Train to Budapest (7 page)

‘Here platform for selection. If you young, can work, this way; if you old, child, mother with children, that way, to gas. Here dead bodies burned. When too many deads and ovens full. Then more
ovens made, but later.’ He shows a photograph of corpses hurled at random into a ditch. The tangled limbs make it impossible to tell one body from another. Not even an orgy could entwine legs, arms, heads and pelvises like that. They look strikingly different from the other inmates, from those circulating like spectres in pyjamas looking for something to eat or queuing for roll call early in the morning. The dead are still full and firm, with prominent muscles. They were gassed at once on arrival and it is hard to know whether to grieve over their abrupt extinction or to rejoice that they were spared the torture of camp life.

Vienna. January ’42

Dear Amara, yesterday we opened the door to find two servants in uniform, complete with aprons. ‘We’ve come to clean the house for the new owners,’ they said. My mother, always polite, offered them coffee. ‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ she told them, and added, ‘there really must have been a misunderstanding; this is our house, my father bought it before I was born.’ ‘But now it has been assigned to Consul Schumacher and his family.’ ‘Please, madam, don’t insist, we’ll sort it all out, you’ll see.’ ‘Aren’t you Jews by the name of Orenstein?’ ‘Yes, but Austrians first and foremost, my father lost an arm in the Battle of the Kolubara during the First World War and the Emperor himself pinned a medal on his chest.’ ‘Your house has been requisitioned, here are the papers. You must move out by tomorrow. We start cleaning now.’

My mother made telephone calls in all directions but couldn’t reach any of her friends. Only an employee at the department of social administration who told her abruptly that her house had been requisitioned under the new anti-Jewish laws and assigned to an Aryan family by the name of Schumacher.

‘Please come back tomorrow,’ said my mother very politely. ‘You will find the house clean.’ The woman made a sign to her assistant and they left. Soon after the doorbell rang again. This time it was an SS squad. They searched the house saying they were looking for arms. Of course there were no arms. But when they left they took with them all my mother’s silver, jewellery and furs, an eighteenth-century Venetian mirror and a nineteenth-century English silver teapot.

By now Amara knows nearly all Emanuele’s letters by heart. The words of her little lover echo in her mind, his voice gradually growing more dry and desolate.

‘This, first gas chamber. This, second gas chamber. Here,
crematoriums one, two, three, four, five. Bodies gassed by pipe here for burning. Body in, smoke and ashes come out. One load every half hour. Here toilets and baths.’ The guide continues relentlessly, taking them rapidly from one part of the camp to another.

Łódź ghetto. February ’42

They knocked on the door of our house in Vienna at four in the morning. Gave us an hour to pack our bags. One case each, not more than three in all. But where are we going? No answer. They were impatient and bad-tempered. Papà and Mamma began arguing about what to put in the suitcases. Papà wanted to fill them with food. Mamma with clothes: rugs, warm coats. Her furs, jewels and money had already been taken by the other SS. When they came back after an hour we weren’t ready and they started shouting. Finally we left all loaded up; my father with a valuable mat under his arm and my mother with two cashmere jackets. But at the main door they took everything from us except the three cases. We were loaded onto a lorry and then a train. We had no idea where they were taking us. Four nights of hell in an armoured cattle-truck together with about a hundred other Austrian Jews and nothing to eat or drink. Luckily we’d brought some sausages and apples with us. My father kept saying: You see? You see I was right to bring food? We ate a sausage and an apple each, keeping the rest for later. But when we went to get more, Papà’s case was empty. One of those starving people had stolen the lot. Even the Prague ham, the hardboiled eggs, the bilberry liqueur and the biscuits. We were parched with thirst. We arrived dirty and thirsty. Where? At the Łódź ghetto, another Austrian told us in a whisper. Why there particularly? No answer. Only my mother kept asking questions and protesting. My father seemed more dead than alive. They assigned us to a small room in a crumbling building, on the second floor, in an apartment where four families were already living. Only one kitchen. One bath for everyone. Mamma started again on her long lament about her father having won a gold medal for military valour in the Battle of the Kolubara, but no one listened.

