Pursuit (17 page)

A husky sergeant dropped from the cab of the truck and looked the three of them over while the driver, a corporal, filled the radiator. The convoy rolled past, churning up dust. The sergeant nodded and spoke around the stub of an unlit cigar in one corner of his mouth. “Campies, huh?”

“Yes, sir. Bergen-Belsen.”

It was Brodsky who answered. His English was poor, but better than the other two, who spoke no English at all. Brodsky had picked some of it up in Palestine from the British there, and the rest at Buchenwald from an inmate from Latvia who had mastered the tongue during a two-week visit to London before the war.

“Where you characters goin'?”

“Munich.”

“That's American. You guys got passes to cross into our zone?”

Brodsky didn't know what to say. Wolf was the only one with a legitimate pass to cross into the American Zone; his home had been in Tutzing on the Starnbergersee, and he considered himself a citizen of Munich. All Brodsky and Grossman carried was a bit of paper saying they had been inmates of Bergen-Belsen. The sergeant looked tough and authoritative, precisely the type to turn them in. But for what crime? They were well within the British Zone, and the American sergeant couldn't really do anything to them for telling the truth.

“One of us,” Brodsky said hesitatingly.

“Only one, huh?” The sergeant removed the unlit cigar stub long enough to spit, and then tucked it back in the corner of his mouth. “You guys got anything to wear except them zebra shirts and them beanies? Any other duds in them packs?”

Brodsky thought he understood, but it left him more confused than ever. He hesitated. Until now their striped blouses and caps had served them well. The sergeant didn't look as if he were going to wait all day for an answer; the convoy was rolling past. But since Brodsky could see no sense in the question, he could see no danger in an honest answer.

“We have British fatigue blouses—”

“Well,” said the sergeant, “then take off them Dodger uniforms and get into whatever else you got. And shove them Sing-Sing hats into your pockets. No sense lettin' the fuckin' MPs have no field day goin' across the line. Cocksuckers hold you up for hours like they got Brownie points, the pricks!”

Ninety-five per cent of this made no sense to Brodsky, but he did get the idea that the burly sergeant, for some unfathomable reason of his own, wanted them to take off their caps and change shirts. Maybe he didn't like people from the camps; a lot of people didn't. Well, they could always change back once the sergeant had taken his truck and gone his way. Brodsky explained the strange situation to the other two, and all three removed their shirts and caps, dug the British blouses from their knapsacks, and slipped them on. And then stood back from the truck as the bulky sergeant climbed in. He leaned out of the window, staring at them incredulously.

“Well, what the fuck you guys waitin' for? A hand-carved invitation? Hop in!”

It was the abrupt gesture of his thumb toward the back of the truck that did it, certainly not the confusing language. The three eagerly tossed their packs in back and tumbled in after them as the corporal took off. The last thing they heard before the roar of the engine drowned out all other sounds was the sergeant snarling at the corporal.

“They payin' you by the hour, Johnson? Step on the fuckin' gas, for crissake! We're supposed to be leadin' this fuckin' convoy, not eatin' their fuckin' dust!”

Felsdorf was too much like the camps they had been liberated from for most of the refugees there to be truly comfortable. The bare wood buildings set on the flat uninspiring plain were terrifyingly familiar. True, the food was good and plentiful, there was adequate water, clean water, not only for drinking but for bathing as well, and the latrines were both housed and clean, and kept clean by ex-SS from nearby Dachau who hoped their newly acquired devotion to cleanliness would earn them a modicum of forgiveness, or at least protection. The medical care was excellent, and there was dental care as well. The authorities were both thoughtful and helpful when they could be; there were no locks on either the barracks doors or on the gate, which was largely ornamental in any event. But it was the sense of returning to a camp, any camp, added to the chilling feeling for many that they were here because they had no other place to go, and would have to stay in the concentration-camp replica for months if not for years. It made for disquiet among those refugees who were not Jews; the few Jews there had the hope of a future in Palestine ahead of them, at least. As tenuous as that hope was, it was better than the despair of endless camp life.

