The Wrong Boy (20 page)

Two soviet nurses found me collapsed on the snow. They lifted me from the ground and helped me walk to a nearby tent. They opened a can of vegetables and fed me carrots and peas. I let them undress me and run a warm, wet sponge over my body. They shampooed my short hair and towelled it dry. I lifted my arms and they pulled a nightgown over my head and led me to a cot with clean white sheets and a woollen blanket. I let them have my cup but I curled up with my black C sharp.

I slept for a day and a half.

When I woke I asked if I could stay. Outside the tent’s draped walls, peasants stacked the dead and dug graves. Farmers hosed down barracks while their wives handed out clean underwear and toothbrushes. I wanted to help too. I needed to do something while I waited for news about my family, and I owed the nurses and the inmates too. I’d had extra rations at the villa and a roof over my head, while they’d survived on spoonfuls of snow.

I fed water to the sick with medicine droppers and when they were stronger I held cups to their lips and fed them soup. I crushed up crackers and fed them crumbs. I washed their bodies and rubbed ointment onto their sores. When the woman who’d begged for soup was brought to the tent, I held her baby while she climbed into bed. And when she woke and asked me to help her bury him, I stood beside her and held her hand while the soldiers lowered his body into the ground.

They buried him behind a stand of birch trees, near a bombed out brick building. Next to the building, a pile of bodies lay frozen in the snow. Inside the ruins a bank of ovens lined the walls. A woman walked in after me and stared into a furnace, her face smudged with tears. She tore her dress and recited Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Father had torn his shirt and sang Kaddish when I was six years old, except he’d been standing over Opapa’s grave, staring into the hole where his father’s casket lay.

I peered into the oven’s dark cavity to see what she saw. There was ash and soot but there was also bone. I felt the ground slip from under me. The strange, hovering smog that I’d noticed the night I got off the train, the smell of charred meat, the smoke that belched from the giant chimneys … they’d been burning bodies. And the piles of dead outside – they weren’t waiting to be buried. They were waiting to be burned.

I felt like I’d been hit across the head with a piano stool. I pushed past the woman and ran for the door and when I got outside I kept running. Past the birch trees and the barracks and the hospital tent until I reached the shower block on the other side of the camp. A boy sat on the steps leading into the change room. I sat down next to him.

“I’ve just been over there.” I pointed in the direction of the birch trees. “I saw the ovens. I had no idea.”

The boy shook his head.

“Please tell me this is a shower block.” I tugged on his sleeve. “It looks like a shower block.” The boy remained silent. “Please,” I whispered.

“They’re not showers,” he said.

I shifted closer to the boy. I should’ve left. I should’ve walked away.

“Not showers?”

“No.” He chewed on a fingernail. “They didn’t pipe water through the showerheads. They piped gas.”

“No, you’re wrong,” I said, standing to leave.

“I’m not.” He spoke slowly, as if to a child. “I worked here.” His shoulders slumped. “I locked the doors.”

I threw up on the snow. Why had no one told me? Karl knew about the ovens. He must have known about the showers too. Why didn’t he tell me? Erika had said she’d heard rumours but I hadn’t let her tell me. Why didn’t she make me listen? Did they think I was too weak? I walked to the nearest hut and flung open the door. I walked from one end of the camp to the other. I climbed through windows and saw bodies crammed into cupboards and storehouses bursting with shoes. I saw walking sticks and spectacles and canvas bags full of hair.

Hitler meant us to die! We weren’t here to dig trenches. We were brought here to die. How did I not see it in all my months in the camp? The women saying Kaddish, the emptying beds, Lili and Agi.

And me, putting on lipstick and playing piano for the commandant.

