The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  Which could have happened to Magda and her sisters, but didn’t. That first day, after they’d fled the march, they hid in an outdoor “washroom,” the first building they stumbled upon. The German countryside was populated, filled with farmsteads. That night, they found a barn, and slipped in and hid in the hay. There were pigs there, and, miracle of miracles, slops. Spoiled milk and moldy bread, potato peels, the best food they’d had since they’d left Gleiwitz. And the best sleep too, despite the mice. The next day, they lay low—they could hear the sounds of war coming closer, planes and tanks in the distance, but they weren’t sure whose.

  But then they started seeing the hammers and sickles on the tanks rumbling down the road, followed by soldiers with red flags on their jackets, who swarmed over the farms and into the farmhouses. They heard shots and screams, but German screams now.

  “Should we turn ourselves over to them?” the girls wondered.

  But better to stay hidden, they decided. One of them slipped down and milked the cow. They drank that, and as soon as night fell, moved on.

  They traveled on the smallest of roads, under cover of a darkness darker than anything they’d ever seen before. The electricity was out here, and once the moon set, the only light they saw was an occasional candle in a farmhouse window. They somehow managed to make their way, though, following roads too narrow for tanks, too rough for SS motorcycles, lest there still be checkpoints. They slipped into root cellars and barns, stole food, and “used the outdoor washrooms.”

  Before dawn, they would choose a barn and sneak in, eat whatever the pigs were eating, and then hide in the hay to sleep.

  Every day there were more Russians, running over the land. “But we were hiding from them too,” said Magda. “They were like wild animals unloosed—it was unbelievable, how primitive, how wild. And crazy for jewelry, with ten, twelve watches on each arm.” Liberators, theoretically, but the girls were almost as frightened of them as of the Germans.

  Not quite, though. They weren’t sure exactly where to go, but home was east, and they headed that way. They sneaked through the countryside, coming out of the forest only at dark, darting from tree to tree. There was nothing yet coming up in the gardens, but there were root cellars with preserves and rotting potatoes. These they ate raw, “a banquet,” said Magda.

  They didn’t know where they were, or even what day it was. The countryside seemed to be getting richer. One evening, just at dusk, they caught sight of a girl going into a farmhouse. She had long blond braids and was wearing a wool sweater, pleated skirt, and kneesocks. The girls watched, stunned at the sight of her. Shocked that such a creature could still exist.

  Magda and Aranka followed her to the house and knocked on the door. She opened it, and they were faced with each other.

  Magda and Aranka were probably about the same age as the German there in the doorway, but weighing about forty kilos, and with their stubble of hair and filthy stripes, they must have looked less like girls than the kind of trolls who lurked under bridges, waiting to eat nice German girls in snowflake sweaters, should they be caught out after dark.

  Magda felt the anger rising. She looked inside. The kitchen behind the girl was beautiful and clean. There was a pink tulip, she told Gabi afterwards, in a vase on the table.

  Magda wanted to hit her, kick her, plump and pink with kneesocks and tulips, but instead half whispered, “I had a sweater like that.”

  “What?” said the German girl.

  Magda took a breath. “Please give us some food.”

  “We don’t have any,” the girl said, and moved to close the door.

  Aranka put her foot in the door. There was a bowl on the floor with some scraps.

  “Will you give us that?”

  “The dog’s food?” asked the girl, incredulous. She shrugged—these two trolls were beneath contempt.

  And Magda and Aranka ate the girl’s dog food. They were too hungry not to eat it, Magda told Gabi.

  But afterwards, she didn’t look down. “Give our regards to our friends the Russians when they get here,” she said as they were leaving.

  THAT NIGHT, MAGDA GOT VERY SICK. They’d found a barn and eaten more raw potatoes and the few weeds they could find in the yard. Magda couldn’t travel the next morning, from the pain in her right side—“Afterwards, I found out it was a gallstone attack.” When the farmer came in that morning, he heard her moans.

