The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Everything is fine, fine, nothing has happened,” and so on. Still, the women were shaken. “To see your father crying is a terrifying thing,” as Magda would testify, years later.

  On the whole, though, they were starting to breathe a little easier as the months rolled by. Magda liked the children she took care of, the people paid her and treated her decently, her mother and sisters were paid for their knitting, and with that, their father managed to buy enough food to keep them going. There was very little coal for heat, but there was some. Not like Poland, where they heard that the Nazis had taken it all, and that most of the old people and small children had frozen to death that first winter.

  But Hungary was neither starving nor freezing, nor did they seem to be deporting people. And as the year wore on, the news from the front started getting better. The British and Americans seemed to be turning things around in North Africa, and Leningrad hadn’t fallen after all. Spring was late that year, but when it came, the family’s spirits couldn’t help but rise a bit. Hermann saw a great blue heron flying toward the marshes, and told his wife that the war wouldn’t last forever. It was 1943.

  “BUT ONE NICE DAY, soon after that,” said Magda, “the Hungarian police came to the house where I was working.” They already had her parents and sisters. Someone had informed on the man who’d made their forged papers, and the SS had arrested him. Under torture, he’d given hundreds of names, including theirs.

  They were taken to the police station, along with scores of other people with false papers, a cross section of Hitler’s Most Wanted from all over Central and Eastern Europe. The Poles among them had it the worst—the men, women, and children who’d managed to escape from the Krakow Ghetto, where people were eating stinging nettles, were shipped back, sobbing and pleading, that day. If Hermann’s family were sent back to Czechoslovakia, they knew their fate would be deportation at best.

  But their cousins managed to get them a lawyer, who convinced the local authorities that the place for these particular criminals was the town’s prison. This took the last of Hermann’s money.

  But that was all right, the lawyer told Hermann, because the tide was finally turning against the Germans. The Allies were starting to bomb Berlin. Hitler was conscripting seventeen-year-old boys, “to die in Russia,” said the lawyer. If he were Hitler, he would give up now.

  Or if not now, next week—it was bound to happen, just a question of when. The lawyer’s strategy was to keep them safe in a Hungarian prison, until it was over and they could raise their heads again.

  “AND SO BEGAN OUR LIVES as jailbirds,” said Magda. The girls shared a cell with their mother, with one blanket between them, and a mattress, and for a bathroom, there was a bucket. A German girl in the next cell, a Jehovah’s Witness, told them the great luck for them was that it had a lid. She knew whereof she spoke, she said. Hermann’s daughters managed to make this a subject for some merriment among them.

  They were let out once a day, for exercise, which meant walking “round and round, like prisoners in the movies. And once a week there were showers, and then we were locked up again.” That, too, rather quickly became normal life, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t so bad after all. The girls and their mother were together, their cousins were permitted to bring them food, and they had visiting privileges with Hermann. They were allowed to see him several times per week.

  Which was a blessing, though they were seeing a certain fire in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. There was a prophet in his cell, a mystic from Poland, who had explained what was happening, everything, from the scriptures, shown them where it had all been written, chapter and verse. They had been wrong, said Hermann, to leave the old ways behind. They were being punished now, but in the end would emerge stronger.

  He urged his daughters to start praying—one day he gave them a little amulet, a small leather pouch with a holy word and magic number inside. This time wasn’t wasted, he told the girls, just compressed. And afterwards, they would rebuild, not their old life but a better life, somewhere far from there, America, or even Paraguay, some people were saying. Anyway, in the New World, away from these medieval haters.

  And as for now, Hermann told them, it was for them to see that their prayers proved acceptable in the sight of the Lord, their Rock and their Redeemer. They must pray to stay safe in this Hungarian prison, where the Lord had decided to show him His face.

  HERMANN’S DAUGHTERS didn’t know quite what to make of their father’s jailhouse conversion, or what would come of it afterwards. But maybe he was right, maybe it was his new kind of fervent praying that had secured for them the luxury of actually wondering about “afterwards.”

  Because as the leaves fell from the lone tree in the prison courtyard, and 1943 turned finally to 1944, even Hitler had to know that his war wasn’t going well. Surely he or one of his generals had studied their Napoleon, and could foresee what would happen as the Russian mud turned to Russian ice and snow, the same ice and snow that had finished off their predecessor’s army.

  But it had been easy for Hitler in Poland, easy, even, in France, so what was Napoleon to him? Napoleon had lingered in Russia, but the Nazis, with their planes, their tanks, their blitzkrieg, had planned to be in and out of Russia before that first winter, and all that land, all that grain, all that oil would be theirs.

  “When the attack on Russia starts, the world will hold its breath,” Hitler had predicted back in the summer of 1941. “We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling down.” He had planned to host a reception at the Astoria Hotel in the heart of Leningrad on the ninth of August of the next year. He even had the invitations engraved.

  And there was a celebration in Leningrad that very day, but it wasn’t the one Hitler had envisioned. The city had been under siege for almost a year by then; more than a million had already died, and hundreds of thousands were starving. The German army surrounding the city expected surrender from one day to the next, and when they heard the music coming from the city, the officers assumed it presaged the town fathers filing out, heads bent, white flag flying. Hitler’s reception would take place at the Hotel Astoria that night after all!

