Gone to Soldiers (107 page)

Typhus, diphtheria, cholera were epidemic in the camp and killed hundreds daily. Sometimes marching to work they saw the men, who looked just like them, except that they wore pajamas instead of shifts. Starved, with shaven heads, they all looked the same, forced to run at the same SS trot, double time, carrying heavy loads, hundred-pound bags of cement. At the factory she could see no difference between the Krupp guards and the SS. When the women went once a day to the latrines, they were forced to run across the courtyard and if they moved too slowly, the factory people turned freezing water on them. Still they could mutter to each other. The slaves taught each other how to turn the heads on the grenades so they would misfire, and then to put the good ones on top. There were tens of thousands of women and men slaving for companies that clustered around the pool of labor in the camps, labor they paid nothing and could work to death.

One night Tovah gave birth. Daniela assisted her. Daniela held her hand across Tovah's mouth. If they were caught, they would all be sent to the gas chamber. It was a long birth. All the women who could endure to, watched, held her hand, wiped her brow with their filthy shifts. At last he was born, the little morsel, tiny but vibrantly alive. The kapo, who was going along with this, said, “Don't give him to her, or she'll never let go.” That would mean death for both.

Daniela wrapped the baby in a torn rag from a woman who had died and the kapo put the little boy outside to die. A freezing rain fell. It should not take long. They tended Tovah as well as they could on the mud floor. Daniela slipped out into the night, where she would be shot if seen, and when she came back, she was plastered with mud. Jacqueline understood and kissed her. Daniela was shivering, but could not cry. They were kept raging with thirst and had no tears. Their ducts were inflamed and dry.

In the next selection Tovah was taken. The SS woman said she looked unhealthy. She went off with the women chosen to die without saying a word, without saying good-bye.

Rumors ran through the camp like disease. How can we go on? Jacqueline wondered, plodding through the freezing rain. This was a cold damp place, breeding chills and fevers, but if you could not work, you would be selected at once to die. She looked about her, cautiously, as they plodded in torn dirty rags down the road, always told to hurry, mach schnell, mach schnell, schwinehund. Random blows. Some days began with one or the other of them getting it in the head or the back or across the breasts when they marched out of the barracks, when they lined up for appel, when they lined up for their three minutes maximum in the wallow of the latrine, when they were marched to the factory through the fog that stank for miles of burning flesh. The grimy freezing grey rain was like universal pneumonia, a mucous discharge of the atmosphere.

Daniela was a bony witch with immense eyes under a grey shaved skull, nose and chin protruding like an old woman's. She could imagine what she herself looked like. Boils and open sores covered their arms and legs. They stank from diarrhea because they all had dysentery. The smells, nobody got used to them, the fearful stench of sick unwashed starving bodies and piled-up waste, of shit and blood and fear.

She could remember when they had first arrived in this place, this vast city of death and slave labor that the German SS men and women called Birkenau, she and Daniela had stared at the musselmen, at the apathetic creatures that had no flesh left, only ropy tendons and bones under the discolored greenish skin. They had felt revulsion. How could people let themselves become like that? Now she knew. Daniela and Rysia and she were still active, still moving, but they had become as frightful as those scarecrows they had turned from when they first arrived.

How long could they survive? She asked this of herself coldly as she worked at her machine. How long could they continue to work while starving? How long? One day when Daniela had been pulled from her machine and beaten by four Estonians who were working for the SS, because the machine had broken down and she had not made her quota, she collapsed in the column marching back. Jacqueline saw her start to fall and moved sideways, hissing at Rysia, who blocked Daniela's fall with her shoulder as they trotted on five abreast, as they were always made to march. The guard they called Slasher was amusing himself kicking a child who had fallen and missed Daniela's misstep. With Daniela between them, they shouldered her along until they were safe in the barracks.

That night Rysia cried. When Jacqueline, who had been trying to ease Daniela's welts and open wounds, asked her why, Rysia said, “You love each other so much. With my mother dead, nobody will ever love me like that.”

Daniela raised her bruised head, her nostrils still caked with blood they had no water to wash off. “Rysia, we will make you our sister too. Yes, we will.”

