Displaced Persons

A
JEEP OF
B
RITISH SOLDIERS
dropped him and Fishl at the edge of a large town, with a map, tins of food, half a loaf of bread, and a number of little amenities. Cigarettes. Almost better, a toothbrush for each of them. Identity papers, protected by a brown envelope. Pens. He could feel the shape of the good one in his breast pocket. He felt wary and afraid but almost relieved to be away from the soldiers, at least until they arrived at the refugee assembly center. It would have been better to be among the Americans, who had liberated him. He was not sure about the British, who shouted at him as if he were deaf, or a donkey. He could not yet speak the language, but he was not a donkey. He was not a donkey, although at times he still felt himself to be a zebra, what they called the men who had nothing but their striped prisoners’ uniforms. He wore clean clothes on his narrow shoulders, having organized for himself a used suit from an acquaintance who worked in the storehouse of clothing
in the abandoned camp. He no longer looked like an animal. He no longer looked, but he felt: he was a zebra.

They shuffled through the gravel near a large villa, empty and quiet, perhaps belonging to a former
Kommandant.
Late spring rains had settled the dust from the rubble, making the roads easier to walk past the long gardens and toward the forest. It seemed to him they were walking quickly, but the sound of his footsteps came at a labored pace. His shoes were hard, their bottoms thick. He had hammered scraps of stolen rubber onto the wooden soles, for himself and for Fishl too. Still he could feel the sharp outlines of stone under his feet.

But the shoes were to him better than bread. At the thought of bread he felt his right knee tremble a little, then steady itself. These shoes could bring him to bread, could bring him to any provisions he could organize, could bring him to a resting place in the assembly center for the stateless, a day’s walk away. To clear his mind from bread he pressed his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He let it hang from his mouth. He could wait before using one of his matches. Saliva welled around the corners of the cigarette, his stomach began to burn again with the sharp tang of hunger, but still it felt good to have something in his mouth, the almost-taste of the tobacco making him walk faster. In a moment Fishl too would take out a cigarette, and they would share a match.

They walked along the town outskirts, along the border between trees and road, ready to flee into the woods if anyone came after them. Newly liberated, this town, the British expanding their authority, the towns people quiet in their houses, afraid. He liked the idea of Germans waiting inside, not knowing who would knock at the door, drag the man of the house, or the mother or the child, into army headquarters for questioning or punishment. He liked the idea. Still the quietness bothered him. He and Fishl saw a young boy with a large dog playing in the road ahead of them. Without speaking to
each other, they began moving deeper into the woods, walking slowly among the trees, seeing the road but not visible from it.

Under a wide plum tree they stopped and leaned against the bark. Now came time to strike the match, and the two of them inhaled the tobacco almost in unison. He looked at his fingers, holding the cigarette away from his mouth. His hands, always slender, looked not brittle but merely thin. Yes, he was stronger now. His hair grew back thick and dark, still short but beginning to curl. He felt the roughness around his chin and cheeks, and felt a shiver of relief: the British had let him use their basin for a shave only yesterday, and already he needed another. It was a healthy man who needed a shave every day.

He looked at Fishl pushing the last bit of the cigarette between his teeth. Perhaps another hour, and they would start to eat a portion of the provisions they had collected from the British. It was important to save. A man knew how to save, how to organize, how to maneuver. He knew Fishl thought the same way. Before the war, he and Fishl had lived in neighboring cities, and their girlfriends had been close; they knew each other only slightly then, trading pleasantries in the same dialect of Yiddish. But now it was as if they had had the same parents, the same home. They were like brothers, a new kind of brother.

J
UST THREE WEEKS BEFORE
the liberation, convinced they were all to be shot, the two of them had cut through the electrical wire near their work barracks during a blackout and escaped to hide in a deserted farmhouse, one sleeping while the other kept watch. In the beginning, still weak, they had hidden in the barn of a farmhouse until the house was requisitioned by the soldiers, Americans with their shocked faces, equipped with a soldier or two who could translate from German. It was rumored that soon the Russians would come, hunting for women. He and Fishl knew to leave. They had refused
to return to the camp, converted from a prison into a refuge. Instead the two of them had moved to the floor of an empty schoolhouse, sleeping, with dozens of others, men and women together, in disinfected military blankets. The soldiers fed them. Not too much, but more than the liberated prisoners received in the camp. People there still died every day, hungry, sick, encircled by wire and guarded by the conquering armies afraid to let the prisoners out into the world, afraid the hunger and sickness would spread and infect. But from the moment the liberators arrived he made sure they understood what he was made of. He would work and learn. He made chess pieces from discarded bits of metal found in the former camp factory, and sold them in sets to the young soldiers, who drew out the grids of a chess game on a bread board or lumber scrap taken from a German family. Yes, a human could make something out of anything, could make the ugliest of objects into a source of pleasure. He still ate the bread they gave him too quickly, he still made a rattle when he scraped the bottom of his bowl with his army-issued spoon, he still craved what the soldiers themselves ate, their meat and their eggs and their milk, but he knew he was coming alive.

