by Irma Joubert
“Surrendered?” Marco asked. “So there’s peace now?”
“That’s what you’d think,” Josef continued. “But when the English landed in the south of Italy, the Germans immediately occupied the northern parts and German special forces paratroopers rescued Mussolini from prison and made him head of the pro-German Repubblica Sociale Italiana.”
Marco shook his head. “So here in northern Italy we are in a socialist republic, still ruled by Mussolini?” he made certain.
“Actually, under German rule, Mussolini is nothing but a puppet,” Josef replied.
“He’s always been one,” said Marco.
“It has radically changed the destiny of the Jews,” the older man said. “Before the German occupancy a month or so ago, no Jews were sent to camps. But then they let loose the SS and the Nazi dogs to sniff us out and arrest us.”
“So the years we spent hiding in the cave were unnecessary?” Marco said, dismayed.
“And Mama died in vain?” Ester asked uncertainly.
“No,” Mr. Rozenfeld said softly, “your mother has been spared this humiliation. She would never have survived it. She rests where there is peace.”
That night, when Rachel lay in Marco’s arms on the thin mattress under the rough blankets, she said softly, “Our years in the cave weren’t pointless, Marco. I was with you every day. It was hard, yes, but it was also the happiest time of my life.”
More Jews arrived every day. After a week in the tented camp, everyone was loaded onto trucks and taken to the station. They boarded the waiting train, up to twenty people crammed into a compartment meant for six.
“I hear we’re going to Trieste, the city in northern Italy with the largest Jewish population,” a man said.
“Where’s that?” Rachel whispered.
“It’s a seaport in the northeast,” Marco answered, putting his arm around her thin shoulders.
“I think they’re sending us to La Risiera di San Sabba, near Trieste,” another man said.
“Is it a military camp as well?” Marco asked.
“It used to be a warehouse, before the Great War,” Josef answered from the side. “Evidently the Deutsche Wehrmacht changed it into a camp at the beginning of the war, actually a kind of police detention barracks.”
“How do you know all this?” an older woman asked sharply.
“I have a friend who lives in Trieste. He works in the industrial district, and that’s where the camp is,” Josef answered, sounding impatient.
“That fellow seems a real know-it-all,” Rachel said softly to Marco.
“Careful what you say,” he answered, smiling. “Have you seen the way he and Ester are eyeing each other?”
“Oh no, Marco!” Rachel said, dismayed.
He laughed softly. “Your baby sister is growing up. She’s no longer a little girl.”
But Rachel frowned and shook her head. “She’s sixteen. She’s too young,” she protested.
“I hear three thousand Italian soldiers were killed there awhile ago by SS officers and the Ukrainian guards,” a third man joined in.
Marco felt Rachel draw a sharp breath. He stroked her arms and said out loud, “I don’t think we should listen to rumors. Let’s see for ourselves what the situation is.”
“I agree,” said the older woman with the sharp voice. “Stories lead to nightmares—and we have enough of those already, thank you very much.”
La Risiera di San Sabba was an unobtrusive building at the docks, in the heart of the industrial district. They were herded down a long corridor, ending in a large courtyard. “Line up!” a stout man roared. “Families together.”
Quickly Marco repeated the order in Italian.
The anxious groups tried to organize themselves. Men stood around uncertainly, women grabbed and let go, children cried, and somewhere a dog began to bark hysterically.
“Where’s the man who can interpret?” the officer asked on the megaphone.
“That’s you!” Josef nudged Marco. “Go talk.”
Eventually Marco and the Rozenfelds were given a number for a small, dark, windowless room. Five beds with thin mattresses were stacked in a corner. The rough walls were covered with faint sketches—relics of previous inhabitants.
They set up the tiny room as comfortably as possible. “We can use the extra bed for storage,” Rachel said.
“Not that we’ve got much to store,” said Ester, taking their four plates and mugs from the bag.
