Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Aunt Esther, where are we exactly? We only know we’re in Poland. If we ask the kapos anything, they just punch us.”

  “It’s called Oświęcim, an old cavalry barracks, but now it’s a city the Germans call Auschwitz. Women built it, in the winter. They gave them evening gowns to work in. None survived. This part is Brzezinka, what the Germans call Birkenau. Birchwood, like a nice resort.” Esther grinned for the first time. They could see that her teeth were badly decayed and in front two were missing, broken. “How old do you think I am?”

  Jacqueline felt a little embarrassed. She had always been told that her aunt Esther, the youngest of the girls, was only seven years older than she was, but that could not be. She shrugged.

  “I’m thirty. And they sterilized me. My hair all fell out. The hair grew back, not like my womb. Have your periods stopped yet?”

  Daniela and Jacqueline nodded.

  “Everybody says it’s drugs, bromide, but maybe it’s just because you’re starving.” Esther motioned them back into the barracks and sidled off into the rain that made oily puddles on the ground.

  Jacqueline put on the boots at once. She would barter the clogs for bread to someone whose clogs had been stolen. Maybe next Sunday Aunt Esther would come back with boots for Daniela.

  Two days later—they were still keeping track of time then—they were among a group of women ordered to strip naked and march out before a group of the SS and men in business suits, who were joking together. Jacqueline had already adopted a technique to survive the stripping and the poking, the whipping and slashing. She imagined that her body was hidden inside an imitation body. The men could only see the imitation rubber body, but she was the bones hidden inside that they could not see or touch. At night in the bunk she had whispered that to Daniela, but one of the other women of the six who lay flesh to flesh in their narrow wooden bunk had heard and said, “Your bones? Ha, they can break them. And when they have burnt the flesh off, they grind them into bonemeal for fertilizer.” Jacqueline told the woman to shut up or she would knock her out of the bunk. It wasn’t for several weeks that she found out the story was true.

  By that time they were working as slaves for Krupp, making grenades. Every morning they were wakened at four A.M. and stood on appel and every morning some women fell and were kicked to death or simply left on the field to be carted off in the trucks that daily took the dead, the dying to the crematoria. They did each wear one boot at appel. Daniela could not cram her foot all the way into the boot, but she could get it on enough to stand in it, to keep one foot warm.

  Every day and every night the sky was red with flames, while heavy ash filtered down on them. The crematoria could not cope with all those gassed, for the Germans had grabbed the Jews of Hungary and were shipping them in the hundreds of thousands into the gas chambers. Every night large piles of bodies were burned in enormous pyres all around the camp, because the crematoria were overloaded. Ash fell from the sky like oily black snow. The stench of burned flesh hung in the air with the stench of decay. Sometimes half an inch of ash lay on everything.

  In these barracks they slept only four to a bunk, Daniela and herself and two Hungarian Jews, a young girl named Rysia who spoke some French, and a young married woman Tovah who spoke only Hungarian and Yiddish. In the hour between the evening appel, the hours of standing in the square, and lights out, as the women were picking lice from each other, anyone who knew a poem recited it or they talked of food. It did not matter what language the poems were in, the women wanted them again and again. The women who knew the most recipes and could best describe them were in great demand. Rysia, who had helped her mother do the cooking for the inn and for her large family—of which only she remained—was particularly valued for her veal paprikash and her cherry strudel.

  She can make you taste it, the women said. Mix the pastry again, Rysikela. Describe how the cherries smell. Rysia, who had done the same heavy labor all day as the rest of them and been marched to the factory seven kilometers through the increasing cold and back again, who had been fed only the same slice of adulterated bread and coffee imitation and worked a twelve-hour day on that, who had stood the appel for two hours that morning and two hours that night and been hit with a rifle butt four times on the trot back from the factory, who had for supper only a small bowl of watery turnip soup, put her last energy into creating for the other women fantasies of food. Rysia was only fifteen, but she had a woman’s strength and stamina. Tovah had just turned twenty-one. Her family had owned a vineyard and made sweet red kosher wine. Her husband had come into the business and had just been learning how to graft vines. When she arrived, she was a dark plump woman. Now she was wan and lean.

