chapter twenty-six
January 1940
Then, finally, what they have all been dreading. The colour drains from Oma’s face as she reads the official document. All their names are listed: Eva Eisenbaum, Frederika Eisenbaum, Karolina Eisenbaum, Luise Eisenbaum, and Wolfgang Eisenbaum. They must report to the Gestapo at Grosse Hamburgerstrasse the following morning. They are allowed one small suitcase apiece.
“I’m not going!” Wolfie cries. “They’re not going to get me that easy!” He strides back and forth across the small room, gritting his teeth together.
“What choice do we have?” Frieda asks.
“Have you heard of ‘submarines’? People who go underground? I know a few the Gestapo would love to get their hands on. I won’t go without a fight.”
Frieda crosses her arms over her chest. “Where will you go?”
“I have friends.” Rage has become deliberation. “When you play cards, you get to know people. Gentiles. One of them already offered me a place. It was just a matter of time before I took him up on it.”
He looks at her pointedly. “You must hide too.”
She glances at the other women: Oma, whose strength she has counted on more than she realized; Mutti, her face shrunken from hunger and worry; Luise, innocent, uncomprehending. “I can’t. I won’t leave them. We’ll stay together.”
He stares at his mother and grandmother. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry ... but I won’t just let them kill me.”
Oma strokes his face with her hand. “Never apologize for surviving. Don’t look back. Of course you must save yourself.”
He takes her hand and kisses it.
“We will fight in our own way,” Oma says, turning on her heels and stepping into the room she shares with Luise and Frieda.
She returns carrying Luise’s suitcase, which has been packed for weeks. The girl stands watching her, mouth open in confusion.
Oma takes her by the hand — neither is more than five feet tall — and, while the others look on, leads her out the door and across the hall. She waits a moment in front of the neighbour’s door, hesitant. Her shoulders square back, then she knocks.
Frau Thaler opens her door. Frieda cannot see the expression on her face: by now she must have seen the suitcase. Oma mumbles something Frieda can’t hear, pauses while the other woman speaks. Then slowly, with great fatigue, Oma puts the suitcase into Luise’s clumsy hand and prods her into the apartment. Oma stands on the threshold looking inside, her eyes large with the knowledge of separation, the knowledge of death in her heart. Then she closes the door behind them and walks back down the hall.
“Oma!” Luise’s voice cries from behind the door. “Where is Oma!”
Oma walks back to her own apartment, tears spilling down her small face. After she steps inside, Frieda closes their door quietly, then follows her to the bedroom.
Oma sits down on the bed, turning dark eyes on Frieda. “It’s time,” she says.
She reaches her hand under the head of the mattress and pulls out the vial of phenobarbital Frieda brought her last year.
“Please help me,” she says, spilling the pills into the palm of her hand. “How many do I need to take?”
While Frieda stares at the pills, Wolfie says, “Take them with this.”
The two women look up at the doorway where Wolfie is standing holding a bottle of schnapps he won at cards. Frieda feels a falling in the pit of her stomach. She sits down beside her grandmother and counts out enough pills, putting the rest back into the bottle.
Wolfie sits down on the other side of Oma. He pours some schnapps into the glass on her night table.
She looks into his eyes, strokes his hair. “My handsome boy.”
He embraces her for a long moment.
She turns to Frieda, whose eyes burn with held-back tears. “It’s for the best,” she says. “I’m too old. I haven’t got the strength to go on.”
Frieda embraces her, sobbing. “You must be brave and survive. My only regret is I couldn’t see your father one last time.”
Oma notices Mutti hovering in the doorway. “We must say goodbye, Karolina,” she says, gesturing for her to come forward.
Mutti bends down awkwardly to kiss Oma on the cheek. “Take care of yourself,” Oma murmurs. “Be brave.”
A tear slides down Mutti’s face as she stumbles from the room.
