Her group, though, looked like it had been chosen for heavy labor. Several of the girls ventured to ask the smiling doctor if they could join the other group.
“Of course, my dears.” He couldn’t have been more agreeable. “By all means, join them if you like.”
Magda considered. Gabi was limping, her own stomach hurt badly, and how would the little one, Vera, fare with hard work? Maybe they should join the other group as well, she was thinking.
And what stopped her? she wondered afterwards. The answer couldn’t be God, since there was no God in Birkenau.
10
THE GIRLS AND WOMEN passed through an iron gate and then continued down a mud road, through the ashes. They still hadn’t eaten or drunk, and one of the girls was saying that the strange smell in the air must be bread—what else could it be? “They’re making us bread,” the girl insisted.
But she must never have smelled bread baking, Magda said to Gabi, how else could she think that this stench had anything to do with bread? Smoke and ash were pouring out of two tall chimneys, and the girls were moving closer to them with each step. That must be the factory where they were to work. Not baking bread, obviously, but making something.
Whatever it was they made here, and where were the other workers? There didn’t seem to be anyone normal around. All you saw were either the guards or the madmen—where was everyone else, and what was this place in the middle of nowhere? It couldn’t be a village—there was no sign of life, no houses, no shops, but there seemed to be hundreds of low buildings, half-finished, surrounded by rows and rows of barbed wire with towers in each corner, where she could now make out figures with big guns.
Was this where they were going to live? But the farther in they went, the less it looked like a camp where families could live “normally,” as the officer had promised. On the contrary—especially since everyone they saw seemed to be divided into those two strange teams of crazy opposites: either human skeletons in striped pajamas or red-faced giants with whips and boots.
So had the officer been lying? Bold-faced like that? But for what? Magda wondered. It made no sense to her. The sign had said birkenau, which meant birches, but there weren’t any birches here, no trees at all, so the name was a lie, too? The place seemed to be a sort of wasteland. There was no sign of any activity, no one working at all—what did people do here?
“Forward, faster!” The women were approaching a sort of yard, enclosed by more barbed wire, triple barbed wire. On the other side was a similar yard, and as they passed, some of the striped skeletons, the crazy people, came running to the barbed wire, crying “Bread! Bread!”
They were clearly desperate, starving, but when a girl near Magda threw them a tin of sardines, one of the guards took out his gun and shot her.
The whole group froze then, and Magda found her own eyes fastened on her shoes. They were called “oxblood,” a sort of beautiful, deep maroon, and she’d worn them in Hungary, and in Czechoslovakia, and long before that, in Vienna. They had a low heel, and an elegant but sensible shape. A lovely fringe that covered the laces. Her mother had spent the money on good shoes for her, since Magda’s feet had stopped growing. She’d wear them for years, her mother had told her father.
She remembered the box they’d come in, a deep gray with cream script lettering. Remembered the lovely smell. Her sisters were clinging to her—she could feel them both shaking.
“Be still!” she whispered to them harshly.
The guard had shot that girl without a word, with no warning. Casually, very, very casually, just like the officer back at the platform, lighting his cigarette with that same nonchalance. Unspeakable acts with untroubled brow—was that how the so-called master race did it here?
“Schnell, schnell!”—new voices, female now. “Move around her, quickly!” they were shouting. Big strapping blondes with starched uniforms and black boots of their own. And dogs, who were snarling and snapping at the girls as they walked by.
One of the girls, closest to them, was bitten. She cried out.
“Silence!” The woman guard struck her with her whip, right across the face. The girl staggered. Everyone turned and stared in horror—expecting, almost, an explanation. There was no trace of anger on the blond guard’s smooth, apple-cheeked face, no sign that she’d just struck a defenseless person a vicious blow for no reason. From the looks of her, she was German or Polish, just off the farm, a nice enough girl if you passed her in the street.
“In here, all of you, quickly, schnell, schnell!” she was shouting at them.
They had come to a big room, not far from the chimneys. Everyone looked around uneasily—the ashes were snowing down on them now.
“In, schnell!” The sound of the whip, snapping. They filed into a big bare room with empty shelves along the edges.
“Clothes off, schnell! Fold them neatly!”
If you didn’t speak German, you were dead here, Magda could see that. When someone didn’t understand, the guards would scream louder and then resort to the dogs and whip. Luckily, most of these people were Hungarian, and had been taught German along with their French in school, but two girls, maybe from Greece, were beaten badly, right there in that room, for not understanding that they were to tie their shoes together and put them here, not there.
“Clothes off, faster!”
Everyone was hesitating. They had stripped to their underwear, which was bad enough. Some of them were countrywomen, who’d come in in their long skirts and shawls. They had never gone out without covering their heads. Now they cowered in their underwear, even in front of the other girls and women, likewise half-naked.
“All off!” A crack of the whip, a cry. Someone who didn’t speak German, didn’t understand. Magda had already learned not to look, not to see.
“Quick, fold them neatly!”
They folded.
“Put them where you can find them later.”
“Later”—they all looked up as one. So there was to be a later!
“Quick, to the showers!”
“What about our baggage?” someone risked asking.
