Bob Greene visited Beit Theresienstadt on Jan 27th 2011 and we publish his moving "Letter to Max," 69 years after Max Renner perished in the Holocaust. The original pre-war correspondance between Max Renner and his cousin, Bob's father, is archived in Beit Theresienstadt

          I write of you, Max, of my younger self and the curse you laid upon us. And of the strange field that joined us. I write to tell you some of the things you didn’t know, to still the anger which still smolders in your ghost, and ultimately, to give you substance once again, bitter as that may be.
 
I was only fourteen when your first letter arrived from Prague.
 
Stern faced you are, Max, in the picture you sent us, steel rimmed spectacles, looking at us as if a wind was blowing at you and you’ll be damned if you’ll budge. Your letter was in German, which my father barely remembered. There was absolutely no warning. How you found us in New York is still a mystery. The letter had been sent airmail and registered. It reached New York via Lufthansa over the North Atlantic. From the many cancellation marks on the envelope the letter had knocked around the city for ten days before it found us. Eventually it made its way to our door at 55 East 86th Street. It wasn’t opened until my father got home from his office that evening. It was in German. Greta Fischer, who was taking care of my grandmother, translated it.
 
 

 Prague, November 15, 1938
 
Lieber Oscar,
 
Please believe me. It is not easy for me to beg you this way because I know it could be a risk for you. For a cousin you haven’t seen for forty years and practically don’t know. The water is beginning to rise in Czechoslovakia up to my mouth. I have lived here for 19 years, but I am still a foreigner, a German and a Jew. Any day I can lose my position, and I simply can’t overlook any possibility for myself and my family to give them a chance that I earn a living. I am sure I can manage it. And if its not in my specialty, then I would work as a shoe cleaner, a cook. I don’t have any hesitation to do anything to make an honest dollar.
Help me!
I speak a bad English, but people understand, and I promise you in four weeks I will speak it perfectly. My wife is used to working with me. She is not an extravagant woman, and she has helped me for years in my business. My younger daughter Liane is only 13 years old and is still going to school.
A young friend, Dr. Harry May, is on his way to New York now. Just before leaving he married my eldest daughter, Helga. She is twenty. He got from Dr. Stephen Wise, a stranger, an affidavit and probably he will work with the Jewish Institute of Religion. I hope that he will soon earn enough so that he can provide for Helga and bring her to America. He arrives just today on the Ile de France in New York.
I am giving the dates of my family. Please don’t let us down. To get a Visa it is necessary to have $6000 dollars. Transfer is impossible and I have no foreign money.
I thank you in advance.
Your cousin,
                                                          Max Renner
 
We were at our dining room table.
“Who is Max Renner?” my mother asked.
I watched my father thinking
 “Max Renner?” my mother asked again. “Who’s he?”
Max, we didn’t even know who you were!
A long silence.
“Read it again,” my father asked Greta Fischer.
She held the letter, starting at the top, slowly translating in her heavily accented English, my mother, my father listening. I watched them think, trying to go back before the Depression, back to the golden years of their marriage, back to their wedding trip in 1919 from New York to a Vienna still smarting from the Great War, back to their visit to my father’s Viennese family until, finally, dimly, in a world almost completely forgotten, they recalled the image of a thin young man who was my father’s first cousin, and whose name was Max Renner.
 “For God’s sake!” my father said. He took the letter from Greta Fischer’s hand and looked at it.
 “Oh, for God’s sake!” he said again.
“Could he have been at that dinner we gave at Sacher’s in Vienna?” my mother asked.
“Saccharin? Why do you use saccharin?” my mother’s mother asked.
 “They’re talking of a hotel in Vienna, Mrs. Stern,” Greta Fisher prompted.
“What?”
They peeled away the years, back to the old homestead on Fleischmarkt street, just above the Danube canal, the ancient buttressed building leaning against it’s neighbor with the help of a small stone arch, the                                                                                   roses hanging down from iron railings in the old courtyard, the sign “Renner” jutting out in the old engraving they had been given. Someone borrowed my father’s Graflex and took their picture, my father in his dress overcoat with the velvet collar, his suit and vest and Sulka tie, my mother with her silver fox scarf, both looking like a million dollars. Afterwards they invited the entire family to Sacher’s hotel, up to their suite overlooking the Opera, where a waiter served champagne and sandwiches on a silver tray. Downstairs, in the restaurant, a table had been reserved and, amid candlelight and bright silver, dinner was served at which my father was the host. It was quite a moment, Max. If you got the idea that my father had made it in the new world, you were right.
The family saw them off at the station. Porters, the leather luggage, the first class overnight compartment. Then, with a rush of steam and a hoot of the whistle, the New World slowly pulled away from the Old. You watched the train, Max, as it grew smaller, then made the turn, and slowly vanished. Then, with the others, the platform now empty, you headed for the tram back to Fleischmarkt. And that was that. It was the only time you saw my father.
 
If you imagined the next part, Max, you were right. The golden 1920’s lay ahead. Gliding across Europe, clickety-clack, eating in the dining car, silver service and flowers in the clean white tablecloth. Outside Europe slid by. Two days later pulling into the Gare de l’Est, Paris, the Meurice hotel, shopping on the Rue de Seine and the Rue Jacob, the last curios, antique boxes, onyx ashtrays, prints, tables, chairs for their new Park Avenue apartment. And when they had done, when they had exhausted both themselves and the weary shopkeepers, they took the train for Cherbourg and boarded the tender to go out to the Aquitania. The fog horn bellowed, the great ship swung around, pointed its prow west, the tugs let go as she embarked for New York and the promise of the 1920’s.
They were breathing pure oxygen, Max. The Gainesboro suite, candlelight in the first class dining room, deck chairs and plaid blankets, until after five and a half days, Sandy Hook, the lightship, the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building.
 
If you thought my father had made it in Vienna, Max, you should have seen him in New York. With his textile firm doing a million dollars a year, he and his  partner decided to branch out. Commercial banking, factoring other textile houses who would put up their inventory as security. By 1925 their volume was eight million dollars. By 1928 sixteen million! You should have come to America then, Max. A roller coaster! By 1929 they were doing twenty million. At that point they decided to go public. “Wouldn’t a hundred million a year be a grand goal to shoot for!” my father said.
They shot for it.
Instead, they hit their foot.
Their stock had just been issued when there was “a slight disturbance in the stock market,” as my father testified in court. Their timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Wall street laid an egg!” bannered Variety. It was the Great Crash of 1929. With the smell of gunpowder in the air, they tried to call in their loans. No dice. Everything had turned bad. An uproar! Had they known? Had there been monkey business somewhere?  Childhood memory, my father sitting with an adding machine, turning the crank, trying to find out where the money had gone. Furious stockholders threatening action. An indictment was filed, charging that they had deliberately defrauded the public by issuing worthless tock and moreover, “did so deliberately and knowingly.” Bail was set and the District Attorney began preparing his case. They were to be tried on criminal counts.
 
