Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

  The book lying open on her lap has an eloquent photograph of hundreds of naked people on their way to the deadly bathhouse that is now lying smashed and motionless before her. The only sign of life is a lizard warming itself in the sun.

  Someone is sitting next to her. How did she not hear him arrive?

  ‘I wanted to see you …’

  Amara turns and recognises Emanuele’s dark, intense eyes.

  ‘So you survived!’

  ‘I’ve thought so much about you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  But when she looks more closely she sees it’s not the Emanuele she knew. The boy sitting on the stone beside her is a very thin child with furrowed hands and prominent veins. In fact, he’s not even a child. More like a decrepit old man who has spent a lifetime digging and carrying heavy weights. He has stooping shoulders, eyes surrounded by wrinkles, rotten teeth that shift in his mouth and nails edged with black. Amara’s heart tightens and contracts into an insubstantial lump.

  ‘How did you survive, Emanuele, and why did you stop writing?’

  ‘I had no pen or pencil.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘I cannot separate myself from the words. They are like stones fastened to my ankles that I must drag with me. Listen.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Now please undress and be careful to remember the number of the hook where you hang your clothes or you won’t be able to find them again … A soft voice speaking. There was nothing to alarm us and we were ready to trust that voice. After the shower there will be hot tea and fresh bread for everyone … But on going into the shower please make sure you leave everything behind; if you’ve forgotten a ring or a little chain, put them here on this table near your clothes. You’ll get everything back after your shower. Here’s some soap, a piece for everyone; wash well, you are all filthy from your journey … Gently, almost ceremoniously, they guided us politely towards the shower hall … Mamma was smiling as we went in. I haven’t washed for eight days, Emanuele dear, I really do need a shower, after that train without food or drink, sleeping on top of each other on that wooden floor, with the stink of shit … Mamma was singing happily, she was Thelma Fink von Orenstein, singing as brainlessly as a goldfinch.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I noticed a disturbing smell. I couldn’t relax. A smell I’d never smelled before but which seemed familiar all the same … Mutti, what’s this disgusting smell? We’re all so dirty … we have to wash … don’t you understand, they’re giving us all a cup of hot tea afterwards? They’re really nice. In my opinion, these men in the camp are clearly superior to the ones on the train, a different brand of SS altogether … No sooner had we got off the train than they took us to the shower, an excellent idea, don’t you agree? Let’s hope the water’s really hot … I’ve never longed so much for a nice hot shower.

  ‘But I knew it wasn’t human filth I was smelling. It was some nauseous chemical related to that big room, something that made me think of bitter almonds gone rotten. The walls were impregnated with it. I didn’t want to go in, I didn’t want to go into that room with its wet, slippery floor. But I did go in, Amara, I did go in with her pulling my wrist as she sang. What a dreamy, absent-minded Mamma I have! They know it, she was saying, they know I’m the daughter of a general who lost his arm fighting for our country in the famous battle of the Kolubara in Serbia, they know that, they know everything, these people. She kept repeating it. She was still convinced, as we headed for the showers accompanied by that revolting smell, that she was privileged and would be respected, she really believed it, because her father had fought for Austria and lost an arm so our soldiers could cross the bridge over the Kolubara. The Emperor himself had pinned a medal to his chest and called him a hero. Even if in the end the Austrians had lost the battle and been forced to abandon the town of Ljig.

  ‘When they bolted the doors noisily from the outside someone started yelling. Why are they locking the doors like that? And what’s this horrible smell? But Mamma didn’t worry. So much fuss about a shower! She encouraged everyone: you’ll see how good we’ll feel when we’re under the water! … But this blessed water isn’t coming, it’s not coming! I said, and I could see her turning the soap in her hand, rubbing it on her stomach behind me. She was hiding behind me out of embarrassment because she was naked. Everyone was naked there, old people, women and children. But why were there no young people there, where were they? Should we not have been suspicious that among all those bodies there was not a single pair of strong muscular legs to be seen, no head of young hair, no calloused hard-working young hand? Only old people who found it difficult to stand, all twisted and swollen and tormented by hunger and thirst. And mothers, young like mine, each with a child or two. It was their job to reassure their children, and the children’s job to reassure their mothers. My mother held me close tenderly, partly to hide her nudity and partly to reassure herself that we were still together. They had not separated us and this gave her a peaceful feeling.

