The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Ach nein,” Hanna said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Just one more day,” Christine whispered, her voice breaking. “If he would have survived just one more day . . .” Hanna put her arms around Christine and made soft, murmuring sounds, like a mother comforting a crying infant. Christine pulled away and wiped at her face. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. It’s my fault.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They said you were caught looking in the male prisoners’ files.”

  “You risked your life to bring me food, didn’t you? Besides, I was looking for Heinz too. It was only a matter of time before the Blockschreiber found a reason to pull me out of there. He had been watching me for some time. If it hadn’t been that, he would have pulled me out for something else.”

  “At least now he’ll pay,” Christine said, glancing toward the trucks filled with Unterscharführers, Blockführers, and guards.

  “I’m afraid a lot of the officers and guards got away,” Heinz said. “When we were getting clothes from the storage sheds, we saw a group of them running into the woods.”

  Hanna closed her eyes and leaned against her brother. For a second, Christine thought she was going to collapse. But Heinz put an arm around her, holding her upright, and Hanna opened her eyes again, putting all her weight on one leg. Christine looked down and gasped. Hanna’s ankle was raw and swollen, ringed by an angry wound. Streaks of purple crawled up the side of her calf.

  “What happened to your leg?” Christine asked.

  Hanna put the injured leg forward and looked down at the wound circling her ankle like a thick, red sock. “The guards chained me to the bed during the day.”

  “Let’s go,” Heinz said, his voice a monotone. “From what I’ve heard, the food storage building has a stockpile. And we should go to the storeroom to get you some warmer clothes.”

  Mobs of prisoners swarmed the food storage building. They had broken down doors and shattered windows, breaking the frames and throwing them out of the way in their rush to get inside. Like a fire brigade, they formed lines to pass the food to the growing crowd. From one pair of thin arms to the next went box after box of biscuits, crackers, dry milk, rolls, and bread. Crate after crate of potatoes, lettuce, turnips, carrots, and beans were split open and passed around. A shout of victory went up as everyone converged on a group of men holding up hard sausages and dried meat. Before long, piles of smoked hams, cases of canned liverwurst, and towers of cheese wheels looked like the inventory of a hundred butcher shops on display in the muddy yard.

  “Be careful,” Heinz told Hanna, Christine, and anyone else who would listen. “Or you’ll make yourself sick.”

  The more insightful prisoners ate only biscuits, crackers, and bread, warning everyone else that their starved bodies wouldn’t be able to handle liverwurst, smoked pork, and rich cheese. But some didn’t listen. They stuffed themselves, then lay bloated and sick, their bellies distended.

  Christine ate four biscuits and a wedge of hard cheese, while Hanna and her brother ripped off hunks of rye bread until an entire loaf was gone. Heinz grabbed more bread and several tins of crackers, then followed Hanna and Christine to the clothes-sorting building on the female side of the camp. He waited outside while Hanna and Christine rummaged through the mountains of dresses, skirts, blouses, and shoes. Christine took off her filthy uniform and put on a cranberry-colored dress, the faint smell of perfume still clinging to the lace collar. She slipped her arms into the soft, thick sleeves of a blue knitted sweater, her shoulders and the backs of her arms covered and warm for the first time in eight months. On the edge of the pile, Hanna was on her knees in a full-length slip, pulling a brown dress over her head.

  It wasn’t long before they found everything they needed, including a pair of slip-on fur-lined boots that fit over Hanna’s swollen ankle and a nearly new pair of black leather shoes that fit Christine perfectly. Christine pushed her calloused feet and bare legs into a stretchy pair of brown stockings and laced up the shoes, thinking it felt strange to be fully clothed, her arms and legs snug and comfortable, like a newborn swaddled in a cozy, soft blanket for the first time.

