by Marge Piercy
He said that he was very sorry to tell her about the death of her father and to tell her so long afterward, but he had just found her address. A journal that had been written by her sister Jacqueline had been found after the battle in such a situation that they believed that her sister had been shot by the Germans, but an exact identification had not been possible because of the condition of the body. He wished he had better news for her, but he was sending her the journal. Under the circumstances of not knowing if Jacqueline were alive or dead, he had taken the liberty of reading the journal as far as he could. He explained that in 1943, she had begun writing in code, and that he had not been able to read it after that point. However, long before Jacqueline had begun using code, she had entered in her diary the address of her sister in the United States.
He hoped she would have good news of the rest of her family. He regretted again to give her the news of her father’s death, but her father had been a great fighter in the Jewish Resistance, and it had taken a tank to bring him down. She should be proud of her father and honor his memory. He had had the pleasure of serving under his command. Further, he had worked with Jacqueline, and her bravery and intelligence in tight situations were sorely missed. She had saved the lives of at least eighty Jewish children.
He ended by saying that he hoped he would meet her someday after the war and that he had a photograph of her father taken when they were all in the maquis, which he had put in the package with the journal. He hoped she would like to have this photograph of her father in remembrance.
When she had finished reading the letter, she stood and then she fainted.
When she came to, she was lying on the living room floor with her head bleeding where she had banged it on the hot air register. Aunt Rose was kneeling over her with a washcloth soaked in cold water and vinegar. Naomi lay on the floor and began to weep and did not want to get up.
Always she had hoped that in the end, even if Maman was dead, even if Rivka had died, all alone with Naomi no longer listening, Papa would still come on his motorbike and take her back into a place where she belonged. Now there was no such place. There was only Jacqueline, far far away, maybe dead too, shot down as Papa had been. Even if she wasn’t shot, she was only an older sister and could not help. Jacqueline was as weak as she was.
Naomi belonged to nobody now except Leib. Not even Ruthie was here to stop her tears, for Ruthie was at work. Now she was really an orphan, and she belonged no place good.
JACQUELINE 12
Whither Thou Goest
On January the eighteenth, Jacqueline and Daniela along with fifty thousand other haeftlings were still alive to stand appel. This day was different from all the others. They could hear the Soviet artillery as they had for two weeks, each day louder, a sound that rose from the earth up into their bones. They hoped, they longed for Soviet shells as they had used to long for the Allied bombers to come. The crematoria had been blown up and black greasy ashes no longer fell. However, the machinery of death had ceased without death itself ceasing. The dying were heaped in piles or shoved into barracks and locked inside. All week the SS had been burning papers and shooting inmates who knew too much.
To the accompaniment of the usual SS chorus of curses, blows with the butt of the rifle, kicks and random shootings, they were marched out and loaded into boxcars like those that had brought them to Auschwitz. Rysia was right behind, but with the arbitrary brutality that marked their lives, Slasher pulled Rysia from them and thrust her into the next car. Their car was as crowded, as filthy as on the previous voyage, but they were all in worse shape and began to die faster. There were no children, no old people, no babies this trip. Like the last time, they had no water, no food except for a tiny bit of bread Daniela and she had secreted under their ragged grey shifts. There was less suspense, she mused, for it was all death.
She had worried about rape, unnecessarily, on her way to the camp. Apparently when the SS had come into Poland, they had raped and immediately killed many women. But why would the SS bother with the stinking starving haeftlings when they had the overfed, overstimulated SS women and their own brothels handy? No, the sexual abuse had been sublimated into total violence. The SS men and women were always stripping them on some excuse or none, always beating them across the breasts. They did not need to rape to prove their power, as they had their rifles, their pistols, their clubs, their machine guns, their dogs sicced on the women to tear their flesh. Rape must seem pallid by comparison, she thought.
“So far we’ve come together, Daniela,” she mumbled. “Whatever happens, we must stay together.”
