by Steven Uhly
There was no kitchen in the house, the food came from the village where the men from Bricha bought it and had it prepared. Twice a day people came up the snowy main street with ox carts to the House of the Jews and unloaded their wares in wooden tubs, thin broths made from bones cooked up so many times there was scarcely anything left in them. Sometimes a cat, which had to be shared between two hundred hungry mouths. On the way to the Jews it got cold, there was no way of heating it up again in the house. Better than nothing, said Ruth, who knew only too well what nothing meant.
At mealtimes everyone had to get to their feet, including the old and infirm, Standing up is good, the Red Army soldiers said, Standing up means surviving. Ruth helped the old man at whose feet Anna slept, I picked him out, she told Anna, You have to be there for someone. Ruth did not want any help, she pulled the man up in three stages, first sitting, then kneeling, finally he was standing and Ruth was sweating and shaking from the effort, but Anna was astonished at the strength in this body which was nothing but skin and bones. The old man let it happen, keeping a straight face, not saying a word, his skull and face were covered in a gray fuzz, his eyes were as large as Ruth’s, his body as frail, he could not weigh much, but still.
People lined up behind each other in a queue that wound its way twice through the room and moved at a snail’s pace between the beds, while the Red Army soldiers stood out in the hallway where the stairs to the room above, the main entrance and the door to Anna’s room met. Each person held an enamel cup in one hand and a spoon in the other, Anna had inherited both from the dead man, Take good care of those, Ruth told her, No cutlery or crockery means no food, like in the camp.
At first glance the queue might have appeared to consist of people in striped pajamas—the camp uniforms—and members of the S.S., all standing together patiently. Some wore entire uniforms, you could even see the bullet holes in the material, Where on earth are they from? Anna asked and Ruth shrugged, saying, the Russians gave them to us because there’s nothing else, they said.
One ladle per person and then you returned to your bed. The impatient ones drank their soup straight from the cup and it was all gone in a couple of minutes, But if you’re smart you’ll eat with your spoon, Ruth said, Slowly, look, like this. She carefully dipped her spoon into the soup, then lifted it up, higher. The spoon arrived at Ruth’s mouth, but rather than putting it straight in she took tiny sips from the side. She looked deadly serious, as if performing a ritual. When the spoon was empty, she put it down and gave Anna a smile of satisfaction, This way your stomach thinks there’s more, she said, And you believe it, too. Anna nodded, she understood perfectly this principle of necessary self-deception, she had practiced it herself for years, albeit in a different way from Ruth.
Once a week, on Saturdays, a Bricha lorry arrived, two men would jump out and open the tailgate, and then they would get better things to eat, vegetables, dried meat, dried fruit, chocolate. They could see from the packaging that these were from the Red Army.
The woman with the three children was called Abramowicz. She was a Polish Jew who until recently had lived in her apartment in Posen, only escaping to the surrounding area when the S.S. beat her husband to within an inch of his life outside their house, before taking him away. Mrs. Abramowicz had stood by the window and watched, her hand covering the eyes of her eldest, ten-year-old Ariel. Ariel was a quiet boy who liked nothing better than to read the only book they had been able to take with them when they bundled up everything and fled out of town via the back stairs—Oscar Koelliker, The First Circumnavigation of the World by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián del Cano. 1519–1522. Compiled from Sources by Oscar Koelliker. With 32 Plates and Maps. Munich, H. Piper & Co., 1908.
Since that day Mrs. Abramowicz barely had a drop of milk in her breasts for her youngest, Dana. The people in the village won’t sell us any, she said, falling silent. Anna looked at the baby. It was thin, but not as thin as Ruth or the old man, which she found reassuring.
Anna listened to her inner self. Confusing things were going on inside her, things she was unable to capture and control in her thoughts. She sat or lay on her camp bed. She wore the coat with the yellow star day and night, for it was not as warm as Abba had said, hardly any firewood was left, most of it had been confiscated or already burned by the enemy armies. There was no lavatory, they had to go out of the house and relieve themselves in the undergrowth, then clean themselves with snow, which had led to several women developing an inflammation of the bladder.
Anna felt unwell because of a power struggle waging inside her. If she felt so unwell that she was unable to eat anything, it meant the good side had won. Then she would share her cold broth, help Ruth feed the old man whose foot odor had by now become a part of her life and give Mrs. Abramowicz’s children her dried meat and chocolate.
She became thinner. Her periods stopped, That’s normal, Ruth said, I haven’t menstruated in ages. At the same time Anna knew she was not starving herself in an attempt to share in their destiny, to be able to tell of the suffering of all, a suffering which would finally become hers too. The truth was that Anna was trying to starve the truth out of existence, make it no longer true.
She laid her palms on her belly and looked at Mrs. Abramowicz’s baby fast asleep on the camp bed. It slept a lot, Perhaps, Anna thought, to save energy and stay alive, and she concentrated on the palms of her hands, as if through them she could feel whether the same was happening behind her abdominal wall. No sooner has it come into being than it needs to sleep, Anna thought, Because I believe that if I starve I’ll gain control over my body and my destiny. Over my life. Over the past. She shook her head.