It took a year, Max, before the trial began. Penniless, we moved to the Croydon hotel where my grandmother Sarah, who had disliked my father even when he had money, now supported us, rubbing it in every chance she got and waited for him to go to jail.
He almost went.
The trial lasted six weeks. The case went to the jury and a verdict was returned that same night. “Guilty!” A vindictive judge sentenced my father and his partner, each, to a year and a half at the Atlanta penitentiary where they use the strap. Pending appeal, they were free on bail.
It took another two and a half years of extensions of sentence before a higher court handed down its opinion. “Verdict Reversed.” We lived on the rack. But by that time no one cared. What had been Page Two news in the New York Times was now barely an inch on page seventeen. Ruined, my father found himself penniless in New York, the city entering the darkest days of the Depression. It was 1932.
 
How do you like it, Max? Not quite what you remembered! Broke, miserable at home, he greeted the 1930’s smoking five cent cigars when he could afford them, and walking back from Wall Street so he could save the nickel. My mother was crossing the street to avoid people she knew. Sarah wouldn’t speak to him, and we ate at a card table in the hall while my father was banished to sleep in the dinette. “Would you ask your mother to pass the salt,” he would say, although their elbows were practically touching. Are you still thinking of the courtyard with the roses on the iron grillwork, my father with his homburg hat and Sulka tie, my mother with her silver fox scarf? Sure you are, Max. Sure your are. No one clued you in.
 
While you were moving to Prague and settling in on Havelska street we finally moved from the Croydon hotel to a decent apartment. There we finally got our things out of storage, relics of the good days when my father was on top of the world, relics which my mother had tried sell but which no one would buy in the Great Depression. My father, meanwhile, still completely broke, was selling life insurance and trying to think his way out of his mess. I remember him fooling around in the kitchen with a toy printing press, some colored ink and a cloth. He was trying to make a printed name tape, the kind you could sew into clothes. And I remember that first decent impression he got, using my mother’s monogram, filling it with ink, and then running a roller over it. I still have the cloth. With that idea he could have a machine built – if he could raise the money. Printed name tapes would be cheaper than the woven ones and quicker to deliver. He would call the company the Name Maker Corporation. He was, quite literally, trying to remake his name.
He had to get my mother to plead with Sarah to lend him the four hundred dollars he needed for a tool maker in Bridgeport to make the first machine. Almost to his surprise, the machine worked. Now he needed capital to start the business. Sarah balked. “I will not lend that man another dime!” He had to give away half his rights to attract two partners for two thousand dollars!
 
They took a loft on 10^th Street in Greenwich Village. Inside were two copies of his machine and a cheap stove in which to set the dyes. Before one machine sat a chap whose distinction was a shock of straight brown hair which fell into his face every time he turned the crank and slapped his paint brush on the plastic strip. On the upward turn the shock of hair would suddenly toss back on his head. Thirty six time he would do this to make up an order of three dozen name tapes. Three dozen tapes for a dollar! Yards of ribbon would be wasted on printing that smudged, were off center, letters that did not come up, wet hair from the paint brush which smeared the ribbon. It drove my father crazy. He was drawing sixteen dollars a week from the business, but that might soon stop.
“Adjust the doctor blade! he would cry, bending over his invention. Sometimes it took an hour to get thirty six impressions passably printed. They would staple the good pieces of tape together, then roll the tape on a reel and put it back into the oven of the small kitchen stove in the back of the loft. The Vat dyes had to be fixed with heat.
He would be sitting at his desk up front. “Do you smell something?” he’d suddenly cry. Leaping from his desk chair - he was a stout man looking something like the actor Sidney Greenstreet -  he’d run back to the oven which was already smoking. Inside would be a reel of browned and charred tape, a whole morning’s work ruined.
“That goddamed oven!” he’d cry. “That goddammed oven!” They couldn’t afford a decent commercial oven with a temperature control. “Can we salvage any of the tape,” he’d ask, perspiring as he leaned over the reel, studying the ruins. They’d sink the reel into a tub of Clorox to try to bleach the stains off. The rest of the afternoon would be spent doing over the order. “Sit by the stove after you’ve finished printing them!” my father would say.” Don’t’ move!”
 
That’s the picture Max. That’s what was going on when your letter arrived. I watched my father read your letter again, his face blank.
 “Please don’t let us down!” you wrote. “To get a Visa it is necessary to have $6000 dollars. I thank you in advance.”
I saw my father scribbling with a pencil on my desk blotter. If he put half of his sixteen dollars a week aside it would take him fourteen years to accumulate six thousand dollars!
“It’s extortion!” I heard him say, searching for a moral reason why he couldn’t do the impossible. Then he scribbled again and just sat there, looking at the blotter.
 
“Can you type a letter for me? he said. I sat down before the ancient L.C. Smith typewriter he had given me when dealer threw it in with the second hand file cabinet he had bought for the business. I put a piece of paper in the platen.
Slowly he dictated and I tried to help. God help us, we did a terrible thing. Instead of telling you my father was dead broke we held out a shred of hope.
 
 
                                                New York, November 30^th, 1938
Dear Max,
 
  I received your letter and while I’ve forgotten most of my German, I was able to read it quite well. I will try to help you but I had a lot of trouble in the past ten years which you don’t know about. I am trying to get a new business started, but it is a very difficult time. I will ask around and see what I can do. I will speak to my partners in the business. Tell Harry May to get in touch with us when he arrives. I send my best you and to your family. With all my best wishes,
                                                          Oscar         
 
It isn’t so easy to say that you’re completely broke, Max, that you almost went to jail, that the business you’re trying to start is so weak it may not last through the year.  But you are still thinking of Sacher’s hotel, way back in 1919.
 
Into the box went the letter.  Some fifteen days later we received Max’s reply.
 
                                                Prague I  December 16^th 1938
                                                Havelska 25
                                                CSR
My dear cousin Oscar,
  
I received your letter and regret very much that I have not written to you in English. I am very glad you are thinking of to help me. Surely you are informed by newspapers of our situation in Europe and it is impossible for Jewish people to remain.
Till now I have no difficulties. But we do not know when Nuremberg antisemitical laws shall be introduced in Czechoslovakia therefore it is better not to wait. To day I have 47 years and this is  the best time to work. I have forces enough to succeed in America. I have ideas and energy. I am busy and keen. I have experience. I am tailor, cutter, designer and expert in textile and rubber goods. But I see no possibilities for the future.  My wife is a moderate person, which is busy, helps me since 15 years in business. The younger daughter has 13 years and is matriculated in the Grammar school.
My youngest brother Erwin is in Vienna and works there as secretary of GILGEMEEESTER Organization for Emigration.  I do not know how long he can remain in Vienna.
My elder daughter Hela is a pupil in art school. She is married with a young man, Harry S. May, Dr. philosophy, a theologian, and he is since 3 weeks in New York. The marriage was half an hour before he started by airmail to Paris. He is a smart young man and I would be very glad if you would communicate with him. If you will see him you can hear all details over us.
Thank you for looking to help us. If you give me the possibility to go over to America you will not any risk. I am waiting for further news from you and I remain.
 