The only thing that matters here is survival. Thousands of Jews are wandering about searching for work and food. They start at five in the morning. Any job, no matter how badly paid, can help to buy bread. They are pale and have difficulty walking. Even the young ones. ‘When your face and your feet start swelling, you know you’re going to die,’ a boy called Stefan, to whom I had given a sweater for two kilos of potatoes, unexpectedly told me. Bread, said Stefan, costs twenty-five złotys a kilo. But they also accept marks which are worth twice as much as złotys. I’m writing to you with a pencil I stole from the directors’ office where Mamma dragged me while she was going on about it all being a misunderstanding and that we ought not to be here. This is how I met Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, a strong man with glasses and a hat. Compared to the others we see around, hunchbacks with tuberculosis and legs reduced to sticks, he looks like a pasha. He too was forced to listen to the story of grandfather Georg Fink and the medal for military valour pinned to his chest by the Emperor. He didn’t bat an eyelid. But he then said very coldly that in the Łódź ghetto all are equal, that no one has any special privileges and that everyone has to work to earn the złotys they need to survive. Then he asked politely, ‘What skills do you have, madam?’ Mamma was so offended she couldn’t answer. But does she have any particular skills at all? Mr Rumkowski advised her to look for work in the textile factory where there are still a few places left for women, then shut the door on us.

Łódź ghetto. March ’42

A month has passed, I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any paper to write on. Now in our little room we also have Uncle Eduard, goodness knows how he came to end up with us. I’ve found a job in a carpenter’s shop. There’s always someone who wants a bedhead made into a table, or a shutter into a bench. Mamma didn’t go to the factory to begin with. But after starving for two weeks she made up her mind. Father is in bed with a fever. We hope it isn’t typhus. Lots of illnesses go around in the ghetto. Uncle Eduard hasn’t found any work. Four of us living in one small room is hell. I sleep on the floor on a shabby little mattress so short my legs stick out, Papà and Mamma make the best of a rickety sofa with exposed springs and Uncle Eduard spends the night on a camp bed. We do have a cooker but often there’s no gas. Worse still, there’s nothing to cook. The potatoes only lasted a few days. Now we’re waiting for Mamma’s first monthly pay packet which will give us thirty złotys to buy a little meat and some sugar for our tea. We still have half a jar of sugar left. The only thing they didn’t steal from Papà’s suitcase on the train. I earn five złotys a day. Butter costs twelve złotys, meat forty-five złotys a kilo. Today the temperature sank to seven degrees below zero. I curse myself for giving away my warmest sweater for two kilos of potatoes. I won’t say I wish you were here with me. That would be blasphemy. But sometimes at night I dream I’m in Florence in our tree, filling my stomach with cherries. Ciao, Emanuele.

9

Uncle Eduard hides the pieces of bread Mamma and I steal under the cover on his camp bed. Mutti doesn’t complain, but says the war will be over in a few months. We just have to stick it out. Every morning at six she walks to the textile and uniform factory on Drewnowska Street. She puts on her apron and starts her sewing machine. Mamma is showing a courage I never expected of her. But Papà seems desperate. He can’t get over the fact he ever left Rifredi. He spends half his time in bed. Uncle Eduard was deported on the same train as us and we never knew. He wanders about the ghetto picking up cigarette-ends. But he says there are no longer many to find. People have no money for cigarettes. What most upsets me is losing my books. I used to have more than a hundred. Most got left behind in the house at Schulerstrasse in Vienna. I only managed to keep the three or four I threw into my suitcase at the last minute. Picked up at random. Now I read them again and again. Dickens’
Great Expectations
,
Pinocchio
and
The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Łódź ghetto. March ’42

Dear Amara. Today my father came home with three passports bought from forgers. He used the last of our hidden money to buy them. Mamma screamed at him that he was mad. He’s convinced we’ll be able to use them to get out of the ghetto and go to America. But everyone knows all passports have been cancelled and no one is allowed to leave the Łódź ghetto for any reason. With or without a passport. Uncle Eduard is ‘going off his head’ as Mamma puts it. He collects fag-ends in the city and buries them under a loose floorboard. The other day he killed a mouse and said: you lot can eat this. I’ll stick to pork.’ But there aren’t any pigs round here. The only little pig in this house is made of pottery and has a slot in its back for coins but it’s empty now and its gentle sugary pink face looks over at the window with a disheartened expression. ‘He’s been driven mad by fear,’ says my father, teasing him. But Uncle Eduard doesn’t smile. ‘We’ll all end up dead, all of us dead!’ he keeps shouting as he collects crumbs of bread round the house, hiding them in his pockets. The other day my mother sniffed the air and asked, ‘What’s this stink?’ Then she discovered it was half a turnip rotting under Uncle Eduard’s camp bed and giving off an unbearable stench.

