Fatelessness (9 page)

Right then, I recall, another familiar figure from the customs post also showed up: the “Expert.” I had already caught sight of him more than once during the days at the brickyard. Though his suit was by now crumpled, his necktie had vanished, and his face was covered in a gray stubble, on the whole, even so, all the indisputable signs of his former distinguished bearing were still apparent. His arrival immediately attracted attention, as a whole ring of excited people gathered round, and he was almost overwhelmed by the myriad questions with which they besieged him. As I soon gathered, he had been given the chance to speak directly with a German officer. The incident had taken place up front, in the area of the offices of the commander, the gendarmes, and other investigating authorities, where during the days here I too had noticed, every now and then, the hurried popping up or vanishing of one or another German uniform. Prior to that, as I managed to hear, he had also had a go at the gendarmes, trying, as he put it, “to get in touch with his firm.” We learned, however, that the gendarmes were “continually denying” him that right, even though “it concerns a defense company” and “management of production was inconceivable without him,” which the authorities themselves had acknowledged, though at the gendarmerie they had “expropriated” the document stating this, like everything else—all of which I was only just about able to follow, because he related it in dribs and drabs, in response to the hail of cross-questioning. He appeared to be extremely irate, but he remarked that he did “not want to go into the matter in detail.” That, though, was precisely why he had approached the German officer. The officer had been just about to leave. Quite by chance, we learned, the “Expert” happened to be close by at the time. “I stepped up to him,” he said. There were, in fact, several present who had been witnesses to the event, and they remarked on his audacity. With a shrug of the shoulders, he responded by saying that nothing ventured, nothing gained, and anyway he had wished to speak “to someone in authority at last.” “I am an engineer,” he went on, “with perfect German,” he added. He had related all this to the German officer as well, telling him how “his work here had been made impossible, both in point of moral principle and in practice,” and what was more, in his own words, “without any cause or legal foundation, even under the currently prevailing regulations.” “But who profits from that?” he had asked the German officer. He told him, just as he was now telling us: “I am not seeking any advantages or privileges. Nevertheless, I am a somebody, and I know a thing or two; I simply want to work, in accordance with my capabilities—that’s all I’m after.” The advice he had then received from the officer was to sign on as one of the volunteers. He had not made any “grand promises,” he said, but assured him that in its present endeavors Germany had need of everyone, especially the expertise of trained people like himself. For that reason, we were informed by him, for the officer’s “objectivity,” he felt that what had been said was “fair and realistic”—that was how he characterized it. He even made particular mention of the officer’s “manner”: in contrast to the “coarseness” of the gendarmes, he described it as “sober, measured, impeccable in every respect.” In response to another question, he also conceded that “naturally there is no other guarantee” than the impression he had formed of this officer; he noted, however, that he would have to make do with that for the moment, but he did not think he was mistaken. “Assuming I am not a bad judge of human character,” he added, though in such a manner that, at least as far as I was concerned, one was left feeling the likelihood of that being the case was, indeed, rather remote.

After he had departed, what should I see but, hey presto, the man with the bad luck spring like a jack-in-the-box out of the remaining group and hare off at an angle after him, or rather to cut him off. It even struck me, from the visible agitation and a kind of resolve on his face: well now, this time he’s going to speak to him, not like at the customs post. In his haste, though, he stumbled into one of the armbanded types, a burly, gangling fellow bearing a list and pencil who just happened to be heading that way. That stopped him in his tracks; he recoiled in surprise, looked him up and down, then leaned forward and asked something, but I don’t know what happened after that because right then “Rosie” called across: it was our turn.

