The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  From there, though, Irene Zisblatt was sent to Auschwitz, to Dr. Mengele, who was experimenting at that point on various ways and means of removing the numbers from the prisoners’ arms. It seemed that most of the SS had gotten tattoos as well, their signature death’s-head, and now that the Russians were coming, there was increasing interest in wholesale removal. To this end, Irene Zisblatt had her arm injected, cut, scraped, Auschwitz-style, with no anesthesia, but the numbers didn’t come off, and the whole thing got infected. Mengele shrugged and told a nurse to give her a lethal injection of phenol to the heart and send her to the crematorium.

  But the nurse was a member of the underground, and instead of phenol, gave her a sleeping drug, wrapped her in a blanket, and threw her into a load of clothes that was being tossed into a train, which stopped at a work camp, where she woke up, crawled out, and sneaked into a barracks. And there, by a continuation of the same extravagant luck that had already saved her twice, she found her last surviving cousin, and the two of them worked together in a factory till the end, and then escaped from the death march and hid in the woods till they were found by General Patton’s army.

  A good ending, except that Irene Zisblatt, old now, somewhere in Florida, had started to cry.

  She and her cousin had been wandering in the woods for weeks by then, she said, with nothing to eat. But they found a little stream and drank some water. Then they went to sleep under some leaves, “for a day, five days, we didn’t know,” just drifting, until they were brought back to life by something poking them.

  It was a rifle. The cousin, Sapka, covered her head. “They’re going to kill us now,” she said, “but at least they didn’t make us into ashes.”

  That had been her mantra at Auschwitz—“Don’t let them turn us into ashes!” She closed her eyes tight, but Irene peeked out at the boots. They were brown, not black. The legs were khaki.

  “It’s not an SS,” she whispered to her cousin.

  She looked up. A man—“so tall!”—was staring down at her, openmouthed.

  “Are you alive?” he whispered, in a sort of German. He was an American, he made them understand. He put them both on his back and carried them back to his camp. When General Patton saw them, he yelled for the medics and swore revenge. They were taken to a hospital in Pilsen and given scrambled eggs, Sapka’s dream in the camps.

  But she died that night anyway, of typhoid fever. “I buried her in the woods and left a marker,” said Irene, though when she tried to find it later, it was gone.

  Or maybe she was looking in the wrong part of the woods—“but,” sobbed Irene Zisblatt, “at least Sapka wasn’t ashes.” True. She herself was taken to a DP camp near Salzburg, where she met “kids from all over, alone, looking for a home.” Most of them figured that it would have to be Palestine. But Palestine was closed to them too then, at least legally; and while they were waiting to hear about an illegal boat from Spain or Italy, an uncle in the Bronx saw her name on a list and managed to have her brought to New York. Her father had owned a resort in Czechoslovakia, but when her uncle called, long distance, thinking maybe to get it back for her, they told him that “no one’s home.”

  Another fine. Consie clicked out again—she’d seen the triumphant pictures in the BG, as the scriptwriters call it, the children, grandchildren. So a marriage, and the usual measure of success despite it all, beyond expectations. Certainly beyond anything that the Native Americans or even Black Americans had been able to muster from their own tragedies, which was strange, now that she thought about it. Even a half-dead European is better prepared for life here than anyone else.

  She glanced at her watch. It was now two thirty, time to go. Much past three and you could sit for hours in that inching mass that makes up the daily fare on the freeway, the countless thousands of cars heading back now, one by one, into the sun. Both ways they get it in the eyes, east in the morning, west at night. Maybe they were used to it, maybe they didn’t know any better, had never been on a subway, a trolley, a train that could be whisking them all the way, together, in speed and comfort, reading the paper as they went.

  But not in LA. Not even the dream of it in LA. With luck now, it would take her a good forty minutes. And she was hungry.

