The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  “He was at Auswetz Concentration Camp with them,” according to those two mythic girls, “Klara and Alice,” who’d come into their lives once, on paper, and never been heard from again. Had disappeared themselves into the mystery of Communist Europe.

  But before that, they were two girls in blue who claimed to have seen Hermann in Auschwitz. Girls who knew him—he was their mother’s brother. Girls who went on to state categorically that “They do know that he escaped.”

  “Know,” they’d said. Not heard. Know. A beautiful word, given the context, glittering like a jewel in all that ash. Academic, granted, since Hermann never came back. But still, a picture she was reluctant to turn away from. One man, smart and brave, pausing to gauge the sun or listening for footsteps. Sleeping under leaves, or whispering abstract thanks beside some half-choked stream. Scared to death, or maybe less scared than he’d been in the death camp. Maybe no longer afraid at all, beyond fear. Defying it all without a gun in his hand. Defeating the Third Reich with every step he took, even if he didn’t take many.

  Hard to let slip back away with the rest of it, especially when, after having done a bit of preliminary research, she found that it might be true. “Escape was extremely rare at Auschwitz,” she’d discovered, “but not unknown.” It turned out that there were six hundred cases of escape from Auschwitz, of whom almost four hundred were recaptured.

  “When an escape was detected, all prisoners in the camp stood at attention for hours on end, while the fugitive was hunted outside the camp; once captured, the escapee was tortured, then paraded around the camp with a sign saying ‘Hurrah, I’m back,’ and then was hanged in front of the rest of the camp.”

  Standard Nazi operating procedure, with even that touch of what passed among them as humor, but that still left two hundred escapees at large—so why not Hermann among them? A month after Hermann got to the camp, if he did get there, that May of 1944, there was an escape that galvanized the whole Auschwitz community, that of Mala Zimetbaum and her Polish lover, Edek Galinski.

  “She was a Läuferin, or runner, in the camp, able to move about on errands and carrying messages. Both had been members of anti-Nazi undergrounds, he in Poland, she in Belgium. He obtained an SS uniform, she ‘organized’ a pass, and they left the camp together in the guise of an SS man transporting a prisoner.

  “Many Auschwitz survivors remember them, for they inspired everyone with tremendous hope.”

  For two weeks, until they were caught by a German border patrol in the Beskid Zywiecki mountains, not far from the Czech border.

  “Back in Auschwitz, both were tortured and then led to the gallows for public execution. Mala slashed her wrist with a razor blade she had concealed, was beaten to the ground and loaded onto the crematorium truck without ever being hanged. Across the camp, Edek leaped into the noose and kicked away the bench before the death sentence was read; the SS rescued and re-hanged him.”

  An Auschwitz ending, but you can’t hang a good idea. A month later, in July of 1944, a Pole named Jerzy Bielecki repeated the same process, but with better contacts on the outside. Dressed as an SS, he went to the laundry where his girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska, was working, asked for her by number, and informed the SS woman guard brusquely that he’d come to take her for an interrogation. He marched her through the camp, and at the checkpoint showed a forged pass authorizing one guard to escort one woman prisoner to a work camp outside the gates. The guards opened the gate for them—“Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!” Bielecki barked back as he left.

  Out of sight of the guards, he and Cyla embraced and then started running, for ten nights, west into what the Nazis called the General Government, part of Poland. There Cyla was hidden by a Polish family, and Jerzy joined his brother in a Home Army partisan unit. Both survived the war.

  But—Auschwitz—afterwards, each was told that the other had died, and they went their separate ways, Cyla to America, Jerzy back in Poland. Only by chance, in June of 1983, did Cyla hear of a man on Polish television, telling her story. Nearly forty years had passed, but Cyla was on a plane to Krakow the next day.

  Jerzy met her with thirty-nine roses, one for each of the years they’d been apart. They met fifteen times after that, until she died. Each had married, lived other lives, thirty-nine years of marriage and jobs and children, and some success, or how could he have paid for the roses, and she the fifteen trips? So, much success, and the attendant satisfactions, large and small, ranging from community approbation down to dinner at nice restaurants, and all of it nothing to their ten days on the run in the mountains.