  ‘Suddenly the light went out and a cry of terror went up. Some narrow slits in the ceiling opened and a hissing could be heard, a disquieting rustle. Here’s the water cried my mother happily, turning up her face to be hit by a shower of cold sand. My simple Mutti thought it was water. Good. Now we could begin soaping ourselves. But the sand raining from the ceiling no sooner hit the wet floor than it began to fizz and dance about. Meanwhile the light had come on again. Something strange was happening! When the bluish grains touched the ground they released blue bubbles that rose in a transparent cloud. A beautiful sight. But when it slipped up nostrils and between lips it made people cough, then spit, then vomit and then … They struggled violently as they tried to climb, to get away from the rising clouds, to reach the iron mouths that seemed to be oozing water. Bewildered, Mamma looked around in astonishment. But only for a second. Then she fell to the floor, dragging me down with her. I couldn’t shout, I had no breath. I clung to her; I wanted to say: Mutti, what’s happening, but I couldn’t speak, my voice had gone. My throat was tied in a knot. I was suffocating. Oh for a drop of water, just one drop, one single drop, and I licked the metal pipe sticking from the wall close to my cheek. I was immediately overwhelmed by another blue cloud, light and translucent. Then another and another. The fizzing had stopped but the bodies were still there, suddenly gigantic and very white, writhing and twisting. Those still on their feet fell, those still breathing began to wheeze and rattle. Silence had descended like a snow of ice on us all. Nothing but that writhing on the floor. Gigantic feet and huge hands near my eyes. Gaping mouths and stiff necks with bulging veins. I no longer thought of breathing. Only my eyes still existed. Those naked bodies were too shocking, too exposed, too silent. Like an ancient sacred dance with long naked legs instead of heads and fingers instead of hair, fingers revolving in silence. In all that whiteness there was only one colour: red ears. I don’t know why the ears were so red, like small poppies growing from white flesh. They were so beautiful, those ears. I could not help gazing at them. I was utterly lucid. I could see children clinging to their mothers, making single bodies with many legs and many heads. The tiniest infants were trying to push their way back into the safety of their mothers’ wombs, pushing and pushing like newborn puppies trying to get milk from the teats of an elderly bitch. A completely bald old gentleman was lying on his back a few inches from my head, his open mouth shooting out red fire. My mother looked surprised. I could feel her arm round my neck. Let her take me with her, I thought, let her drag me wherever she goes, I want to be with her. And she never let go, not even when she stopped breathing. Someone fell on top of me. Feet were beating on my side like a drum. My small stomach swelled and swelled like a football, it was incredible how it could keep swelling. Might I even have a child in my belly? But could it ever be born alive? Luckily Mamma hadn’t had time to discover the trap. She had breathed in the gas rising from the floor so eagerly she had lost consciousness at once. I was happy for her. I lo
oked at her face again: it was pale and tender; her eyes closed and her lips parted in a gentle smile. I wanted to kiss her, say a last goodbye and repeat the prayers people say for the dead but I fell head downwards.’

  Amara reached out to squeeze the boy’s wrist but her fingers met warm stone. She shuddered. ‘Emanuele!’ she whispered. The only thing occasionally moving anywhere near her was the lizard as it tried to find more sun.

  8

  ‘You move, please? With signorina in middle no can photograph ruins.’ A guide comes up followed by a little group of visitors. Amara sees from their faces that she is in their way. She is sitting among the ruins of Gas Chamber number 3. But she can’t make herself move. She sees the group with blind eyes. She hears the guide’s voice explaining: ‘Here shower room, really gas chamber. Nazis put bomb before they going away. But only part fall down. You see roof very broken? But walls still standing. Wait peacefully water. But no water, instead gas grains drop from roof touch wet floor become gas, poison. Zyklon B, death certain, in maybe eight, ten minutes. Death sure. And they all dead, all.’

