldier picked it up on

the opposite sidewalk. A tram went

rattling past and then the soldier crossed over,

holding my beret. Susi was pressing my arm

hard enough to leave bruises. The soldier, a

lieutenant, was very tall and slim. He

looked at me and handed me my beret. Then he

laughed in a slightly aloof way. "Something like

that can't happen to us," he said.

He was still looking at me, but at that moment

another gust of wind came, and his own cap

flew off in a half-circle. He had to run

across the street once more, racing after it. Susi

and I stood there laughing. It served him right, the

conceited man. We forgot all about the

unhappy bride of Messina. The

lieutenant came back to our curb, shaking the

dust off his cap and laughing. He was blond and

tanned, and he clicked his heels and

introduced himself. His name was Gerd Koch. He

asked permission to walk along with us.

Slowly we crossed Wenzeslas Square,

continuing past the Museum and toward the Weinberg

section. "I hope none of our friends will see

me," I thought in panic. "Please, dear

God, make no one see me, everything will be

all right if no one sees me." The

lieutenant wore a gold Hitler Youth

emblem on his uniform, boys from the Hitler

Youth had played in Aunt Klara's garden,

and his chest was full of medals. But he did not

look at all nasty; he had blue eyes and

very long eyelashes, and he was very dreamy. It

occurred to me all of a sudden that he was even more

dreamy than Hannes Stelzer, and I was

The House on Prague Street   191

deeply startled.

I let Susi and him lead the conversation,

while I listened. Susi was going strong, and

they seemed to be having a good time. He told

us that he came from Dresden--"Oh dear me,

we are almost neighbors," Susi said,--and that

he had studied chemistry--"That was always my

favorite subject, too," Susi said--and

that he was twenty-two--"Oh, but you are

ancient, we are only eighteen!" Susi said

and pressed my arm. She is making me two

years older, I thought, and I quickly looked

at the lieutenant to see if he believed her.

Over Susi's head he smiled at me,

confusing me even more--men with Hitler Youth

emblems should not smile so pleasantly. I

turned red and got mad at myself: why am I

turning red like that, I don't have to blush just because

of a soldier!

Then he told us that he was only passing

through, tomorrow he would be on his way to the front.

"What a pity," Susi said, and I breathed a

sigh of relief. Then I got even madder at

myself. Why was I relieved? He did not

concern me at all. Susi was welcome to him,

she could do whatever she pleased.

We parted on the Weinberg Hill, and

Susi gave him our school address and our

names again. She really did not have to give him my

name--I did not want to have anything to do with him.

He saluted and turned back.

Susi said, "Boy, was he nice. I

wonder if he'll write to us? Oh my

God! What will happen if I have to choose between

him and Heinz?"

I said, "See you tomorrow," and ran off. I

could not stand it a minute longer, my heart was

beating wildly. I had to walk home because I

could not bear anyone's seeing me, not even now.

Everyone in the tram would have been able to read on

my forehead: that gold Hitler Youth emblem and

those long eyelashes, and even more dreamy than

Hannes Stelzer ...

My mother had kept supper warm for me. She

asked, "Was it nice?" I stared at her.

"What?" She said, "Didn't you go to the theater

today?" I said, "Oh yes, the theater--was and then

I could not swallow a bite, although we had red

cabbage with potatoes, and I usually liked

The House on Prague Street   193

that. Then I locked myself in my room, holding

my beret on my lap. I looked at it,

shaking because he had held the beret in his

hand--boys from the Hitler Youth had been in

Aunt Klara's garden. Then I took the

beret to bed with me; I laid it next to my

face on my pillow, and I could not stop

shaking.

I was calmer the next morning. I hid the

beret in the drawer underneath my flannel

nightgowns. I knew that I would never again be

able to wear it. In school Susi asked, "Why

were you such a bore yesterday?"

I blushed. Susi looked at me. "You

did like him, I could tell right away! Oh,

Helene, why are you such a dummy?" Then she

hugged me. "When he writes," she said, "you

can have the letter. I want to be faithful to Heinz

anyway." Giggling, she let go of me and

began to sing her favorite aria: "Voi che

sapete ..." I felt myself blushing all the

way up to the roots of my hair; I got up

and threw my grammar text at her. It landed

at Mr. Kohler's feet because he was just coming

into the classroom.

He said, "Sometimes I wish private

schools could give detentions, too."

During class I could not keep my thoughts

together. Vocabulary words buzzed through my head

and did not mean a thing. I looked out the window.

Each gust of wind out there was my friend--it had the

power to make berets roll across the street. I

stared outside and heard neither Mr. Kohler's

voice nor the voice of Ilse Wagner, who

wanted to help me with the pluperfect.

Two weeks later the letter really did

arrive, on a sunny morning in March. For

two weeks I had told myself, "If he

writes to Susi, I will tear up the letter, and that

will be that."

Harry Lawichka brought the letter to class

during the eleven o'clock break. It was addressed

to me, to Helene Richter, and it was the first letter

I had ever received from a man. Harry

Lawichka, happy because he had bet on a good

horse, said, "Well, look here, look at

our dutiful Helene!"

I sat with the letter in my lap and I was shaking

again. The letter bore no stamps; instead, it was

The House on Prague Street   195

franked with a round marker inscribed "Front

Mail." The sender was Lieutenant Gerd

Koch, Front Mail Number 77351. I

ripped open the letter. Written from Charkow,

Russia, it began, "Dear Miss

Richter," and continued, "on my long voyage

here I debated whether or not I might write

to you. You had not asked me to do so." My God,

I thought, the letter is really meant for me, he

hasn't mixed up our names. I went on

reading. "But perhaps you can forgive the savior of

your hat for doing so? I liked your stubborn

silence so much."

"What's he writing?" Susi said. "Show

me--was

I handed Susi the letter. My eyes were

filled with tears. Why did I have to weep just

now? I put my head on the school table. The

green wood, cool against my forehead, glowed

dimly through my tears. Susi said, "Don't

bawl!" as she continued reading for me. "Next

month I will be entitled to a leave because I have not

been home for two years. If you permit, I

would like to come to Prague for a short while. We

could then keep stubborn silence together, because I like

to do that too."

Susi laughed and said, "Your lieutenant

has a sense of humor."

I had to laugh, too. I laughed and cried

at the same time and hugged Susi. He was not

my lieutenant, he had medals on his chest with

swastikas on them, but I was crazy about him.

I poked Susi and pushed her, Susi poked

me back, but I was taller and stronger than

she. We giggled and finally landed on the floor,

bringing us to our senses. "I have at least five

new bruises," Susi said, sulking and

pouting. "Heinz won't believe me when I

tell him that you gave them to me." Then we

giggled some more. But by the time Ilse Wagner

came back from the lounge, we were our serious

selves again.

I had to write a letter in reply, and I had

no idea how to begin. How did one address

lieutenants? "Dear Lieutenant" sounded

funny. "Dear Mr. Koch" would not do either.

"Beware of me because I am a half-Jew.

Sincerely yours, Helene Richter." I

knew that I would never be able to write that. I was

The House on Prague Street   197

sixteen and it was spring, I did not want

to think of my mother, I was shaking when I thought of

him, what concern of mine were all the racial

laws?

"Just write, `Dear Gerd, love and

kisses`!" Susi said, shrugging her shoulders

impatiently. "You really are a silly

goose, so much fuss about one single letter! What

will you do when things get serious?"

"But things are serious, Susi," I said

unhappily. I saw Aunt Klara's garden

and the boys with their brown shirts.

Susi smoothed her shiny hair. "As long

as he doesn't want to marry you, you don't

need to be Aryan." Then she began to sing

"Deh, vieni alla finestra," pretending

to be holding a guitar, just as any famous

tenor would do in Don Giovanni. I

couldn't help laughing again. Susi was right,

everything was very simple.

At night I locked myself in my room

once more. I wrote: "Dear Gerd, I am

glad that you want to come. I will show you

Prague, and maybe I will even add some

explanatory comments."

My father sat listening to the radio every night.

Sometimes Dr. Rechlitz came down, and

sometimes my father's colleague, Mr. Kuchera,

came over. They would put their heads together,

pressing their ears against the fabric of the speaker.

Dr. Rechlitz had no radio, he had been

made to turn it in, but my father was allowed

to keep his once he removed the short-wave

knob. They could get a Swiss station,

Beromznster, on the long wave. The

announcer there spoke a strange German, and

my mother explained, "That's how they speak in

Switzerland. We always wanted to send you to a

Swiss finishing school."

My father always looked cheerful after he had

listened to Radio Beromznster. He said,

"The battle of Stalingrad, that was the beginning

of their end."

But my mother sighed, "It will last a very long

time."

I began shaking again and asked whether they had

not said something about a city named Charkow. My father

said, "Oh no, it won't go that fast, that's in

Western Russia." My mother quickly looked

The House on Prague Street   199

at me, but she did not speak.

Later, in the kitchen, she told me that it was

forbidden under penalty of death to listen to foreign

broadcasts, and that I must never, not with one

single word, mention it to anybody. I became very

impatient with my mother. After all, I was not a

little kid who had to be told such things. My mother

only looked at me.

"I just want you to be absolutely clear

about it," she said. And I thought, if you only

knew, Mama, how good I am at keeping

secrets.

In April my grandfather died. "A

beautiful, quiet death," my grandmother printed

on the postcard. "We were all with him." My

mother wept for a long time; she had not been with him.

She sewed a black band on her sleeve, a

grosgrain ribbon she had taken off my father's

old hat. The shops no longer carried mourning

bands. Maybe they were all sold out.

Toward the end of April I got another

letter. This one had stamps on it and a return

address in Dresden. Gerd wrote, "I've

been home a week now and all I've done

is eat and sleep. Four days and three

nights on a train without a seat can break down

even the hardiest front-line soldier.

Please wait for me and be kind."

On a Monday early in May he arrived.

He was waiting in front of the school when I

came out at twelve o'clock, and there was sunshine

in his face and on the silver epaulets, and he

smiled when he saw me.

I got so flustered that I jumped down the

last five steps, almost falling. Then we

stood there looking at each other. We were in

everybody's way, and I did not care in the

least that Mr. Kohler had come down behind me and

saw, and that Harry Lawichka went past, and

Ilse Wagner, too, and Ilse

Ottenhausen.

We shook hands, and I said, "I'm glad

you came."

He said, "I'm glad you are here." That

confused me again, but fortunately right then Susi

joined us.

"Oh, the lieutenant," she said.

"Visiting our town again?"

He assumed his aloof expression as he

The House on Prague Street   201

replied, "Well, one does what one can."

Susi was tactful, claiming that she would have

to go home at once for lunch, although it was

Monday, and on Mondays we usually ate our

sandwiches in the park before going to the indoor

swimming pool. My sandwiches and bathing suit

were in my school bag. But Susi was tactful,

and I breathed a sigh of relief.

When Gerd said, "Now you will have to guide

me," I was still staring at him. He really did

have eyelashes like a little boy's, very long, and

blond eyebrows.

