The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  “Get moving, quickly!”

  They started out. “I will at least die fighting,” they’d all told themselves as they watched others being taken, but how could they? They were surrounded by guards, and dogs, and in her case, her sisters. And maybe even more to the point, the overriding fact that for as long as they were walking, breathing in and out, looking toward the sun, they were still alive, even if just for one more minute, and there was still a chance, small but conceivable, that they’d live.

  It was a sunny day, the end of June—around the twenty-fifth, she figured, though they had no calendar. Magda noticed then that both of her sisters had fuzz growing on their heads. She must have as well—it was nice of their hair to be growing in, brave of it, she thought. They had underwear too now, and head scarves, and boots that fit, relatively speaking.

  Should we run? she was wondering. Let them shoot us? But sometimes they didn’t shoot, sometimes they hung you, and not just regular hanging, but Nazi hanging. Strung you up, and when you were almost dead, brought you down so they could do it again. She’d heard that’s what had happened with several of the French Resistance women who’d tried to escape.

  But would that be worse than the gas? She didn’t want to go in there with her sisters—couldn’t bear to watch them foam at the mouth and bite their own hands, then turn blue. Alone she could at least just die, but to have to watch her sisters—

  “Pray,” she told them. She hadn’t been praying lately, but what had she gained from that? Punished God? What good had that done her?

  “Pray hard!” she whispered to her sisters as they were sent through a grove of birch trees she hadn’t seen before. So Birkenau had its birches after all.

  Birch trees with their lovely light green leaves just out, dancing in the sun, the way they did anywhere else. Her first trees in a long time, and maybe her last, because behind them was a crematorium.

  “Halt.” They did. If they were told to strip now for the showers, maybe she would run. She didn’t want to see her sisters die.

  But instead, they were marched into a high-ceilinged room behind the crematorium, echoing, empty except for a large number of baby carriages.

  The girls stopped in their tracks, horrified, all of them. It wasn’t as if they weren’t used to the trappings of wholesale murder—they stood sorting the clothes from it, all day, every day. But the sight of these ghost-carriages brought it all home to them again, the very worst of it, even though it probably meant they weren’t going to the gas that day.

  “Get moving, schnell!” There was apparently a shortage of baby carriages in Berlin. A special train was being requisitioned. The prisoners were ordered to each take one and push it “with great care” to the railway platform.

  They held back, awestruck, as if from the sacred.

  “Quick!”

  The crack of a whip, and they took a collective breath and moved forward, each one, to her carriage. They were good ones, beautiful ones, Budapest’s finest, some even from London, with English names. Each one had come in with a baby, maybe just yesterday.

  “Schnell!”

  They set out, single file, in absolute silence. It was true that they were saved, they hadn’t gone to the gas, but the horror didn’t fade from their faces. It was about three kilometers from the crematorium to the loading platform for the trains out, and the girls wound up the path, like a dance of death from those paintings from the Middle Ages, it occurred to Magda, with the guards as the Grim Reapers, whips instead of scythes. Among the younger girls, horror had turned to fury, and they were pushing fast and hard, but the older ones, some of them mothers themselves in a former life, handled the carriages with great delicacy, as if a child were still smiling out from the lace pillows inside. The small beloved who just yesterday, at the break of dawn or the fall of dusk, was locked in a room with its screaming mother and made to breathe gas till the blood ran from its little eyes.

  Who even then was wafting as smoke from the chimneys or burning in the ditches they were walking by, and where had God been then? What a fool she’d been to pray! She looked over at the barbed wire—electrified, but only at night. People waited till dark and then “went to the wire,” as they said here.

  Though the Nazis considered even that a minor loss for their team in the game of Auschwitz, the fact that prisoners would still dare think of their lives as theirs to take. When someone killed himself, the guards would pick ten others randomly and shoot them or hang them. Whatever suited. If Magda “went to the wire,” they would surely come for her sisters.

