Magda nodded—tried to. She hadn’t considered, till then, that they might not all three make it. Had never once imagined going home to her parents without all three.
But Aranka was right. They had to live, all three of them. Her parents would die of grief if one of them was killed here.
“Here’s how you do it,” said Aranka. “When you see someone suffering, you have to tell yourself that they’re not really suffering, they’re somewhere else, way beyond all this, because you can’t help them, and it just hurts you.”
It just hurts you.
The next day the new girls were told to line up for tattoos. Which was good news, said Aranka, since they weren’t doing it so much, not like they used to, they didn’t need so many workers, and more to the point, didn’t want to keep such close track anymore.
Which means they know they’re going to get caught someday, she said, so they’re trying to hide it, starting at the low numbers again, not that they’ll ever be able to hide any of it in the end. For one thing, the men who carried the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens had been strewing the teeth on the ground along the way, so that afterwards, people could tally the millions. And the truth those men themselves wouldn’t live to tell—they were killed off systematically, every three months, so they wouldn’t live to testify—would be told by the teeth.
THE GIRLS WERE LINED UP by last name, and then slowly moved up toward the tables, where two prisoners, older women, sat. One had a book in which she wrote their names, and the other had what looked like a fountain pen with blue ink and an injection needle at the end. Magda had to fight off the urge to bolt. Tattoos were barbaric, hateful to her. Her hair could grow again someday, but they were marking her arm forever. She didn’t look as they took her arm and started pricking. Told herself that this pain and desecration, here in this place of dark reversals, meant that she might live instead of die.
“Don’t cry!” she said to her sisters. “It’s nothing,” but she couldn’t bring herself to look for a while. And afterwards, when her sisters added up their numbers and found good luck in the sums, Magda just shook her head.
“TRY, AND MAYBE YOU CAN SURVIVE,” Aranka had said. Not “Try and you can,” but “Try and maybe.” That was the best you could do here.
Magda was hit with dysentery that night, seized with stomach cramps at the start of the evening roll call, but she knew that they weren’t permitted latrine till it was over. She knew, too, there was no such thing as asking for that privilege, to use the so-called bathroom even just this once, as if she were a human being. But the thought of soiling herself—no, she would hold out, hold it all in somehow. She breathed in, breathed out, looked up, and thought about the stars that must still be in the skies, somewhere. Here you couldn’t see them through the smoke.
She tried to remember the names of the constellations. If the guards let them go soon, she could still make it. If that was even permitted. Because they’d had one latrine—was there another one at night? She tried to remember. There were some buckets, though, in the barracks. If she could get there—but the counting was never-ending, and finally, she felt the warm, stinking trickle start down her legs.
“Nazi stockings”—but even so, could she live like this? With her own shit on her legs?
“But that’s part of it,” Aranka told her. “They’re good at this.” Not only do they want to kill you, but they want to make you wonder if they might be right. If a girl with her own shit on her legs should be walking the earth anyway.
“But if you let them make you feel that way, then they’ve won.”
WHEN MAGDA FINALLY GOT TO the latrine that night, there was some shouting and crying, a sort of scuffle going on. A woman had collapsed, eyes open but barely conscious, into the filth, and a sobbing girl was trying to pull her up. She’d been her teacher, the girl was saying, in Budapest, at school. She’d taught them Faust, and Shakespeare’s sonnets—
“Leave her!” the girl’s friends were crying.
“In English! The poems were so beautiful!”
Her friends dragged her off. “Do you want to die, too?”
But Magda, too, was pulled up short at the sight of the woman’s face, clear and bright somehow, in the filth and the shit. She too had learned some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, from Fräulein Steiner, a teacher like this one. Passionate and clean. Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest—
“Schnell!” A smack from the guard caught her, across her back. Magda staggered.
“Quick, sit down,” hissed Aranka. “Sit and then out, hurry!”
Magda stepped around the beautiful teacher and sat on the stone hole in the filth, and let whatever was still in her stomach run out. They’d been given soup that night, or what they called soup. Ditchwater boiled with some rotten turnips. Magda’s cup actually had a dirty button floating in it.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen—
A guard walked over and kicked the woman, the teacher. Magda could see that she was still breathing. Had Fräulein Steiner been kicked to death in a latrine as well? What would her beloved Shakespeare say to that?
But he knew nothing of this—none of them did. Not Goethe, or Schiller, or Schopenhauer even, with all his dark complaints! Fakers and fools—what did they know, with all their words? Nothing! Even when they had cried, they cried at nothing. “The human condition.” Death in bed.
Which was what, compared to this?
“Come on.” Aranka grabbed her arm. They were hauling the woman out. Her body, Magda told herself. Even if she’s breathing, she’s far away. Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing.
She walked slowly back through the mud to the barracks. “Go to sleep,” Aranka told her. “Try to dream about food.” She herself planned to have her grandmother’s mushroom barley soup that night in her dreams, followed by roast chicken with some of the plum sauce Hermann used to give them after the harvest every fall.