  BUT NOT HUNGRY LIKE AUSCHWITZ, said the little voice that had been whispering in her ear for some time now, and next on the list was a Czech, who’d arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, just when Hermann had. It might take a bit longer to get back, but better maybe than driving down again, plus the parking. She might as well get her money’s worth. She’d give the guy half an hour and then hop into her car.

  She typed in her name, password. It jumped right up, even before she finished typing. So the machine was getting to know her, good. Clicked here, then there, and could even go to the chapters, the different topics laid out: Biographical Profile, National Identity, Awareness of Political or Military Events, which you could skip, which was precisely what she planned to do with this one. With all due respect.

  “Mr. Martin Slyomovits,” a different sort of interviewer was saying. They were in Australia. Good. Surely less of the “How do you feel?” there.

  Which wouldn’t have worked with this man, anyway, she could see even before the sound caught up. He was tall, distinguished, with a small mustache, sitting ramrod straight in a chair, all business. Nice clothes, better than the others she’d seen. A well-cut jacket, tailored shirt.

  He was born in Czechoslovakia, he was saying, in a village in the Carpathian Mountains, the region that was taken by Hungary in 1939, just at the time that—

  She knew that part. The relentless march of the Nazis and their clients. The cruel betrayal of poor Czechoslovakia. She clicked. The screen went black, just for an instant, but when it flashed back on, everything had changed. The Czech with the military bearing was now slouched in his chair, crying, telling the interviewer that he didn’t think he could go on.

  “Stop the camera,” he was saying.

  But the camera didn’t flinch. “Please continue.” The Australian was relentless. “This is for history.”

  The Czech took a breath. He was talking, in fact, about an escape, but not his own. That of two fellow Czechs, Rudi Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who had managed to get out of Auschwitz in April of 1944, with a specific mission—to warn those about to be deported to resist.

  Both boys, Vrba and Wetzler, had been in Auschwitz long enough to have seen the whole picture, seen transport after transport come in, from all over Europe, filled with people still thinking they had come to work. They’d seen them pushed, half-mad with thirst, from the trains with their families, still uncomprehending. Seen them separated with no chance to say good-bye. Seen them walk to the gas chambers thinking they were going into bathhouses, and by the time they understood, they were trapped.

  Trapped, in fact, from the minute they got onto the trains. And still they boarded, not knowing, still thinking that if they followed orders, they could save their families and maybe themselves. “You’re going to work,” they were told. Some variation of “to pick grapes in Tokay.” Which sounded all right, better, certainly, than starving where they were, they were still thinking, fatally unaware of the terrible secret that the Nazis had somehow managed, for the most part, to keep.

  The Czech, Martin Slyomovits, knew the whole story. After the war he’d met Vrba, who told him that what had tipped him off first was hearing the guards’ talk of “Hungarian salami,” famous throughout Europe. Every transport had brought its own food, which constituted key perks for the guards—wine and olives from the Greeks, cheese from the Dutch, sardines from the French. Now, they were talking about the salami, and the camp prisoners understood who was coming next.

  THERE HAD BEEN NO Hungarian transports till then. People from all over the region had taken refuge there, thought they were safe. But it was as if the Reich had been saving them till last, when everything was at peak capacity, and they could kill them all seamlessly. There had been feverish preparations all tha
t spring—more ovens, expanded “undressing rooms.” The train tracks had been extended almost to the gas. That meant the Nazis could skip the truck routine, the “who would like a ride” bit. Now even the feeble, even the small children, could walk to the gas themselves.

  Vrba was determined to get out with a warning. “Because,” Martin Slyomovits on the tape was saying, “we still didn’t know. They told us we were being resettled. No one thought that they would kill us. It didn’t even occur to us.”

  But if they were warned, Vrba, the man in the camps, figured, they could resist. And if they died, they’d die fighting, “like soldiers, not sheep.

  “And we could have run then and hidden in the forest,” Slyomo­vits continued. “Our village was only three kilometers away from the deep woods. We were all woodsmen, all hunters. We would have had a chance.”

