Unravelled (5 page)

The morning our parents were to report for duty, my mother blubbered. Blubbered. That was the only way I could think of describing her reaction. It was worse than the first day she dropped us off to school by ourselves, her face hidden under an oversized straw hat and a pink handkerchief. She waved goodbye to us, probably even after we had already gathered the strength to clasp each other's hands and make our way into the classroom. My father took her by the shoulders and held her tightly in his arms.  I caught a glimpse of them turning to leave as I happened to look out of the window while we were introducing ourselves to our new classmates.

But this was different. Papa ate his mushy porridge silently, stopping only to lick any excess off his lips or wipe his moustache. Mama sat, her hand once again holding the same pink handkerchief she had held three years earlier, her mascara running down her face. Chaya Goldberg had whispered in hushed tones to her husband how absurd it was that Mama even wore make-up in The Ghetto in the first place, but Mama continued to take pride in her looks, putting her make-up on in the mirror each morning.

"They'll be fine," Papa mumbled between chews. Tears poured from my mother's eyes and slight bubbles formed at the corners of her red-painted lips. "They're big girls. They can take care of themselves."

He must have forgotten that we "big girls" had forgotten to feed the dog two days in a row the first week we had him. We had also neglected to help Agata make dinner on a brisk day in February when we said we would learn how to make Polish pierogis. Learning to cook was all part of our mother's grand scheme to help us become "good wives one day", but that one day seemed so far away that we spent the afternoon making snowmen in Zsolt's front yard, leaving Agata alone with disassembled ingredients for pierogis.

"What do you do if someone knocks at the door?" Papa quizzed us in a rapid-fire manner, his right index finger extended to Hajna the way he used to ask us about Hungarian history or English conjugation.

"We pretend we're not home."

Papa nodded satisfactorily, as though Hajna had successfully conjugated one of the more impossible English verbs.

The night before, Chaya Goldberg and Mama spent several hours rearranging the dishes and moving them from the cabinets and clearing out the closets so the children would have somewhere to hide in the event that a Hungarian soldier barged in without warning. Rumors had been buzzing for the past few days that the Hungarian soldiers were collaborating with the Germans and making long lists of names for "resettlement" in the East.

"I heard they take kids away when their parents are gone, put them on the transport and then throw them in a fire!" Daniel had said, his almost-black eyes ablaze with the excitement little boys often had when discussing war or violence.

"Don't say things like that," his mother had chastised him, giving him a small slap on the wrist. She put a hand to her chest and inhaled, perhaps speaking a silent prayer between herself and her God, hoping it wasn't true.

"But that’s what Avram said on our way back from the Rebbe's apartment," Daniel protested, stepping one dirty foot into the cabinet to test out the new hiding place. "And Avram's dad is from Poland. They took him away a long time ago and when he came back, he said that stuff."

Daniel's words continued, even after his mother had shut the light blue cabinet door to make sure he wouldn't be visible. A diatribe about horrible tales of Jews being slaughtered came from the interior of the cabinet, while the rest of us listened, our feet glued to the floor. We did not want to hear it, but we couldn't help but listen.

"That's enough," Zvi Goldberg finally spoke when Daniel got to the part about naked bodies piled up all around the camp where this Avram's father had supposedly been sent. "We don't even know if it's true. And there's no need to worry about something that might not even happen."

Even though my parents dismissed these words as malicious rumors meant to scare the Jews, I could see in their eyes that they still feared them, still worried they would come back from work detail to find their children had been snatched away, their bodies turned to dust.

For all of the preparations made, we children only stayed on our own for less than a month's time. An old woman looked in on us once in a while, one who my father had treated for a heart condition and was, by the decree, too old to work. She would come in, look at us for only a few minutes, make sure we had our lunch and then often leave without a word. That suited me fine as her wrinkled face and cranky demeanor made me feel a little bit nervous. In fact, it has recently occurred to me that I never knew the woman's name, or perhaps I have since forgotten it. But I never forgot the wrinkle that made its way across her forehead. It was so deep that it almost appeared to go straight to the bone. I whispered to Hajna that she reminded me of the ugly witch in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
.

The four of us sat together, ignoring the warnings that we weren't supposed to be in the same room because of the Goldberg's religious objections. We talked to each other, tried to see who had the best ghost stories, compared our schools, exchanged stories about our teachers and played with the checkers and chess set. We even made a jump rope and  took turns turning for one another. Of course, Hajna tried to show off by jumping on one foot.

