by War
Such is the state of mind that Natalie discerns in the car.
She knows better. She cannot rid herself of the information that Berel Jastrow imparted. Nor does she want to muffle her mind in fantasies. Her will to live, to see Louis again, demands that she think straight. She has plenty of time to think, sitting there over the drafty crack in the splintered floor hour after hour after hour, through'long nights and long days, hungry, thirsty, sick from the stench, her teeth and bones arming with the jolts of the train.
The abrupt separation from her uncle is clearing her mind and hardening her resolve. She is on her own, one more body in an anonymous rabble training eastward. The SS men who herded the Jews into the cattle cars took no roll calls, only head counts. Aaron Jastrow is still.identified, still a name, tfli an Elder, still a Pominent, up front in the coach. She is a nameless nobody. He will probably survive in some clerkish job, wherever they are going, until the Allies smash through the failing German armies. Perhaps -he will find her and protect her there, too; but instinct tells her that she has looked her last on Aaron.
Really believing that one is about to die is hard. Hospital patients rotted through with cancer, criminals walking to the electric chair or the gallows, sailors on a ship going down in a storm, cling to a secret hope that it is all a mistake, that some relieving word will come to lift the strangling nightmare; so why not Natalie Henry, young and healthy, riding a train through eastern Europe? She has her private, hope, as no doubt each troubled Jew does all through the. cattle cars.
She is an American. This sets her off from the others. By crazy circumstances and her own stupid mistakes she is trapped in this train, slowing and groaning up into the mountains on the second night, twisting through timbered valleys and rocky gorges, passing at dead slow through moonlit snowdrifts that spray glittering away from the wheels and whirl off on the wind. Looking out at this pretty scene, freezing and shivering, Natalie thinks of her Christmas vacation in Colorado when she was a college senior; so the moonlit snow sprayed from the train climbing up the Rookies to Denver. She is grasping for American memories. A moment lies ahead when she may live or die by her capacity to look a German official in the face and make him take pause with the words, "I am an American."
For, given the chance, she can prove it. Surprisingly, she still has her passport. Battered, creased, stamped Ghetoisiert, it lies in the breast pocket of her gray suit under the yellow star. With their peculiar respect for official paper, the Germans have not confiscated or destroyed it. In BadenBaden they held it for weeks but returned it when she went to Paris. Arriving in Theresienstadt, she-had to turn it in, but after many months she found it one day on her bed with Byron's picture still clipped inside. Perhaps German intelligence used it for forging spy documents; perhaps it merely moldered in an SS desk.
Anyway, she has it. She knows it will not protect her.
International law does not exist for her, or for any rider on this train. Still, in this crowd of unfortunate& it is a unique identifying document; and to a German eye, the photograph of a husband in a United States naval uniform should also strike home.
Natalie pictures Oswiecim as a more dreadful Theresienstadt, larger, harsher, with gas chambers instead of a Little Fortress.
Surely there will be work to do even there.
The barracks may be as bad as this cattle car or worse, the weak, the old, the unskilled transportees may die, but the rest will be laborers.
She intends to look her best, produce her passport, tell of her mica job, offer her language skills, flirt, prostitute herself if she is forced, but live till deliverance comes. That much, however short of the reality, is not entirely delusory. But her ultimate hope is a mirage: namely, that some farseeing SS officer will take her under his wing, so as to lean on her as a character witness after the German defeat. What she cannot conceive is that most Germans do not yet believe they will lose the war. Faith in Adolf Hitler keeps this maddened nation going strong.
Her surmise about the progress of the war is quite correct.
German higher-ups know their game is almost played out.
Little peace feelers like maggots are creeping out of the dying Nazi leviathan. Reichsffuhrer SS Himmler is about to order the gassings halted. He is covering his tracks, preparing his alibi, stolidly setting about to refurbish his image. Natalie is riding the last train taking Jews to Oswiecim; bureaucratic delay in reversing policy has allowed it to roll. But to the SS staff waiting for it at the Birkenau ramp, with crematoriums fired up and Sonderkommandos on the alert, it is just one more routine job. Nobody is thinking of taking on a pet American Jewess as a shield in defeat. Natalie's passport may be a mental comfort, but it is just a scrap of paper.
Conditions in the car keep worsening. By the second day the sickest begin to die where they lie, stand, or sit. Shortly after dawn of the third day, a feverish small girl near Natalie goes into convulsions, writhes, beats her hands about, then becomes limp and still. There is no room to lay. out bodies, so, the moaning mother of the dead girl holds the corpse huddled to her as in life. The child's face is blue, the eyes shut and sunken, the jaw hanging loose. About an hour later an old woman whose feet touch Natalie dribbles blood, gasps, makes noisy rattling sounds, and topples from her wall space.
The Czech nurse, who squirms tirelessly through the car trying to keep people alive, cannot revive her. Somebody else seizes the wall space.
The old woman lies under her own short coat in a heap.
