Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  And then, short days later, she was on her way somewhere else. She didn’t know where, because no one told her, and she was not asked to purchase a ticket for the trip. She was being treated to the ride. But was this even a train she was on, windowless and airless, Marta crushed against fifty others? Was it a train travelling across the land, or was it an elevator car, plunging to the centre of the Earth where the hot devil awaited them?

  And Auschwitz was different. It represented Germany at its murderous best, humanity at its murderous best. At Auschwitz, a tired looking SS officer decided Marta would join the line of people to be murdered later rather than immediately. She was issued a number, to be worn not only on the striped jacket she was given but also on the skin of her left forearm: “181818,” a quaint number, she decided, to wear on her flesh to the grave. The striped uniform also bore an insignia next to the number: there were green triangles for criminals, red ones for political prisoners, and red and yellow Stars of David for Jews. Marta was awarded a red triangle, which both surprised her and distinguished her from the baser Jews and Gypsies.

  She was shaved up top and below. She felt her rich raven hair sliding down her naked back and rump with a feathery lightness. A woman behind her with an unfortunate single bushy eyebrow hooding her eyes had that shaved off, too. The four barbers laughed. They were giving the woman fashion and style help she should be grateful for. And then they hosed the women down and deliced them.

  They were in Birkenau, an extension of Auschwitz originally built for Russian prisoners that had a complete railway-station façade, but no real railway station, as if it were a movie set.

  The guards placed Marta in a lager with two hundred other women, two to a bed. Some of the women had just arrived there and some had been there for months and even years. These were the ones who gave Marta hope, though they’d rob her in an instant or trick her out of a crust of bread. They gave her hope because they’d miraculously survived here for several years, and they were Jews, most of them, horrifyingly skeletal and weak, but still alive, still going, still working and talking and eating whatever scraps could be boiled in a pot and ladled out. These women, these senior veterans, Marta began to admire. The most prominent of them was a woman named Libuse—after the princess, she told everyone, who led the West Slavic tribe and envisioned Prague, the woman who settled the rumblings in her tribe by taking a ploughman as consort and whose dynasty lasted for four centuries. “Except of course the original Libuse was not a Jewess,” Libuse said. “A detail. And she was not from the city of Brno. My parents must have been a little touched.” She pointed to her temple. “They must have been a little too settled in the Czechoslovak nation, too complacent. It went to their heads.” She tapped her temple again. “Hence, the Great Libuse, the Great Princess Libuse.” This tall woman spoke German, and the first night she silenced Marta’s many questions, about when they got to shower and what work they had to do and where the men had got to, by giving Marta simple advice: “Shut up and have a dreamy night.”

  And that first night, Marta lay down gingerly on her straw bunk beside a Polish woman who would not speak to her. They lay back to back until the woman thought Marta was asleep, and then the woman shifted for a moment before turning over to face her outright. Marta could feel the woman’s breath. She thought she could sense the woman sniffing her, felt her spidery hand brush against her hip, then her shoulder, relishing Marta’s luxuriant flesh. Marta was fresh meat, still warm enough with life for a feast. Now the woman’s fingers were worming over the slope of Marta’s shoulder. Marta’s skin crawled. It was like lying with a corpse in a coffin, the corpse hungry to suck her warm blood. And then the fingers tweaked the nub of Marta’s pronounced nipple, and Marta flinched. The woman hurriedly turned over again to face the other way, moved as far away as she could get on the narrow bunk, her bony shoulder blades bumping up against Marta. In another minute, the woman was asleep.

  They were neighbours in a cemetery, not lying in bunks at all but in graves. Each day, some of the women disappeared and were replaced with new recruits. Marta shared her bed with the Polish woman one more night and then, unaccountably, never again. Had she been transferred to another lager or transformed into gas? The stench of the incinerator was thick and relentless. It was Libuse who kept Marta going, barking out remarks in German across the darkness that most of the women could understand and most ignored, but some were reassured by them, by the gall of them. Marta was reassured.