                                   Very truly your cousin,
                                               Max.
 
We didn’t have to wait long for Harry May. He had just arrived in New York on the Ile de Franc, and immediately called my mother. She invited him to dinner. That’s where the real trouble started.
Harry May appeared at our apartment wearing heavy tortoise shell glasses, nicely shined shoes, a dark suit and vest beneath his overcoat. He carried flowers neatly wrapped in floral paper. These he held out to my mother as she greeted him in the foyer. “From Max,” he said, “and all his family.”
I watched him stand in our living room and look around. There, before him, were all the small treasures that had been collected during the great days and which had been in storage during those terrible hotel years. The decorative cups and saucers from the Rue Jacob in Paris, the antique tilt top table they had seen on the Rue de Seine, the English gravy bowl they had picked up in London. He saw the mahogany table with its antique Chinese vase sitting between the taffeta draped windows, the prints they had picked up on the Rue Napoleon hanging on the wall, the onyx ashtray on the coffee table beside an eighteenth century box that held some Pall Mall cigarettes. He saw the pair of “St. Cloud” type potpourri jars sitting on the mantle, the 19th century English coffee table, the rose love seat, the small French armchairs covered in floral chintz. And as Harry May settled into his French armchair beneath the mustard colored old French clock, and gratefully accepted a thin stemmed glass of sherry, he took a breath of relief and realized that what Max had told him was true, that indeed he had been invited to the home of a millionaire.
 
What he didn’t see was that everything had been up for sale, that dealers had been begged to buy the cups and saucers, the clock, the prints, the chairs, the tables, and only the ridiculously low prices offered accounted for their survival. Finally, he could not even guess that the stout man before him, looking like Sidney Greenstreet in the “Maltese Falcon,” had still not recovered from another ghastly day of burnt ribbons, smeared tape, and discussions with his partners how much longer they could stay in business.  
“How is Max?” my father asked.
“Getting bald like you, Oscar!” My father put his hand up to the few blond hairs that remained. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Harry May apologized. “I should not have said that. I just make a joke. I was told it was good to joke. I try to follow your American customs.”
“It’s all right, Harry.”
“Max and Vera, Helga the older daughter and Liane who is thirteen have a nice flat on Havelska street. On the third floor, opposite a church. The Opera house where Mozart played is only five minutes a way. Business is good, raincoat materials and linings. But now Max is worried.”
Before he could go into detail dinner was announced, and Harry May asked to use the bathroom. In the bedroom, in the subdued light from silk shaded lamps made from old apothecary jars, he saw the twin beds with their mahogany headboards, the green taffeta spreads Wilhelmina had put on for company, my mother’s dressing table with the antique chair before it, the large gilded French mirror behind her dresser. These too had once been offered for sale, but the prices offered wouldn’t buy cheap maple replacement furniture at Macy’s.
He took it all in, Max. And when Harry took his seat and unfolded his linen napkin from the 1920’s and sat back to enjoy the roast specially bought by my mother and paid for by Sarah’s checkbook, he was convinced help was on the way.
 
In Germany, Harry said, Jewish life was impossible. “Jews must eat in separate rooms in restaurants. Restricted shopping hours. Only two hotels for Jews in Berlin. Some streets you can’t even walk on! For the barber you have only two hours in the evening. Libraries off limits. Theaters, concert halls. This is what will happen if Hitler comes to Prague!”
 Now he passed pictures around. There was Max, very serious. Vera, plain but pleasant. “This is Liane,” he said. Liane peers out from the photograph, thirteen, delicate, with long hair and a lovely forehead. The light of your life, Max. Her dove eyes are frank and open, and she stares half timidly, half curiously, into the camera. Harry May sees my admiration.
“Maybe you will see her soon in New York,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all go out together.
Later my mother goes inside to Sarah’s bedroom and writes a check for Harry May. She comes back with it in her hand. “Here, Harry. It’s only ten dollars. I hope it will help.”
 Gratefully Harry accepted it and shook her hand. “I will pay you back. Every penny! As soon as I am earning! This is very nice of you.”
Harry May got his overcoat. “Give Max and the family our best,” my mother said.
He asked about me, and I said I wanted to go to Columbia.
“It is such a big thing to look forward to being a student at Columbia” he said.
We saw him to the door. “I will write to Max,” Harry said, “and tell him what a fine evening you have given me.”
The elevator door opened, Harry May waved goodnight, the door closed, and he vanished.
 
Oh, Harry! You don’t have to tell us!  I know what happened.
An hour later, at your cheap East 27th Street hotel, you got your key from the clerk at the desk, squeezed into the narrow elevator, and then walked along the threadbare carpet down to your room. Ignoring the overheated air, you threw your coat on the chair, and using the night table as a desk, began composing your letter to Max. The radiator was hissing, but you didn’t even hear it. You wrote of your gemuetlich dinner, of Oscar and Elsa and their beautiful apartment, “with many antiques of great value,” and of the two servants who were in attendance, “one to serve the dinner, and the other whose only duty was to attend Mrs. Stern.” You spoke of my mother’s generosity to you, a total stranger, and of the check she gave you. “They treated me like family. I’m sure Oscar will help you with your affidavit.” Then you sealed the letter, addressed it, and not trusting the mail chute, went  back downstairs and mailed it from the corner box on 28th Street.
 
Prague! The magical city. Faust’s city! Kafka’s city! Looking down from Hradcany Castle the steeples and towers point the city to the sky. “One of the most magical cities on earth,” Thomas Mann said. A thousand years old. The old town on the right bank of the Moldau, the town of mystical legends and the old Jewish cemetery. The Mala Strana beneath the castle. Kafka country. The old Jewish cemetery, the stones piled on top of one another. Mozart’s city. Past the Jewish town hall. Maiselova. The old clock with the Hebrew dial, the hands moving anti clockwise. The scarlet flag with the embroided shield of David in the Old-New Synagogue. The Castle with its history, the legendary house where Dr. Faust lived in Charles Square. Watching the clock strike the hour from the tower in the old City Hall, Death pulling the bell cord. Prague, city of philosophers and girls with high cheekbones and knowing eyes, Max Brod’s Café Arco, people crowded in four rooms, the air thick with smoke and the aroma of strong coffee. This was your setting, Max. We never even imagined it. But Hitler does.
 
