Prague enters the story as the bureaucratic gateway through which Lale Sokolov passes from ordinary life into the machinery of the Holocaust. After the Slovakian government posted notices demanding that each Jewish family surrender a child aged eighteen or older for labor, Lale volunteered in place of his older brother Max, who had a wife and two young children. He reported to the local government department in Krompachy, where the officials were former school friends who knew his family, and was instructed to make his way to Prague, report to the appropriate authorities, and await further instructions. The city thus becomes the first destination of his coerced journey, a place of officialdom and waiting rather than of terror — the last civilian space he will know before the cattle train.

The Waiting Period

Lale arrived in Prague after a long, emotionally painful journey away from his family, and reported as instructed to the relevant government department. He was told to find accommodations nearby and to report back weekly until his role was decided. On April 16, a month later, he was told to report with his belongings to a local school, where he was housed with a number of young Jewish men from across Slovakia. During this period, Lale prided himself on his appearance, and his living situation did not prevent him from looking his best: each day, he washed and cleaned his clothes in the school bathroom. He did not know where he was headed, but he wanted to make sure he looked his best when he arrived. After five days of sitting around, bored and frightened — mostly bored — Lale and the others were told to gather up their possessions and were marched to the railway station.

The Cattle Train Departure

At the railway station, the men were told nothing about where they were going. A train designed to transport cattle pulled up, and the men were ordered to climb aboard. Some objected, explaining that the filthy wagon insulted their dignity. Lale watched the response, seeing for the first time his fellow countrymen raising their rifles at Jews and striking the ones who continued protesting. He climbed on board along with all the others. When no one else could be pushed into his wagon, Lale watched as the doors were slammed shut and heard them bolted by members of the Slovak army, men whose job it should have been to protect him. This moment in Prague marks the definitive rupture: the city is where the state's protection is revealed as a fiction, and where Lale's voluntary sacrifice transforms into forced transport.

The Journey and Its Contrasts

From Prague, the cattle train carried Lale across the countryside. He rattled along keeping his head up and himself to himself, a twenty-five-year-old among countless young men stuffed into wagons designed to transport livestock. Having been given no idea where they were headed, Lale had dressed in his usual attire: a pressed suit, clean white shirt, and tie — always dress to impress. The wagon was less than ten feet wide, and he could not see the end to gauge its length. He tried to count the men but gave up, his back and legs aching, his face itching from stubble, feeling less and less himself after two days without bathing or shaving. When the men tried to engage him in conversation, he responded with words of encouragement, trying to turn their fear into hope: "We stand in shit but let us not drown in it." Abusive remarks were muttered at him for his appearance and manner, accusations of hailing from the upper class — "Now look where it's gotten you." He tried to shrug the words off and meet the glares with smiles, thinking to himself, "Who am I trying to kid? I'm as scared as everyone else."

The Threshold to Auschwitz

After two days, the cattle train stopped again with a great commotion: dogs barking, orders yelled in German, bolts released, wagon doors clanging open. Lale placed his suitcase on the ground, realizing with a shiver that he was unlikely to see the case or its contents again. He touched his hand to his heart, to the money hidden in his jacket pocket, and looked to the heavens, breathing in the fresh, cool air, reminding himself that at least he was outdoors. A gunshot rang out and an SS officer stood before him, weapon pointed skyward, shouting "Move!" Lale glanced back at the emptied train: clothing blew away and books flapped open. Several trucks arrived, and small boys clambered out, snatching up the abandoned belongings and throwing them into the trucks. A heaviness settled between Lale's shoulder blades as he thought, "Sorry, Mama, they have your books." The men trudged toward the looming, dirty pink-brick buildings with picture windows, trees lining the entrances flush with new spring growth. As Lale walked through the open iron gates, he looked up at the German words wrought from the metal: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. He did not know where he was or what work he would be expected to do, but the idea that it would set him free had the feeling of a sick joke. SS, rifles, dogs, his belongings taken — this he had been unable to imagine.

Prague's Narrative Significance

Prague functions as the narrative's threshold space, the point where Lale's agency — his voluntary sacrifice for his family — is overtaken by the machinery of the state. It is the last place where his civilian identity, his pressed suit and clean shirt, still holds meaning before the camp strips it away. The city's bureaucratic waiting contrasts sharply with the violence that follows: the gas-van murders at Birkenau, where Lale watched dozens of naked men herded into an adapted bus with steel plates nailed across the window frames, the doors slammed shut, a canister upended through a hatch on the roof, the bus shaking violently as muffled screams could be heard, and dead men falling out like blocks of stone when the doors were opened. Prague also stands in contrast to the camp's spatial logic: where the camp assigns Lale a single room immediately inside the door of a new block, isolated from his friends in Block 7, Prague had housed him among fellow young Jewish men. The city remains in the narrative as the origin point of his journey, the place where he was told to wait, and the place he left as a free man in appearance only, before the camp redefined what freedom meant.