  But rather than a plea for terms, what the Fourth Panzer Division got was the world premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, written both to honor and to stiffen the city’s defiance and endurance. Nor were those stirring notes the only warning to the German soldiers; the musicians were already playing in gloves that evening, though it was still August. The Germans, for their part, had no gloves, or much else in the way of serious winter clothing, Hitler’s plan being to have them home by autumn.

  As in Poland, as in France, but Russia proved to be neither, and Hitler soon found himself fighting in the Russian cold, which, he was to learn, Napoleon-style, was unlike any cold he knew. Hitler’s guns froze in the Russian cold, his planes’ engines seized up, his fuel oil froze solid, so that his army had to chip off bits and heat it. Plus his trains were the wrong gauge for Russian tracks, and to compound that problem, Hitler had misunderstood the Russian roads. The Russian roads had looked good on the maps, looked just like the Polish and French roads his tanks had rolled down at lightning speed with relatively little cost to themselves, all told.

  But few of the Russian roads were asphalt, or even graded dirt. The German tanks, with their narrow treads designed for speed, couldn’t get traction in the frozen Russian mud. Nor were Hitler’s horses any match for the native Siberian ponies, who could scratch up grass through the ice and snow with their tough little hooves, while their larger European counterparts, whose feed was stalled behind trains with guns and woolens, stood and starved, helpless, until they keeled over, brown and gray blocks of ice, 750,000 of them.

  Still, since the Russians were fundamentally lesser beings whom the Germans had been born to rule, Hitler concluded that it was only a matter of standing toug
h here. He had already renamed the country “the East Reich,” and once he’d depopulated the place, primarily through starvation, and moved in his own people, better people, Germans, he would get the roads in shape, put the factories on Berlin time, and then talk to the English. Or rather, the English would talk to him.

  He refused to consider any significant shift of strategy; refused even to adjust course in the face of facts. Men he should have sent to finish off Leningrad were sent to Moscow instead, to swallow all of Russia in one gulp, Nazi-fashion. That left him with a line he couldn’t supply, but “Stand or die!” Hitler commanded his armies.

  Though stand and die was what they were doing in Russia, nor could the news from the Western Front have been any more cheering. Bombs were now falling on Berlin with regularity. It was rumored that Hitler had moved to a bomb shelter, and wasn’t getting out of bed till eleven-thirty in the morning.

  All this was greeted in the Debrecen prison as proof of the existence of God. The year was turning, it was now 1944, another good sign—if you added it up, according to Hermann’s mystic cellmate. It came to eighteen, a lucky number according to the Kabbalah. Eighteen meant luck, survival. Life.

  8

  HITLER COULD HAVE SHOT HIMSELF on New Year’s Day 1944. If he had, much of Germany would have been spared destruction and despair. There would have been no firebombing of Dresden, and the Russians wouldn’t have marched into Berlin, or Central Europe, for that matter. There would have been no Iron Curtain, and the death camps wouldn’t have hit their stride. Millions of lives could have been saved. Tens of millions, if you count it up.

  One bullet, but he wasn’t the supreme leader of the madness for nothing; and there was still plenty of Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog,” as he liked to quote Goethe, for him to dispense, and closer to home at that.

  In March of that year, 1944, he invited the Hungarian prime minister, Miklós Horthy, to a conference in a castle near Salzburg, and when it was time to go home, Horthy found his door locked, from the outside. It was the nineteenth of March. That day, the Germans marched into Hungary.

  Among the first administrators to arrive in Budapest was Adolf Eichmann. There was much still to do in Hungary, and Time’s wingéd chariot, in the form of the Russian army, was drawing near. But when it came to separating out huge groups of people for deportation to death camps, Eichmann was the man. He was efficient, tireless, and a true believer. There were, according to his sources, 725,000 people there for the killing in Hungary, and he figured he had the summer to do it.

  He had with him a special SS death squad, and they went to work at once, using the experience they’d garnered in Czechoslovakia, Greece, France, Holland, and Romania. The yellow stars were out in no time. Property was confiscated properly here, which meant straight into the hands of ranking SS men rather than to minor Hungarians. Collaborating community groups were impaneled and given the privilege of saving a few family and friends in exchange for facilitating the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands. And the local Nazis, the Arrow Cross men, were given guns and encouraged to shoot any yellow stars they could find into the Danube River.

  Which they did with such zeal that spring that their own waters went bad, but even that didn’t stop them. Every day, there were more bodies, floating in the river, Magda’s cousin told them in a letter. She no longer dared to venture out to the prison to see them. They had been forcibly moved into an apartment with a hundred other people, but they were trying to get some sort of protection from the Swedish embassy. There was no coal, and very little food. Every day someone jumped from one of the high windows, and people they knew had gone out looking for firewood or food and never come back.

  Her husband’s aunt was almost shot the other day, she wrote. Two Arrow Cross men had caught her outside the Swedish embassy and marched her at gunpoint, along with a small boy, picked up randomly, to a dock on the river.

