The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  Nor was there a bathroom, they realized. Just a bucket, in a corner—was it possible? The girls looked at each other.

  “Good thing Hungary is so small,” one of the men said.

  That was true. It wouldn’t take more than a half day to get to Tokay.

  When the train finally pulled out, there was some relief, but before long the latrine bucket was full, and the children had started crying for water. There were only two buckets of water for the whole car. Some people had brought food, and they gave the girls a bit of bread, but it was all they could spare. That was fine, though. “Half a day at most,” the men were figuring.

  But half a day passed and still they were going. “North,” said someone, who’d climbed up to the small window to get a look at the sun. They should have turned west by now, to get to Tokay.

  If they were going to Tokay.

  Were they going to Tokay? Silence fell in the car.

  Then, “Maybe it’s hard to tell which way we’re going from that little window.”

  The man at the window shrugged—“the sun is the sun,” he said. But he didn’t press it—why make it worse? The girls had thought maybe they’d be able to hold out, but finally had to go “to the bucket.” Someone had rigged a blanket, and they held it for each other. Thank heavens, they whispered, their parents weren’t here to be subjected to this.

  Then they went back to their corner of the train and told stories to the children. “Soon we’ll be there,” they whispered. And finally, the train stopped—at last!

  Which was a good thing, since the water they’d been given was gone, and the latrine bucket was overflowing. And the people who’d been trying to hold out badly needed a toilet of some sort, even the roughest kind, even a bush or railroad siding, and they all needed air. People were taking turns at the tiny windows, but it kept getting hotter, more airless. One woman had fainted and they couldn’t revive her.

  But at least they were there—wherever there was. They pushed to the door and waited, and waited, and waited. There was some shouting, then some shooting, some screams, and then a jolt. People looked at each other—were they attaching more cars? What did that mean?

  People started pounding on the door, calling for them to give them at least some water. But the door wasn’t opened and then, finally, the train started up again.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, the children had stopped crying. Some of them were dead. None of them could talk anymore. People had been told they could bring up to forty kilograms of baggage, but no one had thought to waste their precious allotment on water. Now it had become the only thing in the world. They’d brought food—but the food was like the dead bodies that were starting to pile up among them, nothing but torture. No one could eat any more without water.

  The light turned to dark again, and then the dark to light, and the train stopped again. This time, no one moved. More shouting and shooting, and another jolt, one from the front this time. Another engine. And then one from the back—more cars. They had piled up the bodies, the old too, now, not just the babies. The train started up again.

  A woman who’d managed to climb up to the window saw a sign—KRAKOW. “My God, we’re in Poland!”

  Silence fell on the train. No one knew what to make of it, but everyone felt it boded ill. Till then, they’d been telling each other that if it wasn’t to Tokay, then they were going to Germany. The Germans needed them, they said, in the fields, or the factories. Which meant they wouldn’t let them all die on this train.

  But Poland—what was in Poland?

  “Poland has farms, too,” one of the men finally said.

  “And factories.”

  “Yes, of course,” and so on. People talking not to make sense but as a diversion. An act of kindness. Like any telling of tales, all the way back to the cave, with dire wolves at the door.

  Magda and her sisters had crawled into a corner. She had thought till then that they would live through this, but now realized they could die right there, in the boxcar, among strangers. It didn’t matter so much anymore, though. She fell asleep and dreamt she was lying in the deepest green grass, by the little brook that ran into their pond in the springtime. She was about to drink as much as she wanted, but then she was back in her own house, their wonderful house, by some miracle, and there was water in the tap in the bathroom, and she was about to drink from that, too, when the train stopped.

  It no longer mattered. They were all half-dead anyway. When she opened her eyes, she realized she was lying on a body. The stench was overwhelming. If she’d had anything in her stomach, she would have been sick.

  “What time is it?” someone asked.

  A few of them still had their watches and could tell them the hour, but no one knew what day it was anymore.

  As they awaited another jolt, there came a different kind of noise from outside, and they realized with a new kind of terror that the doors were being unbolted.

  A few of the men scrambled up to the window. “Where are we?” people asked them.

  They didn’t answer.

  “Can’t you see?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Well, which is it, farms or factories?”

  “Not sure—”

  “But you said you could see—”

  “Look for yourself—” But then the doors slid open, and air rushed into the car. How good, how fresh! Did this mean water?

  “Out! Out!” people were shouting at them, in all the languages of Europe, Hungarian, German, Czech, Polish. Hermann’s daughters staggered to the door, gulping air. It was hard to walk, their legs were so cramped.

  “Schnell, quickly!”

  Magda tried to help someone with a pack—“Leave it!” a guard shouted. “All luggage stays in the train!”

  Some people were pushing in—men, but very strange ones. More like skeletons in striped pajamas. They wouldn’t look at people on the train, wouldn’t speak—were they lunatics? Prisoners? Magda’s first thought was that maybe they had come to work in a prison or lunatic asylum. Or had there been some dreadful mistake?

  “Out, quick!”

  There were no steps down to the platform. You had to jump.