I asked, "What would you like to see first?" And

I felt flustered again because I, too, had without

thinking addressed him in the familiar form. It

seemed to me it could not be any other way; it was

as if I had known him for years.

Once again panic seized me. No one must

see me with him, everyone would be able to see that I

was in love with him. Dear God, make me

gain control of myself, and don't let us run

into anyone I know.

I took him to the tram station. The Number

One was just pulling in, and we went the way I

had always gone, to the end of the line. We stood

on the platform, he held my school bag,

and I thought of the man with the star whom they had

pulled off the streetcar that day, how he had

looked back. I thought, if he knew, he

would not be holding my school bag, he would run

away. I am a filthy half-Jew.

Gerd looked down at me and smiled. He

was a head taller than I, and he looked down

at me the way one looks when one has found

somebody for whom one had searched for a long time.

As the tram rattled toward its destination, I

was very happy.

Then we arrived at the terminal. The tram

turned a loop, and the driver and the conductor

took out their thermos bottles. Gerd said,

"Come, you have to have some lunch." We went to a

small tavern, where the waitress was very

grouchy. I knew why she was like that: Gerd's

chest was covered with so many swastikas. All they

had were potatoes with gravy, she said. So we

shared my sandwich and drank bright red soda.

Gerd took off his cap.

"It's almost scary," he said. "The silence

here ..." Then he paid for the soda.

The House on Prague Street   203

I had never had a man pay for anything before,

and I quickly reached for my purse. But then,

halfway, I decided not to; Susi

certainly wouldn't. He noticed and smiled, and

I was embarrassed all over again.

Then we strolled over the meadows of the White

Mountain battlefield. The sky curved

huge and shining over us. Suddenly I was very

talkative. I told Gerd all about the big

battle. I knew exactly where the

Protestant armies had stood and from which side

the Bavarian Prince Bouquoy had arrived.

I had always loved history, and my father had

once described the whole battle to me.

Gerd waved my school bag, he had stuck his

cap under his belt, he held his hand to his mouth

pretending to sound the bugle, and I pretended

to dash off in a gallop. But he caught up with

me.

"Please," he said, "let's not play war,

not even the Thirty Years' War, not this week.

Please."

We walked slowly toward the castle

grounds. He put his arm around my shoulder.

Frightened again, I thought, "Dear God, don't

let it be like in Milowitz!" But Gerd said

nothing about my shape and nothing about me being

absolutely his type. His uniform smeeled

good and strange, and I asked what it smelled

of.

"Freshly deloused," he explained, which

made me laugh uncontrollably. He

laughed, too, and I was no longer scared.

We strolled around the little castle which Ferdinand

of Tyrol had built for his wife in the shape

of a star. Overgrown paths led through the grounds;

no one ever came here, and no one took care of

it. The trees, moss-covered, grew

intertwined. Gerd did not take his arm from my

shoulder, and I felt very protected and happy.

He told me that he had only his mother now

and a young brother; his father had died during the first

days of the war. Now his mother had taken over his

father's practice--she was also a doctor--and his

brother dreamed day and night of becoming a

soldier.

"He doesn't know yet how it is," Gerd

said. "I used to be that way, at eighteen,

volunteering after two semesters." Since then

The House on Prague Street   205

there had been nothing but war: in France, in

Africa, in Norway, in Russia. There

had been months with malaria and a shoulder wound in

a field hospital near Odessa, and nothing

but war again. His face had aged, and his mother had

barely recognized him, he said, laughing.

He had earned all the medals, one after

another, he was proud of them, but they were really

nothing special, he said, and shrugged his

shoulders. I would have liked to touch the furrows in

his face and stroked his hair, too, but I could

not do that. So I contented myself with matching my

steps to his; I had to take very large strides

to keep up with him, and we laughed about that.

Then we sat down in the grass, and Gerd

made me show him my textbooks. He had

learned English in school. He laughed about

all the crinolines, and he said in English,

"It is a beautiful day today, and I am very

happy, are you also very happy?" I nodded.

He lay down in the grass chewing on a

blade of grass. He had closed his eyes,

and his eyelashes spread like small upturned

fans on his cheeks. A May bug came and

sat on his forehead. I carefully took it off

and let it fly into the blue air.

Then Gerd picked a daisy and began to count

quietly, "She loves me, she loves me

not." But he did not tell me the outcome, he

only nodded earnestly and took my hand and

smiled. All was quiet around us; only the

birds behaved as if the whold park belonged

to them exclusively.

Gerd reached into his pocket. "I've

brought you something," he said, "I almost forgot

all about it." The round, red-and-white tin box

said "Scho-ka-kola": it contained chocolate.

I closed my eyes and sniffed it, I had not

seen chocolate for years. "A lady may

accept chocolate and flowers from a

gentleman," Aunt Ella had once told

me. So I thanked him politely, sniffed

some more, and was tremendously pleased. Then I

put the box away in my school bag; it was not

possible to devour something so precious right

away. I wanted to give a piece to my

parents, and perhaps ration the rest to make it last a

long time.

But then Gerd's watch showed five o'clock, and

The House on Prague Street   207

I suddenly remembered my mother. I shook the

grass off my skirt, and we slowly walked

toward the end station of the tram.

As I was walking upstairs at home, I

remembered that my bathing suit was not damp.

My heart started beating madly. I ran

downstairs to the janitor's floor, into the

air-raid shelter, where there was a large water

barrel. I dipped my bathing suit into it.

Now it looked as if I really had been

swimming.

My mother said, "You'll be wanting to eat a

whole loaf of bread, after all this exercise,

right?" She laughed and made some sandwiches for

me.

I said, "It was great today, we'd like to go again

tomorrow, may I?" Gerd was going to be waiting

outside the school at noon.

My mother said, "If it won't tire you out

too much. You're thin enough!"

I replied, "Oh, of course it won't."

She patted my behind. I felt awful for

lying to her, and I was shaking, too, because Gerd

would be waiting for me in eighteen hours.

"Look," I said, "look what Susi

brought me!" I showed her the round tin box, and

my mother said, "Oh my God, there still is such a

thing as chocolate! Where on earth did she get

it?" I pretended to be very casual and said,

"Her Heinz must have given it to her."

My mother quickly put the box away. "Why

does she have to hang around with soldiers," she

said. "Aren't there any other young men? Only

housemaids used to hang around with soldiers."

I thought of Gerd and grew angry at my mother.

I ran out, slamming the door behind me.

My mother came to find me. She hugged me and

said, "Don't be mad, I know Susi is

German, and all the German boys are

soldiers now, that can't be helped. It is

nice of her to share with you."

I sulked for a while longer. Then I

insisted that my mother must divide the chocolate

into three parts, and we all had bread and butter

and chocolate for dinner. It was a real

banquet, my father said. But my mother ate only

one small bite and took the rest to the kitchen.

I never saw it again; the following day a

package went off to my grandmother, and the piece of

The House on Prague Street   209

chocolate from Gerd must have been in it.

At noon Gerd was waiting, and I barely

recognized him because he was wearing civilian

clothes. The sleeves of the brown suit were a

little bit short. He looked much younger today, and

suddenly I loved him so fervently that it almost

took my breath away. He carried my

school bag again.

"Let's pretend that there isn't any war,

shall we?" he said.

I nodded happily, thinking, "Maybe

he'll kiss me today. Dear God, make him

kiss me today!"

We went to the Savarin Restaurant for

lunch. I did not have to worry that someone might

see me with him: there were no more swastikas, he

was a civilian. We sat in the restaurant

garden eating veal with potatoes and cream puffs

for dessert--many, many cream puffs, because Gerd

had a lot of food coupons. The waiter thought

we were very funny: Gerd kept ordering cream

puffs, and we ate and looked at each other and

laughed between the bites of cream which was made of

God-knows-what and was sticking to our tongues.

Then we rode the tram to the star-shaped

castle again because Gerd said that it was the most

beautiful spot on earth. We lay in the

grass thinking up names for all the clouds

gliding above us. Once three little boys came

by and spied and peeked to see whether there would be

something to see. I had often enough done the same with

Irene Dvo%rak: disturbing lovers and spying

on them. But we must have been a disappointing

sight for the little boys, because there was nothing to see.

All we did was hold hands and look up at

the sky.

Once, on Thursday, the fourth day, Gerd

took my hand and pressed it to his face. I

held my breath again and thought, "Now, please,

dear God, now." I looked up at him and

we stood very still. He looked at me and his mouth

twitched, and I gathered all my courage and

stroked his cheek. Very carefully and very gently

he straightened a strand of hair on my neck,

and then we continued along the path.

That evening I wept in my bed. I wanted

him to kiss me, why didn't he? Maybe because

I had all those pimples on my forehead?

He didn't have to kiss my forehead if he

The House on Prague Street   211

didn't like it. The cadet in Milowitz had not

minded and Paul Kunert hadn't either, why did

he mind, when I loved him so much? Then I was

ashamed of myself: how could I think of the cadet

and of Gerd at the same time? I wept even

harder, and in the morning my eyes were swollen and

red.

I had to think up the most far-fetched

excuses now to be with Gerd. I had never been

gone from home that much at a time. There was no

school on Saturday and it was to be Gerd's

last day in Prague: on Monday he had to go

back to the front. I could not come up with another

excuse, so I just said to my mother, "I simply

have to go, Mama, I have to. It is the last

time, please." My mother didn't ask and let

me go.

That day Gerd was in uniform again and I shrank

back, because I had forgotten about all that: the

uniform and the Hitler Youth emblem with the

swastikas. They were all there again. I thought the

whole morning, "I have to tell him, I have

to." I was afraid. Then I took a deep

breath and said, "I have to tell you something,

Gerd."

He looked at me and said: "What will you

tell me?"

I took another deep breath and said, "I

am--I'm not really eighteen, I am only

sixteen. Susi lied about my age!" But that was

not what I had to tell him, that really wasn't

all that important.

Gerd laughed a lot and said, "That doesn't

matter at all. This way I'll be able

to hold on to you longer, when we are very old."

I thought the idea of being very old together very

funny, and had to laugh a lot too. But that

wasn't what I had to tell him.

I was subdued and worried all morning, and

Gerd noticed and tried to be cheerful. In the

afternoon Mozart's Eine Kleine

Nachtmusik was playing in the Bertram

Villa where Mozart had lived. We had not

been able to get tickets any more, but I knew

that we could easily go and sit on the wall. The

concert was in the garden. One year ago Susi and

I had sat on the wall, and it had been much more

fun sitting high up among the leaves, looking

down upon the rows of chairs.

The House on Prague Street   213

In the afternoon we went to the Bertram Estate

and walked up the path on which Mozart had

walked. The fragrance of lilacs was everywhere,

and I thought, "I have to tell him." We

climbed onto the wall and found a spot under a

birch tree. Its branches hung down on us

like a curtain. The rows of chairs were filling

up, and I thought, "I have to tell him." Gerd

took my hand and put it on his knee, and then

he leaned his face against it. I felt his

eyelashes on my hand. It was very quiet, the

conductor tapped and they began to play the

Allegro, and I thought, "I have to tell him."