Nineteen Thirty Eightis drawing to a close. It is almost New Year’s Eve in New York, Max. You are six hours ahead of us. There is a damp wind from the Moldau and there is a chill. You stand with the crowd and wait. The Square is a seal of cobbles. The towers of the Tyn Church rise off to the right. Beyond, across the Moldau, you can see the top of the Hradcany Palace. Everyone waits. And then, a cry goes up and the bells start ringing as the ancient clock strikes, the rooster crows, death reverses the hour glass, and suddenly it is 1939. The stars are pinpoints of ice in the sky. You embrace Vera and Helga and Liane.
 
You are asleep by the time midnight arrives in New York . I have spent it at RKO 86^th Street, watching “Dawn Patrol,” with Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Nivin. I watched as World War I in the air unfolded before me, the sky full of dog-fights, Nieuports and Fokker D7’s, the clatter of Spandus and Vickers, helmets and goggles, white scarves trailing in the split stream, shots of the German ace leaning over the cockpit and pointing down with his gloved hand, then the screaming dive and the goggled face behind the windscreen, the chattering machine gun. We will win, of course. Then there will be Arlo at the organ, “Happy New Year!” flashing on the screen, and when we leave it will be 1939.
 
The year has stolen on all of us. It is a year of doom. The earth is casting its field, Max. We are iron filings on a sheet of paper, and although we cannot see the magnet, the lines of force appear. You are at one pole, Max. We are at another, but we are joined.
 
Not only has the year of 1939 arrived, but stages are being constructed for it. Here, in Flushing meadows, the World’s Fair of 1939 is being built. The Trylon and the Perisphere are going up under a lacework of scaffolding. The lagoons have been laid out, exhibitors are bringing in their wares and the “World of Tomorrow” is taking shape. The Fair, as we already call it, will open in late spring. But on your side of the world Max another stage is being constructed. The music will be by Richard Wagner and the sets by Albert Speer. It will be an opera unlike any the world has yet seen. Sound effects by the Luftwaffe, and the Wehrmacht will supply all the extras needed. The fireworks will be incredible. Case Green, it’s called, the German plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The stage directions, cues for the actors - all exist on this same New Year’s Eve. The libretto contains a few dirty secrets, so it is being kept under wraps in Berlin.
For you, Max, and for the Jews in Prague, a director has already been chosen. His name is Reinhard Heydrich. A handsome man, save for a nasty scar on his chin. A chap of real ability, he’s already had thousands of Jews arrested during Kristallnacht in Berlin. And just this January of 1939, he has received some special orders. They come from Hermann Goering, who for all I know, might have been flying a Fokker D7 in that stock footage I just watched in “Dawn Patrol.” Goering has just instructed Heydrich to form the  Zentralstelle, a central organization in Berlin to assist in Jewish Emigration. Euphemisms, Max! That word “assist.” Be careful! You want to emigrate? Well, Goering and Heydrich are going to help you. “You are charged with promoting emigration of the Jews from Germany by all means,” Goering tells Heydrich. For now Heydrich’s orders apply only to Germany. You live in Prague. Things will expand shortly. But all that is still to come. For now we receive your 3^rd letter, Max. This time it is written in a neat hand in pen and ink.
 
                                      Prague I   February 16th, 1939
                                      Havelska 25
                                      CSR
 
My dear Oscar,
 
A fortnight ago was published a new decrees that all foreigners which are not of Czech nationality can be turned out and must leave this land between 1-6 months. As we are German subjects, we must await every moment that this decree shall be employed for us. Therefore I feel necessary to do all I can in order to find a way of immigration and if there is no possibility to get the necessary affidavit I planned to go to Ecuador, but the climate in this country is awful and I fear for the health of my wife.
 
Harry wrote to me that you and Elsa are to him like parents. Last week we got a cable, which announced us that he got a contract and I hope so that my elder daughter can go abroad in the shortest possible time. Surely you will understand that we would prefer to be in the land where our children are and our other relatives. Harry wrote that you promised to look for the possibilities to procure us an affidavit by your friends.
 
If you can do something in this way for me I should be very thankful. I send you our dates and if you have success I beg you that the affidavit may be sent to me  and not direct to the consulate, because there it can be lost. With the best regards to you and your family, I remain yours,
                                                                             Max
 
CBS Radio:
 
“This is a special news bulletin. Word has jus been received that German troops have entered Bohemia and Moravia encountering no resistance from the  Czechs. Advance columns of motorcyclists are reported now entering Prague We will interrupt our regularly scheduled programs to bring you further word as it comes in.”
 
Music, but it does not last long:
 
“Ladies and Gentlemen. We interrupt this broadcast. At 6 am this morning, Prague time, German Army infantry and aircraft have begun the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Tanks and motorized infantry have been pouring across the Czech border. In Prague squads of German students, in jack boots and arm bands, are jostling their way through bewildered crowds shouting, ‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!’”
 
Suddenly the air waves are crowded. NBC and ABC join CBS on the air.
We can’t see you Max, but you are there. Standing on the cobbles of the Old Town Square, as they come in, the Tynn Church, the old clock, the cobble stones, the crowd stunned into silence. Your maid had come in early with the news.“Er Kommt! He is coming!” She refuses to go out but you have gone around the corner to watch.
 
The line of motorcycles with their sidecars is endless and the roar and exhaust fills the air. Two steel helmeted Germans sit on each cycle, the one in the rear carrying a Mauser. Another helmeted German sits in the sidecar. All are carrying gas mask canisters. It has turned leaden and bitterly cold. Snow is beginning to fall, suddenly turning into squalls, whipping against you.. A tractor hauling a howitzer passes. A woman spits at it. The soldiers ignore her. Now come the troop carriers, tops down, steel helmets low, collars of the greatcoats turned up. Someone in the crowd throws a snowball. There is a rumor that all public buildings have been cordoned off. Throngs stand along the Prikopy and Vaclavske Namesti. Already you can see German police among the crowds, giving orders to the Czech policemen. You’ve seen enough, Max. You know what it means. You head back toward Havelska Street. In the distance, through the snow, you can see the towers of the Hradschin palace.
 
You stay in the apartment that afternoon,  trying to calm Vera, keeping an eye on Liane and Helga. You go over papers, what you own, what is in the bank, how much cash you have in the house. Outside the sound of motors never stops. Then, shortly before dusk, it begins to grow silent. You realize all traffic has stopped. A hush descends over the city as evening falls. And then, in the distance, you hear the sirens waling, rising and falling, growing louder. You take your coat from the hook and go downstairs.
Now the motorcycles are entering Old Town Square. They  slow and draw up on the cobbles in two full lines. A crowd has gathered. A moment later a black Mercedes, red white and black swastikas waving, enters the Square. The hood is covered with light snow. Then another, then another. And in the  third you see him, behind the glass, in the back seat. It is Hitler! In uniform. Two more Mercedes enter the Square. In one sits Heinrich Himmler Their cars stop for a moment. Then the motors gun and they pass under the arch toward the Hradschin Castle. The motorcycles spit and then roar from the square and fall into formation behind the three Mercedes. The crowd stands there, not making a sound. They follow the vanishing lights of the cars. The engines have faded. Gradually the Square becomes silent in the snow. You stand with the others. And then suddenly, on the Hradschin, floodlight are switched on. And now, slowly, it billows out, brilliant under the lights, Hitler’s gold and black standard, slowly balooning between the towers.
 
