The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  But the really good news was that Vera came back every night. It was true, it hadn’t been a trick—she had been put to work in the fields, and given extra bread and soup with real potatoes. Her hands were raw with blisters, but it was worth it for the food. And the other girls told her that in a week or so the bleeding would stop.

  At that, Magda looked up. A week or so—that sounded almost dangerous, almost like hubris. She hadn’t thought long term like that—a week—in a very long time. How long she didn’t know, wasn’t even sure what month it was—still warm, but the days getting shorter, so probably early September. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that the girls slept together every night and none of them were starving to death. Magda’s lot was the hardest, but she was the strongest, the oldest. It would have been worse for her, much worse, had the roles been reversed.

  They were still hungry—conversation among the prisoners centered almost exclusively on food. What they used to eat, what they would eat when—if—they got out, how they would cook it, or better, much better, how their mothers would cook it. Some still had hope of that. Others like Aranka had seen their own mothers’ smoke.

  But Magda didn’t talk about “after,” tried not to even think about it. She was twenty-two—six years had slipped away since that day in Vienna, when the boys in uniform walked her to the station and sent their regards to the Sudetenland. She could still see them, still remembered the two S’s on their collar, but not normal S’s. They looked like lightning bolts—runes, someone told her. She’d liked the idea at first, the ancient echo.

  They’d still smiled at each other that day—they were still boys and girls. She’d put on her traveling suit to go to the station, a very grown-up affair, tweed, from Herr Dratch’s ladies’ shop. Not the children’s section of the shop anymore—she’d been thrilled about that. And now, here she stood, six years later, her feet a bad red, her ankles stiff and thick like their old cleaning woman’s. And when any of the girls spoke of the future—marriage, boyfriends, study, jobs—it was all she could do to keep from crying, “Marry who? Study what?”

  Because what was left of the future now, now that the best had been taken? Supposing they did live—and maybe they would. They were fed enough to live on, and there was no chimney in the background now. So maybe they would walk out of here one day—but to what? She had seen babies burning in Birkenau—actually seen them, seen men, fellow humans, throwing small children from a truck into a pit of fire. Live children. She had seen that with her own two eyes.

  Every girl in here had seen that. The other night one of them came running in with the news that Hitler’s generals had tried to kill him. The Russians were closing in. Soon the war would be over.

  But over for whom? For her? She knew there was some chance that her parents were alive, since anything was possible. But she’d seen those lines of Hungarians walking by, sorted their clothes afterwards, the slim skirts, the close-fitting jackets, clothes of young women, slim women, younger and slimmer than her mother. If they’d been sent to the gas, then how not her mother? How?

  Don’t think, she told herself. Her new prayer. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, think, think. She said it in French, in German, in Czech. Hungarian. Learned from the Dutch girl how to say it in Dutch. From the Greek girl how to say it in both Greek and a dialect from the islands. She had never “known winter,” the Greek girl told them, till the Nazis took her, in her thin pajamas, in the night. The trip had taken ten days, maybe more. Most of her family had died on the train.

  And her older sister, a beautiful girl who’d had dark hair down to her waist before Auschwitz, was caught taking a can of sardines over the wire from one of their brothers and beaten to death, right there, in front of them. But the boys were both boxers and strong, and she’d heard they were still alive when she left the camp.

  “So you have to try,” said someone. “There’s a reason.”

  Finally, Magda could stand no more. “Why is there a reason? What is the reason?”

  No answer.

  “Is that what the lice in the bed say? When I crunch one with my finger, he says, ‘There’s a reason’?”

  More silence. Then, “Maybe it’s a her. Not a him.”

  Laughter. “A she-louse, is there such a thing?” “There has to be,” and so on. That’s right, Magda figured. What’s gone is gone, and what’s left are the she-lice.

  Don’t think. Ne pensez pas. It got colder. The fall holidays passed. No one knew the date, but they saw a crescent moon rising that seemed to speak to them, call back the old times. Day shift, night shift—day shift was better because you got fed before work. But night shift had its advantages, since more of the guards fell asleep then.

  Every few weeks they were given clean underwear. People fell sick, but there wasn’t wholesale typhus here, like at Ausch­witz. Magda’s sisters were both surviving. Winter set in. They worked separately, but slept together every night. There was a chance that they’d make it through till spring.

  ONE NIGHT ONE OF THE GIRLS came rushing in from the night shift. She’d overheard a BBC broadcast in one of the guards’ offices.

  “The Russians have liberated Auschwitz!” she told them. She even knew the date—January 27th, 1945.

  So it was happening, finally. Russia was proving fatal for Hitler. Just as her father had said, years ago, when it still would have mattered to them. When they were still a family, still normal people—uprooted people, true, dispossessed people whose worldly possessions had been taken from them, complete and entire. But still people, with mothers and fathers, cousins and aunts in the world, people who could still crowd around a rickety table somewhere, anywhere, even in a cellar if it came to that, and break bread with each other and find a reason to smile.

  But where was that place now, if there was no one to sit with? The grandest palace on earth, with gold plate and no one?