  If, though, she got them out of here alive, then she would win. It was that simple. Her game was that. There was no further point in thinking about God and the meaning of life, or any whys, for that matter. Since there was no why, just a simple win or lose here.

  A simple “Try, and maybe you can survive.”

  13

  THE NEXT WEEK, there was another lockdown in the barracks before dawn, and this time it did mean a selection. The sickest and weakest would be sent to the gas. A few others too, randomly, if they happened to be in a row with the sick and the weak ones. It was easier to send the whole row of five, so it all came out even.

  “Clothes off!” the guards were shouting. That made it harder to hide a small cut or a bite that would get you “selected.” Because a spot might mean typhus, and even the smallest bruise in the filth of the camps could turn to gangrene, so why take chances when you could just as easily rid yourself of the girl then and there?

  “Pinch your cheeks just before you go by,” Aranka instructed Magda, “and stand straight, walk fast, and run if they tell you to.” She said it in German—laufen. If they say that, or anything like it, she said, run fast, for your life, no matter how cramped and stiff you feel.

  It was hard to walk outside naked, harder still because they were all so dirty, just like the Nazis said they were. filthy, vermin, cockroaches—she remembered those posters on the walls, when they were still at home, clean and clothed. She had never, never once in her life, gone to bed dirty at home, let alone filthy, but they hadn’t been given a shower since they’d gotten here. Just a few seconds to splash on some ice water at a trough, with no soap—

  “Attention!”

  There they were, all of them, five across, a thousand girls and young women, standing naked, at attention, waiting to live or die. An hour passed, another. The sun rose and the shivers turned to sweat. It was hot now, but still they were kept standing. With no possible reason, except to make them as miserable as possible. To kill them once before they killed them twice.

  Finally, “He’s coming” went through the crowd. They didn’t have to say who. The doctor, Mengele, walked up to the front of the group. It was true that he was handsome, like an angel, “the Angel of Death,” they called him.

  But Magda had once seen him beat a girl’s face to pulp, a beautiful girl with bright blue eyes and a thin straight nose, right there in the line, just start beating her head out of the blue, for no reason except maybe that she was lovely, and he didn’t stop until her head was gone, and in its place was something red, nothing like a face or head.

  And then he’d called for some perfumed soap and a basin and, humming his little tune, had washed his hands, right there in front of them, and then strolled off, still humming, his uniform splattered with blood.

  And another time, he’d asked for girls who played the piano to step out, and, with a smile, sent them to clean the latrines till they died. His little joke, part of an ongoing routine, thematically unified if somewhat predictable once you’d caught the thread: the standard Nazi fare of “Us (armed) vs. You (naked),” with some slapstick variations thrown in on the side, as with Mengele’s “Our Acts (unspeakable) vs. Our Soap (perfumed).”

  Which made him less the Angel than one more player in the Death Camp Follies, it came to Magda, as the selection finally began. There were all the women standing naked, five across, as against Mengele, at the front, in his sharply pressed jodhpurs an
d crisp white shirt. Barely deigning to move his finger as he pointed, to the left, to the right, as each one walked past him. Death for this one, life for that, or was it the other way around? No one knew yet. Just knew that if a girl didn’t go the way he pointed, the SS were standing by to attack her. Mengele himself paid no further attention once he’d indicated her fate. Just waited pleasantly for the next one—“Yes, yes, very good, to the right please, to the left.”

  Magda had heard about a woman, an Italian, who’d been a singer before the war. As they were taking her to the gas, one of the SS thought it would be amusing to force her to sing naked atop a pile of dead bodies. This she did, with such a charming smile that he too was soon smiling, and then she leapt at him, grabbed his gun, and shot him dead.

  But Mengele’s gun was under his jacket, and the only way to kill him would be to live this thing out. Since even now, even here, time was passing.

  “Pinch your cheeks,” she whispered to her sisters as they moved closer. They were starving, everyone there was starving. But Magda and her sisters hadn’t been there long enough to become skeletal. Too thin, yes, but still they could walk, even run, if they had to. If he said, “Laufen.”