  Ten days in two long lives, but compounded of all that was the most essential—the clear light, the bright shining stars overhead, the heat, the cold, the desperation, and mostly, the crazy love. Because it would have been crazy, with the whole Third Reich on high alert for them. Thousands of men on their trail, and the two of them lying together in some leafy grove or hidden cave, wondering which it would be that day, live or die? If it was die, they might as well make love. If it was live, all the better.

  And then one of them would burst out laughing—the “Heil Hitler!” as they had walked out the gate. Then they’d fall silent. They had poison, but the SS had revived others who’d taken poison so they could hang them. Hang them badly, painfully, the way they’d engineered it, so that it took longer than normal hanging. Both Cyla and Jerzy had witnessed it. They didn’t want to hang. They fell into each other’s arms again.

  Consie had seen a picture of them on the internet—two old people, smiling. Nice, but not as nice as if they’d met again in 1945. She looked up—the sign said western, her exit. How had that happened? She screeched across four lanes, but made it somehow. No one even honked—funny, that was the one thing people out here seemed to forgive on these roads.

  She groped for the emailed directions but it turned out to be easy, the way it is in proper SoCal. Right for a few straightforward blocks, then a clear left, a clear right, all marked with big green signs, and then a nice big turn into the USC campus with its ample easy parking, as long as you’ve got eight bucks—but who doesn’t have eight bucks out here?

  It was a beautiful day, California winter, hard to beat. Big sun, blue skies, even when it rains, or so it seems. She parked amid the Ranges and the Audis, and followed the blond student body past the roses in bloom to the Doheny Memorial Library.

  A nice place, a lovely old building, tall brass doors, marble floors. Who was Doheny anyway? One of the thugs who killed public transportation out here? There are mansions and libraries all over this town called Doheny, and even a street in West Hollywood, a big street. The movie so-called royalty were small fry to this.

  She’d shaken a resale suit out of her closet to present herself in that day, but the assistant who greeted her turned out to have long hair and jeans. He had her list ready—“Escape References, Auschwitz.” Three pages—she’d had no idea.

  “All these people escaped?” she asked him.

  “Or else it’s referenced for some reason in their testimony.”

  “I see,” she said, almost giddily, half expecting him to retort, Said the blind man.

  But he said nothing, just unlocked a door, led her into a very grand room, the Feuchtwanger Collection, donated to the university by the wife of the best-selling German writer who’d escaped the Gestapo dressed as a washerwoman and then bought a villa in Los Angeles where he hosted his fellow refugees—Brecht, Thomas Mann, Schoenberg.

  Lovely, she thought, appropriate even. A perfect place to research her subject in comfort and light.

  But they continued on through, glancing neither left nor right, to a sunless, grimy little cubicle, with a down-at-the-heels computer with headphones and an elaborate series of passwords to boot. Followed by one of those “If it stops in the middle, just click this, and then do that.”

  She would need him, she could tell. To her nervous “Where will you be?” he gave a “Down the hall, unless I’m out.”


  She didn’t want him to leave, at least not till she got the thing started. He sounded like a Midwesterner. “Do you like California?” she threw out.

  Of course he liked it; all the Midwesterners out here like it, starting with the weather.

  Nothing to talk about there, but her job now was to be nice enough to this guy to get him to help her with this shockingly drab, ancient computer—hadn’t Steven Spielberg funded this project? What had they done with all the money?

  “I’m from near Cleveland,” she tried, but no dice. Best she could get was, “I’ll be here for an hour anyway,” as he slipped out.

  WHICH WAS GOOD, because she called him three times in that hour. The first time was because when he’d taken her to lock her bag in a locker, she’d forgotten to pull out her glasses, and then the key didn’t work, till he came and it worked with one quick try. Next came the fact that the tape didn’t seem to want to play; and then it skipped. And then the thing went back to the beginning instead of playing through—How do you contact Spielberg? she was wondering by then. To tell him that his work here had been in vain?