She did not tell anybody anything.
She stopped giving away her food.
One day the thunder of artillery stopped. It was around lunchtime, Anna was drinking her soup made from bones, and all of a sudden it fell silent, and all of a sudden they heard the slurping of the hundred mouths, the slurping and clanking of spoons, metal on metal, each tiny cough, each whispered conversation. Everyone paused, waiting for it to start up again. But it was over.
The following day someone at the window exclaimed, Look, look everybody! They hurried over and saw men walking past, lots of men, an endless procession passing along the village road and moving eastward, men in rags, men in the tattered uniforms of the German Wehrmacht and S.S., vanquished men with expressionless faces, filthy men who were still alive, but only just, heading toward an uncertain future, Now they’ve got their own death march, said Ruth, who knew only too well what death marches were.
Anna thought of Ranzner and his four adjutants, if they were still alive they would surely be passing by here. She stood at the window for a whole day, scanning thousands of faces, Would I recognize them? she wondered, recalling their facial features, one after another, she recalled each one in detail, close-ups were stored in her special archive, she retrieved them and tried to add the Battle of Posen, the hardship, the defeat and everything she identified in the eyes, mouths and cheeks of the soldiers marching past the House of the Jews, to anticipate what they looked like now. But it did not really work, the images could not be altered, returning time and again to their original forms. Why do I want to see them anyway? Anna wondered, If I knew that one or two or three or all of them were still alive, what would that mean? Although no answer emerged she stood at the window until it became dark and pointless. Then she lay down on her narrow berth, feeling poisoned by all the defeated men who had walked past.
When spring arrived, the shrubs and trees around the house began to come into blossom. Had it not stunk so much of the excrement scattered all over the place and which had now thawed, it would have been almost idyllic.
Anna and Ruth went on long walks, which took them out of little Tulce into the countryside, where the life that still existed had recovered its natural rhythm. The trees and fields turned green, lending the landscape an unspoiled beauty which appeared to know nothing of the past few y
ears, as if the war had been one long winter and now both had come to an end. Better than any death march, Ruth would occasionally comment when they were out, and Anna had the impression that this girl, too, was preoccupied with not forgetting.
She had got used to Ruth, despite her verbosity. The girl linked arms with her as they walked, and while they were enjoying the countryside she would talk almost incidentally about her experiences, There were plenty of German Jews with Polish passports, you know. I never knew before how many we were, but the Nazis showed us, they did a sort of racial census almost as soon as they came to power, and look, there were a few thousand Polish Jews living in Germany who thought of themselves first as Germans, then Jews and finally Poles. The Nazis turned that on its head, they sent us letters which said, No, after close examination of the circumstances, we can inform you that in the first instance you are Poles, then Jews, and have never been Germans. So out you get! Well, Ruth shrugged, Anna felt the movement on her arm, We didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t even take our things with us, only two suitcases per family and off we were on a train to Poland. So then we’re in Warsaw, and I’m sure you know what happened in Warsaw, don’t you? Anna did not know, Ruth told her, for she had heard it from other women, We didn’t stay in Warsaw ourselves, we went west to the German border, because of course we didn’t believe a word the Nazis said, They’re insane, my father said, you know, my father is, he was, an enlightened individual, truly, he was a sort of armchair Zionist, you know, one of those who wasn’t active and certainly didn’t want to emigrate, because they thought it was all just a wonderful pipe dream, but on the other hand they didn’t have anything against young people dreaming a bit and working toward it. It’s good to stand up for your ideals, he said. In our apartment there was a collection box for Palestine, he’d put money into it whenever he had a little spare. She laughed, But that wasn’t very often, because we weren’t rich, hardly surprising, he was orthodox and my mother didn’t earn enough to finance Israel too. But of course she approved of his donations. Ruth sighed, Once a year a young man from the local association of Zionists would come round, empty the box and take the money away with him. Then it would slowly fill up again. Where was I? Oh yes, we were heading to western Poland, but what bad luck! Out of the blue the Nazis came over the border and said, We’ve had enough of you!
Ruth fell silent. The sounds of nature drifted once more into Anna’s ears, the chirping of the birds, the gentle swish of the wind blowing through the leaves and grasses, and brushing the young fields. Well, and then, Ruth said after a pause, we were separated, the men and women, and my mother and I were sent to a camp in Silesia. You won’t have heard of it, it’s called Grünberg, what am I saying, it was called Grünberg, it’s funny, I’m talking as if everything’s still there, well, we had to leave the camp because it was disbanded, and the Nazis thought, Let’s take the women for a walk, she assumed a rough voice and said, In this lovely weather!—Pause.
Chirping, wind, sun, feet on the earth, step by step, two women, one on the other’s arm, in the distance a forest.
And then, Anna, Ruth said, we walked and walked, now she turned to her new friend, giving her a look of such intensity that Anna took fright at the serious expression in her eyes, for she had understood that Ruth would talk about her death march as if it had been a stroll, but surely she could not keep it up, this she saw as she looked into Ruth’s deathly serious face, which now turned away again and gazed at the landscape as if nothing had happened, And then, Ruth said, I tried to drag my mother across the German Reich, she laughed brightly, it sounded like the laugh of a happy girl, You won’t believe, she cried out into the Polish countryside, how heavy your mother can be! Like lead, especially when you only weigh twenty kilos yourself. So we weighed nothing and yet we hardly made any progress, and my mother—pause.