  She looked at the other prisoners taking off their soiled uniforms and putting on actual clothes, watching each other in wonder and awe, as if dresses and shirts were a new discovery or a recent invention. They ran their hands along the arms of sleeves and the lengths of skirts, as if the fabric were made of gold and silk, not simple broadcloth and cotton. And even though it was spring, Hanna and Christine each took a long, wool coat, if only to use as a blanket during their last nights in hell. Christine put her coat on, not because she was cold, but to feel the weight of it on her shoulders. A tall woman wearing a cherry-colored dress pounded her fist against the wall to hush the crowd.

  “We must say danke to our voiceless providers,” she shouted. “And we must say Kaddish for all who have died in this terrible place.”

  The room grew silent as everyone bowed her head to pray. Christine didn’t know how to say Kaddish, but she closed her eyes and prayed for the dead in her own way. She prayed for the souls who had died there, and for Opa and Isaac. She prayed that they had at last found peace, their suffering and tears forever ceased. She said a silent good-bye to Isaac, feeling the manacle of grief tighten around her heart, locking eternally into place with a solid, final thud. Tears found their way down her cheeks. When she finished her prayer, she lifted her head and saw rivulets of moisture on every pale and sunken face.

  Two days later, the growl of incoming army trucks jarred Christine from her sleep. Her body jerked awake, her skull and every joint aching. She took a deep, shuddering breath, turned her head, and opened her eyes. Her first thought was of Isaac, and her stomach twisted with grief.

  “Maybe they’ve sent trucks to pick us up instead of trains,” Hanna said.

  “I don’t care what they send,” Christine said. She sat up and coughed, her chest aching with every bark. “As long as they hurry up and get us out of here.” She crawled out of the bunk and helped Hanna to her feet. With one arm steadying Hanna, she followed the other women outside, trying not to get her hopes up that at last they would be freed.

  During the past two days, the entire camp population had been vaccinated by American army doctors; once again they were forced to strip naked so they could be disinfected with DDT. Hanna’s ankle had been cleaned and dressed, and Heinz had found a pair of crutches in the camp hospital. The need to get away from the camp forever was swelling in Christine’s mind, at times making her feel as if she would start screaming and never stop. If the Americans didn’t send the trains to pick them up soon, she’d start walking home.

  Now, over a dozen U.S. Army trucks had pulled to a stop outside the barracks. Soldiers jumped down from the front seats and went around to the back, rifles in hand, to open the tailgates. As the prisoners watched, elderly men and women, adolescent females, and mothers with young children climbed out of the backs of the trucks. Nearly every person was holding something: a loaf of bread, a wheel of cheese, a basket of eggs, a tin of milk.

  “What’s going on?” Christine said to Hanna.

  “I have no idea,” Hanna said.

  In heavily accented German, an officer ordered the people to line up in pairs. A familiar fear quickened Christine’s breathing. What are they doing with these people? she thought. The German civilians looked at each other and the soldiers, confusion and fear crumpling their brows. They stared at the gathering prisoners, their mouths open in shock. The young children pointed at the ragtag assembly of emaciated captives in mismatched clothing, then looked up at their mothers for answers. After the last truck was emptied, the officer used a bullhorn to address the more than two hundred civilians.

  “Leave your donations for the prisoners of Dachau with the soldiers at the rear of this truck,” he said in German, pointing at two waiting soldiers. “Afterward, remain in line and follow me. Prisoners, line up behind the civilians, and my me
n will distribute the food to you.”

  “That’s probably all the food those people had,” Christine whispered to Hanna.

  “Maybe they’re locking them up,” Hanna said.

  “But why?” Christine said. Hanna shrugged.

  The German civilians handed the food to the soldiers, then fell in line behind the officer and four other soldiers. By then, the male prisoners had joined the women, and the majority of inmates were already lining up to get food before returning to their quarters. The rest, including Heinz, Hanna, and Christine, followed the civilians as the Americans took them into the camp.

