Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  It is already 1943. How time flies. In early September, when Italy is no longer any factor in Albania, when the director of the Banca di Napoli informs Florian, while they are still in Valona, that he is absolutely free to travel immediately to wherever he would like to go, the Tedeschi family secretly accept the help of a small Jewish anti-fascist group, which finds them accommodation near the airport, where, since the war is raging, planes keep landing and taking off and bombs drop like falling stars. Ah, our happy days are forever gone, hums Ada, swinging her hips and taking a long swig from a flask of brandy. Terrible, Ada says to her sister Letizia and brother Carlo after they return to Gorizia in late 1943.

  There is not enough food or bread to go around. They use coupons to purchase coffee and sugar. The Albanians are speaking less Italian and more Albanian; some are even speaking German. These are a wild people, Ada and Florian say after they return to Gorizia, but a brave people, yes, indeed. The German troops attack. German bombs destroy. The Nazis count, catalogue, purify the population, filter it. Every day there are people hanging on the squares, swaying to the rhythm of the palm fronds. Ada believes all this to be a brief and cruel diversion, the work of unruly young men, so one day, after she has had a good swig from the flask that she now hides in the linen cupboard, under the bedding, she goes off to the German Military Command with Haya, convinced she can help free Florian’s colleague Sandro Koffler, the banker. Listen, Ada says, Sandro is an honest man. I am telling you. My last name is Tedeschi. The S.S. officer only glances up at Hitler hanging there on the wall, and waits. Tedesco in Italian means German, Ada says, I am someone you can trust.

  Ja, Tedeschi, the officer says, ein jüdischer Name.

  On their way home, Ada says to Haya, Let’s get some ice cream, while there still is ice cream to be had, while it is still Italian. And she also says, You can’t run from your name. Behind every name there is a story.

  The Italian troops in Albania are now entirely out of favour. Former friends who are called Allies in wartime are arresting and killing soldiers. Some soldiers surrender, others flee, many die. The Tedeschi family move again, this time to the centre of Tirana, and prepare for departure, which is called repatriation. It is September 1943. Life dribbles by. Paula and Orestes go off to the abandoned palace of the fascist ministry in their neighbourhood, where they roller skate on the spacious marble floors, shrieking. For Paula and Orestes life is a thrill. The Nazis are stepping up their raids and searching flats. From a window on the third floor Haya watches a scene, as if from a movie. Later she faints. A young man in a yellow shirt with a hole on the right shoulder sprints towards her building, while across the street a Nazi lounging in an open-topped car lines him up in his sights. The barrage of bullets from the machine gun catches the young man two metres short of the front door. In an instant the yellow shirt grins red.

  In un momento

  Sono sfiorite le rose

  I petali caduti

  Perché io non potevo dimenticare le rose

  Le cercavamo insieme

  Abbiamo trovato delle rose

  Erano le sue rose erano le mie rose

  Questo viaggio chiamavamo amore

  Col nostro sangue e colle nostre lagrime facevamo le rose

  Che brillavano un momento al sole del mattino

  Le abbiamo sfiorite sotto il sole tra i rovi

  Le rose che non erano le nostre rose

  Le mie rose le sue rose

  P.S. E cosí dimenticammo le rose,*

  whispers Ludoviko from Valona, while he watches Haya search for a lost earring in the sand by the sea, imagining himself to be Dino Campana and her to be Sibilla Aleramo, with their last dusk running out; and Haya (at the time), the goose, has no idea what he is mumbling.

  The boy vanishes into Haya’s entranceway; she thinks she can touch him. The Nazis go from door to door, banging and shouting. As if the boy has been swallowed whole. The next day Haya ventures out to buy cornbread mixed with chaff, and on the square she sees more than a hundred neatly stacked bodies, some in civilian clothing, some in partisan uniforms. The passers-by do not look; they move quickly past with rubber tread. The men lie there as if sleeping, as if tired of war, as if they were tree trunks for a building project. There is no smell. There are no flies. The shops are open, banners snapping, the shutters on the windows are shut.

  Ludoviko is not among those who were killed.

  Koffler the banker is not released from prison. They take his wife Angela to the madhouse, because she yanks her hair out and bangs her head on the windowpane. For practically nothing, the Tedeschi family sell what little property they have acquired. Florian’s colleagues sail out of Valona, but do not reach Naples: the ship is bombed by British aircraft and sinks. The only survivor is a clerk named Leone Romanelli, who swims for three days to reach the shore, then arrives in Tirana to tell Florian all about it. He, too, loses his mind. His wife and three children are back there, on board, or rather in the sea, on the bottom of the sea. It is not wise to have many children. Then Leone Romanelli is placed in a madhouse. To keep Angela Koffler company. For ever, Haya believes.

