Skeletons at the Feast (3 page)

Over the following months, more and more of the city's Jews were deported, including Uri's acquaintance who had helped him with the radio, and every evening he and his sister and his parents would crowd around the Volksempfanger in their cramped and dingy apartment--a single room in a shabby hotel that had been converted to Jewish housing--and wait for the four tones that signaled the start of a BBC broadcast. When the broadcast was in German, everyone listened; when it was in English, either Uri or his father would translate it, invariably missing some of the subtleties but usually understanding its gist.

Before the war, the family had lived in an elegant, three-bedroom town house with a yard that looked out upon the gazebo in the city's small park. Now? A dark room in a ramshackle hotel with a squalid bathroom at the end of the corridor that they shared with at least two dozen other evicted Jews crammed onto their floor. And they only had that because his father was a decorated veteran of the earlier world war, and now both he and his father were, more or less, slave labor in a factory the Nazis deemed critical to the war effort. Prior to that, his father had owned a not-insubstantial trucking company. Seven vehicles and twelve employees. The fascists had just drooled when they had forced him to sell it to them for next to nothing. No longer did anyone try to face this stoically or philosophically, to murmur how one didn't blame the ocean for tidal waves. Because, in fact, it wasn't a random act of nature behind this nightmare; it was their neighbors.

Slowly his parents' health began to fail. Somehow his father soldiered on at the factory, but both of his parents were weakened by their steadily diminished rations and the cold and the daily struggle to make do in their squalor. Their Shabbat dinner at sunset on Friday night--already shrunken because of curfews and the reality that as Jews they had almost no food to eat--grew even more intimate, because Uri's aunt and his uncle and his cousins were taken away. And then his grandmother. And, soon, another aunt who never had married. When this last woman--a nurse until the fact she was Jewish had cost her her job, a woman who even as a teenager had been an angel of mercy to wounded soldiers in the previous world war--was deported to the east, his own mother took him and his sister aside and with completely uncharacteristic melodrama told them that they had to live through this nightmare. No matter what, they had to survive. Someone had to let the world know what was going on. What the Nazis were doing.

When they came for him at the factory, he actually asked if he had time to run home to pack a suitcase, even though he knew it would never go with him to the camp. His escort, those two heavyset men from the SA with eyebrows that reminded him of caterpillars and oddly similar wattles of flesh dangling under their chins, told him that his mother had packed one for him. Two, as a matter of fact. Uri had considered informing them that he only owned a single valise, but knew there wasn't a point. He tried to find his family at the station but they didn't seem to be there. Someone told him one train already had left for the east, and in all likelihood they were on it. Still, he searched for them in the mob, moving as best as he could among the throng and twice being struck in the back by different guards when inadvertently he had strayed too near to one of the exits.

Most of the time, the Nazis weren't even bothering with passenger cars by then, and so he was herded into an unheated cattle car that still had giant twinelike balls of straw in the corners and along one of the long walls. Though he recognized a half-dozen people in the car with him, it was mostly a surreal and kaleidoscopic pastiche of shapes and faces he might see on any given day on the street or in the park: surreal because the people were crowded--though not, as he would hear often occurred, packed so tightly that the victims could neither sit nor move, and some would actually asphyxiate-- and were constantly fidgeting and shuffling as they struggled to get comfortable, and so one moment he would spy a pretty young woman named Rivka in a spot across the car, and in the next he would see standing there a very old woman named Sarah; kaleidoscopic because in the variegated light from the slats high on the walls, light that changed as the day wore on and the train chugged its way (dear God, no) east, their eyes and lips and kerchiefs seemed constantly to be changing color. They were, he guessed, the very last Jews left in Schweinfurt: the labor, the technical help--Jews with some rare expertise--and their elderly parents and children.

He asked virtually everyone in the car whether his parents or his sister might be somewhere on the train and he might be reunited with them at their destination, but no one could say. Everyone agreed that there had been plenty of couples roughly his parents' age and a great many girls who looked fourteen at the station--even some who, roughly, matched his description of Rebekah. Still, he hadn't seen any of them there and it didn't appear that anyone else had, either. At least not for sure. And Rebekah was a hard girl to miss. She was tall for her age, womanly, and--partly because they were practically being starved to death and partly because the Singers were naturally slender--thin. She had gorgeous, creosote black hair that reflected the sun like glass. If she were anywhere on this train, the men, at least, would have noticed.

It was evident to Uri after the first day that they were not going to be released from the cars until they arrived at the camp. Periodically the train stopped and a pair of soldiers would slide open the doors to see if anyone inside had died (no one did, at least that first day, not even any of the older people), and to allow one of the passengers to empty the buckets of excrement over the side. The soldiers certainly had no plans to do it. There wasn't room to lie down in the car, but Uri could sit if he curled his knees against his chest-- though this, too, posed a certain hazard: It meant that his nose was close to the level of the arses and the pant legs of the people around him, and his own face and hair would brush up against the pee that had sopped into their wool trousers and the crap that had turned their underwear into unsalvageable diapers. Some of the people who had been brought to the train directly from their homes had a little food with them, and some were kind enough to share their crusts of pumpernickel or rye. But that was gone within hours. From then on, everyone grew more hungry and thirsty and frightened. And the smell from the buckets and, yes, from the people around him--the oldest people around him, he realized, were unable to squat to use the containers; others were simply too modest--grew unbearable. It wasn't merely the stench of sweat and fear, the acrid smell of the urine, or the feces that filled the pails, the pants, and the corners of the cattle car. It was the vomit. Increasingly, the stink alone was making people sick, and that was creating a vicious, malodorous circle.