  Rysia looked like all the rest: gaunt, hollow-bodied, with a shaven head and huge staring eyes, a mangy ghost. Her hair had been red, she told them. Her mother had run a country inn, a restaurant with a few rooms upstairs, and her father operated a mill. Rysia spoke German, French and a little Russian as well as Hungarian and Yiddish. She considered herself uneducated, but she was quick. Daniela and Jacqueline had begun giving lessons, Daniela in Hebrew and Jacqueline in English. It was forbidden and they would be killed if anyone betrayed them, but the women loved the lessons. It took their minds off the hunger, off the terror, off the pain. “To learn,” said one big rawboned woman who had been a laboratory technician, “it’s to feel human briefly.” Most of the women chose to study either English or Hebrew, but some insisted on learning both. Friday nights they tried to burn candles of rags or scraps stolen under pain of death from the factory. One woman led prayers for them in Yiddish, which Jacqueline was picking up more every day. Sometimes Daniela would pray in Hebrew as she lit the imitation candles, covering her eyes. Sometimes they had nothing to light at all, no little flame to ignite against death.

  By now they knew that Tovah was pregnant. Mengele had not caught her on the way in. She would have gone straight to the gas, or else to his experiments. He liked to cut open pregnant women, or experiment with the effects of starvation on the fetus or the newborn child. It could take them quite a while to die, the mothers even longer.

  Typhus, diphtheria, cholera were epidemic in the camp and killed hundreds daily. Sometimes marching to work they saw the men, who looked just like them, except that they wore pajamas instead of shifts. Starved, with shaven heads, they all looked the same, forced to run at the same SS trot, double time, carrying heavy loads, hundred-pound bags of cement. At the factory she could see no difference between the Krupp guards and the SS. When the women went once a day to the latrines, they were forced to run across the courtyard and if they moved too slowly, the factory people turned freezing water on them. Still they could mutter to each other. The slaves taught each other how to turn the heads on the grenades so they would misfire, and then to put the good ones on top. There were tens of thousands of women and men slaving for companies that clustered around the pool of labor in the camps, labor they paid nothing and could work to death.

  One night Tovah gave birth. Daniela assisted her. Daniela held her hand across Tovah’s mouth. If they were caught, they would all be sent to the gas chamber. It was a long birth. All the women who could endure to, watched, held her hand, wiped her brow with their filthy shifts. At last he was born, the little morsel, tiny but vibrantly alive. The kapo, who was going along with this, said, “Don’t give him to her, or she’ll never let go.” That would mean death for both.

  Daniela wrapped the baby in a torn rag from a woman who had died and the kapo put the little boy outside to die. A freezing rain fell. It should not take long. They tended Tovah as well as they could on the mud floor. Daniela slipped out into the night, where she would be shot if seen, and when she came back, she was plastered with mud. Jacqueline understood and kissed her. Daniela was shivering, but could not cry. They were kept raging with thirst and had no tears. Their ducts were inflamed and dry.

  In the next selection Tovah was taken. The SS woman said she looked unhealthy. She went off with
the women chosen to die without saying a word, without saying good-bye.

  Rumors ran through the camp like disease. How can we go on? Jacqueline wondered, plodding through the freezing rain. This was a cold damp place, breeding chills and fevers, but if you could not work, you would be selected at once to die. She looked about her, cautiously, as they plodded in torn dirty rags down the road, always told to hurry, mach schnell, mach schnell, schwinehund. Random blows. Some days began with one or the other of them getting it in the head or the back or across the breasts when they marched out of the barracks, when they lined up for appel, when they lined up for their three minutes maximum in the wallow of the latrine, when they were marched to the factory through the fog that stank for miles of burning flesh. The grimy freezing grey rain was like universal pneumonia, a mucous discharge of the atmosphere.