“I will never let you out of my sight.” Daniela was wedged against her, both jammed against the wall of the unheated car.
“Listen to me, ‘Whither thou goest I will go, where thou stayest, I will stay. Thy people shall be my people and thy gods my gods. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. Let the Lord punish me so, if anything but death part us.’”
“Anyplace?” Daniela managed a skeletal grin.
“Even there.” Yes. To Palestine or to death.
She could not think because of the hunger, the thirst. She was sunk into a state between sleep and waking, afraid to enter sleep fully for fear she would slide down into comfortable death. Her cheek was pushed against the rough cold side of the car. Through the cracks she watched the land. For months all she had seen was black, white and shades of grey: the grey clay underfoot, the grey sky overhead, the grey of their shifts, the grey of the bread and the soup, the black uniforms of the SS, the black flakes of human soot that drifted down, the ivory of bones. In her dreams a white fog choked her.
Whenever she emerged from her cocoon state, she pressed her face to the cracks and stared at the skies, glittery cobalt so bright she had forgotten such colors existed, the dark healing green of the pines, the blue of shadows on the snow, the vermilion of the slanting rays of the low foxy sun. Crows flapped away from the train as she gloated on their glossy wings. How miraculous, to fly. Why had she never stopped to marvel at birds, how perfect in their feathers with their bright eyes and beaks, able to lift themselves and ride on the wind? Blessed birds.
Daniela too was fighting the slope toward death, prodding with her bony elbow and giving her Hebrew verbs to conjugate. Jacqueline riposted with English verbs. Do, does, did, done. They stood leaning on each other, clasped. It was no longer like holding another woman, for neither had breasts or bellies or hips except for the jutting bones that bruised the other’s sharp angles in the embrace of fleshless skeletons, devoid of sex.
They stuck their fingers through the cracks and scraped frost from the side of the car. It tasted of resin and evaporated at once in the mouth, relieving the pain for a moment. Every so often the train stopped and eventually the guards opened the door and shouted for the dead to be thrown out. By the third day half the women in the car had turned to bodies left in the snow. The first time the bodies had been rolled out, she had expected the SS men to order women out to bury them, in their meticulous way of disposing at once of the dead, but they did not seem to care any longer. All along the tracks corpses were strewn. Now there was room to sit in the boxcar, avoiding the mess on the floor.
Outside it was snowing and they kept putting their fingers through the cracks to catch the flakes and eat them. She wondered which had been worse, her trip in the burning summer heat in the first crowded boxcar to Auschwitz or this in the unheated car in the frozen winter. Then her head had been full of fantasies about what they would be facing. No imagining could equal it. All her worrying had been in vain. Would she ever again see Maman or Rivka? She had survived six months of Auschwitz. Could they have survived two years of camp life? Still, her aunt had made it and Maman might too. She had that endless energy to try to make things come out, to manage. If anybody could organize a little survival, it would be Maman.
In the bitter penetrating cold her arm ached where she had broken it, but she was used to that. She stared at the trees with thei
r needles bowing under the snow, their roots wriggling deep into the hillside among the rocks drinking the clear cool deep sweet water, the sun falling on them till sugar brewed in their tissues and their sap sang. If she could become a tree, what a splendid life. To be a tall pine on a mountaintop, free, clean.
“If I had enough to eat,” she murmured against Daniela. They were both sitting now, knees drawn up, heads propped. Their feet were blocked by women’s bodies roughly stacked in the center. “Then I’d never again complain about anything. To think I used to worry if people gave me a nasty look or weren’t fast enough to praise me.”
“And I used to worry I was too fat. I’d love to be the fattest woman in the world. I used to stare in the mirror fiddling with my nose. I used to lie awake worrying if Ari was faithful to me. What would I care?”
It was hard to feel attachment to anybody out in the world, anybody free and still human. It was hard to worry much even about Rysia in the next car. That was a different universe where different people died as slowly or as rapidly as here. If she had a cyanide pill in her tooth the way Jeff had, would she take it? When? No. Because she could not leave Daniela. Never would she leave her.