But soon a young man and woman and their baby moved in with them, and they had to reorganize. The Rozenfelds pushed three beds against one wall and gave the new arrivals two beds against the opposite wall, with a narrow gap between them.
An hour later they had to line up again. They stood for hours in the bitter cold. After a while Mr. Rozenfeld’s legs gave way, and Marco and Rachel held him upright. “I can’t anymore,” he whispered hoarsely through dry lips.
At last they were each given a pair of coveralls made of coarse striped fabric, with a big yellow Star of David on the sleeve. “These are our work uniforms,” Marco interpreted to the dejected assembly. Even the children were provided with coveralls.
“It looks like the men’s pajamas in the movies.” Ester giggled when they were back in their room. “And it’s terribly scratchy. I’m glad Papa sleeps in a nightshirt and cap.”
“This is all I have now,” Mr. Rozenfeld said.
They were divided into work teams. The men worked in the rubber factory nearby, Rachel joined the seamstresses, and Ester worked in the kitchen. The guards, they soon found out, were common criminals who treated the prisoners brutally.
Besides Jews, the prisoners included Communists, Gypsies, and a number of Slovakian and Slovenian citizens.
Life inside the high walls surrounding Risiera di San Sabba began to acquire its own rhythm. When the bugle sounded at dawn, the prisoners shuffled quietly into straight lines for the morning roll call, where their names were carefully ticked off. The names of those who had fallen ill the day before or during the night were struck from the roll and the rest were given a ladle of runny porridge for breakfast.
The mornings and evenings were bitterly cold. The men rubbed their hands together to work up a little heat, and the women wrapped their coats more tightly around themselves. Marco was grateful for the warm Russian coats and caps the Rozenfelds had brought from Lithuania.
The rations were meager, but after their years in the cave, they had grown accustomed to eating very little. They worked long, hard hours, and at night they lay together on their three narrow beds, whispering. Some nights the baby would whimper, and sleep wouldn’t come.
Ester went around with shining eyes. In the early mornings she sat beside Josef, leaning against a low wall in the courtyard, eating her porridge, and in the evenings she disappeared until the bugle sounded, when she would hurry back to their room. Five minutes after the bugle had sounded the guards would search with spotlights, and anyone found moving would be punished.
One night Ester did not return to their room. Rachel lay awake all night. Marco had to physically restrain her from opening the door and going in search of her little sister. “She’s with Josef.” He tried to calm her down.
“But . . . she would never do something like that!” Rachel said. “We weren’t raised that way, we . . .”
With his finger, Marco stroked her cheek in the dark. “It’s no different from us, Rachel,” he said softly.
He felt her stiffen. “It is!” she said firmly. “We’re adults, we’re engaged, and we’ve known each other for years. She met the man less than a month ago. She—”
“Let her be,” said Mr. Rozenfeld from the bed next to theirs. “It may be the last scrap of joy she’ll experience in her young life. Tomorrow we may all be dead.”
Rachel drew a sharp breath. “Papa, don’t say that!” she whispered.
“Death holds no fear for me anymore—just deliverance,” Mr. Rozenfeld said slowly. “I’ll be with your mama agai
n.”
They lay in silence on their beds, his words like heavy blankets suffocating them.
“I wish Ester was here. I’m so worried,” Rachel whispered in Marco’s ear awhile later. “And I’m worried about Papa as well. He seems to have lost hope.”
Marco enfolded her in his arms. “Ester will be fine,” he whispered back. “Grant her some happiness.”
His own anxiety went further than Mr. Rozenfeld, but he didn’t tell Rachel that. He knew Josef had a quick temper and an even quicker tongue.
Today the guards had taken one of the other wise guys aside. The youngster wasn’t at roll call tonight. Marco knew his name would not appear on the list tomorrow morning.
More and more people arrived at the camp and were squeezed into every available space. San Sabba could accommodate a maximum of three thousand prisoners, but by now there were more than five thousand.
