It had been that way with her parents—one,
after the other, they had disappeared into the shuffling columns of
the doomed. She would hear about it a week, two weeks later. So now
it was her turn.
She was so weak she hardly cared. She could
remember some of how she had felt that morning, too dumb with
hunger and exhaustion to have much room for fear. Just once every
so often the idea would flicker through her mind.
I will be dead
soon. They will lock us up in a shed until our turn comes, and then
they will herd us inside one of the death chambers. A day from now,
or an hour, and the
Sonderkommando
will be hauling my corpse
around with hooks, looking for gold in my teeth and washing the
filth off my legs with a hose.
But in order to be afraid one
needed some imaginative grasp, and suffering was a great killer of
the imagination. She could see herself dead, but the picture in her
brain seemed to be about nothing. She merely stumbled forward with
the others, dully aware that soon this would stop and something
else would begin.
In the train, coming from Lodz, she had been
afraid. They had been packed tightly together in the darkness of
the cattle car, and she had huddled in her mother’s arms and wept
for fear. And when the doors had sprung open, and she had seen the
Germans with their machine guns lined up outside, she had been
afraid.
“
Don’t worry,”
her mother had said.
“No one will hurt us.”
And her father had stroked her hair.
After that day, she had never seen him again.
It was a Saturday. The woman in front of her
in line turned around and smiled and whispered. “I hope they take
us today. It will be a blessing to die on the Sabbath.” The woman
looked in her sixties but probably wasn’t more than thirty-five.
The dirt was etched deep into the lines of her face and her teeth
were discolored and broken. She looked half mad.
She’s going mad,
Esther thought to
herself.
She’s crazed with the fear of death.
She put her
hand on the woman’s arm and murmured, “It’s all right—they won’t
hurt us.”
And then the line had shuddered to a stop.
That meant that the pens were full and they would have to wait in
the freezing, ankle-deep mud. Here and there one could hear
sobbing, quiet and furtive, as if even grief here had to be
shabby.
And while the women waited to die, a cluster
of German officers had walked around the corner of the building.
She heard their conversation—loud, confident voices such as no one
used at Chelmno. They seemed different creatures, really like a
separate race. Not human because not suffering.
Their uniforms stood out in the drab,
colorless landscape. They were real and everything else—this camp,
this gray mud, these doomed women—were hardly as substantial as
smoke. For a moment they stopped. Someone was speaking. Here and
there a few of them lit cigarettes. That moment seemed to last
forever.
One of them was looking at her. He was short
and fat, and the face above his stiff military collar was a mass of
creased flesh, pink as the sun. His eyes were lost in the shadow of
his cap bill.
Smile at him
, she told herself.
What have you got to lose? Grasp any chance that offers itself.
To live is a moral duty. Smile.
Finally he raised his arm and pointed to her.
His lips moved. He turned away and walked on.
I will die, it seems
, she thought.
Why should I have thought it could be otherwise? What could
anyone want of me now?
The next thing she knew, two soldiers in
light green uniforms had taken her by the arms and were dragging
her out of the line.
“She stinks.” one of them said.
“They all stink,” the other one answered.
And for the first time, really, Esther was
seized with the terrible dread of death.
. . . . .
Today was her sentencing day. She lay in her
bed on the lowest tier of the bunk, listening to the boards over
her head creaking as the woman above moved in her sleep, wondering
what would happen. Vienna was all around them—sometimes, in the
exercise yard, she could hear the noise from the traffic
outside—but she was quite sure she would never return to Vienna.
This prison was like a separate world. There was a stone wall all
the way around the building, she had seen it for the first and last
time the day she had been brought here. The Russians had erected
another inside it, perhaps twenty feet higher, so that even from
the windows on the third floor, perhaps even from the roof, it was
impossible to see outside to the street. They meant one to forget
there was anywhere else.
She was not guilty of a political
crime—except to the degree that these people regarded all crime as
political. She would be tried for smuggling. They had stopped her
at the checkpoint in the British Zone, had confiscated her
papers—in any case, those were forged—and had had her
strip-searched by a matron. She had been betrayed, of course. They
had found four hundred pounds worth of Russian rubles sewn into the
clothes around her waist. The trafficking in currency was a
profitable business, but dangerous. She was only a courier, of
course. She would have taken a small commission.
The Russians were strict about their money.
They might decide to make an example of her. They might give her
five years.
She would die if she had to stay in this
place for five years.
No, she would not die. One does not die after
having learned that there were no limits to what one was prepared
to do to stay alive.
. . . . .
The Germans had hoisted her up into the back
of a half-empty truck, and she had curled up there under a pile of
empty sacking and listened as the truck lurched forward and started
bouncing along the dirt road that led out through the camp gates
and into the trees. She could see the trees through a narrow rent
in the canvas flap that closed off the back of the truck, but she
made no effort to discover where they were taking her. How would
she have known, anyway? One direction was the same as another, so
long as it was away from Chelmno.
And before long she was too blinded by her
own tears to see at all. Relief and shame and a sickening fear of
death hardly left room in her chest for a breath of air. Already,
while she lay there, swaying back and forth as the truck stammered
along, the gas chambers were probably filling with carbon monoxide.
They had a big diesel engine that pumped the gas into four chambers
at a time, and sometimes it would start right away and sometimes
not. People could wait there, huddled together so tightly they
couldn’t even fall down, sometimes for an hour or two, waiting to
die.
But she wasn’t going to die. Not today, not
yet.
They drove on for two days, stopping to pull
off to the side of the road a few times every day to eat and rest.
They never drove at night—perhaps they were afraid to use their
headlights, afraid of becoming a target for the Allied bombers.