The day we were informed of our resettlement, Hajna had tried to turn a cartwheel while Samuel and I turned the rope for her. She had seen one of the older girls in the schoolyard do it successfully, so Hajna wanted to try. After toppling over once or twice and getting tangled in the rope a few times, she finally turned the cartwheel, only to knock over a bust my mother had brought with us into The Ghetto.  The bust was of some mysterious ancestor of ours, immortalized in white stone. He looked forward and sullen, and my father sometimes joked that he looked a little constipated, which would prompt a playful swat from my mother. The bust had been in our family for generations, a priceless piece of family history that sat in an honored place in the china cabinet. My father had warned my mother not to bring it and he thought Agata and Emilia would be able to take good care of it while we were gone. She then, placed it in a prominent position, displayed with pride on the only end table in the room. It was a memento of her past, a nod to her regal history.

Hajna frantically swept up the pieces with her hands, instigating two small cuts on her fingers as she did so. She assembled them onto the bright yellow end table in the corner of the living room, its home for the past few months.

"You should've moved it!" Hajna chided me as she continued collecting the pieces of the broken statue until there was nothing left of him on the floor. "Now we're going to get spanked so hard we won't be able to walk."

The four of us sat for the rest of the afternoon deciding what exactly we should tell our parents to lessen the blow. Maybe we could pretend the soldiers came in and we got so scared that we accidentally knocked him over? Or we could say he just fell, without any prompting, as though he was ready to commit suicide. He was, I joked, a Hungarian ancestor after all and probably prone to melancholia.

As totally unpredicted, our parents would never even notice his disappearance. Instead, the four adults and Lujza shuffled into the apartment, looking defeated and exhausted to the bone, their bodies slumped and exhausted. Wordlessly, they exchanged their street shoes for their slippers, the corners of their mouths turned down instead of the usual sideways. Papa made his way to the closet and began to pull out our suitcases as Mama, Lujza and the Goldberg adults sought refuge in the dining room chairs.

"What's going on?" I asked Papa, his face twisted as he popped open the brown and plaid suitcases with a loud clink.

"What's it look like is going on?" he asked, his tone dark and stormy. For a moment I wondered if he had already known about the bust.

"David," my mother called from her perch on the chair, her hands to her face as if she were keeping herself afloat. "Don't yell at them. They have no idea what's happening."

Papa sighed as he grabbed a handful of his own clothing and indiscriminately shoved it into his suitcase, without folding them delicately or making sure they were straight. Before going on vacation, Papa was always meticulous about packing, making sure even the corners of his shirts were lined up together. 

"We're on the list. We're going to be resettled tomorrow."

"All of us?" Samuel asked, his face twisted with worry.

"Not this time," Zvi Goldberg shook his head. "Just the Sterns. We're going later in the week. At least that's what Mr. Steinberg said."

"So we're going?" Daniel asked, his mouth turning into a giant black hole as his jaw slacked to make an O. "We’re going to the place where they burn bodies? Are they going to burn us?"

"Enough," Chaya Goldberg chided her son, making a fist and slamming it onto the table so hard they made the salt and pepper shakers mother had brought with us jump into the air like lithe Russian dancers. "Stop saying things like that, Daniel. We're just going to a new place. We're just going to work. There are no burning bodies, no corpses stacked up. Stop spreading those rumors."

From the look on Chaya Goldberg's face, it was clear she was desperate to believe her son wasn't speaking the truth, that this Avram and his father, the people they had known from their village, were simply spreading lies and rumors to scare others. Or maybe the Germans had started these venomous words themselves to breathe fear into the Jews. 

"What do we take?" I asked, stepping forward toward my father, my slippers making a scuffing noise and my weight shifted to him.

"You can only take what? 15 or 16 kilos? I don't know. Don't take too much. A few dresses, underwear, your coat. Maybe a couple pairs of shoes. And food, we have to take food."

"We don't have much left," Mama protested, jumping to her feet and opening the cabinet doors so hard I thought they might fall off of their hinges. "We have maybe seven potatoes, a couple of carrots. Four or five rolls."

"Pack them," Papa nodded. "And don't eat them all on the way, either."