  He climbed up in the hayloft, looked at the girls, then went away, and came back with a pot of soup for them.

  They hesitated—“Don’t be afraid, I won’t poison you,” he said. The war there was over, he told them. His two sons had been killed in the east. The young one had been only seventeen. There had been that moment, the farmer admitted, when he’d thought about joining the party, because it was so bad after the other war, the last one, and he was thinking of Germany’s destiny, but now—“Over. Lost”—he looked around, gestured with his hand. “Everything.”

  He said he himself had never hated anyone.

  They asked him where they were.

  Outside of the town of Prenzlau, in eastern Germany, about fifty-five kilometers from Ravensbrück, as the crow flew. But how far they’d wandered between the two, who knew?

  No one spoke for a while. Then, finally, someone thought to ask him the date.

  “The first of May,” he told them.

  A YEAR TO THE DAY since Magda and her sisters had been taken. But only a year? Magda felt the pain in her side subsiding. The soup was good. Potato soup, with real potatoes, each bowl had pieces of good potatoes, cooked, and some milk, some bread. Good bread. Butter and gooseberry jam.

  The first of May 1945. The farmer’s wife came out with some cheese and gasped when she saw them. Tears started down her cheeks.

  Yes, cry now, Magda was thinking, but didn’t she know? She knew! Where did she think all those shoes were coming from, year after year? All those baby carriages?

  Still, she’d lost her sons—unless the man was lying. Who knew? Who cared? Were these people saints because they didn’t pick up their hoes and beat to death these girls whom their country had turned into fair game for them for the last ten years?

  It was “over,” said the farmer, but over for whom? wondered Magda. Were her parents still alive?

  She suddenly felt much better and realized she had to get home. If they were alive, that’s where they’d be. Her mother! Her father! Maybe they were still alive.

  “Are the trains running to Czechoslovakia?” she asked the farmer.

  Not from there, he said, but maybe from Berlin. It was about 120 kilometers to the southwest.

  THEY SLEPT THAT DAY, and started out the next night. They took shelter in another barn the next dawn, where they found an SS uniform, buried deep in the hay. There were two horses in the barn as well, and a cart. As soon as it got dark enough, the girls managed to hitch the horses to the cart, and set off along the road to Berlin.

  It seemed like a dream to them afterwards. What Magda remembered best was feeling almost giddy with amazement—first that they’d gotten away with the horses, and then at the enormity of the theft. Two horses and cart—what would their father say to that? His well-brought-up daughters—horse thieves!

  They started laughing a bit at that, laughing and then stopping. A laugh and then an abrupt stop. They couldn’t know then that that’s how it would be, for the rest of their lives. But that morning, it wasn’t that, it was just the first time they’d felt close to free, or close to safe, in six long years. Seven girls alone on a road filled with refugees, desperados, and foreign soldiers, riding in a stolen cart pulled by stolen horses—and still safer than at any time since the Nazis had marched into their lives.

  Which was not to say safe. They had discovered, though, that their stripes and shaved heads had, as part of the overall miracle that seemed to be taking place around them, turned into a sort of safe conduct for them through the Russians. Those wild men had been let loose on the general population, an
d every one of them was there with not only a national but a personal grudge to avenge. But when they saw the girls’ stripes, they wrote out passes, certifying them as “victims of National Socialism,” worthy of “special consideration.” When they saw the numbers on their arms, they cried and gave them bread.

  Fresh bread, with salt, and vodka, which the girls drank, one and all, even little Vera. Not so little anymore, though—she’d turned sixteen in Gleiwitz. Still, she was so thin she looked like a ten-year-old. They all did—sick ten-year-olds, with their boyish heads, their great big eyes in thin little faces. They hadn’t had their periods the whole time they’d been in the camps.

  Which was just as well, considering. No underwear, no supplies—but don’t think. Just get to Berlin, and then home.

  Not that it would be home—unless her parents were there. But there was a chance. The whole thing was over. Not just the war. Everything, as the farmer had said. Her parents were strong and smart. Her mother was beautiful. Maybe she’d been put to work in an office. Her father could have been out in the fields, or even sorting clothes.

