The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (38 page)

“They want us to undress, Bubbeh,” the woman said.

Magda stared at her. “But—”

The woman smiled, and something in her smile made Magda wonder if this woman was insane. It was such a calm smile.

“Here, Grandmother.” She unbuttoned Magda’s skirt and blouse, and Magda stood like a child and let her do it. All around them the people were taking off their clothes. “We’re going to shower.”

The woman undressed herself as quickly as she had undressed Magda. She hung all the clothes neatly and then took Magda’s shoes and tied the laces together and hung them up on another hook. She tied her shoes up and hung them with Magda’s. The room was filled with naked people, and they stood quietly now, some of them trying to cover their genitals, most standing with no modesty, stunned and not knowing what to do.

“I hope the water is hot,” Magda said to the woman, who again smiled her gentle smile. Magda was relieved that her voice was clear enough to understand. She would recover from the train and work. If you could work, the Nazis would let you live.

“Remember the number on our hook,” Magda said. “We’ll have to dress quickly if they don’t give us uniforms.”

The woman put her arm around Magda’s shoulders. Then the shouting began again. They were herded into another room.

“Look! Water taps. We can drink. And nozzles to shower.”

The woman tightened her arm around the older wo man’s shoulders. Magda tried to support herself, but her feet stumbled over each other.

“I need a drink,” she said, but the woman was staring back at the door where they had entered, and she tightened her grip even more. The door closed with a great crash of the heavy steel, and Magda heard the bolt slam down. Then she heard something above their heads. Voices.

“What are they saying?” she asked.

“I think they said ‘Give them something to chew on.’ I’m not sure.”

Magda heard the sound of truck engines outside. They were revved up until the roar filled the room. She heard a rattling sound in the metal pillar next to where they stood. Pellets poured into the pillar from above and struck the perforated metal sides like gravel, and then she couldn’t breathe. The air was full of something that burned her skin and lungs. She kept opening her mouth and taking air in, but the air wasn’t air anymore.

The room was full of screaming. Magda was on the floor and others climbed on top of her, trying to get to the fresh air left at the ceiling. The shrieking and howling was muffled outside by the engines of the transport trucks which revved to drown out the sound of the people being gassed.

Pictures flew into Magda’s mind. The giant hornbeam trees. A cup of water from the creek, trembling under her lips. Faces flipped through her mind like a book of pictures being thumbed. Brother. Sister. Grandmother. Mother, and the face of a child. A boy. Curly hair dyed blond. Black eyes. The flickering vision of life stopped with the boy, and his dark eyes stared into her own as she lay trampled and gasping, and then she was dead.

The mass of naked bodies became a mound that trembled only occasionally. Arms stretched out, fingers reaching for nothing, legs akimbo, heads thrown back, tongues out and eyes staring, the shivering mass lay still, and the room was silent. For a few minutes they lay there, and then the SS doctor, watching from his peephole, gave the signal to turn on the ventilators that pumped the gas from the room. The air cleared, but the men who came in, pulling at the mass of tangled corpses, wore masks. There were pockets between the bodies that still held gas.

Magda’s body was under many others. A man leaned over her, pulled open her mouth and stared inside. There were almost no teeth, and no gold. He cut her hair with a slash of the dull razor and put the white locks in a bag. He turned to the man next to the old woman and smiled. Two teeth were gold. The camp worker knocked them out with two blows and looped a strap of leather around the man’s wrist. This gassed Jew was too bald to bother cutting his fringe of hair.

The worker dragged the body with some difficulty to the elevator and went back at a run for Magda. She was as light as a child. He threw her on top and the elevator moved up.

The upper room was trembling with the noise of the flames. The fires that burned night and day were stoked with such violence, the ovens had become living creatures that roared and rumbled. The heat was so oppressive that the soot-stained workers felt battered by it.

A camp inmate threw Magda’s body off the top of the pile of corpses packed into the elevator and it fell onto a metal stretcher. Working as fast as he could, he dragged off a man, almost as fleshy as a normal person, and threw him on top of the old woman.

The orders had been explicit. The best load for rapid burning was one fat body that burned well, one starved that couldn’t burn much, and a child. It had been worked out and was proven to be the most efficient.

The camp inmate didn’t stop to wipe off the sweat that ran into his eyes. He tugged at the bodies. There weren’t many children anymore. Most were dead already, he guessed. He wondered if there were any children left in the world, but he stopped his mind from the thought. Thoughts were a luxury that led to death.

Not finding a child, he threw a small woman onto the stretcher and another worker grabbed the end of it. At a run, they took it and set it on rollers in front of the oven door. Five ovens in a line. Three compartments in each red mouth.

The oven door cranked upward like a metal curtain. Another inmate, as thin as the corpses he burned, shoved coke under the grate. The two workers pushed the metal stretcher into the roar of the oven, the flames so hot that their eyes dried from the wall of heat.

The stretcher lay on the grate, and in a smooth movement, one worker pushed a metal fork against the bodies. His partner pulled out the stretcher with a hard jerk, and the fork dug into the flesh, keeping the bodies inside the oven, letting them fall onto the grate.