As you turn on Havelska street there is the sound of glass breaking. No one has to tell you what it is. It is the window of the Jewish shop on the corner.
 
 
II
 
Later that spring Harry May dined with us again before going off to his job in Cincinnati. My mother gave him another check for fifteen dollars. If he wrote Max after his visit to us there is no record of it, nor if Max ever received any letter. From Max, from Prague under German occupations,  only silence.
I took my College Entrance examinations  in the Columbia gym in June. Then I went up to my old summer camp in Vermont as a junior counselor. Once again the night skies, northern lights snaking across the heavens, bars and stripes of colors momentarily shaming the stars. In New York my mother has coaxed the ailing Sarah to the Fair, the tall Trylon points to the sky as if a rocket to the moon, and the huge white ball of the Perisphere foreshadows the moment of ignition of a grapefruit sized core of atoms. Together they board one of the little trains and snake their way by the flags and lagoons to get a taste of a world Sarah will never live in. It is too much for both of them. “I should have hired a chair,” my mother said, “but it was too expensive.” They return tired and unrefreshed. Later in the summer my parents go by themselves. It is a bittersweet experience. They love the recreation of an old New York street  that Con Edison  has built, with its tangle of overhead wires, gas lights, brownstones and front stoops. In this World of Tomorrow they catch a last glimpse of the yesterday of their childhood but the Fair is no fun for them. Still broke, they enter the French Pavilion, look at the prices, and realize they can’t afford dinner. Memories of Paris and the Meurice Hotel, of golden years.  My father can shrug it off, but my mother is still haunted. For me my summer vacation is ending. Up in Vermont the nights have grown cold, the stars brilliant in a black sky. On an old radio in the clubhouse I try to catch the news. Howitzers in the green Mountains, Northern lights flashing. The gods are making signs, thundering static through gaps in the White Mountains, speeding over storms in New Hampshire. Now the voice of the CBS announcer comes through:
 
ANNOUNCER: There are signs that German troops are now mobilized on the Polish frontier. We take you now to London and Edward R. Murrow.
 
MURROW: The last word that has reached London is that at the British Embassy in Berlin all the luggage of  the personnel and staff has been piled up in the hall. There is a feeling here that if Hitler does not back down, he will probably move against the Poles. Then the decision must be made here and in France and a terrible decision it will be. If it is to be war, how will it end? That is a question Englishmen are asking. And what will be the position of the United States?”
 
New Yorkis waiting, America is waiting for more news. Now again Murrow’s voice, speaking from Broadcasting House in London, relayed from a transmitter in Spain, spanning the Atlantic, speeding over the waves, making landfall in Newfoundland, relayed down to New York, where it slips into the panels of CBS Master Control at 485 Madison avenue, fingers electrons, is patched into the network, flashes down coils, and then resounds into waiting loudspeakers all across America.
 
MURROW: Forty five minutes ago the Prime Minister stated that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany….Almost directly following that broadcast air raid warning sirens screamed through the quiet calm of this Sabbath morning. There were planes in the sky. We’re told that the all clear signal has been sounded in the streets, but it’s not yet been heard in this building.
 
The Germans have attacked Poland. Britain and France have reacted at last. It is September 1st, 1939. World War II has begun.
 
A few days later I enter Columbia College for my freshman year. The war is coming closer. The headlines tell the story.
 

GERMANY INVADES NORWAY
CHAMBERLAIN RESIGNS
CHURCHILL BECOMES PRIME MINISTER       

 
It is Spring, 1940. Suddenly the headlines scream. The Germans have burst into the Low Countries. Motorized columns break though the Ardennes and invade France. Cutting north of the Maginot Line, armored columns begin enveloping fleeing French troops, while Stukas with sirens attached to their wings, begin their terrifying dives. The Meuse line is pierced. Paris is in danger. In the north a German advance heads towards Dunkirk to cut off the British along the coast. On the radio in my bedroom I hear Churchill’s growl span the ocean.
 
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields, we shall never surrender!
 
At Compiegne, in the same railway car in which the Germans had signed the armistice of 1918, the French sign the documents of surrender. The Germans threaten to be in England in a month. In the history department at Columbia there is much concern of what will happen to the French fleet. In her bedroom on 86^th Street, Sarah is engaged in her final struggle. A trained nurse is brought in. There are final examinations in the rickety chairs in the Columbia gym and, suddenly, I find my freshman year of college is over.
 
From you, Max, only silence. But there is a field between us, we are filings on a piece of paper, and the force runs through us. I resonate with you, Max, though in my isolation I do not realize it. You are drowning. And the seas are so rough we cannot even hear your voice. But now, suddenly, you appear once again.
 
It is in Sarah’s now empty room.
The desk is open.
 I have just come home. It is Spring, 1940.
My mother and father are standing by the desk, a letter in their hands. My mother is pale. My father holds the letter and his hand is shaking. I look at the envelope. It has three stamps, a red censor’s stamp, a New York region stamp, a Church Street Annex stamp, and a second registration stamp.
How many letters had you written, Max? How many? But this one got through, and it crucifies us against the wall!
 
May God damn you, Oscar!
I curse you and damn you and your family forever! I pleaded with you, as my only living relative in America, to save me and my family. You lied! I might have gone to Ecuador. Now it is too late! This is your gift to me! Now I make my gift to you! May God strike you down! May God, without pity, strike down your family as mine has been struck down! I shall curse you every remaining day of my life, and I will curse you from hell. You have left me my legacy. This I now leave to you! May an avenging God strike your souls with affliction, and damn you and your family forever!
 
His scream fills the room. You have appeared, Max. It took this long but finally you have appeared.
“We have to do something!” I cry.
My father is frightened and furious.
“What do you want me to do!” he bellows,  his voice rising. He grabs his trouser pocket and turns it inside out. “Look at it! It’s empty! Look at it! Put six thousand dollars in it and I’ll give it to Max. But it’s empty! You understand that?”  He is red faced. He stands there a moment, and then with a startling motion, grabs the letter from my hands, ripping it violently and in a fury hurls it into the waste paper basket. “Leave me alone already!” he cries out, and storms from the room. I have not seen him so upset since the days in the Croydon hotel.
My mother and I stand there, the letter in Sarah’s basket beneath us, the curse still ringing in the room. She is badly shaken. Then she turns and goes to my father. I look into the basket. I want to reach in and retrieve the torn letter. I am afraid to touch it.
 