“Later,” said the guard, and started shoving them through an interior door, into the next room.
And there they stopped short as they came face-to-face with a group of men—the guards, extravagantly clothed, barely deigning to look at the naked women. Just standing there, laughing and joking and picking their teeth.
“We tried to hang back,” said Magda, but there was no hanging back in Birkenau. Those who wouldn’t go fast enough were beaten into the room, cringing and covering themselves the best they could, with their hands.
Where had she seen this? Magda wondered, almost wildly—she’d seen this before, but where? Then she remembered a painting, in Vienna, by Hieronymus Bosch, of dead souls entering hell. The same chaos, the same nakedness, only there the devils had cloven hoofs, not shiny black boots.
“Quick, to the disinfection,” a guard was shouting. So at least this particular circle of hell had some purpose—that was reassuring. “It’s so we don’t get bugs,” Magda whispered to her sisters.
They were formed into several lines, single file—they couldn’t see at first what was happening until they moved forward, around a corner where there were more men, this time the striped pajamas, waiting with razors in hand.
Every single girl and woman in there gasped in turn when she rounded that corner and saw what was about to happen to her. They reached their hands to their hair—Magda’s was black and thick, long, luxuriant. She wore it wound round her head. Gabi’s wasn’t so dark or so long, but was, anyway, her hair; and the youngest’s, Vera’s, was honey blonde, and still in the braids their mother had done for her the morning they were taken.
Back then, before they had any idea of what was coming. That day when they’d awoken as on any other day, and eaten bread with their own mother and drunk tea by her side, and chatted as she braided the little one’s hair. A hundred years ago, Magda was thinking, a thousand.
Hitler had been screaming about his “Thousand-Year Reich,” and for them, he was right. They had lived it already, on that train.
“No, please,” she could hear some of the girls ahead of her pleading, trying to hold onto their hair, to no avail. Off it came, along with all the other hair in there that day. Blond hair, raven hair, long most of it, beautiful hair. Piles and piles of it on the floor.
Nor was it the great commodity it had been even a year before, when it was swept up diligently and carted off to dry in specially designed lofts in the crematoria, before being neatly packaged into twenty-kilo sacks. These the merchants of Auschwitz had sold for the equivalent of twenty dollars a sack, all over the Reich. To the nearby Schaeffler factory, where it was processed into felt for warm blankets and socks for submarine crews; to the distinguished firms of Paul Reinmann or Färberei, where it was made into excellent rope and cord; even to the most fashionable Berlin tailors, who found it made excellent linings for their bespoke suits.
But by May of 1944, what with a quarter of Berlin already in ruins from Allied bombing, there wasn’t the same call for custom suits lined with human hair. Nor were the Nazi submarine crews, the once-dreaded “wolfpacks,” requisitioning the quantities of rope or socks as during the “happy days” of the early war. In fact, the majority of them were sleeping with the fishes by then, and the truth was that by the time Magda and her sisters arrived in the camp, there was already a glut of lovely girls’ hair on the German market.
In fact, it had become rather a problem in the death camps—one more thing to burn. And yet, though it was no longer cost-effective or, for that matter, even practical, still the Nazis continued to shave the girls’ heads, because the process was fundamental per se, a timely and efficient introduction to life in the death camps.
Since most of these girls were still not fully apprised of their situation. Some of them still thought they were going to sleep with their mamas and papas in a nice workers’ cottage that night and then head out to pick grapes in the morning. But one quick shave of the head, and all that was behind them. There were no further expectations, no tedious questions along those lines, once you cut off their hair.
Magda’s young sister Vera was starting to cry. She was still fourteen. They were naked. There were men there. The girls were clinging to each other.
“Loosen your braids,” Magda whispered to her, “and when they see how beautiful your hair is, maybe they won’t cut it.”
Afterwards, she would scoff at that. That she’d thought the Nazis would even look. But at the time, she still thought maybe, somehow—and actually starting praying then, not for their lives, but for their hair.
But her prayer went the way of all the rest of them in Birkenau; and had heavenly attention been directed their way that day, surely she’d have understood if her own prayer had been triaged to the back of the line.
Would have even urged any Answerer of Prayers looking down upon them to rush first to the girls and women, the men and children whom Magda herself had seen and even talked to earlier that day on the platform, the same ones who had climbed politely into the waiting trucks and were at that very moment being shoved naked into a concrete room that they no longer believed was a “family camp” where they would live “normally” or even at all.
But since those prayers went unheeded that day in the airtight chamber, where the doors just then were being shut and locked tight on the maximum number of men, women and children who could be crammed into that space, along with the minimal amount of Zyklon B gas required to kill them all—not in the most timely fashion, granted, since what mattered to the Nazis was not how long the screaming lasted, but how much they had to pay to IG Farben’s Degesch for the cans of poison pellets on a monthly basis; since even those prayers changed nothing and reached no one, Magda too could have saved her breath.
BUT THAT SHE DIDN’T KNOW, not yet, and she prayed, hard and strong, for her hair, her sisters’ hair, as she progressed steadily in line toward the men with razors and was ordered to step up onto a stool.