Oma takes a deep sigh. She looks at the little grouping of pills in her hand, then brings them to her mouth. She reaches for the glass, takes a gulp of schnapps. Swallows. Takes another gulp. Swallows. Frieda on one side and Wolfie on the other each support her with an arm around her back.
“I’ve had a good life,” Oma says. “Don’t mourn for me. Save yourselves.”
Frieda feels her grandmother disappearing. She can almost hear the rhythm of her heart losing speed. Oma’s body becomes heavy between them. When she slumps over, they each take a side and lay her on the bed, smoothing down her skirt.
Frieda sits on the bed, watching her grandmother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. Slower. Slower. Slower. Stop. She holds the small hand until it begins to turn cold.
The undertakers come early in the afternoon. Though they are overburdened with dead Jews, they are organized to bury a body within twenty-four hours as is the custom.
Wolfie embraces Mutti, then Frieda, holding her at arm’s length as if waiting for her to change her mind and say she will run too. She squeezes his arm and watches him leave for the apartment of the friend who has offered him shelter. He has not told her the name in case the Gestapo question her.
The following morning Frieda and her mother, each carrying her one suitcase, enter the sprawling gymnasium at Grosse Hamburgerstrasse. The place is already filled with people sitting on the floor, their luggage next to them. Frieda finds a small spot and pulls her mother down beside her. Though they are both wearing their good coats, Mutti has not combed her hair, which lies in a curly greying mass around her head.
After several hours the guards herd them into open trucks. A convoy of trucks heads west. As she passes through the city she was born in — for the last time? — Frieda is astonished at how beautiful it is. She sees the familiar streets and buildings in a new light: they are enveloped in a rosy haze that fixes them in an earlier memory, a time of absurd innocence. Can there have been such a time, when Jews were people just like everyone else?
She realizes after a while that they are heading for the Grunewald. The suburban scene of Hanni’s triumph, so long ago it seems like another lifetime. They drive past the entrance to the sports arena, now taken over by the Nazis, and finally stop in a railway yard.
“Raus! Schnell!” the soldiers scream, pulling them from the trucks.
They strike at the women with wooden truncheons and whips to hurry them up. Mutti stumbles, falls getting off the truck. Frieda helps her up. A soldier swings with a whip, lashing her arm. Frieda cries out despite herself.
“Schnell!” he screeches, shoving them toward the waiting train.
More soldiers are shrieking and pushing to get them into the boxcars that were made to transport cattle. Frieda manages to scramble up into the high opening and helps her mother climb up. They are surrounded by women squashed together so tightly that there is no room to sit down. A soldier closes the door of the car. The light disappears, then the air. A small ventilation shaft at the top of the door lets in a tiny amount of both.
Women moan throughout the car: “I can’t breathe.” “Get off my foot.” “Get your hair out of my face.”
The boxcar stands in place for hours.
“I’m so thirsty,” someone says.
“Thirst is worse than hunger,” says another.
Voices agree all over the car. They spend some time debating what is the most satisfying drink when one is parched with thirst. The distraction helps pass the time.
Finally a hum, a vibration works its way through the floor. Then a jolt. Then they are moving. “Thank God!” a chorus of voices ri
ngs out.
The train is not in a hurry, it seems, but rolls along slowly for hours. There are no sanitary facilities in the car, only a bucket in a corner for them to relieve themselves. Soon it is overflowing, raising an unbearable stench. Women who cannot reach it urinate where they stand.
Bodies press on all sides of Frieda, squeezing out her life. A coffin of bodies. She must find her way out. She closes her eyes and tries to transport herself to the park near their old apartment. Before the benches were painted yellow and marked “For Jews Only.” She must relocate herself not only in place, but in time.
The effort occupies her for a while. She cannot say how long — she has lost all sense of time. All sense of everything is gone, except thirst.
Then, finally, while faint daylight still creeps through the narrow shaft in the door, the train slows down and comes to a halt.
“Thank God!” voices intone here and there.
