Being fun was valued in my family. Before the war, we ate lunch together in a formal dining room, and if my parents and Bobby were in the right mood they would take turns topping one another with funny stories. I would laugh so hard I had trouble eating. For birthdays and other special occasions, we wrote comic poems. I still have one that Bobby wrote for me in Terezín for my thirteenth birthday, filled with intricate (and untranslatable) puns and rhymes. My own attempts at humor were at times rather crude. One friend at Terezín, before he left on a transport to Auschwitz, gave me his prize possession, a booklet containing the phrase “Kiss my ass” in many languages. I memorized the German, the Dutch, and the Danish, all of which were spoken in Terezín, and when I visited Bobby at the hospital, with its patients of various nationalities, I would go up to one, shout the phrase in his language, and run out of the room as fast as I could. My favorite victim was a Danish priest who liked to correct my pronunciation.

Before Hitler (as we used to say), my mother had few responsibilities. Our cook, Boženka, ran the household, and Bobby and I each had a governess. Bobby’s was German-speaking; my nanny, Fridolína, spoke Czech, or, rather, a Moravian dialect that I loved to imitate. Her real name was Lenka. “Fridolína” was Bobby’s invention, based on Fridolín, the imaginary hero of the stories our father used to tell us. I was attached to Fridolína and, in fact, saw more of her than of my mother. She came from a tiny Moravian village called Želetava, and every year I put up a fight to spend the summer with her there. My mother’s minimal involvement in her children’s daily lives was customary among Prague women of her class in those days, but after more than eighty years I still remember how hurt I was by her detachment. I tried hard to interest her in my activities and to win her approval, but I mostly failed to please her. Luckily, my father and Fridolína always admired my dance performances, found great promise in my drawings, and praised and encouraged me with abandon.

My mother was content with an existence that consisted of seeing friends and having dress fittings during the day and going to night clubs and parties in the evening. But, once the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia and everything changed, so did she. She was assigned a job sorting confiscated property at the Prague Jewish Community warehouse, and she discovered that she enjoyed working and was good at it. She was quick and efficient. When the deportations began, friends and relatives leaving in transports would ask her to do their packing; she had developed a knack for fitting as much clothing and food as possible into the knapsacks and rolled-up blankets that they were allowed to carry. She discovered that she liked being useful.

By then, my father must have realized that his decision not to emigrate had been a fatal error. In 1938, when my parents finally applied for a visa to Colombia, we were required to convert to Catholicism. Mr. Ješátko, the family chauffeur, drove the four of us to Hradec Králové, a town about sixty miles from Prague, where a friendly priest was willing to baptize us. The next day, we had to receive Communion, and my father choked on the wafer. Even though my parents regarded conversion as a necessary formality, it made them extremely uneasy. While they were not observant Jews, they had always frowned on converts.

As for me, I happily embraced my new religion. For years, I had enjoyed my secret visits to the nearby Church of Cyril and Methodius with Fridolína, and I threw myself enthusiastically into the weekly religion classes at the public school, where I was in the second grade. We had to go to confession, and when the young woman who was our teacher (and whom I liked and always tried to please) gave us a list of sins I could not find anything to confess to. So I chose an unfamiliar word on the list, figuring that it was possibly something I had done. It was “adultery.”

But despite the conversion we did not emigrate. I don’t know whether we were unable to obtain an exit permit, or whether my father was perhaps reluctant to leave his mother, my grandmother Tina, behind. She later perished in Treblinka. At any rate, by the time it became clear that emigration was our only hope, it was too late.

It was during the German occupation, when we were still in Prague, that my mother fell in love with Herbert Langer. He was part of my parents’ new, all-Jewish social circle. (Though they were secretly in touch with many of their old Gentile friends, Jews and Gentiles had been forbidden to associate.) Apparently, Herbert had met and admired my mother at the Špindl ski resort before the war. She did not remember him, but she knew that years earlier his father and my paternal grandfather had founded an orphanage together. Even though Herbert was married by the time of the German occupation, he was besotted with my mother, and when he and his wife, Gerta, arrived in Terezín, two days after we did, he began to visit us in the attic almost every day.

My mother responded to the stresses of life in Terezín better than my father did. She was now the stronger of the two. She had a physically demanding job in the Putzkolonne, the cleaning brigade, scrubbing office floors on her knees at night, and, although she was not accustomed to physical labor and her hands were red and swollen, she handled the job well and was liked by her fellow-workers.

To my eyes, my parents still treated each other with affection, as they always had. My father seemed to go along with Herbert’s presence in our lives, but I could only imagine how he felt. Though he never lost his biting sense of humor, it turned dark, his witty puns becoming more sad than funny. He did not look well; he had lost a lot of weight, and his face had an unhealthy color. I used to watch him and worry about him, but I could not tell what, exactly, was wrong with him. Bobby thought he was suffering from cancer.

When my father asked me, after my mother’s arrest and our visit to Weidmann, whether I thought we should volunteer for a transport, I was shocked that he wanted to include me in such an important decision. I knew that leaving for the unknown would be dangerous. But what frightened me most was the thought that it would be up to me to pack all our possessions. They were mostly stored in a suitcase under my mother’s bed. In her absence, I had frequently rushed to retrieve various items from it, and what was left of the flour we had brought with us from Prague six months earlier had spilled onto our clothes. The result was a mess that I couldn’t cope with. Without mentioning the reason, I told my father that we shouldn’t volunteer.

I have often wondered whether he took my opinion into account, and I have felt ashamed that I let such a trivial and selfish motive guide me in a decision that might have resulted in my mother’s release from prison. In the end, whatever his reasons, my father decided against signing us up for the transport. In doing so, he saved our lives—I know now that we would not have passed the Auschwitz selection process. My mother was sick and weak after her imprisonment in a freezing cell, Bobby was paralyzed, and I was small for my age. We would have been deemed unfit for work and sent to the gas chambers.

The author with her brother, Bobby, in April, 1937. Courtesy the author

In my memory, it seems as though my mother remained in prison for months. But according to my diary she “was away from us for three weeks.” Against all reason, we never gave up hope that she would be released. Late one afternoon, my father came to the attic and sat on my bed, as he always used to do after work, while I toasted him a piece of precious rye bread on the communal stove. (In the evening, most of the women who lived in the attic would push and shove one another to get close to the stove, and, since they towered over me and I was not strong enough to squeeze by them, I always “cooked” in the afternoon.) While I was standing at the stove, my mother appeared at the attic entrance. Her beautiful face was thin and pale and looked incongruous atop her body, made bulky by the many layers of clothing she had managed to put on when she was arrested.