by Anna Scanlon
Toward the end of the first day, fellow Jews began to break down and use the buckets, sitting down on them and looking up at their traveling companions with shame glinting in their eyes. They were performing a monumentally private task, usually carried out behind locked doors. They began relieving themselves like animals in front of a large group of others, friends, relatives and total strangers among their ranks. They had no other choice.
It wasn't long before the entire boxcar began to stink of human feces and urine. At first, it hit me, crawling into my nose and making me dizzy. As a somewhat spoiled child living a cushy life, I had never smelled something so horrific--my exposure to any waste being relegated to when Kiraly, our dog, relieved himself while we were playing. I had never even changed a diaper or seen a baby being changed. I noticed the four or five babies and toddlers among us also began to emit a similar stench. With no room for their parents to change their diapers, and certainly no water to wash them off, the parents simply clung helplessly to their crying children as they wallowed uncomfortably in their own filth.
We took shifts sleeping against one another, my mother alternating between sleep and alertness the entire time. When the sun brought some light into our stinking, hot car, I could see she had the rash on her face again--and it had spread to her neck. She didn't complain, she simply stood with her eyes half closed pressed against Papa or a stranger, drifting into fitful sleeps. It was as if she had already died, except for the momentary instructions to us girls or her rummaging through her pack to give us pieces of now dry bread alerted us to the fact that she was, indeed, still alive.
Five days passed. The stink hung so thick in the air that I could feel it all over my body. My coat hung on my arms, my sweat making it stick to my skin. Our feet were covered in waste, human filth. Nature forced every one of us several times to walk to the bucket, pull down our underwear and relieve ourselves Babies cried in infernal wails for days straight, some stopping altogether on the third or fourth day. Grown men wept and prayers came out from the religious, their mouths slightly moving as the holy words tickled their lips, hoping that God or someone or something would hear them.
At the end of the fifth day, in the dark of night, the train stopped again. We were used to this stopping and starting by now, and no one said anything. The sleeping passengers merely sighed, mumbled and readjusted and those awake simply looked up and braced themselves for the impact of the stop. Hajna and I had been trying to entertain ourselves with word games we could remember from school, but we were falling apart and crumbling with the inability to recall them correctly. Like ancient stones, the games turned to dust.
"We've made it somewhere," a woman at one of the barbed wire windows shouted, her eyes lit up. "We're not in the country anymore."
The sleeping were roused slightly, as those who had been awake stretched their creaky limbs and clamored toward the barbed wire, stepping on hands and feet along the way and having already lost their human dignity. Their dry hands sounded like saw dust against the wooden boxcar and the cries of those who had been trod on rang through the car.
"Auschwitz-Birkeanu," a young boy shouted, his words coming out thickly and slowly, like frozen molasses making its way from the jar.
We had never heard of it. Was it a town? A camp? A factory? Had we arrived at our destination at long last or was this just another stop on the endless journey, propelling us toward a destination unknown? Many didn't even rouse their sleeping relatives or friends; simply letting them continue breathing heavily and uttering fitful sighs.
After a few more moments of silence, the boy at the window began describing what he saw. Perhaps he had been prompted to do so by someone we couldn't hear. But like it or not, he began to describe each and every detail that lay before him.
"It looks like a factory. There is barbed wire and a main building where smoke is coming out. A lot of smoke. We're probably going to make munitions or something for the German army. But there are some people coming toward the train. They are wearing striped uniforms. And German officers-"
Before he could finish describing the scene, the doors of the cattle car flew open and a collective, yet misguided, sigh of relief fell over the occupants.
"Out! Out!" came the instructions in languid, accented Hungarian. "Everyone, out! Leave your things on the train. You'll get them later. Out! Out!"
As we were forced from the solace of our sleep and the dead of the night, shouts were heard from the inside of the cars. People were screaming that their children or parents were dead, suffocated in the middle of the night. Wailing mothers and children were dragged out of the train, forced to join the ranks of their fellow Jews next to this factory-like place.
Tripping over suitcases and packages, we made our way down the ramps, not even looking at the men in the striped suits with batons as our feet hit the ground with a shock. There were cracks against human flesh again, hitting indiscriminately and loudly and echoing through the night. All of which were disturbing what would otherwise have been a beautiful and peaceful summer night, the stars shining like beacons of hope above our heads. The stars were ignorant to the scene below and continued showing off their ethereal beauty, blinking every so often.
"Men to the left, women to the right!" the shout came again in broken Hungarian. Papa put his arms around us so tightly I couldn't breathe, but it didn't matter. I wouldn't allow myself to be separated from him. My mother, her body now broken out in rashes and her knees and hands swollen to the size of oranges, held tightly to my father's sleeve.
An SS officer, in full German uniform approached my father. Papa swallowed hard and met his eyes with false confidence, realizing we were now at the mercy of the enemy. There were no longer Hungarians watching over us. There were now only Germans. The officer shouted something to my father in German, a language I knew he understood from his time in the first Great War and speeches he had given in Austria. My father didn't react to the words that had been spit into his face like venom. Instead, he stood erect, holding onto his family even tighter and refusing to let us go. The SS officer pointed a gun at my father for a split second and then fired it in the air, repeating his words. The strong arms that ushered me through my childhood fell lax. Papa was gone, swallowed up by the crowds of men pushing one another in an effort to obey.
