The Belief in Angels (52 page)

And I can live with these feelings.

I’ve decided I can live with this.

Szaja Trautman, 34 years | August 5th, 1944

THE BLACK SEA

A few moments before 1:00 a.m., twenty-five miles northeast of Igneada, Turkey
I CARRIED PIETER’S body from the hospital like a stick and piled it in a ditch with a thousand other sticks. This became my job in those last days. We piled them precisely, like railroad ties alongside a track bed.

My mind had already split so many times I knew nothing remained inside my head but tiny bits. I lay down there in the ditch, in the dusk, with the dead Russian soldier Pieter, praying for my own death. I expected the guards to discover and kill me, but the guards had gone on. They had failed to notice my presence in the pile. There is no surprise in this, only an empty acceptance. They wouldn’t notice. The guards’ eyes crawled away from what is left of our faces—our bones. Without fat and muscle we all looked so similar.

Most of the Jews and other prisoners had been killed or marched away to other camps months before.

There in the ditch, the smell of rotting flesh filled my nostrils. The frozen, muddy earth chilled my body to a numb weightlessness. Time opened and I became lost, but Pieter’s voice pulled me back to awareness.

Here, he said.

Pieter’s mind remained whole, even after the typhoid delirium, even in death. He could conceive and grow an idea.

He shared his thoughts—at first whispers, then fully-sounded words.

The voice of a man who still craved life.

He spoke directly to me. He knew my name. He knew my family. He knew everything I had forgotten.

We made our deal. In exchange for my body, I let him gather and sort the bits of my mind that remained. He told me he would invent the pieces that had been lost. He would direct my thoughts.

My body is a coffin for my soul, Pieter informed me.

It is his idea to hide his naked body under another’s after I had clothed my body in his uniform. He directed me to take off the bandage on his foot and wrap my own. The Russians had butchered Pieter’s foot when he defected.

I climbed, with Pieter’s whole mind, out of the ditch.

At any second, I expected, I would be shouted at, found out—killed on my way back to the camp hospital in Field II. I waited for the bullets as I found my way, as I entered the hospital door. No bullets came. No one noticed that Pieter’s hospital uniform had returned from the pile of sticks.

Then I lay in a moldy hospital bed, listening as the machine guns kill the last of the Jews. Hundreds of starving Jews are shot in those last days. These are the same Jews who had piled the dead bodies of other Jews, the Russian prisoners who are dying of typhus, and the German guards, who started to turn on each other in those last days.

I should have been one of them.

I found Pieter Aleksandrov’s name on the papers in his hospital uniform. But I know he may have been another man. Most of the Russian soldiers there in the camp hospital are defectors like me.

War changes a man’s name.

It changes like blood congealing, Pieter thought.

Names change, just as allegiances change, during war.

Iberkumen
—survival. My father’s word. A word from another lifetime. Another past.

But I have no past. Only one goal. Survival.

I stand on the deck of the Mefkura. On this ship are Jewish refugees, most of them camp survivors and war orphans. I have been free a few weeks.

The Mefkura set off from Constanta. We are headed to Palestine by way of Istanbul.

By way of any means now.

It is past midnight. We are fourteen miles off the coast of Turkey. I still call myself Pieter.

I am an officer on this ship.

I wear another uniform and hold a position. I have become a Romanian crew-member.

I am fluid as the water we are floating on.

I am thinking what must be done now to survive.

We have mere minutes to save ourselves from the attack.

To my right several officers lower the boat.

The lifeboat.

To the left … the stairs lead down to the hold, to the sleeping ones who won’t have lifeboats, who don’t know what we are about to do.

The ones who don’t know what is about to happen.

The boat is life.

I am choosing life, Pieter thinks as I step down the ladder rung by rung.

I help to row now. I am rowing away from death.

I wonder how many strokes to safety.

My heart—no, the place where my heart should be—has phantom pains. My heart lies in a ditch with a thousand sticks. It is beating there still. It could be rescued at another time by another person, but not by me.

This thought makes me want to retch. I do, quietly and swiftly, over the edge of the lifeboat. The officer next to me leans in. “Seasick, eh?”

Isaak. I think the man’s name is Isaak.

Is this a Jewish name? Or German?

Save yourself. Save yourself.

Then another voice. A woman’s voice.

Save the part of yourself you need to stay alive
.

The Mefkura floats on the horizon, a ghostly gray silhouette shimmering in the light of a full moon. How beautiful the ship looks floating there.

There are two more schooner ships somewhere out there, traveling with us on our voyage to the Promised Land.

Two ships also filled with survivors.

I taste bile on my tongue again.

Then it happens.

A flare illuminates the boat beneath the moon. The quiet of the oars’ in … out … shatters.

First the scream.

A piercing scream flies by us and crashes out against the ship with a huge booming and splintering.

The sound of a thousand sticks breaking.

The sight is terrifying. The explosion lights up the shards of boat that are their own missiles now, shooting out in every direction. Firelit and flying, sending arcs of death shooting out into the sea.

The sudden movement of the rowboat.

Geferlekh
—too close.

The boat hurtles backward from the blast and blows apart.

Slamming into the back of the rowboat, I feel bones breaking.

In this moment of shattering pain Pieter abandons me. He is, after all, a defector.

I feel the life painfully ripping out of me and imagine I see other, smaller boats around us.

I imagine I see soldiers in them, with their guns.

Then I see nothing.

I hear sounds of machine guns and people screaming.

The SS. They have found me again. I died in the blast. I am back in the camp.

After the confinement of my soul, the bargain made with Pieter, all my survivals through the murders, the pogroms, the work camps, the trains, my imprisonment in Majdanek, and the escape, I am back in the blackness with the SS.

I knew I would be punished for living through those horrors, but this? This is my punishment? My Hell?

Ah, so it is.

Then, I hear nothing.

September, 1944, Constanta, Turkey

The smell of something astringent.

Like the tonic my
foter
used to shave many years ago.

Foter.

Maybe I have gone to one of the heavens after all and the SS are the Hell I left.

Idel
is my next thought. “Where is Idel in this heaven? I am aching to see him.

Idel. I’ve not thought about you for many years, and the thought of you now breaks my mind apart.

Berl, Ruchel, Sura.

Breathe.

I cannot breathe.

You have no need for breath here.

Hants.

Soft hands almost touching me. Touching the air above what would be my skin if I am alive. Smoothing the air above my hair.

Whispering.

Whispering what? I cannot hear the words, merely the soft whispering around me.

Ahhhhh. Idel’s angel. You finally come. Interesting moment you have picked for my rescue.

I cannot feel my body. Cannot feel the physical. I am experiencing everything in my mind now. Everything that has been stopped, cut, consumed, bottled, bled, stomped, gutted, kicked, pressed upon, slashed.

Foter, you said this slash and burn is important for the survival of the crop. For the good of the inheritors. Slash and burn and there can be new.

I am screaming with the pain without my voice.

Please let me not feel this. It will kill me.

I remember I am already dead.

This is my Hell. To feel again.

The smell. The same smell and the whispers.

And the hants.

This time touching more on my body. I can feel these hands on my body and it cannot be an angel touching me there, on my
mi’leh.

I am in Hell and
sotn
will do what he wants with my privates. Like the boy, Stanoff, with the guards at Majdanek.

No, not that poor boy.

I witnessed the rape of a prisoner and his execution after. I never talked of it to anyone, of course. I had not known men could do this to other men. Would want to do this to another man.

You will not think of this now. You will not think of this again. I am still a virgin. I am thirty-four, but I have never kissed a girl. Simply held a hand.