  Escorted by German soldiers, the Tedeschi family leave Albania and travel for three weeks to Italy. Behind them they leave their physical stench and dead armies, whose generals, Italian and German, lugging maps, registers, medical and army records, dental records and data on medical histories, dragging along with them a priest or two, wandering through the remote mountains and sandy coves of the land of eagles, come back twenty years later, through the mud and rain, the summer heat, regardless, looking for mouldering bones over which crops or skyscrapers have grown.

  At the border between Albania and Yugoslavia columns of Italian Wehrmacht prisoners of war peer frantically about and beg for a crust of bread, while digging in sub-zero temperatures, seeking their way under mounds of snow, looking for a path, an exit. In thin voices that crack with the cold, they call to their loved ones and send them messages. Here, at the border whose encirclement ruptures, making it a passage, an exit, the Tedeschi family, with hundreds of civilians and soldiers on their way to Budapest, clamber into a railway car, never dreaming, not even wanting to know, what is happening just a little further north, what journeys there are, and to what end. Traversing Montenegro, Hungary and Austria, Florian and Ada and their four children arrive in Italy just before Christmas 1943.

  The train stands in Budapest for several hours. Off it leap neatly pressed German soldiers, well fed and freshly shaven. The Hungarians toss portions of goulash, bread, milk and little bottles of rum in through the windows to the other passengers. Not three months later, from this same platform at Keleti station and several other smaller train stations in and around Budapest, other train carriages, locked freight cars, cattle wagons, with a hundred people in each, with a bucket for piss and a bucket for drinking water, will depart for a walled-in station, a blind track leading to a cosmic twilight. From early spring to early summer 1944 the crematorium at Auschwitz will work at full capacity, and daily it will vomit up the remains of 6,000 people, murdered, who will float away like gray eiderdown into the sky. And so it is that in two and a half months 400,000 Hungarian Jews will leap on board the “messianic timetable placed on the Index by the new order”, in a “wretched reworking of the antediluvian evacuation, this landlocked, earthbound reprise of Noah’s ark”, which was written for them by an unknown man in long black tails, in a shirt with a “stiff celluloid collar, yellowed like an old domino, the headwaiter’s tie with a bohemian knot, swinging his cane high in the air, swaying on his feet like a ship’s mast, staring into space”, a gentleman by the name of Eduard Sam, a gentleman who, with a glance at his watch “with a dial and Roman numerals showing the exact time”, steps out of the “frame of the drama and farce of which he is writer”.

  The way lives interweave yet never touch, only to collide in mutual destruction, inconceivably distant in their simultaneity. In 1944 the former senior inspector of the state railways, by then a �
�retired senior railway inspector”, author of a timetable, Eduard Sam, steps along in a “column of the miserable and the ill, among horrified women and terrified children, going with them and alongside them, tall and bent over, without his spectacles, without his cane, which they had taken from him, staggering along with uncertain steps in the queue of the sacrificed, as a shepherd among his herd, a rabbi with his flock, a school teacher at the head of a group of school children . . .” So Eduard Sam moves towards the trains, towards the train carriages, whose departures and arrivals he has so often calibrated, checked, supplemented, coordinated, perfected, and now, as he walks, the times of train departures and arrivals, of routine departures and arrivals, run in his head like a refrain, like a ditty, much like the clacking of wheels, in close harmony with his broken step, like a song that will determine his fate, and to himself he repeats those arrivals and departures of trains, those routine departures. And, while Eduard Sam strides to his finality, high-level Nazi officials in Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, everywhere, the perfect bureaucrats Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, State Secretary of the Reich Transport Ministry, and his superior, S.S. General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s personal adjutant, obediently apply the special, newly composed timetable to the new order. S.S. official Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, without a trace of malice, earnestly, with devotion and meticulous attention, crosses out, annuls Eduard Sam’s timetable of trains, of special trains, which had been honed for years, and in the serenity of an airy office composes his own Fahrplanordnung 587, Fahrplanordnung 290, and so on, special timetables of trains, of special trains, on which he stamps the official seal of annihilation.

  Mr Ganzenmüller, you like trains?

  Yes, Your Honour, trains are my passion, my obsession.

  From 1928 you’ve worked for the German Railways, and as early as 1931, as a member of the Nazi party, you were involved in anti-Jewish activities.

  I wouldn’t put it that way. Things were much more complex.

  You scheduled civilian trains for deporting Jews to the camps. From 1942 to 1945 you supervised the German State Railway.

  I was following orders from above.

  You secured the unobstructed running of trains to the death camps. Thanks to you Operation Reinhard ran smoothly.

  Operation Reinhard? I only heard of Operation Reinhard after capitulation.

  You personally drew up many and varied timetables. Such as a timetable for transporting elderly German Jews to Theresienstadt.

  That was my duty, to see to the unobstructed movement of trains. Besides, composing timetables was a hobby of mine. Like solving challenging crossword puzzles.

  In 1942 a vast “purge” of the ghettoes begins throughout the General Government.

  About that I know nothing.