12
THE IMPORTANT THING was to work, said Aranka, and she got them on a detail sorting clothing—but don’t be tempted to take anything, not yet, she warned them. Not that you couldn’t steal; you could, almost anything you wanted, including food, but you had to do it right, which meant knowing the ropes. Who was on duty, who you were working with, what they didn’t mind letting slip that day, and so on.
“But don’t try anything yet,” she cautioned. “Soon enough there’ll be scarves and belts for you, even underwear.”
Of which there was plenty—scarves, belts, and underwear. Their job was to fold and sort clothes taken from the incoming prisoners—shoes in one big cart, men’s suits in another, dresses here, children’s clothes there, and so on. Once sorted, the clothes were taken to “Canada,” as the giant warehouses were bizarrely called, more Auschwitz slang. Something to do with plenitude, vastness. This one was behind Crematoria III and IV.
And from there they were sent on to Germany, particularly the good things, particularly the baby clothes. All the little suits, the tiny shoes—Aranka held up a cotton sailor suit, still with signs of pressing, though there was a dark stain in the pants. “From the train ride,” she shrugged. Her strategic shrug. Magda couldn’t speak, just shook her head.
“The Germans love these,” said Aranka.
But even this steady supply line of dead babies’ clothes to nice German families was breaking down. The girls had heard the guards talking—their trains couldn’t take clothes into Germany anymore, and “Canada” was out of control now, overflowing, clothes piled up everywhere, and thousands upon thousands of shoes scattered around in the mud.
But still, the Nazis kept the girls sorting, because the clothes kept coming in, better clothes now, the best clothes ever seen in Birkenau, from the Hungarian transports. The latest arrivals, the ones who’d supposed themselves lucky when they weren’t deported earlier. Who’d lifted a cautious glass, “to life,” in the winter of 1944, and thought that since the war was nearly over, they were safe.
But it
was these very people, the Hungarians, who were coming in now, nonstop, by the trainloads. They weren’t even being “selected” as they got off the train, just sent straight to the gas. It was true that the war was nearly over, the Russians were coming from the east, and the English and Americans from the west, but against all that, the gas chambers were at their absolute peak of efficiency. The Nazis had finally honed the whole process to perfection and didn’t want to waste it now.
Which was ironic, since by then it was clear even to the SS that their dream was no longer attainable. They would not, in fact, manage to rid the world of all undesirables.
Still, the romantics among them were determined to carry on to the end. By June of 1944, they had four gas chambers running around the clock in Birkenau, two below ground, and two above. Each chamber could handle from fifteen hundred to two thousand people at a time. The process itself took from ten to twenty minutes, depending on how much poison gas was put into the slots, and who was in front of the vents—with children, of course, it was quicker. And then came the ventilation, and the clearing of the bodies, which also took a certain allotment of time. But on a good day, the Nazis could still gas up to twelve thousand people. Eight thousand of whom could be cremated to fairly good ash, the rest burned in open pits, and all of them, ashes now, dumped into the nearby rivers, which were, by then, pretty much clogged. But there weren’t any fish left in the Vistula or the Sola anyway.
To further facilitate the process, and skip the bit with the trucks, the SS in Auschwitz had a spur of the railway extended, practically to death’s door. From there it would be an easy walk through the woods to the gas for the 700,000 Hungarians they hoped to kill that summer.
MAGDA AND HER SISTERS could see them going by, in the distance. The long lines of men and women in their summer clothes, walking in formation from the platform along two paths into the small woods that hid the gas chambers. A beautiful, colored band they made, the Hungarians, always so stylish. And now they walked in their lovely silks and linens into the woods.
A little later, there’d be a flash of red, and then thick white smoke from the chimneys behind. And then another train at the station, forty cars, fifty even. Sometimes a few new girls would show up at their barracks, still thinking they would see their mothers “on Sunday”; but mostly no one new came in anymore. Even the young and strong were walking into the woods now. The chimneys, all five of them, were smoking all the time.
The girls watched those lines moving by in the distance, mercifully too far away to recognize any faces. They could make out, though, the women pushing baby carriages, and the men with their arms around their sons.
“A shower,” the girls knew they’d been told, “to refresh yourselves, and then you will be put to work.”
“Fine, then, we will work,” they knew the fathers were telling their sons as they walked, and it made sense. “There’s no doubt that Hitler needs us,” these people were reasoning. And they were right, only the universe was wrong.
And when they got to those showers, they would be told to take off their clothes. Told to fold them nicely, tie the shoes together, and remember where they left them. They would be comforted by that last bit. By the signs that read CLEANLINESS BRINGS FREEDOM, and 1 LOUSE CAN KILL YOU! Both of which they would take as boding well. The former with its hint of freedom, the latter with its show of concern.
And there were shower heads in there, in the gas chambers, the girls knew. A clever touch that, all part of the game. But once the women and children were shoved in with the naked men, to everyone’s shock, there would have to come that moment when the little game was over. And then the shouting would start and then the screaming, then the clawing, but in the end, always silence. The Degesch exterminator on duty that day, overseeing it all through a peephole, would then give the SS a thumbs-up. Time to ventilate, and then send in the prisoners whose job it was to haul the bodies out and shove them into the ovens, and after them, the girls with their buckets, to clean up the blood and the shit.
