Dita’s life wasn’t easy during the war years, nor has it been easy since. She and Ota were very close until his death in 2000. They had two sons and a daughter; their daughter died before she turned twenty, after a long illness. But Dita hasn’t allowed herself to be broken by fate’s blows—she didn’t allow it back then; she won’t allow it ever.
It is remarkable how someone who carries so much accumulated pain manages to keep on smiling. “It’s all I have left,” Dita tells me. But she has many other things left—her energy, her dignity as a battler against everything and everyone—and this makes her an upright eighty-year-old woman with fire in her eyes. As we travel around Terezín, she refuses to take a taxi, and I don’t dare contradict her thriftiness, typical of anyone who has lived through bad times. We take the subway, and she stands. There are free seats but she doesn’t sit down. No one can vanquish a woman like that. The entire Third Reich failed to do it.
Indefatigable or tired but never resigned to giving up, Dita asks me to give her a hand because she’s going to take fifty copies of The Painted Wall to the Terezín Memorial store, which has run out. We don’t rent a car; she insists that we go by coach. We make the same trip she made almost sixty years earlier, although now she’s dragging along a suitcase full of books. I’m scared she might find herself affected by this trip back in time, but she’s a strong woman. Right now, her greatest concern is to restock the ghetto library with these books.
Terezín turns out to be a peaceful place full of square buildings, dotted with lawns and trees and bathed in brilliant May light. Dita not only drops off the books but, being her normal feisty self, gets me free entry into the permanent exhibition.
The day is full of emotionally charged moments. Among the pictures by the ghetto internees on the wall is one by Dita herself, a dark and gloomy picture that shows a much less dazzling town than the one we’re walking around now. There’s also a room with the names of the children who were sent to Terezín. Dita runs through the list and smiles as she remembers some of them. They are almost all now dead.
Four video screens show the testimony of survivors talking about their experiences in Terezín. An older man with a deep voice appears on one of them. It’s Ota Kraus, Dita’s husband. He speaks in Czech, and although there are English subtitles, I don’t pay attention to them because I’m too hypnotized by his voice. It conveys such composure that you can’t help but listen to it. Dita silently pays attention. She’s looks grave but doesn’t shed a single tear. We leave and she tells me we’re going to see where she lived. She’s made of steel, or gives that appearance. I ask her if it isn’t difficult for her. “It is,” she replies, but she doesn’t stop, continuing on her way at a good pace. I had never before met a woman with such extraordinary courage in every aspect of her life.
Where she was housed during her time in the Terezín ghetto is now an inoffensive neighborhood block of apartments. Dita looks up at the third floor. She tells me that one of her cousins, who was a carpenter, made her a bookshelf. She tells me much more as we head toward another building where one floor has been preserved as a museum, its rooms full of bunks, just as it was during the ghetto years. It’s an oppressive place, too small for so many beds. They’ve even kept the earthenware basin the occupants used as a communal toilet.
“Can you imagine the smell?” Dita asks me.
No, I can’t. We go into another room where there’s a security guard. Pictures and posters from the ghetto era hang on the walls. An opera by the famous pianist and composer Viktor Ullmann is playing. He became one of the most active contributors to culture in Terezín. Dita stops in the middle of the room, empty but for the bored attendant. She quietly starts to sing Ullmann’s opera. Her voice is the voice of the children of Terezín, which rings out again that morning for a much-reduced but no less surprised audience. This is another moment when time goes backward and Dita becomes Ditiňka with her woolen socks and eyes of a dreamer, singing the children’s opera Brundibár.
During our return trip to Prague, Dita energetically asks the coach driver to open the sliding roof so we won’t die of asphyxiation from heat in a vehicle with windows that don’t open. The driver ignores her, so she starts to pull on the hatch lever herself, and I join her. Between the two of us, we succeed.
It is while we are sitting in the coach that a topic that has been buzzing around in my head for months comes up in the conversation: What happened that afternoon of the 8th of March 1944 when Fredy Hirsch went off to think about the proposal from the Resistance that he lead a camp uprising, given the imminent extermination of the September transport in the gas ovens? Why did a man as composed as Fredy Hirsch commit suicide with an overdose of Luminal?
Dita looks at me, and there’s a whole world in her eyes. And I begin to understand. I read in her eyes what I had read in the lines written by Ota in his book, but which I had taken as artistic license or a personal hypothesis. After all, wasn’t The Painted Wall a novel? Or was it only a novel in order to camouflage certain things which, if Ota had said them in a different context, might have caused him serious problems?
Dita asks me to be discreet, because she thinks that what she’s told me might cause her problems.
That’s why, rather than explaining what she told me, I’ll simply reproduce what Ota Kraus wrote and published in his novel, The Painted Wall, set in the family camp. One of the few characters in the book to appear with his real name is Fredy Hirsch, the instructor in charge of Block 31. This is what the novel recounts about that crucial moment when, after the SS have transferred the September transport to the quarantine camp, the Resistance asks Fredy to lead an uprising, and he asks for some time to think about it:
After an hour, Hirsch got up from his bed to go and look for one of the medics.
“I’ve decided,” he said. “As soon as it gets dark I’ll give the order. I need a pill to calm my nerves.”
…
A revolt against the Germans was madness, the doctor thought; it was death for everyone: the condemned transport, the prisoners in the family camp, and even the team from the hospital requisitioned by Mengele. The man had gone mad, he was clearly out of his mind, and if he wasn’t stopped, the Jewish doctors would die with the rest of the prisoners.
“I’ll give you something, a sedative,” the doctor told him, and turned to the pharmacist.
They were always short of medicine, but they had a small stock of tranquilizers. The pharmacist handed him a bottle of sleeping pills. The doctor emptied the contents into his hand and immediately clenched his fist around them. He had some cold tea in his mug into which he tipped the pills, and then he swirled the tea around until they’d dissolved in the murky liquid.