The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  Christine sat back in her chair, her hunger gone, replaced by something hard and vile. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’ve told people,” he said. “I’ve risked my life to let everyone know what the Nazis are doing. I’ve told the press attaché at the Swiss Legation in Berlin, the coadjutor of the Catholic Bishop of Berlin. I’ve told several doctors and the Dutch underground. But nothing has happened. Just this morning, on the train back from Berlin, I ran into the Secretary to the Swedish Legation in Berlin. We talked for hours. I begged him to tell his government about the atrocities.”

  Christine remained silent, trying to decide if he was telling the truth, trying to decide if the pained look on his face was from sorrow or guilt.

  “I don’t think he believed me,” the Lagerkommandant said. “I sobbed like a child in front of the man. I pleaded for him to make it known to the Allies. He kept telling me to keep my voice down. I’m sure he thinks me mad.” He closed his eyes, the empty glass teetering to one side in his hand. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Christine stared at the wineglass on the linen tablecloth, pinpoints of light from the chandelier above the table reflecting off the crystal. She thought about what this scene would look like to an outsider: her sitting with an SS officer in her dirty uniform and shorn head, dirt and grime caked to her thin legs, the room filled with expensive paintings, Persian rugs, and cherry furniture, a plate of duck on the table in front of her. She felt like she’d gone mad.

  “May I be excused, Herr Lagerkommandant?” she said in a weak voice. He didn’t answer. She stood and reached for the glass in his hand. He sat forward and grabbed her wrist.

  “I’m telling you this for a reason!” he said, the veins on his forehead bulging. “Bitte, sit down! Just let me get this off my chest!” Christine did as she was told, sitting on the edge of the chair, and he let go. He took a deep breath and smoothed the front of his uniform. “Will you at least listen to me? Bitte?”

  “Ja, Herr Lagerkommandant.”

  “If you survive this, you’re a witness too. Tell them that not everyone agreed with what was being done here. There are men here who have been turned by the evil that surrounds them. Their hearts have been plowed open to reveal the rotten soil of their souls. On the other hand, I have guards asking to be transferred to the Russian front, where they know they would die, but they would choose that, rather than assist the insanity within these walls.” He pressed his palms to his temples, as if his thoughts were already driving him insane. “It’s amazing what some will do just to stay alive. I have prisoners willing to save themselves by shoving the dead bodies of their fellow Jews into the fires.”

  She wanted to escape into the kitchen. He looked at her, a man condemned to hell on earth, his face pleading with her to understand. Earlier, she’d placed an open bottle of red wine on the table, unaware that he’d intended on drinking the cognac. Now, he reached for it, his cheeks and forehead crimson, and filled his glass.

  “For some who are committing these evil crimes, and for those of us who allow it to happen, the reality of what we are doing is obscured by the furious turnings of war.” He set down the bottle and drank the wine from the glass. “It will be later, when this war has ended, when we go home, when we sit at the dinner table in our comfortable houses, after we kiss our wives good night, it will be then that we will dread the night. We know what visions will rise from the depths of our guilty minds. It will haunt us until the end of our days, and we’ll surely be spending eternity at Hitler’s side in hell. All of Germany will pay for our sins. You wait and see. Yet brutal actions become war crimes only if you lose.”

  Christine stared at him, speechless. He refilled his glass and sighed. “There. I’ve said my piece.” He motioned toward the plate of food in front of her. “You must eat.”

  “I . . . I’d rather not.”

  “As you wish. Eat it later, then. In the kitchen.”

  Christine stood.

  He got to his feet, swaying and hunched over like an old man. When he teetered, Christine caught him by the arm, helped him back into his chair, and took the wineglass.

  “I guess I can’t drink like I used to,” he said.

  “You drank the entire bottle of cognac, Herr Lagerkommandant.”

