Gratitude (24 page)

“What a miracle,” Klari said, as she kissed her niece. She told Rozsi what Paul had done.

Rozsi finished greeting the new arrivals, and then she embraced her brother. She whispered, “I didn’t know you had this in you.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Have you seen Zoli today?”

He pulled away and looked into his sister’s eyes. “I saw Zoli,” Paul whispered back. “We wouldn’t have been able to pull this off if Zoli hadn’t shown up at the embassy.”

Rozsi beamed.

“It will all be fine,” Paul said. “Let’s all just survive—and bring Istvan home to us, too.”

Rozsi still clung to Paul. “I found a gramophone here,” she whispered. “Could you get me a Gershwin record? One of his suites—or that rhapsody?”

“Rozsi, my dear,” he said, “Gershwin is forbidden. Jazz is forbidden, as you know. Jewish composers are forbidden.”

Rozsi held on. “I love him. I love Gershwin. He’s such a delight.”

“I love him, too,” Paul said. “All he wanted to do was write hits, but instead he wrote masterpieces.”

Robert joined his niece and nephew. “And what about Beethoven,” he said, “now that we’re putting in orders? I guess he’s allowed. Imagine the land that produced Beethoven and Hegel and Schiller—
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
—packing cultivated people into airless railway cars with a bucket in the corner. Who’d have thought? Until now, I didn’t know Beethoven belonged only to them. And we are without our Gershwin—without our Hungary. We reside now in Sweden,” he said, raising his hands and turning to indicate their surroundings.

Klari, Robert, Lili and Simon took a closer look at their new residence. Cots had already been set out around the spacious office. There were pillows and sheets for each cot, and there were several lamps. A sizeable washroom was a few steps down the hall—no bath or shower, but ample sinks, certainly, and two toilets. Food was an issue, and cooking was not possible. There were tins of beans that Paul had found and several precious tins of herring. Paul and Zoli would try to get some clothing out of the Becks’ own closets, if they could.

Paul looked at his watch. “I have to go,” he announced. “I’m meeting Raoul Wallenberg in an hour.”

The new arrivals mobbed him. His Aunt Klari reached up and took Paul’s face in her warm hands. “You dear boy.” Her caramel eyes were swimming with tears. “You are our saviour,” she said.

“Saviours are tedious, Auntie. I’m not that good.”

She smiled. “Will you be all right on your own?”

“Well, you know me. I’m part dog, part man. I’m my own best friend.”

Rozsi joined the mass huddled around Paul. She remembered the huddle at her Uncle Robert and Aunt Klari’s place when she and her brother had come with the news that their father was dead. For a moment, they swayed together as they had then. Then they released Paul, and he was gone.

Fifteen

Szeged – June 8, 1944

MARTA FOLDI WAS DEPORTED
to Auschwitz-Birkenau for no reason other than that she had a whiff of transgression about her. Marta made a stop of a week in Theresienstadt, a camp carved out of an old fortress town in Bohemia, and a showplace for naïve visiting dignitaries concerned about what the Germans were up to. At Theresienstadt, Marta heard a concert played by inmates and led by a Jew who had been famous as the conductor of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, Jan Perecek. It dawned on Marta, as she listened, not as a guest but as an usher at the event, that she had not been to a concert in several years, and here was one being brought to her in her prison. It was quite a lively concert, too, of Bavarian oompah music, as if the assembled listeners were getting set to break into dance and hoist tankards of beer.

Toward the end of the concert, a well-dressed gentleman in his fifties leaned into the aisle and beckoned Marta over. He told her, “You are beautiful for a Hebrew woman.” Marta smiled. She was about to tell him the truth when she realized the remark was intended as a compliment: She had risen to beauty even out of the dross of Jewry. In any case, she couldn’t prove she was not a Hebrew even if she’d wanted to. How did a woman prove it? She’d ask Abraham, she decided, the next time she saw him.

And then, short days later, she was on her way somewhere else. She didn’t know where, because no one told her, and she was not asked to purchase a ticket for the trip. She was being treated to the ride. But was this even a train she was on, windowless and airless, Marta crushed against fifty others? Was it a train travelling across the land, or was it an elevator car, plunging to the centre of the Earth where the hot devil awaited them?

And Auschwitz was different. It represented Germany at its murderous best, humanity at its murderous best. At Auschwitz, a tired looking SS officer decided Marta would join the line of people to be murdered later rather than immediately. She was issued a number, to be worn not only on the striped jacket she was given but also on the skin of her left forearm: “181818,” a quaint number, she decided, to wear on her flesh to the grave. The striped uniform also bore an insignia next to the number: there were green triangles for criminals, red ones for political prisoners, and red and yellow Stars of David for Jews. Marta was awarded a red triangle, which both surprised her and distinguished her from the baser Jews and Gypsies.

She was shaved up top and below. She felt her rich raven hair sliding down her naked back and rump with a feathery lightness. A woman behind her with an unfortunate single bushy eyebrow hooding her eyes had that shaved off, too. The four barbers laughed. They were giving the woman fashion and style help she should be grateful for. And then they hosed the women down and deliced them.