It was the fifth day when the cars stopped, the last dead were thrown out and they were ordered to get down. They were in the middle of a tall beautiful woods. “They’re going to shoot us all,” Daniela muttered, eyes darting to seek cover. Instead they were marched, five abreast double time along a forest track away from the stinking cars. The air was crystalline and entered her lungs like shards of ice, but her head cleared. Ahead and behind they heard volleys of shots and to the side would lie bodies of women who had stepped out of line, walked too slowly, stumbled, fallen. She was stiff after so long in the boxcar. Twice she dared stoop to snatch a handful of snow. Daniela did the same. Finally ahead they saw Rysia. She had survived. Thus far.
Then they marched between stubbly fields. In the distance through a scraggy row of trees they saw many barracks, the familiar electrified wire fencing and guard towers, the SS men, the dogs, the smell of burning flesh. A small sign read Bergen-Belsen. They had arrived.
They trotted in between huge piles of logs with snow drifted over them. As they were marched from building to building, through icy showers, stripped, shaved, she kept tripping over logs in the path. “They must do a lot of lumbering here. Do you think we could get on a work detail?”
“Lumbering?” Daniela repeated, looking where Jacqueline’s gaze pointed. “Those are bodies.”
This place, they discovered, featured a different form of terror and death. There was none of the mad logic of Auschwitz, where everything was used, the last ounce of strength of the slaves, women and men, to produce rubber, ammunition, fuses, to sort clothes, to tailor, to remake out of old clothes fancy new clothes for Berlin; where every death was meticulously noted in columns and every recyclable part of the person ripped from the body, the gold teeth, the hair, the fat and bones.
Here there were the beatings, the shootings, the death on the wire, the dogs that tore the flesh, the hangings, but there was far more death by typhus, by starvation. There seemed to be no gas chambers. The bodies were stacked to be burned, but the system had broken down. Some days no food was distributed at all. Children ran through the camp, the first children she had seen since Dr. Mengele had motioned them into the poison fog in Auschwitz. She was moved to what would have been tears except that she could no longer cry, seeing the little ones covered with fleas and lice even worse than the adults, running in packs among the tents where they slept on straw together, forlorn rat children playing at appell, skeletal hairless beggars.
They were set to work building barracks. After a twelve-hour day, sometimes they had soup and sometimes there was none. Even Rysia looked an ancient crone now. Typhus and diphtheria were killing everyone.
When two SS guards came in with the blockalteste and a man in a business suit who held a handkerchief to his nose, they were asked how many wanted to volunteer to work in a factory. They looked at each other. The SS was always asking for volunteers, and half the time those were the ones marched to the chambers or shot. But sometimes it was work and a chance to get fed. “We’ll die here,” Daniela muttered. The three of them stepped forward.
The factory turned out to be one of many in Magdeburg. They slept in a barracks housing three hundred Jewish women. Every morning they marched from the barracks through the streets of the city to the factory, while the citizens watched, turned away, spat. Regular German workmen were employed alongside them, but many had recently been taken for the home defense forces, and they were to replace them. Working with them were Jewish men, the first they had been near. One man and two women were put on each machine making casings for shells. What they dared, they spoiled.
The man on their machine looked ancient, shriveled, with his yellow teeth. They could hardly communicate because he was an Italian Jew, who spoke only Italian and Ladino, but finally they managed by Jacqueline speaking her little Spanish slowly and the man, whose name was Paolo, answering slowly in Italian. He was twenty-six. He had been a civil engineer in Milan, active in the Resistance in a minor way passing on clandestine writings. He had been scooped up with the other Jews of Milan when the Germans took over. He did not even know if his wife, his child, his family, had been arrested.
