Gone to Soldiers (106 page)

At first she tried to remember every beating, every kicking, every murder but what could she do with the rage that flooded her? Indignation took energy. Daniela must survive and she must survive. The SS men, the SS women, immaculate in their uniforms, well fed, shaved, perfumed, loomed over them like gods. Like demons they had not only their names but special secret names. The kicker. The hammerhead. The chozzer. Daniela and she must study them to outwit their malice. When the hammerhead shifted his gaze in a certain way, he was about to strike out. When the SS woman called the vampire smiled with her lips pursed, she was about to draw blood with her whip. The chozzer liked women to look down always. The kicker if you met his gaze would often pass you by. She hated having to study the idiosyncrasies of brutes as if they were laws of nature, that when the hammerhead whistled, you need not worry, but when he was silent, somebody would die soon.

“Remember reading Suetonius in school?” she asked Daniela. In the French school system, they had all read the same books at the same time. “I thought the Roman emperors were such monsters, that power enabled each of them to become hideous in a different and wilder way. But each SS man over us is his own Roman emperor. They are all crazy with power.”

Never to be quiet, never to rest, never to be clean, never to sleep soundly, never to be full or have enough to drink so that the throat stopped burning and the belly was silent. Never free from terror. Never alone. Never out of the presence of the dying and the dead.

What manner of beings are they that feed their egos by reducing others to shit? Only the same as ordinary, but more so. Is that it? Ordinary hatred of the neighbor, ordinary anti-Semitism, ordinary despisal of women, ordinary acts of domestic and street violence, battering, beating, terrorizing, ordinary callousness shading into brutality given a license, a reward, a theatrical setting, a uniform, a credo. I kill therefore I am. I kill you, thus I am proven superior.

One Sunday afternoon as they were picking the lice from each other's seams, Jacqueline saw a woman who looked a little healthier than the others, with hair grown out a couple of inches, black with streaks of grey although her face was unwrinkled. She could not be a prisoner, because she wore a real sweater over the grey shift and real shoes on her feet. The woman barked some questions, then came toward the two of them. Jacqueline tried to sidle away into the crowd that jammed the fetid room. She had already learned that to stand out in any way was to die. Always attempt to avoid notice. That was not easy since she was one of the tallest women in the room, but she was beginning to stoop.

The woman stared at Daniela and then at her. “Which of you is Yakova Lévy-Monot?” she asked in Yiddish.

Jacqueline was terrified. First of all, it had already been beaten into her that she had no name, only her number. She was a haeftling, a piece only. No one had names here. She had been arrested under her own name, because at the last minute she had destroyed her false identification, since she was wanted under that name.

All the women looked away, as frightened as she was. But the woman who had entered held up her arm with the tattoo. “I'm just a Jew, like you, don't be afraid. Are you Yakova?” She had to repeat her question, as Jacqueline had little command of Yiddish.

Jacqueline nodded, waiting for the blow, the lash, the kick.

“I'm your aunt Esther—your mother's youngest sister. Come outside.”

They both started to follow, but she turned sharply. “Who are you?”

“This is Daniela. Where I go, she goes, or I don't go,” Jacqueline said, in a mixture of Yiddish and French. “We are sisters.”

“What else are you?” the woman asked.

Jacqueline did not understand and looked at her blankly. The woman stared back, then came to a decision and motioned them both to follow her. They all squatted against the wall outside, where a drizzle black from the crematoria smoke pasted a layer of ash on their skin.

Out from under her sweater the woman who said she was Aunt Esther brought a pair of well-used but still good boots. “See if these fit. Now you can divide them if you want, each one apiece, but that won't do you much good,” she said sarcastically.

They were big, but Jacqueline did not care. Real boots. “Maybe you could get some for Daniela too?”