Perhaps they had some other reason. When they stopped, someone
would come, pick up the flap covering the back of the truck, and
give her something to eat. She was not allowed to come down from
the truck except to relieve herself, and then always under the eyes
of a guard, but what did she care? She wasn’t modest—one lost one’s
sense of shame very quickly at Chelmno—and the truck was world
enough for her. She would sit there, dangling her legs over the
edge of the bed, feeling the bright winter sun on her face,
listening to the scrape of the spoon against the tin dish as she
ate.
She ate and ate during those two days; her
stomach was too shrunken to hold very much and a few times she
became sick. It didn’t matter. It was wonderful to have more to eat
than she could hold. What did she care how sick she made
herself?
Finally, they arrived at Waldenburg.
For the first several hours, the Germans
seemed to have forgotten her existence. She sat on the back of the
truck, watching them unload and wondering what was to become of
her. The problems of this world had narrowed themselves down to
just one: will I live today, or will they finally decide to kill
me? She looked around her, sick with dread.
Because Waldenburg was another camp—she had
seen the barbed wire fences and the watchtowers as they drove up,
and although there didn’t seem to be any prisoners about, the
barracks and work sheds were clustered together on the other side
of a muddy ribbon of roadway.
The camp was divided, like Chelmno. On one
side of the road there was grass and neat gravel walkways and
painted buildings, and on the other only mud and horror waiting to
be. Over there, even the wood of the barracks walls had that gray,
lifeless look, and there was a halo of darkness around everything.
The road was the dividing line between the human and the non-human,
between the masters of the earth and their slaves.
What am I doing on this side? she kept asking
herself. What do they want with me? She had just turned fifteen
that year, and her mother had been a woman of strict principles, so
certain possible answers did not occur to her.
A little after noon a soldier brought her a
tin plate of stew. There were chunks of meat in it and it was so
hot that at first she could barely eat any; she couldn’t remember
when anything had ever tasted so delicious. The soldier was young,
hardly older than herself, and skinny enough that his uniform was
noticeably too large for him. The hair on the sides of his head was
cut so short that one could see the scalp through it. At first he
stood with his back to her and wouldn’t answer any of her
questions, but after a bit he forgot himself enough to be
human.
“It’s to be a labor camp,” he said, pointing
to the bare wooden buildings across the road. “The main body of
prisoners hasn’t arrived yet, only the construction gangs. They
will be assembling bomb fuses.”
“And the SS has assigned a general to run
this place?” she asked, a little startled at her own temerity—it
wasn’t safe to question such things. “Even the commandant at
Chelmno was only a colonel.”
“I can t talk about that.” The soldier
shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other and
then turned his back again for a moment and then stared hard at
Esther’s nearly empty plate. “You’ve eaten enough, I think.”
So there was some secret about their presence
here. It had struck her from the beginning—these were combat
troops. They didn’t behave like camp guards, even their uniforms
were different.
The young soldier took her by the arm and led
her to a small outbuilding that might have been a garage. He
unlocked the double doors and thrust her inside. There were no
windows and no light, so she had only an instant in which to look
around her. There was nothing to see; even the cement floor had
been swept clean.
“You’ll stay here until you hear different,”
he said, and padlocked the doors shut behind him.
She stayed in there for a week. After the
first night they brought her a blanket, and once a doctor visited
her. Twice a day someone came to bring her food and a large canteen
of water, but they never spoke.
It wasn’t so bad. Every time the doors opened
and the sunlight streamed in on her, her heart began beating wildly
and she wondered if they were coming to take her away to be
executed, but otherwise she was almost happy. Death was always
near, but she had learned at Chelmno that it was foolish to think
more than a few hours ahead. For the rest, she could sleep as much
as she wanted, and in spite of her confinement, she wasn’t bored.
The absence of hunger and physical suffering was too much of a
novelty for her to be bored. At Chelmno she had felt weak and
slightly sick to her stomach, all the time. Her legs had always
felt heavy and strengthless, so that walking more than a few yards
had been like balancing on a wire. But that was gone now. She felt
as if she would be willing to stay just like this, curled up on an
army blanket, thinking about fresh bread and the taste of cooked
carrots, for the rest of her life.
But finally they did come for her.
There were two of them. In the blinding light
of mid afternoon, she recognized the general who had pointed her
out at Chelmno. He was standing with his tunic unbuttoned, the
white undershirt showing beneath it, and his cap was held in his
right hand. The man beside him had a corporal’s stripes on his arm;
there was a rifle slung from his shoulder.
“I think we have fattened her up enough.” the
general said, gesturing at her with his cap. “Take her with you,
but see that they don’t do any real damage.”
He laughed, as if he had made a little joke,
but the other man stared at her with cold, hostile eyes. And then
the general walked away.
Finally, when they were alone together, the
corporal looked around, shaking his head in disgust. He wouldn’t
come in but stood outside in the sunshine.
“You have made your mess in here, eh,
Jewess?” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
Esther kept her eyes on the ground. There was
nothing to be gained from answering back, except a beating. She
would say nothing—she would not even weep. These people allowed one
nothing, not even the luxury of a little shame.
She would be silent. . .
“Come along, then.”
. . . . .
The distant sound of boot heels told her that
she had about ten seconds before the Russian guards would bang open
the dormitory door to proclaim the beginning of her one hundred and
eleventh day of imprisonment. She let her feet slide over the edge
of the bunk bed and began feeling for her clogs—otherwise there
would be no time to put them on, not unless one was willing to risk
punishment for tardiness at morning inspection, and today of all
days Esther wished not to incur any official displeasure,