  Amara struggles to her feet, her head spinning like a top. She is still looking for the man who has just been talking to her, the person who claimed to be Emanuele. But only the tourists crowd round the guide who continues to explain: ‘Forty thousands Italians deported, thirty-two thousands political and military and eight thousands Jews, only three thousands live. Less than ten per cent.’

  You can tell from a mile off that they are Italians, from the disorganised and uncoordinated way they move, and the trouble the Polish guide is having trying to keep them together, constantly chasing some young man or elderly lady who has moved off to take photographs without listening to instructions. For several years now such groups have been able to come directly from Italy by bus.

  ‘Now, signorina, follow the others, please!’

  He has mistaken her for one of his party. Amara obeys automatically. The man has a pleasant voice despite his awkward, comic Italian. The group moves from place to place through Auschwitz and she goes with them.

  The Polish guide, guardian of the dead, seems more real than anything else in the camp, with the warm crosswind seeming to sweep aside the ghosts like scraps of paper. ‘Here: gypsy zone. Here: hospital men prisoners. Here, name Mexico, transit camp for Jewish women.’

  Amara is holding a booklet published by the camp management with large reproductions of period photographs: a line of naked women, their flesh white with the pallor of skin stripped of clothing in winter. She has never before seen nudity like this. A nudity that in revealing itself terminal has become gentle, transparent and mute. The women’s heads are shrunk into their shoulders and their backs hunched as they try to hide their sex under their hands. The damned moving meekly to final judgement though they know themselves innocent. They are branded with numbers that fix their destiny as martyrs. Their crime is that they are alive, that they are themselves and exist. Even if they never listened to the serpent or bit into the apple of temptation, they must now undergo the humiliation of divine rejection. For ever, say those curving backs, for ever. But why?

  ‘Here SS homes,’ says the guide, lifting his hand. Humble little houses though with some pretension to elegance. Lace-edged curtains carefully hung to form two waves in the middle, blue and white shutters. In the little front gardens daisies struggle with rubble and coarse grass.

  ‘Here storehouse for things stolen from Jews, name Canada.’ This was where Amara had seen the mountains of shoes, the piles of cases, the masses of glasses, the heaps of prostheses. She decides to go back into Canada: perhaps first time round her attention was so distracted by the unexpectedness of it that she failed to make a proper check of the huge number of dusty abandoned suitcases. Would she have been able to recognise Emanuele’s? Of course she would; she had seen it often enough on top of the wardrobe in his room. Faded leather with brass bosses and a shiny hook-shaped fastening whose small tongue was made of silver-coloured metal. The lid stamped E and O in gold.

  But she has hardly taken a step before the fatherly Pole intervenes: ‘No, signorina, this way, please.’ So she turns back, without even knowing why.

  ‘Here platform for selection. If you young, can work, this way; if you old, child, mother with children, that way, to gas. Here dead bodies burned. When too many deads and ovens full. Then more ovens made, but later.’ He shows a photograph of corpses hurled at random into a ditch. The tangled limbs make it impossible to tell one body from another. Not even an orgy could entwine legs, arms, heads and pelvises like that. They look strikingly different from the other inmates, from those circulating like spectres in pyjamas looking for something to eat or queuing for roll call early in the morning. The dead are still full and firm, with prominent muscles. They were gassed at once on arrival and it is hard to know whether to grieve over their abrupt extinction or to rejoice that they were spared the torture of camp life.

  Vienna. January ’42

  Dear Amara, yesterday we opened the door to find two servants in uniform, complete with aprons. ‘We’ve come to clean the house for the new owners,’ they said. My mother, always polite, offered them coffee. ‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ she told them, and added, ‘there really must have been a misunderstanding; this is our house, my father bought it before I was born.’ ‘But now it has been assigned to Consul Schumacher and his family.’ ‘Please, madam, don’t insist, we’ll sort it all out, you’ll see.’ ‘Aren’t you Jews by the name of Orenstein?’ ‘Yes, but Austrians first and foremost, my father lost an arm in the Battle of the Kolubara during the First World War and the Emperor himself pinned a medal on his chest.’ ‘Your house has been requisitioned, here are the papers. You must move out by tomorrow. We start cleaning now.’