  The Polish underground had found its footing in Auschwitz by that point, and they helped Vrba and his partner set up an escape. Two of them who worked outside the camp’s barbed-wire inner perimeter hollowed out a hiding place for them in a woodpile. Others got them work passes for that detail. A Russian POW who’d escaped but been caught “filled in my Manual of What Every Escaper Should Know,” as Vrba wrote after the war.

  “Lesson one: trust nobody. Don’t even tell me your plans. Because as soon as you’re reported missing, they’ll come and torture me.

  “Lesson two: don’t be afraid of the Germans. They try to convince you that they’re superman, but they can die just as quickly as anybody else.

  “Lesson three: don’t trust your legs because a bullet can run faster. Be invisible. Never move by day.

  “Lesson four: carry no money. If you’re starving, you’ll be tempted to buy food, but you’ve got to keep away from people. Steal and live off the land.

  “Lesson five: travel light. You’ll need a knife for hunting or defending yourself, and a razor blade in case you’re about to be captured. Don’t let them take you alive.”

  He told them to take matches and salt, because “with salt and cooked potatoes, you can last for months.” He taught them how to use a compass, and instructed them to steal a watch and consult it, so as to never be caught out in the daylight.

  He gave them some strong black Russian tobacco, which, soaked in gasoline, would put off the tracker dogs. “But only Russian tobacco, Machorka. It’s the only kind that works!”

  On the afternoon of the third of April 1944, Vrba and his colleague Wetzler crawled into the hole in the woodpile. At eight thirty that night, during roll call, the alarm went off, as they’d expected. From inside their woodpile, they listened to the sirens, the marching, the baying dogs. The noise would ebb and flow, with the two men scarcely daring to draw a full breath. Once, they heard some SS very close—“Let’s have another look in this woodpile.” They actually climbed up on it with their dogs—Vrba wrote that he could see their boots. But the Russian tobacco worked, the dogs didn’t pick up their scent, and on the fourth day, the intensive search—again, as expected—let up.

  That night, as soon as darkness fell, the two men crept out, put on the Dutch suits, overcoats, and boots stolen from the dead, and slipped out of Auschwitz.

  They traveled 130 kilometers through the Polish mountains toward Slovakia, using a map from a child’s atlas they’d found in a warehouse. Eleven days after escaping, they crossed the border.

  Fantastic! Consie breathed to her dingy computer. A real “Fantastic!”

  “But,” said Slyomovits.

  Why “but”? They weren’t caught—since Vrba lived to tell his tale, so why the but?

  But “But,” Martin Slyomovits repeated, and then stopped talking again. Put his hands over his face.

  There was a long pause. She held her breath. If he broke down now, she would still beat the traffic.

  But he took a breath, pulled himself together—he was a soldier. You could see that it was true—if he’d gotten to the woods, they never would have taken him, or his mother, father, sisters, or brothers either.

  But they never got to the woods, even though Vrba managed to get his warning to the Hungarian community leadership in time to save them, including “a precise description of the geography of the camps, their construction, the organization of the management and security, how the prisoners were numbered and categorized, their diet, the selections, gassings, shootings, injections, and deaths from the living conditions themselves, as well as sketches and information about the interior layouts and operations of (and surrounding) the gas chambers.”

  Because the community leaders he had trusted to spread the alarm instead suppressed the report. It turned out that one of the heads of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, the influential lawyer Rudolf Kastner, was deep into negotiations with Eichmann—

  Was she hearing correctly? Eichmann??

  —and thus instead of leaping with all urgency to spread the alarm, Kastner slipped the report to Eichmann and then boarded a Nazi passenger train to Switzerland, along with seventeen hundred family members and friends—the price of his betrayal. His reward.

  “They didn’t tell us,” Martin Slyomovits was sobbing to the camera. His mother and sisters had been sent straight to the gas that summer, when they were killing so many that human fat had to be used to accelerate the burning—

  She clicked, she knew that, but instead of turning off, the picture froze. The funny thing was that she’d read something about Kastner once before, in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; but that was a book, so when she got to that part, so disturbing as to be unbearable, she could still slam it shut and put it back on the shelf.

