Lunch with the Stationmaster

by Derek Hansen

  Later that afternoon they were ordered to line up and each given another piece of bread. The girls ate it immediately, chewing patiently until it had softened up and was easy to swallow. Gabriella went to sleep that night wondering about the death camps and whether they were real or just exaggerations created by fear-filled minds. She thought back to her Uncle Jozsef telling her mother, Elizabeth and herself about the rumours, and how horrified, frightened and disbelieving they’d been. The very concept of death camps had seemed incredible in Tokaj Street and seemed even more incredible now. Well, her Uncle Jozsef had been wrong. Wrong then and wrong again when he’d forced her off the train. She recalled the fateful moment when her uncle had wrenched her free of her mother and sister and abandoned her to the Germans and their dogs. For the first time in her life Gabriella hated someone and that person was her Uncle Jozsef. She knew then that no matter how long she lived, another day or a hundred years, she could never ever forgive him for what he had done. Bitter tears stung her eyes.

  The following morning they were made to stand in rows five deep and were counted and recounted until the number of prisoners tallied with camp records. They were then informed of their duties. After roll call they would have breakfast. After breakfast they were to make up their beds and clean their barracks. Once the barracks had been checked, they were required to line up for work assignment. The job of counting and the instruction of their duties kept the young women standing through two hours of tedium.

  Breakfast was a bowl of thin soup. Some of the young women, who the day before had greeted their bowl of soup and piece of bread as something akin to a miracle, now complained of the taste and questioned why they hadn’t been given another piece of bread to mop it up. No one had any idea that they were receiving privileged treatment.

  Reality came when the girls least expected it. They stood in their rows of five awaiting work assignment when one of the guards noticed a stain on a girl’s dress. He immediately began screaming at her and dragged her out of the line to his superior who struck her hard across the face. The more the girl screamed the more the officer abused and hit her. He ordered her to remove her dress and kneel on her bare knees on the cobblestones.

  Gabriella looked on in horror. The guards had not yet reached her section. She glanced down to inspect her clothes, hoping and praying that she hadn’t been careless. She didn’t think she had but would she have noticed if a drop of soup had dripped off the bottom of her spoon? All around her other girls were anxiously checking their clothing. The guards tied the hands and feet of the kneeling girl and left her there sobbing quietly.

  Gabriella passed inspection and stepped forward when her name was called out, along with thirty other girls. They were lined up and marched away from the barracks back towards the road that led to the station. She didn’t panic. All through inspection she’d noticed groups of women being marched away, presumably to their place of work. Gabriella’s detail was halted outside the freshly painted buildings she’d noticed when she’d first arrived. This was how she’d thought the whole camp would be. Even now she assumed the painters would gradually work their way around town.

  Some girls were handed buckets and cloths and told to clean windows. There was no water in the buckets and, even more oddly, the windows were already clean. Gabriella and Julia were given a broom each, led to a building and told to brush out the hallway and steps. The hallway was spotless and so were the steps, but the girls knew better than to argue. Back near the barracks one of their companions was still kneeling on cobblestones, a lesson to all. So Gabriella and Julia swept, as did other girls across the road and in the buildings alongside them, while others ran dry rags over clean windows.

  ‘Smile!’ ordered their guard. ‘You must smile. You must be happy!’

  So the girls smiled. Apart from anything else, they had good reason to. Only a day ago they had feared for their lives. Now they had clean clothes, two meals a day and work that wasn’t really work. All they had to do was keep clean and obey orders. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. If this was how she was destined to spend the war, Gabriella decided, she’d accept it gladly. Together with Julia she swept and reswept the hallway and steps, brushing away non-existent dirt and dust. Occasionally German officers passed by and examined them and their clothes and made sure they were smiling and happy.

  Early in the afternoon Gabriella noticed four male prisoners carrying cans of paint and ladders coming down the street. They stopped outside the building where she and Julia were sweeping the steps for the thirtieth time. One pointed towards the top of the building while the others tried to see what he was pointing at.

  ‘Speak German?’ hissed one of the men.

  ‘A little,’ said Julia hesitantly.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Hungary.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Perfect!’ said the man. He translated for his comrades while Julia translated for Gabriella.

  ‘Why perfect?’ said Gabriella. ‘Ask him.’

  ‘Look at you,’ said the man. ‘You are a lie. You are like these buildings.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Julia.

  ‘A delegation is coming from the Red Cross. The Germans have ordered us to paint all the buildings along the designated route. We have done such a good job, the Red Cross must see through the deceit. They have only to look fifty metres either side to see how things really are. You, you are the icing on the cake!’ He laughed.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Julia.

  ‘Look at you. You girls,’ he waved his hands expansively, ‘you are all so beautiful! Every one of you. All beautiful. Look!’

  Julia translated for Gabriella and they saw the truth in what the man had said. They were all beautiful yet this commonality had not occurred to either of them.

  ‘Look at your faces,’ said the man, ‘they are not prison camp faces. Your faces still have the look of the outside world, of freedom. Look at our faces, look at everyone else in this hell hole. Don’t you see the difference?’

  Again Julia translated and both girls nodded. They already knew that look.

