Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Now there was a real possibility of her being taken on in the bakery where the Fennimans were shorthanded, after school and Sundays. Naomi would make twice what she made baby-sitting and bring home leftover bread, on the occasions there was any. Ruthie’s main aim, aside from thinking that an outside job would be good for Naomi, was to get her away from Leib. Leib had made a pet of the girl, who obviously worshiped him.

  She did not really suspect Leib of anything concrete; after all, he had Trudi around and they went at it often enough, as everybody beneath them could testify. She felt he took advantage of Naomi’s puppy love and drew her away from friends her own age. Naomi was growing up fast, filling out, shooting up. One day, Ruthie realized that Naomi was taller than everybody in the house except Leib.

  Naomi’s boyfriend Alvin was crazy about her. Naomi liked him, but that was about it. Ruthie could remember clearly that stage when a girl wanted a boyfriend but could not understand what all the fussing and deep breathing were about. Alvin seemed fine to Ruthie; she did not think he would lean too hard on Naomi, and she judged that Naomi could handle him. Of course she could understand Naomi having a crush on Leib, because romantic feelings for a man you could not have were easier to sustain—and far safer—than developing romantic feelings for Alvin, who after all was just a lumpy overgrown boy a little less smart than Naomi. Ultimately she did not believe in subjecting Leib to temptation. When they finished the picture taking, she would go to the bakery to see if the Fennimans had decided. Mrs. Fenniman particularly liked Naomi, whom she described as a brave girl, although Ruthie could not imagine why.

  She tried the taffeta dress, but as Sharon and Trudi both pointed out, it had seen better days. Finally she put on the green velvet, bought on the layaway all through her last winter at Sam’s. It needed brushing from hanging so long, but it still looked handsome. Trudi marched her out to the porch again. “That’s good. Now smile. Get rid of the sour puss.”

  “Wait, I want to put on the earrings he gave me. There.”

  “Think about Rose coming home with a big fat goose,” Sharon murmured seductively. “Think of the goose fat rendering, the way the whole house is perfumed. Think about the stuffing with the apples and the dried apricots. Think about how she makes the skin brown and crispy.”

  Boston Blackie, who loved the green dress, leaped up to sit in her slanted lap as she perched on the railing, holding on tight.

  Rose did come back with a goose. It was a little over the hill, a little tough, but it was a real goose. When Ruthie got home from the swing shift, the goose was hung for the night, and Boston Blackie was in disgrace. He had climbed up the pantry door and bitten a mouthful of feathers. Now he was exiled to the basement. When everybody else had gone to bed, Ruthie called him to her room, where he climbed into bed with Naomi, who was moaning in her sleep. She had too many bad dreams, Ruthie thought, clucking over her, uncertain if she should wake her or let her sleep. Sleep had come to seem so precious to Ruthie during her years of always being short, that she let Naomi alone.

  Thanksgiving, they had both the goose and a chicken, the latter for the children, for whom goose was considered too rich, and for Trudi who liked only white meat. Thanksgiving 1944, it seemed the democracies would survive and that the Fascists would finally be beaten. By next Thanksgiving, would Murray be with her? Would she be married?

  Naomi had written to her mother in Paris at the old address, but the letter had come back two months later. Morris said he would begin inquiries through the Jewish agencies, now that France was almost liberated. The Germans held only pockets near the Swiss and Belgian borders. Morris went to the Joint and to the Emergency Committee and returned with some Paris addresses. He wrote a letter in Yiddish and Naomi wrote in French. When Naomi got home from school every day, the first thing she did, Rose said, was to check the mail and then look in the mailbox to make sure nothing had been missed. Letters from Europe, she kept saying, were very thin. They could easily get lost.

  Secretly Morris said to Ruthie that he thought that it was probable all of the Lévy-Monot family had been killed. With France liberated, a letter would have come if there were anyone to write it. Ruthie agreed.

