War and Remembrance (185 page)

The first squirt of apple juice in Natalie’s mouth sets her stopped saliva
flowing; it cools; it sweetens; it sends life stinging electrically through her. She eats the apple as slowly as she can. Around her everybody is crunching fruit. A fragrance of harvest time, the smell of apples, steals through the foul air. Natalie chews the apple down, bite by exquisite bite. She eats the core. She chews the bitter stem. She licks the streaks of sweet juice from her fingers and her palm. Then she gets as drowsy as though she has eaten a meal and drunk wine. Sitting cross-legged, her head leaned on her hand, her one raw elbow on the floor, she sleeps.

When she wakes moonlight makes a blue barred rectangle of the high window. It is warmer than before, when they were coming out of the mountains. Exhausted Jews slump or lean on each other in sleep all through the vile-smelling car. Almost too stiff to move, she pulls herself to the window for air. They are running through scrubby marshy wasteland. The moonlight glitters on patches of swampy water where cattails and leafy reeds grow thick. The train traverses a high barbed-wire fence, strung on concrete posts as far as the moon illumines, spaced with shadowy watchtowers. One tower is so close to the track that Natalie glimpses two guards silhouetted at their machine guns, under the cylinders of darkened searchlights.

Inside the fence, more wasteland. Up ahead, Natalie perceives a yellowish glow. The train is slowing down; the clacks of the wheels are lower in pitch and fewer. Straining her eyes she discerns in the distance rows of long huts. Now the train sharply turns. Some of the Jews rouse themselves at the screech of wheels and groan of the rickety car. Natalie sees up ahead, before the train straightens out, a wide heavy building with two arched entrances into which the moonlit railroad tracks disappear. Clearly this is the terminal, their destination, Oswiecim. Trembling and sickness seize her, though nothing frightening is in sight.

The train passes through a dark arch into a dazzling white glare. The train is gliding to a halt alongside a very long floodlit wooden platform. SS men line the track, some with large black dogs on leashes. Many strange-looking figures also await the train: bald-skulled men in ragged vertical-striped pajamas, dozens of them, all along the platform.

The train stops.

A terrifying din breaks out: clubs pounding at the wooden car walls, dogs barking, Germans roaring,
“Get out! Everybody out! Quick! Out! Out!”

Though the Jews cannot know it, this reception is rather unusual. The SS prefers a quiet arrival that keeps up the hoax to the last: peaceable unloading, lectures about health examinations and work possibilities, reassurance of luggage delivery, and the rest of the standard game. But word has come that this transport may prove unruly, so the less common harsh procedure is on.

Doors slide open. Light glares in on the dazed crowded Jews.
“Down!
Out! Jump! Leave your baggage! No baggage! You’ll get it in your barracks! Out! Get down! Out!”
The Jews begin to vanish out into the white glare. Big uniformed men jump into the car, brandishing clubs and snarling,
“Out! What are you waiting for? Move your shitty asses! Out! Drop that baggage! Get out!”
As fast as they can crowd forward, Jews are stampeding out of the car. Natalie, far from the door, is caught in a crush thrusting her toward the light. Her feet scarcely touch the floor. Sweating with fear, she finds herself in the full blinding glare of a floodlight. God, it is a long jump to the platform! Children are sprawling all over down there, old ladies lie on their faces and backs where they have tumbled, showing their pitiful white or pink drawers. The striped spooks are moving among them, lifting up the fallen. So much registers on Natalie’s nearly paralyzed consciousness. She hesitates, not wanting to jump on a child. There is no clear space to land. The thought flashes through her mind, “At least I spared Louis this!” A heavy blow cracks her shoulder, and she leaps with a scream.

Her uncle has a different experience.

He knows from Berel’s revelations the precise fate that awaits him. In his final entry in
A Jew’s Journey,
Aaron has recorded an almost Socratic acceptance of death, but this serenity is hard to sustain on a three-day train trip toward extermination by poison gas. Socrates, it will be recalled, drank the hemlock and faded off after a short noble discourse to sorrowing and admiring disciples. Jastrow has no disciples, but
A Jew’s Journey
— though he has secreted it behind the planks of the library wall in Theresienstadt, with no hope of living until it is found — is addressed to an audience too, its eventual readers; and Jastrow, a writer to the core, has left the noblest last words he could muster. Thereafter, however, he remains very much alive, and the trip is long.