  ‘Soon the Red Cross will come, they will see how ridiculous these shining buildings are, see how ridiculous you look with your pretty faces and clean clothes, and they will see through the lie. They will insist on inspecting the real camp. Then the world will learn what the Germans have done to us.’

  ‘Guard!’ spat one of the other men.

  Gabriella and Julia instantly put their heads down and continued sweeping while the men pretended to argue about some detail of their building. Eventually they moved off. Later that afternoon the girls were marched back to their barracks and each given a lump of bread and a little marmalade. Gabriella ate her ration of bread cautiously, saving some to mop up the morning soup. While they ate, she and Julia told the women around them what the painters had told them.

  ‘We were taken from the train at Krakow because we are beautiful?’ asked one of the women incredulously.

  ‘Look around you,’ said Gabriella.

  ‘We are part of a lie?’ asked another.

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘that’s what we were told.’

  ‘If we are part of a lie, what then is the truth?’

  ‘The other women are the truth,’ said Gabriella. ‘If you want the truth, look at their faces. Look in their eyes.’

  The following morning the Red Cross arrived to inspect the camp. They travelled down the cobbled road past the clean, freshly painted buildings, saw the pretty girls sweeping steps and cleaning windows and did not deviate one metre from the designated route. Despite the efforts of the painters to paint their buildings like giant dolls’ houses, the delegation never saw the real Theresienstadt. What they saw was a lie, no more real than a movie set. Gabriella was a part of that lie.

  Almost the moment the Red Cross departed, Gabriella and all the women in her barrack were ordered to hand back the clothes they had been given. In retur
n they were given the clothing they had arrived in. Their clothes had been freshly laundered so none of the women objected; in fact, many were happier to have their own clothes. Later that afternoon, when they lined up for their bread, their ration was noticeably smaller and there was no marmalade. The soup the following morning was thinner with precious little evidence of vegetables in it. After inspection they were organised into work groups and given new assignments.

  Gabriella found herself in a factory, sitting at a long crowded workbench assembling parts for weapons. Whether they were intended for the army, navy or air force she had no idea. The light was poor and her seat uncomfortable. The women alongside her worked hard and mostly in silence. Gabriella struggled to keep up.

  During a break while they waited for a new stock of parts, Gabriella turned to the woman next to her who, judging by the dead look on her face, had been in Theresienstadt for some time. She came from a town in Austria near the border with Hungary and spoke some Magyarul.

  ‘Why does everyone work so hard?’ said Gabriella.

  ‘We have quotas,’ replied the woman. ‘Everyone must work hard to meet the quotas or be punished. Work slowly and the overseers will notice. Make mistakes and they will notice. Your name will be called out during selection and you will be taken away.’

  ‘Taken away where?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Work slow and you will find out,’ she said. ‘Work hard you may not.’ She added bitterly, ‘Hard work is no guarantee.’

  Things deteriorated steadily for Gabriella. Every day she and Julia told each other that their lives could not get any worse, but they always did. She got used to seeing bodies on carts being wheeled away down the cobbled streets every morning to the crematorium. Got used to the pathetic corpses of small children, of the sick and those who’d grown too weak to continue living. She got used to having her bread and soup rations reduced, to losing weight and strength and to wondering how long her downward slide could continue before she disappeared altogether. The other women in the camp no longer stared at her and she realised it was because she now looked like them, had become one of them.

  At night Gabriella brought out her book and read it to Julia, translating from English into Magyarul. They studied the picture plates of Peter Pan, pirates and pixies, escaping for precious moments into the wonderful world created by J.M. Barrie and Mabel Lucie Attwell. But the escape was never more than temporary. When the lights went out fears ignited. There was the real world to contend with and the one thing that terrified her most. It paralysed her body and mind with unspeakable fear and, with every passing day, became more inevitable.

  Nobody knew in advance when the selections would take place or whose name would be called out. Nobody knew for sure what happened to people who were selected, though it was generally regarded as a death sentence. Nobody knew the final destination of the trains that carried them away, although rumours of Auschwitz and its dreaded gas chambers had infiltrated the camp and were being spread in horrified whispers in barracks and latrines. The fact that the inmates of the sick houses were always included in the selections added currency to the rumours. The logic was brutally simple: the Germans were not curing the sick therefore they were disposing of them. Selection came to equal Auschwitz and Auschwitz equalled death.

  Gabriella stood in line and heard the names of girls from Sarospatak called out, girls who shared her barrack and bunked down near to her, girls who worked in the same factory as her and worked hard. She stood expecting to hear her name called out too, dreading hearing her name called out and dreading hearing Julia’s. Each time their names were omitted brought relief but also increased their fear. Each day their names weren’t called brought them closer to the day when they would be. Gabriella now understood the underlying cause of the look on her face and on the faces of all the inmates. They were all dead people, dead people whose names had not yet been called.

  One morning Gabriella, Julia and around thirty other women from their barrack heard their names called out at roll call. The paralysis that enveloped Gabriella during every selection gripped her. Julia and another girl virtually had to carry her out front to the assembly point. But instead of marching them towards the station, the guards took them in the opposite direction. Gabriella’s spirits lifted but she remained cautious. They marched for almost ten minutes until, ahead of her, she could see three or four tables set up across the road. Two young women in clean blue uniforms sat at each table. Gabriella had no idea what was about to happen, only that they were not heading for the trains and therefore had not been selected.