  He looked toward the table with unfocused eyes. “So I did,” he said. “Fetch me a cigar, would you?” Christine went to the buffet, opened the wooden humidor, picked out a cigar, and put it in his hand. She retrieved matches and lit it for him. Stale smoke filled the room. He watched her clear the table, his eyelids heavy. When she came back from the kitchen a third time to pick up the glasses and silverware, he was half asleep in his chair. She took the cigar and put it out in an ashtray. He startled her by speaking.

  “Will you do something for me?”

  “What is it, Herr Lagerkommandant?”

  “If something happens to me, will you promise to remember my name? Will you let everyone know that I tried to stop it?”

  Christine thought for a minute, then decided to risk it. “I’ll do that for you if you do something for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “The man I love is here. Find out where Isaac Bauerman is, and if he’s still alive, promise me he’ll stay that way.”

  He sighed. “It’s not that simple. I can’t just search for a certain prisoner without arousing suspicion. The other officers are just waiting for me to slip up so they can get rid of me. The previous Lagerkommandant used to throw drunken parties in this house. He provided them with liquor and prostitutes and let them have their way with the woman you replaced. They killed the one before her.”

  Christine felt the blood drain from her face. If something happened to the Lagerkommandant, then what would become of her? All of a sudden, she felt like she had to choose between Isaac’s life and her own. “But I need to know if he’s all right,” she said, her voice catching.

  “Even if I was able to find out if he’s still alive without drawing suspicion, there’s nothing I can do to keep him that way.”

  Eventually, Christine lost track of how much time had passed. Each long day blurred into the next. A late Indian summer had passed into a chilly fall. She’d cleaned up the garden and tended a second planting of lettuce, chard, and peas. The garden flourished, and the Lagerkommandant told her that the other officers were pleased.

  While working outside, she tried not to look toward the crematorium, but she always looked once, when she first went out, then vowed not to look again. It was foolish hope that made her look at all—hope that one day she would see empty space where the line of people had been. But day after day, the procession of victims grew longer and wider.

  If nothing else, she’d seen the stealthy progression of her time in prison in the mirror above the Lagerkommandant’s bathroom sink. Each time she checked, her cheekbones were more pronounced and the purple rings beneath her eyes were darker. Her eyebrows and eyelashes started falling out, and her skin paled to a chalky, ashen gray. She felt it in her body too, in her weakening arms, the ache in her hips and knees, the shake in her disappearing muscles, and the raw sores on her feet.

  To make matters worse, there’d been no news of Isaac, from Hanna or the Lagerkommandant.

  Now, the long, fall days had turned frigid, and she’d already harvested the last potatoes, piling them into crates and taking them into the cellar. Outside the camp, beyond the barbed wire coils and high fence, past the fields rolling out toward the edge of the forest, the leaves were gone from the trees. The sun was high and distant, the skies a brilliant, icy blue. At night, it was freezing, and the women shivered in their bunks. Christine feared the coming winter.

  The first hard frost made its appearance in the wee hours of a long night, killing off the last of the garden. The morning after was bright and blustery, and Christine shivered, working fast on her hands and knees, yanking withered tomato vines out of the soggy soil. The leaves were black and dead, and it filled Christine with sorrow to pull
them from the earth. It felt like a sign, a terrible omen that Isaac was dead. When she pulled out the last wilted vine, the thought of it suddenly overwhelmed her. She stopped working and hung her head.

  Then something hard hit her in the middle of her back. She sat up and looked behind her, the wind stinging her eyes. No one was there. Again, an object hit her. She flinched, then heard a flat plop as something landed in the soil. There, on the ground in front of her, was a small stone, like a round, brown egg, nestled in the mud. She stood and looked around.

  A hundred yards away, on the men’s side of the fence, a group of men had started working, carrying boards and pushing wheelbarrows. A solitary man stood next to the fence, looking at her. Like every other prisoner, he was bony, filthy, and bald. At first, she wasn’t sure what to make of him. Then he smiled and gave a quick wave, and her legs nearly gave out. It was Isaac. Her hands flew to her mouth. Inwardly, she shouted his name, her body aching to run over, to reach through the fence and caress his face. But she only raised her hand briefly, then quickly put it back down, aware that the guards could be watching.