  Ruthie too found her interest in the mail quickened. Murray had received the first of her letters stimulated by the revived hope she felt, and he responded in kind. His letters began to sound as if they came from the person she remembered. They were longer, full of anecdote. He had read One World and had an interesting conversation with Slo Mo about world government. What did she think of the idea?

  He had also been reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  You wouldn’t think I’d be reading a war novel, but I read whatever I can lay my hands on. It feels great to read again. My brain wakes up. That novel made me think about the differences between fighting a war in your own country, and in other people’s. I wouldn’t be nearly so lonely and we could see each other often. And my family too. But then it’s your real estate and your civilians and ultimately your family that gets it.

  Then the photos came. He said he remembered that dress, but that she should not look so sad when she wore it. She should look happy remembering him and thinking of when they would be together again. He said he liked best the one sitting on the porch railing with the cat, because she looked as if she was thinking about Murray and wanted to kiss him, and just looking at it made him want to fly right out through the barrack roof and rocket through the air like Superman, just to be with her for five minutes. I know what you were thinking about in that picture, he wrote. Ruthie smiled.

  He said that the new legislation was good, and he’d go to school under it as soon as the war was over. No, he didn’t want to live in an apartment. He didn’t care if he had to commute. He wanted a house, a real house with a yard and just them, nobody else.

  At that, Ruthie frowned, because she planned to take Naomi with her. She did not believe anyone in Naomi’s family was left to claim her. She would not argue with Murray through the mails. She would worry about that when he was home.

  He hardly knew Naomi, and Naomi hardly knew him. It would sort itself out. When Naomi spoke, most of the time she sounded like any other American teenager—a new word everyone was using and that Ruthie found herself adopting. Naomi had drawn back a little from her gang, although she still hung out with them. They did not seem to Ruthie as tough or menacing as they had. With Naomi’s improved performance in school, Ruthie began to talk to her about college. She encountered in Naomi an unwillingness, almost a fear, of discussing the future.

  “I don’t know!” Naomi would say, turning her face away and tensing her shoulders. “Why talk about that now? What’s the point?”

  Trying to read through the official line of the newspaper stories, which week after week claimed that Peleliu was almost practically just about conquered, and yet the next day there was more fighting to report, she prayed that maybe the next island in the chain would not be so bloody or so hard. Murray wrote of training, and she wondered what the Marines planned to do with him next. His letters had become more emotional lately, desperate-sounding. One night she dreamed he was crying alone in a forest of tall dark trees. He was calling her, but she could not find him. She could see him very clearly sitting with his head in his hands crying as a woman would cry, but she could not reach him though she ran and ran.

  JACQUELINE 11

  Arbeitsjuden Verbraucht

  They were still together, Daniela and she, and for that and that only Jacqueline could be glad. She was not sure yet, now that she understood the kapo’s jokes about up the chimneys, that she should rejoice that Daniela and she had been selected as strong healthy specimens. Two thirds of their transport—two thirds that is of those who staggered from the cars still alive by the end of the fourth day without food or water and who had not been shot or clubbed to death in transit—had been sent by Dr. Mengele to the left. All the children, people above thirty-five, all women with small children, most of those wearing glasses or with a limp
, had been sent to the left. For the first three weeks, while they were quarantined in barracks where they lay on filthy straw without room to stretch out a leg or an arm, Daniela and she had imagined that those spared what had been done to them must be better off. “Why didn’t the cheminots sabotage the train?” Daniela kept asking. “Why? They know which trains are full of Jews and resistants. Why don’t they attack?”

  In herds of women lashed and beaten, she was stripped, tattooed, shaved of her head and body hair. She found in herself impassivity like a stone to be sucked in raging thirst and found outside Daniela, whom she set herself to keep always in her sight. What is done to her I can endure too. She found in herself intelligence sharp as a whetted knife. Why do they do this to us? First, they intend to treat us as beasts, so they try to make us beasts. We have no names, no clothing, nothing individual. We are forced to live in terror as if it were the air we take into our lungs. The skinnier, the uglier, the more scabrous, the filthier we are, the greater superiority they can feel. They rub our faces in our dirt so we may stink to them, and to ourselves.