The graveness and insistence in his voice shook my insides and made my heart sink deep into my knees. A feeling of warmth washed over me, starting at the roots of my hair and going down into the tips of my toes, making them tingle in my slippers.

After a few moments of silence and watching my father throw items into his suitcase, his anger almost visible around him, my mother slowly got to her feet and began to separate the family's belongings, picking out clothing she felt would be necessary for the trip. As she began folding our clothing, she collapsed on the bed the three of us girls shared, her face contorted in pain.

"My hands hurt," she mumbled, her right hand over her left wrist in an attempt to disguise how swollen it had become. Chaya Goldberg rolled her eyes. Lujza, however, rose to her feet to help her step-mother, tossing her long red hair over her shoulder and wordlessly finding her way to Mama's side.

Feeling terrible for my mother, I rushed to her and put my arms around her, my little arms just barely making their way around her waist. Her flushed skin felt warm against my cool, white arms. She patted my small hands and then wiped her eyes once more before kissing me on the forehead and standing up.

"Girls," she instructed standing onto her feet, wobbling just a little bit and steadying herself on the sofa. "You'll take a bath tonight and wash your hair."

We nodded silently, moving to lay out our nightgowns, find our brushes and soap and readying ourselves to be scrubbed clean. As I picked up the brush Hajna and I shared and removed our jewelry, Hajna turned to me and smile slightly.

"Think of it as a great adventure. Like Peter Pan!" she smiled. "We don't know where we're going, so maybe we're going some place fun."

I couldn't see Papa, but I heard his lips curl into a smile underneath his bushy black moustache, slicing the tension just for the moment.

"That's my girl," he whispered moving out of the shadows, pulling her closer to him and kissing her on the forehead. "We're going to have a great adventure."

5 CHAPTER five



We awoke at 4AM the next day to the alarm of the wind up clock father took with him everywhere. He was so attached to the wretched thing that he even tucked it away in his suitcase when he went away to business meetings and lectures. Mother claimed after being married to him for so long, she had learned to tolerate the infernal ticking and clicking of the clock as each second passed. And it wasn't so much the ticking, but the alarm that I hated. It rang so suddenly and so loudly that I awoke each morning in The Ghetto by jumping a few centimeters off of my mattress, my heart beating rapidly the way it did when I awoke suddenly from a nightmare.

The night before, Mama had helped the three of us bathe, and despite the pain in her hands (they had gotten just big enough to resemble small moons), had brushed out our hair. Lujza had always kept a slight distance from my mother, as if there was an imaginary boundary the two could not cross. Lujza was nearly eight when my parents got married and had always been standoffish, aloof and never embracing my mother. Papa told us she used to hide in the curtains and behind the furniture when my mother came over for dates. When they subsequently married, Lujza found it hard to be in her presence. She would push her small, white body underneath the Victorian couch, breathing as quietly as she could so my mother wouldn't discover her. Lujza didn't want to accept a new woman taking her mother's place in her father's bed, brushing her hair out at night and kissing her before falling asleep. As Lujza grew, she began to accept Mama a little bit more, but never treating her anything like her own mother. Instead, Lujza regarded her more like an aunt or family friend. She didn't tell my mother about crushes on boys or run to her for advice. Instead, she swallowed it, letting her problems fester in her stomach. 

But that night, Lujza's aloofness wasn't as apparent as it usually was. Instead, she stuck close by, helping my mother fold all of our clothing and letting my mother brush out her long, curly, red hair, the red hair she had been given as a gift by her own mother.

Hajna and I had tried to pack two dolls we had brought with us, but Mama wouldn't allow it. Our hearts sank when she told us they weren't allowed. Those ragdolls had been our companions since we were babies, sleeping peacefully beside us in our first pictures. Mama said they took up too much room, room that we needed for food, for clothing, for medical supplies. She suggested we kiss the dolls goodbye and let Samuel and Daniel watch them for safekeeping. We suspected that the minute we put them down, their heads might be torn off or they would be impaled during a mock battle scene in our absence.

We readied ourselves in the dark of the impending dawn, the time of night when shadows still seem a bit more impetuous, a bit more sinister than they really are. Papa insisted that we put on winter coats despite the heat. If we put the coats on, he reasoned, they wouldn't be counted toward the amount of luggage each Jew was allowed to bring to this new place we were going. And who would even know how long we would be there, anyway? Would we stay at this new place a month? A week? A day? A year? Father shrugged and decided we needed to be prepared for any type of situation that could arise, including winter snows. What he didn't take into account was that he usually bought us a new coat each winter, our arms and legs telescoping out of last season's. But we kept quiet and put the coats on anyway, the sleeves already threatening to make their way past our wrist bones.

