Read Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale Online
Authors: Mario Levi
The next day we were woken at four in the morning and taken like criminals at gunpoint by three soldiers. Daniella, dumbfounded as she was, kept saying that she had to go to school while clasping my hand. She was asking me where we were being taken. I said I hadn’t the slightest idea. After so many years I realize that the answer I had given was correct. Anyone who had not had the opportunity to see those places could not fathom them. I had also said to my daughter that all this was part of a game. Somebody was playing a trick on us, or staging a play; yes, a play, since all these could be interpreted as scenes of a play; one which destroyed its actors leaving the remaining scenes without players; scenes in which the children aged before their time, a play they watched with unfocused eyes, a play they were compelled to act in.
Before long we had found ourselves at the platform where freight cars stood behind the train station. They were actually livestock cars. You can guess how they shoved us into them with coarse insults. Each car contained sixty people. Among us were octogenarians and newborn babies. Once filled, the doors were slammed shut and bolts were pushed through; during the two-day journey we had had to answer the call of nature in the car. At the conclusion of the second day we arrived at Drancy. Legal formalities were performed, among others ‘cross-examinations.’ My situation and the situation of my wife and daughter were clear enough. Our formalities took no time; decisions were made immediately. Notwithstanding our situation we still entertained some hope for Nesim and his family. After all they were Turkish nationals, subjects of a country for which Germans had some affinity. I was aware that it was too late. But hope persisted. Nevertheless, our privileged case was disregarded. To be a Jew meant to be a criminal to the Germans. Nesim’s impeccable German dating from his Viennese days might have served some purpose. It was up to your elder brother to decide rather than up to them. It was unacceptable for him to observe the betrayal and ill treatment by a culture he had always admired. He had vowed not to speak German from that moment on; he had buried the language deep within himself. His mastery of the language could serve him as an asset that should not be waived. Everybody tried to discover something to hold onto in those days. This betrayal had enabled him to see the collapse of something in his depths. That was the moment of his death, the moment when he had resigned himself to death. Death, for him, started exactly at the moment in question, at the very moment when silence fell.
Following the interrogation, we, as a collective mass, without distinction of sex or age, were dragged out of the room. Once outside, Paulette, in her pristine innocence, said, remembering her boyfriend: “I hadn’t the opportunity to make a call to him and say farewell.” All those images are still fresh in my memory. I distinctly remember: life had suddenly come to a standstill. Time had stopped. Our surroundings, the circumstances, the conditions, and the objects by which we were surrounded would vanish into thin air in no time, their image seeming to have been left in another world.
Our sojourn in Drancy lasted four days. I waited in vain for aid from the Turkish consulate; everybody was so helpless.
At the end of the fourth day, we were once again aboard the freight car which took us to Auschwitz; the time of our arrival was 10 p.m, January 23rd. We were hauled down from the car and they allowed us to take a minimum of things we had brought along with us. What followed was the most heartrending scene of our lives. Husband and wives and children were torn asunder without finding the opportunity to say goodbye to each other. We were heading, I believed, for our final destination. Three men, Nesim, Isaac, and I, three men, we had remained behind; just like during our strolls along the beach at Biarritz. The conditions were different, of course. Our feet were engulfed in icy water up to our ankles. It was bitterly cold. It rained cats and dogs. After a while, our feet began aching. We were going to get accustomed to such pains soon. Under the pouring rain and deprived of shelter, we stood there side by side until two in the morning. Then, we were hauled up and dumped in a truck which took us to Morowitz, twenty kilometers from Auschwitz. From there we were hastily unloaded and shoved into a large shed. Having promised that they would be returning them to us, they told us to strip off our garments. With skulls cleanly shaven, we were pushed under an icy shower. There they dispossessed us of our wedding rings, the last ‘relic’ we kept from the earth, lost along with all our other assets. In Paris, we had been robbed of our valuable effects; under the circumstances the loss of our wedding rings might seem insignificant; yet, we had the impression that we had been disinherited. I can still feel the sharp pain that this had given me. When we came out of the shower, there was no trace of our garments. Stark naked, in cold weather, we were led to a shed and had to cover a rather long distance on foot. Whenever I think of those days, I cannot imagine how we had plucked up the courage to put up with all those tribulations. There must be more than one reason, surely. Moreover, looking for a sufficient cause outside the framework of those encampments may look somewhat absurd. Nevertheless, I still keep asking myself about my place in that setting. This is, by the way, one of the ways I can endure my solitude and abandoned state. A man learns how to coexist with the dead, allowing him to cling to his own life even more strongly. After some time we began to recognize our dead as our most trustworthy companions. Our death reminds us of the days we have lost through deferrals and which we ought to recapture. We found our new garments in the shed: they consisted of a striped cotton jacket, slacks, a beret, and clogs. The setting was complete; we had been acclimatized; we were no longer casual visitors to the place. We were abandoned to starve for hours; then, at three o’clock we were served a black soup that contained a piece of black pork in it. At a moment of starvation pieces of black pork flesh! German gentility! Personally I didn’t care. The important thing was to survive. Nothing was more valuable than one’s subsistence. I was resolved to be a war veteran; yes, a veteran of war. Moreover, we were so hungry that even that execrable piece of flesh had tasted like a succulent beefsteak. There were other things besides; this was but one of the ways, subtle in deceit, that our executioners took their revenge on us. At present I feel as though I should not overlook this possibility.