  But he didn’t, though he looked at them closely. Even moved Magda’s arm away from her side, gently, with a doctor’s hand, to see if she was hiding any spots. But she wasn’t, and his finger moved to the right, for all three, and Aranka too. They still weren’t sure if that was the live or die side, but the girls around them looked stronger, and the weak ones seemed to be to the left.

  And sure enough, their group were ordered back to their barracks, and the dump trucks came around for the other girls. The selected girls started crying then, wailing—they weren’t newcomers off the train, to be beguiled by tales of showers. They were too weak to fight the Nazi soldiers, too sick, too thin, but they could cry and the SS had to hear it. No charades with this group. Just the darkness, face-to-face.

  Two girls in Magda’s own bunk bed were sent to the gas that day. One was from a village near theirs. She’d been a kindergarten teacher. The other was only seventeen. They were nice girls, kind, smart girls, dead girls now. Magda and her sisters said a prayer for them that night, more for their own sakes.

  But there was also the arithmetic of Auschwitz, which meant that there was now more room in the bunk for them.

  ALTHOUGH BY ANOTHER VARIATION of that same arithmetic, this one graphing the 1,300 calories they were fed per day, a few more months here and they’d be among the walking skeletons, the ones selected by the moving finger for the gas. There was no help for this, beyond an occasional extra crust or scrap of cheese found in the clothing of the dead, but a week later the word went around that there would be another selection, this time for girls to go to a factory to work.

  No one knew where—just that it wasn’t here. Which made it automatically preferable, and “by some miracle” Magda and her sisters were all chosen, and Aranka too. They would be leaving right away. “This way, fast, march!”

  They were taken to a dressing room, and given their first shower since they’d gotten to Birkenau, four months earlier. They were also sprayed again, this time with a disinfectant powder, and given better clothes—underwear, a dress, and even a coat, though it was late August and still hot. This was a very good sign, said Aranka. It meant both that they actually—probably—were going to work somewhere, and that they were expected to live till winter.

  Then they were marched back along the road they’d come in on, to the platform where a line of boxcars was waiting. A few months earlier, they’d been shocked at the sight of a similar train, but now it looked like redemption on wheels. It was taking them out of there—four hundred of them. The SS counted them, once, twice, again—kept them at attention. There was the train, but still they were kept there, standing outside.

  Another death camp charade? A little joke on girls on their way to the gas? Like the salami with the Gypsies? It was possible. There seemed to be an argument going on among the SS. Not to mention another group of girls shouting and crying nearby, locked in the cellar of what looked like a farmhouse, but with bars on the windows. It was one of the holding chambers, where they locked people waiting for the gas. There was no hope for those girls, Magda knew.

  But for them? Finally, they were ordered into the boxcars, and the doors locked behind them. But still the train didn’t move, and now they could overhear the arguing outside. The SS officer in charge of the gas chambers had space right then for a few hundred more women. The girls on the train were exactly the number he needed to fill his slots.

  But the officers who’d gotten them out to the train had gone to a certain amount of trouble over these girls, what with the selections, the showers, the clothes, all part of their obligation to provide a precise number of prisoners for the munitions factory nearby. The girls sat listening—live or die? Not that work in a munitions factory guaranteed life in the long term. But if the train pulled out, they would live that afternoon.

  An hour passed, and then another. If the doors opened, they knew they’d be taken straight to the Little White Farmhouse to accompany the girls already locked inside to the gas that day. None of them were speaking—they all sat, attentive and still. People called the gas chamber “the mouth of the dragon.” Others said “wolf,” but dragon had seemed more fitting, since it implied mystery alongside the death. That’s what Magda had started telling herself—that maybe there was some mystery there. Not just horror. Not only death.

