Which was fair enough, Magda figured. They were “German, not Czech,” they’d all shouted when Hitler marched into what they called the Sudetenland. Now let them be Germans.
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. People used to quote that at Birkenau. Fine. Let Goodmann reap.
LET THEM ALL REAP. But what about her? What about her father and her mother? Had they sown the wind? She took a taxi out one day with her sisters to Hermann’s plum trees, outside of town. It was fall. There were a few stragglers out there, picking the plums, but no real harvest. Half the trees had fallen, anyway, or been chopped down. Much of the fruit lay rotting on the ground.
She picked up one of her father’s plums but couldn’t eat it. Her parents weren’t coming back. She knew it now, had even heard the details. They’d been taken with the transport from the border town of Sátoraljaújhely, not far from home. She remembered the town—a nice place before the war, famous for its friendliness, its good schools. But all that had changed as the Nazi winds had blown through the place, even in the early forties, and by the time her parents had fled there, from the Hungarian prison, in 1944, everyone they knew had been pushed into a few blocks, and were starving and filthy. “Doctors and lawyers, teachers and farmers, patrons of the arts, Hungarian patriots,” a young man told them.
The girls knew that. Knew who was there—that is, everyone. It didn’t matter that they’d given their sons in the last war and left their whole fortunes to found schools for the local children. Had family roots there going back to the 1500s, and Hungarian names, Hungarian faces. They were still shoved into the boxcars that left on the night of the twenty-eighth of May, 1944, and that was the end of them in that town. Two trainloads, and they were gone forever.
The trains had stopped in Birkenau the next day, the young man went on, and there was no selection, no workers saved. The transport from Sátoraljaújhely with Hermann and his wife, like all the others coming in from Hungary that summer, was marched straight from the train tracks to the gas that day. The girls probably saw them in the distance, disappearing into the woods.
THE THREE SISTERS moved back into their house, “theirs” again officially, though to no avail. Without their parents, it was a dark, dim place. They wandered through the silent rooms, “trying.” They put their mother’s sheets back on their beds, they sat for dinner around the dining room table. They ate, they drank, they kept the holidays, a cold exercise. God might still be God, they neither knew nor cared anymore, but as for this world, “There was no warmth, no one left.”
One day, before the snows, Magda and her sisters took shovels out to the plum trees and dug up the places where they’d helped Hermann bury the last of the gold, in glass jars. Magda thought she remembered the spots, remembered pacing it all off with Hermann, him showing her just how to find everything again, “when we come back.” But despite digging all day, in the right spots and nearby, allowing for some shifting what with the frost and the rain, the sun, the roots of the nearby trees, they never found anything, or even a trace of anything, not a shard of glass, or even a cast-off lid.
Someone must have gotten there first—maybe several people, maybe everyone in town. “People would have guessed that those leaving would be burying things,” said Magda. Maybe they’d come digging before the family had even left town.
17
IT WAS VERY COLD, that winter of 1946. The Russians had fought for every inch of this part of Europe, and they weren’t leaving. Hermann’s dream of a Czech democracy had gone up in the same smoke as his friends and family, along with his quest for real citizenship, for true belonging in the land that he’d loved. The Russians incorporated the eastern part of the country, the state of Ruthenia, directly into the USSR, and a few years later put the rest of Czechoslovakia under Communist rule. In her recording, Magda didn’t mention whether they got the farm back. Even if they had, this was the eve of the era of collectivization. Private ownership would soon be a thing of the past. There was no further talk of her father’s grain business.
Nor does she say how she and her sisters lived that first winter. “It took a big courage to come back to life,” was how she put it. A young woman she knew who’d made it back tried to hang herself, but someone had caught her in time.
“Thank God!” Magda hugged her.
The woman shrugged. “Maybe, but it seems to me that I’m not alive anyway.” She lit a cigarette butt, hand trembling. “Can you come out of there alive?” she asked.
Magda didn’t know. “You have to try.”
Yes, she tried, said the woman, but she couldn’t stop thinking about “back there.” The day she tried to hang herself, she’d woken from a dream that was more a memory, about one morning when they were woken for roll call—“Nazi morning, still pitch black”—and she scrambled down from her bunk and realized that her sister wasn’t moving. “I called her name, but I knew she wouldn’t answer. Even without touching her, I knew that she was dead.
“And I fought to live, to come back, so that all those deaths wouldn’t have been in vain, but it seems to me now that they were in vain anyway.
“What did they die for? So that I, you, a few others might return?” Another butt from the overflowing ashtray.
Magda looked out the window. When she was recovering in Berlin, she’d heard that workmen were being paid with bags of old butts. It was all they had.
Her friend went on. “We came back with that hard kernel that we all forged, at the core of our hearts, to prevent our destruction, preserve our identities, keep our former beings—”
Magda nodded.
“—but all that, that superhuman will, only worked there, in the camps.” Here, she said, it just “melted, dissolved, and we’re left with nothing.”
The butts had all been smoked, once, twice, already. Still she sifted till she found one she could relight.
“They were braver than I was, smarter than I was, stronger even.”