Jacqueline cupped the high-domed skull of the girl, encrusted as were all their scalps with running sores, and caressed what would have been her hair. “We'll be family.”

“After the war, my darlings, my sweet ones, after the war,” Daniela intoned through swollen lips.

“When we are liberated,” Jacqueline said. “When we escape.”

“Then we will eat enough, we will eat chicken roasted and gedempte flaisch and as much as we want until we are full,” Rysia whispered. “We will have a warm bath and clean clothes and underwear and real shoes on our feet, with stockings. We will sleep on clean sheets in feather beds.”

“After the war,” Daniela intoned, “we will go to Eretz Yisroel and we will live together in a house and raise apricots, there, where the sun shines and it's warm. We will have chickens and sheep and a rosebush with red roses and one with yellow roses. No one will ever again call us dirty Jews. No one will make laws against us, ever again.”

“Chickens! Eggs … real eggs …” Rysia intoned, cuddling up to Daniela as gently as she could in the narrow wooden bunk.

“Roast lamb,” Jacqueline whispered, “and clean warm water and roses on the table.” Why should she argue anymore? She had nothing to go back to. She had only Daniela and Rysia. She would agree to dream about Palestine. At least there it must be warm.

Every day she dragged herself from the crowded cage of plank bed, aching, feverish and thought she could not stand the stench, the noise, could not endure her own bag of bones wrapped in a foul scabby rag of skin, could not endure the pain in her vitals, could not endure working past the dropping point, the poison of permanent exhaustion that drained even the minerals from the bones, could not endure the fear jabbing their bellies, the hatred, the unending vicious petty and horizon-vast hatred.

To Daniela and Rysia she whispered, “I will not hate myself because I stink. I will not hate myself because I have no hair. I will not hate myself when they force me to run naked across the yard. I will not hate myself because diarrhea runs down my legs and they won't let us wash. I will live and tell the world about this. I will live and make them pay.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Rysia mouthed back.

“Yes.” She told her the story of rescuing Daniela, while Daniela herself listened with shock and dismay.

“You should not talk of that here,” Daniela whispered, deeply upset.

“Here is precisely where I should talk about it. And remember.”

“I will think about it all day,” Rysia whispered. “Better than food.”

On October 7, an explosion shook the camp and shots followed. In the morning they were kept standing at appel for hours. Word came through the grapevine, muttered without movement of lips. There had been a revolt of the Sonderkommando: the men who shoveled the corpses out of the gas chambers and loaded them in the crematoria. They were to be gassed, as happened to each batch finally, but this group revolted. Some women from the munitions factory had smuggled powder to them and they had made bombs. They had managed to kill some of the SS, nobody knew how many, but as they stood in the appel, Jacqueline looked sideways out of the corner of her eye at Daniela and blinked her pleasure and Daniela signaled back. They had to be extra careful because Slasher was prowling this morning and the SS female commandant was pacing before the rows, pulling out victims to kill. She had a way of wetting her lips when she was about to seize a victim, as if she could taste her. All the women of the Krupp factory were punished, randomly beaten, their food withheld, but four were taken away to torture.

They heard that the model ghetto Terezín in Czechoslovakia, often shown off to the Red Cross (who maintained Jews were simple criminal prisoners and not prisoners of war, and thus refused to help), had been largely emptied. The inhabitants were arriving but nobody got to meet them, because on October 28, which was the Czech equivalent of 14 juillet, they were gassed. The guards made jokes. The execution was arranged to celebrate Czech independence day.

The women who had been tortured from their factory had not broken and had given no names. One morning all the women were kept standing, soiling themselves as they could not help by the fifth hour, until the women from the munitions factory were marched in, mangled, bloody, to be hung before them. Nobody cheered because there had been an incident like that once and a machine gun had been turned on the whole block. Hanging is no worse than being gassed, she told herself. We'll find their names and remember.