I don’t recall we ever spoke of Max Renner again. My father never mentioned him and I didn’t dare to. Nor did my mother mention him. Yet he hung over us. His previous friendly letter had been a year and a half ago. Surely he had attempted to write since. What had happened in the interval? What had happened to the missing letters? What had happened to him?
 
It wasn’t until after my father’s death in 1972 that once again the letters of Max Renner re-emerged. My father had kept them, all those years, in the drawer of the green chest in his room. Now, going though his papers after his death, they reappeared. But it was more than the letters. It was you, Max, your ghost, waiting. You never left us. It was as if you directed that I find you once again. Now I can begin to follow your trail.
 
 My search begins with the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Leo Baeck had been the chief rabbi of Berlin before the Holocaust. In their files there begins to emerge a paper trail I had not suspected. The Germans registered the Jews of Prague, as they did all Jews of Western Europe, on duplicate index cards and records. Their persons, their possessions, their bank accounts, their furniture, their professions, their place of birth, their birth date. “Prague Jews found themselves entered on at least fourteen sets of index cards.” The Germans knew what they were going to do, the Jews did not. But before they threw you out of your apartment, Max, they made life hideous.
 
 

JEWISH STUDENTS EXCLUDED FROM ALL PUBLIC AND HIGH SCHOOLS!
 
CURFEW FOR JEWS IN FORCE EVERY NIGHT FROM 8 PM UNTIL MORNING!
 
JEWS EXCLUDED FROM THEATERS AND MOTION PICTURE THEATERS!
 
JEWS PROHIBITED FROM PUBLIC PARKS AND GARDENS IN PRAGUE!
 
JEWS FORBIDDEN TO SET FOOT IN CERTAIN STREETS!

PUBLIC LIBRARIES OFF LIMITS TO JEWS!

JEWS PROHIBITED FROM RESTAURANTS, SAVE IN ROOMS FOR JEWS!

JEWS PROHIBITED TO VISIT BARBER SHOPS, SAVE FROM EIGHT TO TEN IN THE MORNING!

JEWS EXCLUDED FORM ACCESS TO THEATERS!

JEWS NO LONGER PERMITTED TO RENT VACANT APARTMENTS!

JEWS DENIED LEGAL PROTECTION AGAINST TERMINATING OF LEASES!

JEWS FORBIDDEN TO LEAVE THEIR PLACE OF RESIDENCE EXCEPT BY SPECIAL PERMISSION!

           JEWS BARRED FROM ALL BARBER SHOPS!

This was just the beginning, Max. At Wannsee, a large and pleasant villa in Berlin’s suburb, certain arrangements are being made. They are the fruition of the memo Goering send to Heydrich:
 
In completion of the task which was entrust to you of solving the Jewish question, I herewith charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard for an overall solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organization, practical and financial measures, for the execution of the intended Final Solution of the Jewish question.
 
Eichmann, who took the minutes of the meeting, remembers Heydrich’s words. “The Fuehrer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.”
The entire Jewish population of Europe is to be destroyed!
Highest levels of the Nazi bureaucracy are present. All relevant Reich agencies now need to be coordinated. There are over eight million Jews to be eliminated in Europe, eleven million if Britain and Scandinavia are included. The list has been drawn and tabulated. It is a staggering project. An entire bureaucracy must to be organized to achieve it. Death factories will have to be constructed, barracks built, gas chambers and sufficient ovens to handle the traffic. In Poland and Russia the killers went to the victims but shooting Jews into open pits is too slow and cumbersome. The entire population of Europe’s west must now be coordinated.
 
 Now, in a clever twist,  the process will be reversed. The victims will be sent to the killers! It will require an accurate census of the Jews, then concentrating them in ghettos where, on carefully worked out schedules, they can be fed to the railways and taken to the death camps. Arrangements with the Reichsbahn will have to be worked out so that the railroads can handle the traffic, be paid,  timetables coordinated, books kept, Hollerith machines collected, operators trained, millions of punch cards ordered. First comes the census. A census like no other census before. It is a census for death.
That night, at Wannsee, they break out the brandy. With France already ground under there is a plentiful supply.
 
Before the Jews of the former state of Czechoslovakia can be destroyed they must be concentrated.  Where shall they be put? The name of Theresienstadt begins to appear. It is an old fortress town some 80 kilometers north of Prague. It once held, at its maximum, seven thousand troops and seven thousand civilian workers. Surely fifty thousand Jews could be put there. In anold Baedeker (1891) I find the following:
 
“Theresienstadt.(Rail.  Rest.); the fortified town (Hotel Kronprinz Rudolf; pop 11,482, lies 1 ½ M. Ato the N., the influx of the Eger.Fine view of the picturesque basaltic cones of the Mittelgebirgefrom the station: to the N.E. the Geltsch and the Kelchberg; to the N. , the Kreuzberg, Radischken, and Radobil; to the N.W., the Lobosch, Mileschauer, and Kletschen; to the W. the Kostial, with a ruined castle; to he S. W. the isolated Hasenburg. Beyond Theresienstadt the Eger is crossed.”
 
This garrison town had been built in the 19^th Century and named after the Empress Maria Theresa. It had never been attacked or besieged but quietly settled into the wake of time. Perfect for “settling” the Jews of the Protectorate and from elsewhere in Europe. With its ramparts it would restrict movement and there was a rail line only kilometers away. A spur could easily be built into Theresienstadt itself. That it will become a way-station to Auschwitz is not even breathed.
 
In the Baeck files there are constant references to “Yad Vashem.” This is the great Archives in Jerusalem where are kept the records, the memories, the fragments. the documents of what were once living Jewish communities in Europe. Other records are Pages of Testimony by family or friends who knew the victims. The Yad Vashem Archives are an effort to reconstruct, with a sense of life, locale, and substance, what the Germans are now degrading to symbols and numbers.
 
Now I have the background but I want more. Are you more, Max, than just a few letters, a curse and silence? Is there any further record of you and Liane and Helga?  I write:
 
YAD VASHEM
THE HOLOCAUST REMBRANCE AUTHORITY
POB 3477
Jerusalem91043, Israel
 
Can you help me?
I am trying to discover the fate of my father’s cousins in Prague. I assume they perished in the Holocaust, but I have no details. I enclose their names, birth dates, and the last address I have for them in Prague. These are all the pitifully few details I have.
Please accept this small contribution. I thank you for your efforts. While I realize your search may be futile, I shall be relieved that it has been made.
 
I despaired of getting any information. To my surprise a Rabbi Schachter replied, almost immediately.
 
I received your letter this morning, the day after Yom Kippur. I hasten to respond. Herewith my worksheet  from the Terezin lists.
 
