Fatelessness

  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.

  The next thing, I was wakened by a bustling and flurry of excitement. Outside, the sun was by now blazing in full brilliance. The train was again in motion as well. I asked the boys where we were, and they said we were still in the same place but had just now begun to move on; this time, it seems, the lurch must have awoken me. There was no question however, they added, that factories and settlements of sorts could be seen up ahead. A minute later, those who were at the window reported, and I myself also noticed from a fleeting change in the light, that we had slipped under the arch of some form of gateway. After a further minute had passed, the train came to a halt, at which they informed us in great excitement that they could see a station, soldiers, and people. At this, many started to gather their things together or button up their clothes, while some, women especially, hastily freshened up, smartened themselves, combed their hair. From outside I heard an approaching banging, a clattering-back of doors, the commingling hubbub of passengers swarming from the train; I had to concede there could be no doubt about it, we were indeed at our destination. I was glad, very naturally, though in a different way, I sensed, than I would have been glad yesterday, say, or still more the day before that. Then a tool snapped on the door of our wagon, and somebody, or rather several somebodies, rolled the heavy door aside.

  I heard their voices first. They spoke German, or some language very close to that, and from the way it sounded, all at once. As far as I could make out, they wanted us to get off. Instead, though, it seemed they were pushing their way up among us; I could still see nothing as yet. The news was already going around, however, that suitcases and baggage were to be left here. Everyone, needless to say, so it was explained, translated, and passed on from mouth to mouth around me, would get their belongings back later, but first disinfection awaited all articles and a bath for us—and none too soon, I considered. They then got closer to me in the hurly-burly, and I finally got my first glimpse of the people here. It was quite a shock, for after all, this was the first time in my life that I had seen, up close at any rate, real convicts, in the striped duds of criminals, and with shaven skulls in round caps. Naturally enough, I immediately recoiled from them a bit. Some were answering people’s questions, others were taking a look around in the wagon, yet others were already starting to unload the luggage with the practiced skill of porters, and all with a strange, foxlike alacrity. On the chest of each one, apart from the customary convict’s number, I also saw a yellow triangle, and although it was naturally not too hard to work out what that color denoted, it still somehow caught my eye; during the journey I had, in a way, all but forgotten about that entire business. Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect. I found them suspect and altogether foreign-looking. When they spotted us boys, I noticed, they became quite agitated. They immediately launched into a hurried, somehow frantic whispering, which was when I made the surprising discovery that Jews evidently don’t only speak Hebrew, as I had supposed up till now: “Rayds
di yiddish, rayds di yiddish, rayds di yiddish?”1 was what they were asking, as I gradually made out. “Nein,” we told them, the boys and me too. I could see they weren’t too happy about that. Then suddenly—on the basis of my German, I found it easy to figure out—they all started to get very curious about our ages. We told them, “Vierzehn” or “ Fünfzehn,” depending on how old each of us was. They immediately raised huge protestations, with hands, heads, their entire bodies: “ Zestsayn!” they muttered left, right, and center, “zestsayn .” I was surprised, and even asked one of them: “Warum?” “Willst di arbeiten?”—Did I want to work, he asked, the somehow blank stare of his deep-set, drawn eyes boring into mine. “Natürlich,” I told him, since that was after all my reason for coming, if I thought about it. At this, he not only grabbed me by the arm with a tough, bony, yellow hand but gave it a good shake, saying then in that case “Zestsayn! . . . vershtayst di? Zestsayn!” I could see he was exasperated, on top of which the thing, as I saw it, was evidently very important for him, and since we boys had by then swiftly conferred on this, I somewhat cheerfully agreed: all right, I’ll be sixteen, then. Furthermore, whatever might be said and quite irrespective of whether it was true or not, there were also to be no brothers, and particularly—to my great amazement—no twins; above all, though, “jeder arbeiten, nist kai mide, nist kai krenk” 2—that was about the only other thing I learned from them during the possibly not quite two whole minutes it took as I moved in the crush from my place to the door, finally to take a big leap out into the sunlight and fresh air.