  “Fast!” Magda held Vera’s hand and jumped, but Gabi hesitated, and was pushed from behind. This caused her to fall and hurt her leg.

  “Get her up, fast!” hissed one of the skeletons as he pushed past, into the train. Magda pulled her up and out of the way, out onto a platform, but a platform where?

  Where were the farms? Where were the factories? Or had they gotten the trains mixed up and brought them to a lunatic asylum? The suitcases from the train, full of the carefully selected valuables, were tossed out and heaved, willy-nilly, onto carts. People were pouring out of the endless line of boxcars, onto the platform by the thousands, young, old, blond, dark, rich, poor, doctors, philosophers, balloon women, men in fine summer suits, with ladies still in silk by their side—as wide a cross section as you could get, but all with the same look on their faces, confusion giving way to outright dread.

  And together they made a sea of chaos, which surged and flowed into channels and finally was stopped dead, by a wall of green and black that stood against them, tall men with shiny red faces, well-fed men who weren’t thirsty, in well-pressed clothes from another world. Shiny boots, snarling German shepherd dogs, and the skull and crossbones above the swastikas on their chests.

  Magda clung to her sisters. If they got separated now, they might never find each other again. Already, all around them, people were crying out for lost ones. It was a scene of total confusion. It was daylight, maybe even morning, but morning where? Even the light seemed different, like the light in a bad dream.

  “Out, fast!” the striped pajamas were shouting.

  But people couldn’t move fast. They stood dazed, looking around, searching the faces, trying to grasp where they were. They’d all been told they were being sent to work in factories and farms, but the train had stopped at a siding that seemed to be—nowhere.
There was no station, no factories, and no fields anywhere in sight.

  Though not far off there was a long row of low buildings, closed off by barbed wire, and then, beyond that, others, with two high chimneys, spewing columns of smoke and fire into the sky.

  Could that be the factory? But what could they be making? There was a very bad smell, and the ground was covered with white ash, like snow. Everyone was pushing, shouting, calling for parents, reaching for children. Someone bumped into her—there were thousands of people getting off the train, which stretched along the platform, as far as the eye could see.

  “Line up, schnell!”

  “What? What?” people were crying to each other.

  “Five across!” someone was shouting into the confusion. But no one could see where to go or what to do. There were thousands of them—afterwards she thought they could have rushed the SS, despite the dogs, the whips and guns. Died fighting.

  If they’d known—but no one knew yet. That was the amazing thing, the whole point. No one knew. Everyone still hoped. At least to save their families—that was the worst part. People were trying desperately to stay together, meanwhile dazed with thirst.

  “Men to the right, women to the left!”

  “But my husband!”

  “My baby!”

  “My mother!”

  The officers had been standing off with their snarling dogs, laughing and joking among themselves, as if all this had nothing to do with them. But now one of them stepped forward.

  “Silence!” The word went through the crowd.

  As he waited for people to quiet, the clean and pressed superman from another planet pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket and extracted a cigarette, which he lit with a silver lighter, and took a leisurely puff, which he blew out his nose, two long tendrils that floated up and away. Someone handed him a bullhorn, and he cleared his throat.

  “Gentlemen and ladies,” he said—Magda remembered for some reason that he’d said “gentlemen” first. Remembered wondering if that indicated anything. Something that she should know, that might save her and her sisters.

  “We know that you are very tired, that you had a very long and exhausting journey. Neither food nor water was plentiful.”

  People had stopped, and were standing stock-still. The polite tone was almost the only thing they were not prepared for. Tears started rolling down the faces.

  “We are sorry, but it was not our fault. And anyway, now it is behind you. Here we will put you in a camp, and those able to work will work. But all of you will live in normal conditions.”

  People were listening now with a new kind of attention. Listening to catch every word, so as to be able to comply well and speedily with this reasonable man’s reasonable orders.

  “I am sorry, but there is some bad news. It is three kilometers to camp, and there is not enough transportation. Thus, we are asking you now: All mothers with children no older than fourteen, and all sick or disabled, please come this way to get a ride in the trucks.”

  How kind of him, how understanding. “We heard you were going to kill us,” said one of the women.

  The officer looked shocked. “Do you think that we Germans are barbarians, madame?” he asked her.

  He looked around the crowd. “Who is sick? Who cannot work? Step this way for a ride in the truck if you’d rather not work.”

  The women and babies and all the small children, the old and the sick started off.

  “Don’t worry about saying good-bye,” he told them. “You’ll all be together very soon.”

  Magda was worried about Gabi’s hurt leg. “Maybe you should take a ride on the truck,” she whispered to her, “and then you won’t have to work so hard at first.” But the sisters had never been separated before, and Gabi told Magda she’d rather walk and stay with her.

  “Now if all able men would step to the left, and all women able to walk and thus able to work step to the right.”

  The masses started shifting. It had been bad, very bad, that train, but it was over now, and they had survived that. They were here to work—good, they would work. Work hard and well and survive that too, in this camp with their families. “Yes, yes, you’ll be with the women and children shortly,” said the officer, to those who took courage from his kindness to ask.

