They Went Left

by Monica Hesse

  This young soldier said he could manage something, but it would be a big favor, requiring payment. I put my hand down his pants; I was very pretty then. Three minutes later, he agreed. He wouldn’t send us to Auschwitz. He would send us to Birkenau.

  The train crawled along the earth. By the time we got to Birkenau, we’d been on it for so long. The distance was short, but we kept stopping, for hours, with no reason or warning, nobody paying attention to our pleas. The car was crowded, so crowded we didn’t even stumble when the train lurched. During the first night, people began dying. Bodies sank to the floor while the rest of us tried not to step on them and begged for water. My father gave us his. That whole trip, my father didn’t have any water at all.

  I didn’t realize, of course, that there could be more than one city of nightmares, and so close together. The soldier whose pants I had reached down had kept his promise in the cruelest of ways. In a way intended to mock us. I realized it almost immediately.

  Like Auschwitz, Birkenau was also on the outskirts of the town called Oświęcim. It was constructed barely a kilometer away from the original camp, built because the original camp could not keep up with the volume of people it was designed to torture and kill. The soldier sent my family to Birkenau. He didn’t tell me that it was also known as Auschwitz II.

  We reached the gate, Abek and I. We were sorted to the right. He walked into the camp in his jacket with the alphabet sewn in the lining. And then he turned to me because suddenly this was dream Abek again, not real Abek. It was dream Abek, and he was walking away from me, saying goodbye, and I was trying so hard to stay there with him, but instead, I was waking up.

  Part Two

  Allied-occupied Germany, September

  I CAN TELL WHEN THE TRAIN CROSSES THE BORDER INTO Germany.

  When the train is still in Silesia, this annexed land that was Poland once and maybe is again, the tracks are haphazard and the route is meandering. The ticket master at the Sosnowiec station warned me: The Red Army was dismantling tracks, digging up the metal ties to create routes that would lead to Russia, not to Germany. The Katowice-Munich line was once direct, but now the route is circuitous—we backtrack, we divert, we reach portions of the track where multiple locomotives must share a single line, and we spend entire days waiting for another train to pass. While in Poland, the tracks and the land look confused and forgotten; the train feels like a mouse trying to escape a maze.

  But I can tell when the train crosses the border into Germany, because here, the same rolling hills become scorched and scarred. The green farmland is interrupted by angry black gashes cutting open the earth. Everything was bombed here, recently, by the Allies, who were trying to cut off the German Army supply lines.

  We move even slower. We stop even more frequently. Train employees tell us the tracks ahead are being cleared of debris.

  An old man took the seat next to me just before the departure. He had a full gray beard and a dark coat, and he reminded me of my grandfather Zayde Lazer. He didn’t say anything at first; I wasn’t even sure we spoke the same language. But as the rumble of the wheels began, sending vibrations up our legs, he pulled a small bottle of amber liquid from his coat and handed it to me for a taste.

  Nalewka, spiced vodka, sweet and strong, the small sip burning my throat. I passed the bottle back, he took his own drink, and returned it to me again.

  “I don’t like trains anymore,” he said to me.

  “I don’t, either.”

  Now this man has become my nameless friend. The seats fill with passengers, and then the aisles fill. The old man and I rise to use the bathroom only when we can no longer wait, saving each other’s seats each time. And then the roof of the train is full, too: With nowhere left to sit, people climb up the ladders on the side of the train or pack together on the platforms linking the cars.

  The trip is so long. So long and so hot, and at times I can’t even tell whether I’m awake or dreaming. At times I think I see Abek next to me. My past and my present blend together, and I let them. The hours pass, and my bad foot aches as if all my toes are still there, as if I can still wiggle them. And the days pass, and then my whole body hurts and my whole body is numb, like I’m not sure any of it exists at all.

  “For bad dreams,” the old man says at one point, handing me another bottle of something that makes my head fuzzy and my mind quiet. He says this to me after I’ve just woken, gasping for breath. It’s the rhythmic motion that makes my brain scream. As soon as I fall asleep, my body remembers the train to Birkenau. I can tell my brain not to think about it, but when I fall asleep and feel the rhythm of the train, my body remembers.

  “For a noisy mind,” the old man says. Another bottle.

  This makes the trip bearable. It’s not a cure for what’s wrong with me, but it feels like a temporary solution. The bottles, and the fact that every time I look out the window—every time we stop and women reach up to the window with bread or boiled eggs for us to buy—I know I am getting closer to the place where Abek might be.

  Finally one morning, just before dawn, the train lurches to a stop. There are no more tracks, not for a gaping fifty meters. Just remnants of twisted metal sticking up like claws from the charred soil. There are no other tracks we can divert to, the porter explains. No other way to backtrack and join up with a new line. All the tracks in this stretch of land have been demolished. So there is nothing to do but deboard, all of us, and walk ten kilometers to the next usable station.

  We stumble off the train, onto a bedraggled barley field. I’m surprised to see clusters of people waiting for us. Mostly girls, my age or a few years younger, wearing farm dresses. Some hold baskets of food for sale—wrinkled plums, underripe apples—but others have no food. They stand by skinny horses hooked up to carts.

