The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

UNDER A CRUEL STAR
Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the
world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy
little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes
in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and
flutter its wings in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that
short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more
powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon
there was life indestructible, always triumphant.
The first force was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.
They made my life a microcosm in which the history of a small country in the
heart of Europe was condensed. The little bird, the third force, kept me alive to
tell the story.
I carry the past inside me folded up like an accordion, like a book of picture
postcards that people bring home as souvenirs from foreign cities, small and
neat. But all it takes is to lift one corner of the top card for an endless snake to
escape, zigzag joined to zigzag, the sign of the viper, and instantly all the
pictures line up before my eyes. They linger, sharpen, and a moment of that
distant past gets wedged into the works of my inner time clock. It stops, skips
a beat, and loses part of the irreplaceable, irretrievable present.
The mass deportation of Jews from Prague began two years after the outbreak
of the war, in the fall of 1941. Our transport left in October and we had no idea
of our destination. The order was to report to the Exposition Hall, to bring
food for several days and essential baggage. No more.
When I got up that morning, my mother turned to me from the window and
said, like a child, “Look, it’s almost dawn. And I thought the sun would not
even want to rise today.”
The inside of the Exposition Hall was like a medieval madhouse. All but
the steadiest nerves were on the point of snapping. Several people who were
seriously ill and had been brought there on stretchers died on the spot. A
Mrs. Tausig went completely crazy, tore her false teeth out of her mouth, and
threw them at our lord and master, Obersturmbannfuehrer Fiedler. There were
babies and small children who cried incessantly and, just beside my parents, a
small fat bald man sat on his suitcase playing his violin as if none of the
surrounding bedlam were any concern of his. He played Beethoven’s Concerto
in D Major; practicing the same passages over and over again.
I wandered around among those thousands of people looking for familiar
faces. That was how I first happened to see him. To this day, I believe he was
the most handsome man I have ever seen. He was sitting, calm and erect, on a
black trunk with silver brackets, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a gray tie,
and a black overcoat topped by a black homburg. He had gray eyes and a
perfectly trimmed gray moustache. His slim, delicate hands were folded on the
handle of an umbrella rolled up as thin as a toothpick. In the middle of that
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