I lined my pockets with rocks and stormed from the camp. I wasn’t the only one. There were dozens of us looking to even the score. We smashed windows and broke chairs and tore curtains from the walls of the SS officers’ quarters. We rampaged through the villages circling the camp. We stole chickens from their coops and threw eggs at farmhouses. We drove nails through truck tyres and drove cattle from their paddocks. We pulled washing from lines and pulled down fences. I didn’t feel guilty; I felt entitled. I’d passed those farmhouses hundreds of times. Their owners had seen me march through the snow with a gun at my back and they’d done nothing. I wanted them to taste fear. I wanted
them
to be scared.

We weren’t allowed to return to Hungary. The guards told us it wasn’t safe. Hungary was still under siege. The Red Army had surrounded Budapest, but the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross gangs still ruled the streets. They roamed the capital robbing Jews. They beat them in their homes and threw their bodies into the Danube.

The Russians moved us from Birkenau to the nearby Auschwitz camp. We slept in the SS officer’s quarters on beds with thick mattresses. It took me a long time to sleep well on those clean, white sheets, to turn on a tap and not be surprised by the gush of clean water. To be called by my name and have people smile at me. I looked down at my arm, at the number in blue ink etched into my skin. I might have survived, but I wasn’t free. No matter how hard I tried to erase what happened, I was still marked. Nothing could rub out the past, not even Karl. Especially not Karl. Maybe he was right. Maybe every time I looked at him, I’d be reminded of what his father had done to us. Maybe we couldn’t help but drag each other back to this place.

I tried not to think about Karl, but every time I heard someone hum a tune or speak German I was reminded of him. I hoped working at the camp hospital might help. Anything to keep me busy and stop me thinking about Karl. And worrying about my parents. And fretting over Erika. On my third day on the ward I ran into Vera. I was washing the dormitory windows, staring out at the navy sky. I heard her voice before I saw her.

“Has anyone got a sponge they can spare?” she called out, and without even looking, I knew it was her. I jumped down from my ladder and grabbed her by the arm.

“Vera! You’re alive!” I wrapped my arms around her.

“Hanna!”

We stood there looking at each other until we both believed it was true – we’d survived. I took her hand and led her outside.

“Did you know?” I asked her, my smile fading.

“Know what?”

“That Mengele sent babies and pregnant women straight from the train to the gas chambers?”

Vera nodded. “Old people too. My grandmother was one of them. My mother and I were sent to the right and my grandmother to the left.” She took a deep breath. “Two weeks later, they took my mother.”

“At a selection?”

Vera nodded. “All those men and women picked off, one by one.” She shook her head.

“They weren’t all sent to the showers?”
Not my mother, not
Anyu.

“No, not all of them.” She spoke quietly. “But the SS could only squeeze so many bodies into the barracks and we kept coming, week after week. They had to make space for the new inmates, the ones who could work.”

“I was thinking about going home to see who …” Bile rose in my throat. “I won’t see my mother. That’s what you’re trying to say, aren’t you? That she’s dead.”

“Your mother …” Vera’s hand flew to her throat. “I’m so sorry, I forgot.” Vera shook her head. “My mother was weak. I think it was typhus. She was dizzy and when they asked her to hop up and down …” Vera covered her face with her hands. “She could barely walk. If she’d been a little stronger maybe they would have sent her to the infirmary. Maybe your mother …” Vera looked up at me. “I don’t know, Hanna.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Go home.” Vera pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped my nose. “Go back to Debrecen. If your family’s alive, they’ll be waiting for you.”

I shook my head.

“Miracles happen.” She blotted my tears. “The day Mengele pointed you to the right, that was a miracle. Winning the audition, watching the Red Army walk through those gates … Maybe there’s a miracle waiting for you in Debrecen. You need to go home and find out.”

“What about Karl?”

“Karl’s in a prisoner of war camp being interrogated.”

“What?” I stumbled backwards. “He was captured? But I was with him. We said goodbye. I came back to camp. The SS were still here.” I stared at Vera “He had time to get away.” I counted the days in my head. “He had a week.”

“The commandant got away.” Vera pressed her handkerchief into my palm. “If the Red Army stormed the villa and found Karl there, it was because he wanted to be found.”

