War and Remembrance (186 page)

He stands in the shadows with the
Prominente,
watching. Evidently they are exempt from the selection process. Their baggage remains in the coach, so far. Can the optimists possibly have been right? One SS officer and one guard have been detailed to this special handful of Jews; average-looking young Germans who, except for their intimidating uniforms, are not menacing in aspect. The guard, rather short and in rimless glasses, looks as mild as he can with a submachine gun in his hands. Both seem bored with their routine chore. The officer has ordered the
Prominente
not to talk, that is all.
Shading his eyes from the floodlights, Aaron Jastrow keeps peering down the platform for a sight of Natalie. He means to take his life in his hands if he can spot her; point her out to the officer as his niece, and tell him she has an American passport. The utterance will take thirty seconds. If he gets beaten or shot, let it be so. Conceivably the Germans may want to know about her. But he cannot pick her out, though he knows she is there somewhere. She was too strong to sicken and die on the train. Certainly she is not in the thin straggle of women going to the left. Those are easy to tell apart. She could be in the thick crowd of women sent to the right, many of them leading or carrying children, or in the long line of the unselected.

The women sent to the right come shuffling past the
Prominente,
with scared stunned faces. Half-blinded by the floodlight glare, Jastrow cannot discern Natalie as they go by, if she is among them. The children walk docilely, holding on to their mothers’ hands or skirts. Some of the children are being carried, sound asleep, for it is after all the middle of the night; the full moon rides in the zenith above the glare. The line passes by. Now two striped men board the SS coach and toss down the privileged Jews’ luggage.

“Attention!” says the SS officer to the
Prominente.
“You will go along with those now, for disinfection.” His tone is offhand, his gesture toward the departing women is forceful and unmistakable.

Dumbfounded, the seventeen look at each other, and at their tumbling luggage.

“Quick march!” The officer’s voice hardens. “Follow them!”

The guard waves at the men with the submachine gun.

In a quavering, ingratiating voice, the Berlin lawyer exclaims, stepping forward,
“Herr Untersturmführer,
your honor, aren’t you making a very serious mistake? We are all
Prominente,
and —”

The officer moves two stiff fingers. The guard drives the gun butt into the lawyer’s face. He drops, bleeding and groaning.

“Pick him up,” says the officer to the others, “and get along with you.”

So Aaron has his answer. The uncertainty is finished, he is going to die. He will die very soon, probably within minutes. It is an exceedingly peculiar realization: awesome, agonizing, but at the same time sadly liberating. He is looking his last at the moon, at things like trains, at women, at children, at Germans in uniform. It is a surprise, but not such a great one. This was what he was ready for when he left Theresienstadt. He helps the others pick up the Transport Section head, whose mouth is a bloody mess, but whose frightened eyes are worse to see. In a last glance behind him, Jastrow observes the long lines still stretching down the floodlit platform, the selections still going on. Will he ever know what happened to Natalie?

A long trudge in cold air under the moon; a silent trudge, except for the crunch of footfalls on frozen muck, and the sleepy whimpering of children.
The line arrives at a beautifully kept lawn, bright green under tremendous floodlights, in front of a long low windowless building of dark red brick, with tall square chimneys which fitfully flare. It might be a bakery or a laundry. The baldheads lead the line down broad cement steps, along a dim corridor and into a big bare room brightly lit with naked electric lights, rather like a bathhouse at a beach, with benches and hooks for undressing along the walls, and around pillars down the middle. On the pillar facing the entrance a sign in several languages, with Yiddish at the top, reads:

UNDRESS HERE FOR DISINFECTANT BATHS
.

FOLD CLOTHES NEATLY
.

REMEMBER WHERE YOU LEAVE THEM
.

It is disconcerting that men and women must undress in the same place. The striped prisoners herd the few
Prominente
off in one corner, and to Aaron’s surprise, they help the women and children undress, chattering apologies all the time. It is the rules of the camp, they say. None of this takes long. The main thing is to hurry, fold clothes neatly, and obey orders. Soon Aaron Jastrow sits naked on a rough wooden bench, murmuring psalms, his bare feet on chilly cement. One must not pray naked or utter God’s name bareheaded, but this is
shat hadhak,
an hour of emergency, when the law is lenient. He sees that some women are young and enchanting to look upon, their rounded naked flesh rosy as Rubens nudes under the bright lights. Of course most of the figures are spoiled: scrawny or drooping, with pendulous breasts and stomachs. The children all look thin as plucked fowl.