During the second day, when the threshold of his own gag reflex had become downright heroic and he had grown inured to the touch of someone else's shit-soddened fabric, he would encourage the old people and the children to lean against him. Or sit against him. Or use his shoulders as a pillow or his knees as a hassock. And they did. No one, not even the children, had the energy to sing, but he would tell anyone who was interested stories about . . . anything. He would make up anecdotes about the ball-bearing factory, he would recall whatever he could about his aunt's service on the western front a quarter of a century earlier. Or his father's. There was an older fellow in the car who, it would turn out, had served in the same stretch of trenches as Uri's father, though the two men had never met. Sometimes people listened to Uri and he thought it might have helped a little bit. But he also knew he was merely throwing a glass of water on a house fire.

By the third day, he and some of the others were sure they were going to Auschwitz. Much to Uri's astonishment, there were actually grownups in the car who hadn't heard of the place. Oh, they knew of the concentration camps and the deportations. But they honestly believed--had, almost inconceivably, managed to reassure themselves--that this was all about resettlement. Not extermination.

It was this, he decided later, the fact that there were Jews--

Jews, for God's sake!--who didn't believe what was happening that finally propelled him with his bucket of shit through the opened cattle car doors. It wasn't the reality that a wonderful old man who had consoled his wife with the sighs and murmurs of an angel had expired beside him, it wasn't the death of one of the car's two babies-- he honestly missed the infant's howls because it meant the little one had died--and it wasn't even his own fear about what awaited him at the train's eventual destination. It was, in essence, what his mother had said: Someone had to survive this inferno and, indeed, it might as well be him.

And so when the train was starting to move once more (and, yes, there was that whistle), as a soldier was jogging beside the car and sliding the door shut--just as this middle-aged corporal of the Reich was using his own gimpy legs to jump back onto the train-- Uri acted as if he were merely tossing one more pail of waste into the woods and weeds that lined the tracks. But this time he allowed his body to follow his arms. He landed on his side, drenching his shirt and his face in diarrheic muck, and rolled into the brush. He heard the guard screaming at him, the train accelerating. Almost simultaneously he was aware of the crackle of gunfire and felt something stinging his arm. But he knew they weren't about to stop the train for one shit-covered Jew, and the guard wasn't about to remain behind and miss the trip east. And so he kept pinwheeling, spinning like a rolling pin amid shrubs and high grass and spring weeds and then, much to his relief, among actual trees. There he stood and he started to run, and he didn't stop until the sound of the train (and its infernal whistle) had receded far into the distance.

He had no idea where he was, but he was nowhere near a railway station or a town and that was probably a pretty good sign. He leaned against what he thought, in the dusk, was an oak tree, and looked at his arm. His shirtsleeve was sliced open and his upper arm was bleeding, but the bullet had just grazed him. It was actually his right hip that hurt like hell. And his knees. Clearly he had banged up his hip and his knees when he'd fallen. Well, he thought, that's what you get when you dive from a rolling, accelerating train.

But, initially, he was still very glad that he had.

It was only after he had caught his breath and begun to concentrate on the sounds of the odd and unfamiliar animals he heard all around him--owls and bats and somewhere not terribly far away, a wolf--that he began to fear that he just might have deserted his family. Rebekah. Yes, she was tall and pretty, but she was only fourteen. And perhaps because there had been a child, another girl, born between him and his sister who had died within days of her birth, he and his parents had always doted on Rebekah to the point that she was really rather helpless. And what if she was on that train, in one of the other cars? His parents, too? The thought left him a little sickened, and he wasn't sure now what he would do next. He was, he realized, worse than a stranger in a strange land. He was a Jew in the east. And so the very first thing he did was to rip his star from his shirt. He'd figure out the rest--clothes, a name, a ration card for food--after he'd gotten some sleep.

as the emmerich family was preparing to leave the estate--Kaminheim was their name for their home, because the house had so many fireplaces, some of them the height and width of a pony--much to Anna's astonishment, Mutti was actually dusting. And, with the cook--the lone servant who remained--mopping the floor. And then beating throw rugs outside on the terrace in the icy January air. Apparently she believed that someday they might return, and then they would whisk the crisp white sheets off the couches and chairs--a magician's reveal--and their life would resume as if they had only been away on a holiday.

Anna presumed that her mother had been disabused of this notion by now, as they trekked through the snow in the woods and away from the caravan of refugees, trying to catch up to Helmut.

But perhaps not. This was a woman, after all, who had always maintained a completely illogic faith in her fuhrer and a naive ability to compartmentalize what she deemed his good and his bad attributes. Back in 1940, Anna recalled, the very summer when Jewish friends of her parents from Danzig would appear, homeless, on their doorstep, Mutti had insisted on hanging in the parlor the signed, framed photo she owned of Hitler. They had taken the Jewish family in without a moment's hesitation, and Mutti had seen no inconsistency in celebrating the fuhrer and offering shelter to her friends. Even now, after Soviet shells had pummeled her brother's estate a mere twenty-five kilometers farther east, she could still sound like a star-struck little girl when she talked of Hitler's blue eyes, or the entire afternoon she had spent on the Schlossplatz in 1940 because the man was staying at the Hotel Bellevue and she was hoping to steal a glance of him. She hadn't been alone. There had been very big crowds that day--including Mutti and her sister-in-law and some other women from the corner of Poland that, thanks to Hitler, recently had been returned to Germany--and they hadn't been disappointed. They had gotten to stand within yards of their leader when he had walked from the hotel to the Cafe Weber; they had, as one, thanked him for reuniting them with their country.