  Now they were out of quarantine. Those who had survived were routed out for morning appel, when they stood in thin grey shifts and outsized wooden clogs in the rain or with the sun burning their newly shaven heads for two to three hours, and again in the evening. Sometimes they were marched out for slave auctions, for entrepreneurs and businessmen to select workers. Rumors ran through the barracks, where sleep was always difficult in the stench and overcrowding and noise, of freedom, of punishment, of what was or wasn’t going to happen to them or to others. Huge bold rats waddled around chewing on the corpses and attacking the living. Mice infested the straw. Some days they were marched out to carry huge stones they could barely lift from one end of camp to another, work without purpose or end, designed only to exhaust and punish and finally kill. To fall into the mud would be the end, to suffocate in mud.

  Death surrounded them, women pulled out of line and beaten to death for some fancied tone of voice or look, women shot for stumbling, for stooping to pick up a potato peeling. Every morning corpses lay in the crowded bunks with the living, women who died during the night of starvation, of overwork, of a severe beating that had left internal injuries. Their bodies were rolled out like logs and stacked. Every dawn and every evening appel, more women dropped and were taken to be burned.

  At first she tried to remember every beating, every kicking, every murder but what could she do with the rage that flooded her? Indignation took energy. Daniela must survive and she must survive. The SS men, the SS women, immaculate in their uniforms, well fed, shaved, perfumed, loomed over them like gods. Like demons they had not only their names but special secret names. The kicker. The hammerhead. The chozzer. Daniela and she must study them to outwit their malice. When the hammerhead shifted his gaze in a certain way, he was about to strike out. When the SS woman called the vampire smiled with her lips pursed, she was about to draw blood with her whip. The chozzer liked women to look down always. The kicker if you met his gaze would often pass you by. She hated having to study the idiosyncrasies of brutes as if they were laws of nature, that when the hammerhead whistled, you need not worry, but when he was silent, somebody would die soon.

  “Remember reading Suetonius in school?” she asked Daniela. In the French school system, they had all read the same books at the same time. “I thought the Roman emperors were such monsters, that power enabled each of them to become hideous in a different and wilder way. But each SS man over us is his own Roman emperor. They are all crazy with power.”

  Never to be quiet, never to rest, never to be clean, never to sleep soundly, never to be full or have enough to drink so that the throat stopped burning and the belly was silent. Never free from terror. Never alone. Never out of the presence of the dying and the dead.

  What manner of beings are they that feed their egos by reducing others to shit? Only the same as ordinary, but more so. Is that it? Ordinary hatred of the neighbor, ordinary anti-Semitism, ordinary despisal of women, ordinary acts of domestic and street violence, battering, beating, terrorizing, ordinary callousness shading into brutality given a license, a reward, a theatrical setting, a uniform, a credo. I kill therefore I am. I kill you, thus I am proven superior.

  One Sunday afternoon as they were picking the lice from each other’s seams, Jacqueline saw a woman who looked a little healthier than the others, with hair grown out a couple of inches, black with streaks of grey although her face was unwrinkled. She could not be a prisoner, because she wore a real sweater over the grey shift and real shoes on her feet. The woman barked some questions, then came toward the two of them. Jacqueline tried to sidle away into the crowd that jammed the fetid room. She had already learned that to stand out in any way was to die. Always attempt to avoid notice. That was not easy since she was one of the tallest women in the room, but she was beginning to stoop.

  The woman stared at Daniela and then at her. “Which of you is Yakova Lévy-Monot?” she asked in Yiddish.

  Jacqueline was terrified. First of all, it had already been beaten into her that she had no name, only her number. She was a haeftling, a piece only. No one had names here. She had been arrested under her own name, because at the last minute she had destroyed her false identification, since she was wanted under that name.

