Born Survivors (12 page)

Although the couple had been quite serious about each other, it never occurred to Anka to go with Leo, even though she’d been given the chance. ‘Two English ladies came to Prague to offer work to Jewish girls as domestics or in nursing. I applied for a job in nursing and got it. They provided me with a valid visa and exit papers and I could have gone then but … I procrastinated so long … I had all the papers in my hand and then war broke out in Europe … and I couldn’t have been happier that I [had] managed to prolong it so long that I couldn’t go any more … How stupid was that?’

Others given a similar
Durchlassschein
or special exit permit did leave, but they were in the minority. Among them was Tom Mautner, the husband of Anka’s sister Ruzena, who seized the chance to flee to England on one of the last trains to London. He’d pleaded with Ruzena to go with him and bring their son Peter but she’d refused to leave her home and family. ‘It was so much nicer to stay there than go to England so she stayed, and she paid dearly for it,’ Anka said sadly.

Like Ruzena, many more remained, hoping for the best. Soon afterwards, she must have regretted her decision. Hitler seized control of Sudetenland after the signing of the Munich Agreement, adding more than two million Germans to his domain. It seemed that nothing could be done to stop his march across Europe. Later that same year he repeated his intent with the vow: ‘I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.’

Jewish refugees from the border towns flooded into the city, bringing with them only what they could carry, as Hitler’s intentions became frighteningly clear. With no help from Britain or their allies, the Czechs felt terribly betrayed.

Then in March 1939, German tanks rolled into Prague. Just as in Austria, Anka looked out onto the streets one day to find them teeming with soldiers while people stabbed the air with salutes. She wasn’t the only one who watched aghast as wave after wave of steely-eyed Nazis marched through Wenceslas Square that grey day. ‘It was the height of winter with snow on the ground, and it was a catastrophe.’

Nazis invade Prague, 1939

From the ninth-century Pražský Hrad or Prague Castle, Adolf Hitler proclaimed the partitioning of Czechoslovakia as they knew it into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the (first) Slovak Republic or Slovak State. While Hitler waved to crowds from the
windows of the castle high above the city, twenty-one-year-old Anka and her family suddenly found themselves citizens of a Nazi-administered territory and part of the Greater German Reich. ‘I didn’t have a care in the world until Adolf Hitler came,’ she said. ‘You don’t give [your home and your country] a thought until it disappears … which it did after twenty years and it was the biggest shock.’

Initial student demonstrations against the occupation were quickly crushed as troops stormed the university where Anka studied law. Nine student leaders were executed and 1,200 professors and students rounded up and sent to concentration camps before all the universities were closed. Following further random arrests, the imposition of the Nuremberg Laws began, restriction after restriction systematically stripping the ‘enemies of the Reich’ of their fundamental human rights. People had no choice but to grow accustomed to the gradual loss of freedoms they had previously taken for granted.

Among numerous strictures, Anka’s family car was taken. A commissioner appointed by the Reich took over the factory of Kauder & Frankl and threw Anka’s parents out of their apartment. They were allowed to move into Ruzena’s villa in the garden with her and Peter while the authorities decided what to do with them. Whenever Anka went home, that was where she stayed too. Then the family’s assets were frozen and they were forbidden to withdraw more than 1,500 crowns per week from their own bank account. Their citizenship was taken away and they were only allowed in segregated areas of restaurants and a few hotels.

In Prague, Jews were banned from using public baths and swimming pools and from entering the popular cafés that lined the River Vltava. Pushed to the back of the second car on the city’s crowded trams, they were also prevented from owning bicycles, cars or wireless radios.

Denied access to the university, Anka’s studies came to an end after just one year – which she always joked was a blessing in disguise, as she’d done very little work because she’d been enjoying herself too much. There was little enjoyment to be had under
German occupation, however. ‘It got worse and worse but as you get used to everything in life, so you got used to that as well,’ she said. ‘First we were not allowed this and then we had to give up that and you just did it. We talked about it … and there was a possibility to get out but unless you knew what was waiting for you it did seem very difficult to let everything go and leave everything behind for the unknown.’

The one Nazi measure that hurt Anka the most was that she was banned from going to the cinema. This seemed to her to be an unnecessary torment to someone who loved the movies. So when a film came out that she desperately wanted to see, she decided to go anyway. Setting off without telling anyone, she was – she admitted later – ‘a complete fool’. As she sat on her own deep in the middle of the cinema, the screening was halfway through when it suddenly flickered to a stop. The houselights came on and members of the Gestapo burst in to check everybody’s identity papers, row by row. As the Nazis drew closer Anka sat frozen to the spot, terrified of how they would react to the ‘J’ stamped in her documents. Looking around frantically, she wondered if she should try to make a run for it but decided that would be worse. Then suddenly the Gestapo stopped one row in front of her and, apparently bored, abandoned their inspection.