I whispered, "Gerd, I must tell you

something."

He whispered too. "Yes? What will you

tell me?"

I took a deep breath. The orchestra was

playing pianissimo. I whispered, "I am

a half-caste of the first degree." That was the

legal term for people like me, my father had told me

once. Gerd raised his head and looked at

me. He had not understood.

I took my hand off his knee. The hand was

poor and lonely without his face, and I pressed

it against my body; poor hand. Then I

explained. "My mother is a Jew. You can go

now if you want to, I'll understand."

Gerd looked at me, he was very pale, and the

muscles below his cheekbones were taut; I could

see each one of them. The Adagio had started.

Please, say something, you have to leave or speak.

But please, don't say "What I don't

know won't hurt me," anything but that, because I

could not forgive you, please say something.

Gerd swallowed with great difficulty. "I

must tell you something, too, my girl," he

said. "I am in love with you. Do you know what that

means?"

I nodded, and he went on. "That's much more

important now."

The birch tree rustled and a voice below

warned us, "Quiet!"

Gerd took my face between his hands and kissed

my eyes. Then he kissed my mouth. I

sank into a bottomless happiness, deeper and

deeper; the Minuet was now being played. I

knew Mozart minuets were the only music

played in heaven. And then he took me in his

The House on Prague Street   215

arms, I felt him shivering. I put my arms

around him, and he pressed his face against mine and

held me.

We sat embraced, unmoving all through the

Allegretto. Even during the applause we

did not move. I wanted to stay this way always.

Then the garden began to empty, many steps

rustled the pebbles of the paths, and many happy

voices, and finally some more, singly, and then

silence fell. Somebody began to collect the

chairs down near the stage.

Gerd lifted his head as if he had just

awakened. His fingers touched my mouth to seal his

kiss. I looked at him, he was as beautiful

as the young Greeks in the pictures in the art

dictionary.

He smiled sadly. "We have to go."

I nodded. We walked down the graveled

path, hand in hand and very quiet, and we took the

tram back to town, very quiet. Then we had

to say goodbye, because Gerd's train for Dresden

was leaving at seven and he still had to pick up his

things in the barracks. I had to go home. We

shook hands, and Gerd touched my temples with the

tips of his fingers, very gently, and the muscles

under his cheekbones were very taut again.

He said, "Please wait for me." I

nodded, and he touched my temples once more.

Then he went away.

I came home and threw myself on my bed and

wept. My mother came in and sat down next

to me. "Don't you want to tell me about it?"

"No, not yet."

She got up, took off my shoes, and went

back to the kitchen. I wept and was happy at

the same time, and I thought, "Dear God,

thank you. Please take care of him for me."

The following day I sat down with my mother,

she was just grating carrots for a Sunday carrot

cake. If you closed your eyes, it tasted just

like nut cake.

I began to tell her about Gerd--how it had

begun with the beret and how it had continued. I did

not leave out a thing, neither the Hitler Youth

emblem nor the swastikas. Everything I told

her was most important; I wanted her to know

the whole story. My mother stopped grating

carrots. She sat down and stared at me. She

was pale, much paler than Gerd had been, and

The House on Prague Street   217

her hands were folded in her lap. The tips of

her fingers were yellow from grating the carrots. The

only thing I wanted to keep from her was that Gerd

had kissed me, that belonged to me alone.

But she asked, "Did he kiss you?"

I answered, "Yes, once. Yesterday."

She looked at me again and said nothing. I

had not known that a person could be so pale. Then

she got to her feet the way old women rise,

with great effort, leaning her weight against the table.

She went back to her carrots.

I waited for her to speak. She would have

to answer in some way. But she acted as if the

dumb carrots were the most important thing under

the sun. That made me mad. I would not eat a

single bite of that carrot cake, not one.

That afternoon I went to see Susi, who had

stopped going to Milowitz. Her Heinz was in

Germany now. We went for a walk, and Susi

wanted me to tell her all about it. I hugged

her and sighed, and she said, "Now you at least know

how dreamy men can be!" I talked, but there were

so many things that I could not tell her about: the way

Gerd's mouth had twitched, and about his face when

he had lifted it toward the curtain of birch

leaves.

Susi said, "But next time you have to sleep with

him, that's part of it."

Then we took the Number Fifteen tram

to a suburban movie where an old Hannes

Stelzer film was playing. All at once I

no longer liked Hannes Stelzer. I

closed my eyes and remembered Gerd's face

under the birch curtain, and Susi poked me in

the ribs and said, "You really are a hopeless

case, Helene Richter!"

By evening I was hungry. I ate half of

my mother's carrot cake at one sitting. My

mother looked less pale by now. She even

laughed when my father said, "My God, what one

has to put up with these days! Am I a

rabbit?" But he also ate a piece of the

cake, and my mother told him that he had always

been too much of a gourmet. I had to look up

the word in the dictionary.

The following week a letter arrived, mailed from

Dresden. Gerd wrote: "Thank you for those

six days. I will love you all my life for

those six days, because you have shown me that pure and

The House on Prague Street   219

quiet things still exist. I had stopped believing

in anything. And I will honor your mother because she

raised you."

    At the end of May Harry Lawichka

came into our classroom. He was very

ceremonial, as if he had put all his money

on the very best horse. He announced that the

school would have to close at the end of June,

because somebody in the Ministry of Education had

discovered that he was not a hundred percent Aryan

lineage. There were rumors, he said, that all

half-Jews would be sent to camps soon.

"Let's hope that I can at least look at

some horses through the barbed wire," he said and

laughed.

Mr. Kohler cleared his throat, and Harry

Lawichka quickly looked at Ilse Wagner,

slightly unsure of himself. She was German,

and one never knew what one could and could not say.

But Ilse Wagner bent her head over her

grammar book. She was no longer in

mourning--it had been two years. Once she

had told Susi that her parents were after her to come

home and get married again because the Fzhrer

needed more children. But she still carried her husband's

photograph in her purse, and she said that she

would much rather stay in Prague, it had a healthier

climate. Besides, she was not a machine for the

production of cannon fodder.

"Did she really say that, Susi?" I

asked. Ilse Wagner suddenly seemed a

heroine. What she had said was surely considered

high treason.

Susi had been unhappy for a while. Her

Heinz had never once written to her from

Germany. She said, "Pooh, the great love

affair!" For several days she acted like a

tragic diva, with a deep voice and a

melancholy air. Then she recovered and was the

same old Susi again: she had met Werner

at the swimming pool. She danced around and

sang arias about fickle feminine hearts, and

she looked at herself in the mirror and pursed

her lips. She had very nicely shaped lips.

She threw her arms wide and said, "Oh, I

just adore men! Especially when they lose their

heads!" Then she proudly looked herself over.

"Werner tells me I drive him

The House on Prague Street   221

absolutely crazy!"

In the summer she went to the Sudetenland

to visit her mother. Mrs. Renner wrote to me

and invited me to come along. I spent long

mornings standing in line at police

headquarters applying for a passport. But I

was refused. Half-Jews don't need

passports, the Czech official told me

angrily. If they have no valid reason for

traveling, they should stay home.

Susi was away the whole summer. I

missed her a lot. She had gone on

to Munich, where her mother's family lived, and

she wrote glowing letters about the Hofbrauhaus

and trips to the Starnberger See. She wrote:

"How can I be faithful to Werner when there are so

many nice men here? Oh, life is heavenly!"

I went swimming every afternoon at the Moldau

pool, dozed in the sun, and dreamed about Gerd.

Once in a while some young man would try

to speak to me, but I was not interested in meeting

anyone. I belonged to Gerd; not one of the others

could measure up to him--how dare they look at

me?

Gerd wrote: "My God, why didn't

I kiss you? Now I dream about you and kiss you

in my dreams, why didn't I kiss you for

six days?" And I wrote: "I dream of you

too and want you to kiss me, and you can have all of

me if you want me, next time." And he

wrote back: "No, my beloved, I don't

want all of you and you will have to remind me if I

should forget, next time. I will have to leave you again,

and I know what longing can do to men and to women. Not

until we can be together for good--not until then."

Susi returned in the fall. We

registered at a private art school to learn

fashion design. Susi said, "If I can't

become a famous actress then I want to be

a designer with you. Renner and Richter! All

the theaters will want us to work for them!"

Because the school was Czech I had to interpret

for Susi: she had never learned to speak

Czech. But now she picked up the most

important words very quickly and spoke with a lot

of verve, using her hands and feet as well.

Sometimes she would simply hang Czech endings

onto German verbs. All the girls

understood her; they thought she was a lot of fun.

The House on Prague Street   223

They called her Susichka and liked her

tremendously. I came very near to jealousy.

All through the fall we spent our mornings

drawing gladioli, first in pencil, next in

ink, and finally in watercolors. Afternoons we

did figure drawings in pencil, then in pen;

by the spring, Mr. Pikar, our teacher, said we

might perhaps advance to watercolors.

We much preferred figure drawing to the

boring gladioli; it was closer to fashion

design, we thought. Our model was a small

woman with a tired face and fresh scars on her

breasts.

"My dear Olga, you do look like an

eighteen-year-old now," Mr. Pikar had

exclaimed on the first day before turning to us.

"They reached almost to her knees last year!"

Olga smiled in her tired way, we all

blushed, and Mr. Pikar laughed his head off;

he knew very well that many of us were embarrassed

at seeing a naked woman for the first time in our

lives.

My figure drawings were much better than

my gladioli. Mr. Pikar said, "Good, one

hundred times more, and don't forget weight

distribution!" It took only a few days for

us to become blasi about Olga's nakedness;

Susi said, "Even Botticelli could not have

done much with that one, the poor thing!"

On our free afternoons we had to learn to sew

and to make our own patterns. It was left up

to us to choose the place where we wanted

to apprentice. My mother went next door, where

the fat widow Nowotna maintained her

workroom, and asked her to take me on. Widow

Nowotna liked the idea; she had a lot of

alterations to do, and apprentices were hard to get.

So there I sat every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon

on a stool, hemming and basting and trying to learn

something from the older seamstresses.

Widow Nowotna and her seamstresses loved

talking about men while they sewed. They held

back a little when I was around, and they whispered

things they would surely have said aloud in my

absence; even what they allowed me to hear was

bad enough. I was ashamed and horrified, and I

loved Gerd terribly because I knew that with him

it would all be different and beautiful.

My father had subscribed to the opera because my

The House on Prague Street   225

mother told him, "Our girl really should go out with

her own family once in a while, she can't

hang around Susi Renner exclusively!"

But it was not easy to go out with my family: my

mother could go neither to the theater nor to the movies

nor to a cafi. She could not go out of the house

after eight o'clock at night. And my father would much

rather play chess or listen to the radio.

But my mother insisted. "Never mind, let

Aunt Annel go in my place." So my father

had bought three subscriptions.

We went every other week to see operettas,

because Aunt Annel had said, "I wouldn't

understand anything else anyway, it would be a

waste of money." She was in seventh heaven

listening to The Gypsy Baron and The

Emperor's Waltz. Her button shoes

tapped in time with the music, and above her

old-fashioned feather boa her cheeks were pink

like a young girl's.

