And them too—who could even begin to believe now that these bald-headed, filthy creatures in stripes slogging through the mud had once been nice, clean, pretty girls living at home with their parents, in a brick house on a friendly street? Czech girls who’d loved art and music, with grandparents and cousins—and where were all of them, now? Her old aunt would have fallen getting off that train. Would that gentleman officer have shot her? Had he shot her? A tear started down Magda’s cheek.
They clumped on, through the mire that was part of it too, trying to catch their boots, trip them, and get them a beating. The only way was to shuffle—as she’d seen the striped pajamas doing when they first arrived. She’d thought it had something to do with them, their characters, thought they were shufflers. Now she was a shuffler, too.
But what did it matter if a bald-headed girl comported herself with dignity or shuffled? They continued past what seemed to be half-built sheds on either side. What were they? Did people work here? Sleep? It was getting darker now, and the smoke from the chimneys glowed red as the sky turned black. They could see fire shooting out into the night. One of the girls behind her started crying. She wanted to cry herself, just lie down and cry. There was a shot. This time she didn’t turn around.
They were ordered to halt in front of one of the buildings and given, finally, something to eat. Food—she’d forgotten there was such a thing. Still they were hungry, famished in fact, and they ate the hard bread with no salt that tasted of dust, and drank the dark liquid that must have been something, but wasn’t coffee. As they stood eating in silence, a group of girls came out of what seemed to be a barracks—girls in filthy clothes like theirs, though a few had belts around their baggy dresses, and scarves on their heads. A great improvement.
“Anyone from Poland?” “Who’s from Czechoslovakia?” Magda and her sisters looked up—were you allowed to answer? Was it a trick? Would they be beaten? Shot?
“Lodz!” called someone beside Magda. Some of the girls with scarves ran over to her.
Magda looked uneasily at the guards, but they were chatting together, and didn’t turn around. Her sisters clung to her side.
“Trebišov!” she said low.
“Trebišov?” A girl came toward her and looked at her closely. But Magda recognized her first, thanks to the scarf.
“Aranka?”
She was taller than when she’d last seen her—it had been three or four years at least—and very thin, but not dying-thin. And her hair had grown out a bit. She hadn’t been exactly a friend, but her family had been part of their lives at home. They were poor back there, and Hermann had supported the father with odd jobs and food from his farms, even money now and again.
Aranka studied her closely, and then the two sisters. “Magda?” she said.
And that’s when Magda started to cry.
11
BUT DON’T CRY, Aranka told her. Not here, she said. She kissed them all, and hugged them close. “Try,” she said to Magda, “try, and maybe you can survive.”
She would help them all she could, she told them. She’d been there for a while and had a position. The first thing would be to get them on a work detail, right away. Otherwise they’d just be gassed like all the others.
“Gassed?” What was Aranka saying?
But she didn’t answer, just took their arms. “Did you get your tattoos?”
“No, thank God!” They’d been spared that desecration at least.
“Well, that’s the first thing we have to organize,” said Aranka. She explained that if they didn’t bother to tattoo you, they weren’t planning to keep you.
“Don’t worry, I can help you. Come inside”—Aranka took them into the shed, which was their bunkhouse. It had been built to stable fifty-two horses, but now held a hundred and eighty girls. The brick floor was uneven, since it had been built right on the marsh, with no foundation, and the whole place smelled like a cellar, damp and chill.
It was lined with bunks built into the walls, from floor to ceiling. Not so small, about the size of a twin bed at home, except, as Aranka explained, almost apologetically, each one had to hold eight girls. Nor were there mattresses on the bunks, or even straw. The top bunks were best, “since nothing falls on your head,” but they were all taken, so Aranka got Magda and her sisters a middle bunk at least. They’d been given only one threadbare blanket for the three, but Aranka would try to “organize” them another.
“And scarves”—she looked at them ruefully, but you had to take things practically here, she said. The fact that they’d bothered with the haircutting was actually a good sign. It meant they weren’t going to kill you right away.
