I wish we could have talked. He thought he might have said the words aloud, but no one paid him any attention; the subject had moved from politics to the comparative qualities of the camp’s women.
Savko had taken his midday meal with other men from his camp. Talking while working was nearly impossible, and what language would they speak? Russian, which the new Yugoslavs avoided with visceral hatred? Serbian, of which Filip knew only a few words, was even worse, sure to stir up ancient rivalries. German? It seemed absurd. Yet he was sure they could have found a common tongue. If only he had tried.
What pushed a man to this extreme, to commit an act so senseless? That cupful of urine in the vat was not sabotage; it made no difference whatever to the quality of the product, would make no wall crumble or foundation crack. It was either an irrepressible childish prank or simple, insane suicide.
Savko’s body lay on the floor until the evening of the next day, gradually sifted over with a thick layer of stone dust that filled his open mouth and powdered his chestnut hair, leaving only his eyes to glisten, unseeing, in the gloom of the cavernous hall. Dust penetrated every crease of his stained brown shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular hairless arms until they, too, were covered, along with his torn worker’s pants and bare feet.
The task of removing the corpse fell to two of his campmates. “Where to?” they asked.
The SS captain never looked up from the evening roll call. “Into the furnace.”
5
MORE WORKERS ARRIVED; the men from the new transport replaced most of the women at the plant. Ksenia and Galina were assigned to the camp kitchen. Ksenia was on familiar ground. Rising an hour before dawn to prepare the officers’ breakfast was no hardship at all. A good cook, she knew how to work wonders with the simplest ingredients, how to compensate for shortages. Several of the guards noticed, and rewarded her on the sly: two extra potatoes here, a sliver of hard cheese, the uneaten crust of an officer’s bread.
“Don’t eat the workers’ bread,” she cautioned her family. “There’s sawdust in it.” She tried by sleight of hand, she told them, to avoid adding the pulverized wood shavings to the dough, but there were too many eyes and no one could be trusted. “It is indigestible,” she said. “It will kill you, in time.”
“Mama.” Galina’s voice was barely audible, her head lowered over a bucket of half-rotted potatoes she was peeling for the inmates’ dinner. “They want me to go to the officers’ club, to wait on tables. I would have better food and a bed in a special dormitory.”
“That will never happen,” her mother vowed, bringing her cleaver down on the mess of cabbage in front of her with enough force to make the table shake.
When they came for her, two men, one holding a frightened young woman by the arm, the other reaching for Galina, Ksenia put down her knife and stepped between them. “My daughter is a respectable married woman, with a husband in this camp. You will have to kill me before you take her.”
“That would not be difficult,” the younger guard sneered, reaching for his pistol.
“Wait,” the older one said, remembering, perhaps, the previous day’s turnips flavored with a hint of bacon and parsley. His own mother had never thought to do that. What other magic could this stubborn Russian woman do in the kitchen? “I saw livelier girls at the factory. All they need is a bath. But you”—he pointed at Galina—“you will report to Herr Doktor Blau. He has work for you.”
* * *
The camp matron who escorted Galina to the dentist’s house told her he’d been recently widowed, perhaps to explain his taciturn disposition. Herr Doktor Blau was well into middle age; his creased and jowly face was not unkind, although he seldom smiled. His wife had been much younger, Galina saw from the framed picture on his desk. They stood in front of a park carousel, she laughing, one hand holding a wide-brimmed straw hat to her head, the other pushing down the skirt of her summer dress against a playful breeze. The dentist, at her side, looking at her with bemused admiration, the painted eye of a carousel horse just above his head, two small girls aloft on the horse’s back.
He said nothing about his wife’s death, and Galina did not ask. The cottage stood a short distance from the camp, along the road the truck traveled to deliver workers to the factory, dropping her in the early morning and picking her up ten hours later. After a month spent toiling in the cement plant, and another laboring in the camp kitchen, this work was easy. She bathed the three-year-old twin girls, combed and braided their hair, helped them to dress, prepared their meals. Unless the weather was stormy, their father expected them to play outdoors, in the little fenced backyard, before they came in for a bowl of hot soup and a long afternoon nap. She cleaned the house and did the laundry, picked up their wet boots and soggy mittens with a smile, trying to decipher their cheerful chatter of southern German laced with baby talk.