Magda nodded. She knew. Survival was less a matter of heroic triumph than of simple chance. It occurred to her that that somehow made it harder, for some reason.
“I do what one does in life,” her friend continued, “I eat, sleep, walk around, but I know very well that this isn’t life, because I know the difference between before and after.”
Yes, that was true, they all knew the difference. Magda looked down at the shoes on her feet—real shoes, nothing like Auschwitz, but nothing like the ones her mother had bought her in Vienna, either. She’d never have shoes like those again.
“I know I should keep going, in memory of her, of all of them.” The young woman got to her feet. She was done talking. “But the truth is I died in Auschwitz, too, only no one knows it.”
“TRY,” SAID MAGDA, but she didn’t bother with reasons, because all the reasons were just variations on the same lie, and the truth was that she didn’t know why, and no one else did either. Why should they keep living? Out of spite? Vengeance? To affirm the ultimate beauty and light of the universe, the goodness of God?
Another woman she met who’d just had a baby confessed that even at the birth, she’d felt no joy. Right then, when her child was born, and they were all celebrating and congratulating her, a scene had flashed before her eyes, from the infirmary at Auschwitz where she’d been forced to work. A baby was born there, to one of the prisoners, and an SS man grabbed it and held it under a running faucet and drowned it.
“Here you go, little Moses, down the river,” he’d laughed.
“I know I should be happy now,” the woman told Magda, “but I’m like stone inside.”
“TRY,” REPEATED MAGDA, and she herself did try, she and her sisters. They heard of a cousin who’d made it back to a village nearby. “Before the war, we barely knew her, but now she became a close relative.” The girls went to visit her often that first fall, and even married men she found for them. Two young men who had fought in the Resistance, one with the Czechs, the other with the Poles. They were both stron
g, healthy, and unmarried. Neither of them had been in the camps.
Perfect, the cousin told the girls, even before she’d met them. The point now was to marry; it almost didn’t matter who. The cousin told them that she’d been at one wedding, in a displaced persons camp after Auschwitz, where just before the ceremony a boy had smiled across the room at a girl and asked her if she’d like to “take advantage” of the ceremony and get married too?
He had no one left in his whole family, and neither did she. She was twenty. He was nineteen. They were both tall and nice looking.
“Yes?” he asked her.
“Why not?” she’d answered.
And for some reason, said the cousin, that had made everybody happy. People started clapping and singing, people she’d never seen smile till then. “It was as if, suddenly, we saw a way that we could live.”
And when it came to the vows, everyone laughed again since it turned out they didn’t even know each other’s names.
But they liked them—“Beautiful!” they’d each cried as the other spoke them.
“What were their names?” asked Vera, the young one. Seventeen, but with the mind of a child, Magda was coming to see. As if she’d been stopped right where they’d taken her.
But how could it have been any different? Given that absolutely toxic mixture of what she’d seen, what she’d lived through?
“What does it matter?” Magda said to her shortly.
But the cousin had smiled and said their names were Margot and Peter.
“Beautiful!” Vera agreed.
Yes, and the two young men for Magda and Gabi had beautiful names too, she said. “Eugene and Alex.” One could marry one, and one the other. The girls could sort that part out themselves.
WHICH THEY MUST HAVE, since Magda married Eugene that January 1946. “There was a terrible blizzard,” she laughs on the tape, “but I wanted to be married outside.” She doesn’t say why. Someone loaned her a white fur coat, and two children who’d been born in hiding served as flower girls.
And then Gabi married Alex, and the two couples lingered a while longer in the town. The last people were still straggling back from the east. The girls accepted the fact that their parents had been killed, they’d heard it from several sources, but between themselves and in whispers, they agreed it wasn’t entirely definitive, it couldn’t be. Since the people who told them hadn’t been there, not right there, not in the gas.
Or else how would they have lived to tell the tale? And even if they’d been on the same transport and thought they knew, they didn’t know, not entirely, not beyond a shadow of doubt. They hadn’t walked into those fatal woods with Hermann and their mother, weren’t shoved into that concrete chamber, weren’t inside when the door was bolted shut and the screaming started, and the people began climbing over each other to get to the last of the air.
The Nazis.
But the point was that no one who’d lived to talk about it afterwards had actually seen her parents go through that door, Magda repeated to Gabi.
Maybe they’d been marched to the east somehow, and then taken ill. Maybe one of them was still lying in some far Polish hospital, too weak to walk, but alive. Amnesiac even. There was a chance, and a chance, too, that they’d still come home—who could say there wasn’t?
Though on the twenty-eighth of May that first year, the day the transports from Sátoraljaújhely had left for Auschwitz, the girls lit candles. That didn’t mean their parents were necessarily dead, they told each other. Just that their daughters were remembering.
And the same thing the next year as well.
But the year after that, Gabi’s husband Alex and his brothers bought a farm in Canada. Both she and Magda had babies by then. Even Vera had gotten married. It was time to move on.