  “Five across please”—it was extraordinary how quickly things went now, thanks to that kindness and understanding. No longer terrified, people were happy to do what they were asked, to show how they would cooperate in exchange for their lives and the lives of their families. In less than half an hour, the groups were separated—and the women and children, the old and the young, waved as their trucks rolled away.

  Taking them to some sort of “family camp”—they were glad for the ride. Meanwhile, their menfolk had fallen into ranks, five abreast to the left, and their sisters and older daughters to the right, all of them with reasonable hope in their hearts. The trucks with the women and children were followed by some smaller trucks, painted white, with red crosses on them.

  Everyone found this reassuring. “The Red Cross,” people comforted each other.

  But these “Red Cross trucks” weren’t Red Cross trucks at all—they were the opposite of Red Cross trucks, carrying not nice rolled bandages but cans of Zyklon B poison gas.

  This little side game, which after all had taken some preparation and forethought, could have been seen as another manifestation of the SS humor that had welcomed them to this “family camp,” but no one coming off this transport got that yet. “This way, please, ladies,” said the Nazi gentleman in his polite tones. Behind him, the men in striped pajamas were in the process of throwing the dead bodies out of the boxcars. These they piled onto carts, which they pushed away.

  To be buried? wondered Magda.

  “Yes, yes, keep going,” the officer waved them on. She was sorry he wasn’t accompanying them. To explain, should there be any misunderstanding, that they were workers, to be treated well. They started down the dusty road to the camp—only it wasn’t dust, it was some kind of ash, from those chimneys.

  Vera was managing to keep up, but Gabi was limping and falling behind; Magda turned back to see if she was all right. There was a very small child not far behind them, a little girl with soft curls, clearly lost, separated somehow from her mother. The child was wandering around in circles, not part of the line.

  “Why isn’t she in the truck?” asked the polite Nazi officer, and then, with the same nonchalance with which he’d lit his cigarette, he kicked the child to the ground, drew his pistol and shot her, twice. One of the striped pajamas quickly hauled off the body.

  Magda turned back quickly, fighting panic. Her sisters hadn’t seen. Which was good, they were right: You don’t look back. She remembered the stories from her childhood—Orpheus looking back and losing Eurydice. Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Though now that she thought about that, maybe that wasn’t the worst fate, being turned to salt. Compared to being kicked to the ground and shot twice in the head.

  She tried to make sense of what she’d just seen. It didn’t square with what she’d just heard. Maybe the child was—what? A threat to the Nazi officer, so she had to be shot? Had the plague and he had a trained eye, he could see it, so had to shoot her to save them? Or maybe he hadn’t really shot her. Maybe it was some kind of joke. There hadn’t been any noise, and no one else seemed to have noticed.

  But then why had the striped pajama carted her away? Another wave of panic surged up, and she felt that shooting pain in her stomach, but didn’t dare stop walking.

  Finally, they were ordered to halt, near a straggly birch tree —the only tree around, but it must have given the place its name. The gates said auschwitz-birkenau, a “grove of birches,” in a village presumably called Auschwitz. There was a table just outside the gates, where another handsome Nazi gentleman was standing, this one even more elegant, with his soft leather riding boots and jodhpurs, and fine suede gloves, even though it was a warm
day in May.

  They were instructed to form a single line, to pass before him.

  “How handsome he is,” Gabi whispered to Magda.

  An officer approached him and clicked his heels—“Dr. Mengele.”

  So, he was a doctor. That was good, Magda told herself.

  “How strong you all look, how healthy!” he said to them in pleasant tones—those same pleasant tones the officer had used. Before he shot the girl.

  The doctor called for a photographer to take some pictures of them.

  “See how we treat our guests?” he was saying. “Are they underfed? Are they in striped clothing? Let the world see.”

  The girls and women were passing in front of him. “Who is sick?” he asked, with concern in his voice. “Who cannot walk? Step to this side please if you’d rather not work.”

  He said it so kindly that Magda turned again to Gabi. She had been protecting her younger sister since kindergarten. “Maybe you should go over there, so you won’t have to work so hard,” she suggested again, but Gabi looked at the exhausted women moving to that side and decided to stay with her sisters. She was afraid that she might be assigned to a bunkhouse with those strangers. She was still imagining a sort of cottage, since the officer had said “camp.”

  “Are there any twins?” asked the doctor. “Twins to the side, please.” He seemed quite pleased when several sets of twins stepped out of the line. “Perfect, wonderful, you’ll come with me,” he told them, and it seemed a special privilege. The rest of the women were told to file past. He looked them over.

  “You to the right, please, and you to the left, thank you. How old are you?” He stopped one woman.

  “Thirty-five,” she answered.

  “To the left, please. Thank you.” He was whistling as he looked them over. In his gloved hand was a riding crop, with which he beat time.

  Hermann’s daughters filed past. “To the right,” he pointed with his crop.

  Which meant harder work, Magda figured, since the girls on their side were the strong ones, no question. The older women, and anyone who looked a bit tired or sick, were being sent to the left. Likely they’d get the easier factory jobs, or maybe not have to work at all. They were lucky.