“Listen for the siren,” the dentist said on his way out to the black car waiting at the gate. He spoke to her in clear, slow German. “If there is an air raid, take the girls to the basement and stay there until all is clear. Understand?”
She understood, wondered where that black car took him several times a week—a vehicle that, as far as she knew, never portended anything good. Other days, he received patients at home, the whine of the drill from the examining room setting her own teeth on edge.
Afternoons, while the girls slept, she starched and ironed his shirts and their dresses. He wouldn’t let her press his trousers, said he liked them just so, preferred to do them himself. It was amusing to watch him at the ironing board, bent close to his task, absorbed in placing each knife-edge crease with absolute precision. But she never dared laugh, just busied herself with the dinner they would eat after she had gone.
The morning the beggar came she was alone in the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes. It had rained, a quick, drenching spring shower that left the yard too wet for the girls to go out until later. She could hear them twittering together like a pair of little birds, playing dolls in the dining room. Herr Doktor was out.
The man appeared out of nowhere, popping up at the open window like a circus performer on a trampoline. He was so close she could see the lice crawling in the stubble of his shaved head. He pulled a bundle from under the shirt of his striped pajamas, a yellow star hanging by a thread just below the collar. He held up a short-sleeved red dress with big white buttons, a clothespin dangling from one shoulder. “Nice, for you. You buy?” he croaked at her in rapid German. His voice was high, rasping, painful to hear.
Galina tried to scream, but no sound came. His collarbones were sharp as razor blades under the filthy cloth of his threadbare shirt. Huge scabby hands hung from his matchstick wrists; the toothless, gaping mouth smelled of rot. How could anyone so decimated still walk and talk? When had he last seen food? She reached for the nearest thing, the unwashed pan from this morning’s oatmeal, several spoonfuls of cold cereal stuck to the bottom. She thrust it at the man and slammed the window shut.
She heard the pan crash to the ground. Footsteps, running. Dogs. A stifled wail. And silence, broken by the call of a crow, raucous in its sudden vulgarity.
She didn’t know, for certain, that he was a Jew. She had heard some talk in the work camp, of other camps, much worse than this one. She remembered the closed cattle car, the muffled disembodied voices begging for water. Where did they go? What happened to them? And why? Did the barely human apparition at the window have some connection to such rumors? She did not know what to think.
Galina never again let the girls out by themselves, not even to the sheltered safety of the fenced yard. She took her mending or laundry tub outside, keeping her charges always in sight.
After she found the gold fillings, everything changed. The tin was not in the examining room; she was only allowed in there, to dust and sweep and clean the glass cabinets, when the dentist was present. It was on his bedroom bureau. She had never seen it before, an old cocoa tin with a smiling Bavarian Mädchen on the sid
e, her hair a golden wreath of braids. The tin clattered to the floor with a swipe of her dust cloth, spilling its glittering contents on the polished boards, some of the nuggets still ringed with bits of black decaying teeth.
Her mind conjured an image of her father, in happier times, his head thrown back, a glass of tea in his hand, laughing, his gold teeth catching the light of the evening lamp. She had heard of widows asking for their departed husbands’ fillings before burial, as a sentimental memento or a hedge against impending poverty. But this, this could be no fond remembrance. This was something dirty, a shameful hoard wrenched from the mouths of what? Corpses? Whose? And if they were inmates, didn’t the gold belong to the captors, the Reich?
The noise brought the doctor in from the next room.
“I’m sorry, Herr Doktor. I am so clumsy.” Galina was on her hands and knees, gathering the evidence of her transgression into his secret life.