I said, "But Aunt Annel, this is nothing

compared to Mozart!"

And Aunt Annel replied, "To each his

own, my dear child."

I usually wore my good navy wool

dress with the lace collar, and my father put on

his good dark suit. He still looked very

presentable, I found, and my mother said, "What

an elegant family I have! Go and have a good

time."

I knew exactly what she would do while

we were gone. She would take in her dresses and

her skirts, so that my father would not notice the

weight she kept on losing. She always

divided everything we had into three portions and

most of the time carried her own plate back to the

kitchen. Later she would give the food to me

or send it to Theresienstadt. She would say,

"I don't enjoy it anyway." Sometimes when

she looked at me there were tears in her eyes.

When she saw that I noticed, she would leave the

room. I could remember a time when she would have

hugged me instead of leaving the room--before Gerd.

All Gerd's letters were now addressed to my

home, and she always carefully placed them next

to my lunch plate. But she never said a word.

She never asked how Gerd was or what he

wrote. I became obstinate. I would not say

a word to her either if that's how she wanted it, she

The House on Prague Street   227

was not my friend, she was not being honest with me. Or

did what Gerd had to tell me really not

interest her at all?

The cards from Theresienstadt stopped coming. From

time to time we would still get a note that had been

delayed by the censor. But all of them were put

into transports leaving Theresienstadt, going

to a work camp called Birkenau, near

Auschwitz, in Poland: grandmother and the three

aunts from Aussig, and Uncle Fritz and

Aunt Elsa. Silly Paul had gone off

much earlier with my ski boots. And Aunt

Klara's parents and Aunt Irma, and my

grandmother's brothers and sisters and their

families, whom I barely knew.

Aunt Ella was the only one who still wrote

from Birkenau, near Auschwitz, in Poland,

once a month. "My dear ones, I am

well I am healthy, how are you?" Maybe the

old people were no longer allowed to write? Dr.

Rechlitz said that his parents had never written

from Birkenau, near Auschwitz, in Poland,

either, and he whispered to my father. My father folded

his hands on the table with such force that his knuckles

cracked.

He said aloud, "But something like that is not

possible in civilized times. They could not do that.

Not that."

Shortly before Christmas Gerd sent me his

front mail stamp. I had asked for it because

I wanted to send him a Christmas package.

When my mother looked at the stamp I knew

what she was thinking: the stamp looked almost

exactly like the ones from Theresienstadt.

She merely said, "You can take some of

Aunt Annel's butter and bake cookies

for him, we don't need all the butter now.

We don't send packages any more."

I jumped up, "Oh good! Thanks,

Mama." I hoped she would cheer up. But she

only smiled sadly at me. She looked so

tired; but I did not want to think about tired

faces, I wanted to be happy. Why should I

be bothered with sadness?

For one whole day I baked butter

cookies, and the whole apartment was fragrant.

After supper we had some with our tea, and my father

said, "Your Gerd will certainly like these." I was

pleased--at least my father understood me. I

The House on Prague Street   229

used my pocket money to buy Msrike's

novella about Mozart in Prague. I

packed the cookies into a box, added the book,

and then took my navy beret from underneath my

flannel nightgowns where it had been since that

day; I put it into the package as well.

Gerd wrote, "My Christmas Eve was

made beautiful by your book. I didn't get

too many of the cookies, though, because all my

comrades thought they were the best thing they had ever

eaten. Later you will have to make them for me at

least once a week. And I am wearing your

hat under my helmet now for good luck. I

only wish I were a medieval knight."

He wrote almost every week. Sometimes his letters

were only ragged slips of paper, the pencil

markings almost illegible, without much sense,

expressing infinite exhaustion. I wept

over them, my poor, poor Gerd, please

sleep, I will not worry even if you don't

write. I thought of him constantly; talking

to my mother, watching my father play chess--always

there were thoughts of Gerd. They made me forget the

sadness in my mother's eyes and the way the hands of

my father shook, his fingertips yellowed by the

foul-smelling cigarettes that were his ration.

I wrote long letters to Gerd; every night I

sat in my room writing. I described

everything I had thought and done during the day, and

sometimes I wrote about the way life had been

long ago: in my grandparents' house with the

attic, with the swimming pool blinking in the sun

next door, and with my father going out hunting when

he was still my hero, and with my mother, not thin and with

lines of suffering in her face, but young and

beautiful on Aunt Klara's terrace under the

stars. I wrote happy letters because the thought of

Gerd made me happy. Sometimes he wrote

back happily, too; he described his

comrades on the front and his childhood in

Dresden. Once he had had an accident

playing hockey, long ago: he rammed the

blade of his skate into his foot. But he would

not say a word about it at home--men should not

moan, his father had said. When at long last he

had to confess what had happened, the sock had

already grown into the scar. "You will have a very hard

life with me," he wrote, "because I am very

stubborn." In the margin he drew a grim,

The House on Prague Street   231

bearded face.

Once he wrote, "Imagine, two days

ago I was on a train going right through

Prague, but you must have been asleep, because it was

three in the morning. Our train didn't even

stop. Now we are in Brescia, in northern

Italy, and we have a lot of time to rest up.

It is so beautiful here, trees and flowers are

blooming all around, and I'm beginning to understand

why all our ancestors were always attracted

to Italy. Besides, a year ago today I picked

up your hat, do you remember? To think that I

might never have found you if that day hadn't been

windy! Some day we'll go to Italy together

to celebrate."

I looked up Brescia on the map and was

happy. Nothing would happen to him there, there was

no fighting in northern Italy. His next letter

contained a photograph: his shirt sleeves were

rolled up, his face was tanned, and he was

laughing. It really was almost summer in

Brescia. Susi nearly fainted when I

showed her the picture. She admitted that Gerd

was more dreamy than Hannes Stelzer.

I carried the photograph with me everywhere.

At night I put it on the bedside table.

My mother saw it when she came in to kiss me

good night, and for a fleeting moment she smiled.

I thought, "Maybe everything will be all right between

us now." But her eyes turned sad again. She

turned off my light and closed the door.

    On a Friday afternoon in late March, when

I came home from art school, I found my

mother lying on the couch. She was very pale as she

said, "I don't know what's wrong with me, I

don't feel well at all."

When my father came home from his office, I

warmed up our dinner. My mother was lying very still and

did not want to eat.

Susi and I had tickets for Don

Giovanni that night, and I asked my mother

whether she wanted me to stay home.

"No," she said, "No, just go. It won't

amount to anything."

My father went upstairs to get Dr.

Rechlitz. The doctor pressed my mother's

stomach; she said that it hurt. She cried out, and

her forehead was suddenly wet with perspiration.

The House on Prague Street   233

Dr. Rechlitz said, "I really cannot

examine her, but you should send for a doctor at

once."

My father called Dr. Klatil, whose

patient my mother had been some years ago. But

Dr. Klatil could not come; he was not allowed

to treat Jews now. He did not want any

trouble.

Next my father called the Jewish

hospital. But they only asked if he was

unaware that none of them were allowed out after eight

o'clock--neither the doctors nor the ambulance

attendants. My father, desperate, replied,

"Of course I know."

I put on my navy wool dress and went

to see Don Giovanni. My mother was

moaning softly. My father sat with her, holding

her hand. "Maybe everything will be all right by the

time I get back," I thought.

But nothing had changed. Another Czech

doctor, who had been willing to come, had

wanted to take my mother to a hospital. But when

he saw her identity card, marked with the large

red J, he had to cancel the order for an

Aryan ambulance. Jews were not allowed

to travel in Aryan ambulances. He could

only give my mother a sedative, saying, "It

looks like an intestinal obstruction. She

needs surgery. Rush her to the hospital as

early as you can."

My mother was moaning loudly by now, tossing her

head from one side to the other. My father sat with

her all night, and I sat up in my room.

I could hear her moans through the closed doors.

But they did not want me with them. I no longer

belonged with them.

When day broke, my father called the Jewish

hospital again. My mother whispered, "The child should

not be here watching." I went and got dressed;

but I did not know where to go--it was Saturday and

there was no school. I kissed my mother. Her

eyes were sunken and rimmed by large black

circles. Then I went next door to ask the

widow Nowotna whether she had some work for me

to do.

The widow Nowotna gave me a stool

to sit on and a piece of taffeta to hem. I

pulled the stool to the window. I wanted to see

the ambulance when it arrived: my mother had always

The House on Prague Street   235

wanted me to see things and to remember them. When

the Jewish ambulance with the yellow star on its

side arrived and they were putting my mother inside,

I started to cry.

The widow Nowotna said, "Don't cry on

the taffeta, tears will leave spots."

My father had also gone in the ambulance. After

a while I said, "I think I'll go now."

I had been careful about my tears, but the hem

had turned out crooked.

I went home and waited there, thinking of

Gerd. The dinner dishes were still in the kitchen

sink. It was after eleven when my father came

back. His face gray, he said, "It was too

late." Then he sat down at his chess table,

lowered his face into his hands, and cried.

I had stopped crying. I went into the

kitchen, washed the dinner dishes, and could not

believe it. Yesterday at noon, she had been

well. After lunch she had said, "Don't

make poor Olga cross-eyed today!" because

that's what we did sometimes to annoy Mr.

Pikar. My mother always thought that such behavior was

not polite. And now she was supposed to be

dead?

That afternoon we went to the Jewish Hospital.

Dr. Rechlitz led us down to the basement.

My mother lay on a wooden bench, naked, her

stomach covered with a towel. They had tied her

chin with a strip of gauze, making it look as if

she were wearing a bonnet. Her face was smooth

and young, as it had been that night on the terrace

under the stars, and my father bent down and kissed it.

I wanted to do the same and touched her hand first.

But I shrank back: the hand was like stone, cold

and hard. I could not kiss her.

Then my father sent me to Aunt Annel's,

and Aunt Annel sat on her bed in her

kitchen and wept into her handkerchief. Over and

over she said, "Your poor Mama, she's

better off. God knows what would have happened

to her."

That night I called Susi, who packed

her nightgown and her toothbrush and told her

father that she was going to stay with me for a while. We

huddled together in my bed that night, and Susi

whispered, "You have Gerd, be thankful for that, I

wish I had had someone like him." Her words

finally allowed me to cry, and Susi cried with

The House on Prague Street   237

me until we were both exhausted. Falling

asleep, I no longer thought of my mother.

Instead, my mind repeated, "Poor, poor

Susichka."

Three days later my mother was cremated.

She could not be buried because that would have meant

burial in the Jewish cemetery: my father

refused to have her there. The people at the

crematorium did not insist on seeing my

mother's identity card. My father probably did

not tell them that she was Jewish, though such

concealment was high treason. My father did not

seem to care.

Because I did not own a black coat,

Mrs. Rechlitz loaned me her Persian

lamb. It was much too short for me--Mrs.

Rechlitz was tiny--and my legs looked even

thinner and longer in the black stockings which Aunt

Annel had let me borrow. My father sat

next to me in the front row. His shoulders were

shaking. Then the coffin, which stood at the center

of a stage, also began to shake and to move

backward. A curtain pulled shut. It was like

being at the theater, except that we did not

applaud.