They began a new life in the New World, far from the death camps, but far from everything else as well. The rich, cultured parents who had loved them, the smiling aunts and uncles with their lively children, reduced to a few crumpled old photos that had fallen behind a bookcase, and that they’d been lucky to find in their house before they left. The girls in pleated skirts and hats with streamers, the boys in sailor suits—Magda kept them out at first, but they were hard to make sense of in a cramped Toronto apartment, and one day she put them in a drawer.
“IT TOOK A BIG COURAGE to come back to life”—when Magda said that to the camera, she was an old woman with nine grandchildren. Her son had become a doctor. He lived in a big house on Long Island, outside of New York.
He’d made his own way back to a life his grandfather would have recognized. His children grew up as Magda had, nice girls, rich girls, studying music and art.
Magda herself, however, had said good-bye to all that. Not that she and her husband hadn’t done well, considering. Their life in America, though, had gone very much as Hermann had foreseen when he’d hesitated so fatally on that brink. She and her husband had arrived penniless, to a land where plum trees meant little, and music studies in Vienna even less. English had proved a demonic language. The v’s and w’s never did come out right.
“He would have suffered here,” Magda once blurted out, in the middle of dinner. She didn’t say who, but her husband had turned the cold eye she’d come to know by then.
“So it was better there? In the gas?”
No, no, she said quickly. It wasn’t better in the gas.
SHE MADE FRIENDS IN CANADA, most of them outsiders like herself, faces still turned east to a place that would, on the other hand, never be far enough away. Some of them took pills, or shot themselves in despair. One friend took a train to New York and jumped from a tall building. A woman whose husband had done well, and just bought her a big house outside the city.
But “I keep dreaming—” the woman wrote, and then her note broke off. Any one of them could have finished it for her.
But Magda didn’t have time to dream. She and her husband both had to work hard to get started, first in factories, and then Magda learned hairdressing, and Eugene did something in “wholesale jewelry,” and they ended up owning a dry cleaning plant. By the end, they had a nice apartment in Toronto, and went to Florida in the winter. It had, one might say, all worked out.
“Thank you, Magda,” the interviewer was saying, and then the screen went blank.
CONSIE GOT TO HER FEET, went over, fiddled, played it back. Had the disc skipped the end, cut off early? Wasn’t there a bit more, when Magda would mention that even though the settled story was that her father had been sent to the gas on May 28th or 29th, with a specific Hungarian transport, there was a chance, a rumor, that he had escaped? Wouldn’t she just want to float that, as a sort of antidote, up against all the rest of it? As something that might actually matter to her, some true consolation, as opposed to, say, the Florida winters?
Consie listened again—nothing. No word of Hermann, nothing about any escape. And then it struck her so hard it took her breath away, one more tragedy to add to the heap. Magda—of course, of course!—had never read Consie’s uncle’s letter. Never heard mention of her father’s escape.
“FOR NOTHING IS RESOLVED, NOTHING IS SETTLED . . .”
Jean Améry
18
“DEAR”—HAD CONSIE PUT “DR.” OR “MR.”? She didn’t remember. There had been no title listed before his name in the directory. But surely doctor? To the curator of an archive, even in Southern California, no?
Whatever she wrote got a quick and courteous reply. “Wed.?” she’d asked, abbreviating, lest he be impatient with email, and “Wed.” it was, along with the directions that were taking her east on the 10 that morning, away from the money of Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, past the delis to the north on Fairfax, the crumbling clapboards on Crenshaw, all the little houses, a few still with sheep and chickens, on all the old streets north and south of Vermont, of Western, of Normandie, which someone out here thought to spell in Olde French, and then off at Hoover.
Named for the president, she trusted, not
the vacuum, unless the vacuum people had donated some giant sports center on the street? Who knew? And, thinking twice, why not a street for the man who’d invented such a blessed machine, rather than the one who’d stood in spats as the stock market crashed around him?
The traffic was stopped long before any of that anyway, around the San Diego Freeway, a virtual parking lot, the worst in town. Lucky for her she hadn’t joined the flight to those northern suburbs where the lower middle, once happy in rentals in West LA, had taken the bait for “home ownership” in the last ten years. They’d bought all the spec houses the developers had thrown up out there near Magic Mountain (an amusement park, not a book in this neck of the woods), and now spent two hours on a good day commuting back in to a job that no longer paid the mortgage.
Poor them. Anyway, the point was her lane was moving. And there was another point too—because since the thing had been left, in a way, with her, she had decided to take it a bit further. Rather than let go of that one fleeting glimpse of a man in stripes on the run through the Nazis’ woods.
Because it had been with a growing sense of joy that, as she checked all the sources of the dead, she’d found that Hermann’s name didn’t come up anywhere. Not in the Auschwitz ledgers, not in Washington, not in Jerusalem, though the list-makers stressed the incompleteness of it all. Many names apparently weren’t entered in the camp records, particularly those from the Hungarian transports, who were sent straight to the gas toward the end, when the Nazis had stopped counting.
Which would have been Hermann if, instead of escaping, he had been killed that May, upon arrival.
But against the logic of all that, the near-perfect percentages in the math of extermination that spring, there, holding it all off, stood one line in an old letter.
The Plum Trees Page 16