  The third night, as Marta was beginning to believe the Polish woman would not return and that the authorities had forgotten to replace her, a smaller, rabbit-like woman joined her, quivering, in bed, also a Polish Jew, also silent like her predecessor. This one didn’t want her body even to drift into contact with Marta’s, let alone to fondle her, even though some closeness helped warm up the bed.

  An Italian Jew cursed as she tried to settle, and her fierce Greek bunkmate answered in Ladino. A Ukrainian woman asked in Yiddish what the hell kind of language the woman was speaking, and Marta heard the woman spit. The woman was new, evidently. She spoke too boldly and confidently and naïvely. She asked in Yiddish, a language Marta understood, because it derived from German, where they were holding their belongings. Several people laughed out their answer: “Canada.”

  She laughed, too—she didn’t know why—and asked, “What is Canada?”

  “It is the land of abundance,” Libuse said.

  “Kanada,” someone repeated in Ladino, and then said something else, and laughter erupted again in a small corner of the lager.

  The Ukrainian woman said she’d brought an emerald brooch her grandmother had received as a little girl from the Tsarina Katarina. The comment caused another round of laughter. The woman was a comedian without knowing it.

  Finally, Libuse said calmly, “The brooch from the Tsarina is now in Canada, the land of abundance. It’s a warehouse here in the camp filled with all the confiscated valuables. They’re sorted, assessed and then sent to Berlin for ‘redistribution’ or to Switzerland for cash for the German war effort.”

  Marta remembered the temple in Szeged, piled to the ceiling with confiscated effects. She wondered if some of it ended up here, in Canada.

  Someone said something sadly in Yiddish, then someone else spoke in a language Marta couldn’t identify, Serbian, possibly, because the words had a Slavic ring.

  One of the first things that had impressed Marta in the lager was the many different languages floating in the darkness. So many languages, but the tone of the voices was universal—angry, plaintive, scared. One understood hesitancy or longing in any language. The lager was a little League of Nations, except that it was not united in the pursuit of harmony and peace, but united in anguish, united in the transmogrification of the group into another species, rodent or insect, but ineffectual rodents—toothless ones—and sterile insects.

  Marta’s thoughts drifted to home again, to Szeged, and to Istvan, whom she’d left without saying goodbye. Where must he think they’ve taken her? Did he think her dead? Did he shed a tear as he considered her fate? What was going through his smart stubborn head as the meagre supplies dwindled to nothing, his cramped, dark world closed in altogether, the cat now silent, now dead, provided four, maybe five, additional meals for its enslaved master? Could he hang on for Marta? How long would it be? Could she hang on for him?

  She remembered the little garden out back—the tomatoes and peppers—always the peppers. Could Istvan get to the last of these, quietly, in the dark of night? And the angelica, which sprang out from among the tomatoes every second year, the great balls of green blossom reaching up toward heaven. He could see these plants and feel encouraged, could sit down among them and get lost.

  At roll call the following morning, the SS officer in charge, a muscular woman named Ute Schlink, asked “241,” the last three digits in a frail woman’s identification number, whether she was planning to accept the breakfast of bread about to be offered to her. The Hungarian woman looked
down at the mud she was standing in and didn’t answer, or not audibly. Schlink struck her across the head with her gloved hand, and the woman dropped to one knee, but then stood again quickly and remarkably, pulling her knee out of the mud with a squelch. “You declined dinner last night as well, I was told. Can you tell me why?” The woman didn’t answer, so the officer asked for an interpreter as she removed her truncheon from its sheath in her belt. Marta stepped forward. Schlink put the question to the woman again, and Marta translated.

  The woman looked at Marta and then at the SS officer. She said, barely audibly, in Hungarian, “Last night and today are Yom Kippur, when we fast.”

  Marta turned to the officer and haltingly translated, almost as quietly as the woman had spoken. “It was Yom Kippur,” Marta said. But she said to the woman, “It’s not Yom Kippur. Even I know that much. Yom Kippur is in the fall.”

  “Quiet,” the officer said to Marta.