Our living room looked like a flower shop:

they did not cremate the flowers but gave them

to us to take home. My mother's ashes came in

a small urn; the flowers took up much more

space. Later we buried the urn in the

crematorium grounds, under a young birch

tree. My father played chess again and listened

to broadcasts from Beromznster, and his eyes were

tired.

Gerd wrote, "You will miss her a lot, you

are still so young. But think how unhappy she must have

been. I wish I could be of more help to you now.

I have asked for leave and will probably get it

in early summer. Think about how we'll be together

for two whole weeks, and don't be sad."

I was not sad, and I did not cry much, I

had Gerd. I removed the black grosgrain

ribbon from my mother's winter coat and sewed it

on my spring jacket. Spring came quickly that

year, fat buds sprouted on the trees as if

nothing at all had happened.

I went to the crematorium grounds often, and

underneath the young birch I would quarrel with my

mother. "You did not like him," I said, "and I do

The House on Prague Street   239

understand, but not completely, only half of me

understands. You shouldn't have been so angry with me.

After all, you went against grandfather's wishes when

you married Papa. You should have known how I

felt when you never asked me about him, never

once. You of all people should have known."

    There was talk in school that all private

schools would definitely be closed down that

summer. All of us would be put to manual

labor for the total war effort. My father said that

all half-Jewish males had already been put

in camps, and that it was only a matter of time for

me. I started to make deals with God again.

"Dear God," I said, "I will go to a camp

gladly, but please don't make me go before

Gerd comes, please."

Gerd was in France now, he did not write

where. But France was safe, anything was better

than Russia. The front there was being revised

every day, the Germans said, and every day Radio

Beromznster announced new terrible losses

for the Germans. "It cannot last much longer now,"

my father said. But he was not cheerful as he

spoke; it seemed to be all the same to him.

He listened to Radio Beromznster only from

force of habit.

Every day after school I went to Aunt

Annel's. She prepared lunch for us

now--generally nothing but potatoes and gravy

except on Sundays, when there was a piece of

sausage. I could talk about Gerd to Aunt

Annel, I could read her his letters.

She said, "You certainly don't have it

easy, you children. When I was your age, I went

dancing twice a week, all I thought about were

ballgowns and dance cards. All you have are letters

and danger, and maybe a few days of leave.

It's all so sad. I wish there were an end to it

all. You know, I read a fairy tale

once, where a good witch comes to a girl and

tells her, `You can choose to be happy in

your youth and poor and sad and alone in your old

age, or you can choose the opposite.` I

don't remember what the girl chose, but that's

how it is in life: either you have it this way or that.

And you belong with those who will have a peaceful old

age. I wish it for you with all my heart."

School ended the first week in June. Besides

The House on Prague Street   241

Olga and the gladioli, we had also drawn

handbags and shoes and jewelry--in pencil, in

pen, and finally in watercolors. The real

fashion designing would have started the following

year, but that was not meant for us. The school was

closing, and the names of students and teachers were sent

to the Labor Office.

Then it was June sixth and the invasion began.

The announcer on Radio Beromznster told

of it in a jubilant voice, and people on the

tram nodded to one another, even total

strangers. I knew that Gerd would not be coming

now. "Just imagine," he wrote, "when things

started here, I already had my pass in my

pocket. Two days later and I would have been

in Prague. Please think of me now, you are

much in my thoughts."

That summer Susi went to Munich again. She

sent a happy letter, and on a postcard from a

sailing trip to the Starnberger See, a certain

Helmut signed his name under hers and made a

heart around both names; Susi had written

"ED" under his name which of course meant

"especially dreamy." There was no further

mail from her for a long time, and I began to be

miffed: had she really forgotten me just because of some

new man? But toward the end of the summer

Susi's mother wrote to me. The letter was very

short, and I had to read it twice before I

understood what it said. Susi, Mrs. Renner

wrote, had been killed during an air raid

on Munich. Her family's house had received

a direct hit, so at least Susi had not had

to suffer.

Dr. Rechlitz was sent to Theresienstadt.

Mrs. Rechlitz was put into a factory--because

now it was the turn of the spouses of Jews, my

father said. He himself was no longer counted among that

category, so he could keep his job as legal

counsel. Mrs. Rechlitz exchanged her

high heels for work boots and blue overalls.

She left very early in the morning; sometimes I

could hear her running downstairs before daylight.

I spent the summer in the Moldau swimming

pool, waiting for the Labor Office to catch

up with me. But the Labor Office did not

seem interested. Its raids were directed

only at young men, who were immediately sent to the

Reich as forced labor. I no longer made

The House on Prague Street   243

deals with God: they could send me anywhere they

wanted now that Gerd would not be coming. I dozed in

the sun dreaming of him. All his messages were

short and exhausted again. The entire Normandy

front was collapsing, said Radio

Beromznster. Gerd wrote, "I'm still

alive and can't believe it myself at times.

Only the thought of you makes me glad."

I thought a lot about Susi that summer.

Maybe Helmut had been with her at the end,

or some other man. God, you wouldn't let her

die all alone, would you? Maybe that is why

she had lived so fast, maybe she had known it

all along, poor, poor Susichka.

Maybe she had felt that she had to live a

lot before it was all over for her. She had not

been eighteen.

Sometimes I visited Susi's father. He was

alone now with his Greek books. I did not

know exactly what to say to him. At the end of

summer he was put into a transport because he was

no longer living with the Aryan part of his family:

Susi was dead, and Mrs. Renner was not allowed

to leave the Sudetenland.

I helped him pack his suitcase; there was

no one else to help him, and he was very

clumsy. Everybody was saying that rucksacks

were certainly much better for transports than

suitcases, but he did not have a rucksack.

His transport would be going directly

to Birkenau near Auschwitz. Maybe he

would be able to find Aunt Ella out there; Aunt

Ella had not written for months now either.

Susi's father gave me a small notebook

of Susi's poems, saying I should keep them

for later. Then he left. He wore his

black professor's suit, and the suitcase

looked much too big for him.

    In August I finally received the order

to report to the Labor Office of the Jewish

Community. On the same day Radio

Beromznster reported that the Allies had

liberated Paris. I went to report for work.

The man behind the desk told me, "Here is a

requisition for overalls. You are going to an

armament factory, where all half-Jews are

sent now." In a whisper he added, "It

won't be a picnic."

The House on Prague Street   245

I was amazed that I would not be sent away from

Prague. The armament factory was only an

hour's tram ride. The following morning at

six I and my new overalls were at work.

The Hermann Regner armament factory was

engaged in producing hand grenades and

flashlights for the Wehrmacht. The hand

grenades were pressed downstairs in the machine

room, and after a week there I would go upstairs

to the flashlights for two weeks. The old man

to whom I handed the pressed halves of hand

grenades shouted, "That's because the likes of you

can't stand the noise down here longer than a

week!"

The machine room was very large and dark. Every

machine was manned by one worker and one half-Jew

to help him. Besides handing the hand grenades to the

old man, it was my duty to pour liquid into the

machine every three minutes, so that it would not

overheat. I asked the old man what kind of a

liquid it was, it looked like very dirty soap

water. But the old man could not hear me, he was

deaf. The room was very hot. We worked until

six.

The first evening I fell asleep on the

tram going home and rode all the way to the

final stop. The conductress woke me,

saying, "Did you stay out too late last

night, Miss?" I had to ride part of the way

back to get home, and I did not arrive

until eight. In order to be at the factory

by six in the morning I had to leave home before

five. One minute after six the clock started

punching in red. If you had two red times in one

month, you had to work an extra week in the

machine room.

One day as I carried a canful of liquid

from the warehouse to the machine room, a man in a

black uniform strutted toward me. "The SS

are sniffing 'round here all the time," the deaf

old man had said, "ever since the half-Jews

started working here." The can was very heavy, and it

slammed against my knee as I walked. I could

not make room for the man quickly enough. He

reached out with his gloved hand and slapped me. I

almost dropped the can and spilled all the

liquid. Remarking, "Damn dirty vermin!"

he marched on in his black leather boots as if

nothing had happened.

The House on Prague Street   247

Then the letter from Dresden arrived. My father

had put it next to my dinner plate, just as my

mother had always done. It had come with the morning

mail, and it was from Dr. Elizabeth Koch.

I stared at the letter and did not want to open it.

If I leave it alone, I thought, maybe

nothing will have happened. But I knew. I held

my hands behind my back. I will have to open it, I

thought, maybe it won't be terrible. But I

knew. "Dear Miss Helene, Gerd has

been missing in action since September. I

received the news today. I had promised him

to let you know immediately should something happen. He

liked you so much. Yours, Elizabeth Koch."

The world did not fall apart, nothing moved, the

kitchen light went on burning, I sat at the

table, the soup plate still in front of me and the

torn envelope and the letter were in my lap.

My father was speaking from the kitchen, "Aunt

Annel made us a very nice potato soup

today." He came into the dining room, the steaming

soup pot in his hands, and said, "What

happened?" He put the soup pot on the table.

I got up and handed him the letter. The envelope

fell on the floor; I picked it up and went

to my room. I undressed. Then I

remembered that I had not washed; I went to the

bathroom and washed and brushed my teeth. Then

I went and lay down.

My father came in and said, "It doesn't have

to be the worst. When someone is missing, there is

always hope--was I nodded. He looked at me

and left.

I looked around my room. Nothing had

changed in it. Gerd's photograph was on my

night table, his tanned face was smiling at me

as he stood in his shirtsleeves. As I

looked at the picture, I thought, "Why

didn't I feel it? Is it possible that one

doesn't feel it?"

Two days later another letter from Gerd

arrived. It said, "Do you know what we forgot

to do? We forgot to carve a heart into a tree with

our initials in it, there are so many of those here.

We have to do it next time, I've become as

superstitious as an old woman, with your hat

under my helmet." There won't be a next

time, I thought. But it is not possible, I did

not feel it, it just is not possible.

The House on Prague Street   249

One more letter came from Dresden. Gerd's mother

was sending me a letter the commanding officer had

written her. "Gerd was in the front lines,"

it read, "and when we retreated, we realized that

he was no longer among us. It is possible that

he was taken prisoner. Otherwise we must

fear--was I did not read on. I did not

want to read on. I sent the letter back

to Mrs. Koch, otherwise we must fear,

otherwise, otherwise. In the night I woke

up because somebody was screaming, screaming so

terribly, was he alone and hurt, but it was

me--only I had screamed in my sleep. Were

you alone and hurt, all alone somewhere, all

alone, and I didn't feel it?

But even the nights in which I screamed

passed. The factory clock went on

ticking, you have to punch in, don't forget

to punch in, one minute after six it will punch

red. One week in the machine room, two

weeks of flashlights. Nothing was different,

nothing had changed. Only I had not felt it.