The next day we were transported to a quarry; we were given a pickaxe and a shovel; we were supposed to hew huge stones and carry them somewhere. The job required superhuman strength and a capacity for endurance. In addition to a series of illnesses, Nesim had an inguinal hernia. When the overseers took notice of this, he was given a belt; although it was of worn out material, it proved helpful. “Now, here you have a token of human diligence and generosity!” you may say. Yet, when you consider that this was meant to enable him to go on working so that the employer could derive greater benefit from his toil, you start thinking otherwise. Among the things we learned were also the benefits one could derive from contemplating, entertaining suspicions, and thinking
ad absurdum
. Nesim got sick at the end of the eighth day. He was covered with blisters and wounds; he had to be hospitalized. We could not learn of his experiences during the course of his stay at the infirmary; what tribulations he had faced over the course of that one month, who he had communicated with and to what extent; back among us, he hardly uttered a word. He was about to lose contact with reality. He even denied hearing, let alone talking. It didn’t take him long to be re-hospitalized. We knew what had happened to him. His hyperglycemia had worsened and begun to impair his faculties. He needed special treatment; but asking for special treatment would be tantamount to a revolt.
For three months, he shuttled between the infirmary and the jobsite. One day an announcement was made according to which the able-bodied and the disabled were to be sorted out. Nesim had to remain among the latter group. He, along with a group of others, were taken away to a place of which we had no idea. We did not expect that the moment of separation would come so quickly. We cast each other furtive glances. Notwithstanding, we tried to behave as though we would meet again. We needed this conviction in order to be able to survive. We were obliged to believe in our self-deceptions.
That was the last time I saw or heard of Nesim. To be precise; I did see him, although in a different guise. Barely a month had elapsed since our separation. I noticed a hernia suspension on one of the inmates in the dormitory; the same that Nesim had worn. At such times you cannot help being inquisitive. We stared at each other for some time. I could not possibly expect him to understand what I was thinking or feeling. I kept quiet. I said nothing, I didn’t inquire. He, in turn, was ostensibly struggling for survival, like me or like any one of us, for that matter. I had already got the gist of it. I had parted with Nesim in full consciousness of the fact that we were seeing each other for the last time. Similar partings I would be experiencing in the days that followed. Not only hopes but also our self-deceptions served us in keeping body and soul together.
We remained in this concentration camp up until January 18, 1945. We had heard that the Russian army had been advancing. This must have been the reason for the sudden evacuation from our place on an icy night under a howling blizzard. There was a layer of snow half a meter thick on the ground. It was almost impossible to advance with our clogs. In spite of all the adversities that beset us we marched on and covered a distance of eighty kilometers without stopping for a rest. Those who failed to make headway were machine-gunned. The rest you can imagine. The cold was not the only enemy that confronted us; the rifle butt was like the sword of Damocles. What followed I dare not recall.
Another day and another night . . . and we were at a new camp where we were to stay overnight. The next day we traveled in open freight cars for six days and nights under the severest of conditions toward an unknown destination, at the end of which we found ourselves at Buchenwald. Many people died on the road. We were continually diminishing in number. Whose turn was it next? That was the only question we asked each other. Every now and then one of us was snuffed out like a candle. On an interminable road we were rapidly reduced to the point of almost complete extermination in compliance with their whims. This reduction meant for me a kind of proliferation that connoted escape and deliverance. A considerable number of our traveling companions had abandoned us on the road; I often see them in my dreams, their contours in different guises as though they are still alive through me in the labyrinths of my nightmares.