  Although maybe, if they were still alive, Hermann and her mother, or even—for she had to face this possibility—Hermann or her mother. Even if one of them was still alive, then maybe. If she could rest her head on one of their breasts and cry for a while. See the joy in her own mother’s lovely eyes, upturned a bit, or her father’s smile, the spring back in his step, when he caught sight of his three girls, walking toward him again one day.

  AUSCHWITZ LIBERATED! And what were the Nazis now, the SS beasts, without their Auschwitz? Wasn’t it, as much as their conquests, who they were? What their conquests were about, in the end? And if they no longer had Auschwitz? She knew there were other camps where they gassed people, but Auschwitz could gas twelve thousand a day. It was the height of their achievement, the jewel in their crown.

  And without Auschwitz? The Nazis blew up some of the crematoria, the girls heard, before the Russians got there, to try to hide their crime—which meant they knew it was a crime? Magda actually lost her breath at that.

  And the whole thing changed color for her then, in that one moment, slipped from the black of nightmare into the white glare of noon. Till then, Auschwitz had been another universe, governed by a new set of laws that had nothing to do with what used to be called human.

  But if they were trying to hide what they’d done, if they too knew it was a crime, a shameful crime and not a whole new subset of the rules of nature—then it was over. Not a new world after all, but just history. Just something people would read about in Hitler’s “thousand years,” like the Mongol hordes, or Attila.

  A WEEK PASSED, a month, two months. There was still snow outside, but the days were starting to get longer. They could hear the planes all the time now, and the sounds of something in the distance. reinforcements are on their way, we will never surrender! said the German newspapers that were pasted up on the walls where the girls were working.

  Which had scared them at first, but then one of them pointed out that if you take away the “never,” what’s left is “surrender.”

  Which was true. There’d never been talk of surrender, even “ne
ver surrender,” before. Always of movement forward, more and more, for a thousand years.

  One night about a week later, an alarm rang in their barracks and the guards swarmed in, hitting the bunks with their sticks.

  “Everyone up! Out!”

  It seemed too early. They had just gone to sleep. They stumbled to their feet, started to file out, as usual.

  “No, this way.”

  “But—”

  “Out, schnell!”

  “But our shift—”

  “No more shifts. Out the door, line up, five across.”

  Raw fear rose anew in every throat, Auschwitz fear—Are they going to kill me, right now, today, after all this? My sisters? My friends? All of us? There was no gas here, but there were armed men with guns pointing at them, outside in the snow. Were they to die here, before dawn, that morning?

  It was still freezing outside, everything was still covered with snow. Some of them had grabbed coats, but most had little more than their stripes. Magda couldn’t bear to think about the girl from Greece. She had told them once about the breezes in the islands, soft breezes, warm, zephyrs. “Like in the Greek myths,” she’d said, and then started talking about the food. The pastries with pistachio nuts and honey.

  “More Greek myths,” they teased her.

  But all the food they described to each other, in minute detail, seemed like myth to them here. French myth, Hungarian myth—her own mother’s wild mushroom sauce, Hermann’s plums. Aranka’s grandmother’s goulash, with carrots and beets. Peeled potatoes.

  “Eins, zwei—” the guards were counting, but too fast, carelessly. Nothing had ever been careless with them before. Word was whispered through the ranks—the Russians were a day away. The Nazis were running.

  “Quick, march, fast!” There was no soup that morning. The gates around the factory were opened, and the girls were ordered out. Someone fell in the snow. A guard shot her.

  “And we were back to square one,” said Magda.

  THE PINK TULIP

  15

  NO ONE KNEW TO CALL IT a death march. No one knew anything, not even the men with the guns. When someone fell in the snow, they shot them—that much, at least, was standard Nazi procedure. But where were they going? This not even the guards seemed to know.

  Magda’s group was marched first north, and then west, through the snow. Somehow, the girls got hold of burlap bags, which they tied around their shoulders as blankets. There was a little bit of bread the first night, and melted snow for soup. Nothing else. The next day more of them dropped and were shot. Sometimes the other girls were allowed to cover the bodies with snow. Mostly they were forced to keep marching, right over them, not even permitted to push them to the side.

  But Magda and her sisters managed to keep walking, and Aranka too, and the Greek girl. The lovely Dutch girl dropped then, already dead even before they shot her, a smile on her face. And there she lay, her miserable striped shirt up above her waist, half-naked in the snow, smiling. She’s beautiful, Magda realized then. It was the first time she’d ever seen her smile.

  Don’t think, she told herself. In Dutch, for the girl. Niet denken.

  When they stopped in the woods by the side of the road to get their crust of bread, they could hear the sound of guns, and the rumble of tanks in the distance. The planes came overhead in waves. One of the planes dropped packets, from the Red Cross. The girls were starving. They ran to get them.

  “Stop! Verboten!” shouted the guards. Forbidden. They shot the girls who picked them up.

  So the guards were still Nazis, though without quite the same gleam of perfect faith in their eyes. Still willing to shoot starving girls who tried to pick up food dropped by their friends from the sky; but knowing, even as they shot them, that it was those girls who had friends in the sky, not them. In their own sky, by the way. What used to be their own sky, these Nazis.