The second day at Felsdorf, Benjamin Grossman, accompanied by Morris Wolf, decided to go into Munich, leaving Brodsky to get acquainted with the camp, as well as to keep an eye on their belongings. Pilfering was not unknown in the refugee camps; concentration-camp habits died hard. And besides, Brodsky had never known Munich and had no particular interest in seeing it.

The two men hitched a ride to the St. Paul Platz across the Bavarian Ring from the Theresienwiese, coming down from the outskirts of the city through the Nymphenberger Park, appalled at the destruction about them. They walked slowly up the Landwehr Strasse, through the rubble that marked the narrow winding streets that constituted the Old City. At St. Peter's Platz they paused and looked about them. There was debris everywhere, the ruins of a once beautiful city. The Peterskirche had been heavily bombed; its thick walls gaped at the open sky with jagged stone teeth. The Neue Veste, lying between Max Josef Platz and the Hofgarten, had been leveled; the former Residenz looked like a huge park with stone shards doing for grass.

They took the one tram line that had been put back into service and rode to the end of the line at the Ostbahnhof on Orleans Strasse, aware of the side glances their striped shirts and caps earned them, but not caring much. Besides, wearing them meant not having to pay fares with money they did not possess. On each side as the tram swayed along the crooked curving tracks, the hard evidence of the destruction of war and the Allied bombing was clearly visible. The four-story houses along the Wiener Strasse, once elegant homes shaded by tall elm and linden, were now split and sliding into the street. Furniture could be seen clinging precariously to the upper, sloping floors, the rooms exposed to view, all modesty gone.

They climbed down from the tram at Steins-dorf Strasse and walked along the Isar, stunned by the destruction, the wreckage, the utter waste. The river was clogged with wreckage: a half-sunk barge had its cargo of grain of some sort dribbling from a gaping wound in one side. Small children were scooping up the smelly mess in tins while rats watched them jealously from the sloping deck.

At Kohl Strasse, Wolf paused and pointed.

“I had a friend who lived there.” His finger indicated a cleared lot; there was nothing to show there had ever been a building at the site. In the center of the bare lot an old man fed bits of rubbish onto a fire, although the day was warm. There were tears in Wolf's one good eye; he wiped them away fiercely. “My first job was just around the corner. I washed the floors of a small cafe. I was eleven. It was a good job. It was a good cafe. They fed me.”

He sighed; they moved on. At Blumen Strasse an old woman rummaged in a garbage pile, a stick in one hand to protect her against two gaunt children awaiting the opportunity to replace her in her search.

“I don't know whether to cheer or to curse,” Wolf said sadly.

They returned to the camp resolved not to return to the city until they were ready to move on, and even then to avoid it if they could. It was too depressing.

Since the formation of the Felsdorf camp, a Mossad Aliyah Bet man had passed through as frequently as his limited time would allow. Together with the Jewish Agency and other groups, he had helped the authorities to organize such activities as theater, concerts either by the refugees themselves or by visiting artists, and discussion groups, activities to occupy the minds of all, but for the Jews a means of passing the time until the Mossad was ready to help them reach Italy and eventually—hopefully—Palestine. There were occasional travel lectures on Palestine and its wonders, complete with lantern slides, always of the most beautiful views, the loveliest beaches, the widest boulevards, the greenest kibbutz, the richest orchards. Even the few slides taken of the Dead Sea area were photographed from angles that made the surrounding hills appear majestic rather than starkly barren; the Negev and the Wilderness of Zin became challenging rather than hopelessly desolate. It was a needless ploy on the part of the Mossad; the Jews at Felsdorf were merely awaiting the word to go.

All but a Jew named Benjamin Grossman.

By the end of the second week the others from Bergen-Belsen had arrived, those who were to be in the first contingent from that group to leave for Italy. There was a meeting of them, for the decision had been made to severely limit the size of the groups traveling together and gather them again in Italy near the ship the Mossad was readying for their trip. Twenty-six had come from Bergen-Belsen in the first group; twenty of them Polish Jews, five Lithuanians, and Wolf the only German. The meeting was held in the mess hall after supper, and Grossman refused to attend. To begin with, he was anxious to get to Switzerland, and the Jews, with their endless meetings and their ceaseless discussions, did not seem to him to be of much help. Then, too, the meetings were conducted in Yiddish, which was, after all, the lingua franca of the Jews in the camps, and while Grossman had picked up considerable Yiddish in his year at Belsen—since it was only a bastardization of German in the first place—the language still grated on his ears. It was still Jew language, and now that the war was over and he was no longer in a concentration camp—and also now that he was near his money in Switzerland and freedom-he felt about the language as he had always felt about it. It was an inferior means of communication between inferior peoples.