His worksheet is a piece of paper divided in half. On the left are the three Renner names. Max, Vera and Liane. Beside each name are their birth dates and the letters Au-1, Ay, Em. These are the transport designations. The numbers 388, 389, and 390 are written beneath each of their names. Then, with skill and sensitivity, he leaves it to me to put everything together. And as I do so the past beyond the dark window slowly emerges.
 
For their assembly point in Prague before delivery to Theresienstadt, the Germans have chosen the Trade Fair grounds, an open expanse where trade fairs had been held in the spring and fall. The names of the victims have been selected from an enormous card file of registered Jews. Groups of one thousand or two thousand Jews are ordered assembled. Summonses are usually delivered at night, a day or two before, along with a sheet giving instructions how and where to report.
Ruth Bondy, in her superb book “Elder of the Jews”  reconstructs the scene at the Fair Grounds.
 
The deportees were to bring all the cash in their possession, their savings-account passbooks, certificates of stocks and bonds, jewelry and food-ration slip to the appointed assembly site and hand them in, together with the keys to their flats. The keys were marked with the transport letter and the owner’s personal number. The same number was stamped on the cargo, and on a piece of cardboard hung with string around the neck that was compulsory apparel for every deportee.
 
Schachter gives the details. The Renner’s convoy number is Au-1. Max, Vera and Liane are given the numbers 388, 389, and 390 and handed the cardboard and string. Cipher is being changed into flesh. Rabbi Schachter interprets:
 
The numbers after the Au-1 indicates the ordinal position in the convoy. Thus, 388, 389, and 390 indicate family.
 
Your curses Max, must have rent flesh! The Germans are now ready for the next step. From the Fair Grounds, before the city is awake, with a guarded escort, you are now all marched off to the nearby train station. It is done carefully, with the dawn, lest the sensitivities of ordinary Prague citizens be offended.
 
Early morning chill. The three of you, trying to stay together. With the crowd, the checking off of numbers, the waiting, the standing about, it takes several hours. At first passenger cars, later freight cars fitted with benches,. There is a hiss of engine, a cloud of steam. Transport number Au-1 pulls out. The date is May 15th, 1942. You are leaving Prague for the last time. You have only days to live, Max.
 
The trip to Theresienstadt takes two to three hours. An old Baedeker describes it:
 
Vor (78km) Stat. Theresienstadt – Bauschowitz (Bahnrest.) uber die Eger; es beginnt das deutsche Sprachgebiet. ½ St. n. die ehem. Festung Theresienstadt (Gasth. Erzherzog Karl;  Restaur. Deutsches Haus) an der Eger, die unterhalb in die Elbe mundet. – Jenseits Aussicht auf die malerischen Basaltkegel des Mittelgebirges.   R. an der Elbe Leitmeritz.
 
Over the Elbe river. The fortress Theresienstadt. Now one begins to speak German. The restaurant Deutsches Haus. In another age they might have stopped. But that’s another time and another planet. Ruth Bondy describes your arrival:
 
The passengers poured out into the commotion of the railway station, physically and emotionally drained, bewildered, the elderly often dazed. Awaiting them were Czech police in green uniforms, Jewish police in train conductor caps, the SS…transportation workers who had come to unload the cargo…The Germans urged everyone on. “Schnell! Schnell!” Transportation was provided on trucks, or platforms towed by tractors, driven by the SS “kindergarten.” Arranged in groups of four, the procession set out, the marchers clutching their hand luggage. It is a march of two kilometers to Theresienstadt.
 
You see the old fortress town in the distance.
 
Theresienstadt lay on the Ohre River in a gentle plain among meadows and low sloping hills. In the distance were the blue tinged mountains of Bohemia. But the town itself was grim. Its chief features were high scarps and deep moats, fortress walls and huge gray barracks. Streets intersected each other at right angles and the old, dark and dismal homes were indistinguishable from the barracks. The S.S. camp command overflowed into the town and took up numerous houses as well as barracks. Streets leading from the outside to these buildings were lines with barbed wire and wooden fences.
 
You, Vera and Liane are led over the moat and through one of the six gates, into the reception depot. Ruth Bondy describes it.
 
The depot was called “die Schleusse,” meaning sluice or lock…for the most part located in the damp, dark, subterranean dungeons of the ghetto walls, where new arrivals spent two or three days on soiled floors, waiting for all the procedures…After the SS warned the newcomers against hiding money or jewelry, people turned them over voluntarily. Then came the luggage check by Czech gendarmes, sometimes followed by a body check…every article of value on the official list of contraband was confiscated the moment it was spotted; tobacco, contraceptives, soap, toilet paper….By the time the luggage returned to its owners, if it was return at all, it contained only a pitiful remnant of all the articles that had been prepared with so much care, so much thought and deliberation. It took some time to recover the shock of this loss.
 
You are in the sluice two days. It is crowded. You sit on the earth floor of the Schleusse of the old fortress with the others, the dampness, the mildew, the smell. Here the paperwork is being done, the lists consulted. But now comes even more. Having taken away your rights, your money, your ration cards, your apartment, your freedom, your hope, they now tear out your heart. It is Liane they come for. She is to proceed into Theresienstadt itself.  You and Vera are directed to stay. These are the last moments you will ever be together. Finally they have amputated your soul and your screams must have rent hell itself! I can hear you, Max. I can hear you.
 
Rabbi Schachter knows what comes next.
 You and Vera are alone now, bereft of Liane. Are you aware of the others crowded in the dampness around you? Or is the pounding of your pulse so thick in your ears you are now in a hell of your own?  After endless hours your names and numbers are marked off against the transport lists. You retain the numbers you had on leaving Prague. It is not a random process. Each transport contains an inventory that has to be verified. Then you, with the other deportees who are not to remain in Theresienstadt, are told to get back on your feet and marched back to Bohusovice station. A train stands on the track. It waits for you, Max.
 
Rabbi Schachter tells your fate:
They were not “settled in” at Terezin – but merely “processed” for transfer to Poland on May 5, 1942.
 
You knew, Max. You knew when you were evicted from Havelska Street, had your movements in Prague proscribed, were denied the amenities of life. You knew when you handed over your bank account, were marched to the Fair Grounds and boarded the train for the trip to Theresienstadt. You knew when you lay those two days in the sluice with Vera trembling beside you. You knew when there was still time to curse. and you knew that moment when the very earth shattered and they came to take Liane. You had seen it coming for three and a half years and now it was here. And when finally they shoved you and Vera on to the cattle car at Bohusovice and the steel door banged shut your curse must have split the skies! The consciousness of me and my father and mother were slammed in with you.
 
 “Died in Majdanek two days later,” Rabbi  Schachter writes.
Full stop.
 
