by Herman Wouk
Her uncle has a different experience.
He knows from Berel’s revelations the precise fate that awaits him. In his final entry in A Jew’s Journey, Aaron has recorded an almost Socratic acceptance of death, but this serenity is hard to sustain on a three-day train trip toward extermination by poison gas. Socrates, it will be recalled, drank the hemlock and faded off after a short noble discourse to sorrowing and admiring disciples. Jastrow has no disciples, but A Jew’s Journey — though he has secreted it behind the planks of the library wall in Theresienstadt, with no hope of living until it is found — is addressed to an audience too, its eventual readers; and Jastrow, a writer to the core, has left the noblest last words he could muster. Thereafter, however, he remains very much alive, and the trip is long.
Seventeen Prominente are crammed with him into two rear compartments of the coach in which the SS rides. It is very close quarters. They must take turns standing and sitting, dozing when they can. They are fed watery soup and stale bread at night, one cup of brown slop in the morning. For a half hour each morning they have access to a toilet, which they must then scrub and disinfect, ceiling to floor, for German use. It is not first-class travel. Still, compared with their fellows in the cattle cars they are well off, and they know it.
That is, in fact, Jastrow’s torment. The privileged coach ride gnaws at his fatalistic serenity. Can there be any hope? Certainly the seventeen others think so. They talk of little else, day and night, but the positive aspects of their favored treatment. Those who have wives and children in other cars are optimistic even about them. True, the train evidently is not heading for Dresden. But wherever it is going, on this transport Prominente remain Prominente. That’s the main thing! Once at their destination, they will manage to look after their loved ones.
Common sense warns Aaron Jastrow that the coach ride can be more sadistic German foolery, or a bureaucratic mischance, or a calculated move to keep out of the cattle cars personages around whom a spark of resistance might flicker. But it is hard to hold out against the desperate ebullience of the others. He too yearns to live. These seventeen cultivated, highly superior men can argue persuasively: three Elders, two rabbis, a symphony conductor, a painter, a concert pianist, a newspaper publisher, three doctors, two army officers with war wounds, two half-Jewish industrialists, and the head of the Transport Section, a bitter-faced little Berlin lawyer, who alone does not talk to the others or even look at them. Nobody knows how he fell afoul of his bosses.
Except for one guard posted outside their compartments, the Germans pay no attention whatever to the Jews. Riding in the SS car, however great a privilege, is unnerving. Jews are usually quarantined from this elite like diseased animals. They can smell the hearty meals brought on board for the SS. At night jolly songs drunkenly roar out in the car, and loud arguments go on, sometimes sounding ugly. This Teutonic boisterousness close at hand makes the Prominente shudder, for at any time it can occur to the SS to work off their boredom by making sport with Jews.
Late on the second night, the SS men are beerily bellowing the Horst Wessel song, and Jastrow is remembering the first time he heard it, in Munich in the mid-thirties. Those early feelings flood over him. Ridiculous though he thought the Nazis were then, their song did embody a certain elemental German wistfulness; and now that he is probably about to die at their hands he can still hear that simple romantic Heimweh in this discordant chorus. The compartment door bursts open. The guard shouts, “The stinking Jew Jastrow! To compartment number four!” He is shocked into shivery alertness. With long faces the other Jews make way. He goes, the guard tramping behind him.
In compartment four, a gray-headed SS officer with a gross double chin, sitting with several other officers drinking schnapps, tells him to stand there and listen. This SS man is discoursing on a comparison of the Seven Years’ War and World War II, pointing out the comforting analogies between Hitler and Frederick the Great. Both wars show, he argues, how a small disciplined nation under a great warlord can hold its own against a huge shaky coalition led by mediocrities. Frederick made brilliant use of diplomatic surprise just like the Führer; he always attacked first; time after time he reversed what looked like sure defeat by iron willpower; and in the end, the sudden death of Elizabeth of Russia gave him the break he needed for a favorable peace. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill are all elderly ailing men of unhealthy habits. The death of any one of them could similarly explode the coalition overnight, says the grayhead. The other officers are most impressed, looking at each other and wisely nodding.
Abruptly he says to Jastrow, “They tell me you are a famous American historian. You must be familiar with all this.”
