War and Remembrance (184 page)

If the hope is not the coming of the Prince of Peace, it has to be that in their hearts most people, even the most fanatical and boneheaded Marxists, even the craziest nationalists and revolutionaries, love their children, and don’t want to see them burn up. There is no politician imbecile enough, surely, to want a nuclear Leyte Gulf. The future now seems to depend on that grim assumption. Either war is finished or we are.

A
N
officious Jew from the Transport Section stops Aaron Jastrow by bustling through the crowd and grabbing his arm, as he and Natalie are climbing the wooden ramp into the train.

“Dr. Jastrow, you’ll ride up ahead in the passenger coach.”

“I would rather stay with my niece.”

“Don’t argue or it will be the worse for you. Go where you’re told, quick march.”

All along the track SS men are bellowing obscenities and threats, and thrashing at the transportees with stout sticks. The Jews are panicking up the ramps into the cattle cars, dragging suitcases, bundles, sacks, and whimpering children. Natalie manages one hasty kiss on Aaron’s bearded cheek. He says in Yiddish, which Natalie can barely hear over the German shouting,
“Zye mutig.”
(“Keep up your spirit.”) The shoving crowd thrusts them apart.

As the moving crush bears her inside the gloomy car, the cow-barn smell gives her an incongruous memory flash of childhood summers. Places to sit along the rough wooden walls are being fought over with exasperated yells and violent pushing and pulling. She makes her way as through a rush-hour subway mob to a corner under a barred window where two Viennese co-workers from the mica factory are sitting with husbands, children, and luggage crammed around them. They make a bit of room for her by moving their legs. Natalie sits down in a place which becomes hers for the next three days, as though she has bought a ticket for this one dung-caked spot on the slatted floor, where the wind whistles through a broad crack, the racket of the wheels sounds loud as the train rolls, and querulous people press against her from all sides.

They leave in rain, and they travel through rain. Though it is almost November the weather is not cold. When Natalie struggles to her feet and takes her turn at the high barred window to look out and breathe sweet air, she sees trees in autumn colors and peasants picking fruits. These moments at the window are delicious. They pass all too quickly and she must drop back into the fetor of the car. The barn odor and the smell of unwashed crowded people in old wet clothes is soon overwhelmed by a stink of broken toilets. The men, women, and children in the car, a hundred or more, must relieve themselves into two overflowing pails, one at each end, to which they must squirm and struggle through the crowd, and which are emptied only when
the train stops and an SS man remembers to slide open the door a crack. Natalie has to face away from the pail not five feet from her; less to avoid the stench and the sounds, for that is futile, than to give the pitiful squatters some privacy.

This one breakdown of primitive human decency — more even than the hunger, the thirst, the crowding, the lack of sleep, the wailing of miserable children, the grating outbreaks of nerve-shattered squabbles, more even than the fear of what lies ahead — dominates the start of this journey; the stink and the humiliation of lacking a clean private way to dispose of one’s droppings. Weak, old, sick people, helpless to get to the pails through the jam, even void where they sit, choking and disgusting those around them.

Yet there are brave spirits in the car. A strong gray-headed Czech Jewish nurse pushes around with one bucket of water, which the SS refills every few hours, doling out cupfuls to the sick and the children ahead of others. She recruits women to help tend the sick and clean up the unfortunates who foul themselves. A burly blond-bearded Polish Jew in a sort of military cap makes himself the car captain. He rigs blankets to screen the pails, puts a stop to the worst quarrels, and appoints distributors for the food scraps thrown into the car by the SS. Here and there in the lugubrious crush sour laughter can be heard, especially after a share-out of food; and when things have settled down, the car captain even leads some doleful singing.

Rumors keep rippling through the car about where they are going, and what will happen when they arrive. The announced destination is a “work camp outside Dresden,” but the Czech Jews say that the line of stations they are going through points toward Poland. Each time the train passes a station the name is shouted around and fresh speculation starts up. Oswiecim is hardly mentioned. All eastern Europe lies ahead. Tracks branch off every few miles; if not toward Dresden, then to many other places. Why necessarily must they be travelling to Oswiecim? Most of these Theresienstadt Jews have heard of Oswiecim. Some have received cards from transportees who have landed there, though it is a long time since any postcards have come. The name evokes a shadowy terror laced with whispered details too gruesome to be believed. No, there is no reason to assume they are going to Oswiecim; or even if they are, that conditions there in any way resemble the frightful stories.

