“Bohemia. Slovenia. Moravia. Germany. Karpathy. Russia.” The tour guide’s voice crackles through an old chrome microphone, over the hum of the bus, pulling me back from the edge of sleep. We’re on our way to Theresienstadt, a tourist attraction raised from the ashes of my people in this former concentration camp and major transport hub on the way to extermination centers. Embraced by the window and my extra-large boyfriend, Lee, I’d managed to tune the guide out for a few minutes, lulled by the rhythm of the wheels beneath me, bumping along the road. I’d hoped Lee’s rapt attention from his aisle seat would serve us both. But this petite, blue-eyed, sixty-something woman, is a zealot. She stops speaking to await my attention. Then she smiles smugly and resumes.

“Czechoslovakia prior to WWII.”

The Nazis had seen the potential in this forgotten bucolic setting. They knew their real estate. They succeeded in fooling foreign dignitaries who were told it was a summer camp beside the 18^th century town, originally built as a fortress.

I’m cranky. My stale breakfast roll is stuck in my gut. I caught a cold the minute we landed in Prague five rainy, chilly days ago even though it’s May. We were hours late getting into our hotel room that first night because of our visa problem. By that time, I was so ill, I couldn’t wait for my bed. When Lee realized I didn’t want to go downstairs for dinner, he looked at me as though I were ruining his life.

“My first night in eastern Europe. Com’on. We’ll just walk down the street. Grab the first place we see.”

On and on, relentlessly. I begged him to please go without me. In my feverish mind my therapist was speaking. You must be clear to yourself, first. I kept asking myself, was I being selfish? Could I get up? Would I feel better if I did? I couldn’t seem to move, never mind discover the appropriate way to deal with this behavior. I hadn’t learned that lesson yet.

“We’ll stay in the hotel,” he said, like it was a serious concession.

I got up. It seemed the fastest way to my bed.

But none of the Atrium Hotel’s restaurants suited Lee.

“Come on. It’ll do you good to get some air,” he said in his doctor voice, leading me out the front door with an iron grip on my upper arm, the kind you use on a problem child. All my energy went to staying on my feet, with Lee coaching me all the way. I knew no matter what I said now, he would not let up until he got his way. I didn’t have the energy to argue.

After a few blocks, we turned around and went back the other way. Lee kept pushing for one more block. It was the middle of the night. Everything was closed. That’s when the knowing began, when I absolutely couldn’t go any further. All I’d learned from my therapist that spring welled up in me.  “No,” I said “I’m not going another step.”

We ended up at a McDonald’s, hideously situated beside an old, abandoned underpass filled with garbage.

I wanted to spend a day in the hotel room and rest. I did not want to attend this all day horror story. I’ve heard it before. It breaks my heart every time. Usually Lee is happy just to shop. If he wanted moral support, I’d understand. But he thinks I need a lesson, more empathy for my history. He’s right about the lesson. I need to learn to say no.

Whenever my energy or enthusiasm doesn’t match his, Lee says I should see a doctor. When I’m really sick, like now, he can’t hear me at all. After seven years in this relationship built around travel – we live separately at home – I still struggle with this. The truth is, I admire his energy. If only he would allow me to be different.

Seven years? How did that happen? It seems to me I’ve been leaving since day one. And I did leave, several times. This morning I felt so ill I had to sit down to tie my shoes, these shoes I bought for traveling, shoes I’ve seen the world in. I tied them thinking, this will be our last trip together. I cannot walk another mile in these shoes.

We had a confirmed reservation at The Intercontinental, the charming old hotel in the coolest part of town. But we were dropped off at The Atrium, a sterile glass box, a cabride away from the center. Lee demanded to see the manager. Out came an enormous creature resembling a nightclub bouncer acting like a Nazi in an American movie.

“Atrium no? Go home.”

It was frightening to be treated this way in a five-star hotel which despite its rating had a lobby like an airport, bright lights, walls of windows, and no attempt at any welcoming charm. Lee shut right up. This was so unusual for him my heart rate shot up and I started feeling sick right then and there. I thought about the visas. I remembered Lee discussing this with his friends who we ran into at De Gaulle Airport, two couples from Montreal co-incidentally booked on our plane to Prague, a miracle that afforded me a quiet moment, so I wasn’t listening. But I remember Lee, out of the corner of my eye, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, rocking back and forth in his walking shoes, saying, “So we’ll get visas there. Why pay ahead?”

I hate this attitude that it’s good business to try to get away with things. Lee says I think like the goyim. But the goyim wouldn’t be stuck at The Atrium at the mercy of cheating cabbies to get around. They’d be at the charming, old world Intercontinental right in the heart of things, where we were booked.