  Daniela was a bony witch with immense eyes under a grey shaved skull, nose and chin protruding like an old woman’s. She could imagine what she herself looked like. Boils and open sores covered their arms and legs. They stank from diarrhea because they all had dysentery. The smells, nobody got used to them, the fearful stench of sick unwashed starving bodies and piled-up waste, of shit and blood and fear.

  She could remember when they had first arrived in this place, this vast city of death and slave labor that the German SS men and women called Birkenau, she and Daniela had stared at the musselmen, at the apathetic creatures that had no flesh left, only ropy tendons and bones under the discolored greenish skin. They had felt revulsion. How could people let themselves become like that? Now she knew. Daniela and Rysia and she were still active, still moving, but they had become as frightful as those scarecrows they had turned from when they first arrived.

  How long could they survive? She asked this of herself coldly as she worked at her machine. How long could they continue to work while starving? How long? One day when Daniela had been pulled from her machine and beaten by four Estonians who were working for the SS, because the machine had broken down and she had not made her quota, she collapsed in the column marching back. Jacqueline saw her start to fall and moved sideways, hissing at Rysia, who blocked Daniela’s fall with her shoulder as they trotted on five abreast, as they were always made to march. The guard they called Slasher was amusing himself kicking a child who had fallen and missed Daniela’s misstep. With Daniela between them, they shouldered her along until they were safe in the barracks.

  That night Rysia cried. When Jacqueline, who had been trying to ease Daniela’s welts and open wounds, asked her why, Rysia said, “You love each other so much. With my mother dead, nobody will ever love me like that.”

  Daniela raised her bruised head, her nostrils still caked with blood they had no water to wash off. “Rysia, we will make you our sister too. Yes, we will.”

  Jacqueline cupped the high-domed skull of the girl, encrusted as were all their scalps with running sores, and caressed what would have been her hair. “We’ll be family.”

  “After the war, my darlings, my sweet ones, after the war,” Daniela intoned through swollen lips.

  “When we are liberated,” Jacqueline said. “When we escape.”

  “Then we will eat enough, we will eat chicken roasted and gedempte flaisch and as much as we want until we are full,” Rysia whispered. “We will have a warm bath and clean clothes and underwear and real shoes on our feet, with stockings. We will sleep on clean sheets in feather beds.”

  “After the war,” Daniela intoned, “we will go to Eretz Yisroel and we will live together in a house and raise apricots, there, where the sun shines and it’s warm. We will have chickens and sheep and a rosebush with red roses and one with yellow roses. No one will ever again call us dirty Jews. No one will make laws against us, ever again.”

  “Chickens! Eggs … real eggs …” Rysia intoned, cuddling up to Daniela as gently as she could in the narrow wooden bunk.

  “Roast lamb,” Jacqueline whispered, “and clean warm water and roses on the table.” Why should she argue anymore? She had nothing to go back to. She had only Daniela and Rysia. She would agree to dream about Palestine. At least there it must be warm.

  Every day she dragged herself from the crowded cage of plank bed, aching, feverish and thought she could not stand the stench, the noise, could not endure her own bag of bones wrapped in a foul scabby rag of skin, could not endure the pain in her vitals, could not endure working past the dropping point, the poison of permanent exhaustion that drained even the minerals from the bones, could not endure the fear jabbing their bellies, the hatred, the unending vicious petty and horizon-vast hatred.

  To Daniela and Rysia she whispered, “I will not hate myself because I stink. I will not hate myself because I have no hair. I will not hate myself when they force me to run naked across the yard. I will not hate myself because diarrhea runs down my legs and they won’t let us wash. I will live and tell the world about this. I will live and make them pay.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” Rysia mouthed back.

  “Yes.” She told her the story of rescuing Daniela, while Daniela herself listened with shock and dismay.

  “You should not talk of that here,” Daniela whispered, deeply upset.

  “Here is precisely where I should talk about it. And remember.”

  “I will think about it all day,” Rysia whispered. “Better than food.”