“Do you know what they do to us if they catch us taking clothes?” She pointed at the chimneys. “Be careful that those boots don't get stolen. Listen to me, I'm an old number, I know. You're lucky if you can stick together, because you can watch for each other. Anything you leave will always be organized, stolen, because it's life or death, a scrap of sawdust bread, a slice of rotten turnip, a piece of cloth to bind your legs.” As Esther spoke, Daniela translated. “I work in the office, because they found out I'm a good bookkeeper and I do sums in my head. So sometimes I have something I can trade to the women who work in Canada, where they sort clothing from the new transports. If you get sick, act well. Don't go to hospital, because Dr. Mengele will cut you up alive. It's a place where he plays with the dying as if they are violins of pain for him.”

“Esther, my mother Chava, my sister Rivka, they were transported in December 1942. Are they here?”

“There are worse camps than this I've heard where everybody's killed, everybody, right away. There's hundreds of camps. People mostly don't last that long. I was in a factory in Lodz before. Listen to me, get into a factory if you can. Look lively. Straighten your spine and look strong and tall when they come to pick you. Pinch your cheeks. Otherwise they'll take you in a selection. Tell them you worked in a factory in France.”

“Won't they find out we lied?” Daniela argued.

“The boss who picks you, he won't be there when they put you on the machines. They'll beat you anyhow.”

“Esther, please see if you can find out about Maman and Rivka, please.”

Esther shook her head. “What you don't know is better. Think of them as alive. Better not to know the truth. When I came, they took my son and my daughter. For the first four months, I survived believing they were in some other camp, a children's camp. I lived only to get them back.” She paused for Daniela to translate.

“How old were they?” Daniela asked.

“Four and six. By the time I learned what happened to the little ones, I had become an animal, a beast that lives to live. You harden yourself. One of the women in Canada, she found her own baby's little dress. She killed herself on the electric wire. When we do that, the guards laugh. Always remember, if you die, they win.”

“Ask her, has anyone escaped from here?”

“People escape, but they bring them back. Some Yugoslav partisan women got away. But as a Jew, nobody out there will help you. You have to make it on your own. Still, if you ever have a chance, seize it. They whip and hang you when they catch you, but the chance is worth it.” She leaned toward them. “What of the war? What do you know?”

Esther had heard about the Normandy landings but had not yet heard about the August landings in the south of France. In the camp at Gurs the day before they were deported, Daniela and Jacqueline had heard that French troops had landed at Toulon. That was where she heard too how her father had died at the barricade.

“When we were being transported through Germany, we heard bombs falling. Germany is being heavily bombed, we could tell,” Jacqueline said and Daniela translated.

“Why don't they bomb here? Why don't they bomb the gas chambers? Why don't they bomb the railroad lines here? Why?” Esther stood. “Get yourself chosen. You must.”

“Aunt Esther, where are we exactly? We only know we're in Poland. If we ask the kapos anything, they just punch us.”

“It's called Oświęcim, an old cavalry barracks, but now it's a city the Germans call Auschwitz. Women built it, in the winter. They gave them evening gowns to work in. None survived. This part is Brzezinka, what the Germans call Birkenau. Birchwood, like a nice resort.” Esther grinned for the first time. They could see that her teeth were badly decayed and in front two were missing, broken. “How old do you think I am?”

Jacqueline felt a little embarrassed. She had always been told that her aunt Esther, the youngest of the girls, was only seven years older than she was, but that could not be. She shrugged.

“I'm thirty. And they sterilized me. My hair all fell out. The hair grew back, not like my womb. Have your periods stopped yet?”

Daniela and Jacqueline nodded.

“Everybody says it's drugs, bromide, but maybe it's just because you're starving.” Esther motioned them back into the barracks and sidled off into the rain that made oily puddles on the ground.

Jacqueline put on the boots at once. She would barter the clogs for bread to someone whose clogs had been stolen. Maybe next Sunday Aunt Esther would come back with boots for Daniela.