The camp authorities began to send away groups of Jews by train. “To Poland,” someone said as they were sitting in a circle slurping their evening soup. They ate slowly, to make the food last a little longer.
“I heard one of the guards mention Auschwitz,” another man said.
“Auschwitz? Have you heard of such a place?” Josef asked skeptically, looking at Marco.
Marco shook his head. “No, I doubt it’s the name of a place. It’s probably just the name of the camp.”
“What does it matter what a camp is called?” said Rachel. “I suppose all camps are the same.”
Josef shrugged. “It can’t be any worse than here,” he said.
“No, it is worse. I hear they’re killing Jews on a large scale,” the first man said. “They load them onto trucks and gas them with exhaust fumes—truckloads of them.”
“They bury them in mass graves. I’ve heard it as well,” the second man confirmed.
“Well, I think it’s absolute nonsense,” Marco said firmly. “After the Great War, the League of Nations was formed by all the Western countries to maintain a degree of order, of . . . civilization, even in times of war. Not even the Nazis can ignore it.”
“Or the rest of the world will declare war against them?” Josef scoffed.
“I believe every word I hear about those pigs,” the first man said, leaning into the circle and lowering his voice. “Let me tell you: Just after the Italian surrender was announced in September, the Nazis sent an entire commando of SS dogs to Lake Maggiore and arrested a lot of our people in Licino, Stresa, Baveno, and Pallanza. Those people simply vanished, just like that, off the face of the earth. But—and listen to this—fishermen discovered a large number of bodies in the lake. Something smells fishy, wouldn’t you say?”
The people in the small circle didn’t look up. They slurped the last of their soup, got up quietly, and went to their rooms.
Josef got to his feet as well and motioned with his head in the direction of his room. “Come,” he said brusquely to Ester and walked away.
Rachel watched them leave, a worried look on her face. Then she turned to Marco. “I don’t like that fellow,” she said quietly.
Marco shook his head and did not reply.
Early in 1944, Sturmbannführer Christian Wirth became the camp commandant at San Sabba. He was a harsh man with a thunderous voice, and soon he became known as “Christian the Terrible.”
The guards, Marco noticed immediately, were as afraid of him as the prisoners. “You must be careful,” a guard said to a column of men winding their way in the dense fog to the factory in the early morning. “He was in charge of Operation Harvest Festival at Lublin in November last year. More than forty thousand Jews were killed in two days—just because one of them had refused to toe the line.”
“I think he’s talking nonsense,” Josef said loudly to Marco.
“I’d be careful,” Marco said quietly. “Wirth seems the kind of person who would do something like that.”
From the continuous stream of new arrivals at the camp they heard that the Allied Forces were gaining ground all over Europe—first in Russia, and now there was a rumor that England and America were planning to invade and liberate France.
“Italy is being shot to pieces, destroyed from below by the Allies, from above by the Nazis,” one old man said somberly. “Our houses and our synagogues are nothing but blackened ruins, and centuries-old cathedrals have been shot to pieces.”
More and more trains left every week—for Poland, they heard. Early in the morning the people were lined up, names were read out, and they filed out the courtyard and through the long corridor and disappeared.
One morning near the end of the winter of 1944, the names of Marco Romanelli, Rachel Rozenfeld, and Ester Rozenfeld were read out as well.
Josef’s name wasn’t read.
Neither was Mr. Rozenfeld’s.
From the corner of his eye Marco, saw Ester begin to move. With a swift movement he grabbed her and covered her mouth with his hand. “Stand still and be quiet!” he whispered urgently. “Cooperate, or they’ll shoot you without thinking twice.”
Without time to say good-bye, without travel papers or any form of identity document, Marco, Rachel, and Ester—three numbers on a typed list—walked to the station, heading for an unknown destination.
Hefty men in Nazi uniforms were waiting on the platform. Their dogs were barking, straining at their leashes. “Line up!” the commander bellowed.