Such is the state of mind that Natalie discerns in the car. She knows better. She cannot rid herself of the information that Berel Jastrow imparted. Nor does she want to muffle her mind in fantasies. Her will to live, to see Louis again, demands that she think straight. She has plenty of time to think, sitting there over the drafty crack in the splintered floor hour after hour after hour, through long nights and long days, hungry, thirsty, sick from the stench, her teeth and bones jarring with the jolts of the train.

The abrupt separation from her uncle is clearing her mind and hardening her resolve. She is on her own, one more body in an anonymous rabble training eastward. The SS men who herded the Jews into the cattle cars took no roll calls, only head counts. Aaron Jastrow is still identified, still a name, still an Elder, still a
Prominent,
up front in the coach. She is a nameless nobody. He will probably survive in some clerkish job, wherever they are going, until the Allies smash through the failing German armies. Perhaps he will find her and protect her there, too; but instinct tells her that she has looked her last on Aaron.

Really believing that one is about to die is hard. Hospital patients rotted through with cancer, criminals walking to the electric chair or the gallows, sailors on a ship going down in a storm, cling to a secret hope that it is all a mistake, that some relieving word will come to lift the strangling nightmare; so why not Natalie Henry, young and healthy, riding a train through eastern Europe? She has her private hope, as no doubt each troubled Jew does all through the cattle cars.

She is an American.
This sets her off from the others. By crazy circumstances and her own stupid mistakes she is trapped in this train, slowing and groaning up into the mountains on the second night, twisting through timbered valleys and rocky gorges, passing at dead slow through moonlit snowdrifts that spray glittering away from the wheels and whirl off on the wind. Looking out at this pretty scene, freezing and shivering, Natalie thinks of her Christmas vacation in Colorado when she was a college senior; so the moonlit snow sprayed from the train climbing up the Rockies to Denver. She is grasping for American memories. A moment lies ahead when she may live or die by her capacity to look a German official in the face and make him take pause with the words, “I am an American.”

For, given the chance, she can prove it. Surprisingly, she still has her passport. Battered, creased, stamped
Ghetoisiert,
it lies in the breast pocket of her gray suit under the yellow star. With their peculiar respect for official paper, the Germans have not confiscated or destroyed it. In Baden-Baden they held it for weeks but returned it when she went to Paris. Arriving in Theresienstadt, she had to turn it in, but after many months she found it one day on her bed with Byron’s picture still clipped inside. Perhaps German intelligence used it for forging spy documents; perhaps it merely moldered in an SS desk. Anyway, she has it. She knows it will not protect her. International law does not exist for her, or for any rider on this train. Still, in this crowd of unfortunates it is a unique identifying document; and to a German eye, the photograph of a husband in a United States naval uniform should also strike home.

Natalie pictures Oswiecim as a more dreadful Theresienstadt, larger, harsher, with gas chambers instead of a Little Fortress. Surely there will be
work to do even there. The barracks may be as bad as this cattle car or worse, the weak, the old, the unskilled transportees may die, but the rest will be laborers. She intends to look her best, produce her passport, tell of her mica job, offer her language skills, flirt, prostitute herself if she is forced, but live till deliverance comes. That much, however short of the reality, is not entirely delusory. But her ultimate hope is a mirage: namely, that some farseeing SS officer will take her under his wing, so as to lean on her as a character witness after the German defeat. What she cannot conceive is that most Germans do not yet believe they will lose the war. Faith in Adolf Hitler keeps this maddened nation going strong.