Lee, who plans months in advance, has surely noticed I have not committed to another trip. No Lisbon in September. He probably thinks I’ll change my mind, or that he will change it for me. I look out the window thinking about this. The countryside, low-lying and hilly, is a luscious green and so much like home. But where are the cows and sheep? I see only uncultivated land, surprisingly unpopulated, magnificently lacking in signs of commerce.

Outside, that is. Inside, our tour guide’s voice rises again and stops, dead, to catch us strays. Lee hangs on her every word, snaps her photo. I look up and meet her gaze. She resumes.

“How integrated Czech Jews were. Czech first, Jew second.”

Lee turns around to snap a shot of our friends from home who are also on this bus. We’ve been to The Jewish Cemetery together and had drinks with them at the roof top restaurant at The Intercontinental, where they are staying. They who arrived with visas. It offered an outstanding view of that beautiful, low-rise city, right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Terra Cotta roofs poking through the thick green trees. It was a beautiful summer night, the first nice weather we had. Lovely light. The waiter took our picture with the town at sunset behind us. Being part of this gang means so much to Lee. It’s his dream.

I wanted to stay and have dinner up there with them, but for some reason Lee didn’t. It surprised me since he valued these friends, and he spent money freely when he felt like it. But no reason given. Instead, we went on another odyssey until I was exhausted, and we ended up in the same place we’d eaten the night before in the Stare Mesto, with the same street musicians. Lee asks for my input, but rarely takes my suggestions. Then he wonders why I’m reluctant to have any. He needs to go up against me, to reassure himself he is in control.

Just let me be sick one day. Don’t insist I make a trip I don’t want to make in the first place. I remember an excursion we took in Goa, to the Old Portuguese town with the white churches. A bus and a boat ride up a filthy river. An Indian couple, newlyweds from our hotel, were with us. I noticed her leaning on him, sick as a dog before we even left. Another girl who can’t say no. Someone brought her a pail for the ride. I was relieved when they got off the bus before she needed it. But then they got back on again. And I remember thinking how ridiculous this behavior was, yet knowing I suffer from the same problem and can’t seem to correct it. A little later, rocking on that slow boat, the poor thing finally barfed into the pail, mindful of all of us, and her sari.

Gazing out the window now, enjoying the green and blue scenery, I see these moments when I, a normally strong and independent woman, have no more will than those poor Jews who went to their deaths here so many years ago. They so out-numbered their captors. How does that happen?

And what about this hard-working survivor, walking up and down the aisle of a moving bus for over an hour. She must be sixty. It can’t be an easy gig for her. Now she’s taking us through the Czech Jews’ “slow demise.” How I hate hearing this again.

“Slowly but shuur-rre-ly,” she stretches her Israeli accent for all its worth, gagging on her R’s. “First losing zay-er money, zen losing zay-er possessions, zay-er status, livelihood, zen ze camps, forced labor-rre and dess.”

From the time we got to Prague good reasons for bad moods kept showing up. The taxi drivers made the city seem three times bigger than it was. They drove us around until we got angry. Then suddenly we arrived. In a better mood we might have enjoyed the tour, which was cheap at the price. But being a target makes you paranoid, and just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not a target.

The guide tells us she was born in Prague and now lives in Israel. How did she survive, I wonder? The passengers ask her questions, but no one asks her this. She comes back every summer, she says, because she loves Prague and doing these tours.

Penance, probably. And the tips, surre-ly.

But what is the point? What about Bosnia? Rwanda? What good is all this remembering when nothing ever changes? Why waste our time like this?

On our way in from the airport, our taxi driver warned us about the black market money trade. Lee was on the edge of his seat. He loves a bargain. The first thing he does wherever we go is to find the best exchange. The black market is his favorite.

Lee does things I’d never do, which titillates me, I have to admit. It gets my blood up. Makes me understand why I don’t do it. Watching the gypsies rob him right before our eyes was amazing. Better than a movie. We were stunned when Lee found himself with a handful of paper. We staggered to the nearest café, wondering what hit us.

Then Lee lit up with a wry smile and his blue eyes full of mischief. “I have to try it again.”

“Are you crazy? You just lost a hundred dollars. US!”

“Not quite.”

He reached in his pocket, pulled out the few local bills which had enfolded the paper scam.

“$90. They won’t get me next time. We’ll both be watching.”

“We were both watching.”

The next day I sat on a bench in Wenceslas Square while Lee, alone this time, priced his umpteenth crystal shop in search of wine glasses. I don’t share his enthusiasm. Crystal is so fragile. The stores are crammed with it on glass shelves everywhere, begging you to break something. I felt myself wound so tight in those stores, afraid of knocking something over and myself exploding, shattering into a million pieces, bringing the whole store down upon us, triggering a domino effect all the way around the square, the Stare Mesto, so sweet sounding, starry-Mesto, stars like crystal, a violent Kristallnacht catastrophe.