  “Welcome committee?” jokes my older friend as we stand in puffs of steam and dust.

  It soon becomes clear what the girls are really doing. For a fee, they’ll take us in their carts to where the tracks pick up again. They approach the soldiers first, the men in uniform who they know must have spending money. They negotiate prices with flirting smiles, but those disappear as soon as the transaction is finalized and the coins are tucked into their apron pockets.

  One of them, a wiry girl of sixteen or seventeen, avoids the competition over near the soldiers and comes to me instead.

  “Ride?” she asks me in German.

  “I can walk.”

  I’m worried about walking, though. Ten kilometers is a long distance with my bad foot, with the pain that still shoots up my calf. But I’m worried more about unnecessary expenses; this entire trip, I’ve been buying only the cheapest rolls.

  The girl jerks her head toward the old man. “He probably can’t walk. But my wagon has a cushion for him. And if you don’t ride with me, you might not get to the next train in time to have a seat. He’ll have to stand the whole way.”

  “I will pay,” the old man offers chivalrously. “If you don’t mind being my seatmate a little longer.”

  The cushion is lumpy, the wagon is high, and the girl doesn’t bother to help either of us into it. She keeps her eyes straight ahead as I hoist myself into the back and pull the old man after me.

  We’ve barely settled before she clucks the horse forward.

  I’ve been to Germany only once before of my own free will. My father took me on business to Berlin. He said it was the capital of modern civilization: The clothes we saw women wear there would be what we would make for Polish women in five years. These girls now, though, the ones driving the wagons or selling fruit, don’t look fashionable. They just look tired.

  We pass a man painting a sign: We’re still a long distance from Munich. But the notice is not only in German, it’s also in Russian, French, and English.

  “They divided up the country,” the girl says when she notices me reading the sign. “Four Allies, four corners. All of them get a piece of Germany. Where are you going?”

  “Munich.”r />
  “Americans are in charge of Munich,” she says.

  “Who’s in control here?”

  “Nobody,” she says cryptically. “Nobody controls himself here. Everything is a mess. They’re still finding bodies.”

  “Bodies?” I ask.

  “From the Allied bombs. Buried under the rubble. As long as they still find bodies, no one will pay attention to the other things happening.”

  She turns back to her horse, and then she doesn’t say anything until we’re almost at the spot where the tracks pick back up. The new “station” isn’t an official building. It’s a rusted boxcar, nestled in the grass. Someone has painted a word on the side, the name of the closest town, I presume.

  Clusters of soldiers already wait there. They’re bawdier than when they got off the train an hour ago, enlivened by fresh air or girls.

  Our driver sets her mouth in a firm line, her jaw working as if she’s deciding whether to say something. Only when she’s stopped the cart and I’m beginning to climb down does she reach out and clamp my wrist with her skinny fingers.

  “British or Americans, but not Russians, okay?”

  “What?” I ask.

  She keeps her eyes straight ahead. “Soldiers can help get things, and that’s useful. But ask British or American soldiers, not Russians. The Russians have ideas of what you owe them. And they’ll take it if you don’t give it willingly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t care if you believe me, but I’m not the only German girl who will tell you that.”

  “A Russian soldier saved my life,” I tell her.

  “Good for you.” Her voice is full of bitterness. She keeps her eyes ahead, bringing her hand to her throat and rubbing there. “That’s really good for you.”

  My limbs ache; my skin is creased with sweat and dirt. No lice, though, I remind myself. No bedbugs. No empty stomach. No room left to complain. I have been through worse.

  The old man whose name I never learned rode the train all the way to Munich. He said his daughter was meeting him there, and when we reached the station, he was met by a slim, red-haired woman who shared his nose and broad shoulders. They held each other and didn’t let go, and I didn’t stay to say goodbye. I didn’t have a role in this family reunion.

  Then, in the chaotic marketplace of the train station, I found a stand of drivers for hire. Trucks mostly—men calling out destinations and grouping passengers by the direction we’re traveling in.

  Now, several hours later, my driver has dropped off everyone else but me. He pulls to a stop off to the side of a gravel road and says I’ve reached Foehrenwald. But I don’t see a sign or anything to orient me.

  What I see instead are fields, flat and brown. Dozens of men and women in farm clothes till the soil. Several hundred meters behind them, I see the pitched-roof buildings of a town.

  I look back toward the man who drove me here to see if he has any other guidance, but he’s already pulled away, too far for me to catch him. So I pick through a neat row of dirt and pause at one of the working women. Spade in hand, she’s depositing seeds into the ground.

  “Pardon, but I’m looking for the camp?” I ask in German. “For displaced persons. Is it close by?”

  Her face is blank; she hasn’t understood my question. I switch to Yiddish and then Polish and still get no reply, but with the last language, the woman’s face lights up, and she beckons over another women, gesturing that I should ask her instead. This new woman answers in Polish, friendly but with a heavy accent that I think might be Italian.

  “Foehrenwald is here,” she says. “You’re already on the boundaries.” She nods her head backward toward the structures on the horizon.

  “Which buildings?”

  She laughs. “All of them.”