The night of the meeting, when Brodsky and Wolf had returned to the room they shared with Grossman, he put the question to them squarely:

“All right! We've been here two weeks; your people are finally all here. When do we leave this place?”

Both Wolf and Brodsky looked at him in surprise. There had been a touch of arrogance in his voice, of command, they had never heard before. Wolf shrugged and went to his cot; Brodsky, in typical fashion, overlooked the tone of voice, putting it down to nerves.

“When the Mossad says so,” he said patiently.

“And just when will that be? Next year? The year after? Never?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“Soon, you hope! You don't even know what route you'll be taking! I'm only a hundred miles from Konstanz right now, and from there all you have to do is cross a street and you're in Kreutzingler, in Switzerland. What am I doing sitting here, waiting for you people? I must be mad!”

“I'm on your side,” Wolf said agreeably. “You must be mad.”

“A hundred miles is a hundred miles,” Brodsky said quietly. “If we go through Lindau, when we reach Austria you'll be within walking distance of the frontier.”

“If!”

“Let's go back to your being mad,” Wolf said affably. He was sitting on his bed cross-legged, an ugly gnome with an eye patch, spiky black hair, and a twisted cheek and curled lip. “At Konstanz they'll have more guards than we had at Belsen.”

Grossman looked from one to the other, his irritation growing, slowly becoming anger and then fury. Who were they to tell him what to do? Then, with an impulse he would have utterly rejected in his earlier life as a careful planner, he swung open his locker and dragged his pack from it. He opened it and took out the British army blouse, laid it on a chair beside his cot, and tossed the pack with its rations and other clothing onto Brodsky's bed. He took off his striped shirt and added it to the pile, retaining only the striped cap, which he jammed into a pocket. It was, after all, free transportation, that cap. Which was another thing: the Germans wouldn't be letting people travel free much longer, ex-camp inmates or not. Time was running out for him in every sense.

“I won't be needing any of that,” he said evenly, pointing. “I'll be off in the morning.”

Brodsky looked irritated.

“Ben, don't be a fool! You're making a snap decision because you're angry, God knows why. Think a bit. Hasn't anything I've said to you about Palestine these past weeks—these past months—meant anything at all to you?”

Grossman looked at him. “Hasn't anything I've said to you about Switzerland meant anything at all to you?”

Brodsky stared in frustration at the things on his bed.

“So, if you have to go, at least take some of the tinned goods and some of the clothes. It's almost October. It gets cold in Switzerland.”

“I don't expect—” He had been on the verge of saying he didn't expect to be there long, but he caught the words in time. It will be a good thing when I get away from this bunch, he thought. One of these days I'd be blurting out something that would get me in trouble. “—to freeze. I'm not going mountain climbing or skiing. And the less I carry, the faster I travel.”

“Grossman, I agree,” Wolf said genially from across the room. “Besides, why waste good rations and clothing? If you're going to try and cross at Konstanz, they'd only end up in the Bodensee and get wet.”

Brodsky threw up his hands in disgust. For a moment Grossman forgot the other man was a Jew. His anger left him; they
had
been friends after a fashion.

“I'm not doing this blindly, Max,” he said quietly.

“Grossman,” Wolf said, not argumentatively but merely stating a fact, “you're doing this blindly.”

Grossman ignored him, addressing himself to Brodsky.

“There's a regular military bus that leaves the Maximilian Plata in Munich, going to Stuttgart. I'll drop off it at the Ulm road, south. They tell me there's plenty of traffic on that road, coming down from Regensburg and even from Nuremberg, heading for France. I'm sure I'll have no trouble getting a ride as far as Tuttlingen. Maybe even Singen. From there, worse comes to worse, I can walk to Konstanz.”