All I remember next is that by the time I was making my way back toward our quarters with the boys on that last day it was a notably tranquil summer evening, the sky ruddy over the hills. On the far side, over toward the river and above the wooden fencing, I could see the roofs of the green carriages of the local suburban train as it sped by; I was tired and also, very naturally after the registration process, a little bit curious. The other boys likewise seemed, on the whole, satisfied. The man with the bad luck had also somehow managed to slip in among us, telling us, with a sort of solemn, though at the same time somehow inquisitive expression, that he too was now on the list. We approved, which, as far as I could tell, went down well, but then I did not listen much to what he said after that. The brickyard was quieter back here, toward the rear. Though here too I could still see smaller groups conferring with one another, others were already preparing for the night or eating supper, keeping an eye on their baggage, or simply sitting around just so, mutely, in the evening air. We came up to a married couple. I had seen them plenty of times and knew them well by sight: the petite, frail wife with her delicate features and the gaunt, bespectacled husband with a few teeth missing here and there, ever on the move and at the ready, a film of perspiration constantly on his brow. He was very busy right then as well, squatting on the ground and, with the wife’s sedulous assistance, feverishly gathering their bags and strapping all the items together, seemingly preoccupied with this task to the exclusion of all else. The fellow with the bad luck, though, came to a halt behind him, and it looked as if he too must have recognized him, because a minute later he asked if that meant they too had decided in favor of traveling. Even at this, the husband only cast a quick glance behind and up at him, squinting from behind his spectacles, sweaty, his drawn face troubled in the evening light, and merely offered a single astonished question as a rejoinder: “We have to, don’t we?” Simple as it was, I felt that this observation, in the end, was no more than the truth.

The next day we were sent on our way early in the morning. The train set off in brilliant summer weather from the platform of the local branchline, in front of the gates—a sort of freight train made up solely of brick red, covered boxcars with locked doors. Inside were the sixty of us, our luggage, and a consignment of food for the journey given by the men in armbands: piles of bread and large cans of meat—stuff of real rarity, looked at from the perspective of the brickyard, I had to admit. But then ever since the previous day I had been able to experience the attentiveness, the signal favor and, I might say, almost a certain degree of respect that had generally enveloped those of us who were making the journey, and this abundance too, so I sensed, might perhaps have been a form of reward, as it were. The gendarmes were there as well, with their rifles, surly, buttoned up to the chin, looking somehow as if they were watching over enticing goods but weren’t really supposed to touch them—no doubt, it crossed my mind, on account of an authority even mightier than them: the Germans. The sliding door was closed on us, with something being hammered onto it on the outside, then there was some signaling, a whistle, busy railwaymen, a lurch, and—we were off. We boys made ourselves comfortable in the rear third of the wagon, which we took over as soon as we boarded. It had a single windowlike aperture on each side, placed fairly high up and carefully covered with tangles of barbed wire. It was not long before the matter of water and, along with that, the duration of the journey was raised in our wagon.

Other than that, there is not much I can say about the journey as a whole. Just as before, at the customs post, or more recently at the brickyard, we had to find ways of somehow passing the time. Naturally, here that was, perhaps, made all the more difficult by the circumstances. On the other hand, the consciousness of a goal, the thought that every completed section of the journey, slow and tiresome as it might be, what with all the bumping, shunting, and stoppages, was in the end bringing us closer—that helped one through the troubles and difficulties. We boys did not lose patience either. “Rosie” kept on reassuring us that the trip would last only until we got there. “Fancyman” was ragged a lot over a girl—here with her parents, the boys reckoned— whose acquaintance he had made in the brickyard and for whose sake he often vanished, especially to start with, into the depths of the wagon, with all sorts of rumors about this circulating among the others. Then there was “Smoker”; even here some sort of dubious, crumbling twist of tobacco, a scrap of paper of some sort, and a match would emerge from his pocket, and he would bend his face to the flame, sometimes even during the night, with all the avidity of a bird of prey. The occasional cheerful word or remark was to be heard, even on the third day, from Moskovics (incessant streams of sweat and grime trickling from his brow—as they did on all of us, myself included, it goes without saying—to run down his spectacles, his snub nose, and his thick lips) and from all the others, as well as the odd flat joke, albeit with a stutter, from “Leatherware.” One of the adults even managed, I don’t know how, to discover that the destination of our journey was, more specifically, a place by the name of “Waldsee,” and whenever I was thirsty or it was hot, the implicit promise held by that name in itself promptly gave a degree of relief. For those who complained about the lack of space there were plenty who reminded them, quite rightly, to remember that the next time there would be eighty of them. And basically, if I thought about it, when all was said and done, there had been times when I was more tightly packed: in the gendarmerie stable, for instance, where the only way we had been able to resolve the problem of fitting ourselves in was by agreeing that we should all squat cross-legged on the ground. My seat on the train was more comfortable than that. If I wanted, I could even stand up, indeed take a step or two—over toward the slop bucket, for example, since that was situated in the rear right-hand corner of the wagon. What we initially decided about that was to use it as far as possible only for purposes of taking a leak; but as time passed, entirely predictably of course, it was forcibly brought home to many of us that the demands of nature were more powerful than any vow, and we boys acted accordingly, just like the men, to say nothing of the women.

