WHICH SEEMED TO HERMANN to be happening the next fall, in September of 1939, when Hitler marched into Poland, and the French and English declared war at last. America would follow suit shortly, he was certain, and even confided to Magda that he thought there was a chance that they’d be back in their own house by Christmas.
Though it was around then that the first stories started coming out of Poland. Two small boys had somehow made it over the mountains, alone and on foot, and had emerged from the woods not far from there, like sylphs with horror in their eyes and the news that the Nazis in Poland were shooting people into mass graves.
They’d rounded up everyone in their village, the boys said, and marched them into the woods, where they shot them all into a big hole, their parents, their sister and two brothers, their grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, and friends. These two boys fell under some bodies, which saved them, and when it got dark they managed to crawl out and escape through the deep Polish woods.
“Is it possible?” whispered Hermann’s wife, later that night. “The Germans shooting people into mass graves?” No one had ever heard of anything like that before.
They knew that Hitler was insisting on more “living room” for the German people, which was why he had gone into Poland, or so he claimed. But that was a far cry from depopulating Poland, as some people were saying, in order to turn the whole place into a breadbasket for Germany—preposterous!
And how would you depopulate Poland anyway? There were thirty-five million people living there. Was Hitler planning to dig a mass grave from Warsaw to Lodz? It was inconceivable.
“Think of Goethe, think of Beethoven!” Hermann concluded. “Those boys have to be lying. The Germans couldn’t be shooting people into mass graves.”
STILL, THE WAR WASN’T GOING as he had expected. Incredibly, France seemed to be falling, and Hermann was thinking that maybe he’d underestimated Hitler. He had taken him for a buffoon, a monstrous child, but now he was parading up the Champs-Élysées, and seemed to have invented a new kind of warfare.
He called it Blitzkrieg, his “lightning war.” He’d taken Poland practically overnight, before the Poles could even mobilize. And he was bombing England, firebombs falling from the sky every night. Hermann had seen the pictures posted on the walls, all over town. “London in flames!”
Horrible, and where were the Americans? There were words coming up in conversation that they hadn’t heard before. Words like “transports” and “deportation”—what exactly did they mean? That is, he knew what they meant in the dictionary, and what they used to mean, but what did they mean now, especially when applied to people like them, law-abiding citizens in their own country, with proper papers?
Because citizens or not, papers in order, people were starting to disappear; there was no question about that. Sons were taken, supposedly for the army, but then when inquiries were made, the sons weren’t listed anywhere. Or people set out for the market and never came back. The Germans hadn’t sent many SS into that part of Czechoslovakia yet, but the Czechs didn’t seem to need the Germans, they had their own Nazis, the Hitler Jugend, the Youth, former juvenile delinquents, the kind of boys who set cats’ tails on fire and torture songbirds for fun.
Now they were given uniforms and encouraged to attack anyone they caught in the street at night. This gradually progressed to killings, mostly of the hands-on variety, often with clubs or stones. Afterwards, they’d hang the bodies from the lampposts. You’d see them every morning now, two or three at least.
“By the end of 1939, we were petrified,” said Magda. “We mostly just stayed at home.” Hitler had installed a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso, as his man in this part of Czechoslovakia, now called “the Slovak State.” Tiso was an ardent Nazi, and so enthusiastic about Hitler’s policy that he offered to pay the SS for every man, woman, and child “transported” out of his country.
Hermann and his friends were still debating what that might mean. Some argued “relocation,” others “forced labor.” It didn’t occur to anyone to go beyond that.
6
THE FIRST TRANSPORTS from Czechoslovakia started in 1941, and by then the word no longer needed quotation marks. They still weren’t sure where they were going, but they knew by then how it started: people rounded up on the street, sometimes for a reason—they were refugees, immigrants—and sometimes not. Sometimes it was just because they were there, or their yellow star was too high or too low. One man was deported because the sewing was too “fancy,” and another man because his star wasn’t sewn on but simply pinned to his coat.
The Hitler boys kicked him with no compunction in front of the general populace, and then threw him onto a truck for “immediate deportation” to Germany, “to work,” people were told. So not the worst fate, and the feeling was still that if you kept pretty much off the street, you should be all right.
But then late one night, there came a knock on Hermann’s door. He and his wife sat bolt upright, clutching each other’s hands—“My God!”
He cast around the room—the girls were sleeping, where to hide them? The first place they’d look would be the small closet, and then under the bed. He didn’t think it would be like this, with no chance to think or take action—
Another knock—“Please, sir!”
He and his wife looked at each other. It wasn’t the police. Hermann hadn’t been “sir” to the police for almost a year now. He squeezed her hand and got to his feet. He opened the door just a crack. Goodmann was standing there, Goodmann the farmer, who’d once worked for him on what had been his farm.
Hermann was so astonished to see him that he almost couldn’t place him. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about Goodmann. He’d known the man for twenty years, and it hadn’t been more than a year since the two had traded places. But that was by the old calendar, and time moved differently under Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” which cared nothing for Hermann, but had made Goodmann’s fortune. He was even wearing a German uniform that night.
