Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,82

delighted him even more than those of John Tenniel. Having produced Arthur Rackham, John Tenniel, and Lewis Carroll, England could never produce a Hitler, he said. Not even France, with its history of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, could have produced Hitler. Prague had not been free of anti-Semitism, no place was, it seemed, but it had been a good home to him and his parents before him.

His little tale was not Alice in Wonderland, he said; it was merely a retelling of a very old Slovenian folktale called “Salt over Gold,” collected in the nineteenth century by the Czech writer Božena Nĕmcová.

“Three sisters are asked to tell their father, the king, how much they love him,” he begins. “The youngest, like King Lear’s daughter Cordelia, cannot ‘heave her heart into her throat,’ and finally says that she loves her father more than salt. Which enrages him, just as Cordelia’s silence enraged Lear. Freud proposes that the youngest daughter’s silence represents death, but in my story, as in Nĕmcová’s version, the youngest daughter triumphs over death. She embodies, indeed, a life-affirming principle. In fact, I began to worry as I studied various versions of the folktale that I had missed a crucial and darker interpretation. Now I understand all too well; the darkness was there all the time. When, like the young girl in the story, you have lost your family and home, and in my case also the right to practice the profession you love, to walk in a park, to read a newspaper at a café—all of your gold, in other words—when all of that is gone, only salt remains, an essential compound without which there cannot be life. That is the evil genius of the Nazis: to take away even the salt of life.”

Anna’s father said he would like to offer Dr. Shapiro sanctuary in their home. Dr. Shapiro would have his own room, a typewriter, books; he could work undisturbed; his family could visit in secret. If necessary, he could go up to the attic, which was quite habitable; they would put a mattress up there and bring him his meals, and when it was safe to do so, he could come downstairs. Dr. Shapiro said, Julius, one prison is much like another. When he was leaving, he said, “If you want to see what the heroine of my little tale looks like, you have only to look at Anna. She is exactly as I picture Marica.”

Early the next morning, Anna’s father went to the train station, but the police kept him from approaching the boarding area, and he was unable to find Dr. Shapiro.

Theresienstadt was sixty kilometers north of Prague, near the Elbe River. A former military garrison, it had been built by Emperor Joseph II and named in honor of his mother, the archduchess, Empress Maria Theresa. Gavrilo Princip, the young man who belonged to Free Bosnia and assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, precipitating the 1914 war, had been imprisoned there. Acting Reich protector Reinhard Heydrich had designated Theresienstadt a ghetto for Czech Jews over the age of sixty-five and for those who were war veterans or had been distinguished or influential in some sphere of life. Anna remembered Franz saying that this attempt by the Nazis to present a prison as some sort of retirement home or holiday camp fooled no one.

There is too much cruelty, Anna thought. Her head ached, her eyes bothered her. Her mother took her to an optician for an eye examination and to another doctor, who drew blood from her arm, listened to her heart, and tested her reflexes. She was in good health, the doctor said. A little nervous, maybe. She should try to get more sleep.

Fear kept her from sleeping. Fear and a feeling that at the back of her neck she had a small wound where the SS captain had placed his hand. He had not really shot her, but sometimes she felt as if he had, as if fear could inflict as mortal a wound as a bullet. If so, she surely had a dangerous injury. She looked at Dr. Shapiro’s manuscript on the coffee table in the living room. Franz had read it, her father had read it. Anna ran her fingers over the title page. She hesitated, retreated, came back, and then one day she sat down and began to read:

Long ago, there was a king who ruled over a vast and prosperous kingdom. This kingdom was richly endowed with