The gendarme did not, in the end, cause too much unpleasantness either. The first time, he startled me a bit, his face popping up at the window opening on the left, just above my head and shining his flashlight in among us on the evening of the first day, or rather the night by then, during what was one of our longer halts. It soon became clear that he had been impelled by good intentions, coming merely to impart the news: “Folks, you have reached the Hungarian frontier!” He wished to take the opportunity to address an appeal, a request one might say, to us. His behest was that insofar as there were any monies or other valuables still left on any of us, we should hand them over to him. “Where you’re going,” so he reckoned, “you won’t be needing valuables anymore.” Anything that we might still have the Germans would take off us anyway, he assured us. “Wouldn’t it be better, then,” he carried on, up above in the window slot, “for them to pass into Hungarian hands?” After a brief pause that struck me as somehow solemn, he then suddenly added, in a voice that switched to a more fervent, highly confidential tone which somehow offered to forgive and forget all bygones: “After all, you’re Hungarians too when it comes down to it!” After a flurry of whispering and consultation, a voice, a deep male voice from somewhere in the wagon, acknowledged the force of this argument, provided we could get some water from the gendarme in exchange, to which the latter seemed amenable, despite its being “against orders,” as he noted. Even so, they were unable to reach agreement as the voice wished to be given the water first, but the gendarme said it had to be the articles, and neither would budge from his own sequence. In the end, the gendarme took great umbrage, snapping: “Stinking Jews! You make a business out of the holiest of matters!” In a voice nearly choking with indignation and loathing, he threw this wish at us: “Die of thirst, then.” That did indeed come to pass later on—that at least was what they said in our wagon. There is no denying that, from about the afternoon of the second day on, I too was constantly subjected to a particular voice coming from the wagon behind us: not exactly pleasant. The old woman, so they said in our wagon, was ill and had presumably gone mad, undoubtedly from thirst. That explanation seemed credible. Only now did I realize how right were those who had declared at the very start of the journey how fortunate it was that neither small infants nor the extremely elderly had landed up in our wagon. The old woman finally fell silent on the morning of the third day. Among our lot, it was said at the time that she had died because she could get no water. But then, we were aware that she was also sick and old, which is how everyone, including me, found the case understandable, all things considered.

I am in a position to declare that waiting does not predispose to joy—that at least was my experience when we did indeed finally arrive. It may have been that I was tired, then again perhaps the very keenness with which I had been looking forward to the destination ended up making me forget that thought to some degree, but it was more that I was left somehow indifferent. I slightly let the entire event slip by. What I remember is that I awoke suddenly, presumably at the demented shrieking of nearby sirens; the faint light that was filtering in from outside signaled the dawn of the fourth day. The base of my spine, where it had been in contact with the wagon floor, ached a little. The train was idling, as it had often done at other times, invariably so during air raids. The window spaces were taken up, as they always were at this time. Everyone was claiming to see something—that too is how it was nowadays. After a while, I myself managed to get a place: I could see nothing. The dawn outside was cool and fragrant, with wraiths of gray mist lying on wide stretches of meadow, from somewhere behind which, a bit later, a sharp, thin, red shaft of light appeared unexpectedly, like a trumpet blast, and I grasped that I was looking at the sunrise. It was pretty and, on the whole, intriguing: back home, I was usually still asleep at this time. I also glimpsed, directly in front and to the left, some building, a godforsaken railway halt or possibly the signal box for some larger terminal. It was minuscule, gray, and, as yet, completely deserted, its small windows closed and with one of those ridiculously steep-pitched roofs that I had already seen in this region yesterday: it first solidified before my eyes into its true contours, then mutated from gray to mauve, and at that moment its windows also gleamed ruddily as the first rays of sunlight struck them. Others also spotted this, and I too gave a commentary to the inquisitive crowd behind me. They asked if I could see a place-name on it. In the strengthening light, on the narrower gable end of the building, facing the direction in which we were traveling, on the surface below the roof, I could in fact make out two words: “Auschwitz-Birkenau” was what I read, written in spiky, curlicued Gothic lettering, joined by one of those wavy double hyphens of theirs. For my own part, though, I cast around my geographical knowledge in vain, and others proved no wiser than me. I then sat down because others behind me were already asking to have my place, and since it was still early and I was sleepy, I quickly dropped off again.