There was hope that those girls would be saved by the Russians. The New Year came, even in Auschwitz, January 1945. The Germans were burning papers and dynamiting the crematoria in an absurdist effort to hide what they’d done. The camp commanders seemed to have lost their appetite for hanging. One of the men in the underground managed to ply the SS guard with liquor and sneak into Block 11, the punishment cell, to see Roza Robota in prison.
“I descended the steps, led by the guard, until we reached Roza’s cell,” wrote Noach Zabludowicz. He “opened the door, led me inside, and disappeared. When my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I made out a figure wrapped in rags, lying on the cold cement floor. The figure turned its head in my direction. I barely recognized her. Her face was marked from endless pain and suffering. After some moments of silence Roza began to tell me about the sadistic means that the Germans had used against her during the interrogation and she said that she had accepted total responsibility without naming anyone else.”
“I knew very well what I was doing and I know what is in store for me,” she told him, and asked that the comrades continue their work. “It’s easier to die when you know that your work continues.”
He told her to take courage, that the Russians would save her. “Maybe,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
And they almost did, the Russians; they would have, except for a special order, radioed from Berlin, to execute the four girls immediately by hanging. On January 6, 1945, gallows were erected in the women’s section of the main camp at Auschwitz. All the women remaining in the camp were forced to witness. The girls who’d known them best were ordered to the front.
The SS commander, Hössler, read out the sentence, screaming that all such traitors would be destroyed in this manner.
But the last word went to Roza Robota. “Revenge!” she shouted, just as they hung her.
And three weeks later, the Russians were there.
LATE, THOUGH. For Roza Robota, for all those millions, and maybe for Hermann too. One man, plucked from the uncountable heap of stiff gray bodies by a line in a letter. There was a footnote to the mass escape in October of 1944, though, that seemed to offer one last chance for him.
“One group, numbering twenty-seven prisoners, moved westward under the leadership of a prisoner, reached as far as Germany. They were apprehended by the ‘Volkssturm’ (German Civil Defense) and jailed in a small German town.”
There had been an all-points alert by then, about the escaped prisoners, but these men “were saved by their claim to have escaped a transport on the way to Dachau. It was not possible to refute their claim, as this was a throughway of prisoner transports, and the transfer lists were by that time in utter disarray. The prisoners were sent to one of the remote camps in the area and remained there until the day of liberation.”
They would have the names of those prisoners, somewhere. Consie figured she could write, delve further, but she wouldn’t. Hermann hadn’t come home. Unless she wanted to put him in some Polish hut somewhere with a new wife, permanent amnesia, and a faraway, puzzled look in his eyes every fall during plum season, it was better to leave him shot outside of Auschwitz, in the uprising. Give him that moment of absolute triumph over the Nazis, just before a bullet grazed his head and left him facedown in the Polish mud.
Which, she knew from her dreams, would be better than the gas. She walked outside. Scorpio was rising. It was the one Zodiac sign she knew, although one clear night somewhere out west, she’d looked up and seen them all, circling in the sky, and gotten it. Got the whole turning of the cosmos, and it made the night even more wonderful. As it must have been for Greek shepherds, ancient night hunters, everyone, really, from the beginning of time till now who had cause to venture out into the real dark. A dark with great beauty twinned with terror, packs of wolves and lions, leopards in the trees, grizzly bears rampant. Which meant you didn’t go out without some cause. Food, your animals, and once in a while, love. In the spring.
She read the philosopher Jean Améry, who’d been in Auschwitz: “I do not have [clarity] today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history.”
Yes, he was right. He knew, he had been there, lived it, died it too, though years later, by his own hand. But he was right. She too had no clarification, no “disposal,” nor should she.
SHE LET IT GO. Moved on, as they say. She had other work, neglected too long, going nowhere. She had lost, even almost forgotten, that feeling of dawning astonishment, even joy, when she’d first read the letter, read what had seemed to her the only good news from that world that she’d ever come upon. That her grandfather’s brother, a man whose picture had smiled out at her from the pages of their own album, had escaped—might have escaped—from Auschwitz.
Which is where she figured she could leave it, at “might have escaped.”
But one evening, months later, she found herself leafing again—how? why?—through her grandmother’s old address book, and noticed a number she hadn’t seen before. She dialed and got a distant cousin in New York who remembered her family, and gave her a name and a phone number.
“I’m not sure it will work,” said the cousin.
Consie hung up the phone and dialed with shaking hands.
“. . . BUT MAYBE A THREAD”
The Letter
21
“YOU TAKE THE D TRAIN,” they’d told her, and get off at Church Avenue.
She’d lived in New York in the seventies, but had never taken the D train beyond the Village in those days. To her it was the unknown. Bob Dylan. All-night girls. Escapades out on the D train.
But this was nothing like that.
For one thing, it was four in the afternoon. For another, it was ninety-six degrees in the shade. The train was packed with tired-looking persons of all description except all-night anything. Blacks, Asians, bearded white men in baggy black suits who looked like they’d gotten dressed last January in one of those villages in Poland that had wiped the slate clean of men like them seventy years ago.
