Terezín

Terezín occupies the novel as both a real destination in the persecution of Jews and a place filtered through rumour, belated knowledge, and uneasy remembrance. It is spoken of as a ghetto where Jews are to be concentrated; Oskar Hanák is sent there before being deported to Auschwitz; and, years later, Zdenka recalls visiting its abandoned streets and wondering why the museum commemorates resistance while the Jews’ fate remains unspoken. The location’s significance lies in that disjunction between a place’s historical use and the partial stories through which its history survives.

A wartime destination under rumour

During the occupation, information about Terezín reaches characters as uncertain report. One woman says that the fortress is being turned into a ghetto and that Jews are to be concentrated there. Her companion answers with indifference, calling it a possible practical solution. The exchange shows how persecution is discussed amid rumours and evasions, while the prospect of confinement is treated as an administrative convenience rather than a human catastrophe.

The language of rumour recurs in a later account of the Hanák family. A letter writer says that Hana and her husband have both been arrested, but acknowledges having heard the story only fourth- or fifth-hand. Oskar, identified as Jewish, is said to have been sent to Theresienstadt, while Hana’s whereabouts remain uncertain: some reports place her in Germany, others in an Austrian work camp. Even the description of the Landauer House as a scientific laboratory is relayed through this uncertain chain of news. Terezín enters the account not as a place the writer has seen, but as one fragment in a larger landscape of arrest, disappearance, and unreliable information.

Deportation and personal loss

Hana later recounts that the Gestapo came to her home at night and took both her and Oskar away. She never saw her husband again. Only after the war did she learn that he had been sent to Theresienstadt. Her account gives personal consequence to the earlier rumours: the place is not merely a proposed destination for a mass of people, but one stage in the separation of a married couple by arrest and deportation.

Hana’s knowledge of Oskar’s final movements is limited but precise in its central facts. He remained at Terezín for about a year, then left on a transport to Auschwitz in January 1943. She calls him the only man she ever loved, while admitting that she had betrayed him many times. The combination of intimate confession and incomplete knowledge makes his route through the camps both historical and irrecoverably personal: Hana can name the places and the date of his deportation, but cannot recover what happened to him beyond them.

Zdenka’s visit and the abandoned town

Zdenka’s memory of Terezín begins after the Communists have taken power, when she is seventeen and still believes in the political ideals of the period. On a visit with the Union of Youth, her group goes to the Museum of the Resistance in the small fortress outside the town. She and a friend leave the group and walk along the straight road across the river toward the former garrison town, which they have heard was the Jewish ghetto.

The place they encounter is desolate: a moat, walls, empty barrack blocks, and weeds growing in the streets. An old woman shouts at them from an upstairs window. Zdenka and her friend do not understand her words and run back to the fortress museum. The possibility that the woman is Jewish, perhaps one of the few left behind, remains a question in Zdenka’s memory rather than a confirmed fact. The scene’s unanswered shout gives the abandoned town a living, if inaccessible, voice: the visitors see traces of the past but cannot interpret the person who addresses them from within it.

Memory, omission, and the living

The visit leaves Zdenka with questions that the museum does not resolve. Why, she wonders, was the town abandoned, and why did the fortress museum remember the Resistance without remembering the Jews left to die? Her recollection makes Terezín a site of competing historical visibility: the institutional account of resistance is present, while the Jewish history that gives the nearby town its darkest meaning is absent or incomplete.

That absence is intensified by the way the novel distributes knowledge across time. During the war, the ghetto is a rumour and Oskar’s destination is hearsay; after the war, Hana can recount his deportation but not the end of his life; later still, Zdenka remembers an empty town and a woman whose identity and words remain unknown. Terezín thus connects persecution to the afterlife of memory without suggesting that later visits or fragments of testimony can make the lost experience whole. Its abandoned streets preserve the shape of what happened, while the narrative’s gaps register how much was forgotten, concealed, or never known.