Downstairs in the machine room the workers were

on overtime. The Czech workmen received extra

cigarette rations when they produced a lot of

nice hand grenades. The foreman did not even

like the old man taking a sip from a bottle of

beer. Each sip meant half a hand grenade

less, a pinch of tobacco less for everybody,

wheels have to keep turning for victory, sweat

poured down every face. At noon the factory

became quiet for thirty minutes. But ears

continued ringing in the workers' cafeteria, they

rang over the potatoes with gravy, three

days more, two days more, one day, and then the

flashlights again, otherwise we must fear,

otherwise-- Upstairs, where the flashlights

were made, was less noisy. The machines were

smaller, and they were run by hand or with a foot

lever. I was assigned to a small hand press

with which to attach black-out lenses onto the

black bakelite, red-and-blue adjustable

lenses; if you put one over the other they made

purple--we had learned as much in first grade.

Two out of every three women upstairs were

half-Jews. You could tell who they were at first

glance, although they wore the same dirty

overalls as everybody else: the large

family of half-Jews. Upstairs everyone

The House on Prague Street   251

was cheerful, everyone always knew exactly about the

last BBC news; Radio Beromznster was

much too tame. Some of them were very old

ladies, also in overalls. Of course, old

ladies were half-Jews too: why had I

always thought that all half-Jews had to be young like

me?

Even Ilse Ottenhausen was there. I had

not seen her for a whole year. Mrs. Meikle

had died, she told me. She had simply

keeled over one day. The doctor had said that

she had had a piece of shrapnel in her head

and that it had been a miracle she had lived with

it for almost three years. No, she had never

complained, she simply could not hear at all

toward the end. Now Ilse lived alone in the

apartment with the portraits and the carpets and the

suitcases. She was sixteen. She had not

heard a word from her father since the twentieth of

July, and some of the officers who had been shot

had been his friends. No, she said, nobody had

denounced her yet to the Housing Ministry for

living alone in a three-room apartment. She

shook her head disbelievingly and laughed. She

was not at all pretty, poor Ilse, her

nose looked very Jewish, and I would have liked

to be especially cheerful with her, she needed that.

But how could I be cheerful?

Marie sat next to me at her press.

She was the only one I had to ask whether she was

half-Jewish or not: she wore clean white

collars on her overalls, and she was not sullen

or vulgar. Yes, she was a factory worker.

Before the war, when the factory had only

produced flashlights, she had been the

mistress of one of the directors. But he had

fled to England and had left her behind. Marie was

waiting for him, she had been waiting for five

years. She said, "It will be over soon, and

Jan will come to get me, you'll see."

The other factory workers poked one another

with their elbows, sneering. "Yeah, he'll come like

Saint Wenzeslas, on a white horse, your

Jan! He'll come back, but with a wife and

four kids, he will! Marie thinks she's the

only one in the world!" And Marie pressed the

lens onto the black bakelite. She shook

her head, and she said, "You will see."

I could bear the days, they left no time for

The House on Prague Street   253

thinking. But at night, when Gerd's face

looked at me from my night table, things were very

bad. I could not sleep, and though I buried

my head under my pillow, I saw him all the

time, alone, in pain, otherwise we must

fear, otherwise--Dear God, if it is that

way, did he at least die quickly? If you

made him suffer, if you made him suffer all

alone, I will not believe in you any more. You

don't care in the least what happens here on

earth, why don't you care, why? Do you even

exist?

Twice a month I was on night duty.

I had to sleep at the factory. Three of us

were on duty at any one time. Every two hours

we had to bundle up and patrol the factory.

It was icy cold, our teeth were chattering, we

were scared of the silence in the machine room and

scared of the shadows in the yard. But we had

to patrol the factory and protect it from

sabotage. A clock in each room had to be

punched every two hours. We clung to one

another; often I was the oldest, and I was

seventeen.

One day on the tram I picked up a

leaflet. It was old and yellow, and it read:

"German soldiers! Surrender while you still have

the chance! East Prussia has fallen. The

American Army stands at the Rhine. Germany

lies in ruins. Surrender, shorten the war, and

save your lives." I put the leaflet in my

pocket. Surely such news must mean the end

of the war? I was breathless when I arrived at the

factory, and I showed the leaflet to the others.

But they were not as pleased as I was. Marie

grabbed it out of my hand, put a match to it, and

threw the charred pieces down the toilet. She

said, "Don't ever pick up such a thing again!

If they found it on you, they would put us all

against the wall!" She shook her head. "These

children have no sense!"

New posters in all the trams showed a

large red claw with long talons about to crush the

Prague Castle. The caption read:

"Order--or Bolshevik chaos!" Most of the

posters had been defaced with the penciled addition:

"We are not scared, that's not where we live!"

It rhymed in Czech, and everyone knew that the

Prague Castle was the seat of the government which

The House on Prague Street   255

cooperated with the Germans. The posters were

removed overnight.

Each day was like any other. Was I still

alive? Factory, sleep, factory,

sleep. Every fourth Sunday I had a day off.

How would I celebrate my day off when it

finally came, otherwise we must fear,

otherwise? I sat under the portraits with

Ilse Ottenhausen, where nobody cooked

hot cocoa for us now. Once Ilse said,

"Sometimes I feel like everybody around me is

dead. I'm the only one left. It's a

terrible feeling." We played dominoes and

Monopoly, the apartment was deathly still. I had

always been so happy when I won a game.

Otherwise, otherwise--was it possible that

one didn't feel it?

Then the first flower women came to sit on the

Graben again, selling the first snowdrops. I

could not see them because at five-thirty in the

morning when I went past the Graben on my

way to work, they were not there yet; and at night when

I went home, they were already gone. But my father

told me that they were there. The wind was blowing as it

had that day two years ago. But I did get

to see the spring once in a while because several

times a week we had to have an air-raid

drill. The shelter was a quarter of a mile

away from the factory, across the meadow. The sun

was in my face as I ran to it, and the clumps of

grass were thick and green again. I had always

been so happy about the coming of spring; I had

always felt it like a special present just for

me. Now I could not feel happy.

Fat Mrs. Malechek said, "They'll

hit us for sure before we can even get there!"

She was running along with me, and her old body

in the patched overalls was shaking. How

beautiful it would be, I thought, to be able to lie

down in the grass and not move, and maybe even

cry. But I could not cry anyway. The

air-raid shelter smelled damp and dirty,

the door slammed shut behind us, the sun

disappeared. We sat down on the ground, as part

of the drill.

And one day it was not a drill. Even as we

ran across the meadow we heard detonations.

Mrs. Malechek yelled, "What did I

tell you, they'll hit us right here, like

The House on Prague Street   257

rabbits!" We ran until we gasped, but the

bombs did not seem to be coming closer. The

air remained pure even after the all-clear had

been sounded. Only when we returned to the

factory did we hear that the Weinberg

Section of Prague had suffered several

direct hits.

"Those jerks," yelled Mrs. Malechek.

"Don't they know where the factories are in this

town?" Mrs. Malechek was a Communist,

Marie said, and the Americans could never do

anything right as far as she was concerned.

Going home on the tram that night, I was

afraid. Our house was right under the Weinberg

Hill. I saw fires burning behind the

Museum, but no, it was not Aunt Annel's

house. We had to get off the tram and walk,

trams had stopped running for the night. But

everything was all right at home, only one window

pane had burst. Later, Radio

Beromznster announced that Dresden had been

destroyed that day. The northern sky glowed a

pale orange all night long. Three

weeks later my letter to Mrs. Koch was

returned to me. It had been rubberstamped

to read: "Addressee missing in terrorist air

raid." Poor Gerd, I thought, now you

don't have your mother any more. How good that you

don't know.

One Sunday dawned more beautiful than all

the others. The sky was clear and pure, and even

before the sirens sounded we could hear the humming.

Then we saw them, because we just could not stay put

in the shelter. We saw them like tiny specks in

the huge sky, in strict formation, moving very

slowly, and then we heard the bombs. The

janitor said, "If the warden catches us out

here, he's gonna blow his top!" But none of

us felt like going into the shelter; it was all so

unreal, how could one sit underground on one's

free Sunday when the sky was so wide and

blue?

Then the smoke clouds appeared. They rose

very slowly, soiling the shiny blue sky. Mrs.

Rechlitz said, "That's the factory district.

Thank God we're off today!" The humming

grew more and more distant, until it was gone altogether.

The sirens sounded the all-clear. By night we

knew that the factories had got it this time, because

The House on Prague Street   259

the radio listed the names of the ones that had been

hit, the Hermann Regner factory among

them.

The following morning I saw the wreckage.

I need not have hurried to arrive by six, because the

time clock was no longer there. The whole street

was gone, leaving only piles of rubble. The

workers were happily climbing all over them,

noting, "This is where my machine used to be."

But all you could see were bricks, iron rods

and girders, and mountains of debris. Even

fat Mrs. Malechek had to admit that it had

been precision work if one considered how high the

Americans had flown.

Old Regner was running back and forth, his

party button shaking with indignation, and he was

yelling at us. "Now we'll start rebuilding.

Get going, all of you!" We began to pile

up the bricks, but none of us was in too much of a

hurry--it was spring at last and it felt like a

holiday.

Several days later we succeeded in digging out

the bakelite room; there were many boxes with

halves of flashlights completely intact, the

red-and-blue lenses were not even cracked. But

even old Regner would not be able to do much with

halves of flashlights, said Marie, and she

laughed. We wore gloves, and we covered

our faces with scarves because the dust billowed

all around. I thought of the Rockies and of Wild

Bill Hickok--only the wide prairies

were missing in the picture here. Once I had

spent a whole summer imagining I was a

cowboy. How long ago had it been? That was when

everything began to fall apart in the old house.

Sometimes, while Marie stood guard, I lay

down in the rubble to take a sunbath, because

Marie claimed that I looked like a ghost. But

I did not really care about my looks, I

did it only to please her. At night, when

I took a bath, a layer of dust always formed

on the surface of the water.

One free Sunday I went to town. But

without Susi it was not much fun. The theaters had

all been closed down. As an exception, one

of Dvo%rak's operas was given a special

performance as a concert, without costumes and without a

stage. It was impossible to imagine that the

elderly lady on the dais could be a water

The House on Prague Street   261

sprite. Why was she so sorrowful for her

prince? Wasn't he alive and standing right

next to her?

I was hungry all the time now. My father

organized some cornflakes somewhere, and I

ate them with a dusting of sugar. But then we were out

of sugar for my father's coffee substitute.

When the cornflakes were all gone, Aunt

Annel gave us a pound of onions, and we

ate those, browned in substitute fat, with dry

bread. My father did not say anything more about

having to put up with things: he was no longer a

gourmet.

We began to notice that the black uniforms

that had always guarded us at work appeared less and

less frequently. There would be whole days when

none would show up at all. Toward the end of

April they were gone altogether. And the day came when

even old Regner, who had yelled so much about

rebuilding, was not to be found anywhere. "The

rats are leaving the ship," Marie said.

The lilacs began to bloom in early May.

They bloomed everywhere, the whole town was filled

with their fragrance. Never before had they bloomed so

lushly. Everyone talked about their beauty.