  The first thing I noticed was a vast expanse of what looked like flat terrain. I was immediately a little blinded by the sudden spaciousness, the uniformly white, eye-stabbing brilliance of the sky and the plain. I did not have much time to look around, though, what with the bustling and teeming, the cries, tiny incidents, and sorting-out going on all around me. We would now, I heard, have to separate from the women for a short while, for after all we could not bathe together with them under the same roof; however, there were motor vehicles waiting a bit farther away for the elderly, the weak, mothers with infants, and those who had been exhausted by the journey. We were given to understand all this by a new set of prisoners, though I noticed that out here there were now German soldiers, in green forage caps and with green collars on their tunics, who were keeping an eye on everything and making eloquent hand gestures to indicate directions; I was even a bit relieved to see them, since they struck me as smart and trim, the sole anchors of solidity and calm in the whole tumult. I immediately heard, and moreover agreed with, the exhortation from many of the adults among us that we should try to do our bit by cutting questions and good-byes short, within reason, so as not to give the Germans the impression of such a rabble. As to what followed, it would be hard to recount: I was caught up and swept along by a damply seething, swirling tide. A woman’s voice behind me kept on squawking about a certain “small bag” that she was letting someone know had stayed with her. An old, disheveled-looking woman kept getting in the way in front of me, and I heard a short young man explaining: “Do what you’re told, Mama, we’ll be meeting up again before long anyway. Nicht wahr, Herr Offizier?”3 turning, with a knowing and, in a way, somewhat grown-up conspiratorial smile toward the German soldier who happened to be giving orders right there, “wir werden uns bald wieder . . .” But my attention was already being taken up by a hideous squealing from a grubby, curly-haired little boy, dressed up a bit like a shopwindow dummy, as he tried with peculiar jerks and wriggles to free himself from the grasp of a blonde woman, evidently his mother. “I want to go with Daddy! I want to go with Daddy!” he screamed, bellowed, and howled, stamping and drumming his feet, incongruously shod as they were in white shoes, on the white gravel and white dust. In the meantime I was also attempting to keep up with the boys, following the intermittent calls and signals that “Rosie” was giving, while a stout matron in a sleeveless, floral-patterned summer dress forged a path through everybody, myself included, in the direction where they had pointed out the vehicles were. After that, a tiny old man with a black hat and black necktie bobbed, twisted, and jostled around for a while, looking anxiously this way and that and shouting out, “Nellie! Nellie!” Then a tall, sharp-featured man and a woman with long, black hair clung to one another, faces, lips, their entire bodies locked together, causing everyone a flash of irritation, until the ceaseless buffetings of the human tide finally detached the woman, or rather girl, carrying her away and swallowing her up, though even as she receded I saw her a few times more, struggling to remain in view and waving a sweeping farewell from where she was.

  All these images, voices, and incidents in this maelstrom flustered me and made my head swim slightly, jumbling them into what was ultimately a single, strange, colorful, and, I might almost say, crazy impression; that was one reason why I was less successful in being able to keep track of other, possibly more important things. I would find it hard to say, for instance, whether it was as a result of our own efforts or those of the soldiers or the prisoners, or all together, that in the end one long column was formed around me, now made up solely of men, all in regularly ordered ranks of five, which moved forward in step with me, slowly but at last steadily. Up ahead, it was again confirmed, was a bath, but first, I learned, a medical inspection was awaiting all of us. It was mentioned, though naturally I did not find it hard to appreciate, that this was obviously a matter of grading, of screening for suitability for work.

  That gave me a chance to catch my breath until then. Along with the other boys beside, in front of, and behind me, we shouted across and signaled to one another that we were still here. It was hot. I was also able to take a look around me and orient myself a little as to where, in fact, we were. The station was smart. Under our feet was the usual crushed-stone covering of such places, a bit farther off a strip of turf in which yellow flowers were planted, and an immaculate white asphalt road running as far as the eye could see. I also noticed that this road was separated from the entire vast area that began behind it by a row of identically recurved posts, between which ran strands of metallically glinting barbed wire. It was easy to work out that over there, clearly, must be where the convicts lived. Maybe because this was the first chance I had to spare the time for it, they now began to intrigue me for the first time, and I would have been curious to know what offenses they had committed.

  The scale, the full extent of the plain, also astounded me as I looked around. Yet, what with being among all those people and also in that blinding light, I was not really able to gain a truly accurate picture; I could hardly even discern the distant low-lying buildings of some sort, a scattering of raised platforms here and there that looked like game-shooting hides, a corner, a tower, a chimney. The boys and adults around me were also pointing at something up there, lodged in the milky vapors of a sky that, though cloudless, was nevertheless almost bleached of color, an immobile, elongated, severely gleaming body—a dirigible, to be sure. The explanations of those around generally agreed on its being a barrage balloon, at which point I recalled that dawn siren wail. Still, I could see no sign of concern or fear on the features of the German soldiers around us here. I remembered the air raids at home, and now this air of scornful composure and invulnerability all at once made the kind of respect with which the Germans were normally spoken of back there more clearly comprehensible to me. Only now did two forked lines on their collars catch my eye. From that I was able to establish that this must mean they belonged to that celebrated formation of the SS about which I had already heard so much at home. I have to say they did not strike me as the slightest bit intimidating: they were ambling up and down in leisurely fashion, patrolling the entire length of the column, answering questions, nodding, even cordially patting some of us on the back or shoulder.