Don’t thank him so quickly, Frieda thinks. Where have they come to?
The door of the train is suddenly pulled wide open. Though the sun is feeble in the grey sky, the light hurts her eyes after all the hours spent in the dark. People in the front begin jumping out. At the same time that relief floods over her, Frieda feels herself falling from the sudden lack of support. By the time she reaches the opening, she is on her hands and knees lowering herself down to the ground. Where is Mutti?
She joins the other women who stand and stare at the astonishing blue lake in front of them. On the far shore, sycamores surround a church steeple. Is it possible this is the place she was so afraid of?
The soldiers arrange the women into ragged columns. Frieda finds Mutti and stays with her as they march along the road that follows the shore of the lake. Mutti trips over stones in the road and Frieda must keep steadying her. They pass a few villagers who turn away at their approach, unwilling to catch their eyes. After about a mile, the columns climb a hill. When they reach the top they see where they have arrived: acres of low grey barracks hemmed in by concrete walls mounted with guard towers. In the middle stands a square smokestack discharging a film of vapour.
Frieda hears a woman whisper in horror, “Ravensbrück!”
The word spreads down the column like a hiss.
chapter twenty-seven
Her dusty red Jaguar was still sitting, lonely, behind the medical building as Nesha dropped her off Monday morning. He was one of those men who couldn’t be without a car and had rented a Pontiac at the airport.
“You sure you’ll be all right?”
She had spent most of Sunday in bed with a heating pad and Aspirin every four hours. “I feel better today.”
He had made her a succession of cups of tea with lemon, which he claimed were better for her than coffee. Lying in his arms didn’t hurt either.
“Doctors have a right to recovery time like everyone else,” he said, putting his hand on the back of her car seat, drinking her in with his eyes.
“I’ll be fine. I’ve got a full day of patients who need me.” She leaned over to kiss him. He hadn’t shaven yet, and a fine grey stubble scratched her cheek. She liked the intimacy of him before he was ready for the rest of the world.
“If you find it’s too much for you,” he said softly in her ear, “call me and I’ll come get you.”
He waited in the car, his window down, while she walked to the front door. She could see his breath turn visible and wisp into the cold morning air. Waving goodbye, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
She started up the stairs, then stopped, remembering something. Turning back down again, she flicked the light on in the back hall and stepped toward the rear door. Outside, Nesha’s car had already disappeared down D’Arcy. She unlocked the trunk of her Jag and opened it, picking up the dirty shopping bag that Birdie had thrust at her.
Holding it with her thumb and forefinger, she carried it upstairs. She deposited the bag on the paper liner laid out on the examining table in one of the treatment rooms. Iris prepared each room the evening before by ripping the used liners off the leather tables, then pulling fresh paper down. She wasn’t due for another forty minutes.
A musty odour escaped the bag. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought it upstairs. She took a pair of latex gloves from a dispenser near the sink and pulled them on. Instead of catching up on her paperwork, she was dissecting garbage. Precious, Birdie had said. Opening the top of the bag, she pulled out a blue cotton blanket wrapped in a bundle. She unravelled the mass impatiently until it lay revealed: an old plastic doll with one arm and one leg. Naked and bald but for a few tufts of blonde hair. One eyelid moved up and down over a marble-green eye, the other stayed closed. The mouth startled her. Though it shouldn’t have, since it was a typical doll mouth, pursed together like a flower. As if it had just exclaimed Oh! Miriam wouldn’t be saying Oh! for a while, but she had the same mouth.
What was that around the doll’s jointed neck? It looked like a hospital ID bracelet. She lifted the doll sideways to read it. “Eisenbaum.” The date and name of the hospital had been cut off and string had been attached to the holes in the plastic bracelet. She heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Iris was early. She rewrapped the doll in the baby blanket and placed the whole thing back into the plastic bag. Let the police deal with it.