  The soldiers led the civilians through the stench-filled barracks and the cement shower rooms, past the overflowing piles of shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses, hair, and gold teeth. The women held their aprons over their mouths, weeping and covering the children’s eyes. The old men stared, their wrinkled faces rigid with grief and shock. As they moved closer to the gas chambers and crematorium, Christine heard the growl of a giant engine. A huge bulldozer was pushing dirt from a wide trench. Beside the trench, male prisoners had loaded horse-drawn wagons and pushcarts with rotting corpses. The civilian women screamed and moaned, pushing their children’s faces into the folds of their skirts. The old men wept silently and tried to hold the women up, but some fainted.

  The soldiers said nothing. They held their rifles to their chests with both hands, looking straight ahead, and took the civilians into the gas chambers. They took them past the blood-spattered carts used to transfer the dead bodies into the fires. On the carts, piles of skeletal bodies still lay naked and twisted, abandoned and forgotten on their journey to the crematorium. From there, the soldiers took the civilians into the crematorium, past the giant brick ovens filled with ashes and pieces of bone.

  Christine, Hanna, and the rest of the prisoners didn’t enter the gas chambers or the crematorium. Just being close to the buildings made Christine nauseous. When the civilians came out the other side, the soldiers handed shovels to the men and to any female who wasn’t carrying a child.

  “What are they doing?” Christine said, her heart pounding. “Tell me they’re not going to shoot them.”

  “They’re making them bury the dead,” Heinz said.

  Christine gasped and looked around at the other prisoners and the soldiers, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Were they blaming the German civilians for this? For not doing anything to stop it? She thought of Oma and poor dead Opa, her mother, her younger sister and brothers, hungry and hiding in bomb shelters. Would they blame them for the camp in Hessental? When she saw the soldiers direct the old men to start unloading the corpses, she stepped forward.

  “Why are you doing this?” she shouted, hoping one of them understood German. The soldiers’ faces snapped in her direction.

  “What is she doing?” a female prisoner asked Hanna.

  “Christine,” Hanna said. “Let it go.”

  “It’s not their fault,” Christine said to Hanna. “What could they have done to stop it? Any of them? What could they have done without getting themselves killed?”

  “They kept quiet,” another prisoner said. “They did nothing.”

  Someone behind Christine shouted in Polish, another in French. A rock came flying out of the crowd and hit one of the German children in the head. The boy put his hand to his temple and buried his face in his mother’s apron. Christine turned and yelled into the throng of prisoners, “These people didn’t do this to you!”

  “Well then,” a female prisoner shouted. “Where is your SS lover, the Lagerkommandant? He’s not here to take the blame, is he?”

  “He tried to tell people!” she shouted. “No one would listen. What makes you think anyone would have listened to them?” She pointed at the civilians.

  “Liar!” a man yelled.

  Christine turned around again. The German civilians were unloading the bodies from the wagons and throwing them into the trench, the old men struggling to hang on to the pencil-thin wrists and skeletal ankles of stiff corpses, the women shoveling dirt into the massive grave, sobbing and vomiting into the yard.

  Christine’s breath came in shallow bursts. She wished she could remember the few English words Isaac had taught her. But it was no use; her brief lesson had been too long ago. She moved toward the Americans anyway, hoping one of them would understand. “They didn’t do this!” she said.

  An American soldier came toward her, his hand up, his gun drawn.

  “You don’t know what they’ve been through!” Christine said.

  Heinz pulled Christine back. “Come on,” he said to Hanna. “Let’s get her out of here.”

  “We have to tell them,” Christine said to Hanna. Heinz tried to drag her toward the barracks. “We have to tell them they didn’t do anything!”

  Hanna stopped and turned on her. “How do I know that?” she cried. “How do I know they didn’t turn in their Jewish neighbors for a loaf of bread?”

  Christine stopped struggling, and Heinz let her go. “Do you think I’m guilty as well? Should I go over there and help the women shovel?”

  Hanna looked away. “Nein,” she said, shaking her head. “Nein.”

  “The Americans have no idea how much these people have already suffered!” Christine said. “They need to know about the food shortages and the Gestapo! They need to know about the villages and cities leveled by bombs!”

  “They know about the bombs,” Heinz said. “They were dropped from their planes, remember?”