  “I’m here,” I whisper. I’ve done it.

  The girl regards me curiously after this last statement, but for a minute, I can’t say anything else. I’m rooted to the ground with quivering limbs because I’ve actually done this crazy thing. For better or for worse, I’ve spent more than half of the money I had on train tickets and food. There’s no way to turn back now, no way to get home. My stomach clenches in brief fear, but I’ve done it; it’s done.

  “The administration building is probably what you are looking for,” the girl continues, a bit carefully, noticing my silence. “It’s in the middle of the camp—keep walking toward that road, there. Michigan Street. Once you get close, someone else will be able to help.”

  I force a smile to look bolder than I feel, and I try to repeat the street name she’s just said. It doesn’t sound Polish or German or even Italian. “Mi-chi-gan,” she pronounces again. “It’s an American province. All streets in the camp are named after American provinces.”

  “Thank you.”

  The dirt road she pointed me down leads me farther into Foehrenwald, which is less and less what I was expecting. I’d pictured rows of long barracks laid out on a grid, the architecture of war. I’d steeled myself for this war architecture, steeled it to make my mind unravel.

  But I can now see that Foehrenwald looks more like a small town, organized like a wheel with spokes. I breathe a sigh of relief.

  Michigan is a street on the perimeter; others, with names like Illinois and Indiana, lead toward a hub in the center of the camp. Whitewashed cottages with pitched roofs line all the spoke streets, while the larger buildings in the middle—the administration buildings, I presume—are blockier and more industrial, clustered around a central courtyard.

  At the front doors of administration, a group of people stands outside, smoking and talking. After my exchange with the Italian woman in the field, I’m not surprised to hear different languages, but I am surprised by the variety: Hungarian. Czech. Slovenian and Dutch. Most of the people are my age or a little older; a smaller number are my parents’ generation, and smaller still are the very old, the age of the man on the train. Nobody is younger. Nobody who could be Abek.

  I clear my throat, gripping the handle of my valise. “Excuse me. Is there a person in charge?” I ask in German, the language I hear most.

  A sandy-haired boy interrupts his conversation. “Of which division?”

  Division. I hadn’t expected something so formal. “Of—I’m looking for someone in the camp. Another prisoner—refugee, I mean.”

  He nods to a smaller, adjoining building. “Then you want to go there. Ask for Frau Yost.”

  I don’t have to ask for her, though. Inside the building, modern and with linoleum floors, a small woman with wire-rimmed glasses approaches me almost as soon as I walk through the door. She’s wearing a plaid shirtwaist dress, foreign-seeming in a way I can’t place my finger on, and when she shakes my hand, it’s businesslike.

  “Englisch?” she asks. “Deutsch?”

  “Ja,” I tell her, explaining that I am Polish but can speak German. “My name is Zofia Lederman. Frau Yost?”

  She nods. “That’s me. I’m so relieved you speak German.” Her own is accented, American or Canadian. “To communicate with a Hungarian woman the other day, I had to go through someone who spoke French.”

  I expect that she’ll ask me what I’m doing here, or invite me to sit down, but instead, Mrs. Yost takes a hat hanging from a hook on a wall and pins it on her head as she ushers me back toward the door I’ve just entered.

  “I told them nobody had time to clear out that much housing.” She holds the door open. “But we did the best we could—a bed here, a bed there, but we’re already doubled up and desperately short on blankets. You knew that, right? In terms of food, with all the extra people, we can manage for maybe a week without additional rations. The gardens help.”

  “Mrs. Yost—”

  “And your official ration cards will be eventually transferred over, I believe, but because absolutely nothing is working yet in this country—”

  “Mrs. Yost, I’m so sorry, but—”

  Finally, she breaks off, noticing that I haven�
�t followed her through the door. She steps back inside. “Feldafing?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re from Feldafing?”

  I shake my head. “No, outside they told me to ask for you in here.”

  She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m so sorry. We received a telegram saying that the camp in Feldafing was overcrowded and that some residents would arrive by the end of the week. A representative was supposed to be here now to see to the accommodations. It’s not normally my job, but I’m the only one who could take the meeting.”

  She reaches for the door handle again. I sense that if she were wearing a watch, she would be checking the time. “But, anyway. You’re not from Feldafing, because of course you’re not. Whom do you represent?”

  “I came here on my own. I’m looking for my brother.”

  “Do you know what cottage he’s in?”

  “My family is from Poland. Abek and I were separated in our first camp, but I heard prisoners from there were sent to Dachau, and then the prisoners from Dachau came here.”

  “So you don’t know what cottage he’s in. Do you know for certain that he’s here at all?” She has a pointed, matter-of-fact way of talking that makes me feel automatically foolish.

  “No. But I think he is. I heard the prisoners from Dachau came here.”

  “Some of them did.”

  “So I came here. My name is Zofia Lederman. My brother is Abek Lederman. He would be twelve, but we told him to say he was older. He could be saying he’s as old as fifteen, and—”

  “This is an adults-only camp,” she interrupts. “I’m sorry, but we don’t admit anyone under the age of seventeen unless they’re accompanied by parents or guardians.”

  “Could I just—”