“But they’re not going to kill us!” said Magda. “We’re here to work!”
“To pick grapes?” said Aranka. “But where are the grapes here? Where are the factories?”
“But the chimneys—” said Magda.
“The chimneys!” A strange little laugh. Birkenau wasn’t a work camp, explained Aranka. The other Auschwitz subcamps, a few kilometers away, sent slave labor to the factories that had sprung up around them, but Birkenau had no factories.
Still, there was work to be done, even here, which was why Aranka was still alive, and meanwhile scarves would help, they’d help a lot, though they were hard to come by and sometimes you had to trade a whole day’s food. But it’s worth it, said Aranka. It helps you to care. And they pay attention to such details at selection, she told them.
“Selection?”
Again Aranka didn’t answer, instead looked down at their feet, and shook her head at the oversized boots, already caked with mud.
“Still, you’re lucky,” she told them. When she first came, the prisoners were given wooden clogs, “like from the Middle Ages,” which fit no one and bruised their feet terribly. And “death here,” she told them, “can start with the shoes.” One small cut gets infected and then turns red, then black, and if they see it, or you can’t walk, that’s the end.
But now they were gassing so many people that they couldn’t ship out all their shoes, “so they give us the worst ones, which are better than what we used to have.” She’d try to find them something smaller, and even socks and underwear, eventually. “It’s not like there’s not plenty around.”
Magda could only stare at her, trying to fathom. Had Aranka gone crazy? Talking about gassing like that? But she didn’t seem remotely crazy—so was the place crazy, then? Was what looked worst actually the best for you? If they stripped you naked like a beast, paraded you before men, and shaved off your long hair, it meant that you were lucky? If they defiled your arm, permanently and forever, with a brand like an animal, you might live?
If, on the other hand, they took you nicely in your own clothes in a perfectly good truck, they meant to kill you? Gas you somehow? Right then, with your hair still on your head?
“But—why?” was all Magda could say then.
“Oh, there’s no why in Birkenau,” said Aranka.
She told them her story. Her family hadn’t had any money to get out of the country or pay someone to hide them, so they’d been taken in the first transports, and she’d managed to stay alive here almost two years, some sort of record. She knew the ropes now, but had almost died at the beginning. She’d come down with a bad case of typhoid fever—“It’s rampant here, because of the lice”—and was so weak that they sent her to the infirmary, which is only a waiting room for the gas, a nurse warned her. So she’d tried to get up out of bed but staggered and fell, and one of the Nazi doctors saw her, and since they were getting rid of all the children there that day, she was sent out with them.
What do you mean, “getting rid of all the children”? Magda knew that a nice normal person would have asked. But she knew, too, that as of that day in that place, she was no longer a nice normal person. Nor did she ask again about the smell, or what was burning in the ditches. The whole thing had become fully comprehensible to her, all at once, the way a nightmare sometimes does.
Aranka said that the doctors told the children they were taking them to a better place to sleep, “near their mothers,” but even the small children knew the truth, and were running back and forth in the outer room, where they take your clothes, holding their little heads, and crying pitifully.
But there’s no pity either in Birkenau, and they were all shoved into a concrete room with some shower heads but no signs of water, her too, and when she heard the door locked behind them, Aranka knew she was going to die.
And she would have, except that an older girl who was on a cleaning crew was still inside there, cleaning up the excrement from the last round, and noticed her, towering above the children.
“How old are you?” she whispered to Aranka.
“Fifteen,” said Aranka.
“You’re eighteen now,” said the girl. She threw Aranka her own head scarf. “Quick, put it on.”
Then she gave her a bucket of human excrement.
“Pick it up, quick.”
Aranka picked it up.
“Come on, hurry!”
Aranka followed the girl to the door.
The girl pounded. “Cleaning Kommando!” she shouted. The door opened a crack. The SS man looked suspicious.