The landscape thrust itself toward them, the sounds—but now Anna wanted to hear what had happened, not because she was expecting a surprise as you might get in a good story, but because she knew what was coming and she wanted it finally to be stated, to be over, for listening to death was sheer torture, she would rather feel life. But then, to Anna’s surprise, Ruth said, Well, you can imagine what happened next, can’t you?
Anna nodded, half relieved, half disappointed, I wonder why, she asked herself, Is it because release doesn’t come until everything’s out? So she said, Then your mother died, didn’t she? And she looked at Ruth, who turned away and pretended to be gazing still at the landscape, and who nodded and said, Yes, exactly.
Ruth no longer looked like someone who had recently been liberated from a concentration camp, her eyes and mouth no longer seemed so big, her face was no longer so small and shrunken, her hair had grown, and when Anna said, You look good, Ruth gave a crooked grin and said, slightly too loudly, Thirty kilos! Slowly I’m beginning to be like my real self again. But both of them knew that nobody was granted such a return journey.
On the day no ox carts came to the house with food, the Jews in the Jewish house thought it must be an accident or a mistake, perhaps the carter, an old and somewhat frail man missing all his teeth, had fallen ill and found nobody to take his place. They shrugged; they had experienced worse, much worse. We’ll just wait till tomorrow, Ruth said.
But the carts failed to arrive the next day or the day after that. The Red Army soldiers guarding the house set off and came back with bad news. The villagers did not like the Jewish house. They did not like the stench of Jews that sometimes wafted through their windows when the wind was easterly. They did not want to see Jews taking walks in their Polish countryside. And they had made it plain to those who had been delivering food to the Jews for months that they were not to feed them anymore. Ruth was beside herself, They’re mad, she screamed, but Mrs. Abramowicz just shook her head, saying, Nothing’s changed here.
Fear had returned. During the siege of Posen the people in the Jewish house had lived in dread, for they could not be certain that the Germans would not conjure a miracle weapon out of nowhere and rout the Russians. But then Germany had surrendered and spring had come. We allowed ourselves to get hoodwinked, Ruth said bitterly, and the old man spoke for the very first time, saying in Yiddish, Ribono shel olam kenn nischt iberuul zein, by which he meant that the creator of everything, the whole world, could not look in on every little corner because it was all too big. And the old man said this with a covert rancor, for he had refused to speak to God and his world since being forced to accept that the Ribono shel olam had failed to ensure that things such as gratuitous hatred and bloodlust and systematic humiliation and torture and gassing and betrayal of one’s own people did not exist amongst human beings.
One week later the Red Army soldiers were withdrawn. They made faces like people who know that this time they could not obey the order. But they did obey. They warned the people in the house, they said, The minute you notice something suspicious, run away. Then they left, taking their weapons with them.
“We need to guard this place ourselves,” someone said. Anna volunteered. And so, together with five others, three men and two women, she spent her first night in a long time outside. They dispersed around the building, looking out and listening in the dark. One of the men gave Anna a truncheon, she said, What am I supposed to do with that? and put it down.
For two days everything was quiet. For two days they contemplated how they might escape without leaving anybody behind. The goyim aren’t going to get any more of us, not a single one, said those who had been in concentration camp. Not a single one, they reaffirmed emphatically.
They allocated people to carry the elderly and children, so it could proceed quickly if need be. They practiced for two days, then someone shouted, They’re coming, and in a flash everyone was on the move, the hallway turned into a bottleneck because of the people streaming from the first floor, which is why they decided that those who were able should climb through one of the eight windows that faced east.
No longer did anyone think,
That’s a bit excessive. Nothing was excessive anymore.
They came at night.
They came as if a pogrom were a performance, a medieval play that had to be enacted as realistically as possible. They came with torches and pitchforks, with truncheons and ropes and pistols. They came with wrath and although they themselves did not know who had bequeathed it to them, they knew precisely on whom they had to vent it. Men, particularly men, old, young, some practically still children, a few women amongst them too. With them came the village dogs, which normally roamed freely, but now they had been put on short leashes, and the dogs felt the energy, panting as they dragged their masters onward, as if hunting hares.
They headed down the village street to the eastern edge, where the house stood. They went in silence to surprise the Jews in their building.
They arrived at the Jewish house, but arrived too late, for the Jews had heard them coming and had taken flight, they had climbed out of the eight windows, rushed down the stairs, they had dragged the old people out of the house, in the darkness they had run through the stinking and scented undergrowth, made their getaway across the fields that stretched out to the rear. They had left everything, the little that they had still possessed was lost now too.
Anna carried Maria, the six-year-old daughter of Mrs. Abramowicz. The girl clung to her, trembling, she did not whine, she did not cry, the Jews kept as quiet as the Poles had, over this night lay a great, collective Shush!