  On October 7, an explosion shook the camp and shots followed. In the morning they were kept standing at appel for hours. Word came through the grapevine, muttered without movement of lips. There had been a revolt of the Sonderkommando: the men who shoveled the corpses out of the gas chambers and loaded them in the crematoria. They were to be gassed, as happened to each batch finally, but this group revolted. Some women from the munitions factory had smuggled powder to them and they had made bombs. They had managed to kill some of the SS, nobody knew how many, but as they stood in the appel, Jacqueline looked sideways out of the corner of her eye at Daniela and blinked her pleasure and Daniela signaled back. They had to be extra careful because Slasher was prowling this morning and the SS female commandant was pacing before the rows, pulling out victims to kill. She had a way of wetting her lips when she was about to seize a victim, as if she could taste her. All the women of the Krupp factory were punished, randomly beaten, their food withheld, but four were taken away to torture.

  They heard that the model ghetto Terezín in Czechoslovakia, often shown off to the Red Cross (who maintained Jews were simple criminal prisoners and not prisoners of war, and thus refused to help), had been largely emptied. The inhabitants were arriving but nobody got to meet them, because on October 28, which was the Czech equivalent of 14 juillet, they were gassed. The guards made jokes. The execution was arranged to celebrate Czech independence day.

  The women who had been tortured from their factory had not broken and had given no names. One morning all the women were kept standing, soiling themselves as they could not help by the fifth hour, until the women from the munitions factory were marched in, mangled, bloody, to be hung before them. Nobody cheered because there had been an incident like that once and a machine gun had been turned on the whole block. Hanging is no worse than being gassed, she told herself. We’ll find their names and remember.

  The next day at appel it was snowing and they stood, many of them barefoot, on the frozen earth. Winter was coming. She began to understand that for all they had been through, the worst was yet to come. That night she asked the woman who had survived the longest, a woman who had been working first in the mines and now at Krupp since November of 1943, “Now that winter’s coming, will they give us at least coats? Or stockings? Or blankets?” By now she could make herself understood in Yiddish.

  The woman who was only twenty-four, she told them, just laughed. She opened her brown toothless gums and laughed.

  MURRAY 4

  The Agon

  Landing on the beach at Tinian, Murray was hit with a .38 bullet that lacerated his shoulder and cut the arter
y. It was the same damned shoulder that had taken a piece of shrapnel on Saipan. He must lead with it. He missed the fighting on Tinian, but then his regiment joined him on Saipan.

  The 8th Marines received replacements just drafted, kids of eighteen. They also got new officers and NCOs to replace those killed or badly wounded. Jack and Murray had both been made corporals and Reardon, promoted to sergeant major, encouraged them to snap in for sergeant. He liked them both, if only because they’d been through so much. They weren’t regular marines, but they were old marines by present standards, and they could be counted on to help break in the kids. Zeeland was gunnery sergeant now.

  Fox Company got a new second looey and a new sergeant. Sergeant Hickock had been with the outfit on Guadalcanal, before Murray had been assigned, then hospitalized with a leg wound. He had been with Baker Company that caught bad casualties on Tinian. Murray had seen Sergeant Hickock once or twice but had little impression of him except that he was regular marines, about thirty and a southerner, handsome, blond and square-jawed. He had a wife back in Columbia, South Carolina, and two boys, Lee and Jefferson.

  He learned something else quickly about Sergeant Hickock. “Feldstein. What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s my father’s name, sir.”

  “It’s a Jew-name, that’s what it is.” The man was smiling thinly, looking around for support. What he mainly met was indifference. “Isn’t it? You’re a Jew-boy.”

  “You could see that on my dog tag. It’s no secret. Sir.” Murray felt himself heating, shame, anger, helplessness.

  “I thought they kept Jews and niggers out of the Marines. How’d you sneak in?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer, but he did. He repeated his question.

  “I joined.”

  “Maybe they needed somebody to clean out the latrines, to lick them clean. We all know who started this war and who’s too yellow to fight it.”