Allowing herself to breathe, she sat in her seat until the credits rolled in order not to draw attention to herself. When she told friends what she’d done, they were appalled and told her, ‘They could have shot you!’ To her dying day she couldn’t remember the film she’d risked her life to see, but it may well have been
Gone with the Wind
– which had been one of her favourite books as a teenager and was released in 1939. It was a movie she watched so often after the war that she could quote entire passages from it, and which had such significance later.

As the restrictions on Jews tightened still further and more people made plans to flee, Anka and a girlfriend were approached in a café by some English journalists. ‘My friend said, “I’m going to
marry one of them!” and she was married within six weeks,’ Anka recalled. ‘He had a friend and I was introduced to him and in ten minutes he said, “Marry me?” I thought he was insane and funny but I wasn’t interested at all.’ Flattered, she turned him down, still not appreciating the chance to escape from the danger she was in.

Instead, she became apprenticed to her aunt as a milliner at her salon in the city’s historic Black Rose Passage and her social life continued behind closed doors. It wasn’t mere bravado that kept her from fleeing, however. She had one other very good reason for staying in Prague. In November 1939 her cousin had introduced her to Bernhard ‘Bernd’ Nathan, a devastatingly good-looking German Jew who’d fled Berlin in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Among the hundreds of thousands German Jews who’d emigrated by 1939, he’d mistakenly believed Prague was far enough away to be safe. His younger brother Rolf had fled to Holland and then Switzerland, where he joined the US Army and remained safe. His younger sister Marga also escaped to Australia and survived.

Bernd Nathan

Born in 1904, Bernd was thirteen years older than Anka. An architect and interior designer, he worked at the famous Barrandov Film Studios, one of the largest and best-equipped in Europe and a place that would become known as ‘the Hollywood of the East’. With his own workshop and staff, he had a lucrative sideline in furnishing shops. He also worked for Nazis, who had no idea he was Jewish and commissioned him to equip their bars, nightclubs and coffee houses.

Bernd considered himself German first and Jewish second. He was not at all religious, and as German was his native tongue he was better able to flout the restrictions and pretend to be Aryan. ‘He looked like them … and he spoke like them because he was from Berlin,’ Anka said. ‘They kept on inviting him to come out with them … We were doing rather well, even under Hitler.’

Bernd’s father Louis had won Germany’s highest military award – the Iron Cross (1st Class) – in the First World War and was
kriegsblind
(war-blind) by mustard gas, something that gave him a heroic status. In spite of his disability, Louis was a womaniser and eventually divorced his elegant wife Selma – Bernd’s mother. It was Selma who ensured that her eldest son received a private income of 2,000 crowns a month.

With his captivating looks, Bernd was a natural ladies’ man like his father and had a way about him that melted women’s hearts. When Anka first spotted him at a swimming pool in Barrandov, hers did a backflip. ‘I thought he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen in my whole life.’ A few weeks later, they were formally introduced at one of the nightclubs he’d recently refitted. ‘It was love at first sight,’ she said of the handsome architect with the light brown hair, dazzling blue eyes and ready smile who was brought to her table. ‘We got to know each other and we clicked and … behaved like complete idiots.’

After what she described as ‘a whirlwind romance’, they were wed within a year, on Wednesday, 15 May 1940, eight months after the start of the war. Anka had just turned twenty-three and Bernd,
still listed by the authorities as a German immigrant, was thirty-six. ‘Hitler had reigned over Czechoslovakia practically from the Munich Agreement,’ she said. ‘Even then we didn’t realise the deadly danger we were in.’

Bernd and Anka at their wedding, 1940

Their simple wedding took place at the German
Oberlandrat
or regional office in Prague, next to the art deco Grand Café Slavia. It was attended by just two witnesses. As Jews weren’t allowed to own gold or diamonds, Anka’s engagement ring was a pretty rectangular amethyst in a silver setting, along with a plain wedding band. In a hat and dark suit over a crisp white blouse and with a shell comb in her hair, Anka posed with her besuited husband for photographs. Carrying a spray of lily-of-the-valley, she was beaming with joy.

She only plucked up the courage to contact her parents in rural Třebechovice to inform them of her marriage the following day. They were not at all pleased, chiefly because Bernd was German and they worried that this might cause her unnecessary trouble. Even when they met him, they didn’t particularly like him. Anka’s
mother thought he was a philanderer and claimed to see ‘straight through him and out the other side’.

The day they were married, Holland surrendered to the Nazis. Twelve days later the Allies had to evacuate their troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in France. On 28 May, Belgium surrendered. On 10 June, Norway followed suit and Italy declared war on Britain and France. Almost a month to the day after they took their vows, Paris fell. Then began what they dreaded most of all – resettlement transports.