  But then, one of the clicks went right, and a man was speaking. He was old, and he looked mean at first, a crosspatch glaring at the camera. His name was Chaim Feig, and he was from Romania, he said, and then came the childhood, the aunts and the uncles, all the cousins. Nice hot tea and a piece of cake in the morning. Fish in the river. She pushed fast-forward. It didn’t work, and then it wouldn’t stop. By the time she stopped it again, the crosspatch was in tears.

  He had been part of the Sonderkommando, the “Special Command,” the SK—the prisoners who were forced to move people in and out of the gas chamber, and then to the oven. “Pieces,” he said the Nazis called them when they were dead. His own particular assignment had been the children, “nice little boys and girls, holding their little hands, five in a row—”

  She pressed fast-forward again.

  “. . . all day and all night, into the gas. We’d hear them crying for their mothers—”

  Where was the part about escape? This man had arrived in Auschwitz just a little bit before Hermann. If he’d escaped, since he’d escaped, maybe Hermann had left with him.

  “And all their little bodies, so beautiful, so clean, so perfect, in contrast to the filthy rags they were wearing—”

  She pushed the button—what was wrong with this thing? Even her computer at home was better.

  “We put them five at a time into the oven. But they were so thin that sometimes we needed a woman’s body, with some fat, to help it burn—” She hit the thing. It went back to the beginning.

  She called the assistant—“But feel free to leave a message.”

  She got up, walked out to her locker, opened it successfully this time, and got a pill. Drank some water from a fountain, walked back, and put on the headphones again.

  “After six weeks, I made up my mind to get out, somehow, some way.”

  At last.

  But it turned out his escape was more sideways than out. On the spur of the moment, he hid under a load of clothes from the dead children he’d been loading into a truck. The SS searched, as always, with their bayonets, stabbing through the piles, but they missed him by an inch, and the truck pulled away.

  “Now what?” he said he thought to himself. The SS almost immediately noticed he was missing and were searching, “each one with fifty eyes. It was very, very important to them that no one get out of the SK.” The truck would have been searched again if it had gone out the gates, but instead it pulled up outside a deserted barracks in another part of Auschwitz. Once night fell, he crept out cautiously and into some barracks, where he found a chimney that didn’t have a metal grate. This he took as a sign that he might live. He crawled inside and fell sound asleep.

  He heard the dogs barking, but for some reason they didn’t smell him there. The second night, he sneaked out and stole some bread—he didn’t say where—and filled a bottle with water. This became his life in those days. During the days, he slept in the chimney, and at night he’d steal his bread and water. He counted ten days, he thought, but was no longer sure. He was alive, true, but beginning to feel confused.

  But then he overheard some prisoners talking about a transfer out, to a work camp, the next day. “This is it,” he told himself. He waited till the men assembled for the predawn roll call, and then melted into the throng.

  The trucks to take those selected for work were waiting, but the roll call wasn’t coming out right, there was one too many. One among the fifteen thousand—“me,” he smiled now at the camera.

  The SS started screaming, “Schwein! Pig! Get out!” but despite counts and recounts, there was no way they could identify the one bald, half-starved man in stripes, standing at attention with all the others, who was there out of order.

  Making a mockery, in fact—“Step out, pig, filth!” Chaim Feig looked neither to the left nor to the right. These men were not his buddies, but no one turned him in. Finally, an officer shouted, “Load the trucks anyway.” This was a first for the SS, this concession. But it was mid-1944, and by then the Nazis’ need for labor trumped their passion to spend the time it would take—starting with the random killing of men on the outside lines till they got to someone who would squeal—to flush out the one defiant prisoner who was laughing up his ragged sleeve at them that day.

  AND THUS IT WAS that an “ecstatic” Chaim Feig clambered into the trucks with the rest of them and was driven out through the gates of Auschwitz and away.