  Some glimpse of something just before—or after, she was praying for the girls she’d gotten a glimpse of through the bars of that cellar, girls who looked beautiful to her, girls who were alive and were about to be murdered. Grant them some mystery as they stare in the face of the dragon, she was praying, and us too—she had given up other prayers, prayers for safety or deliverance. She had concluded that God was old and weak. He couldn’t do it.

  But something at the end, some flash of joy, even enlightenment, for them and for us, some overview, some tiny jot of meaning, she was praying, there in the boxcar, sitting stock-still with her sisters, when suddenly there was a jolt. The girls looked at each other with wild hope—another jolt, and then a whistle, and the train started off. One of the girls had overheard the officers saying that if they didn’t provide the labor, they might suffer some consequences, might even be called to answer, and that must have clinched it.

  “The cowards!” she’d laughed.

  They all laughed at that, too much. Laughed almost like crazy women, but then the laughter turned to crying, and they fell sobbing into each other’s arms, all four hundred girls, as the train took them away from Birkenau late that August afternoon.

  14

  THEY DIDN’T GO FAR—but it felt like the right direction. North and then west, toward home, what used to be home. Czechoslovakia, anyway. Would they cross the border? A sort of hope took hold in the hearts of these girls, most of them Czech, just to be going west and not east. At least that part of it was better, had to be better.

  It was hard to keep track of how far they’d gone, since the train stopped and started, stopped and started, and there was no light, no window, and, of course, no food or water, nor did they expect any by then. Even as newcomers to the death camps, they’d arrived fully apprised of the logistics of Nazi train travel.

  And given that introductory journey, this one seemed almost civilized. No one died. No one became unhinged by thirst. No one started crying and then begging for bread. The latrine buckets did not overflow. There were no children on board to triple the pain.

  The train finally stopped and the doors were opened even before the cramps in the girls’ legs became serious, threatening their ability to jump like well-fed gymnasts from the boxcar and run past whoever was pointing to the gas or not, wherever it was they were going.

  But the great thing, the almost incredible thing, was that there didn’t seem to be those death camp smokestacks in the place where they landed, which w
as called Gleiwitz. Nor did this seem to be a camp where they wanted you to die. What they wanted here was for you to work hard, and they seemed to acknowledge that this required a certain amount of food and even some limited comfort.

  The girls were marched to a barracks, where they were assigned only four to a bunk, and shown to a real latrine, one that had been dug out properly. No overflowing—“a five-star hotel to us,” said Magda. That night they were given potato soup and a slice of bread each. And then the girls on the night shift were marched off to work.

  Magda and her sisters were lucky. They got the day shift that first round. It started at five in the morning—each shift was five to five. As they were heading out that first morning, though, Vera, the young one, was stopped. She would be sent to work in the fields instead, one of the guards told them.

  Magda and Gabi turned, terrified. “No, please, she’s with us—” Magda started, but one of the other prisoners, a girl from Holland who’d been there for a few months already, told them that it was all right, that it wasn’t a trick. Vera actually would be sent to work in the fields. It would be better for her, the girl said. Outdoors.

  The sisters were still scared, but “Who wasn’t scared then, all the time, anyway?” and what could they do? Nothing, ever, no one could ever do anything except follow along and hope for one more day, or in this case, half a day, as life was divided in this Nazi slave labor camp. Which, despite being, like everywhere else on earth, better than Auschwitz, was not without its own torments.

  First, there was the work itself, which in Magda’s case meant making gunpowder. This entailed either mixing the sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, or running the machines that put it into the cartridges. Both left her covered with black powder, and both required standing for the entire eleven-and-a-half-hour shift.

  Her ankles swelled the first day and never unswelled after that, not even at night, which proved extremely painful. But on the positive side, the Nazis gave them soap to wash off the black powder, and showers, every day. Even oil to clean their eyes—they couldn’t make bullets for the Reich if they were blinded. And then—“I don’t remember how it happened,” Magda said—it was discovered that Gabi had beautiful handwriting, and she was taken into an office and set to recording. Long lines of lovely numbers, the kind the Nazis liked. She was even permitted to sit by a window to work.