Instead, I was relaxing on a bench, basking in a rare moment of having said no, no more crystal shops for me. I don’t know if it was the clarity of my tone, or the lure of a store he hadn’t seen before, but for once Lee didn’t argue.

In the crowd of people crossing the square in all directions before my eyes, I noticed a young man about twenty, in jeans and tee shirt, approach a tourist as big and obvious as Lee. I began to shake. The gypsy discreetly showed the man something in his hand. Just as the man reached in his pocket, another gypsy appeared and joined them. That surprise made the tourist look up. It was just enough time for sleight of hand.

I was shaking when Lee showed up. My hands were cold and clammy.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just saw how they did it. I need a coke. Please.”

When I’d had enough sugar to stop shaking, I said, “It’s when the buddy shows up. It distracts you.”

Lee was on fire. He couldn’t wait to try it.

We got up and wandered around the square. Two minutes later a guy showed up and the whole thing played out exactly the same way again. At the critical moment the buddy appeared. We figured we had them. But like rushing the net in tennis, the sudden move won the point. It’s a reflex. Works every time. I looked up too. They got us again.

An hour out of Prague our bus emerges from the countryside, bounces through some dense woods and pulls up beside a pretty town park, two blocks long. One minute we were on the highway, the next we’re in front of a two-story museum set back behind a stately wrought iron fence with thick, high bushes in the center of Theresienstadt. Around this marktplatz are two-story stucco facades like those we saw in Prague, narrow houses painted tasteful hues of pink and white, taupe and white, yellow and mustard. They’re real buildings but the town has no depth. A few blocks and that’s it, like a movie set.

This is the first sunny day we’ve had. I confess to feeling exhilarated as our group of some twenty-five walks through woods thick with trees and away from the town, out in fresh country air.

“Ze children were told zay were going to summer camp.”

Oh no. Not the children. I slow down and drop to the back of the pack. With my hands discreetly under my hair, I plug my ears.

A few minutes later our group gathers at a clearing in front of a cemetery, rows of neat stones in a grass field with a giant menorah presiding over it all. I imagine my relatives appealing to me from their graves. Don’t waste your time on the dead. Help those suffering now!

Nearby is a one-story industrial building, the crematorium. We shuffle into a cold, damp, garage-like room and stand on the cold cement floor in a semi-circle. Everyone is silent, staring stupefied at the large oven six feet away, a steel and cement structure with a large opening with a Jewish flag on top, an opening big enough to take a body lying on the dolly with a Star of David flag draped over it.

I can’t wait to get out of there. I’m trying to block thoughts of the horror of facing this fate.

Surely the worst is over now. If I were running this show I’d say enough. Let them buy crystal. Lee still hasn’t bought his glasses. Theresienstadt does have a few stores and a café.

But no, the tour isn’t over. The museum is showing a true-life horror movie. Lee, so happy to be with his friends, lets me off the hook, thank god. We’ll meet in the park in front of the museum in an hour.

Free to indulge my curiosity alone, knowing I can leave anytime, I wandered the museum. There’s a wall covered in portraits of the serious-looking inmates, all by the same artist, all compelling and original. In a series by children I see a painting by a six-year-old that’s so upbeat I’m glad not to have missed it. For the second time that day I find a value in being here. In the top left corner, in a clown’s hat, a boy’s face beams down on us like a sun, the artist sharing his fairy-tale landscape below, decorated tents, elephants, horses, and girls in pretty skirts – in colors that seemed to sparkle. His short visit to our planet had been fun for a while. Right beside it is a picture by an eight-year-old, an abstract in black and grey, heavy vague forms, every inch of paper expressing the profoundest sense of despair and dread. I can hardly breathe.

Outside, I relax on a wood bench with peeling green paint and enjoy the rose bushes. The map in our brochure shows the center where I’m sitting as part of an organized landscape, though there’s not much sense of that now. It all looks unreal. Dead.

I can feel the sun healing my sick body and drying my red nose. The tree bark has deep rivulets like Canadian maples. There’s some patchy crab grass in the dry dirt. Sparrows chirp and argue. Kids roller skate and bicycle.

Lee and his buddies come out of the museum and walk towards the crystal shop. He waves me over. This is not easy. But my courage is up now. There’s no going back. He won’t insist in front of his friends. I just shake my head gently but firmly. No.

The bus ride back is mercifully quiet. Lee embraces the brown paper package in his lap. He can tell friends at home that his crystal comes from Theresienstadt.

 

Elizabeth Goldner Ross lives in Toronto near her son and granddaughters. Her essays and stories have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, national magazines, and the video Me and Madison Avenue 1968.