He pushed her aside. It was the only time in her four months’ employment he had ever touched her. “Leave that,” he said in a menacing voice icy with repressed rage. “Crying won’t help. You think it’s easy serving these butchers? Yanking the fillings from the wretched bastards’ remaining teeth, the bodies not yet cold, the SS standing around telling bawdy jokes.” He scooped the fillings up with a quick sweep and jammed the fistful of gold into the pocket of his immaculately pressed trousers. “They cannot pay me enough for what I do. I have my daughters to think of, their future.”
“I . . .” But there was nothing to say. Will your daughters thank you for a future bought with these gruesome wages of death? Galina wiped her face with her hands and backed out of the room.
The following week she was reassigned to the camp kitchen.
She told no one. Not her mother, working with her at the camp kitchen stove. Not her father, assigned now to clean the infirmary, his coughing, aggravated by the ever-present stone dust, making him useless at the factory. And certainly not Filip, lying on the adjoining mattress, waiting until the others were asleep before groping his way onto hers, with urgent whispers and insistent hands.
6
SO IT WENT. Days of mind-numbing drudgery were relieved only by episodes of desperate resistance. Each careless blunder or show of independence was punished, the retribution that followed marked by wanton cruelty.
Day and night, there were Allied air raids. So often that, after the first few, work continued at the factory as if the disturbance was nothing more than a passing thunderstorm. Anyone who was outdoors when the bombers approached could seek shelter inside, but only until the danger passed. When one corner of the plant was hit, the storage silo split from top to bottom, every pair of hands went to work scooping up the dry stone clinker, transferring the salvaged material into the three remaining towers.
The work was so loathsome, so backbreaking and filthy, that when an officer entered the plant and demanded, “Who here speaks good German?” Filip stepped forward without the slightest hesitation.
The camp was filled beyond capacity, housing over three hundred workers in a space designed for half that number. No one was idle; the factory now operated twenty-four hours a day, with the same bunks and mattresses serving double duty for those returning from their shifts. Some preferred to take advantage of the milder weather and slept outside in hastily erected tents, hoping to avoid the bedbugs and disease that plagued the barracks in spite of regular fumigation.
With so many people and such demanding work schedules, there was plenty for an interpreter to do. Filip was busier than he had ever been, serving the communication needs of the camp administrators and factory managers at any time, day or night. But he never lacked for cigarettes, and his hands were clean.
The nighttime encounters perplexed Galina. Gradually, the dread she felt as bedtime approached gave way to resignation. Their corner was no different from any of the others, the darkness filled with grunts and whispers and, occasionally, muffled tears. She even heard, from time to time, a muted stirring from her parents’ end of the room. “Men need this . . . this release,” Ksenia had told her shortly after the wedding. “Women must endure, or lose their husbands.”
She and Filip had known each other so long; it seemed natural for them to be together. But was it enough? She thought about romantic novels she had read as a girl, films she had seen. Where was the spark that passed, unspoken, between lovers, the caress that signaled a meeting of hearts? Filip had never so much as stroked her cheek. She wondered how that would feel, if it was different from her father’s tenderness.
Galina remembered the clumsy fumbling of their early married nights, Filip awkward and self-conscious, angry with himself for not knowing quite what to do; she waiting, equally unschooled in the art of intimacy. Now, they grew adept at the love act (there were other words for it, she was sure, but in her innocence, she did not know them), with a furtive haste that reduced it to little more than coupling, leaving her wondering while Filip slept. What happened between them, was it love? She wanted to ask her mother, How do we get to where you are, you and Papa? That place of harmony and understanding, one being with two hearts? But she could not.
Once, not so long ago, her husband had looked at her with admiration. What was there to admire now? Since losing her job with Herr Doktor Blau, she had grown thinner, her hair dull as straw, her face pale and mottled, her hands roughened by kitchen work. He, Filip, had bloomed on leaving the factory labor force; his work, while unpredictable in its demands, was far less taxing. He did not suffer the mindless exhaustion that, for her and so many others, marked the end of every working day.