The next day at appel it was snowing and they stood, many of them barefoot, on the frozen earth. Winter was coming. She began to understand that for all they had been through, the worst was yet to come. That night she asked the woman who had survived the longest, a woman who had been working first in the mines and now at Krupp since November of 1943, “Now that winter's coming, will they give us at least coats? Or stockings? Or blankets?” By now she could make herself understood in Yiddish.

The woman who was only twenty-four, she told them, just laughed. She opened her brown toothless gums and laughed.

MURRAY 4

The Agon

Landing on the beach at Tinian, Murray was hit with a .38 bullet that lacerated his shoulder and cut the artery. It was the same damned shoulder that had taken a piece of shrapnel on Saipan. He must lead with it. He missed the fighting on Tinian, but then his regiment joined him on Saipan.

The 8th Marines received replacements just drafted, kids of eighteen. They also got new officers and NCOs to replace those killed or badly wounded. Jack and Murray had both been made corporals and Reardon, promoted to sergeant major, encouraged them to snap in for sergeant. He liked them both, if only because they'd been through so much. They weren't regular marines, but they were old marines by present standards, and they could be counted on to help break in the kids. Zeeland was gunnery sergeant now.

Fox Company got a new second looey and a new sergeant. Sergeant Hickock had been with the outfit on Guadalcanal, before Murray had been assigned, then hospitalized with a leg wound. He had been with Baker Company that caught bad casualties on Tinian. Murray had seen Sergeant Hickock once or twice but had little impression of him except that he was regular marines, about thirty and a southerner, handsome, blond and square-jawed. He had a wife back in Columbia, South Carolina, and two boys, Lee and Jefferson.

He learned something else quickly about Sergeant Hickock. “Feldstein. What kind of name is that?”

“It's my father's name, sir.”

“It's a Jew-name, that's what it is.” The man was smiling thinly, looking around for support. What he mainly met was indifference. “Isn't it? You're a Jew-boy.”

“You could see that on my dog tag. It's no secret. Sir.” Murray felt himself heating, shame, anger, helplessness.

“I thought they kept Jews and niggers out of the Marines. How'd you sneak in?” He didn't seem to expect an answer, but he did. He repeated his question.

“I joined.”

“Maybe they needed somebody to clean out the latrines, to lick them clean. We all know who started this war and who's too yellow to fight it.”

He thought maybe that would satisfy Hickock, to have stirred up some of the new guys to pick on him along with Rostrovitz, a Pole from Chicago with whom he had never got along. Two days would pass and he would think Hickock had finally let him go. Jack stuck up for Murray and so did Tiny and Slo Mo Mazzini, a big kid who had been a replacement before Saipan, and he knew Reardon and Gunny Zeeland liked him. But in the Marines, an NCO could use any religious or ethnic or racial slur. That was the Marine way.

He tried to hold himself together. He had a deaf great-aunt on his father's side who wore a hearing aid. When she found conversation boring or inconvenient, she shut it off. Murray tried to pretend to himself that he had a hearing aid he could turn off. He tried to pretend he didn't understand, that that thin-lipped mouth was moving in some strange incomprehensible tongue. But he heard every word.

There was a lot of liquor on Saipan. There wasn't supposed to be, but the marines traded battleflags for it. Jack would sit around sewing up Japanese flags out of parachute silk and dipping them in iodine to look like blood and then they'd trade them to the Navy or the fliers for booze. There was also a hot market in Jap souvenirs, from canteens to swords to helmets and even skulls. Besides, every platoon had a still hidden. Murray didn't drink till he got drunk, but his fever had been coming back, and the booze helped. Otherwise sometimes he got the shakes. It was better not to stand out from the men in any way. Tiny drank too, against his upbringing, although he wouldn't gamble or shoot craps or visit whores.

A league of ball teams was set up, enlisted men versus officers in the various outfits. It passed the time. Murray had caught on his high school team, so he played catcher. Books were distributed in special armed forces editions. All the guys lined up for
Forever Amber
because it was supposed to be hot. He was reading
A Bell for Adano
. On Saipan they had movies regularly and shows every couple of weeks. In January they had the Andrews Sisters; in February, Joe E. Brown and Carmen Miranda.