W
ALKING AMONG THE DARK
trees, they heard a steady rhythm behind them, footsteps, the slow turn of wheels. They turned. Two men in wool coats, seeming even from a distance to sweat, each dragging behind him a loaded wagon. The wheels of the wagons caught on the tree roots, and the men pulled with their necks bent forward, their shoulders straining ahead of their legs, bodies at a diagonal. They looked like children, small boys playing at a race. But they were men. Not strong, but men. Middle-aged, perhaps office workers, functionaries, Germans.

The Germans stopped moving. He could feel Fishl’s breath turn
warmer next to him. An idea with no words ran through his head and pushed his legs forward. He saw Fishl move his hand into his pocket, the pocket with the knife. They went slowly toward the Germans, and he could feel the same rage pulsing between him and Fishl, and without even opening their mouths to speak they knew they were right: the wagons were filled with valuables, money, bagfuls of reichsmarks, gold and silver finery. The men trembled and begged as they gave up their watches, their rings, and their stolen jewels, they looked at the two thin Jews as if it were they, he and Fishl, who were killers. Even as he concentrated his mind on keeping the fury inside his body, he could understand how funny it was, these men in their uniforms, fat men, afraid of former prisoners who perhaps could denounce them, prisoners with one knife between them, liberated prisoners still in their cage of hunger.

In one of the men’s coats—he and Fishl let them depart with only their jackets—was a velvet pouch. They leaned against a birch and opened the soft bag. Two dozen tiny stones.

Is it something? Fishl said. Can you see?

It is something, he answered. In the first work camp a cutter, an older man whose labor he had done on occasion, had taught him to recognize cracks and facets in a diamond. They had been able to keep some of their possessions then, and the man had taken out his loupe and his dead wife’s ring and made him understand how to see. Now in the forest, he and Fishl could only guess. But would men wear wool coats in spring for a velvet pouch of glass?

He took twelve of the diamonds and replaced them in the little bag. Fishl wrapped the other twelve in a scrap of paper, wrapped the paper in a handkerchief, pushed the handkerchief into the bottom of his rucksack. They rolled money into their rucksacks, into their new coats, into their shoes. Now it was he and Fishl spilling over with dirty gold, possessions stripped from the living as they were pushed through the gate of the dead. Spilling over with dead men’s money,
dead women’s jewels. He and Fishl might be thin, they might think every hour of the bread they kept in their rucksacks, but already the hunger felt less like a stabbing and more like an itch, for here was the promise of food and more food, for weeks, perhaps even months. They were heavy, solid. Not so heavy that they could not walk—how ignorant these Germans were, how unschooled in the methods of carrying the world on their bodies—but enough so they could not run. The functionaries had run. But he and Fishl would stroll, coats over their arms, walking along the inner perimeter of the woods like two university students observing nature, breathing the green air. They had money. They had money, and they were together. Money could sometimes take the place of force and strength. The fleeing Germans had been right to try and hold on to their bloodstained gold; it could help them. But look how quickly they had given it up!

I
N THE REMAINS OF
a bombed-out train station at dusk they found an old woman begging for food. Papers and gold safely tucked into their clothes, they showed her their tins of fish and meat from the British and followed her to her house. She showed them to a large empty room upstairs. There was room for both of them in the bed, and they lay down, each covered with a blanket.

All day and all evening the excitement of ownership had made his skin tingle. But now the tingling had become an itch, an uncomfortable dryness on his back and arms. A small chill came over him, and he folded his knees close to his chest.

Fishl, he said.