"David!" my mother shouted, extending her engorged hands in front of her. "David!"
I had never seen her quite so distressed, so panicked. Her despair now surpassed how frantic she had looked when Hajna dove into the Tisza, coming back for air more than a minute later with a grin on her face and announcing that she had set a new record. Then, my mother's face had been stripped of all color and she ran toward the water, ready to jump into the lake, shoes and all. But Hajna had come back up and Mama's panic had changed to rage as she doled out a punishment for scaring her like that. Now, the panic did not subside and the four of us were ushered with the rest of the women and girls on the convoy to the designated area "for women".
As we were herded into the mass of scared and confused women, I noticed my mother began to lose her color. Her eyes started to glaze over. She fell to the ground with a sharp thud. A woman next to her, perhaps traumatized by the journey, screamed when my mother's body went limp next to hers. We three girls wasted no time in rushing to her side, grabbing her cold hands and standing her up. Her eyes slowly opened, revealing a small light behind them.
"If anyone does not feel well, there are trucks that will take you to the camps. Do not worry, you will be reunited with your families soon."
I craned my neck and saw a truck in the distance with a Red Cross emblem on the side. Old people and children began climbing onto the truck. There were a few young people with yellow faces, doubled over in pain that were waiting to climb aboard as well. Some were supporting themselves by holding on to the sides of the truck.
"Mother, the truck will take you over there," the three of us chimed in, throwing her limp arms over our tiny shoulders and half-carrying
her toward it. She tried to walk, her legs limp and weak.
"I'll be okay," she nodded. "Taking the truck is a good….i….dea…."
Her words came out of her body slowly and painstakingly, as though it hurt to speak.
We approached the truck, where an SS guard and several people in striped uniforms stood, helping people onto the green truck. The interior was lined with benches filled with coughing and sickly people, their dirty hands over their mouths as they hacked and cleared their throats.
"Can my children go with me?" my mother asked, dazed but beginning to come back to life from the haze of her faint. "I know I'll meet them later, I just want them to be with me."
My face was hidden in her dress, right in one of the oversized roses that hung on her left thigh. If the flower had been real, I thought, it would have emitted a sweet and savory smell instead of the stink that it had absorbed from the boxcar. I pretended I was smelling the rose and that sunshine was on my back, that I was at the Tisza with Hajna on a hot July day.
"Of course," the officer answered, his words traveling from his mouth to the ears of a prisoner in stripes who translated and then spoke the words to my mother. Without another word, we climbed up into the truck, Hajna and I sitting on either side of our mother on the hard and unwelcoming benches. They had been scraped in several places, making small half-moon shapes as though fingernails had been dug into them. It was then I looked down and noticed I had scraped my leg climbing onto the truck, blood trickling down my bare, white leg and into my sock. Instead of alerting my mother, I said nothing. It was small, miniscule compared to the scene to my left, where dead bodies of men, women and children were being pulled out of the train. Some of the prisoners lifted the dead children up by their heads, their bodies swinging in the midnight summer breeze like lifeless chickens. I buried my head in my mother's dress again, convinced if I squeezed my eyes shut just long enough, I could wake myself up and I'd find Agata standing beside me, trying to rouse me from a deep sleep so that she could help us get ready for school. When I opened my eyes again, I was still there, inside the stuffy truck. The recycled air in the back of the truck smelled of sickness. This time, even though I knew it was real, I put my face back into my mother's lap, her arm around my back a comfort.
"How old are you?" someone barked in rough Hungarian. I didn't raise my head enough to see who the voice belonged to, but I heard a familiar one answer it.
"Sixteen," Lujza answered. It was a lie. She wouldn't be sixteen for another year, but someone must have whispered for her to tell the SS she was sixteen, or maybe it was simply a reflex, a lie that came from her throat with no reason or purpose.
Before I could lift my head up, I heard Lujza scream, her cries starting right next to me, but quickly moving further and further away.
"Wait!" my mother screamed. "That's my daughter!"
"Only the little ones can stay with you," the Hungarian prisoner in the stripes translated what the SS officer was saying once again. His affect was flat, his face devoid of emotion as though he were an apparition. He was like an actor, delivering a scene he had rehearsed so many times that he forgot the emotion behind it.
"No! Hajna! Aliz!" she cried, her voice small among the chaos.
I lifted my head up just enough to see Lujza turn away, her long and now dirty red hair a banner behind her as the SS officer led her toward a herd of women. Next to the train, the men and women stood separated as one by one each approached an SS officer wearing pristine white gloves. The officer waved them to the left or to the right, separating parents from their children. Old people and children seemed to be going one way; strong, healthy young people were going the other way. As the engine of the truck started with a loud pop and bang, rattling us and making our entire bodies vibrate, I saw Lujza from a distance being shoved with the young women from our transport, her face desperately searching the crowd for someone, anyone she might know. The truck pulled away before I could watch her anymore, a sinking feeling rising from my stomach and then falling to the bottom of my feet.