  The German circled the woman and asked her to remove her clothes, which she did without hesitation. She stood in the damp air without a gram of fat to insulate her bones. They looked to Marta like bones pressing to break out of their prison of flesh. Marta wished she could help the woman, say something to the officer to make it easier, but her mind raced. Why hadn’t the woman accepted the food, even if she hadn’t planned on eating it, so she could give it to someone else? Was that a sin? Was it a sin even under these circumstances? Could an inmate commit a sin at Auschwitz? The officer said, “241, if you don’t eat, you will no longer be much use to the work effort.” She circled the woman again and touched her bony rump with the truncheon. “I cannot eat today,” the woman said, “but only today.” Marta translated.

  The guard said, “What if I decide you will not eat tomorrow? What if I decide that tomorrow is Yom Kippur and, in your case, the next day, too?” Schlink said it like a German, naturally: “Yom Kippah,” she called it.

  And suddenly it made sense to Marta: you didn’t have the right to eat much here, but you didn’t have the right to starve yourself, either, because that would have put you in control of your own demise.

  The woman simply shook her head, but only just perceptibly. Schlink thwacked her across the skull with her truncheon this time, the hollow clang as it struck bone resounding around the yard. The woman fell to the same muddy knee again but didn’t rise.

  Then came a voice from behind them, in German, “Maybe the fare doesn’t agree with her.” It was tall Libuse, Princess Libuse.

  Schlink rushed at her like a mad dog and thwacked her, too, the same way, but Libuse stood firm, a dark welt of blood forming immediately beneath the skin at the base of her skull. Then the officer rushed back at 241 and clubbed the kneeling woman yet again, again with the truncheon against the skull. The woman fell face down in the mud. The others from the lager watched, waiting for her to pull her face out to take a breath, but she didn’t. She looked like a mythic white creature emerging from the mud rather than sunken into it.

  Marta imagined for the first time what 241 must have looked like filled out and with a rich head of hair, as auburn as her eyebrows. Did she take this trip with her family, and was she the final one to go, erasing their auburn line with a single last assertion that on this day, the day she imagined was Yom Kippur, she would not eat or take food to share with others, because it was the day of atonement?

  And then came the selection—an impromptu selection this morning—a little rushed and without the usual fanfare of handing out cards with names and numbers on them. In the exercise, those who were to be left working, standing, sitting, lying down, rising up, eating and evacuating their bowels and bladders were to be separated from those who would no longer be performing these functions because they were to be gassed and incinerated.

  With the help of her attendant guards and the kapo, the Jewish inmate selected to rule each lager, the one who was bloodless, Schlink took her customary march up and down the line of prisoners, pointing with her truncheon at those to be excused from life and calling out numbers, “141, 775, 416, 225,” the kapo marking them down on a chart, signalling with her head for each prisoner to step out of the line. About twenty were selected that morning from the group of two hundred, the same number in each of the lagers down the line throughout Birkenau and Auschwitz. One of the women selected was the Ukrainian whose emerald brooch had ended up in “Canada.” She didn’t seem sure what had happened to her. Perhaps she clung to the hope she was being relocated again, which is what she’d originally been told, that possibly she’d see her husband and son. The selection of this woman was peculiar, if only because she was a recent arrival and hadn’t lost enough weight or colour to suggest she couldn’t carry on in work detail. She seemed calm as her lips moved rapidly in prayer. Some of the other women selected cried out but then covered their mouths, worried about stepping out of line even now. Others looked on as blankly as they had when 241 hit the mud. They looked as though thoughts no longer moved behind their eyes.

  Marta could hear an orchestra playing in the distance, the notes riding on the foggy air toward them, and she knew what was coming—she’d heard, and she knew the drill: the executions up against a wall of the uncooperative and the “criminal,” the ones, for instance, who’d managed to trade a contraband British cigarette for an extra half bowl of soup. The ceremony was marked by a round of shots, puncturing the notes, followed by another round, the music—marching tunes, mostly—making the occasion festive.