Along with the rest of the Jews on the list, we marched to the train station at six in the morning, our stomachs full from a sensible breakfast and food in our packs. Before the sun had even crept up over the yellow city of Szeged, there were already hundreds of Jews lined up and waiting for the train to arrive. Although I looked around me, I couldn't find anyone I knew. Everyone seemed to be from surrounding villages or maybe they attended a different temple from the one we rarely frequented on High Holy Days. Even so, I continued to crane my neck, looking at each turn to find at least one familiar face among the crowd. The crowd, the strangers and my family were hemmed in, unable to go anywhere, by the foreboding Hungarian soldiers, each brandishing a rifle over his chest. They watched us with menacing eyes, making sure we stayed together and in our place. 

After a few hours of waiting without anything happening, everyone began to sit down on the ground. The crowd began to crumple, like a row of dominos. Children began to cry for food and water and mothers sat down with their infants to nurse them to quell their cries. The sun crept higher and higher into the sky and felt like it was coming closer and closer to my face, ready to burn me at any moment. Mother, always prepared, opened her pink and white polka dot umbrella and sat underneath it so that the rays wouldn't graze her porcelain skin.

Another hour or so went by before a train whistle sounded in the distance. All of the waiting Jews stood up, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that was to take us to our fate, to our next adventure. Due to my height, I was unable to see the train until it was right in front of us. When I realized it was nothing but empty cattle cars, I sat down again, expecting this brown, wooden and rickety train to be on its way to a nearby farm to pick up livestock.

"That's not our train," Papa shook his head. I could hear mumbles of others around us making the same assumption. A few people resumed their places, sitting down on the ground and taking off their outer layers of clothing they had hurriedly put on, assuming our train had come. A collective sigh of relief escaped as everyone resumed their position, at the ready to wait another few hours.

I sat down on my suitcase again (the lock had made a tiny indent in my leg, pushing the pattern of it into my flesh), rested my face on my hands and let out a deep sigh. Just as I began to wonder if the train would ever actually arrive, we heard a shout from the Hungarian officers. They began ordering us to get on the trains, in voices that were shrill, yet deep and booming at the same time. There was a moment of surprise, a hesitation from the crowd. Stunned silence. How could they possibly expect us to travel like that?

There was an order to get on the train and it grated through the abrasive nothingness. We stood, as if our feet were glued to the pavement. The soldiers began to hit those closest to them with the butts of their rifles or their belts, striking indiscriminately.

"Get on the train, you Jews! Get on!"

The sudden sound of flesh being hit repeatedly made my stomach turn and tears stung my dry eyes. 

"Mommy!" I cried in an infantile reflex I didn't expect from myself. My mother held me close, my head buried in her red and pink floral dress, the one she had bought last spring when her closest friends invited our family to their house in Lake Balaton. Tears began cascading down my face, more freely, making small puddles in my mother's skirt, watering the roses that lived on the fabric.

"It's okay," Hajna nodded and put her hand over mine. And in that tender moment, the soldiers told us to run, to get on board the cattle cars. We kept to the middle of the crowd, avoiding the blows from the rifles, each strike hitting Jewish flesh with a loud crack. It reminded me of thunder piercing through a hot, summer day.

My family ran up the ramp to the middle of the car, surrounded by a wall of people on all sides. The middle was a great place to be to avoid a smack, but a terrible place to be on an indefinitely long train ride. I felt hands push me from all sides as each person struggled to find a space in the chaos. Shouts were still coming from outside ordering us to cram into the train further and further until the car was almost overflowing. It reminded me of how I felt after a large meal while my Nagymama stood over me, urging me to eat more. My father kept his hands firmly on Hajna and Lujza's shoulders, telling his daughters to hold on to their belongings while we were tipped forward and backward, as though the crowd was a wave, and we were floating along the tide.

After what seemed like an eternity, but less than a few moments, the door to the boxcar slid closed and was sealed from the outside with a loud, definite clink. It was only then that I noticed our only sources of air were coming from the cracks in the wood and four small windows, one in each corner of the car, which were covered with menacing barbed wire.