It was no longer necessary for Marco to interpret. Everyone was familiar with the commands. “Where you’re going,” the man thundered, “you’ll get first-class treatment. It’s a good labor camp, one of the best, with recreation facilities. You’re the lucky ones.”
“It sounds good,” Rachel whispered. “Marco, what do you think . . . Papa . . . ?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Rachel. He . . . does good work in the factory offices . . .” But he didn’t believe himself. And he didn’t believe a word the Nazi officer had said about the camp where they were heading.
The officer read out every name on the roll. Then he looked up and asked, “Wieviel Stück?”
A corporal answered smartly, “Fünfhundert und zwölf Stück! Alles ist in Ordnung!”
They were hastily bundled into ten cattle trucks waiting at the platform. The doors were shut and bolted from the outside. Inside, the people were squashed together.
The train did not move. After a few minutes, someone whispered, “What’s going on?”
Nothing happened.
Almost soundlessly, people in the crowded truck began to clear a little space for themselves, their only view through the narrow chinks between the wooden slats.
Night was falling by the time the locomotive began to blow and pump and inch forward. The train moved slowly all through the night.
Outside, the moon was bright. Marco sat pressed up against the rough wooden boards. Rachel and Ester leaned on each other, half on top of him. They finally managed to fall asleep, but for Marco sleep would not come.
Slowly the moonlit landscape moved past. What awaited them at the end of this journey?
Sometimes the train stopped for a long time in the open country, seldom at a station. Through the parallel slats of the cattle truck he gazed at the tall, dark cliffs. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help, Marco thought. Looking down into the dark hollows of the Adige Valley, he told himself, The eyes of the Lord are in every place.
The names of the last Italian cities disappeared behind them as they passed one brightly lit station after another. “I’m so thirsty,” Ester mumbled. “Marco, is there no water?”
Marco stroked her hair. “Try to sleep, Ester,” he said softly.
She curled up and began to cry softly. She did not ask again.
When the sun rose on the second day, the train was steaming and puffing over the winding Passo del Brennero, the centuries-old pass through the Alps that forms the border between Italy and Austria. “I must get water,” Rachel whispered.
“Look outside,” Mar
co said, his finger pointing through a crack. “It’s the Brenner Pass, built by the Romans in the second century.” He was trying his best to distract them. Ester had been crying all night, while Rachel had clung to him with a kind of desperation. “At first it was just a track for horses and mules, of course, later for mule wagons. Round about 1860 the railway line was built.”
“I see,” said Rachel.
Below them lay green hills where cattle grazed peacefully. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters . . .
“This is also where Mussolini and Hitler met at the beginning of 1940 to sign the Pact of Steel,” Marco carried on resolutely.
“What does it matter?” Ester asked. “Isn’t there any water at all?”
But the single bucket of water that had been in the truck at the beginning of their journey had been finished within the first hour.
“They’ll bring us water soon,” said Marco.
“Who? The guards?” Ester asked bitterly.
And she was right. While the freezing cold had been their worst enemy during the first long night, thirst now descended on the wagons. When they stopped, people begged for water. Women and children squeezed their hands through the slats, pleading for a handful of snow, but no one responded. The soldiers on the platforms chased away any person who tried to approach the train.
Children kept whining while the old people simply gave up, lying in defeated heaps.
By the second night it grew quiet. Occasionally someone would still groan or cry softly, tearlessly. Fear about what was waiting ahead dominated the thoughts of the survivors, hunger pushed up in their throats, thirst filled their bodies, made their tongues thick. Sleep eluded them.
Through the cracks they recognized Austrian names: Salzburg, Vienna. Then the names of Czechoslovakian towns and cities. Finally the peculiar spelling of Polish names. During the fourth night the cold was unbearable, the world outside covered with pale white snow.
They had stopped trying to communicate with anyone on the outside. After four days and four nights without food or water, they no longer had the strength.