  My mother made telephone calls in all directions but couldn’t reach any of her friends. Only an employee at the department of social administration who told her abruptly that her house had been requisitioned under the new anti-Jewish laws and assigned to an Aryan family by the name of Schumacher.

  ‘Please come back tomorrow,’ said my mother very politely. ‘You will find the house clean.’ The woman made a sign to her assistant and they left. Soon after the doorbell rang again. This time it was an SS squad. They searched the house saying they were looking for arms. Of course there were no arms. But when they left they took with them all my mother’s silver, jewellery and furs, an eighteenth-century Venetian mirror and a nineteenth-century English silver teapot.

  By now Amara knows nearly all Emanuele’s letters by heart. The words of her little lover echo in her mind, his voice gradually growing more dry and desolate.

  ‘This, first gas chamber. This, second gas chamber. Here, crematoriums one, two, three, four, five. Bodies gassed by pipe here for burning. Body in, smoke and ashes come out. One load every half hour. Here toilets and baths.’ The guide continues relentlessly, taking them rapidly from one part of the camp to another.

  Łódź ghetto. February ’42

  They knocked on the door of our house in Vienna at four in the morning. Gave us an hour to pack our bags. One case each, not more than three in all. But where are we going? No answer. They were impatient and bad-tempered. Papà and Mamma began arguing about what to put in the suitcases. Papà wanted to fill them with food. Mamma with clothes: rugs, warm coats. Her furs, jewels and money had already been taken by the other SS. When they came back after an hour we weren’t ready and they started shouting. Finally we left all loaded up; my father with a valuable mat under his arm and my mother with two cashmere jackets. But at the main door they took everything from us except the three cases. We were loaded onto a lorry and then a train. We had no idea where they were taking us. Four nights of hell in an armoured cattle-truck together with about a hundred other Austrian Jews and nothing to eat or drink. Luckily we’d brought some sausages and apples with us. My father kept saying: You see? You see I was right to bring food? We ate a sausage and an apple each, keeping the rest for late
r. But when we went to get more, Papà’s case was empty. One of those starving people had stolen the lot. Even the Prague ham, the hardboiled eggs, the bilberry liqueur and the biscuits. We were parched with thirst. We arrived dirty and thirsty. Where? At the Łódź ghetto, another Austrian told us in a whisper. Why there particularly? No answer. Only my mother kept asking questions and protesting. My father seemed more dead than alive. They assigned us to a small room in a crumbling building, on the second floor, in an apartment where four families were already living. Only one kitchen. One bath for everyone. Mamma started again on her long lament about her father having won a gold medal for military valour in the Battle of the Kolubara, but no one listened.

  The only thing that matters here is survival. Thousands of Jews are wandering about searching for work and food. They start at five in the morning. Any job, no matter how badly paid, can help to buy bread. They are pale and have difficulty walking. Even the young ones. ‘When your face and your feet start swelling, you know you’re going to die,’ a boy called Stefan, to whom I had given a sweater for two kilos of potatoes, unexpectedly told me. Bread, said Stefan, costs twenty-five złotys a kilo. But they also accept marks which are worth twice as much as złotys. I’m writing to you with a pencil I stole from the directors’ office where Mamma dragged me while she was going on about it all being a misunderstanding and that we ought not to be here. This is how I met Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, a strong man with glasses and a hat. Compared to the others we see around, hunchbacks with tuberculosis and legs reduced to sticks, he looks like a pasha. He too was forced to listen to the story of grandfather Georg Fink and the medal for military valour pinned to his chest by the Emperor. He didn’t bat an eyelid. But he then said very coldly that in the Łódź ghetto all are equal, that no one has any special privileges and that everyone has to work to earn the złotys they need to survive. Then he asked politely, ‘What skills do you have, madam?’ Mamma was so offended she couldn’t answer. But does she have any particular skills at all? Mr Rumkowski advised her to look for work in the textile factory where there are still a few places left for women, then shut the door on us.