  Schlink worked her way back to Libuse, and the two attendant guards raised their rifles, expecting to lead the woman off for execution, but uncharacteristically Schlink said, “You will spend seventy-two hours in confinement block, and you will not eat or drink. Yom Kippah.” Libuse’s life was to be spared so Schlink could affirm her cleverness and reassert her authority, even without a truncheon, authority that had faltered in the hands of 241.

  The officer then strolled over to gaze at Marta. She smiled at her eerily, as if the two were acquaintances meeting in a park. Marta shuddered. Schlink’s dark blond hair under her cap was tied in braids wound tightly around the sides of her head like rope, as if she were getting set to string herself up by the top of the head. Schlink said, “I understand you worked in a dental office, 818. You will not join the others for work detail. You will help out in the infirmary.”

  Marta nodded. She felt the eyes of everyone upon her. She was a medical assistant all of a sudden. Rarely did anyone in the camp rise out of the dross of shorn prisoners in dingy uniforms. No one had a past or future. No one had been a florist, a professor of chemistry, a chambermaid. Curiosity faded rapidly when starvation and filth attended upon the women hourly and daily. Marta had learned a short, sharp lesson. She learned not to be amazed, not even surprised. Anything that was possible here was probable and even likely to come about.

  Marta found herself feeling buoyant, grateful even. The sun still went on shining. And then she saw a pigeon land on a small flat stone in the mud, a white-grey stone the colour of 241’s skin. And another landed beside the first, crowding the other bird on the little platform. Here were animals who could fly over an electrified barbed-wire fence, and they flew into Auschwitz? But why not? They awaited scraps of food here as they did each day in the town, as they did in Oswiecim, in the square in front of the church. How were they to know that everyone who stood in the mud before them today awaited the same scraps, that the birds themselves were scraps if the inmates could snatch one without being seen? What a treat were these pigeons to the condemned and the not-yet-condemned: they reminded the assembled women of the miracle of flight; they reminded them of the statues in their own cities and of the fountains and squares, of a time when the birds seemed to live for their amusement. Marta thought of Mendelssohn Square, the pigeons, Istvan’s father, the horrible scene that was routine here.

  Now, for the first time, they felt humbled by the pigeons as the grey birds sat on their royal rock and cooed. Here, nothing belonged to the many women stripped of their citizensh
ip, not the sky, not the air, not the earth, not the cramped wooden shoes that kept their feet from sinking into the earth. The women who were to be exterminated this day were to pass their belongings to women who were yet to be exterminated, new arrivals. Everything belonged to the authorities, from the wooden shoes to the sky. Everything was for the authorities to lend to you and for you to receive. In that sense, the authorities displaced God. They could say when Yom Kippur was to occur and when Christmas came, if they so chose. It was a tidy ecosystem and hierarchy: Germans, pigeons, inmates to die later, inmates to die today.

  The pigeons flew off when Schlink dismissed the women. They flew toward the sounds of the orchestra and firing squad to see if they might have better luck there.

  MARTA SPENT HER DAYS in a building along whose sides stood a row of cedars of Lebanon. They stood erect like green soldiers, as if to mimic their dark keepers. She was to assist Doctor Joachim Fischer, a veterinarian who’d succeeded another inmate, a French doctor named Marcel Levi. He had himself contracted Korperschwache, an organic decay which claimed the majority of its victims.

  It was nicer to work in the infirmary than in the workshop where she’d made crude spoons out of the iron sent to them from Berlin. The infirmary was warmer, the food was more plentiful, and Marta was treated respectfully by Dr. Fischer and by the patients, who thought that she had more influence with the authorities than they had. It was here the red triangle insignia, which marked her a political prisoner and distinguished her from the lower caste of inmate, made all the difference.

  More importantly, the eyes of Auschwitz were not always on Marta, and she could work her magic here, dishing out extra half bowls of soup to patients who needed it most, not always reporting a patient’s temperature, because a fever sometimes condemned the patient to death in the gas chamber, reassuring inmates that their lives would get better even when she knew they couldn’t.