  AFTER A FEW DAYS OF MARCHING, they saw a sign on the road— BRANDENBURG. So Germany. The northeast, not too far from Potsdam, or even Berlin. Magda had learned the German states in her geography classes. She used to think the name Brandenburg was beautiful. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the Brandenburg Gates.

  Now nothing German would ever be beautiful again. They walked along the road—maybe toward Berlin? They hadn’t had anything to eat in two days. There were thousands of them, thronging the road, the guards on the sides, but no longer shooting the girls who fell. Just leaving them to die in the snow.

  They came to a fence, barbed wire. “My God, a camp,” the girls whispered through the lines. RAVENSBRÜCK, said the sign. There were the horrible chimneys, but they were cold—no black smoke, no red fire.

  It was a women’s camp, someone said, women and children. They didn’t have gas here, that wasn’t how they killed people. They starved them to death—you could see some of the striped skeletons, moving in that slowed-down way across the barbed wire. Or else worked them till they dropped, in the Siemens factory, right next door.

  But that was over here as well. The SS commander who met them at the gates told their commander that he was evacuating the camp. The Russians were coming, and quickly, he’d heard. His orders had been to kill all the witnesses, but he didn’t have enough fuel to burn the bodies in pits. He’d thought of just shooting them, but if he left them lying there, that too would tell its own tale, hence his dilemma. He was troubled, confounded, not exactly sure what to do next. Maybe kill them along the way? But wouldn’t that too leave a trail for the Russians to follow, like Hansel and Gretel’s, through the woods?

  Although he was thinking to march west, into Mecklenburg. Maybe the Russians wouldn’t get that far.

  MAYBE. MAGDA’S GROUP was ordered into the camp, to help with “packing up the place,” as she put it. A day or so later, the women still able to walk, about twenty thousand all told, were marched out of Ravensbrück. The four thousand women and children unable to walk were left behind. Seven thousand, mostly French, had been turned over to the Swedish Red Cross the week before.

  Which news was another reordering of the universe. The Swedish Red Cross—actually there, inside one of the Nazis’ sacred places, hitherto sealed shut from the outside world, taking girls out—incredible. They’d marked the back of their jackets with big white X’s, the girls who’d been selected. Or not selected, if you were using the Nazis’ lingo.

  But maybe the Nazis’ lingo didn’t apply anymore. “We weren’t sure of exact dates,” said Magda. “We still knew absolutely nothing of the outside world.” But it had to be March, or even April. The snows were melting, which made water harder to find. But there were the first shoots of grass, and the girls ate that, as they were given no more bread. They could hear the sounds of war, coming closer. Bombs were falling, sometimes around them—bombs that could kill them too, but their bombs nonetheless.

  They would jump into ditches, or take cover in the woods. Some of the girls started slipping away then. “Shoot them!” the commanders shouted, and the guards did at first, but then the girls noticed that the guards seemed to be melting away as well. “Should we run?” everyone was asking each other, but the real question was where?

  They were in Germany, bald girls in stripes. It wasn’t as if residents would take them for errant milkmaids. But how much did the Volk here hate them? Would a farmer or goatherd shoot them on sight? Go for them with his plowshare or pruning hook?

  Still, the girls who stayed on the march were dropping dead all around them, and if they did run, they might be able to make their way to the Russians, who might feed them. The next day, the commander counted off a hundred girls closest to him and ordered them to come back to his wagon. He was going to distribute bread, he told them.

  No one could remember the last bread. But as soon as those girls filed back to the wagon, the commander ordered the guards to open fire.

  They all stood, horrified. But instead of the thunder of gunfire, there was a great silence, and some of the girls broke then and ran for the woods.


  “Shoot them!” the commander shouted.

  More silence.

  The rest of the girls started to run.

  “Shoot,” the commander shouted to the guards, “or I’ll kill you!” He fired a few rounds from his pistol and hit one of the fleeing girls.

  But still nothing from the guards. They were starting to look around, with strange, almost startled looks on their faces, like men waking up from a long dream. They stood staring at the girls, as if they weren’t sure who they were.

  “Shoot!” the commander was screaming now.

  The guards turned to him, as if not comprehending. Then one of them raised his gun and fired into the air.

  The commander pointed his gun at him but didn’t shoot. Magda and her sisters watched, not even breathing. One after another, the guards raised their rifles and shot into the air, then started running, in twos and threes, toward the woods, ripping off their SS badges and flinging them behind them as they went.

  “Let’s go,” whispered Aranka to Magda. She and her two sisters, along with Aranka and the Greek girl and a few others, turned and fled into the woods.

  NO ONE KNOWS how many people died on these marches. The usual statistic is one in four, but this doesn’t count the large number of people killed in great haste—shot and left in piles—in the camps before the marches started, or whole groups finished off once there was nowhere else for the Nazis to run. There was one group from Auschwitz, six thousand or so, who survived a march all the way to Danzig and were then forced into the Baltic Sea and shot.