  Isaac went back to work with the other men, building some sort of structure near the rear of the men’s complex. He bent over to saw a board in half, glancing over at her every few seconds. Christine wiped her hands on her uniform, then walked on shaking legs to the edge of the enclosure that surrounded the house. She knelt, pretending to pull weeds along the edge of the fence. There were two guards with the men, but they were smoking cigarettes and trying to stay warm, their backs turned to the harsh wind, the collars of their jackets pulled up around their necks. Their backs were turned to her and the prisoners.

  Christine stood, went into the house, ran to the kitchen, and took off her shoes. She put a slice of bread in one shoe and a wedge of cheese in the other, then carried them out to the front porch. She went into the yard and stood by the front gate, her eyes on the guards, her heart knocking hard against her chest. For a split second, the world reeled in front of her, as if she had just stepped off a spinning carousel and was still dizzy. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Now, the guards were building a fire in a barrel, preoccupied with using their bodies to block the growing flames from the wind. She put her shoes in one hand, ready to drop them and put them on again at any second, then opened the gate and walked as fast as she could without running toward the interior fence, her eyes darting between Isaac and the guards huddled around the barrel.

  When Isaac saw her coming, he shook his head back and forth. She ignored his warning and pointed at her shoes, then at him, then motioned for him to move closer to the fence. He glanced at the guards, trying to decide, then hesitantly took several steps in her direction, a piece of lumber in his hand. When she was within a few feet of the fence, they were barely three yards apart. Now she was close enough to see the grayish-yellow color of his skin, the scrapes and bruises on his face and hands, the stains on his uniform. But his eyes were shining, and his smile was bright. The other male prisoners saw her too, but they kept working, trying not to draw attention. If the guards were provoked, all of them could pay.

  Christine felt a charge course through her body. She pushed the bread and cheese through the wire, then turned away, her shoes held fast to her chest. Glancing over her shoulder as she went back toward the house, she saw Isaac drop the plank on the ground. He bent over, picked up the food with the board, took a bite of cheese, and shoved the rest into the ankles of his boots. Then he turned and went back to work, the guards oblivious, warming their hands over the fire. She returned to the garden and took her time pulling the rest of the dead plants. They watched each other until Christine had to go in to prepare the Lagerkommandant’s Mittag Essen. For the rest of the afternoon, she checked out the window as she worked and kept finding reasons to go outside.

  When she left that evening, the men were gone, returned to their barracks for the night. She could hardly wait to get back herself, to tell Hanna that Isaac was alive. But Hanna was nowhere to be found. Christine climbed on the edge of the wooden rack to ask the women on the top bunk, one of whom worked in the records department, if they knew anything.

  “Do you know where Hanna is?”

  “Nein,” the woman from the records department said.

  “You didn’t see anything?” Christine asked.

  “You’re the Lagerkommandant’s whore,” the woman hissed. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Christine felt blood rise in her face. “I’m not . . . I just work there. I . . .”

  The woman moved closer, and Christine’s nostrils filled with the sour stench of tooth decay. “The Blockschreiber dragged her out of the building. He caught her looking through the male prisoners’ files.”

  Christine forgot how to breathe. It took a moment before she could speak. “Is there any way you can find out what happened to her?”

  “Nein,” the woman said. “Leave me alone.”

  Numb, Christine climbed down and crawled into her bunk, Hanna’s cold, empty space beside her.

  The next day, Christine carried the Lagerkommandant’s poached eggs into the dining room, trying to choose her words carefully. Between her elation at finding Isaac alive, and the guilt for whatever had happened to Hanna, she hadn’t slept at all. Now, she didn’t trust herself with the smallest of tasks, let alone trying to ask the Lagerkommandant for help. If she made him angry, as she had the first time she’d asked him to find Isaac, the conversation would be over. But that had been months ago; surely their relationship had changed.

  He was at the breakfast table, peering over his reading glasses at the newspaper. The morning sun cast rectangles of light across the linen, illuminating the steam from his coffee and the smoke from his cigar, like wispy spiderwebs floating in the air.