One skinny wool-stockinged leg with a green garter protrudes until Natalie pushes it under the coat, trying to suppress her horror with callous thinking of other days, other things. It is not easy. The smell of death comes through the excrement stink, more and more strongly as the train clacks, sways, and rolls on to the east Farther down the car, where the SS crammed in the Theresienstadt sick, perhaps fifteen people are dead. The transportees, sunk in wretched apathy, doze or stare about in the asphyxiating miasma.
A halt.
Rough voices shout outside. Bells clang. The train moves jerkily backward and then forward again, changing locomotives. It stops. The car door opens to allow the emptying of the reeking slop pails.
Sunshine and-fresh air flood in like a burst of music. The Czech nurse gets her water bucket refilled. The car captain talks about the corpses to the SS guard bringing the water, who shouts, "Nal die haben noch Glack!" ("Well, they're lucky!") He slides the door shut, and turns a screeching bolt.
When the train moves again, the stations that glide by have Polish names. Now one hears "Oswiecim" spoken aloud in the car. A POlish couple near Natalie says they are heading straight for Oswiecim. It is as though Oswiecim is a giant magnet sucking in the train. sometimes the route has seemed to Turn in another direction and spirits have revived, but sooner or later it always bends back to OswiecimAuschwitz, the Viennese women call it.
Natalie has now been sitting up for seventy-two hours. The elbow she leans on is rubbed raw and staining her suit with blood. Her hunger is gone. Thirst is racking her, blotting out everything else.
Since leaving Theresienstadt she has had two cups of water. Her mouth is as dry as if she has been eating dust. The Czech nurse gives water to people who need it more: the children, the sick, the old, the dying.
Natalie keeps thinking of American drinks, of the times and the places where she drank them: ice-cream sodas in drugstores, Coca-Colas at high school dances, cold beer at college picnics, water from kitchen taps, water from office coolers, water from an icy brown mountain pool in the Adirondacks where she could see trout swimming, water in a cold shower after tennis that she caught in her hands and drank. But she has to shut off these visions. They are driving her crazy.
A halt.
Looking out, she sees farmlands, woods, a village, a wooden church. SS men in gray-green uniform pass outside, stretching their legs, smoking cigars she can smell, chatting amiably in German. From a farmhouse close to the railroad a whiskered man in boots and muddy clothes comes, car
rying a large lumpy sack. He pulls off his cap to talk to an SS officer, who grins and makes a contemptuous gesture at the train. In a moment the door slides open, the sack is tossed through the aperture, and it closes.
"Apples! Apples!" The joyous unbelieving word sings through the car.
Who was this softhearted benefactor, this muddy bewhiskered man who knew there were Jews in the silent train and pitied them? Nobody can say. The transportees get to their feet, eyes gleaming, gaunt faces suffering and eager.
Men move about putting fruit into snatching hands. The train starts.
The jerk throws Natalie off her numb feet. She has to grab at the man bringing the apples. He glares at her, then laughs. He was the construction foreman at the children's pavilion. "Steady, Natalie!" He fishes in the sack and gives her a big greenish fruit.
The first squirt of apple juice in Natalie's mouth sets her stopped saliva flowing; it cools; it sweetens; it sends life stinging electrically through her. She eats the apple as slowly as she can.
Around her everybody is crunching fruit. A fragrance of harvest time, the smell of apples, steals through the foul air. Natalie chews the apple down, bite by exquisite bite. She eats the core. She chews the bitter stem. She licks the streaks of sweet juice from her fingers and her palm. Then she gets as drowsy as though she has eaten a meal and drur, wine. Sitting cross-legged, her head leaned on her hand, one raw elbow on the floor, she sleeps.
When she wakes moonlight makes a blue barred rectangle of the high window. It is warmer than before, when they were coming out of the mountains. Exhausted Jews slump or lean on each other in sleep all through the vile-smelling car.
Almost too stiff to move, she pulls herself to the window for air.
They are running through scrubby marshy wasteland. The moonlight glitters on patches of swampy water where cattails and leafy reeds grow thick. The train traverses a high barbed-wire fence, strung on concrete posts as far as the moon illumines, spaced with shadowy watchtowers. One tower is so close to the track that Natalie glimpses two guards silhouetted at their machine guns, under the cylinders of darkened searchlights.
Inside the fence, more wasteland. Up ahead, Natalie perceives a yellowish glow. The train is slowing down; the clacks of the wheels are lower in pitch and fewer. Straining her eyes she discerns in the distance rows of long huts. Now the train sharply turns. Some of the Jews rouse themselves at the screech of wheels and groan of the rickety car. Natalie sees up ahead, before the train straightens out, a wide heavy building with two arched entrances into which the moonlit railroad tracks disappear. Clearly this is the terminal, their destination, Oswiecim- Trembling and sickness seize her, though nothing frightening is in sight.
The train passes through a dark arch into a dazzling white glare.
The train is gliding to a halt alongside a very long floodlit wooden platform. SS men line the track, some with large black dogs on leashes. Many strange-looking figures also await the train: bald-skulled men in ragged verticalstriped pajamas, dozens of them, all along the platform.
The train stops.
A terrifying din breaks out: clubs pounding at the wooden car wails, dogs barking, Germans screaming, "Get out! Everybody out!