A second group of women comes crowding into the disrobing room, with many more men behind them. He cannot tell if Natalie is there, it is such a mob. Strange brief reunions occur between naked women and their clothed husbands: joyous cries of recognition, embraces, fathers hugging their bare children. But the baldheads cut these scenes short. There will be plenty of time later! Now people must get on with the undressing.

German voices soon call flat harsh orders outside:
“Attention! Men only! Proceed by twos to the showers!”

The striped prisoners shepherd the men out of the disrobing room. This lot of naked males jostling along with exposed dangling genitals in bushy hair is very like a bathhouse scene, except for the strange stripe-clothed baldheads among them, and the crowd of nude women and children watching them go and calling out to them affectionately. Some women are crying. Some, Aaron can see, must be stifling screams, with hands clutched to their mouths. They fear being beaten, perhaps, or they do not want to alarm the children.

It is cold in the corridor; not for the armed SS men who line the walls, but certainly for the naked Aaron and the men marching with him. His mind
remains clear enough to note that the fraud grows thin. Why this cordon of armed booted men in uniforms for a few Jews going to the showers? The faces of the SS men are ordinary German faces, mostly young, such as one might see on the Kurfiirstendamm strolling on a Sunday with their girls, but they frown in an unpleasant way, like police facing a disorderly crowd and watching for violence. But the naked Jewish men, young and old, are not at all disorderly. There is no violence on this short walk.

They are led into a long narrow room of raw cement floors and walls, almost large enough to be a theatre, though the ceiling filled with hundreds of shower heads is too low for that, and the rows of pillars would be in the way. On the walls and the pillars — some of solid concrete, some of perforated sheet iron — are soap racks with bars of yellow soap. This chamber too is lit to almost uncomfortable brightness by bare bulbs in the ceiling.

So much registers on Aaron Jastrow’s consciousness, as in his detached and fatalistic frame of mind he murmurs Hebrew psalms, until physical discomfort erases his tightly controlled religious composure. The prisoners in stripes keep pushing the men farther and farther inside.
“Make room! Make room! All men to the back!”
He is being jammed against the clammy skin of other men taller than he is, a miserable sensation for a fastidious person; he can feel their soft genitals crushing against him. The women are coming in now, though Aaron can only hear them. He can see nothing but the naked bodies pressing in around him. Some children are bawling, some women weeping, and there are random forlorn shrieks amid distant German shouts of command. Also many women’s voices are soothing their children or greeting their men.

The crowding, ever tighter, throws panic into Jastrow. He cannot help it. He has always had a fear of crowds, a fear that he would die trampled or smothered. He absolutely cannot move, cannot see, can hardly breathe, packed in on all sides by naked strangers in a gymnasium reek, jammed against a chilly perforated iron pillar, directly under a light that shines in his face as an elbow jams under his chin and roughly forces his head up.

The light suddenly is extinguished. The whole place goes black. From far down the chamber comes a slam of heavy doors, a screech of iron bolts, turning and tightening. In the huge chamber a mournful general wail rises. Amid the wail there is terrific shrieking and yelling:
“The gas! The gas! They are killing us! Oh, God have mercy! The gas!”

Aaron smells it, strong, chokingly strong, the disinfectant smell, but far more powerful. It is coming from the iron pillar. The first whiff burns, stabbing into his lungs like a red-hot sword, shooting alarm through his frame, racking him with cramps. He tries in vain to shrink away from the pillar. All is howling chaos and terror in the dark. He gasps out a deathbed confession, or tries to, with congesting lungs, swelling mouth tissues, in breath-stopping
pain:
“The Lord is God. Blessed be His name for ever and ever. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One God.”
He falls to the cement. Writhing bodies pile on top of him, for he is one of the first adults to go down. He falls on his back, striking his head hard. Naked flesh presses on his face and all over him, stilling his contortions. He cannot move. He does not die of the gas. Very little enters his system. He goes almost at once, the life smothered out of him by the weight of dying Jews. Call it a blessing, for death by the gas can take a long time. The Germans allow a half hour for the process.