It’s snowing. It’s cold. I sleep in my coat. Mamma looks like a whale, wearing all the clothes, both summer and winter ones, that she brought with her, three pairs of thick socks, and a now almost hairless fox muff that she wears on one arm even while cooking. The butter’s finished. Lard costs ten złotys and we can’t afford it. My father has run out of tobacco for his pipe. He’s started smoking birch leaves which makes a nice smell in the house. But it also makes him cough like a consumptive.

Yesterday I saw two SS men beating up a boy who had no yellow star on his coat collar. The boy showed them that he had his star sewn in full view on the lapel of his jacket, which he was wearing under his coat. But they went on hitting his head just the same. The boy was holding his head in his hands. One ear began spurting blood which stained the snow all round. A very thin and decrepit dog came from God knows where and began licking the blood up as though it were redcurrant syrup.

Amara tries to imagine Emanuele in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto in Łódź, with the snow falling. She has always loved snow. It softens and refines houses and countryside. But what can it have been like in that dirty and overcrowded ghetto?

Łódź. March ’42

I’ve found some paper. I swapped a silk handkerchief of Mamma’s for an exercise book. Writing to you is like writing to the whole world. But I’ve no money for a stamp. And in any case I don’t know if the post will take letters sent abroad. When we first came to the ghetto letters did go off. And sometimes they arrived, even if half blocked out. But not now, no longer. We’re shut in, closed in a trap. But I’m writing to you all the same. One day you’ll read the letters I’m writing in this exercise book. Or at least I hope so. The ghetto’s getting more and more crowded. More Jews are arriving, some from Holland, some from Hungary. Bringing with them the odd bundle, or suitcases tied with string. Many have no shoes, just hungry eyes. An organisation here looks after them. Gives them shelter and something to eat. But only for the first few days, after that they have to fend for themselves, find some workshop to employ them so they can earn the złotys they need to buy a little bread and margarine or barley coffee and sugar which today costs forty złotys a kilo. Yesterday my mother gave her gold wedding ring for three pig’s feet and two kilos of potatoes. When Papà heard they are deporting those without work, he too started looking for something to do. Yesterday nothing, but today he helped carry bricks for a bricklayer with frostbitten hands. Luckily he still has his pigskin gloves and carried bricks all day for seven złotys.

I’ve lost my job at the carpenter’s. There are too many of you, said the manager. There are fifteen of us boys and he can’t afford to pay us all. All the same, he let us have a portion of soup at midday. I don’t want to think my family have been stupid. I don’t want to think that. But I do think it sometimes, even if I don’t want to. The stupid patriotic idea of returning to Nazi Vienna when everyone else was trying to get away from it. Why am I not with you now? I see our cherry tree again, I remember our games, I can feel your hand again in mine. The thought of you distracts me and helps to keep me going.

Łódź. April ’42

Dear Amara. I’m writing to you from the shelter in the cellar of our block. There are hundreds of us crushed in here. Someone is singing a mournful dirge. A child is crying. Shots can be heard from far away. The good thing about a crowd is that it creates heat. It’s warmer here than in the flat. I’m writing by the wavering smoky light of an oil lamp. The pencil is still working. My letter is in this exercise book. It’ll be easier to write your name and your address on it and stuff it into a hole in the wall I recently discovered. Maybe it had something to do with the chimney of a stove that’s no longer here. It had been stopped up with a piece of wood and whitewashed over. But I managed to get it open with a penknife. I’ll leave my memories there for you, if we don’t manage to get out alive. Otherwise, if the war ends in a few months, I’ll bring it to you myself. How wonderful it would be to hug you again! An epidemic of typhus has broken out in the ghetto. There’s no medicine and people are dying of fever. It’s a miracle none of us is ill. Mother says all you need is to keep a pad soaked in vinegar between your lips. I’m not going to be able to stand the stink of vinegar much longer. Yesterday my father found some eggs for sale at a fair price. He brought them for my mother as a present, very proud of himself. How small and light they are! she cried. When she opened them she found nothing inside. Someone had pierced them with a needle and sucked out the contents and then sold them like this, empty. If you looked closely you could see the holes made by the needle, stopped up with transparent wax. My mother wept in despair. Those eggs had been bought with my złotys. Three days’ work gone up in smoke.