“Two?” he said. “I thought there was just one.”
The girl held up the stinking bucket toward him. “I needed help.”
He stepped back in disgust. Such filthy people. “Get out,” he said, and the two girls slipped past with their buckets of shit.
So instead of dying that day with the children, Aranka had lived, but her hands still hadn’t stopped shaking. “See?” She held them up—it was true, they trembled like an old woman’s with the palsy.
“Funny, no?” said Aranka.
Funny or no? Magda had no idea. In fact, she couldn’t speak. Vera, the little one, didn’t seem to understand. She asked Aranka about her family. There’d been a little sister, her age. The two of them used to play under the plum trees. “Is Anna here?”
Aranka looked at her for a moment, then said, “She was your friend, wasn’t she?”
That was all, though, and after that, there were no more questions. Magda learned that too, the first night. No questions in Birkenau. If someone had something to say, they’d say it. Otherwise, it was better not to ask.
THAT NIGHT, IT WAS routine by ordeal. The Nazis hadn’t let them dig a proper latrine—just put a long line of holes in a concrete box, which filled up in no time, but was cleaned out only sometimes, and they beat you if you didn’t sit down, so that it was impossible there not to smell of it.
And then came the meals which would kill you if nothing else did—300 grams of bread that wasn’t really bread so much as sawdust held together with only the flour it took for that, shared among five girls. The etiquette was five bites and pass it. Same with the dark drink, a half-liter of the non-coffee, non-tea. You got the cup, took three sips, passed it to the next one. No one cheated, Magda saw.
But if there was a little bread left, or if you “organized” an extra piece, you had to sleep with it under your head at night. Otherwise it would be gone in the morning. Your boots too.
Aranka had gotten them a bunk with just four other girls, but that still meant seven girls in a bunk for one. And all the boots under the heads, the laces tied together—crucial, Aranka told them. If someone’s boots were stolen, she would have to steal yours. Because if you showed up in the morning without boots, you went straight to the gas.
“Straight to the gas”—there was still a chance, Magda was thinking, that Aranka was crazy, or a liar, with her horrifying talk of gas and children and buckets of shit. It’s not really true, is it? Magda wanted to ask her. Beg her: It’s a bad joke, no?
But then there was a whistle, and everyone went clambering into their bunks, tying their shoes together, putting them under their heads, as Aranka had said. The other girls in their bunk put the three sisters down at the foot end—they slept head to foot—and explained that when someone wanted to turn over, they all had to turn. And then silence fell, only it wasn’t really silent. Soon people started breathing fitfully, and then moaning in their sleep, murmuring, some even laughing. Which must constitute escape around here, even for just a few hours at night, but Magda pitied those girls. To wake up from a good dream here must make it worse.
She herself couldn’t sleep. She tried to swat the bugs she could feel crawling up her legs, praying these particular ones weren’t carrying spotted fever. Tried even to say her old prayers, blessing the individual members of her family, naming each name, even of far-flung cousins, but she kept stopping in the middle and having to start again. From outside, in the distance, there came an occasional scream in the midst of what seemed to be a low-level, ongoing wail.
Was it praying, that wail? But then what about the screaming? Or was it all a dream? But she wasn’t asleep, or at least that’s what she thought until she was shocked awake by a terrible gong ringing, and then Aranka, at their bunk, shaking them, “Hurry, get up, quick!”
It was still dark, half past four in the morning. “Get up, right away,” Aranka urged them, speaking fast and intensely. “Hurry, they beat the last ones out.”
The three girls half fell out of the bunk and stumbled outside after Aranka, boots on, dresses never off. She showed them how to line up, five across—the Nazis loved five—for what they also loved: their roll call. During which the prisoners were required to stand stiff and straight, for as long as it took, hours and hours, sometimes half a day, sometimes all day into the night, with no food or water or even latrine, while the SS men strolled through the lines and counted them at their leisure.