Two days later—they were still keeping track of time then—they were among a group of women ordered to strip naked and march out before a group of the SS and men in business suits, who were joking together. Jacqueline had already adopted a technique to survive the stripping and the poking, the whipping and slashing. She imagined that her body was hidden inside an imitation body. The men could only see the imitation rubber body, but she was the bones hidden inside that they could not see or touch. At night in the bunk she had whispered that to Daniela, but one of the other women of the six who lay flesh to flesh in their narrow wooden bunk had heard and said, “Your bones? Ha, they can break them. And when they have burnt the flesh off, they grind them into bonemeal for fertilizer.” Jacqueline told the woman to shut up or she would knock her out of the bunk. It wasn't for several weeks that she found out the story was true.

By that time they were working as slaves for Krupp, making grenades. Every morning they were wakened at four
A
.
M
. and stood on appel and every morning some women fell and were kicked to death or simply left on the field to be carted off in the trucks that daily took the dead, the dying to the crematoria. They did each wear one boot at appel. Daniela could not cram her foot all the way into the boot, but she could get it on enough to stand in it, to keep one foot warm.

Every day and every night the sky was red with flames, while heavy ash filtered down on them. The crematoria could not cope with all those gassed, for the Germans had grabbed the Jews of Hungary and were shipping them in the hundreds of thousands into the gas chambers. Every night large piles of bodies were burned in enormous pyres all around the camp, because the crematoria were overloaded. Ash fell from the sky like oily black snow. The stench of burned flesh hung in the air with the stench of decay. Sometimes half an inch of ash lay on everything.

In these barracks they slept only four to a bunk, Daniela and herself and two Hungarian Jews, a young girl named Rysia who spoke some French, and a young married woman Tovah who spoke only Hungarian and Yiddish. In the hour between the evening appel, the hours of standing in the square, and lights out, as the women were picking lice from each other, anyone who knew a poem recited it or they talked of food. It did not matter what language the poems were in, the women wanted them again and again. The women who knew the most recipes and could best describe them were in great demand. Rysia, who had helped her mother do the cooking for the inn and for her large family—of which only she remained—was particularly valued for her veal paprikash and her cherry strudel.

She can make you taste it, the women said. Mix the pastry again, Rysikela. Describe how the cherries smell. Rysia, who had done the same heavy labor all day as the rest of them and been marched to the factory seven kilometers through the increasing cold and back again, who had been fed only the same slice of adulterated bread and coffee imitation and worked a twelve-hour day on that, who had stood the appel for two hours that morning and two hours that night and been hit with a rifle butt four times on the trot back from the factory, who had for supper only a small bowl of watery turnip soup, put her last energy into creating for the other women fantasies of food. Rysia was only fifteen, but she had a woman's strength and stamina. Tovah had just turned twenty-one. Her family had owned a vineyard and made sweet red kosher wine. Her husband had come into the business and had just been learning how to graft vines. When she arrived, she was a dark plump woman. Now she was wan and lean.

Rysia looked like all the rest: gaunt, hollow-bodied, with a shaven head and huge staring eyes, a mangy ghost. Her hair had been red, she told them. Her mother had run a country inn, a restaurant with a few rooms upstairs, and her father operated a mill. Rysia spoke German, French and a little Russian as well as Hungarian and Yiddish. She considered herself uneducated, but she was quick. Daniela and Jacqueline had begun giving lessons, Daniela in Hebrew and Jacqueline in English. It was forbidden and they would be killed if anyone betrayed them, but the women loved the lessons. It took their minds off the hunger, off the terror, off the pain. “To learn,” said one big rawboned woman who had been a laboratory technician, “it's to feel human briefly.” Most of the women chose to study either English or Hebrew, but some insisted on learning both. Friday nights they tried to burn candles of rags or scraps stolen under pain of death from the factory. One woman led prayers for them in Yiddish, which Jacqueline was picking up more every day. Sometimes Daniela would pray in Hebrew as she lit the imitation candles, covering her eyes. Sometimes they had nothing to light at all, no little flame to ignite against death.

By now they knew that Tovah was pregnant. Mengele had not caught her on the way in. She would have gone straight to the gas, or else to his experiments. He liked to cut open pregnant women, or experiment with the effects of starvation on the fetus or the newborn child. It could take them quite a while to die, the mothers even longer.