Goodmann was now a ranking member of the Nazi Party, he said, which was why he’d gotten wind that there was going to be a deportation any day from the town. It would take all the young boys and girls, Goodmann told Hermann, and his daughters’ names were on that list.
Hermann stood stunned. He’d done all they’d asked of him, and still they would take his children? And what now? Run? But how? There was a curfew, and the whole place was guarded by the thugs, the Jugend, whose sport was to pick off people who tried to move through the streets at night.
But Goodmann said he remembered Hermann’s kindnesses over the years, and that he was willing to hide the girls. He named a very large sum of money.
Hermann accepted at once. He would have it for Goodmann the next day, he promised. He roused the three girls and kissed them, and then hustled them down the narrow stairs, still in their nightgowns, to Goodmann’s wagon, which stood waiting out back, the horses stamping, horses they knew. Their horses.
And hidden under their own father’s hay, the girls were taken out to the farm that night, and locked in a room with no window, and nothing on the walls except an oversized photograph of Hitler. Magda was eighteen, Gabi sixteen, and Vera just twelve. Goodmann’s wife brought them bread and cheese, morning and evening, and sometimes Goodmann himself came at night, with a letter from their parents.
They weren’t allowed out, even for a breath of air. anyone seen helping them will be treated like them—a man who’d made a joke, calling for “all bicyclists to wear yellow bicycles,” had recently been arrested. Which meant that someone had reported him, someone who’d heard his little joke, so a friend maybe, or a neighbor. No one knew who was watching, who was listening, or even why. What good it could possibly do them.
But Goodmann’s wife wasn’t asking who or why as she turned the key in the lock twice a day, and a deaf ear to the girls’ pleas for just a quick walk, even in the darkness. “You want me to be shot, too?” was all she’d say. It hadn’t been her idea to
have them there in the first place.
“So there we sat in that room,” said Magda, “staring all day at Hitler’s picture.” His eyes, his nose, his infernal mustache—where was the mystery? she asked herself. Where did the hatred lie?
And why them? What crime, what offense had been so enormous as to bring old friends to hate them, and reduce them to incarceration in their father’s former tenant’s back room? Nice girls, all three—nice-looking, yes, but not too pretty, nothing to envy about them, and their parents were well-off, but not the richest in town.
So why? Why? Was it their violins? The trees in their garden? Their mother’s nice coat, with the fur trim? But half the women in town wore coats with fur trim, all bought from nice Mr. Friedman, whose prices were considered fair, but whose shop was now closed and shuttered, after boys with swastikas on their arms had broken the windows and Mr. Friedman’s leg.
And she’d heard that people had cheered at that, even people in Mr. Friedman’s coats, but why? She couldn’t make sense of the thing, no matter how hard she tried. Grown-ups, people she knew, her friends’ mothers and fathers, were putting on armbands and turning on their neighbors. With a new look in their eyes, a new cruelty in their faces.
But was it fun, that cruelty? Was that what it was? Like picking on the slow child at school? But even if you teased him a bit, you didn’t hit him, you didn’t want blood to flow from his poor nose, you didn’t cheer for that! She turned away from the picture, tried not to see it. Made it a game with her sisters—trying not to look at Hitler’s picture.
“You looked!” “I didn’t!” “There he is!” “I forgot!” The days in Goodmann’s back room were long and tedious. They lived for their bread and cheese in the morning, the sweet notes from their parents at night. There was no calendar, and after a few days they lost track of time, and started arguing about how long they’d been there.
So they weren’t sure how long it had been—a week, or even two—when Goodmann unlocked the door one night and told the girls to come out, “Quickly!” He was taking them back to their parents, he said. The horse and cart were waiting. He tucked them back under the hay and drove into town.
It was too risky for him to keep them any longer, he told Hermann. There were rumors going around, it had been noted that the girls were not on the transport.
“Noted by whom?” their mother cried. Certainly not the Germans in the town, who didn’t know them, so who? Who wasn’t satisfied? For whom wasn’t it enough that two hundred other girls had been rounded up and shoved into boxcars and taken from their midst; girls they knew, girls whose mothers they knew, whose grandmothers even? Tall girls, short girls, some so young they were crying for their mamas, others proud and brave, heads high, but nonetheless deemed unfit to live among them.
And for whom hadn’t that been enough? Whose rest had been disturbed by the niggling little question of where those last three girls might be, when the doors were slammed shut on the rest of them, locked and barred from the outside?
“Who? Who?” she cried to Goodmann, as Hermann tried to quiet her.
Goodmann shrugged; he didn’t know. The rumors had started only after the train had left, he said. If the Germans had noticed someone missing, they would have held the whole thing up and searched right then.
So it was someone who knew them, someone who was watching as the rest of the girls were shoved into the boxcars—who? A teacher who’d taught them the tributaries of the Danube? A former maid who’d left their house with regular gifts of hams and cheese? A classmate? A friend? A neighbor? “Who?” cried their mother.
But the who of it didn’t concern Goodmann. What concerned him now was that there might be a search for the girls, and he was washing his hands of them, though he was sorry. Still, what choice did he have?