There, at the least expected moment, I came across my beloved friend Isaac who had disappeared at Morowitz without leaving any trace. It was as though we had not seen each other for ages. We dared not speak about those we had had to leave behind. We hardly put questions to each other. Oblivious to any concept of time, we didn’t know how to live or what to live for. Anyway, it would not take long before we were to part again. Isaac was emaciated; he could hardly stand on his feet. It was a miracle that his legs still held him up. I can freely use this word now, when I remember those days. Our survival was a miracle indeed! The coverage of those long distances was a miracle; to be able to forget those we had to leave on the road was a miracle. Our unexpected encounters were miracles. Our touching each other was a miracle. After a few days we were told that we were to set off again. This journey would be different, however; we knew that. This would be a fatal separation. I was seeing Isaac for the last time. Both of us had felt this predicament that we could never escape. Our new journey lasted two days. We had become inured to traveling in open freight cars to destinations unknown. Well, we had ended up at Clavikel, the extermination camp. The burning flesh stank to high heaven. We were told that this camp was not like other camps and that no one could come out alive from it. So was this the end of the long journey? Had we been faced with all those tribulations for nothing? Had all those hopes been entertained in vain? The scarcity of food and the heavy working conditions seemed to justify the intelligence we had received. They told me that I would be receiving my job description soon. I was eventually given the job of shoving gassed bodies into the ovens. I was pressed for time. It was a nightmare I cannot put into words no matter how I try; a nightmare that haunts you even when you are wide awake; innumerable masses of human bodies who had come to this world like any of us, living in different cities, and communicating with different individuals; who had experienced joy and sorrow like any one of us, who had suffered, hoped, striven to survive but ended in a lifeless rigidity. They had possibly come there having traveled long distances like us; they also had had—up until a few months before—tomorrows and pasts and expectations. They had had their weaknesses, regrets, little accounts to settle, and letters planned but deferred to be written. After all those sentiments, struggles to cling to life, they were now ageless, denuded of nationality, name, sex, and vernacular. At first, I had felt as though I had fallen into a nightmare from which I could never awake. The nightmare haunted me day and night; I continued to perform my duty even in my dreams, in contorted images. The only difference being that the bodies suddenly resurrect as I am about to throw them in the furnace while a young woman lasciviously screams: “Young man,” she says, “how about pulling me from this inferno!” On the other hand, a small kid cries: “Uncle stoker! How about catching me, eh!” then runs away. Some, once thrown in the furnace burst with laughter, speaking in Spanish, like the Spanish I used to listen to when I was in Teruel; while others exclaim: “Enough of this fire! We are overheated, you brute! We are overstuffed in this hole!” Once I had heard the voice of my mother coming from the furnace. She was chanting one of those psalms she had taught me when I was a child, a psalm I had completely forgotten, one I preferred to forget. I began to chant with her; the strange thing was that I remembered the entire psalm which I thought I had forgotten. Were you to ask me to repeat it now, I doubt if I can remember a single word of it. Having come to the end of her chanting, she had said: “You’re growing up, my dear child. Be not afraid. I won’t say anything about this to your dad.” She must have thought that my father, a confirmed atheist, would be annoyed were he to learn that I had sung this psalm with my mother. However, I had never had any fear of my father in any period of my life. We had always been intimate friends, companions. Such are the nightmares that haunt me. But I have no other choice but to live with it. As I shoved the bodies into the furnace one after another, I kept repeating: “He’s dead, and I’m alive! He’s dead, and I’m alive!” I was living, I had to live. However, a short while after I became inured to it. When, after ‘the work day’ I went out into the fresh air, I ceased to smell the burnt flesh. The ‘profession of stoker’ had become a routine job. I would never have believed it, but there it was! I must confess, however, that this experience of mine was not unsullied, but accompanied with a very important anticipation: I was inured to this execrable job, alright, but I had a gnawing apprehension within me: suppose I came across the body of someone I knew, one of my relatives! This person might well be someone I had left behind in Biarritz, but it could be worse; it might be my wife or my daughter! Nothing was impossible for us anymore. Among the bodies, among the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of bodies, I might well come upon one of mine, i.e. of those I had buried within me. I was reminded of such a possibility by the nightmares faithful to me; those nightmares that ever recurred without giving me any respite. Although the details, images, and conversations change, the fear of encounter lingers at the doorway of that labyrinth of fire. I’m trying to ignore it; what else can I do? I’m averse to describing to you all that I have gone through partly for this reason.