Her poor barber didn’t even look at her face, just shaved off the long dark hair she’d spent her life growing. Three quick swipes, one, two, three, and then a strange and terrible chill upon her head.
“Raise your arms.”
The razor was old and it pulled, but he’d had practice. One swipe each and the hair was gone from her underarms.
“Stand straight.”
Another swipe, rough and painful, and her pubic hair was gone.
“Next.”
She half stumbled off, then turned to wait for her sisters.
“Move along, schnell!” from one of the blond beasts. But they were quick, those barbers, and her sisters were done, too, and they “moved along” together, eyes on the ground, unable to risk a look at each other right then.
They were still naked, more naked now, and more ashamed. And the chill to the head—why did they do this? she wondered. Cleanliness? But everywhere she looked was filth. Some of the girls still had excrement on their bodies from the train ride. And the barbers’ striped clothes were filthy, their razors were filthy, the floor—even the guards, in their blatant spotlessness, seemed in some way part of the dirt. Just the other side of it.
She would escape from here, somehow, get them all out, all three of them. There had to be a way and she would find it, she was already telling herself, when she was stopped by a very strange sight: a girl who looked familiar, but with a bowling ball for a head, and two ears sticking out.
She touched her head—so did the horrible girl. And then she realized, with dawning horror, that the Nazis had hung a mirror right there, to catch them as they came out, right in the face. Lest anyone still doubt. Nor were there any “Get moving’s,” or “Schnell’s,” as they stood there, one by one, frozen by a dreadful image—themselves.
Their new selves. “Wilkommen to Birkenau,” a nearby guard stood, repeating.
Magda turned—was he joking? For one wild moment, the whole thing—the politesse on the platform, the elegant doctor, and now this pleasant welcome—slipped into a sort of wild joke, a giant farce being played out here, with a cast of thousands. But why? And what was her role?
She looked at her sisters—her former sisters, weird freaks now, dirty and bald. Were they supposed to be funny? Or was it the guard who was the clown?
She looked at his face for a moment, but his eyes glittered hard at her, and she saw in them what she looked like, no longer a girl, but what? That was still the question—what? A bald, naked something on the edge of somewhere—what came next? A giant pit? A black river? Had she sinned and gone to hell? What had she done? She couldn’t understand, she didn’t understand, not that it mattered anymore. Because whatever it was, it was done, definitive. They’d taken her in, stripped her bare, shaved her hair—even if she ran away, who would recognize her now as the girl she was? Not even her own father.
She followed, stumbling half-blind, into what was called “the sauna.” Which in this part of Birkenau meant a huge crush of people, a small trickle of cold water, and no soap. They pushed desperately toward the water, but there wasn’t enough. “Please, we are filthy,” but they were all filthy. That was part of the point at Birkenau.
But this group didn’t know that yet, and they were still trying to wash themselves, somehow, when they were herded out again, shivering—no towels for the likes of them—to another room, where they were doused with petroleum, “disinfectant,” and then moved on to the next room, where they were given clothes.
Not their own clothes, so nicely folded as they entered this place, but striped uniforms, and that’s when it came to Magda that those skeletons in stripes must have once looked like she had this morning. But how long ago? That was the only question left: How long did it take to transform a perfectly normal person into a half-crazed inmate in this lunatic place?
AS THE GIRLS FILED PAST, each was handed a garment, randomly. Some were given nothing but long shirts, but Magda and her
sisters were lucky and got dresses, though coarse and scratchy, oversized, and with no undergarments at all. Likewise big rough boots that wouldn’t fit anyone outside the Norse myths. And then they were complete, the bald heads, stripes. Girls coming off the trains tomorrow would look at them in disgust.
They walked in silence out into the May afternoon, evening now. It was warm, but somehow dank. One of the girls stumbled out of her oversized boots in the mud. A woman guard came by and hit her with a whip. The girl lay in the mud. Someone stopped to pick her up and was beaten as well.
Beside them, the ditches were on fire. Behind them the chimneys were spewing fire and ash. “They’re burning garbage,” the girls tried to reassure each other. Fighting the growing sense that something here was truly wrong.
Finally, one of the girls asked a guard, “What is that smoke from the chimneys?”
The woman laughed. “That smoke is your parents, your children, your friends.”
“She’s joking,” Magda whispered to her sisters, but—what was coming out of those chimneys? And what was that smell?
It was like nothing she had ever smelled before, just as the place itself was like no place on earth. It had been May when they were taken from prison, but did they have May here? There was no way of knowing, since there were no trees and not a blade of grass to be seen. No green at all, just mud and ash, making what the old nursery rhymes called “a mire,” worse than mud, mud that grabbed your horrible boots, held you, and beyond that, barbed wire, rows and rows of it, strung on the ugliest posts she’d ever seen. Concrete posts that bent in, wanting to catch you, too, with their claws, to hurt you if they could.
All making part of a whole, as if the universe had conspired. When had they done all this, the Nazis? How long had it been since they’d taken control over everything, turned God’s blue sky murky, and the earth beneath their feet to mud?
The Plum Trees Page 10