“No choice,” said Hermann quietly. What else was there to say? He showed the man to the door.
Goodmann said good-bye to him, definitively, Hermann noted, as if quite sure he’d never see him again. And then he went home in his Nazi clothes to his picture of Hitler. The farm was a good one, and his crops were growing, as they would for a thousand years now. Life for Goodmann, in a general way, had improved, Hermann had to admit.
BUT FOR HERMANN, the general was now the personal, and whoever had missed his daughters on that transport might at any moment of the night or day take it up a notch and send someone looking. They had to get out, all of them, no question now, but first the girls, right away, no matter the risks. The real danger now was in staying where they were.
It was 1941 by then, though, and as Hermann pondered the map of Europe in his head, no matter which way he turned it, it didn’t come out right. Germany to the north and west, Poland to the east, the golden door of America slammed shut just as they were fully realizing the worth of that offer. And now, even the places they’d never thought about, wild Australia, would no longer have them.
“We have no racial problem, and we don’t want one,” the Australian prime minister had stated the other day.
“Racial problem??” thundered Hermann. There were rumors that Roosevelt was proposing a haven in darkest Africa, or somewhere in South America—some time in the future.
But at the moment, the only places they could actually get to—on foot, or at best, by horse cart, hidden under hay at borders—were not far enough away anymore. Hitler held France, Romania, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium. Europe was his.
But there was a chance that Hungary might still constitute something of a refuge. Hungary had its own fascist government, much like Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain, which made it a natural German ally, and the Nazis hadn’t marched in. Hermann had heard that the Hungarians were not deporting people. He and his wife both had relatives there, and the girls could speak Hungarian. He managed to get a message—“how, I don’t know,” said Magda—to his wife’s brother: he was sending his girls across the border the next night. Three local boys who knew their way through the woods had agreed to act as guides.
THE BOYS CAME right after dark that night to the back door of the apartment. Hermann took it as a good sign that the moon was new and had set early. That should give them a little extra time to make it. It was thirty kilometers, more or less, to the spot outside the village of Sátoraljaujhely, where Hermann’s wife’s brother would, with any luck, be waiting.
“Be with them, let them make it,” he prayed over the girls’ heads. He handed the boys a thick packet of money, kissed the girls, and went to bed. He couldn’t watch them leave—there were guards to evade, though the boys seemed to think that would be all right. Maybe it would be. But if it wasn’t, or if the boys themselves should hurt them—Hermann went to bed with his sobbing wife and listened in terror into the dawn for shots in the distance.
But there weren’t any that night. The girls and their guides got safely down to the marshes around the Torysa River, and from there it was a straight slog across. “We had to walk most of the night in the water,” said Magda. She was a violinist, and her sisters both studied piano. They had planned, each of them, a life devoted to music. They were none of them athletic, not the sort of girls who went in for mountaineering. It is possible that the youngest one could barely swim.
But they didn’t falter, just pushed on after the boys. They hardly knew each other, and they hardly spoke. The boys said they were thinking about joining the party. One of the Nazis had promised them “books on sex” that people like Hermann were said to keep in their houses.
But one of the boys said his brother had raided a house, and there hadn’t been any such books, at least nothing with pictures.
Magda said she actually laughed then—“Can you imagine laughing at a time like that?” she said years later. “Does he mean Freud?” she whispered to Gabi at the time. But mostly they were silent. The boys were hunters, and knew how to walk without breaking any sticks. The girls’ feet were unaccustomed and aching, and they had to summon everything they had to keep going; but finally, just before daybreak,
the boys told them they had crossed the border into Hungary, and soon after that, right on the edge of the marshes, they met their uncle, who was waiting with another wad of bills.
The boys wished them well, and melted back into the swamp. They seemed nice, but there was still the chance of betrayal, and it was too risky for the girls to stay in the village. There were no yellow stars in Hungary yet, so their uncle put them on a train to Budapest, which seemed miraculous to Magda—to get on a train, like anyone else.
She sat looking around, almost in awe—no hateful looks, no faces turned quickly away. For the first time since it had started, a tear trickled down her cheek.
“What?” asked her sister.
“Nothing.”
But it was hard, this vacation, this brief visit back to the land of normal living. It had been so good before, so beautiful, their lives, and why had it ended? Why?
She persuaded her sisters to walk once around the station in Budapest. They had very little money, but they bought a hot chocolate to share, and she drank her third very slowly. She wanted to run through the streets, pushing and shoving among the other people, one of them once more, no longer separated by a horrible strip of yellow. Just a girl—a shabby one no less. A poor girl—fine! She would take it. Even that would be beautiful, life as an indigent, a beggar, in a city filled with music and light.
But they had no papers, and every step outside was a risk, they’d been warned. If they were picked up for anything, or even nothing, they’d be shipped back, or off, and no one would know where. With one last look of longing at the streets, they went back into the station and waited, “like mice,” as their uncle had instructed, for the next train to Debrecen, 160 kilometers to the east, where their mother’s second cousin would be waiting to take them in.
The Plum Trees Page 6