Quick! Out! Out!"
Though the Jews cannot know it, this reception is rather unusual.
The SS prefers a quiet arrival that keeps up the hoax to the last: peaceable unloading, lectures about health examinations and work possibilities, reassurance of luggage delivery, and the rest of the standard game. But word has come that this transport may prove unruly, so the less common harsh procedure is on.
Doors slide open. Light glares in on the dazed crowded Jews.
"Down! Out! Jump! Leave your baggage! No baggage!
You'll get it in your barracks! Out! Get down! Out!" The Jews begin to vanish out into the white glare. Big uniformed men jump into the car, brandishing clubs and snarling, "Out! What are you waiting for? Move your shitty asses! Out! Drop that baggage! Get out!" As fast as they can crowd forward, Jews are stampeding out of the car.
Natalie, far from the door, is caught in a crush thrusting her toward the light. Her feet scarcely touch the floor. Sweating with fear, she finds herself in the full blinding glare of a floodlight.
God, it is a long jump to the platform! Children are sprawling all over down there, old ladies lie on their faces and backs where they have tumbled, showing their pitiful white or pink drawers. The striped spooks are moving among them, lifting up the fallen.
So much registers on Natalie's nearly paralyzed consciousness.
She hesitates, not wanting to jump on a child. There is no clear space to land. The thought flashes through her mind, "At least I spared Louis this!" A heavy blow cracks her shoulder, and she leaps with a scream.
Her-uncle has a different experience.
He knows from Berel's revelations the precise fate that awaits him. In his final entry in A Jew's Journey, Aaron has recorded an almost Socratic acceptance of death, but this serenity is hard to sustain on a three-day train trip toward extermination by poison gas.
Socrates, it will be recalled, drank the hemlock and faded off after a short noble discourse to sorrowing and admiring disciples.
Jastrow has no disciples, but A Jew's Journey-though he has secreted it behind the planks of the library wall in Theresienstadt, with no hope of living until it is found-is addressed to an audience too, its eventual readers; and Jastrow, a writer to the core, has lei the noblest last words he could muster. Thereafter, however he remains very much alive, and the trip is long.
Seventeen Prominente are crammed with him into two rear compartments of the coach in which the SS rides. It is very close quarters. They must take turns standing and sitting, dozing when they can. They are fed watery soup and stale bread at night, one c'up of brown slop in the morning. For a half hour each morning they have access to a toilet, which they must then scrub and disinfect, ceiling to floor, for German use. It is not first-class travel. Still, compared with their fellows in the cattle cars they are well off, and they know it.
That is, in fact, Jastrow's torment. The privileged coach ride gnaws at his fatalistic serenity. Can there be any hope?
Certainly the seventeen others think so. They talk of little else day and night, but the positive aspects of their favored treatment.
Those who have wives and children in other cars are optimistic even about them. True, the train evidently is not heading for Dresden.
But wherever it is going, on this transport Prominente remain Prominente.
That's the main thing! Once at their destination, they will manage to look after their loved ones.
Common sense warns Aaron Jastrow that the coach ride can be more sadistic German foolery, or a bureaucratic mischance, or a calculated move to keep out of the cattle cars peiwnages around whom a spark of resistance might flicker.
But it is hard to hold out against the desperate ebullience of the others. He too yearns to live. These seventeen cultivated, highly superior men can argue persuasively: three Elders, two rabbis, a symphony conductor, a painter, a concert pianist, a newspaper publisher, three doctors, two army officers with war wounds, two half-Jewish industrialists, and the head of the Transport Section, a bitter-faced little Berlin lawyer, who alone does not talk to the others or even look at them.
Nobody knows how he fell afoul of his bosses.
Except for one guard posted outside their compartments, the Germans pay no attention whatever to the Jews. Riding in the SS car, however great a privilege, is unnerving. Jews are usually quarantined from this elite like diseased animals.
They can smell the hearty meals brought on board for the SS.
At night jolly songs drunkenly roar out in the car, and loud arguments go on, sometimes sounding ugly. This Teutonic boisterousness close at hand makes the Prominente shudder, for at any time it can occur to the SS to. work off their boredom by making sport with Jews.
Late on the second night, the SS men are beerily bell
owing the Horst Wessel song, and Jastrow is remembering the first time he heard it, in Munich in the mid-thirties. Those early feelings flood over him. Ridiculous though he thought the Nazis were then, their song did embody a certain elemental German wistfulness; and now that he is probably about to die at their hands he can still hear that simple romantic Heirnweh.p in this discordant chorus. The compartment door bursts open.
The guard shouts, "The stinking Jew Jastrow! To compartment number four!" He is shocked into shivery alertness.
With long faces the other Jews make way. He goes, the guard tramping behind him.
In compartment four, a gray-headed SS officer with a gross double chin, sitting with several other officers drinking schnapps, tells him to stand there and listen. This SS man is discoursing on a comparison of the Seven Years' War and World War II, pointing out the comforting analogies between Hitler and Frederick the Great. Both wars show, he argues, how a small disciplined nation under a great warlord can hold its own against a huge shaky coalition led by mediocrities.