  Still tell herself that it wasn’t really true, just Hannah Arendt trying to turn the narrative away from the fact that she’d been in love with Heidegger, her professor, a Nazi activist, and had helped to rehabilitate him when he came whimpering back to her after the war. Which proved that Arendt was human, but did that impair her judgment on this? Was she right about Kastner and the rest?

  Was it possible? That there were members of the community who could have spoken but hadn’t? That rather than warning every endangered soul from Prague to Budapest, they’d actively collaborated in the organization of their murder, 450,000 people that summer alone—including both Slyomovits’s family and, now that she thought about it, Hermann’s as well—in exchange for a train ride to Switzerland?

  And then from there, they’d apparently gone on to found the new shining State of Israel, because that’s who they seemed to be, the founders and early leaders of Israel—was it possible??

  She stared at the screen—Slyomovits, frozen in mid-speech. She liked his looks, wondered what he’d looked like when he was young. Some of the speakers had shown early, lighthearted pictures, but Slyomovits showed no pictures.

  A tap on the cubicle. “We’re closing now.”

  She looked up. “What??”

  “This room closes at five,” said the woman.

  Five? How could it be five?

  She was screwed now, completely. Hers would be the mother of all drives, in the mother of all rush hours. She would sit through five lights just to push her way onto the freeway, to be followed by a slow-mo slog from the right lane into the left—twenty minutes or more, just to get into position to start inching west, and that only if it was a good day. If no one had texted into his or her predecessor’s fender, which would bring the whole thing to a grinding halt while the backed-up masses swarmed around the malfunction, like caterpillars she’d once seen on a leaf in Brazil.

  A broad leaf. Her husband had barely brushed it with his arm, which had been enough to send the caterpillars’ poison shooting up to his lymph glands, where it nearly killed him.

  She could try driving back on Venice—there were all the lights, but at least there was something to look at. First the Latino markets, the brides and the pawnshops, and the only real butchers left in town, and then the Indian shops with bags of curry and cardamom out front, along with bolts of raw silk, but where do yo
u find a dressmaker out here? And then the nice Tibetan place where she might stop for some so-called yak milk tea, or the bright Brazilians next door for a real coffee, and then after that, the strip malls giving way to the quirky little theaters, and finally, the beach.

  Though that would take an hour, at least.

  “Just one more minute?” she begged the librarian. She suddenly had to hear the end of the Slyomovits tape.

  He was saying that Vrba’s report finally came to light anyway, but three fatal months late, and only after 450,000 people had walked, utterly unaware and in orderly fashion, onto the trains in Budapest and into the Auschwitz gas. She even knew what they looked like—some arty SS guy had taken photos of their arrival. Well-dressed people in coats and hats, looking worried but still trying to understand. Strong young men and women who could have fought in the woods had they known.

  Had they been told. But the first account of the Auschwitz death camp was broadcast only on the fifteenth of June by the BBC, followed by the New York Times on the twentieth. This led the Hungarian government to panic, fearing that they might be held responsible for the whole thing. They insisted that the Nazis stop the transports, which they did on July 9, 1944. Voilà.

  This saved the last 200,000 slated for the gas. And the Swedes, under Raoul Wallenberg, managed to shelter another 33,000, until January of 1945, when the Red Army got to Budapest and liberated the town.

  What was left of the town. Some of those who could have spoken and hadn’t, defended themselves afterwards saying that if the truth had gotten out and there’d been an uprising or people had tried to flee, more of them might have been killed in the process. But Hannah Arendt had done the math on this one too: of those who resisted the Nazis, about fifty percent died. But of those taken to Auschwitz, it was a clean ninety-five percent.

  “Thank you, Mr. Slyomovits,” the Australian was saying. “It’s so important to hear from the survivors—”