He did not talk much. The camps seemed to have turned him simple. Sometimes he smiled at them with his loose yellow teeth, but mostly he worked, as they all did as slowly as they dared, as badly as they dared. They no longer believed that if they worked well they would be spared. At the barracks at least they got ersatz coffee and a piece of bread in the morning; turnip soup and a piece of bread at night; on Sunday, one slice of spoiled sausage.
There were French workers in the factory too, mechanics who fixed the machines when they broke down, as they constantly did. They were more protected and more uppity than the other slaves. One of them always said “Bonjour” when he passed Daniela and Jacqueline. They did not dare answer unless they could mouth the words without being seen, but always she looked into his eyes.
One afternoon he was replacing a flange on the next machine. As he left, he dropped into her lap something hard. She looked down. It was an apple. She almost fainted. She could scarcely hide it quickly enough. It seemed to her the luscious aroma filled the entire factory, but she brought it back to the barracks and with the knife they had manufactured from a tiny fragment of shell casing, Daniel divided it into three equal parts. Rysia, Daniela and she each had a third of an apple. It tasted like warm weather, like flowers, like sunshine, like promises. She cut it into smaller and smaller pieces, figuring out the smallest piece she could eat without losing the flavor. After it was gone, she licked her own hands again and again for the last of the savor.
In the factory it was less cold and there were no fleas, no lice and in the latrine, running water the times they were let to go. They could drink water until they felt full. They could wash themselves quickly. In the barracks, there was no running water and only a bucket that overflowed each night in which to relieve themselves from the terrible diarrhea that sucked their strength. Something in the food caused it, but if they did not eat, they starved. On the food, they starved more slowly.
In March bombs began falling on the factory. If it happened during the day, the Germans ran for the shelters, but they were locked in. After one such bombing, she saw the crushed body of the French mechanic who had given her the apple. They hid under the machines. Mostly the ceiling fell in and the slaves were killed, while iron machines stood hilled over with rubble but otherwise undamaged. They were forced to dig them free.
March 28 in the barracks, the women celebrated Pesach without food. Rysia asked the four questions, as the youngest woman still alive. Slaves telling the story of slaves who had risen up, who had escaped. At the close, at the words next year in Jerusalem, Jacqueline thought of Papa, whom she had had no time to mourn, but Daniela took her hand and Rysia’s in a hard gri
p of promise. Part the sea of iron and blood for us! Let us go.
She enjoyed the bombing, because she loved the destruction, but it meant that they got killed, not the Germans, and still the machines survived. Then one night a tremendous raid pounded the town so the ground shuddered under the barracks. The plant was finally demolished. That day they did not march from the barracks. Their soup came that evening but otherwise they were let alone. Some of their guards disappeared. Daniela, Rysia and Jacqueline talked all day of escape, although in their camp shifts, they could not get far among the hostile population. They were stuck in Germany and did not know which way to run. Nonetheless, if they saw the chance, they would bolt.
The next morning the SS men came and called them out of the barracks, lining them up for a selection. They were made to take off their shifts in the cold wind, so they could be inspected. About half of them were pushed to the sides and machine-gunned against the wall, as the rest yanked back on their shifts to the usual measure of SS blows and curses.
After the remaining women had stacked the warm and bleeding naked bodies with the wounded, the SS poured gasoline over them and set them afire. They began marching out into the streets of the city as the pungent black smoke blew into their lungs. The women were herded to the railroad, but it had been bombed. Wrecked locomotives lay on their sides. The tracks were splintered and hung crazily over craters. They were kept standing there waiting for some SS miracle. Then they were marched back, faster than before, the guards shouting mach schnell, mach schnell, all through the city again so that by evening they had reached the far suburbs.
There they were herded into a deserted warehouse and locked in. No food came. During the night it rained and they were able to catch rusty water in the makeshift bowls they always carried, through the hundreds of leaks in the corrugated roof. They were wet to their fleshless bones and cold and hungry, but at least for a few hours, they were relieved of raging thirst. In the morning they were routed out to march double time.