And yet, here they all were, as if nothing had happened. All those millions killed, and yet, here they still were, their doubles, their clones, as if they’d come back up the chimneys, fully clothed, to ride the D train with everyone else back to Brooklyn.
She got off where they did. The place looked rough but not exactly dangerous. The billboards on the main street were in Spanish, the usual 1-888 affairs, giant lawyers, smiling tutors. LOSE YOUR ACCENT! BEEN IN A CRASH? PODEMOS AYUDAR!
She ducked into a florist shop—mostly funeral wreaths draped with ribbons, also in Spanish. VAYA CON DIOS! WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. A few teddy bear arrangements for kids shot in a schoolyard.
A Korean girl, still in her Catholic school uniform, was hard at her books. “Don’t you have anything more cheerful?” Consie asked her.
The girl looked up with math in her eyes, and then blinked and went into the back and came out with a bunch of yellow mums.
“Nothing pink?”
No, there was nothing pink. This wasn’t the Upper East Side for peonies and tulips.
“Can you wrap them? It’s a present.”
An offering really, and in fact, a garland from a sacred bull or a burnt sacrifice would have been more to the point. She was going to see Klara of “Klara and Alice” of her uncle’s letter, who it turned out was still alive.
It was hot but Consie was cold. She wasn’t expecting anything, not even for Klara to live to the meeting. She’d taken the first plane she could get, and then hopped on the D train, but if someone met her at the door with the news that Klara had died that morning, she wouldn’t really be surprised. The whole thing already felt outside of the realm of possibility.
How could Klara still be alive? And if she was, since she was, how had Consie never heard her name till she read the letter? The only possible trace she had found was one picture from the fifties, of a glamorous couple, the
woman with her hair up, the man with one of those pencil-thin European mustaches, sitting at a table full of flowers—“On the Danube,” someone had written in German on the edge of the photo. And beneath, in another hand, “Klara,” but followed by a question mark.
Living in Vienna, it had been assumed, and yet all the time, she had been in Brooklyn? Was that possible? Without giving any sign?
Or had she, to Consie’s grandfather perhaps, or her uncle? She hadn’t talked to Klara herself, but to her son’s wife, who sounded like people she’d known on the Lower East Side. Could she come? she’d asked.
“Yeah, sure,” the daughter-in-law said, nicely. “Klara’s old, though. Too bad you didn’t call before her stroke.”
Yes, too bad, so much of it, but what about Wednesday?
And now here she was, like Orpheus, on a trip down to all those dead. Shaking in the heat, walking the two blocks as instructed, and then turning off the main drag in Borough Park, onto a street with good-sized sycamores where suddenly everyone was dressed like the Amish.
Women with longish skirts and thick stockings, herding groups of schoolchildren, laughing and playing in the street like children anywhere. The girls had on skirts and blouses, though, and the boys long trousers, no shorts or T-shirts in this ’hood, but still, they looked happy. A few men passed, some more fully costumed than others. But it didn’t matter, because this was their world.
In fact, she was the only civilian, so to speak, on the street. It was a curious place, but not without its charm. The buildings were what you get in the New York boroughs, brick, three, four, six stories at most. Some trees, but nothing great, since this was Brooklyn, not Locust Valley. Still, there were more trees, sycamores, in the direction toward which she was walking, which she took as a good sign.
When she got to the address she’d been given, however, she started to wonder. It was a run-down, flat-faced building with two sets of doors. Metal doors, multifamily maybe—was Klara poor? This hadn’t occurred to her.
She rang. Nothing. Was this how it would end, then? She had traveled a lot in the Brazilian outback. They call it a “dis-encounter” out there.
But then the door was opened by a woman dressed like the ones in the street—a long dowdy skirt, almost a head scarf.
“Oh,” said the woman. Klara’s daughter-in-law.
“Yes, we’d spoken—”
“Yeah, but when you didn’t call—”
Of course, she should have called again, called twice, three times. She’d thought maybe it was better not to bug them, push her luck, that sort of thing.
But she should have. And now—
“Well, come in.” She was ushered into a hushed, darkened house. Was Klara sick then?
But it turned out Klara didn’t live here.
“Oh.”
She lived close, though—
“That’s great!”
“—if she’s home.”
The daughter-in-law took her up a flight of stairs, and then another. The house was echoing, empty.
“Do you have children?” Consie asked, and then instantly regretted it. There were no signs of children anywhere, nothing cooking, no toys or schoolbooks or jackets slung about. The terrible word “barren” flashed across her mind, from Sunday school days.
But “Yeah,” Klara’s daughter-in-law answered.
Relief. “That’s great! How many?”
“Fourteen.” She was dialing and then waiting—a long time, too long. “I don’t think Klara’s home.”
Breathe deeply, Consie told herself. It was true that she’d put a lot into this trip, everything she had left, in fact. Charged the flight with the last of the credit.
But it’s not Auschwitz, she told herself. Funny, though, how that didn’t help. Just increased the proportion of bad to good in life.
But then the daughter-in-law was saying hello, and it didn’t sound like to a machine. Had someone answered? There was a pause and then she said something else, not in English, but at least it was a conversation, which boded well.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” she said to Consie, and a few minutes later they were being driven by a bearded man with a hat to another brick building, where Klara lived.