  “Turn around,” they commanded, and her husband’s aunt took the boy’s hand and asked him, “desperately,” if he could swim.

  He’d whispered back yes, which made her “strangely happy,” she said, but for some reason, the men didn’t shoot, just laughed and walked away.

  “So as you can see, you are safer in prison,” their cousin concluded, though unfortunately, she no longer had any food to bring them.

  WHICH WAS HARD, but not surprising. They’d been hungry since the Nazis had taken over. Rations had been cut and then cut again, the daily outing for exercise was decreased to twice a week, and worse, the girls were no longer permitted to talk to their father. All they could hope for was to catch sight of him now and then, parading with the others around the tree in the yard.

  What was he thinking? That it would still be all right, in the end? Did he think they’d get out soon, and, if so, when? Their mother didn’t look well. Someone had told her the Arrow Cross were going to come into the prison and shoot them, and she’d told them to be quiet, not to talk such nonsense, but her hair had turned white overnight then, just like that.

  But what if they did come in to shoot them? Should they run, Magda wanted to ask her father, or try to hide? Try to argue with them, call for the Hungarian guards, who knew them at least? Would they help?

  Hermann would know, he would tell them—she wanted to talk to him, even just to hear his voice, get a hug in his strong arms. Her mother had gotten thin and dry, like straw. But her father looked strong still. He would know what they should do.

  And they did meet again, one day in the yard. The women were brought out early, before the men had been taken in, and Magda broke their lines and ran to her father—everyone did, pushing and crying, fathers and children, husbands and wives.

  “Get back or we’ll shoot!” shouted the guards.

  “Shoot then!” people shouted. “Good!”

  But the guards were Hungarians and didn’t shoot, and she and her mother and sisters got over to Hermann before they were pushed apart, and he touched their hair and whispered a prayer, asked how they were, even kissed their cheeks, which was good, since they never saw him again.

  BECAUSE A FEW DAYS LATER, out of nowhere and with no warning, an SS officer came through their wing of the prison with a list. Magda and her sisters’ names were on it. This time there was no Goodmann to hide them, no midnight trip through the swamps to steal them away.

  The cell door opened.

  Her mother jumped to her feet—“No!”

  But there was no “No!” with an SS man. He opened the cell door and motioned with his whip for the three girls to file out. “You should be happy, madame,” he said to their mother. “The girls will be going to Tokay, to help with the grape harvest.”

  That was reassuring. Tokay was said to be beautiful. And how wonderful, to be outside again. Better than factory work.

  “Quickly,” he said, as they hugged their mother.

  “Can’t you take me too?” She turned to the SS man. “So we can stay together?”

  “Don’t worry, madame, you’ll be together again shortly,” he said, not impolitely, as he pushed the girls out the door.

  “THE WITCH’S KITCHEN”

  Faust, Part I, Goethe

  9

  IT WAS THE FIRST OF MAY, 1944, the day the fairies were said to dance around the sacred trees deep in the woods, on Brocken Mountain. All the girls and boys in the Debrecen prison were shipped out that day, “to Tokay,” as if on a school outing, the SS made it sound. There was little panic, either among them or their parents. They filed as instructed into trucks that would take them to the station, to get their train.

  Which they still expected to be a passenger train. Something meant for people, so it was worrisome when what pulled up was a boxcar, for freight. The platform was thronged—their group from the prison, and others, men and women, many with small children, who couldn’t possibly help with “the harvest,” or “work in factories,” as they had been told.

  Were they in the wrong place, then? Magda wanted to ask, but ask whom
? The SS officer who’d brought them had been joined by others, many with dogs. She and her sisters clung together—Vera, the youngest, was almost fifteen now, and could barely remember their house or their garden. When someone in prison asked her if she played the piano, she’d turned to Magda. “Do I?” she’d asked.

  “Yes.” Magda hugged her. “You did. You will.”

  In the truck to the station, she’d asked the Hungarian guard when their mother was coming.

  “Sunday,” he’d answered, but had averted his eyes.

  THE DOORS OF THE BOXCARS opened and then the SS, polite enough till then, started screaming. “In, schnell! Schnell! Quickly!” There were no steps up, and it was high—the girls scrambled up, schnell, but some of the older people had trouble. One of the guards hit an older woman on the back with his club. She fell, out of sight.

  Magda stared in horror. But then she was pushed into the car, on top of people inside already, and then a guard shouted, “A hundred and twenty!” and the door was slammed shut. They could hear the bolt closing on the outside. A hundred and twenty of them in a car made for boxes. There was nowhere for the girls to sit—the hard floor was already covered with the old and the children. Nursing mothers, crying babies. All on their way to work in the fields, they said.

  “For the harvest,” they’d been told—but what do you harvest at this time of year? someone asked. It was May. You didn’t harvest till August, he said.

  Which was true. So maybe it was to plant the grapes, someone else said, or to work in factories. They were in boxcars, people were saying, because Hitler needed all the passenger trains for the troops. That’s why he needs us to work, why we don’t have to worry. We are needed. We’ll be all right.

  It was already stifling, and the train hadn’t started to move. There were only two small windows at the top—not even enough for cattle, murmured someone. This car was only for freight. Cattle would have needed more air.