One day the tram stopped at the railroad

station. People were running toward the station from every

direction. Even the conductress and the driver

got out and started running, nobody really knew

why. The conductress's money bag rattled with

every step. I got off and ran too, although I was

tired and dirty.

A train of cattle cars was standing in the

station, SS men with pointed machine guns before

it. They pointed their guns at us and shouted

"Halt!"

No one moved. We stood staring at the

train. The conductress's money bag was

silent, and the only sound was that of deep breathing.

We all stared, mesmerized, because the cattle

cars were full of people; the doors were open, and we

could see them. But they were not really people, they were

skeletons in striped suits, with numbers on

their chests, Uncle Rudolf, skulls. They

were alive, they were standing there, one of them moved his

arm in greeting. A skeleton trying to wave

with a bone.

Then the SS men with the machine guns started

marching in a line toward us, shouting, "Get out of

The House on Prague Street   263

here!" We pressed through the station door back

into the street. A woman next to me started

weeping. The conductress's bag was still quiet,

no one breathed hard any more as all of us went

back very slowly. We boarded the tram again and

continued on our way, and the man next to me said,

"That's how they're sending them back, the sons

of bitches," and the man across the aisle said,

"I didn't believe it when the BBC

announced it." Then no one spoke at all.

But the silence was not because they were cautious, the

way they had been all those years. They were

quiet because there simply was nothing more to say.

The following day people all over town began

to tear down the German signs. They tore them

off shops and off tram cars, and they decorated

the shops and the trams with sprigs of lilac.

On Saturday morning my father ordered,

"You'll stay home today. There will be a lot

happening today, and I don't want you

outside."

It seemed very odd to be at home on an

ordinary weekday. I tried to clean the house

a little. The apartment had been neglected, though

a cleaning lady had been assigned to us because we

were a "motherless household." She did not clean

well at all. When the war is over, I

thought, I will have to start cleaning house. When

grandmother and Aunt Ella and all the others come

back, the apartment will have to be spic and span,

they will surely want to stay with us for a few

days. For a long time I sat looking at

Gerd's picture, Gerd with a smile and in

shirtsleeves. If I didn't have the

photograph, I wouldn't remember how you

looked. All we ever had were those six days.

Your arm on my shoulder, I can still feel it

sometimes, but I wouldn't know how you looked

anymore.

At noon the shooting began, single shots

here and there. The radio was deathly quiet. My

father reported that the town had gone mad, someone

should try to pacify both sides, he said, it

would never work out in this mad and angry way. He

was hoping the Americans would arrive soon,

only their arrival could prevent bloodshed.

They had already reached Pilsen, he said.

Then they began to call for help on the

radio, in English and in Russian. The

The House on Prague Street   265

janitor came and said that we would have to go to the

shelter; the Americans were not coming, and a tank

division of the SS had decided to make a last

stand in Prague. As I picked up my

suitcase, I heard something click close

by. Suddenly the chest of drawers had a

small hole where there had been none a second

earlier. A shot had gone through the window frame

into the chest of drawers. There it rested, a

minuscule silver bomb.

We stayed in the shelter late into the night.

The radio was begging for help in English: "The

Germans are shooting women and children here, where are

you, please come and help us!" People in the shelter

were turning to look at Hilde Kuchler and at

my father, who were both Germans.

Then we went back upstairs. Mrs.

Rechlitz said that it certainly would be more comfortable

to die in a warm bed than in the musty shelter.

My father's eyes frightened me. I woke up

several times during the night to hear him walking

through the apartment. The sky above Prague was very

red, and I heard my father muttering, "It can't

happen this way, it can't, not after all that

waiting. There has to be a bridge."

Next morning he told me, "I have to go.

It's no good anymore just keeping out of it. I

can't let them kill one another like this."

I objected. "But you have a German accent,

Papa," I said. "How will they know that you are not

a Nazi?"

But my father shrugged his shoulders. "I have

to help. They have to negotiate instead of killing

each other. Maybe everything is not lost yet."

My father left. I snuck out the door after

him and watched him go. He walked quickly,

keeping close to the house walls, his hands in his

pockets. Soon I lost sight of him.

When Mrs. Rechlitz heard that my father had

gone out, she looked worried. "He should not have

done that," she said. "Here we all know him,

nothing would have happened to him here." Mrs.

Rechlitz's face was white, and she had

forgotten to put on lipstick. The radio had

announced that an epidemic of typhoid fever

had broken out in Theresienstadt, and Dr.

Rechlitz was still there. The Americans had not

come yet. It took only three hours to get

to Prague from Pilsen--where were they?

The House on Prague Street   267

At night the sky was red again over the city,

and the radio said that the SS had put whole

blocks on fire, as well as the old City

Hall. And then the radio exhorted, "Kill

them, kill the Germans wherever you can find them,

kill them all, every man, woman, and child!" I

shivered. People in the shelter were staring at Hilde

Kuchler, the only German in the house now.

I thought of my father and of his German accent and of the

fact that he had no proof that he was not a

Nazi. How would they believe him when they had

killing on their minds?

The following day, as I was looking out the

living room window waiting for my father, I saw

a man with a gun running across the meadow where the

sheep had always grazed. He looked like wild

Rudi playing soldiers. The man fired as

he ran, who was he firing at? Then I saw

a flash come out of a window on the other side.

The man threw down his gun and fell. I

waited for him to get up again, but he did not

get up. At night, women carrying a white

flag came and took him away. The next day

they brought flowers and put them down on that

spot, a bouquet of lilacs.

Then the radio said that the Russians were

marching on Prague. They would arrive tomorrow.

They had had a long journey, all the way from

Berlin, the radio said. But the Americans had

been much, much closer: why had the Americans

not come? "The Western allies always left us

to stew," said the janitor. The sky was red again

over the city that night.

Three men in the uniforms of Revolutionary

Guards came to our shelter and asked for

Germans. People pointed at Hilde Kuchler,

and the men ordered, "She's coming with us." Hilde

Kuchler smiled at me in passing; she still had

blond curls on her forehead. One of the men

went upstairs and picked up her radio. They

probably needed it to make up for all their

trouble. They came back once more and asked,

"Is that all now?"

The janitor said, "There is a radio at

the Richters'.was

I went upstairs with them and gave them my

father's radio. It was true, it was a

German-owned radio, and they probably needed

that one also to make up for all their trouble. The

The House on Prague Street   269

man looked at me and said, "What about her?"

Mrs. Rechlitz stepped in front of me.

"You leave her alone," she said. "Her mother was

a Jew."

One of the men sneered. "They were

collaborators too, those Jews!"

Mrs. Rechlitz said, "You go to hell!"

The man scowled angrily at her. "You,

sweetie pie, have a German name too!" Then

he left.

Mrs. Rechlitz would have jumped at him if

he hadn't gone, she looked so angry.

On the following day the Russians arrived.

We heard the rejoicing on the radio, and then they

said that the war was over now, our Russian

brothers had saved us. Why had they not allowed

the Americans to save us? The war could have been

four days shorter for us.

Then I waited for my father. But he did not

come home. I wanted to look for him, but

Mrs. Rechlitz said, "I'd rather you stayed

home now. The Russians are still celebrating

like wildmen." A quarantine had been

announced in Theresienstadt, but Dr.

Rechlitz had sent a radio message that he

was well.

I waited for my father and for grandmother and for Aunt

Ella. A newspaper had been published and

had written about extermination camps and gas

chambers. I thought, "But somebody has to come

back, one of them has to, they can't just all be

dead." But then I remembered the skeletons

in the cattle cars at the railroad station, and

I remembered my mother's eyes. Had she

known?

And again I waited. One day Mr. Kuchera

arrived. He was my father's friend, and they had often

listened to Radio Beromznster together. Now he

also wore the uniform of the Revolutionary

Guards. "Come with me," he said, "I have found

your father in the Weinberg School."

We walked up the Weinberg Hill. I

wanted to know what had happened. Mr. Kuchera

did not speak for a long time; his legs were very thin

and he was walking very fast, I could barely keep

up with him.

Several blocks later he said, "Your father

stood on a barricade, in the midst of all the

shooting, and he spoke about reconciliation and

The House on Prague Street   271

about bridges between Czechs and Germans, in the

middle of the revolution he did that." Then

Mr. Kuchera fell silent again. I had

trouble following him, he walked so quickly.

"I saw him," he said, and his voice sounded

strained. "I saw him. The Germans were

shooting at him and the Czechs were throwing

cobblestones at him, there was a lot of confusion.

Now I've found him again, in the Weinberg

School."

Then Mr. Kuchera was silent once more.

We stepped over a mountain of cobblestones which

had been ripped out to build tank

barricades. Maybe they were the same ones?

When Mr. Kuchera spoke again, he said, "You

will have to be very brave, he is not well. He

should be in a hospital, but the hospitals

don't take Germans. I tried." Then he

gave me a swift glance. His hands were clenched

deep in his pockets, and he was walking very

quickly.

The Weinberg School had been turned

into an internment camp. The Germans were sitting

on the hallway floors and in the

classrooms, there was not enough room for all of

them, and Revolutionary Guardsmen with machine

guns were posted at every door. On one wall a

large lithograph showed Jan Hus before the

Council of Constance.

They let Mr. Kuchera and me pass through.

We stepped over people dozing and people sleeping, all

the children were crying, there was a stench everywhere. My

father was lying on a bench in classroom 3-A.

His shirt was bloody, and he was moaning. I

stroked his hand, it was very hot, and he opened his

eyes. His eyes were no longer frightened. He

opened his mouth, and a thin stream of blood

trickled from one corner. He smiled at me.

"Helenka. Be good." Then he closed his

eyes again, his face had turned white. There was

blood on his pants as well. Someone in the

corner said, "He'll die today for sure. Then

we'll have more room."

Mr. Kuchera took my hand and led me

outside. "He won't last much longer," he

said. "He wanted to see you." Then he let go

of my hand and slammed his fist against a wall.

"What a disgusting business, what a sickening

business, our Revolution!"

The House on Prague Street   273

As he walked me home, he asked, "Do

you have any money?"

I said yes, I did, my father had been paid

just last week.

He said, "I'll come again to see if you are

all right."

I nodded, and said, "Yes. And thank you."

The nights were always filled with shooting now and

screams and singing. People huddled together and whispered,

"The Russians are celebrating." Mrs.

Rechlitz said, "Just don't ever open the door

at night to anybody!" During the daytime, she

said, I could go to town on my own. I wanted

to visit Aunt Annel, I had to know what

had happened to her.

But Aunt Annel was not there; her apartment

door was sealed just as Aunt Ella's had

been, except that this seal proclaimed,

"Confiscated for the Republic." I stood

there, uncertain what to do next. Aunt

Annel had not divorced a Jew, as had

Hilde Kuchler. She had given her German

butter to us all those years so we could send it

away. She had been the only one of my father's

family to accept my mother with love. Why was her

apartment confiscated now for the Republic?

I stood there and didn't know what to do. Then

the janitor's door was opened downstairs. The

janitor's wife came up, wearing a blue

bathrobe with torn pockets. She whispered,

"They shot your aunt, the Revolutionary

Guards did. Right here in front of the house

they shot her, on that Saturday they did, because

the SS was also shooting people." She patted my

arm and went back downstairs.

