I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree (10 page)

“Ever since that first night when I saw you, I've wondered why they took the trouble to bring in one person. I would have expected them to shoot you instead. Tell me what happened.”

I hesitated.

“Come on, you can trust me.”

In tears I blurted out the events that had taken place at Kra
nik. I held nothing back. Finishing the story, I said, “I'd wanted to believe him and convinced myself he was trying to help me. I made the mistake of ignoring the danger signs.”

“Stop blaming yourself for trusting the Nazi. Anyone would have done the same,” he said reassuringly. “You could not have guessed the outcome.”

We parted with plans to meet again the next evening. I hurried back to the barrack.

“Fella, wait till you hear what happened to me!” I exclaimed to my friend.

“So, tell me already.”

“I think I am in love.”

“The Polish soldier?”

“I met him tonight, in the shed behind the kitchen. He brought me bread and coffee. I don't mean the bitter stuff they give us; this was sweet and tasty. For once I am not hungry.”

“How can you talk of love in a place like this?” Fella snapped. “One doesn't fall in love in a place like Budzyn.”

“It's too late, darling Fella. Love is not something you plan, it just happens.”

A bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling cast shadows. The barrack was uncommonly quiet, but I was too excited to sleep. The young man had looked so handsome in his uniform, and up close his eyes were even more magnetic. Never before had I seen eyes like his. Somehow they reminded me of a doe I'd once surprised in the woods. Her dark, fluid eyes had looked at me for a split second before she fled into the underbrush. His eyes were like that.

This night the rough straw covering the bunk didn't irritate my skin as much, and there were no hunger pangs. The chunk of bread he had brought was almost as much as a week's portion, and I had eaten all of it.

The anticipation of seeing the Polish prisoner of war at work the next day made getting up at dawn not nearly as bad. However, nothing had changed in the forest. The stench of human decay remained, and the knowledge of being at a mass grave, having to disguise it, was no less horrible. But the thought of seeing
him
made it bearable. Every now and then I caught him looking my way. At noon, when the soup was brought and we had time to rest for a short while, he walked over to where I sat and reminded me to come this evening to our meeting place.

When we went back to work, a woman who had been toiling alongside me suddenly moaned and grabbed the sleeve of my dress before collapsing to the ground. In the process she dragged me along.

Nothing escaped the guard. “Get up, you lazy swine,” he growled.

I complied quickly, trying to lift the woman to her feet as well, but the guard put his rifle to my chest. “She'll get up by herself.”

The woman was unable to move. The guard screamed more obscenities at the poor woman before emptying his gun into her.

•   •   •

In the evening I met him at the shed. Like the night before, he brought coffee and bread with margarine.

“I don't even know your name,” I said, accepting the gifts.

“Call me Hillman, everyone else does,” he replied jovially.

Still traumatized from what had happened in the forest, I told him how I detested having to stand by without being able to help the poor woman.

“I saw it,” he said. “I know how you feel. Every time I am in a situation like that, I hate
myself for not helping, knowing full well that there is nothing I can do. It's not that we don't want to help, but we are helpless ourselves. Imagine what the guard would have done to you had you defied his orders.”

When it came time to part, he pulled a pair of socks and underwear from his pocket. I blushed at the sight of the intimate garments, but already I could feel their warmth against my cold body.

•   •   •

In spite of the danger of being discovered I met Hillman almost nightly at the shed behind the kitchen.

“It's your turn to tell me about your life,” I urged him one evening.

I learned that he had been conscripted into the Polish armed forces in 1939 and shortly afterward was captured and sent to a German prisoner of war camp.

“I was in that POW camp nearly three years,” he said. “I had typhoid fever and almost
didn't make it. Only once did I try to escape, but the Germans caught me. They beat me so bad, I was unable to sit for many weeks.”

His eyes had a far-off, dreamy look. Talking about that time seemed to take him back there. I knew it was painful for him to remember.

“You may as well tell me the rest,” I said after a long silence. “How did you get to Budzyn?”

“No one at the POW camp knew I was a Jew. It wasn't as if I hid it deliberately, but Jewish prisoners were singled out for extra punishment, and the Poles . . . they were eager to do their part against us too. They stole boots from Jews, making them walk barefoot in the cold of winter. So you can see why I didn't own up to who I was.

“One day the Germans made us an offer, announcing that all Jewish prisoners would be free to go home. I was eager to get back to my mother and sisters, knowing they could use my help, so I stepped forward.”

“Had you heard from your family during those years?”

“Now and then a postcard came via the Red Cross. Mother wrote that my brother, Isio, was no longer at home. All the more reason for me to be with her. I should have known better than to believe the Germans. As soon as we stepped forward, they herded us onto trains, where SS men awaited us. We knew then that it had been a trick. I ended up here.”

It was at that moment that I realized how deeply I had fallen in love with him.

“I have good news,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. “Starting tomorrow I'll be working in the camp kitchen. My friend Medjuck arranged it. He's the cook.”

More good news: I learned that Dr. Mosbach and his family were here in Budzyn. I immediately got my hopes up and rushed to the infirmary to talk to him about the evacuation from Belzyce. Had he seen my family?

The doctor shook his head sadly. “There was a lot of confusion, and I was concerned about keeping my family together. I paid little attention to anything else.”

My hopes shattered, I turned to walk away.

“Look here, Hannelore,” he said, “I can well understand why you are sad. I wish I had more to tell you. But just because I didn't see your family doesn't mean anything. They may
be working in another one of the labor camps.”