They were in Birkenau, an extension of Auschwitz originally built for Russian prisoners that had a complete railway-station façade, but no real railway station, as if it were a movie set.

The guards placed Marta in a
lager
with two hundred other women, two to a bed. Some of the women had just arrived there and some had been there for months and even years. These were the ones who gave Marta hope, though they’d rob her in an instant or trick her out of a crust of bread. They gave her hope because they’d miraculously survived here for several years, and they were Jews, most of them, horrifyingly skeletal and weak, but still alive, still going, still working and talking and eating whatever scraps could be boiled in a pot and ladled out. These women, these senior veterans, Marta began to admire. The most prominent of them was a woman named Libuse—after the princess, she told everyone, who led the West Slavic tribe and envisioned Prague, the woman who settled the rumblings in her tribe by taking a ploughman as consort and whose dynasty lasted for four centuries. “Except of course the original Libuse was not a Jewess,” Libuse said. “A detail. And she was not from the city of Brno. My parents must have been a little touched.” She pointed to her temple. “They must have been a little too settled in the Czechoslovak nation, too complacent. It went to their heads.” She tapped her temple again. “Hence, the Great Libuse, the Great
Princess
Libuse.” This tall woman spoke German, and the first night she silenced Marta’s many questions, about when they got to shower and what work they had to do and where the men had got to, by giving Marta simple advice: “Shut up and have a dreamy night.”

And that first night, Marta lay down gingerly on her straw bunk beside a Polish woman who would not speak to her. They lay back to back until the woman thought Marta was asleep, and then the woman shifted for a moment before turning over to face her outright. Marta could feel the woman’s breath. She thought she could sense the woman sniffing her, felt her spidery hand brush against her hip, then her shoulder, relishing Marta’s luxuriant flesh. Marta was fresh meat, still warm enough with life for a feast. Now the woman’s fingers were worming over the slope of Marta’s shoulder. Marta’s skin crawled. It was like lying with a corpse in a coffin, the corpse hungry to suck her warm blood. And then the fingers tweaked the nub of Marta’s pronounced nipple, and Marta flinched. The woman hurriedly turned over again to face the other way, moved as far away as she could get on the narrow bunk, her bony shoulder blades bumping up against Marta. In another minute, the woman was asleep.

They were neighbours in a cemetery, not lying in bunks at all but in graves. Each day, some of the women disappeared and were replaced with new recruits. Marta shared her bed with the Polish woman one more night and then, unaccountably, never again. Had she been transferred to another
lager
or transformed into gas? The stench of the incinerator was thick and relentless. It was Libuse who kept Marta going, barking out remarks in German across the darkness that most of the women could understand and most ignored, but some were reassured by them, by the gall of them. Marta was reassured.

The third night, as Marta was beginning to believe the Polish woman would not return and that the authorities had forgotten to replace her, a smaller, rabbit-like woman joined her, quivering, in bed, also a Polish Jew, also silent like her predecessor. This one didn’t want her body even to drift into contact with Marta’s, let alone to fondle her, even though
some
closeness helped warm up the bed.

An Italian Jew cursed as she tried to settle, and her fierce Greek bunkmate answered in Ladino. A Ukrainian woman asked in Yiddish what the hell kind of language the woman was speaking, and Marta heard the woman spit. The woman was new, evidently. She spoke too boldly and confidently and naïvely. She asked in Yiddish, a language Marta understood, because it derived from German, where they were holding their belongings. Several people laughed out their answer: “Canada.”

She laughed, too—she didn’t know why—and asked, “What is Canada?”

“It is the land of abundance,” Libuse said.

“
Kanada
,” someone repeated in Ladino, and then said something else, and laughter erupted again in a small corner of the
lager
.

The Ukrainian woman said she’d brought an emerald brooch her grandmother had received as a little girl from the Tsarina Katarina. The comment caused another round of laughter. The woman was a comedian without knowing it.

Finally, Libuse said calmly, “The brooch from the Tsarina is now in Canada, the land of abundance. It’s a warehouse here in the camp filled with all the confiscated valuables. They’re sorted, assessed and then sent to Berlin for ‘redistribution’ or to Switzerland for cash for the German war effort.”

Marta remembered the temple in Szeged, piled to the ceiling with confiscated effects. She wondered if some of it ended up here, in Canada.

Someone said something sadly in Yiddish, then someone else spoke in a language Marta couldn’t identify, Serbian, possibly, because the words had a Slavic ring.

One of the first things that had impressed Marta in the
lager
was the many different languages floating in the darkness. So many languages, but the tone of the voices was universal—angry, plaintive, scared. One understood hesitancy or longing in any language. The
lager
was a little League of Nations, except that it was not united in the pursuit of harmony and peace, but united in anguish, united in the transmogrification of the group into another species, rodent or insect, but ineffectual rodents—toothless ones—and sterile insects.

Marta’s thoughts drifted to home again, to Szeged, and to Istvan, whom she’d left without saying goodbye. Where must he think they’ve taken her? Did he think her dead? Did he shed a tear as he considered her fate? What was going through his smart stubborn head as the meagre supplies dwindled to nothing, his cramped, dark world closed in altogether, the cat now silent, now dead, provided four, maybe five, additional meals for its enslaved master? Could he hang on for Marta? How long would it be? Could
she
hang on for
him
?