  Something. Even the Nazis wouldn’t have wasted his talents. Even they would have seen how strong he was, how capable. How noble and good, both of them.

  They couldn’t have just killed them, not even the Nazis. The closer they got to Berlin, the better a chance it seemed. Her parents had to be alive. They were probably traveling along a road right now, like this one, somewhere. Who knew but that they might even come upon them in Berlin?

  “Imagine that!” Magda said to Gabi. Imagine us driving around a corner, and there they are.

  They laughed, then stopped. They had seen the Hungarian transports. Watched from across the camp as the long lines trailed into the woods. Her mother was forty-two, her father forty-eight. Old to be selected for work.

  But it could have happened. They could have come on a day when they needed workers. There were a few days like that. They could have gotten through.

  Though when she thought of the SS on the ramp, with their dogs and their whips, their cruel little games—“So sorry about the conditions on the train”—her heart froze. But “Either in Berlin or back home,” she told her sisters. The news was all good now, and better every day. Germany had surrendered. Hitler had shot himself in the head.

  16

  THE OUTSKIRTS OF BERLIN were wrecked and deserted when they drove through. They passed houses with their fronts sheared off by the bombs, and the back halves still standing with their furnishings, like the dollhouse Hermann had brought them years ago from Prague.

  They stopped to try to find food at a big house that stood relatively intact but deserted, the front door open wide. They walked in—the Russians had been there. The grand piano was turned over and the silver strewn all across the floor. There was a small silver tray, like one they’d had at home. This Magda took for their mother.

  They drove on, into the city, under the Russian banners hanging on the gates: LONG LIVE THE SOVIET ARMIES THAT PLANTED THEIR VICTORY STANDARDS IN BERLIN! They made their way in silence through the rubble-filled streets, past the bombed-out apartments and overturned tanks with SS license plates. The streets were deserted except for the very old and very young, out scavenging for firewood or standing in long lines at the pumps for water. The Russians seemed to be camped in whatever apartments were still standing, with makeshift stables and little farmyards in the squares.

  Whatever reserves of strength and even ecstasy that had gotten the girls that far gave out on those streets. Magda couldn’t quite remember what came next—if they slept in one of the deserted houses, or just lay in the cart. It started to rain—she realized how lucky they’d been with the weather till then. Anyway, soon after they arrived, someone, maybe the Russians, took them to the Belgians, “who saved our lives.”

  There were four thousand Belgian soldiers in Berlin, “the first truly decent people we met,” said Magda. When they saw the girls, they rushed them straight to a hospital they’d set up in one of the big houses still standing, “and there they cooked for us and fed us like starving children. And slowly, they brought us back to health.”

  MAGDA DOESN’T GIVE DATES. It’s hard to know how long they stayed there. She mentions the Belgians leaving—“We were so sad when they left, we were all waving.” Which is another thing the Belgians did for these girls from the death camps—got them to wave. No small feat, considering.

  By then the girls were well enough to travel. The trains had started running again, jammed with refugees trying to get home. There was no fare system in place yet, and “people were climbing in through the windows,” said Magda, but somehow she and her sisters managed to get onto a train.

  It was about 900 kilometers from Berlin to their hometown of Trebišov. Magda doesn’t mention their route—probably south to Prague and then east to Budapest, down to Bratislava, and then east again to the town of Košice, where the train still stops, about fifty kilometers from Trebišov. How they got the rest of the way, who knows? Bus, cart, taxi—she doesn’t mention money, either. Never says how or even if they paid for food along the way.

  Still, there came that moment, sometime in the late summer, or maybe the fall of 1945, when the three girls found themselves back in the place they had once called home, walking down the street where they used to live, their hearts pounding. There was a small chance, had to be, just one in a million, or in this case, 450,000, but that was all they needed—just that one chance that when they got to the house where they knew every brick, the door would be opened by someone they loved.