•   •   •

Commandant Feix, the madman, was always on the rampage, seizing every opportunity to torment us. The danger of encountering him during the day was constant, and an encounter with Feix was something every prisoner wanted to avoid. But we could not avoid him at night. He was there, every evening, at the place of assembly. One time the counting of prisoners took exceptionally long. Something was very wrong.
Kapos
ran back and forth, counting again and again.

Fella, her voice as low as she could make it, said, “I think someone escaped. That's why they are keeping us.”

Feix started to scream. “Swine! Children of whores! Dirty Jews! I will keep you here until I know what happened. One of you has the answer. Come forward or all of you will suffer!”

It was so quiet, people forgot to breathe. Feix
strutted among us women, letting his riding whip dance freely over our heads and other parts of our bodies. There was no mention of our evening ration or of going to the barracks to sleep for the few hours that remained before the morning whistle called us back for another count.

Drunk with rage, Feix kept us standing there. A full moon looked on, a witness to our misery. Then the madman rushed over to the men's side, pulling every tenth prisoner forward until he counted ten men.

“Let this be a lesson,” his voice thundered. “For every one who tries to escape ten of you will die!”

Pulling out his revolver, he shot each of the men. Soon a pile of twitching bodies lay before us.

At last we were allowed into the barracks. Our evening ration had been forfeited as punishment.

“Now you know why life in Budzyn is like a game of roulette,” Fella said sourly.

Sickened by what I had just witnessed, I could not reply.

•   •   •

I didn't see Hillman the next evening or the one after. I had caught a cold and was barely able to make it through the day. I even had to give up my walk along Lagerstrasse to look for Mama and Selly.

When the cauldron of soup arrived the next day, Hillman carried it.

“Where have you been?” he asked. But one look at me convinced him I was ill. “You must come tonight to the shed. What you need is food and some warm clothing.”

When evening came, I dragged myself to the shed. He was already there, waiting with a bowl of hot soup filled with vegetables.

“Eat while it's hot,” he ordered. “We'll talk after.”

It tasted like real soup, not the watery brew we were served. I felt better instantly. Then came the next surprise. He pulled a pair of
boots and a sweater from under his jacket and held them out to me.

Suddenly everything seemed better. No longer so hungry and already feeling the warmth of the boots and sweater, I exclaimed, “To think, only a short time ago we were total strangers, and here you are now, risking being punished for bringing me these things. How can I ever thank you?”

“You should know by now why I am doing this,” he said. Then he reminded me it was time to go back.

It was Sunday, the one day I didn't have to go to work. I got up early anyway to be one of the first people in the washroom. To be able to stand near the basin and have plenty of water before the supply was shut off was a luxury I did not want to miss.

At midmorning I took a walk along Lagerstrasse. Here and there I stopped to talk to people I had gotten to know. Quite unexpectedly, someone tapped me on the shoulder. Big brown eyes set in hollow sockets looked straight at me. The man was terribly thin . . . or perhaps it was a boy; it was hard to tell.

“Hannelore” was all he said.

How did he know my name? I didn't think I had ever met him before.

Again he said, “Hannelore.”

The way he pronounced my name . . .
Selly?
No, it couldn't be my brother. Selly was young and handsome.

“Don't you recognize me? Have I changed that much?”

“Dear God,” I cried out. “It
is
you, Selly! You can't know how I have searched for you!”

I wanted to hug him, to hold him, but held back, lest we be noticed. To hide my shock at seeing him like this—emaciated, his clothes in tatters—I prattled on. “It's just that . . . you have grown so much. You're tall, like Papa.”

But it wasn't only the way Selly looked that frightened me. He had a hard time breathing, and I could hear a rattling noise coming from his chest every time he coughed.

“Something to eat.” He grabbed at my
sleeve. “I need something, anything. You don't know how hungry I am!”

Fortunately, I had the extra bread Hillman had given me the night before in my pocket. When Selly was done eating, I tried taking his hands in mine. He pulled them back. His hands were full of open sores. I could only imagine how painful they must be.

I took him to the infirmary. Dr. Mosbach was as surprised as I to learn that Selly had been in Budzyn the entire time. He confirmed what I already knew.

“Your brother is undernourished and growing too fast. Add to that the collapsed lung he received from the beating in Belzyce. Not a good picture. How old is he, Hannelore?”

“F-Fifteen,” I stammered.

Selly was admitted to the infirmary. Dr. Mosbach promised to keep him there as long as he possibly could.

I went to see him each evening. From the infirmary I rushed to the shed to meet
Hillman. By now I called him Dick, the name his comrades had bestowed on him. We had even kissed in the dark shed.

In spite of my feelings for Dick I was too troubled by my brother's condition to feel real happiness. Dick tried helping me as best he could. To lighten my mood, he hummed arias from operas. Most of the time I recognized the tunes, explaining that Papa, too, had liked opera and that oftentimes he would transpose the tunes into songs we sang on Friday nights to usher in the Sabbath.

“Tell me what you remember most about home,” Dick asked me one evening.

“A lilac tree,” I said. “It bloomed every May around the time of Mama's birthday. Papa was a romantic; he would stand under the tree and sing songs of lilacs and love to her. The memory is so vivid in my mind, I can almost smell the lilacs now.”

“One day, when this is over, I'll plant you a lilac bush. Perhaps it will grow old and
become a tree, like the one you remember.”