She walked down the hall to the counter expecting to see Iris. In the middle of the waiting room stood the young homeless man she had seen in the library.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
He looked around, in no hurry, his blond hair in corkscrew curls. “This is a doctor’s office, isn’t it?”
“We open at nine. Call the secretary and make an appointment.”
“But I’m sick now. You gonna turn away a sick person?”
“If you’re really ill, go to Emergency.”
“It’s not an emergency. I’m just sick.”
He would have been a handsome young man if his hair were washed and his ski jacket and jeans were clean.
“What are your symptoms?”
“I got pains.”
“Where?”
“Here.” He pointed to his throat. “And here.” His head.
His watery blue eyes watched her sullenly. He made her nervous, but he wasn’t the one who had tried to run her down.
“How did you find me?”
“You gave the librarian your card.”
“And she gave it to you?” she asked, incredulous. “She doesn’t like you.” He grinned.
“She likes me. She left it on the counter where I could get it.”
“Unbelievable,” she muttered under her breath. Then to him, “Are you really sick?” Not the best bedside manner.
He tilted his head. “Pain’s killing me.”
“I don’t suppose you have a health card? Never mind. What’s your name?”
“Nigel.”
“Wait here, Nigel.” She imagined his proud mother naming him Nigel when he was born. When had that promise of childhood died?
Too suspicious to let him come into a treatment room, she went down the hall to collect some supplies and bring them back to the waiting area. Stethoscope around her neck, carrying tongue depressors, an ophthalmoscope, and an audioscope, she turned to step out of the exam room. There he stood in the door, blocking her way out. He was taller than she’d thought. If he wanted to, he could overpower her. Her hands began to sweat.
“Hey, your old man knock you around some?” He pointed to the bandage on her cheek.
“I fell. Not that it’s your business.”
He smirked.
She had to stay authoritative, show no fear. “Take off your jacket and sit down.”
He obeyed, but the odour of sweat radiating from him made her turn away. She reached for a wooden tongue depressor. At least she felt more in control now that he was sitting.
“Open wide.” She held down his tongue to look inside his throat. Listened to his chest with the stethoscope. Looked in his ears. Felt his forehead with her h
and.
“Nothing here,” she said. “You’re not sick, are you?”
He shrugged.
“Why are you really here?”
“I want my friend back.”
“Stanley?”
“They wouldn’t let me go to the station with him. Hard-asses. Don’t have no one else.”
“I’m sorry. But what does it have to do with me?”
“It was your fault they got him. You called the cops.”
Now she understood. “But he probably killed that woman.”
“That stupid old broad? No, he didn’t. Never. He liked her. Though she was a loser. Never knew what he saw in her.”
“You were jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“She took him away from you. He spent time with her.”
His blond eyebrows rose. “Guess so.”
“Did you kill her?”
He scowled. “I dunno. Don’t remember. Can’t always remember so good. Might’ve been high that day. Wouldn’t remember if I was high.”
“You wouldn’t remember killing her?”
He thought a moment. “Would I get to stay in jail with Stanley?”
Footsteps sounded on the stair. Iris. Finally.
They both listened as Iris’s heels clicked on the tile in the waiting area, then proceeded down the hall.
“Rebecca?”
“Who’s that?” he hissed, jumping down from the table.
“It’s all right. Just my secretary.” She called out, “In here, Iris!”
Perfectly groomed in a navy wool suit, Iris stopped short when she reached the exam room. Her usually relaxed face froze. “What happened to your face? Are you okay? Should I call someone?”
“Everything’s —”
She turned to reassure Iris when a large, unyielding arm swung her backwards with dizzying speed and landed around her neck. He held her facing Iris, his arm cutting off her air circulation.
“Leave her alone!” Iris cried. “You’re hurting her! What do you want?”
“I want you to shut up! That’s what I want! What’s with you old broads anyhow? Can’t you shut up?”
Iris put up her hands in acquiescence. “Okay. Calm down. Just tell me what you want and I’ll get it.”
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