But Fishl was already breathing in short gasps and snores. Fishl could sleep through fear and thirst. It was a gift, a great piece of luck, a talent, to stop oneself from reflecting and thinking, to conquer the dread with a command to the body: sleep, sleep. His back pressed into
the thin mattress, and he breathed in and out. It was good to have a bed again, after the few days in the British military headquarters, where each of them had been given a cot for a few nights, then sent on their way.

He turned on his side, curled his spine. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he looked at the dull wall. A framed drawing of a tulip hung above the chest of drawers, the only decoration. The petals of the tulip were open, one petal almost falling away from the flower. The old woman had a garden. She was afraid to have men in the house. She had walked behind them after opening the door to the house, waited until they climbed the stairs before she herself came up. They had arrived just before nightfall, and at the corner of the road they had seen three houses crushed inward, the skeletons of rooms only half-standing. But this part of the street was untouched. Yet it seemed no one else came to give her food. He shook his head in anger at himself—should he feel sorry for this woman, alone but safe? The walls of her home were still intact and her blankets had not yet been sold for food—this was not a suffering to pity. His grandmother should have had such a decision to make, his father should have suffered so! No, he was not sorry. He thought of the food the old woman would cook them in the morning, perhaps coffee and the fish warmed from the tin. They would trade for her, they would keep their part of the bargain.

Sleep, sleep. In camp he had not been able to fall asleep quickly, the constant fear of the next day troubling him into the night. But now, even with an empty day before him, he felt the same inability to translate his fatigue into rest. Fishl’s snores had faded into strong breaths. He tucked his hand underneath his trousers, pushed his fingers into the hidden pocket, felt for the cotton bag he had sewn to the inside. The cotton was still there, its slim contents pressing against his thigh. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, the cloth warming his hand. A cotton strip of handkerchief, that was all, but it held his most precious possessions. Photographs, one of his mother and
one of his father. He liked to touch the handkerchief that protected them, but he did not want to squint in the dark. And they would be spoiled by their exposure to the damp air. He had taken them out so often that when he remembered his mother and father now, he saw them as they were in the pictures, their bodies creased and wrinkled, their skin the color of brown stone, their mouths steady and grave. No, he would not take them out. One had to be careful, not greedy, even with a photograph. One survived a prison if one kept his secrets hidden, as Joseph had survived his prison in Egypt, emerging to bring his family out of hunger, to see his father, who wept that the favored son was alive. There was no seeing his father now, he knew. But he had had contact with his sister in 1943, and with his second brother a short time earlier. Even a cousin—his aunt’s boys, they were strong ones—perhaps they had come out.

He tapped his pocket again. He would give away any of his gold and stones and money, to hold on to those photographs. Still the papers and the money gave him the means to sell and to travel. The photographs might help him sleep, but the money would help him find. He dropped his arms along his sides, feeling the bones of his legs through his trousers.

S
TRIPES OF LIGHT CAME
through the window, and he opened his eyes to a prison cell, cement walls, a damp and tattered blanket around his chest. He did not know how he had come there, but when he turned he could see Fishl lying next to him. He breathed out with relief. Then he tapped at his trouser leg, felt nothing, tapped at his breast pocket, felt no lump from a makeshift pocket, and he sat up in fear. They were gone, how could they be gone? He remembered a word he had learned from the soldiers in English:
jail!
Had he been searched by the British, the Americans, whoever had given this punishment?
But to the new soldiers the contents of his pockets were not valuable. Just to him. Fishl, he cried, Fishl, but Fishl was silent. The air was cool, but when he felt his own neck, it was coated with sweat, and he could sense the stench of bodies—where? outside?—seeping into him, staining his skin. They could be here for weeks, rotting from hunger, shitting and eating out of the same bowl. He heard the step of the guards. Perhaps these wardens would give them other clothes, new prisoners’ clothes, take away from them the stolen wool trousers and jackets meant to make them look like ordinary citizens, humans. Yes, perhaps even these weak disguises would be taken, and they would be left with nothing but their battered faces and worn bodies as identification. He turned over on his side and watched a brown beetle make its way through the damp mud in the corner. The beetle moved slowly, with an even, careful rhythm. It buried itself inside a pile of dark sand, emerged again, then disappeared behind a crevice in the stone wall. The beetle would escape. The beetle would be free. He stretched out his hand toward the beetle and saw his arm was still covered by his own stolen jacket. This was something. Still he knew they would tear the clothes from him, tear them into strips for the hanging, and he pushed the blanket away from his body—let them take it! Let them take it already!

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