  “A friend of mine disappeared yesterday, Herr Lagerkommandant,” she said.

  The Lagerkommandant kept his eyes on the paper. “Ja,” he said, moving his head up and down as he skimmed the headlines.

  “I wish I knew what might have happened to her.”

  The Lagerkommandant pushed his glasses back on his nose and looked up, his face hard. “If you haven’t seen her, I doubt you will.”

  “I’m sorry, Herr Lagerkommandant. But that’s not entirely true. I saw Isaac just yesterday. After all this time, he’s alive.”

  “So. Now you know. Good for you.”

  “But Hanna could be alive somewhere too.”

  The Lagerkommandant shook his head and sighed, disgusted. “How long have you been here?”

  “I’m not sure, Herr Lagerkommandant,” she said. “Several months.”

  “And have you ever known anyone to return once they’ve disappeared in this godforsaken place?”

  “Nein, Herr Lagerkommandant.” She lowered her eyes, knowing she had to ask him one more thing. She cleared her throat and went on. “Isaac is working at the new construction site on the other side of the fence.” The Lagerkommandant dropped the newspaper and took off his glasses, then rubbed his eyes and looked at her, waiting, his mouth pressed into a line. “I was hoping he could be given a different job. In a factory maybe, or the kitchen, somewhere out of the damp and cold. He’s very smart, a quick learner, and . . .”

  The Lagerkommandant slammed both hands on the table. The silverware rattled, and Christine jumped. He stood, and his chair fell over. “One more word,” he said, his voice quaking with anger, “and you will be finished here! I’ve told you once, and I’m not going to tell you again! I will not put myself on the line for anyone, let alone someone who wasn’t smart enough to keep out of trouble in the first place! If you say one more thing about you and your friends to me, it will give me a reason to prove to the other officers that I’m a loyal Nazi. I’ll have all three of you strung up by the front gates! Do you understand?”

  “Ja, Herr Lagerkommandant,” Christine said, stepping backwards. “I’m sorry, Herr Lagerkommandant.”

  The Lagerkommandant grabbed his hat from the table, yanked his
uniform jacket from the back of his toppled chair, and walked out of the room. Christine stood motionless for a long time, staring at the sun-filled breakfast table, tears streaming down her face. Then she picked up the chair, cleared the table, and got back to work.

  For the next two weeks, Christine saw Isaac working at the construction site every day. The guards assigned to watch over the prisoners were nearly always distracted. If the weather was cold, they bent over a fire barrel. If it was warmer, they played cards. When they weren’t looking, she threw potatoes over the fence or got close enough to shove more bread or cheese through the wires. They didn’t speak, but seeing Isaac alive reinforced her will to survive. Then, after two short weeks, the project was finished, and the men didn’t return.

  By that time, the biting wind spit dry snow, and the low, ashen clouds moved swiftly through the somber winter sky. Within a month, a blanket of white shrouded the countryside, and the world seemed to be waiting in an expectant, hushed silence. The pounding chug of incoming trains echoed off the snowbound hills, amplified by the cold and stillness as if transmitted through a thousand loudspeakers. As the trains drew closer and closer to the gates of Dachau, each mighty, lumbering exhale of the slowing engines sounded to Christine like the final, dying breath of humanity.

  Throughout the long, cold months, Christine persevered. If nothing else, the job at the Lagerkommandant’s had surely saved her life. The extra food and the warmth of the house made all the difference. She was able to wash the sores on her feet and use the toilet, which meant she didn’t have to wade in the filthy ditches where the other prisoners were forced to relieve themselves. As a result, she avoided the ravages of dysentery that spread through the camp. Even so, her nights were spent in the freezing barracks, and a rattling cough had settled deep in her chest by the end of winter. Her nose seemed to run continuously, and she was exhausted due to lack of sleep. But she wasn’t close to death as so many others were. The majority of the women who had been in the barracks on the night of her arrival were nowhere to be found.