Her surmise about the progress of the war is quite correct. German higher-ups know their game is almost played out. Little peace feelers like maggots are creeping out of the dying Nazi leviathan. Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler is about to order the gassings halted. He is covering his tracks, preparing his alibi, stolidly setting about to refurbish his image. Natalie is riding the last train taking Jews to Oswiecim; bureaucratic delay in reversing policy has allowed it to roll. But to the SS staff waiting for it at the Birkenau ramp, with crematoriums fired up and Sonderkommandos on the alert, it is just one more routine job. Nobody is thinking of taking on a pet American Jewess as a shield in defeat. Natalie’s passport may be a mental comfort, but it is just a scrap of paper.

Conditions in the car keep worsening. By the second day the sickest begin to die where they lie, stand, or sit. Shortly after dawn of the third day, a feverish small girl near Natalie goes into convulsions, writhes, beats her hands about, then becomes limp and still. There is no room to lay out bodies, so the moaning mother of the dead girl holds the corpse huddled to her as in life. The child’s face is blue, the eyes shut and sunken, the jaw hanging loose. About an hour later an old woman whose feet touch Natalie dribbles blood, gasps, makes noisy rattling sounds, and topples from her wall space. The Czech nurse, who squirms tirelessly through the car trying to keep people alive, cannot revive her. Somebody else seizes the wall space.

The old woman lies under her own short coat in a heap. One skinny wool-stockinged leg with a green garter protrudes until Natalie pushes it under the coat, trying to suppress her horror with callous thinking of other days, other things. It is not easy. The smell of death comes through the excrement stink, more and more strongly as the train clacks, sways, and rolls on to the east. Farther down the car, where the SS crammed in the Theresienstadt sick, perhaps fifteen people are dead. The transportees, sunk in wretched apathy, doze or stare about in the asphyxiating miasma.

A halt.

Rough voices shout outside. Bells clang. The train moves jerkily backward and then forward again, changing locomotives. It stops. The car door
opens to allow the emptying of the reeking slop pails. Sunshine and fresh air flood in like a burst of music. The Czech nurse gets her water bucket refilled. The car captain talks about the corpses to the SS guard bringing the water, who shouts,
“Na, die haben noch Glück!”
(“Well, they’re lucky!”) He slides the door shut, and turns a screeching bolt.

When the train moves again, the stations that glide by have Polish names. Now one hears “Oswiecim” spoken aloud in the car. A Polish couple near Natalie says they are heading straight for Oswiecim. It is as though Oswiecim is a giant magnet sucking in the train. Sometimes the route has seemed to turn in another direction and spirits have revived, but sooner or later it always bends back to Oswiecim — Auschwitz, the Viennese women call it.

Natalie has now been sitting up for seventy-two hours. The elbow she leans on is rubbed raw and staining her suit with blood. Her hunger is gone. Thirst is racking her, blotting out everything else. Since leaving Theresienstadt
she has had two cups of water.
Her mouth is as dry as if she has been eating dust. The Czech nurse gives water to people who need it more: the children, the sick, the old, the dying. Natalie keeps thinking of American drinks, of the times and the places where she drank them: ice-cream sodas in drugstores, Coca-Colas at high school dances, cold beer at college picnics, water from kitchen taps, water from office coolers, water from an icy brown mountain pool in the Adirondacks where she could see trout swimming, water in a cold shower after tennis that she caught in her hands and drank. But she has to shut off these visions. They are driving her crazy.

A halt.

Looking out, she sees farmlands, woods, a village, a wooden church. SS men in gray-green uniform pass outside, stretching their legs, smoking cigars she can smell, chatting amiably in German. From a farmhouse close to the railroad a whiskered man in boots and muddy clothes comes, carrying a large lumpy sack. He pulls off his cap to talk to an SS officer, who grins and makes a contemptuous gesture at the train. In a moment the door slides open, the sack is tossed through the aperture, and it closes.

“Apples! Apples!”
The joyous unbelieving word sings through the car.

Who was this softhearted benefactor, this muddy bewhiskered man who knew there were Jews in the silent train and pitied them? Nobody can say. The transportees get to their feet, eyes gleaming, gaunt faces suffering and eager. Men move about putting fruit into snatching hands. The train starts. The jerk throws Natalie off her numb feet. She has to grab at the man bringing the apples. He glares at her, then laughs. He was the construction foreman at the children’s pavilion. “Steady, Natalie!” He fishes in the sack and gives her a big greenish fruit.