  THOUGH THEY PROBABLY would have known right away, before they knocked, as soon as they saw the house. Something would have told them—the wrong windows open or shut tight; curtains drawn on the sunroom. Bricks out of place on the front walk. And in truth, they probably would have heard something by then, either among the displaced persons in Berlin or even on the train. Would have met someone who’d given them their own version of “the worst of all news.”

  Because that’s how it mostly happened, people say. Not always the worst news, though; sometimes it was the best. Those who made it through mostly found each other by word of mouth. Someone on a train had seen someone else, who could tell them that their brother was living with a cousin in Debrecen, or their aunt was back at her house in Munkács. One girl on the train with Magda met an acquaintance who told her that her mother was waiting for her in the next village.

  “Her mother!” Everyone on the train started to cry.

  So the girls must have known that if Hermann or their mother had come home, they probably would have heard something by then. Still, there was the chance that no one had seen them yet, or even that one of them was on the way back, right then, and that they’d meet on the street. At the station. In the house.

  But when they held their breaths and knocked, the door was opened not by one of their parents, but by the man who’d been given the house by the Nazis. One of the bystanders, for whom 1942 had been a very good year.

  He had in his hand what passed for a newspaper those days, a Russian broadsheet that combined a version of the news with the latest requirements of martial law—information on where to register for ration cards, obligatory work, and so on. He opened the door a crack.

  Behind him the girls could see their parents’ paintings still on the wall, and their Persian rugs on the floor, where they’d left them.

  They couldn’t speak.

  He stared at them a moment and then turned white. “How come you’re still alive?” he blurted. “We heard you were all dead!”

  Of course he was right in the aggregate. They were all dead, statistically. But the exceptions who proved the rule now had the law on their side.

  Which meant that the house belonged to the girls again. Magda left and came back with two Russian soldiers to inform the man of that. They would stand by, the soldiers said, while he and his wife packed, quickly. After which, their bags would be inspected. If they tried to steal anything
from the house, they would be sent to Siberia.

  And, that accomplished, the Russians drove the three girls out to pay a visit to Goodmann.

  When Goodmann’s wife opened the door and saw them, she fainted.

  The girls stepped around her—into Goodmann’s version of their parents’ dining room, “set up exactly like it had been.” Their table, their chairs, the needlepoints of fruit and pheasants made by their mother in her own fine hand. Even the chest with their linens, and the sideboard with their crystal and china—the soldiers loaded it all onto the truck, “right then, before they could hide it.”

  Magda walked back into the closed dark room where their nightmare had first taken form. The giant picture of Hitler was gone. Goodmann now had a small red Russian flag flying, cut from one of his old Nazi banners. You could still see that bit of the white on the edge, from where the swastika had been.

  Goodmann himself came running. “See how we kept everything for you! Just like you left it—we’ve been taking care of it for you. We never lost hope!” And so on.

  Only this time, the desperate worry was in his eyes, not theirs. The Russians immediately stripped Goodmann’s watch from his arm, he being an ethnic German, part of the Volks- whatever it was they’d called themselves. The ones who’d run to inherit the earth with the Nazis, and now had the Russian army in their living rooms.

  “Where’s your Nazi pin?” Magda asked him, but in Czech, so as not to have to watch the Russians beat him right there.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Goodmann came by to see her, hat in hand. He begged her to testify in his defense. He had been denounced as a Nazi and threatened with expulsion—would she tell the court how he’d hidden them? How he’d tried to help?

  Which was true—he had helped. For an extortionate amount of money from her father, but still, he’d taken a risk, he and his wife, just the same. Which is what she said in court—though she refused to go further, to make a plea for him. When she looked across the courtroom at him that morning, she could still picture him in his Nazi uniform, “strutting like a peacock.” And the surviving members of the community told her that Goodmann had been a key player in the transports, naming names, checking lists—fine. Let him be expelled, let his beloved Germany take him back, along with the rest of those turncoats, who were being pushed, destitute, out of Central Europe now.