  Which in fact constituted the end of his escape, since he was now part of a detail of prisoners again. But though most of his colleagues were beaten or starved to death over the next few months, Chaim Feig was still alive in April of 1945, when the British marched in.

  He was turned over to the Swedes, “who were really human, and really tried to help us,” treating him with great kindness. But his whole universe was gone, there was no one he knew still alive, no family, no friends or teachers or even enemies, and the worst part was that he knew how they’d all died. Knew exactly how his mother, his sister, his little nieces, his father, had walked into the “High Gothic room,” as he put it, quoting Goethe, still with some hope in their hearts. Knew how they’d folded their clothes and noted where they’d put them, as instructed. Knew what relief they’d taken at that.

  And Chaim Feig unfortunately knew, too, the signs of the sinking feeling as the charade played itself out, and the pushing started. Knew how some started praying, some screaming, some still took hope from the false shower heads on the ceiling. A few brave Czechs once sang the national anthem, and some French women sang “La Marseillaise.”

  Until the gas, of course, when the singing turned to screaming, and then the screaming turned to choking, and then the chokes to gasps—but it wasn’t quick, that transformation. It took twenty minutes at least, of screams, chokes, gasps, blood from the mouth, blood from the ears—the Nazis had really done it. Found the worst death since the beginning of time. You died faster if you were burned at the stake, a French priest had told him. A prisoner there, too, who was obsessed with Joan of Arc.

  And though suicide was a mortal sin for a Catholic, the priest told Chaim Feig that he couldn’t face the gas. And he was no longer sure that there was anyone to punish him anyway. Was there a God? The priest was thinking maybe not, and a few days later he “ran to the wire,” and electrocuted himself. The best you could do at Auschwitz.

  As for himself, said Chaim Feig, afterwards, when he was turned out of the displaced persons camp in 1946, “the only thing I could think to do was to go to Palestine and kill the whole world. I wasn’t just shooting Arabs there, I was shooting everyone—”

  She clicked again, and there he was, back in the present tense, living outside LA, and being interviewed in what looked like a nice room, with photos of grandchildren in the background.

  “. . . But every night, when I close my eyes, I see them still, all those children, good little girls and b
oys, holding hands so nicely, five across, walking into the gas—”

  “And how do you feel?” the California interviewer asked him.

  “How do I feel??” His voice was rising as she clicked it off.

  FINE. SHE WANTED TO KISS HIM, wanted to look him up on the internet and send him flowers. She was glad he’d gotten out of there—glad for his marriage, his children, his comfortable life in the San Fernando Valley.

  But now she could see them too, all those little children—and for what? She was coming to think there was no meaning to any of this—that Auschwitz was either a “one-off,” a bizarre detour from the progressive path of life with no message beyond its particular horror, or else a true unmasking of the real face of Man. Maybe “holocaust” is the natural state, and it takes every Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and all the Kennedys in the universe just to keep it at bay.

  But be that as it may, Chaim Feig’s escape was a fluke, and had nothing to do with Hermann, and she should have clicked out right away and gone on to the next one.

  Which she did now—a woman who’d been a young girl in the camps, twelve at the time, when she was selected for her beautiful skin to be made into gloves by Ilse Koch, the wife of the camp commander at Buchenwald.

  Wrong camp, then. The thing was obviously mismarked on her list. It was supposed to be “Escape from Auschwitz.”

  She should click out—but gloves??

  “Who was Ilse Koch?” an interviewer was asking in soothing tones.

  “A maniac.” The woman, Irene Zisblatt, looked away. The wife of the director of the camp. She would ride through on her horse, seeking beautiful skin or an interesting tattoo. She would then have those girls killed at once, and their skins sent to her.

  Her house wasn’t far from the barracks, and one day Irene and five other unblemished young girls were marched over there by two SS, as a sort of offering to their boss’s wife. But Ilse Koch wasn’t home, so they were marched back to camp and lived that day instead of being turned into gloves.