She remembered the little garden out back—the tomatoes and peppers—always the peppers. Could Istvan get to the last of these, quietly, in the dark of night? And the angelica, which sprang out from among the tomatoes every second year, the great balls of green blossom reaching up toward heaven. He could see these plants and feel encouraged, could sit down among them and get lost.

At roll call the following morning, the SS officer in charge, a muscular woman named Ute Schlink, asked “241,” the last three digits in a frail woman’s identification number, whether she was planning to accept the breakfast of bread about to be offered to her. The Hungarian woman looked down at the mud she was standing in and didn’t answer, or not audibly. Schlink struck her across the head with her gloved hand, and the woman dropped to one knee, but then stood again quickly and remarkably, pulling her knee out of the mud with a squelch. “You declined dinner last night as well, I was told. Can you tell me why?” The woman didn’t answer, so the officer asked for an interpreter as she removed her truncheon from its sheath in her belt. Marta stepped forward. Schlink put the question to the woman again, and Marta translated.

The woman looked at Marta and then at the SS officer. She said, barely audibly, in Hungarian, “Last night and today are Yom Kippur, when we fast.”

Marta turned to the officer and haltingly translated, almost as quietly as the woman had spoken. “It was Yom Kippur,” Marta said. But she said to the woman, “It’s not Yom Kippur. Even I know that much. Yom Kippur is in the fall.”

“Quiet,” the officer said to Marta.

The German circled the woman and asked her to remove her clothes, which she did without hesitation. She stood in the damp air without a gram of fat to insulate her bones. They looked to Marta like bones pressing to break out of their prison of flesh. Marta wished she could help the woman, say something to the officer to make it easier, but her mind raced. Why hadn’t the woman accepted the food, even if she hadn’t planned on eating it, so she could give it to someone else? Was that a sin? Was it a sin even under these circumstances? Could an inmate commit a sin at Auschwitz? The officer said, “241, if you don’t eat, you will no longer be much use to the work effort.” She circled the woman again and touched her bony rump with the truncheon. “I cannot eat today,” the woman said, “but only today.” Marta translated.

The guard said, “What if I decide you will not eat tomorrow? What if I decide that tomorrow is Yom Kippur and, in your case, the next day, too?” Schlink said it like a German, naturally: “Yom Kippah,” she called it.

And suddenly it made sense to Marta: you didn’t have the right to eat much here, but you didn’t have the right to starve yourself, either, because that would have put you in control of your own demise.

The woman simply shook her head, but only just perceptibly. Schlink thwacked her across the skull with her truncheon this time, the hollow clang as it struck bone resounding around the yard. The woman fell to the same muddy knee again but didn’t rise.

Then came a voice from behind them, in German, “Maybe the fare doesn’t agree with her.” It was tall Libuse, Princess Libuse.

Schlink rushed at her like a mad dog and thwacked her, too, the same way, but Libuse stood firm, a dark welt of blood forming immediately beneath the skin at the base of her skull. Then the officer rushed back at 241 and clubbed the kneeling woman yet again, again with the truncheon against the skull. The woman fell face down in the mud. The others from the
lager
watched, waiting for her to pull her face out to take a breath, but she didn’t. She looked like a mythic white creature emerging from the mud rather than sunken into it.

Marta imagined for the first time what 241 must have looked like filled out and with a rich head of hair, as auburn as her eyebrows. Did she take this trip with her family, and was she the final one to go, erasing their auburn line with a single last assertion that on this day, the day she imagined was Yom Kippur, she would not eat or take food to share with others, because it was the day of atonement?

And then came the selection—an impromptu selection this morning—a little rushed and without the usual fanfare of handing out cards with names and numbers on them. In the exercise, those who were to be left working, standing, sitting, lying down, rising up, eating and evacuating their bowels and bladders were to be separated from those who would no longer be performing these functions because they were to be gassed and incinerated.

With the help of her attendant guards and the
kapo
, the Jewish inmate selected to rule each
lager
, the one who was bloodless, Schlink took her customary march up and down the line of prisoners, pointing with her truncheon at those to be excused from life and calling out numbers, “141, 775, 416, 225,” the
kapo
marking them down on a chart, signalling with her head for each prisoner to step out of the line. About twenty were selected that morning from the group of two hundred, the same number in each of the
lagers
down the line throughout Birkenau and Auschwitz. One of the women selected was the Ukrainian whose emerald brooch had ended up in “Canada.” She didn’t seem sure what had happened to her. Perhaps she clung to the hope she was being relocated again, which is what she’d originally been told, that possibly she’d see her husband and son. The selection of this woman was peculiar, if only because she was a recent arrival and hadn’t lost enough weight or colour to suggest she couldn’t carry on in work detail. She seemed calm as her lips moved rapidly in prayer. Some of the other women selected cried out but then covered their mouths, worried about stepping out of line even now. Others looked on as blankly as they had when 241 hit the mud. They looked as though thoughts no longer moved behind their eyes.