I went home. It was all right. The

Republic would clear out Aunt Annel's

kitchen, which had been so full of secrets. It

would do it in the same way the German Reich

had cleared out the attic of my grandparents.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It

was all right.

Once I saw a large column of

German prisoners of war. They dragged past

our house, some of them wearing dirty bandages,

and a large cloud of dust hovered over them.

It is possible that he was taken prisoner,

otherwise--People watching from the sidewalk spat

at them. Women were doing the spitting, they had

The House on Prague Street   275

received extra cigarette rations for producing

hand grenades. Now they were catching up on the

spitting. A man said, "Leave them alone,

look at them, they're all poor devils!"

The women threatened the man with their fists and

screamed at him, "We'll do away with the

likes of you, too!"

When the new ration cards were handed out the

following month, I had to return the ones for

my father. They had issued some to him, but he was

dead now. The ration cards were just like the ones my

mother had always received: instead of JUDE

JUDE they had GERMAN GERMAN

printed all over them. But I could go and

return them because my father was dead.

    The town was dusty; summer had come suddenly.

The lilacs were wilted. Red flags hung

everywhere. Men with white swastikas painted on

their backs were clearing away the rubble by the side

of the road. A Revolutionary Guard stood

over them with a machine gun. When they had loaded

the cart, the guard harnessed one of the men to it and

prodded him with a whip. When the man did not

take off fast enough, he was beaten as a horse

would be whipped by a mad driver. The guard ran

alongside with his machine gun, whip in hand,

laughing. Good that my father is dead now, I

thought. Tricolored Czechoslovak flags

hung next to the red ones.

In June Dr. Rechlitz returned from

Theresienstadt. He was haggard and his head was

shaved, but he was hale and healthy, he said.

Mrs. Rechlitz wore lipstick again and very

high heels, her eyes sparkled and her

dimples were deep and happy. I went

upstairs every day to have my meals with them.

Dr. Rechlitz said, "In the fall you can

go back to school, Helenka, and maybe you can

exchange the large apartment for a small one. You

are young and healthy, things will be all right for you.

You don't know how fortunate we all are because

we are still young and well."

I did not want to give up the apartment as

long as there was a chance that someone might come

back. I went to the crematorium grounds

often. The young birch had grown since the

previous year, and a plaque under it gave my

mother's name, Marie Lswy-Richter. The

The House on Prague Street   277

crematorium people had wanted to remove the

plaque, the name had seemed too offensively

German. It took me a long time to persuade

them to leave it. I had to show them my mother's

identity card with the red J which meant Jew and the

yellow star on my mother's winter coat. Only

then did they decide not to tamper with the spot under

the birch tree.

I no longer argued with my mother. I understood

now why she had had such sadness in her eyes.

Nobody was coming back. It was useless to wait,

nobody was coming back. It was useless to wait,

nobody would ever come back again. They were all

dead. She had known it all along, from the very

beginning. She had been alone with her knowledge, and I

had been of no help to her. How should I have

helped her, when all my thoughts were with Gerd, in

love with Gerd? I had not belonged with her. But

now she had my father with her again, and maybe he

would be able to persuade her to forgive me.

I went to visit Marie. But she had aged

suddenly, and she did not wear her white

collars any more. Her Jan had returned from

England, but fat old Mrs. Malechek had

been right: he had returned with a wife, with an

English wife. Marie shrugged her shoulders.

I had always thought that she could not be much older

than I. But she was much older, her forehead was

tired and furrowed, and she said, "I knew it,

too, deep down and in secret. Six years

is too long."

I went to visit Ilse Ottenhausen. But

the sign on the door no longer read

"Ottenhausen-Meikle." There was a strange

name there now. I ran downstairs to make

absolutely sure that I was in the right house.

Then I ran back up and rang the bell. A

disheveled woman opened Ilse's door.

Behind her back I could see one of the

portraits, and I asked for Ilse. But the

woman said, "How should I know where all the

Huns are, I hope they all went to hell!"

Then she slammed the door in my face.

One day I met Irene Dvo%rak. She

was very pregnant. When I said, "How nice,

and what's your name now?" she replied,

"Nice, my foot." She had a hard mouth which

I had never noticed before, and she said, "He

didn't want to marry me, that bastard

The House on Prague Street   279

Nedoma. But he had to. And once the brat

is born, I'll show him what I can do!"

She laughed, but her eyes were cold. She

gave the eye to a young man who was just passing

by, and the young man turned several times to look

at us.

    Then the trains were running on schedule again,

and I could take a trip to see the old house

on Prague Street. Mrs. Rechlitz

gave me a chocolate bar to eat on the

train, English chocolate, called

Cadbury's. I could not eat something so

precious right away, maybe a small piece

every day. Cadbury's. The last chocolate I

had tasted had been called Scho-ka-kola.

But that had been long ago, a long time ago.

The begonia baskets were still hanging above the

platforms. The brickyard was across the tracks,

and so was the old thread factory. Main

Street looked just as it always had; only the

dimensions had changed--everything looked smaller

than I remembered. I knew none of the people, not

one of them. Where would I go first, to the old house

or to visit Franziska?

I decided to see Franziska, because I

wanted someone to talk to. I turned left.

At once I came to the development near the

sugar plant. In my memory the way had

been much longer. Franziska was in her garden,

hanging up the wash. I called to her.

For a second she stared at me

uncomprehendingly, then she dropped the wash

and the clothespins and ran toward me. She was round

and friendly and very soft, and she was bawling again.

Franziska had always liked to bawl, and I

told her, "You must stop now, Franziska,

or I'll start, too."

Then she took me into her kitchen, where the

floor was scrubbed bone white. I said, "But

I'll track in dirt," and she said, "Do you

have any idea what it looks like when my men

get home?"

After she made coffee, she asked, "And how

is your Papa?" Of course, she did not know

yet. My father had written to her about my mother,

but she did not know about him. I told her. She

sat very still and wiped her eyes with her apron.

"Dear Lord," she said, "dear Lord. There is

The House on Prague Street   281

no end to it."

Then she composed herself and poured the coffee.

She apologized because there was only bread and

butter to go with it. "You should have written that you were

coming! Nothing lasts in this house, with those three

hungry men!" I drank Franziska's

coffee and ate her bread and butter. The food

tasted wonderful. The butter still had tiny

droplets of water in it, and they burst when I

spread it with my knife.

Franziska was telling me about the

gravestone. My grandfather had had a gravestone

made before they went away, with his and grandmother's

names and their birthdays, and he had bought a lot

for it in the municipal cemetery. "You only

have to add the death dates, nothing else,"

Franziska said. "The stonemason will do it for

free, and the town will take care of the flowers and of the

planting." Then she cried again. I nodded. So

my grandfather had known, too. He had known just as

my mother had known. There was a gravestone. But

where was his grave? And where was grandmother's grave?

Franziska had stopped crying. She began

telling me about the German refugees who had

lived in the house during the war. "And now," she

said, "now there are people in it who had returned from

Auschwitz. But they know nothing about your

family, the mayor has already questioned them. I

wish you wouldn't go there. You won't recognize

the house." Then she whispered, her eyes

filled with horror, "They live like animals

there, God knows what kind of people they are. I

wish you wouldn't go."

But I insisted, "That's why I came,

Franziska."

Franziska put away the coffee mugs.

"I'll give you some of the butter to take with you,

if you like it so much. We have plenty." She

hugged me. "You should get married soon," she

said, "to a decent man, and have children. Then you'll

have a family again, and things won't be so terrible

any more." I nodded, just to please her. Why was

I nodding? Gerd was dead too.

Franziska walked with me as far as the

road. She wiped her eyes with the corner of her

apron and waved with the other hand.

The trees in the park across Prague

Street were taller now. The silver firs at

the garden gate almost reached the roof, and they

The House on Prague Street   283

shivered slightly. The garden gate stood

open, and the lawn was an expanse of weeds. The

last fluffy dandelion balls stood guard where

grandfather's strawberries had once been. Behind

the house, between the bed of rhubarb and the currant

bushes, lay a pile of decayed wood with

traces of green paint here and there: my lawn

swing.

I went up the three steps to the glass

veranda. The panes were cracked and broken. The

front door, which had been yellow, was

weathered-looking, and the brass had turned

black. How seldom had I ever had to ring the

bell here: there was always someone waiting for me,

there was no need to ring. I barely knew how

to ring. I shrank back when I heard the peal.

Nothing moved in the house for a long time. Then

someone shuffled through the hall, the spyhole was

opened: how often had I played with the spyhole?

An eye was looking at me. There was quiet

for a long time. Then the door opened a crack,

the chain was latched: how often had I played with

that chain? A man's voice said, "Yes?" and

I said that I used to live here a long time

ago, and would they let me come in for a minute

to see the house again?

The man came out from behind the crack. He

wore a black hat and a long black coat.

He shook his head. He had not understood.

I repeated my request, in German this

time, and very slowly. He seemed to understand. He

motioned with his hand and closed the door again. After

a while he opened it, but he had forgotten about

the chain. He had to close the door once more

before he could finally open it all the way.

He gestured for me to come in. I entered.

The hallway floor, which had always been so shiny

and where everyone's footsteps had resounded, was

covered with ashes and charred logs. The

campfire was at the center of the hall. The

room smelled of humans and of animals.

Two goats peeked out of the pantry; a board

had been nailed to the door frame to keep them

in. Chickens cackled in the kitchen.

And then they came out--from the parlor and through the

dining-room door, and down the stairs which were no

longer covered with yellow-red plush: men with

black hats, four, five, six of them, and

one woman. The oldest man's beard was

The House on Prague Street   285

white; he also wore a black hat and a long

black coat. He was bent over: had my

great-great-grandfather looked like this when he came

to town with his handcart? The oldest spoke, in

Yiddish, "What does the child want here?"

And I told them that I had lived here a

long time ago, and that I had only come to see the

house again. I spoke very slowly. I wanted

them all to understand me, I was afraid of them.

They were all so quiet. They stared and were

quiet.

Then one of them moved, he pushed up his

coat sleeve and showed me his arm. A number

was tattooed on the skin that covered the bone.

Then all of them pulled up their coat

sleeves, and all of them showed me their bone

arms, even the woman, even the oldest among

them. All wore numbers on their arms, and

all were so quiet as they looked at me.

Then the oldest spoke. He said, "Go

away, child, and don't come back. Don't

disturb us. You don't know, you haven't seen.

You haven't suffered. You haven't endured.

We are the last. Don't disturb us."

I nodded and gave a final look around. The

pale square with the nail above it was still on the

wall. I handed Franziska's package of

butter and Mrs. Rechlitz's chocolate,

Cadbury's, to the oldest. He accepted the

offerings and bowed. All of them bowed to me, even

the woman.

I went out, down the three steps.

Carefully I closed the garden gate behind me.

The silver firs were shivering slightly.

On the platform the begonia baskets

rocked quietly to and fro. The train for

Prague left before darkness came.

                THE END