Her apartment was nice, comfortable, everything you need. A sofa in the living room, a TV, a few armchairs off to the side. Even a nurse, a nice Hungarian woman, but it turned out that Klara was—of course—no longer the girl in blue from her uncle’s letter.
As soon as she walked in, Consie realized her mistake. Realized, that is, that she’d been expecting to walk into her dream of a girl in her early twenties in a blue dress, who would look a bit like her handsome young uncle, and tell her how Hermann had escaped. And then maybe introduce her Romanian fiancé.
Husband, in the end—Klara’s first husband, it turned out. Who’d died young, she was told, from a transfusion of the wrong type of blood, not long after the war, in all the confusion over there, behind the Iron Curtain.
It wasn’t quite clear—nothing was. Klara didn’t speak English, or much of anything else anymore. She asked several times who Consie was. The daughter-in-law would shout something to her, the old woman would nod and smile, and then ask again.
Consie moved closer, and asked about Hermann.
More nods, more smiles.
“But he was there with you? In the camps?”
The daughter-in-law translated, but Klara just looked puzzled.
“He was strong and healthy—”
More translation, though she didn’t hear the word “Hermann,” just her uncle’s name and her grandfather’s.
“Did you ask her about Hermann?” she said to the daughter-in-law.
The daughter-in-law turned to her, not unkindly, but definitive. Like explaining to her eleventh child that there would be no puppy.
“Hermann died,” she said.
“But Klara told my uncle that he escaped!”
From Klara, a “Vas?”
“She said she knew.”
“People didn’t escape from Auschwitz,” said the daughter-in-law.
No, no, they did, Consie said. Six hundred, and some of them lived, and when exactly was Klara in Auschwitz with Hermann? She leaned closer to the old woman.
“When?” she asked her.
“During the war,” said the daughter-in-law. She got to her feet. “Klara looks tired—”
Consie took Klara’s hand.
“When were you there? Did you see him? Or just hear?”
From Klara, a nod, a smile. “Good night, Ma,” the daughter-in-law was saying. The nurse came in.
It was over. Consie leaned in to kiss the legendary Klara in the old woman. She studied her face, but couldn’t see her uncle there at all. Still, she whispered, “Did you know, really?”
But there was no answer, and they walked out.
IT WAS DARK NOW, a nice night, summer, but soft, not too hot. The car service man with the beard was delegated to drive her back into Manhattan. Afterwards, she couldn’t remember if she’d said good-bye to the daughter-in-law. So overcome was she with a sense of loss.
“Fuck,” she said aloud as they drove toward the bridge, away from her last chance here.
“What?” said the driver.
Was it a stoning crime for a woman to blaspheme in this neighborhood? “That truck—” she mumbled, and slid down in her seat.
And even if he didn’t stone her, he could take her to the Women’s House of Detention instead of the Village.
Still, it was a miracle, after all, that this man, this driver, was even here. A miracle that she was here too, but lesser. There hadn’t been an all-out campaign to keep her from walking the earth or breathing the air, but much of Europe had joined arms to kill this man’s parents, and yet, here he was, driving her in a comfortable old car back to the city.
People could debate the causes, say this, say that, cite historical precedents or psychological proclivities. Speak of “projection,” mold on bread, World War I till the co
ws came home.
But she had finally ended up with the historian, Raul Hilberg—there were no explanations, he’d concluded. The whole thing was “the culmination of a process that in retrospect had emerged from an inner logic not recognizable even to the perpetrators. It was primal, beyond rationality and irrationality . . . a ‘reckoning.’ ”
NOT THAT IT WAS, in the end, a reckoning. It was all for nothing, after all. The people whom Hitler had wanted off the earth were still driving through the warm summer night, and meanwhile Poland lost 17 percent of its populace, the USSR 13.7 percent, Germany itself 8.6 percent.
And as for those dead, the loss is already mostly statistical. There are few hot tears still shed for any one of them. “Life carries you along,” as a Hungarian countess who’d washed up in Brazil and survived by reading palms once told her. She herself had boarded the D train earlier that day, driven by what? Something to do with Czechoslovakia, a place she could barely find on a map? An attempt at resurrection, as much of her uncle as of anything? Mixed, perhaps, with a half-memory of her own grandfather, in the middle of America, eating the purple plums he got every year from one far-flung farmer, way out somewhere, farther than people would usually drive in those days, into the next county, farmland still, where people wouldn’t change their clocks for daylight saving.
She remembered him sitting with them on the front porch in the evenings, at the end of summer, and cutting the plums in half with his thumb. He was a formal man who would have used a knife for an apple or a peach, but this was something else, something he did the way he did it, something from a world that wasn’t theirs.
He never spoke of the plums, never linked them to his childhood, but they were special to him, sacred, she would say in retrospect. They were golden on the inside, with the skin almost navy blue. She never asked, and he never told her. Just gave her pieces, by the half, and seemed pleased that she liked them.
Fine, let it be. It turned out that she was no raiser of the dead.
The Plum Trees Page 21