When the men in stripes pull apart the tangled dead mass, the sea of stiff human nakedness, and uncover him, his face is less contorted than others, though nobody notices one old thin dead body among thousands. Jastrow is dragged by a rubber-gloved Sonderkommando to a table in a mortuary where his gold-filled teeth are ripped out with pliers and dropped in a pail. This process goes on wholesale all over the mortuary, with the search of orifices and the cutting off of the women’s hair. He is then loaded on a hoist which is lifting bodies in assembly-line fashion to a hot room where a crowd of Sonderkommandos is busily at work at a row of furnaces. His body on an iron cradle, with two children’s bodies piled on top of him because he is so small, goes into an oven. The iron door with a glass peephole slams shut. The bodies rapidly swell and burst, and the flames burn the fragments like coal. Not until the next day are his ashes carted to the Vistula in a big truck loaded with human ash and bone fragments, and dumped into the river.

So the dissolved atoms of Aaron Jastrow float past the river banks of Medzice where he played as a boy, and float all the way through Poland, past Warsaw to the Baltic Sea. The diamonds he swallowed on the walk to the crematorium may have burned up, for diamonds burn. Or they may lie on the river bed of the Vistula. They were the finest stones, saved for an ultimate extremity, and he had meant to slip them to Natalie on the train. Their sudden parting prevented that, but the Germans never got them.

T
HE
turning earth brings the same bright moon over a low black vessel cutting through rough waters off Kyushu. Spray glitters up over the bridge as the
Barracuda
speeds toward a dawn attack on a Leyte Gulf cripple; a big fleet tanker screened by four escorts, crawling at nine knots and down hard by the bow. An Ultra dispatch has vectored the
Barracuda
to this limping ship, and the new captain’s test of fire is on. Tankers have become prime targets. The Japs cannot fight on without oil, and it all comes in by sea. Hence four escorts. A tough shot! Byron has rescued downed airmen, helped a grounded submarine free itself from a reef, and patrolled all during the battle with no results. He has yet to conduct an attack.

He and his exec are getting soaked by the cold spray. Lieutenant Philby wears foul-weather gear, but Byron has come topside for a look around at midnight in his khakis. He does not mind; the salt shower is cheering. On the sharp moonlit horizon the tanker is a smudge. The escorts are invisible.

“How are we doing?”

“Okay. We’ll be on station at 0500, if he doesn’t change course.”

The exec’s tone is reserved. He wanted to try a stern chase and a night attack up-moon. Had they done that they would now be in the approach phase. Byron doesn’t regret his decision for an end-around run; not yet. The enemy is holding course. If the sky had clouded over the night attack would have been chancy. Carter Aster always favored an approach on the bow with good visibility.

“Well, I’ll turn in, then. Call me at 0430.”

The skeptical squint on the exec’s wet face all but shouts,
Who are you kidding? Sleep before your first attack?

“Aye aye, sir.” A faint note of disapproval.

Byron is unoffended. Philby is a good exec, he has found. He hardly sleeps, he is getting ashen as a dead man, and he has the ship up to the mark in all departments. On torpedo maintenance and readiness he is red-hot. How he performs in an attack and holds up under depth charging is the real question. That will probably soon be clear.

Shucking off the wet uniform, Byron lies down in his cabin facing pictures of Natalie and Louis taped on the bulkhead. Often he no longer notices them; they have been there too long. Now he sees them afresh: the snapshots
from Rome and Theresienstadt, and a studio photograph of Natalie. The old aches throb. Are his wife and son still in the Czech town? Are they even alive? How beautiful she was; how he loved her! The memory of Louis is almost unbearable. Frustration has turned the love he felt for that boy to a festering grudge: at his father for driving Natalie to Europe, at her for her funk in Marseilles. And Dad’s involvement with Pamela Tudsbury…