  The girls in blue were apparitions, visitors from another world entirely. Gabriella stared at them as she had been stared at when she first arrived in Theresienstadt. They still had flesh on their bones and their hair hadn’t thinned or fallen out. They were beautiful, every bit as beautiful as she had once been. Gabriella closed her eyes and sniffed. Even at a distance from the tables she could smell soap. Soap!

  The guards ordered the girls to form a line in front of each table, which they did. But their curiosity got the better of them and they gradually edged forward until they could see what these beautiful apparitions in blue were doing.

  ‘They’re tattooing numbers on our arms!’ one girl exclaimed.

  Gabriella and Julia hugged each other, tears forming in their eyes. The significance of the tattoo was not lost on them. Most of the women in the factory had numbers tattooed on their forearms. Tattoos were a sign of permanence. Tattoos meant that the Germans had a use for them, which lessened their chances of being selected.

  Gabriella glanced at the guards who were showing no interest at all in the proceedings. They stood leaning against a wall, soaking up the sun. She took advantage of their lapse in discipline to examine the work of the tattooists at each of the tables. Some were sloppy and tattooed large numbers in irregular lines. But one girl seemed to have a talent for the task, or at the very least a greater sense of diligence.

  ‘Come. This line,’ said Gabriella and grabbed hold of Julia’s arm. When their turn came they engaged their tattooist in conversation as best they could. Gabriella praised the girl’s neatness and told her how she had chosen her to tattoo their arms because her numbers were smaller and neater. The girl appeared flattered and reacted as they had hoped by making certain she did a neat job on their arms. In the course of their conversation they discovered that the tattooists weren’t German as they had thought but Jewish girls from Czechoslovakia. They were all quite fair-skinned and looked German. Gabriella guessed that was why they were privileged, well fed and well clothed.

  Once all the girls had been tattooed, they were marched directly back to their work places. The morning which had begun in such fear had developed into a glorious autumn day with little breeze and a bright blue sky that reminded Gabriella of picnics.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  For Milos liberation was a triumph but for Tibor it came as an anti-climax. He’d been too long at the edge and could not step back from it. He became restless and impatient and wanted to follow along behind the Russian advance, far more closely than was safe. He needed the thrill of living every day as though it was his last. Milos had only one aim, which was the whole purpose of his survival. This was to return to Sarospatak, but Tibor complained he couldn’t see the point. He wanted to follow the Russians to Budapest and see what opportunities awaited them there.

  ‘We have nothing in Sarospatak,’ he argued, ‘no home, no friends, no future. When Budapest is liberated it will be full of desperate people who will need food, clothing and coal for their fires. There will be opportunities for us to make something of ourselves.’

  ‘What about Dad? What about Gabriella?’ argued Milos stubbornly.

  ‘One day we will discover where they died and put flowers on their graves. What more can we do?’

  ‘You don’t know they’re dead,’ said Milos indignantly. ‘We can be home waiting for them when they return. We can make something for them to return home to.’


  ‘Home? Forget home,’ said Tibor. ‘It’s somebody else’s home now. We’re going to Budapest. Both of us. You are coming with me.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Milos. ‘We are going home.’

  The argument remained unresolved, a chasm between them that widened as the boys grew further apart. In the Carpathians to the north, the front had stalled as the Germans dynamited roads, bridges and railway lines ahead of the advance. Tibor used the fact that the Russians were making faster progress towards Budapest than they were towards Sarospatak to strengthen his argument, but Milos would not be persuaded. He believed that he had an obligation to his father in the event that Jozsef had somehow managed to survive, and he had a promise to Gabriella to keep. He would not be diverted.

  Tibor grew tired of arguing and spent increasingly more time with the Russian soldiers. He tried to learn their language and they respected him for this. They failed utterly to realise his motives: that he was trying to learn how they thought, what motivated them, and how he could best use this knowledge once he got to Budapest.

  Milos and Tibor also argued about the amount of time Tibor was spending with the Russians in light of their atrocities. The Hungarians had wanted the Germans out but not at the expense of allowing the Russians in. The Hungarians feared the fierce Russian soldiers far more than the Germans and they had every right to. When the liberating army passed through villages, women and children showered their tanks and trucks with flowers. The soldiers accepted the flowers and at night came back to rape the women.

  ‘The Russians don’t want much,’ a woman from a liberated village complained to the boys, ‘just to eat all our food, drink all our palinka and rape us. Mothers and daughters, the young and the old. Beyond that, they just loot everything the Germans left.’

  The pattern was repeated in every village and town as the Russians advanced. The soldiers got drunk, raped the women and shot anyone who got in their way. Then they’d go back to fighting Germans and dying by the thousands. Yet Tibor saw another side to them. He admired the courage and discipline of the Mongolian and Kirgiz troops as much as his countrymen recoiled at the atrocities they committed. Tibor did not condone the conduct of the Russians but he was prepared to allow mitigating circumstances.