And then, they’d be ready for the next batch. The Third Reich might be collapsing around them, but the death camps chugged along in tiptop order that June. One day, in the distance, Magda thought she saw her mother moving by in the line. If not her mother, then her aunt for certain. No one else walked quite that way.
Tears rolled down her face but no one asked her why, because they all knew why. There wasn’t a girl in the barracks who still had a mother. A few days later, they were all terrified by a command to return to their barracks. That meant the Nazis were going to kill an entire block of prisoners, with no selection, for one of their reasons—either disease or because they wanted the room.
The girls lay there through that night in the darkness, terrified, listening, but the dump trucks they used to transport prisoners didn’t stop at their door. They rolled past, and then, from another part of the camp, they heard some activity. “The Gypsies?” someone whispered. They had been kept with their families, about a kilometer or so away, on the far edge of the camp, and had a slightly favored status, were allowed to live together, almost normally, for Birkenau. The doctor, Mengele, visited them often, and brought the children chocolate. “Uncle Pepi,” they called him.
But the next morning, when the girls walked by their camp on the way to work, they saw it was deserted, the barracks doors gaping open. There were some clothes strewn around, and a few fiddles lying in the mud. The Gypsies had a little orchestra and gave performances, which Mengele often attended.
Later they heard that it was he himself who’d gotten them all out of there so smoothly, with no resistance, by bringing them first extra rations of decent bread and even salami, to “strengthen them,” since they’d be going to “a new camp, a better camp,” he promised. And they fell for it—ate the bread and salami, and followed Uncle Pepi to the showers, and were gassed, all three thousand of them, in one night.
Dead, all of them, just like that—but hadn’t the Nazis liked their music, liked their children? And yes, Mengele had been clever to trick them into going with no fuss, but how much of a victory was it, since the guards were there to beat them into the dump trucks anyway, if they hadn’t walked in themselves? The story went round that Mengele had even driven some of the children, his favorites, to the gas in his shiny car, but surely he left before the game was up? Surely even he didn’t have the stomach?
Because there always came that moment of realization, no matter how elaborate the ruse. And then, could even Mengele have whistled in the faces of the people he’d befriended—his version of befriending? The people he’d set up for the worst mass death ever devised? Could even Uncle Pepi have waved to the small children as they were shoved, screaming with horror, into the gas?
Magda met a young woman, a Pole, who, like Aranka, had been inside and made it out. She’d been sick with spotted fever, typhus, but was recovering and had started working in the infirmary for a woman doctor, a prisoner herself, who’d taken a liking to her and had been able to protect her. But when the doctor was out one day, all the girls in the infirmary were loaded into a dump truck, and told they were being taken to the showers.
But the truck backed down a ramp, and they were dumped down a chute, like sacks of flour. Those who were hurt and couldn’t get up were shot where they lay, but the others were herded into the so-called showers. The room was dark, the young woman said—the only windows were small ones, high up, near the roof. There were shower heads, and even towels and soap, but as soon as the doors were closed behind them, she felt her eyes begin to water, she started coughing and felt a terrible pain in her chest and throat. There was some screaming, and people closer to the windows were falling down, coughing, foaming at the mouth, and biting their own hands.
But then, the doors were opened and an SS man wearing a respirator came in, calling her name, and pulled her out, then quickly shut the door again. The infirmary doctor had come back in time to make a plea for her life, and she’d been lucky. A minute later and she�
�d have died with the other girls in there that day.
Though afterwards, she said, she couldn’t eat anything for days without vomiting, and she’d had a heart attack too, though she was only twenty-eight. They told her her heart would never be right again.
“But that’s only if I live.” She laughed, one of those short laughs that Magda would always associate with Auschwitz.
“You’ll live,” someone said to her, but would she? Would any of them? And if they did, how they would live? As what? That day, as they were walking back from the sorting, they’d had to pass by children’s bodies burning in a pit. It was said that children slowed down the ovens, since they had so little fat. But up against that was the fact that you could stuff more of them inside. So it was a toss-up.
Something for the Nazis to debate. But as for Magda, she had been there two months and learned not to dream at night. She slept among what she called “the octopus of legs” without moving, like a mummy, or one of the living dead.
THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday, which was sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes they didn’t have to work so much, and sometimes they had to work twice as hard for no reason. And sometimes on the Sundays when they weren’t working, the guards in the towers took potshots at them. A girl sitting next to Aranka had been shot a few weeks back, and the noise was so loud and so close that she told them she thought she’d been hit herself.
But she hadn’t for some reason, or maybe none. That Sunday as they waited, hoping for a bit of rest, they were called out to work as usual. But as they were filing out of the gate, fifty of them, including Magda and her sisters, were counted off and told to turn left instead of right. They all stopped for a heartbeat, terrified—Crematorium II was over there. The gas chamber too, and the woods where they’d watched so many disappear.
Was this it for them, then? On a Sunday morning like this one, with no warning?
The Plum Trees Page 12