The eighteenth century is not Jastrow’s field, but he knows Carlyle’s work on Frederick. “Ach, ja! Carlyle!” exclaims the gray-headed officer, encouraging him to proceed. Aaron says that the two wars are indeed amazingly similar; that Hitler seems an absolute reincarnation of Frederick the Great; and that the death of Elizabeth of Russia certainly was a providential break, such as could happen any day in this war. When he is dismissed, he returns to his compartment full of disgust with himself. But the guard brings him a roll and sausage which he gives to the others to share out, and that makes him feel better.
Next morning the gray-headed officer summons him again, this time for a private talk, just the two of them. He seems quite senior and quite sure of himself; he allows Jastrow to sit down, something unheard of for a Jew in an SS presence. He once taught history, he says, but a scheming Jew got a university professorship he was in line for, ruining his career. Puffing on heavy cigars, he treats Aaron to a three-hour pedantic harangue on the probable political structure of German Europe for the next three or four centuries, branching off into Germany’s world leadership, quoting authors back to Plutarch and comparing Hitler to such great men as Lycurgus, Solon, Mohammed, Cromwell, and Darwin. Aaron has only to listen and nod. In a way this drivel is a diversion from the waves of fear and uncertainty about oncoming death which have been plaguing him like migraine. Dismissed, he receives another sausage and roll in the compartment, which he shares out again. He sees the grayhead no more. Once the train enters Poland, and the names of the towns they pass draw an arrow toward Auschwitz, Aaron finds himself wishing for some such distraction, even a rowdy SS songfest to kill the nerve-wracking hours. But this day the Germans have fallen silent.
Only when he descends on the Birkenau ramp does Aaron fully grasp what he has been spared so far. Standing huddled with the Prominente beyond the floodlights, he sees at a distance the detraining — the terrorized leaping, falling, and milling about of the Jews, the casual tossing out of bodies and luggage by bald-skulled prisoners in stripes, the long row the corpses make laid out along the platform; especially the far-stretching separate line of children’s bodies, which the unloaders throw about like sawdust dolls. He looks for Natalie in the floodlight glare. Once or twice he thinks he sees her. But more than two thousand Jews have poured out of all those cattle cars. They crowd the long platform, lining up in fives under the shouts and club blows of the Germans, the men separately from the women and children. It is hard to be sure of anybody’s identity in that confused mass of drooping heads.
After this first violent and noisy ejection of the Jews from the train, the scene on the ramp for a while looks tame and tedious, reminding Jastrow queerly of his own family’s disembarkation at night from the steerage of a Polish ship at Ellis Island amid a throng of shabby Jewish immigrants. Uniformed officials strut about under floodlights now as then, shouting orders. The new arrivals, bewildered and helpless in a foreign place, stand and wait for something to happen. But at Ellis Island there were no dogs, no machine guns, and no rows of the dead.
In fact, something is happening. The living and the dead are being counted, to confirm that as many passengers arrived as departed. The SS pays a group fare to the Reichsbahn for every Jew transported to Oswiecim, and bookkeeping must be punctilious. Separated by sexes, the Jews stand
quietly five abreast in two dark queues all the way down the track. The baldheads in stripes have time to empty the cars and stack all the belongings on the platform.
These make enormous mounds. The stuff looks like the rubbish of beggars, but Jastrow can guess what wealth may be hidden there. The Jews find desperate ways to carry a remnant of their lives’ earnings with them, and it is all hidden in those shabby piles or concealed on their bodies. Knowing what lies in store for him, Aaron Jastrow has left his money belt behind the wall in Theresienstadt with the manuscript of A Jew’s Journey. Let the finders have both, and may their hands not be German! Berel’s description of the looting of the dead in Auschwitz gave Aaron Jastrow his first slippery grip on the crazy massacre. Murder for plunder is an ancient risk Jewry runs; the innovation of National Socialism is only to organize it as an industrial process. Well, the Germans may kill him but they will not plunder him.
The women’s line at last begins to move. Now Jastrow sees before his eyes the process that Berel described. SS officers are separating the Jewesses into two lines. One tall thin officer seems to be making the final decision with a flick of a hand, left or right. It all goes in a quiet matter-of-fact official manner. The talk of the Germans, the rare yap of a dog, and hissing bursts of steam from the cooling locomotive are all one hears.
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 pe
rforated 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!”