  All the women looked away, as frightened as she was. But the woman who had entered held up her arm with the tattoo. “I’m just a Jew, like you, don’t be afraid. Are you Yakova?” She had to repeat her question, as Jacqueline had little command of Yiddish.

  Jacqueline nodded, waiting for the blow, the lash, the kick.

  “I’m your aunt Esther—your mother’s youngest sister. Come outside.”

  They both started to follow, but she turned sharply. “Who are you?”

  “This is Daniela. Where I go, she goes, or I don’t go,” Jacqueline said, in a mixture of Yiddish and French. “We are sisters.”

  “What else are you?” the woman asked.

  Jacqueline did not understand and looked at her blankly. The woman stared back, then came to a decision and motioned them both to follow her. They all squatted against the wall outside, where a drizzle black from the crematoria smoke pasted a layer of ash on their skin.

  Out from under her sweater the woman who said she was Aunt Esther brought a pair of well-used but still good boots. “See if these fit. Now you can divide them if you want, each one apiece, but that won’t do you much good,” she said sarcastically.

  They were big, but Jacqueline did not care. Real boots. “Maybe you could get some for Daniela too?”

  “Do you know what they do to us if they catch us taking clothes?” She pointed at the chimneys. “Be careful that those boots don’t get stolen. Listen to me, I’m an old number, I know. You’re lucky if you can stick together, because you can watch for each other. Anything you leave will always be organized, stolen, because it’s life or death, a scrap of sawdust bread, a slice of rotten turnip, a piece of cloth to bind your legs.” As Esther spoke, Daniela translated. “I work in the office, because they found out I’m a good bookkeeper and I do sums in my head. So sometimes I have something I can trade to the women who work in Canada, where they sort clothing from the new transports. If you get sick, act well. Don’t go to hospital, because Dr. Mengele will cut you up alive. It’s a place where he plays with the dying as if they are violins of pain for him.”

  “Esther, my mother Chava, my sister Rivka, they were transported in December 1942. Are they here?”

  “There are worse camps than this I’ve heard where everybody’s killed, everybody, right away. There’s hundreds of camps. People mostly don’t last that long. I was in a factory in Lodz before. Listen to me, get into a factory if you can. Look lively. Straighten your spine and look strong and tall when they come to pick you. Pinch your cheeks. Otherwise they’ll take you in a selection. Tell them you worked in a factory in France.”

  “Won’t they find out we lied?” Daniela argued. />
  “The boss who picks you, he won’t be there when they put you on the machines. They’ll beat you anyhow.”

  “Esther, please see if you can find out about Maman and Rivka, please.”

  Esther shook her head. “What you don’t know is better. Think of them as alive. Better not to know the truth. When I came, they took my son and my daughter. For the first four months, I survived believing they were in some other camp, a children’s camp. I lived only to get them back.” She paused for Daniela to translate.

  “How old were they?” Daniela asked.

  “Four and six. By the time I learned what happened to the little ones, I had become an animal, a beast that lives to live. You harden yourself. One of the women in Canada, she found her own baby’s little dress. She killed herself on the electric wire. When we do that, the guards laugh. Always remember, if you die, they win.”

  “Ask her, has anyone escaped from here?”

  “People escape, but they bring them back. Some Yugoslav partisan women got away. But as a Jew, nobody out there will help you. You have to make it on your own. Still, if you ever have a chance, seize it. They whip and hang you when they catch you, but the chance is worth it.” She leaned toward them. “What of the war? What do you know?”

  Esther had heard about the Normandy landings but had not yet heard about the August landings in the south of France. In the camp at Gurs the day before they were deported, Daniela and Jacqueline had heard that French troops had landed at Toulon. That was where she heard too how her father had died at the barricade.

  “When we were being transported through Germany, we heard bombs falling. Germany is being heavily bombed, we could tell,” Jacqueline said and Daniela translated.

  “Why don’t they bomb here? Why don’t they bomb the gas chambers? Why don’t they bomb the railroad lines here? Why?” Esther stood. “Get yourself chosen. You must.”