The door rattled down. There was no time to rest. The men ran with the stretcher to the elevator and began to pull out more bodies. Some days it seemed the whole world was in line downstairs, waiting to come up on the elevators.

The short white hair left on Magda’s head lit around her face and burned first. It was a puff of light for a second, and then the skin began to burn. It took only twenty minutes for her shoulders and torso and legs and her pitiful, twisted feet to turn to ash. The heat was so great that even the bones turned to ash and only an occasional tiny lump showed that the ash had been a person.

It was a while before the ash was raked from beneath the grate. Magda’s ashes were raked out and mingled with the ashes of hundreds of others. And she had one last journey before the wheel of her life in this world stopped completely.

Her ashes were dumped with the ashes of thousands of others into a truck and covered so they wouldn’t blow out. The truck drove off, one in a long line of trucks, to the banks of the river Vistula. There the workers shoveled and dumped the ashes on the water, but unlike a casting of bread onto water, no sins were forgiven by this act.

Magda, that which had been Magda, swirled into the air and fell lightly, drifting with the breeze which occasionally had a hint in it of the coming spring. The white ash fell on the surface of the river and lay for a moment, and then was gradually moistened by the water and slipped under the surface and washed down to be caught and moved in strong sweeps of current, icy with the runoff of snow, to disappear.

The men threw the shovels in the trucks. It was late in the day, but that did not mean that the work was over. There was no end to the work of the furnaces. The ovens had to be fed day and night or grow cold and useless. Any break in the burning was inefficient.

The trucks turned back toward the long brick buildings and the setting sun reflected in an orange glitter on the dormer windows as they drew close. The chimneys cast their smoke up into the sky, and the workers, inmates of Birkenau, saw none of it anymore.

They sat hunched on the floor of the truck and knew that they must not see it because if they saw this thing and thought about it, it would begin to eat at them. The furnaces would work their way inside them and char them from the inside out. Then they would weaken and be thrown into the fire by their fellow workers who had not looked at the chimneys.

But above the buildings, had they only dared to look, the air was disturbed, beaten, torn apart. The waves of heat lifted into the sky, and some said it was the natural dispersing of the heat from the ovens. The waves of hot air moved over the camp night and day, and one man in the truck weakened when they were nearly back at the buildings. He looked up.

He saw the dark smoke and the columns of vibrating heat in the sky, and the thought came to him that the moving air was the souls of all the people. There were so many of them going back to God, so quickly, that the air rippled, the smoke tossed by the heat of their souls rising.

The man shut his eyes. He knew that this single thought had made him fuel for the ovens. But he was too weakened, and he gave up and allowed himself to think of life before, the sweet face of his wife turned toward the child, a meal on the table, and then he looked up again at the chimneys and thought he could already see his own soul above the roof, rising in the hot air. He knew that he was a dead man, but he smiled and just sat smiling as the truck stopped, and all the others climbed out and began to run toward the fires.

Leaving

“
M
agda will worry. We have to go back to the hut.”

“The hut’s gone. They took Magda.”

Gretel shook her head. “She’ll be back soon.”

Hansel stood and listened. A raven’s call rattled over his head, and the creek gurgled. His back hurt, and the red marks on Gretel’s legs must hurt too, but she didn’t seem to notice it.

“You have to shut up, Gretel. You can’t make any noise unless I say you can. Come on.”

She took his hand, and he led her back toward the hut. When they drew close, the smell of burning was heavy in the air. Hansel crept from tree to tree. Then he could see the place where the hut had been. There was a circle of burned wood, no flames now, but the pieces of charred wood glowed red and the circle smoked. The huge iron stove was the only thing left. It lay on its side where it had fallen when the floor under it had burned through.

Magda had told him that he’d have to be the older one. He had to think now for both of them. He looked back. Gretel had stayed behind a tree and was invisible.

“Gretel, you can come out now.”

“I didn’t make any sound. We have to go home to Magda now.”

“The stove is all that’s left.”

“That’s not Magda’s hut.”

“They burned it. They took Magda. We hid in the oven.” He was shouting.

“I was in the oven. She wanted to cook us. Why did Magda do that?”

“You’re talking crazy. Gretel, please don’t be—” Hansel sat down and moaned.

“Don’t be sad. We’ll go home and Magda will have soup. We can’t sit here.”

Gretel was right. They couldn’t sit there. The soldiers might come looking for them. He glanced back toward the creek. The food was at the hidey-hole, and Telek and Nelka would come looking for them soon. There was nothing here that they could use, but he pulled the brush away from a fallen log and uncovered a basket. He took out a small bottle, pulled the cork, and sniffed. It was empty, but it still smelled of raspberry syrup. He sniffed deeply, remembering Magda using the syrup for Gretel when she was sick. Then he put the cork back in and slid the bottle carefully into the pocket of his coat.

“Come on, Gretel. Promise that you’ll do what I say.”

Gretel stopped walking and stood thinking. She had promised something once, but she couldn’t remember what the promise had been. “I promise I’ll do what you say. Really.” This time she’d do it right. She had done it wrong before.