Seventeen
Prominente
are crammed with him into two rear compartments of the coach in which the SS rides. It is very close quarters. They must take turns standing and sitting, dozing when they can. They are fed watery soup and stale bread at night, one cup of brown slop in the morning. For a half hour each morning they have access to a toilet, which they must then scrub and disinfect, ceiling to floor, for German use. It is not first-class travel. Still, compared with their fellows in the cattle cars they are well off, and they know it.

That is, in fact, Jastrow’s torment. The privileged coach ride gnaws at his fatalistic serenity. Can there be any hope? Certainly the seventeen others think so. They talk of little else, day and night, but the positive aspects of their favored treatment. Those who have wives and children in other cars are optimistic even about them. True, the train evidently is not heading for Dresden. But wherever it is going, on this transport
Prominente
remain
Prominente.
That’s the main thing! Once at their destination, they will manage to look after their loved ones.

Common sense warns Aaron Jastrow that the coach ride can be more sadistic German foolery, or a bureaucratic mischance, or a calculated move to keep out of the cattle cars personages around whom a spark of resistance might flicker. But it is hard to hold out against the desperate ebullience of the others. He too yearns to live. These seventeen cultivated, highly superior men can argue persuasively: three Elders, two rabbis, a symphony conductor, a painter, a concert pianist, a newspaper publisher, three doctors, two army officers with war wounds, two half-Jewish industrialists, and the head of the Transport Section, a bitter-faced little Berlin lawyer, who alone does not talk to the others or even look at them. Nobody knows how he fell afoul of his bosses.

Except for one guard posted outside their compartments, the Germans pay no attention whatever to the Jews. Riding in the SS car, however great a privilege, is unnerving. Jews are usually quarantined from this elite like diseased animals. They can smell the hearty meals brought on board for the SS. At night jolly songs drunkenly roar out in the car, and loud arguments go on, sometimes sounding ugly. This Teutonic boisterousness close at hand makes the
Prominente
shudder, for at any time it can occur to the SS to work off their boredom by making sport with Jews.

Late on the second night, the SS men are beerily bellowing the
Horst Wessel
song, and Jastrow is remembering the first time he heard it, in Munich in the mid-thirties. Those early feelings flood over him. Ridiculous though he thought the Nazis were then, their song did embody a certain elemental German wistfulness; and now that he is probably about to die at their hands he can still hear that simple romantic
Heimweh
in this discordant chorus. The compartment door bursts open. The guard shouts, “The stinking Jew Jastrow! To compartment number four!” He is shocked into shivery alertness. With long faces the other Jews make way. He goes, the guard tramping behind him.

In compartment four, a gray-headed SS officer with a gross double chin, sitting with several other officers drinking schnapps, tells him to stand there and listen. This SS man is discoursing on a comparison of the Seven Years’ War and World War II, pointing out the comforting analogies between Hitler and Frederick the Great. Both wars show, he argues, how a small disciplined nation under a great warlord can hold its own against a huge shaky coalition led by mediocrities. Frederick made brilliant use of diplomatic surprise just like the Führer; he always attacked first; time after time he reversed what looked like sure defeat by iron willpower; and in the end, the sudden death of Elizabeth of Russia gave him the break he needed for a favorable peace. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill are all elderly ailing men of
unhealthy habits. The death of any one of them could similarly explode the coalition overnight, says the grayhead. The other officers are most impressed, looking at each other and wisely nodding.

Abruptly he says to Jastrow, “They tell me you are a famous American historian. You must be familiar with all this.”