  In June and July there are construction works on the railway line leading to Sobibor—a mass extermination camp. There is an unplanned halt in the transports, and on 16 July S.S. General Karl Wolff seeks your help.

  I don’t remember.

  Instead of sending 300,000 Warsaw Jews to Sobibor you redirect them to Treblinka. After 22 July a train runs daily with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, while another train runs twice weekly from Przemysl to Belzec. Further, on 28 July, 1942, you, Albert Ganzenmüller, Secretary of the Ministry of Transport—Reichsverkehrsministerium, and Deputy General Director of the German Reichsbahn, report to S.S.-Gruppenführer Wolff on the measures you have taken.

  Have you proof?

  We have your correspondence with Wolff. On 13 August, 1942, Wolff writes:

  Warm thanks, both in my own and the S. S. Reichsführers name, for your letter of 28 July, 1942. I was especially delighted to hear from you that already for a fortnight there has been a daily train, taking 5,000 of the Chosen People to Treblinka, thus enabling us to carry out this movement of population at an accelerated pace. I have personally contacted all the agencies involved in the process so that the job can proceed without impediment. I thank you again for your efforts regarding this question and also request that you continue to bring your personal attention to every detail, for which I will be particularly grateful. Sincerely yours and Heil Hitler! W.

  I do not recall this correspondence.

  So you claim you received Wolff’s letter, stamped as Top Secret, a letter from the second highest official in the Third Reich, and you did not read it? Three million Jews were taken to their deaths in that operation.

  I know nothing of Treblinka. I did not realize that Treblinka was a mass extermination camp. I thought it was a Jewish reservation, so Himmler explained it to me. I knew nothing of the fate of the Jews. I saw nothing. I worked in my office. I was not out strolling around.

  This is drivel, Ganzenmüller. In May 1942, before the camp was set up, we knew something was going on at Treblinka, and the information was given to us by German railway workers. Some S. S. officials arrived at Treblinka in May 1942 and arrested a hundred men, Jews from both Treblinka and its neighbourhood, and ordered them to clear the land. The Ukrainian guards arrived right after the prisoners. The S. S. claimed that the inmates would work on damming the River Bug to build a new military installation, but the German railway workers stubbornly insisted it was going to be an extermination camp for the Jews.

  Yes? And who are you?

  Franciszek Zabecki, head of the civilian train station at Treblinka. A member of the Polish resistance movement. I followed the arrivals and departures of trains. I noted them down. On 22 July, 1942, I received an official telegram stating a short, regular and very frequent line would run on the Warsaw-Treblinka route. This line was supposed to transport new “settlers”, the telegram said. The trains would be made up of sixty covered cattle wagons, or rather closed goods wagons, it said. After unloading, the trains were to be sent back to Warsaw, it said. Why “settlers” in goods wagons, I ask you? Behind bolted doors and narrow slits covered in barbed wire instead of windows; crammed in like livestock, so packed together they couldn’t even crouch. That telegram was signed by you.

  I don’t remember.

  You are the person who drew up the train timetable, Mr Ganzenmüller. This was your timetable, Mr Ganzenmüller. There were between eight and ten thousand men, women, the elderly and a lot of children in the first train which arrived on 23 July, 1942. A lot of small children, infants. When it spewed out its freight, the train returned to Warsaw. Empty. To pick up new “settlers”. When the horrors became unbearable, and I could tell you about them, the horrors, day and night, you halted all regular passenger traffic to Treblinka, Mr Ganzenmüller. Surely you remember that, Mr Ganzenmüller, you drew up that schedule. After September 1942 the only trains that reached Treblinka were military and deportation trains, there were no picnickers, no excursions; civilians did not come out on nature tours, Mr Ganzenmüller. The trains were met at the station by S.S. men with sleeves rolled up and pistols drawn. Tempo! Schnell! they shouted. The number of passengers was marked on each wagon with chalk. I wrote it down. For two years I wrote this down, from one day to the next, and I added it up. I know, while others guess. I am the only living witness who was at Treblinka from the day when the extermination of the Jews began to the day the camp was closed on 16 August, 1944. All the German documents were burned, but I copied them. One million two hundred thousand people were killed at Treblinka. There is no doubt about it.

  Even after the rebellion, the transports did not cease. You don’t remember Mr Ganzenmüller. You don’t remember how you again changed the timetable of trains. How after the rebellion you redirected the trains to other camps, and you turned Treblinka into a transit station. I remember.

  Transport PJ 201: 32 wagons, Bialystok-Lublin via Treblinka, 18 August, 1943.

  Transport PJ 203: 40 wagons, Bialystok-Lublin via Treblinka, 19 August, 1943.

  Lublin via Treblinka, 19 August, 1943. That same day, transport PJ 204: 39 wagons from Bialystok to Lublin, stopping at Treblinka.

  Transport PJ 209: 9 wagons, for Lublin via Treblinka, 24 August, 1943.

&
nbsp; Transport PJ 211: 31 wagons left for Lublin on 8 September.