And now, as May’s last coolness gave way to the bright days of June, and even in this gray, depressing place some grass grew here and there in defiant clumps and violets appeared, followed by buttercups, and birds sang—now she was sick. “Mama, I can’t eat this,” she pushed her portion of greasy soup away. “You take it. I’ll only throw it up.”
Ksenia looked at her daughter as if seeing her bony body and sunken cheeks for the first time. “You’re pregnant,” she finally said. “Lord have mercy.”
Summer changed to autumn. The bombing raids intensified. The factory continued to operate around the clock, blackout curtains over every window giving it a funereal aspect. It was, the men said, like working in hell, or some infernal tomb.
There was no way to conceal the smokestacks, to hide the sooty plume that hung perpetually overhead, sparks swirling into the night like ominous fireflies. As 1944 drew to a close, October was marked with frequent raids; November brought an onslaught so intense that even at the camp, several kilometers away, the ground quaked, walls shook, the air screamed and whistled with each explosive contact.
“Why don’t they stop?” Galina’s voice dissolved into a whine, her hands over her ears. “Don’t they know we’re not the enemy?”
Filip stared at her. How could anyone be so naive? She had never before been so prone to hysteria, so perpetually close to tears. It must be the child, he decided. My child. “We don’t matter. To anyone.” He lit a cigarette and sat, elbows on knees, to smoke it.
In the morning, the factory was gone. Several trucks were salvaged, and those people who were nearest the doors escaped outside, running for their lives as tons of stone, iron, and timber collapsed in a vast cloud of smoke and ash. Those inside, workers and guards alike, perished, their bodies crushed by falling slabs or incinerated beyond recognition in the ensuing fire.
The runners, too, were far from safe. Bombs rained randomly from the sky for another twenty minutes, until the planes swooped in a wide arc and disappeared into the night, leaving few survivors on the ground.
At the camp, no one knew why they had been spared. For hours after the attack, fires burned all around, lighting up the sky and obscuring a timid dawn. At the command house, there was a frenzy of activity. Telephone lines were down, telegraph communication intermittent. Confusion reigned until the highest-ranking surviving officer ordered all remaining inmates to the scene for
rescue and salvage operations.
It was too soon. The rubble was still too hot to touch; dislodging any stone was likely to reignite the embers, causing new fires to spring up, fanned by the frosty air. More than once, moving a cooled piece made a fresh avalanche of debris descend on the would-be rescuers.
They worked for hours, shifting what could be moved, sorting what could be salvaged, all very much aware of the ultimate futility of the work. “They’re waiting for orders,” Filip clarified, helping a dozen or so men move a pile of rocks from one spot to another just like it. “They do nothing without orders.”
By midafternoon, the orders came. The captain read the dispatch, conferred briefly with his staff, and turned to the expectant workers. He looked a moment at the blackened faces streaked with runnels of limestone dust, the impassive eyes like beacons in the smoke.
“Halt,” he said, climbing onto a pile of charred timbers, his expression inscrutable. “Stop and listen. This Arbeitslager has been closed. You may return to gather your things. Everyone is to be gone by morning.”
Gone? Gone where? The question buzzed through the crowd, the workers looking first to each other, then back at the German, who suddenly seemed smaller to them, less self-assured. Something that might have passed for compassion flickered in his eyes and disappeared.
“You all have work papers. Go where you want.” He jumped to the ground and turned to Filip. “You, interpreter. You ride with us.” He moved off in the direction of the waiting jeep.
Filip followed, pulling Galina by the hand. “Thank you, Herr Kommandant. But my wife, she is—”
“Ja, ja. I see. All right, then, but no one else.”
But Galina broke away, refusing to ride while her parents walked.
They set off, a pathetic-looking crowd, filthy, hungry, thirsty, disheveled, confused. All knew they would not reach the camp before dark, and to have food, any food waiting for them was a miracle none expected to happen. They followed the dust of the retreating jeep until it disappeared around a bend in the road. Rounding the bend, they saw a man in the road, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, waiting.
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