I left Auschwitz the day the German troops surrendered Budapest. It was a sunny day in February; the snow had finally begun to thaw and the sky was blue with possibility. I left with a toothbrush, a spare pair of underwear, and the promise of a new beginning. I had a coat, a pair of second-hand boots, Karl’s scarf and a train ticket to Debrecen. I kissed Vera goodbye and promised to keep in touch.

I stopped at the gates of Birkenau on the way to the station, looking through the gaps in the barbed-wire fence at a place I didn’t recognise. There were no bodies lying in the snow, no scarves of smoke spiralling from the chimneys. Grass sprouted in the cracks between bricks. Last time I’d stood at the fence, the sky had screamed with fighter planes. Now bees buzzed overhead. Last time, my head had been covered with bristles. Now my hair skimmed my ears. I was wearing a dress without a yellow star on it, and in my bag I had three plums, a loaf of rye bread and a thermos of water.

The barracks had been flattened but I didn’t need the windowless walls and corrugated iron roofs to navigate my way through the camp. I could still see the imprint of the shower block where I’d scrubbed myself clean and the burned-out remains of the barrack I shared with Erika. I knew the exact spot where the orchestra had plucked their bows, and in which corner of the yard the SS had erected their gallows. I ran to the shower block where they’d stripped us of our clothes and stopped at the step leading into the showers. I bent down, reached under the wooden slats and pulled out Erika’s film canister. The tin was rusted, but its lid was fixed firm and the film inside was dry.

I had one more stop before I could board the train. I walked to the commandant’s villa, my heart hammering against my ribs. The cobblestone streets of Oswiecim were deserted. Coils of black smoke filled the air, bricks littered the pavement and doors hung smouldering on their hinges. I picked my way through the rubble to the commandant’s house. I headed straight for the music room. I don’t know what I was looking for, or what I expected to find, but it wasn’t there. The room was a mess. The curtains reeked of urine and the walls were doused with wine. The piano stool lay on its side, its black leather seat slashed. Beside it the piano sloped on three legs, its hammers and strings wrenched from its frame. I climbed the stairs to Karl’s room. The last time I was in the house, we’d kissed. I didn’t want the memory distorted by shattered glass and splintered wood, but I had to say goodbye. If I couldn’t say goodbye to Karl in person, then I’d say it to his paintbrush and easel, to his music and the books that he loved.

Karl’s room had been his refuge, the only room in the house without a picture of Hitler, a room filled with art, music and beauty. I stopped at the door, saw the easel in pieces on the ground, books smeared with paint, a shredded map. I stepped into the room, careful not to tread on the punctured tubes of paint lying on the floor, their blues, reds and yellows leaking out of them. Above Karl’s bed, the words
Die Nazi
bled on the wall.

I fell onto the bed and buried my face in Karl’s sheets. The smell of him was everywhere, in the blankets and the pillows and the pages of his books. I ran my hands along his bookcase, saw his sketchbook on the top shelf. I pulled it from the shelf and opened it to the last page. The delicate girl with the pale eyes Karl had drawn all those months ago had changed. There was a new strength to her lines, less shading, more depth. She wasn’t cowering in the shadows, so much as stepping out of them. I tore the sheet from the book and stuffed it into my pocket.

I sat down at the piano and ran my fingers along the paint-splattered keys. My fingers found a blood-red C sharp, then an angry purple D. I hadn’t played piano for a month, hadn’t thought about Clara Schumann in weeks, but my fingers found the heartbreaking opening to her Romance in A Minor. I played the love song for my mother, tears streaming down my face. She’d been so thrilled when I’d told her I’d be playing piano with the Birkenau Women’s Orchestra. I remembered her standing in front of the watchtower staring wide-eyed at the thin-armed players.

I bore down on the keys and Clara’s music filled the room.

“I promised to play Clara for you,
Anyu
,” I shouted above the chords. “I promised never to give up.”