  “I guess the Lagerkommandant was right,” Christine said, tears running down her face. “Brutal acts only become war crimes if you lose.”

  Christine curled up in the back corner of a boxcar, her head resting on her coat, which was folded against the wall like a pillow. She closed her eyes, hoping the steady side-to-side wobble of the train would lull her back to sleep, even though she only dozed in fits and starts. Unlike her journey to Dachau, there was room for everyone to stretch out. The Americans had covered the floor with straw, which provided cushioning and helped mask the odor of death that still clung to the wooden walls and floorboards. Along with the straw, the Americans had provided blankets and had lined the center of the car with crates of food and water. And while all these simple things added to the comfort of their journey, nothing in the world could make up for the fact that most of the women had made their first trip accompanied by parents, siblings, husbands, sons, and daughters. This time they were alone. Contemplating lives without their loved ones, they made the trip in silence, sleeping or staring at nothing, mixed tears of grief and gratitude in their eyes.

  Earlier that morning, American officers had announced that the women would be released first, the men left behind until tomorrow. A train would take them to a village, where they would be housed in a temporary barracks until the Americans could help them return home. An hour later, when the first train pulled in, a nervous hush had settled over the crowd. They watched in silence as the lumbering locomotive braked and screeched, braked and screeched, pistons hissing longer and slower until it came to a shuddering stop. Then the boxcar doors slid open, American soldiers jumped out, and everyone cheered. When the young soldiers saw their skeletal welcoming committee, they reached into their pockets for gum and candy, giving the prisoners everything they had.

  Now, countless hours later, Christine pictured the thin, hopeful faces of Hanna and her brother Heinz, smiling as they waved good-bye beside the shrunken men watching silently as the women left the camp. Understandably, Hanna had chosen to stay behind with her brother so they could travel together. She’d memorized Christine’s address, with promises to write when they were finally settled, wherever and whenever that might be. The only thing that she and Heinz were certain of was that they would be leaving Germany forever.

  Christine couldn’t get the wretched image of Dachau out of her head. The watchtowers, the electric fences, the long, dark barracks, and the soot-stained chimney would be forever painted in her mind, like a monochroma
tic portrait. Even if she lived to be a hundred and ten, she’d never forget the gray stone colors of Dachau, colors that reminded her of crumbling bones and ancient tombstones on a bleak and rainy January day.

  Later, when they arrived at the train station, Christine woke up as the train braked and throbbed to a shuddering stop. She sat up, her throat and chest burning, her neck stiff, the hip she’d been leaning on screaming in pain. When she could breathe without coughing, she stood, put on her wool coat, and climbed down from the boxcar with the other women.

  Clutching bread and clothes collected from the Dachau storage rooms, the somber, newly released prisoners exited the boxcars and lined up without complaint, waiting patiently on the platform to give their information to the Americans. Christine found herself trying to help a confused woman remember where she was from.

  “My name is Sarah Weinstein,” the woman cried. “My husband’s name was Uri . . . but he’s dead. I can’t remember the name of the town where we used to live. I can’t remember anything!” She waved her hands in the air as if swatting at an invisible swarm of flies. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me; my whole family is dead. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Some of your relatives must have survived,” Christine said. The woman ignored her. Christine tried naming every town she could think of, but the woman kept shaking her head.

  “May I help?” an American soldier asked in broken German.

  “She can’t remember where she’s from,” Christine said. She thought about adding that the woman had lost her mind, but kept quiet. There was no need to state the obvious. Maybe we’ve all lost our minds, she thought.

  The soldier shrugged and shook his head, and Christine realized he hadn’t understood. He spoke some German, but not enough. Again, she tried to remember the few English words she knew, but nothing came to her. She couldn’t think straight. The soldier was smiling at her, but his grin looked forced, below eyes filled with unprocessed horror and pity. She tried to imagine what she looked like to him, blue eyes staring out from a pale, skeletal face, a walking dead woman with only a few inches of matted hair on her head.