We stood together, united in the brutality and sharing a common scent of fear. Although we did not know so much as the name of the people standing next to us, their bodies pressed up against ours so intimately. I looked around the car again, trying to find a place to relieve myself amid the deafening cries of babies calling for their mothers, milk or water.

Finally, we heard the train whistle and felt a jerk as the train started forward, inching ever so slowly toward our unknown destination. Smoke from the train filled the car through windows, prompting several coughing fits.

"I have to go to the toilet," I winced feeling the familiar tickle in my bladder, the floor of the train moving unsteadily beneath my feet.

My mother looked around the train car, desperate for a place to help her daughter relieve herself.

"Where can I take my daughter to use the toilet?" my mother called out, standing on her tiptoes and surveying the crowded car.

"Here!" a man said from the corner, holding up two wooden buckets that had evidently been placed there in lieu of sanitary facilities. They were empty black holes. 

"I'll hold it," I told my mother looking from the angry mouth of the bucket to her pained eyes. "Maybe we'll get there soon."

My mother nodded and pushed her way through the crowd of strangers to my father and sisters. We stood huddled together as if they were freezing cold despite the intense heat pouring through the sides of the boxcar. Coupled with the body heat of an innumerable number of people surrounding us on all sides, the air became stale almost immediately. 

The first day passed in silence. By the time night fell, a shock came over the car like a tidal wave as we collectively wondered aloud if we would actually be traveling through the night. Everyone seemed to murmur the question to his or her neighbor, aghast that we were still on the train. The train would stop for a few hours in the middle of open fields. The people near the windows of the boxcar would report as they tried desperately to figure out where the train was going, what country we were in, what part of that country, and everything in between. We were being propelled toward a destination, like sheep with blindfolds. 

Toward the end of the first day, fellow Jews began to break down and use the buckets, sitting down on them and looking up at their traveling companions with shame glinting in their eyes. They were performing a monumentally private task, usually carried out behind locked doors. They began relieving themselves like animals in front of a large group of others, friends, relatives and total strangers among their ranks. They had no other choice.

It wasn't long before the entire boxcar began to stink of human feces and urine. At first, it hit me, crawling into my nose and making me dizzy. As a somewhat spoiled child living a cushy life, I had never smelled something so horrific--my exposure to any waste being relegated to when Kiraly, our dog, relieved himself while we were playing. I had never even changed a diaper or seen a baby being changed. I noticed the four or five babies and toddlers among us also began to emit a similar stench. With no room for their parents to change their diapers, and certainly no water to wash them off, the parents simply clung helplessly to their crying children as they wallowed uncomfortably in their own filth.

We took shifts sleeping against one another, my mother alternating between sleep and alertness the entire time. When the sun brought some light into our stinking, hot car, I could see she had the rash on her face again--and it had spread to her neck. She didn't complain, she simply stood with her eyes half closed pressed against Papa or a stranger, drifting into fitful sleeps. It was as if she had already died, except for the momentary instructions to us girls or her rummaging through her pack to give us pieces of now dry bread alerted us to the fact that she was, indeed, still alive.

Five days passed. The stink hung so thick in the air that I could feel it all over my body. My coat hung on my arms, my sweat making it stick to my skin. Our feet were covered in waste, human filth. Nature forced every one of us several times to walk to the bucket, pull down our underwear and relieve ourselves Babies cried in infernal wails for days straight, some stopping altogether on the third or fourth day. Grown men wept and prayers came out from the religious, their mouths slightly moving as the holy words tickled their lips, hoping that God or someone or something would hear them.

At the end of the fifth day, in the dark of night, the train stopped again. We were used to this stopping and starting by now, and no one said anything. The sleeping passengers merely sighed, mumbled and readjusted and those awake simply looked up and braced themselves for the impact of the stop. Hajna and I had been trying to entertain ourselves with word games we could remember from school, but we were falling apart and crumbling with the inability to recall them correctly. Like ancient stones, the games turned to dust.

"We've made it somewhere," a woman at one of the barbed wire windows shouted, her eyes lit up. "We're not in the country anymore."

The sleeping were roused slightly, as those who had been awake stretched their creaky limbs and clamored toward the barbed wire, stepping on hands and feet along the way and having already lost their human dignity. Their dry hands sounded like saw dust against the wooden boxcar and the cries of those who had been trod on rang through the car.