In ghetto Theresienstadt there is the turning of the leaves, but now the sound of trains again fills the air. There had been a lull but now the transports are resuming. They come in from Bohusovice station to the siding that has been built into Theresienstadt. The lists of transportees have been drawn up two days in advance. The cars are loaded and then pull out. No one knows the secret, or will admit they know.
 Liane Renner is still there. She has been there for almost a thousand days. She has spent the summer of 1942 here, then the long winter of 1942-43. Never a word from Max or Vera nor has she  been informed they are long past words.  She has been here for the spring of 1943 and yet another summer. Finally it is autumn, 1944, the skies clear, the air growing brisk.
As life flows through the countryside, so does it flow through her. She is now eighteen.  October has arrived. Cold and damp winds from the Baltic begin to sweep through Theresienstadt. The war has just seven months to run. It is going badly for the Germans but there is still time to wage the war against the Jews. There are a few weeks before the gas chambers and crematoriums are to be dismantled before the advancing Russians. Eichmann’s charts show there is still room on the schedule. The Jewish Council has been forced to prepare new lists. Who shall be protected? Who shall go? How much more time can be bought as the end of the war draws closer? Dr. Jacob Jacobson, who was there, remembers that autumn:
 
At first, two transports, with 2,500 men each, left Theresienstadt. The men had been told they would be sent to work in Germany. Then the wives of these men were persuaded to volunteer for joining their men folk…Then one category of Ghetto inmates after another was sent away on transports, some of them selected personally by the SS officers.
 
Transport Ej pulls into Theresienstadt. It is September 27th. It is loaded and pulled out. Transport Ek  follows, destination Auschwitz. Two thousand, four hundred ninety-nine people are put aboard. More orders issued, more numbers assigned. The pace is picking up. It is September 29th, 1944. Another transport, El,  destination Auschwitz, with  2, 499 people on board.
 
The whole staff of the Post office is being deported, along with doctors, dentists and nurses, nearly all the Rabbis, many of the musicians and artists, war cripples, the blind, almost the whole kitchen staff, most of the leading officials, and many employees of offices and workshops. We lived only from transport to transport. We knew by now that all these transports went to the East, to Auschwitz.
 
It is October 1st, 1944. The train for transport Em pulls into Theresienstadt. Slowly the engine comes in on the single track, the empty cars behind it. The deportees have been notified and given two days to get ready. Liane Renner has been told to get ready. In her barracks the tiered bunks have been cleared, the few belongings packed. Along the platform fifteen hundred deportees wait. She stands with them. She is number 1107. Does she know without knowing?
The desks, the checking off, the wait. Who is with her? Who is there to comfort her? Are there goodbyes?
 
All that is known is that Liane Renner, ciphered into a number and a date, steps off the platform into Transport Em, along with 1,500 other deportees, to meet their fate. She will not be at Theresienstadt when news of the Allied victory is heard. She will not make her way back the eighty kilometers to Prague to see what legacy of the family still remains. She will not look up at the windows of the apartment on Havelska street. She will not see her nineteenth birthday. The train doors are bolted, the orders given, the shrill whistle sounds, and the string of cars move away from Theresienstadt and then slowly make the turn toward the East. Following a route like that of her parents, the train climbs along the Vistula, then continues for three entire days, endlessly heading east, finally slowing as it enters the grounds of the great death factory the Germans have built, stopping at last along the long platform where the doors are unbolted and slid open.
 
She has arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
 
Suddenly the guards, the dogs, the shouting, the leather booted SS, the riding crops, deportees dismounting,  the shouted directions. The Germans no longer have need for pretence. She has arrived where the gassings take place. The moment has come. What hopes she had, what dreams she had, can only be registered in heaven. Only her epitaph is left, written by Rabbi Joseph Schachter.
 
“Because of her youth she might have been selected for slave labor in Auschwitz, or killed on her October 3^rd arrival there.”
 
The dark window shuts. It is over.
 
Is there any more? Schachter can supply no further details. “We have no more information,” he writes. “ “I suggest you write to ‘Beit Terezin,’ on a Kibbutz in Israel. They have the most comprehensive archives on Theresienstadt.”
He enclosed the address.
I wrote immediately to “Beit Terezin.”
“Do you,” I asked, “have any lists of Terezin survivors on which Liane Renners name might be mentioned. Do be kind enough to let me know!”
A quick response. From Beit Terezin an Alisah Schiller promptly replied:
 
Dear Mr. Greene:
“We have lists of survivors from the Em transport on which Liane Renner was sent to Auschwitz. I am, however, sorry to tell you that she is not on the list and also in our index she appears among the non-survivors.
 
          It is over. And so, Max, this is my letter to you. I have carried your surviving letters to Prague and stood in the courtyard of your building on Havelska Street, your letters in my pocket, looking up at the windows from which you looked down as you wrote them. I have mailed your letters and your picture to Beit Terezin in Israel and now have visited there myself. And I try to think of what went wrong in a world completely gone wrong that might have helped save you.
 
 Two things come to mind. The first is our reply, in 1938 to your first letter. I remember sitting at the old L. C. Smith typewriter as my father and I worked on a reply. We made a fatal mistake. We held out a shred of hope when there was no hope at all of my father procuring you a visa. He had absolutely no money. It was out of the question. But it took a certain courage to write that to you and in that we failed. And so we said polite things and I typed them. The error was compounded when Harry May visited us. Harry saw the nice furnishings left over from the 1920’s that my mother had been unable to sell during the Depression. He must have written to you that he was well received in an opulent home. He never dreamed that my father was trying to get along on sixteen dollars a week and that his new business was in great danger of failing, and that we were being supported by my grandmother’s small income. And so you were mailed an illusion, not reality.
 
          A second miscalculation might have been made by you. You mentioned that you had had a possibility of going to Ecuador but that you hesitated because of the climate and fear for your wife’s condition. How real was that possibility probably neither of us know. Emigration was not easy although we met, later, some of your relatives that had indeed gone to South America. Whether you lost a chance or not can never be known.
 
          But there was a third error, perhaps the most fatal of all, and we both share it. That the Germans would seriously set out to murder all the Jews of Europe was utterly beyond comprehension. We all shared an illusion – that in a civilized world such behavior is impossible. It lay beyond imagination so we never imagined it. There might be war but not mass, deliberate murder on a continental scale. We were all mistaken.
 
          So it is now time to say goodbye Max. How does one do it? I suppose by picking up pieces of broken hearts, left along the way. Theresienstadt is paved with them. Beneath the weeds and wild grasses which now cover the deserted grounds lie the dreams and hopes of a generation. Almost 160,000  souls passed through. Of these more than 88,000 were sent on to be murdered in the extermination camps while 35,000 died in the ghetto itself. But with these words you and Liane and Vera come to brief life again, if only to say farewell. To give you body, substance, feeling, is all I can do. It is, perhaps, better than anonymity, bitter as it may be.
      

                      © RSG 2011. All rights reserved.