The eighteenth century is not Jastrow’s field, but he knows Carlyle’s work on Frederick.
“Ach, ja! Carlyle!”
exclaims the gray-headed officer, encouraging him to proceed. Aaron says that the two wars are indeed amazingly similar; that Hitler seems an absolute reincarnation of Frederick the Great; and that the death of Elizabeth of Russia certainly was a providential break, such as could happen any day in this war. When he is dismissed, he returns to his compartment full of disgust with himself. But the guard brings him a roll and sausage which he gives to the others to share out, and that makes him feel better.

Next morning the gray-headed officer summons him again, this time for a private talk, just the two of them. He seems quite senior and quite sure of himself; he allows Jastrow to sit down, something unheard of for a Jew in an SS presence. He once taught history, he says, but a scheming Jew got a university professorship he was in line for, ruining his career. Puffing on heavy cigars, he treats Aaron to a three-hour pedantic harangue on the probable political structure of German Europe for the next three or four centuries, branching off into Germany’s world leadership, quoting authors back to Plutarch and comparing Hitler to such great men as Lycurgus, Solon, Mohammed, Cromwell, and Darwin. Aaron has only to listen and nod. In a way this drivel is a diversion from the waves of fear and uncertainty about oncoming death which have been plaguing him like migraine. Dismissed, he receives another sausage and roll in the compartment, which he shares out again. He sees the grayhead no more. Once the train enters Poland, and the names of the towns they pass draw an arrow toward Auschwitz, Aaron finds himself wishing for some such distraction, even a rowdy SS songfest to kill the nerve-wracking hours. But this day the Germans have fallen silent.

Only when he descends on the Birkenau ramp does Aaron fully grasp what he has been spared so far. Standing huddled with the
Prominente
beyond the floodlights, he sees at a distance the detraining — the terrorized leaping, falling, and milling about of the Jews, the casual tossing out of bodies and luggage by bald-skulled prisoners in stripes, the long row the corpses make laid out along the platform; especially the far-stretching separate line of children’s bodies, which the unloaders throw about like sawdust dolls. He looks for Natalie in the floodlight glare. Once or twice he thinks he sees her. But more than two thousand Jews have poured out of all those cattle cars. They crowd the long platform, lining up in fives under the shouts and club blows of the Germans, the men separately from the women and children. It
is hard to be sure of anybody’s identity in that confused mass of drooping heads.

After this first violent and noisy ejection of the Jews from the train, the scene on the ramp for a while looks tame and tedious, reminding Jastrow queerly of his own family’s disembarkation at night from the steerage of a Polish ship at Ellis Island amid a throng of shabby Jewish immigrants. Uniformed officials strut about under floodlights now as then, shouting orders. The new arrivals, bewildered and helpless in a foreign place, stand and wait for something to happen. But at Ellis Island there were no dogs, no machine guns, and no rows of the dead.

In fact, something is happening. The living and the dead are being counted, to confirm that as many passengers arrived as departed. The SS pays a group fare to the Reichsbahn for every Jew transported to Oswiecim, and bookkeeping must be punctilious. Separated by sexes, the Jews stand quietly five abreast in two dark queues all the way down the track. The baldheads in stripes have time to empty the cars and stack all the belongings on the platform.

These make enormous mounds. The stuff looks like the rubbish of beggars, but Jastrow can guess what wealth may be hidden there. The Jews find desperate ways to carry a remnant of their lives’ earnings with them, and it is all hidden in those shabby piles or concealed on their bodies. Knowing what lies in store for him, Aaron Jastrow has left his money belt behind the wall in Theresienstadt with the manuscript of
A Jew’s Journey.
Let the finders have both, and may their hands not be German! Berel’s description of the looting of the dead in Auschwitz gave Aaron Jastrow his first slippery grip on the crazy massacre. Murder for plunder is an ancient risk Jewry runs; the innovation of National Socialism is only to organize it as an industrial process. Well, the Germans may kill him but they will not plunder him.

The women’s line at last begins to move. Now Jastrow sees before his eyes the process that Berel described. SS officers are separating the Jewesses into two lines. One tall thin officer seems to be making the final decision with a flick of a hand, left or right. It all goes in a quiet matter-of-fact official manner. The talk of the Germans, the rare yap of a dog, and hissing bursts of steam from the cooling locomotive are all one hears.