If there was a miscount, they’d start again. Under the blazing sun of high summer, the wind, the rain, the sleet, hail, snow in winter. When people dropped of exhaustion, and some always did, during the long ones, it was absolutely forbidden to pick them up. They had to be left to be shot, Aranka warned.
And roll call was tricky in other ways too, she said. It was here that most of the routine beatings took place. “If they beat you, try to stand it.” But best was to get a place in the middle. If you’re on one of the edges, sometimes they tease the dogs at you, for no reason. For fun, said Aranka. Then, if you flinch, they beat you. Or sometimes if you don’t.
And keep your eyes down if they come your way.
But no one came their way that day, nor was this roll call one of the long ones, and all the girls there lived to sip their ersatz coffee and gnaw off their bites of so-called bread.
Aranka was in a hurry to get them their tattoos. There wasn’t much work in Birkenau, and what there was went to the girls with the numbers on their arms. The others—
“Fuel,” another girl piped in. Especially the new girls, she added, who weren’t starving yet and still had fat on their bodies.
Magda turned to her.
It’s true, the girl shrugged. New girls were sometimes “selected” just to help burn the other bodies, since skin and bone didn’t burn so easily without some fat. “Breasts,” she said. “And this”—she patted Magda’s behind.
Magda wondered if this girl too had gone crazy. She’d been here almost a year, long enough to lose her mind, and she smelled—they all did. These girls all had mud on their legs, and shit too. They were filthy. She hated them all, suddenly. They made her sick, with their dirt and their shit, like crazy women.
But she was dirty now, too, and there was no water for washing.
But why not, since there was water everywhere here? The ground was mud, the bunkhouse was dripping. Why couldn’t they just wash? Then maybe they wouldn’t have to be burned.
Magda started to cry without a sound, started to shake. “Try!” Aranka whispered to her. She pointed out a few of the girls who were stumbling around with glazed eyes and blank looks on their faces, some holding crusts of bread they weren’t even bothering to eat. “Musselmen,” Aranka said they were called here, for some reason, or no reason, maybe a play on words. Auschwitz s
lang for people in the last stages of starvation. Walking skeletons, no longer answering to their own names.
She went over to one of them and took her bread. No reaction. “She’s already gone,” said Aranka. She offered some of the bread to Magda, who just shook her head.
“Eat it,” said Aranka, “you have to try. Do you want them to burn you too? Turn you to ashes?”
Magda shrugged.
“Ah, that’s when they win,” said Aranka. Of course, the main goal is to kill us, she said, but part of the game for them is to turn us into that—she pointed at the walking ghost. The living dead, indifferent even to the gas.
Aranka sympathized with the girl, she said, had even come to respect that form of escape. But as for her, she was determined to live to “tell the tale,” and to that end, had developed certain strategies. For one, she said, she called the shit dried on their legs “Nazi stockings.”
“Because it’s them, not us, the filth, you have to understand that. It’s all them, their foul bread that makes us sick to begin with, and their fevers that give us the dysentery they won’t let us wash off our legs. Their filthy clothes, their bugs, their latrines, their smell”—she pointed to Magda’s head—“their haircuts! You saw the mirror?”
Magda nodded, though barely.
“They wanted you to think it’s you, but it’s them you were looking at.” All of them, too, not just the ones in here. All those clean, long-haired girls in their starched, pressed dirndls, said Aranka, and the good-looking boys with their hats and horns. Every mother and father on their way to church on Sundays, and all their writers and philosophers and music lovers and beer drinkers with their steins and their sausage, who were, in one way or another, through commission or omission, the reason for the shit on the legs of the filthy, bald-headed girls in here today. And that’s who’s really staring back out of that mirror, said Aranka, and she for one was going to live to hold the mirror back at them someday.
“Or die trying,” said Aranka, “and you have to try, too. You and your sisters. For your parents. Think what a victory it will be for them if you all three make it.”
The Plum Trees Page 11