"Where is she going?" Hajna asked.
"We'll find her later," Mama nodded, kissing our foreheads and laying her head on the wall of the truck. It was as though her head had become too heavy for her body to support.
The truck trudged along and we, the cargo, silently surveyed the camp through the opening in the back. It was covered in barbed wire, it seemed, even more so than The Ghetto. There were wooden huts, as far as the eye could see. Each of them appeared dark, lifeless. In the distance, there was a large chimney with smoke spewing out of it like a dragon breathing fire on its subjects below. As the truck inched closer toward its destination, a smell, an indescribable smell permeated our nostrils. It wasn't feces or urine or burning wood, but it was foul, mixed with a twinge of something sweet that our lungs caught at the very end of a whiff. We hit a pothole and I flew a few centimeters in the air, landing on my tailbone with a thud. Pain radiated up my spine.
"What is that?" an old man mumbled from the corner of the car before covering his mouth with a handkerchief and coughing up what sounded like all of the contents of his body. His brown, wrinkled hand clutched the top of his cane possessively.
Mumbles spread through the truck, each person guessing what they thought the smell could be. It was like pork or some kind of meat, or some even suggesting old donuts. Maybe the Germans were making some sort of new product for their men at the front lines.
"'Raus! Juden! Raus!" came the cry from the SS officer as soon as the truck stopped, just a few feet short of the chimney. He opened the back of the truck with a loud clink and men wearing striped outfits stood by helping out those who had trouble walking, sick children covered in rashes, some sweating with fever and old people bent over so far, they almost looked as though they would snap in half.
In the rush to leave the truck, an officer pulled me down by the waist and then set me on the ground with a thud, the mud all but covering the white leather shoes my father had bought me only a few months before.
"For the summer time," Papa had said, a broad smile on his face as he handed me the package.
"You're spoiling them," my mother chastised as Papa handed Hajna a similar, but not quite matching, pair of white "good shoes" (as my mother called them). He had smiled that day, his pink lips curled under his moustache. He had seen them in a store window and thought of us. He just wanted his daughters to have them. I looked down at them, trying not to cry over the fact that they were no longer my "good shoes". I pinched my filthy hand to distract myself from the oncoming deluge of tears.
The SS officer then pulled my sister down by the waist and set her down next to me, her hand immediately clasped in mine, the way it often did during times of uncertainty. It was natural, comforting, to feel our hands holding on to one another's, like holding on to your other half and making yourself complete.
Before the SS officer moved to pull my mother out of the truck, he turned to us and shouted something in German, gesturing once again to an apparition in a striped uniform to translate the mumble he was saying. This man, the new translator, took off his striped hat, revealing a head full of stubble. His eyes and nose looked too big for his face, as if someone had drawn him in a newspaper cartoon. I squinted my eyes and tilted my head to the left, trying to decide what kind of haircut he might have had if he had had hair.
"Are your daughters twins?" he asked my mother as the officer sat her down on her feet. She put her hand on the side of the truck, her face now turning a gray pallor. We rushed to either side of her, trying to hold her up. Our heads only came to her shoulders. An appreciative smile curled on her colorless lips.
"Yes," my mother answered, putting her arms around our tiny shoulders, partly for support and partly for protection. As the SS officer eyed us, looking at us with an unfamiliar glint in his eyes, my mother pulled us closer to her waist, our arms clasping one another's behind her.
"Zwillinge!" the SS officer shouted with glee, before looking to another
officer who had helped load us into the truck. He began to yell at him in German, spit coming from his tight mouth on every other word, his finger pointing to us every so often. His finger was straight and unwavering, definite.
"Go with him," the Hungarian man with cartoon features told us, pointing toward an SS officer who stood no more than a few meters away from us. His arms were crossed over his chest, his boots surprisingly clean despite the sea of mud surrounding him.
The three of us began to walk toward the SS officer, my knees starting to wobble with genuine fright and fatigue. This was the first time I could feel in the pit of my stomach that maybe something could happen to us, that maybe we weren't protected after all.
A mumble of German passed between the man in the striped uniform and the SS officer before the Hungarian man turned back to us. His oversized mouth dropped into a frown, his exaggerated features reminding me of a clown's face.
"Just the girls," he informed us, his face looking to the mud in distress.
"No," my mother protested. "I'm not going without them."
Our arms tightened around her waist protectively. I couldn't think. I couldn't form any words. All I knew was that I could not be separated from my mother in all of this confusion.
"You must go with the other sick people," the man in the striped uniform said tersely, "The girls have been ordered to come alone."
"But where are you taking them? How will I find them?"
"Calm down," he told her, motioning to the SS officer behind her. "It'll be fine. You'll see them later."
And before any of us could exchange another word, two men in striped uniforms lifted us up by the waists and an SS officer pulled my mother back to the band of the sick. She looked resolute, as if she were about to collapse from the sudden realization that she would be without us, alone.