Gone to Soldiers (113 page)

After the remaining women had stacked the warm and bleeding naked bodies with the wounded, the SS poured gasoline over them and set them afire. They began marching out into the streets of the city as the pungent black smoke blew into their lungs. The women were herded to the railroad, but it had been bombed. Wrecked locomotives lay on their sides. The tracks were splintered and hung crazily over craters. They were kept standing there waiting for some SS miracle. Then they were marched back, faster than before, the guards shouting mach schnell, mach schnell, all through the city again so that by evening they had reached the far suburbs.

There they were herded into a deserted warehouse and locked in. No food came. During the night it rained and they were able to catch rusty water in the makeshift bowls they always carried, through the hundreds of leaks in the corrugated roof. They were wet to their fleshless bones and cold and hungry, but at least for a few hours, they were relieved of raging thirst. In the morning they were routed out to march double time.

The days soon began to blur, because their march was senseless, numbed, bloody. All day they marched. Women fell to the ground and were shot. Women ran into the woods and were shot. Women stumbled and were clubbed to death. Every other day they had soup, never enough. At night they were locked into barns. Daniela's feet were bleeding from broken infected blisters. Rysia had lost her shoes and walked barefoot leaving bloody tracks. Jacqueline had the boots that her aunt had given her. She tried to take a pair of boots from a corpse for Daniela or Rysia, but the SS guard they called Weasel knocked her down.

They were marching east, then west, then east again, then north, she could tell by the sun. Rumor said they were being marched hundreds of kilometers to Mauthausen, where all the camp inmates not yet dead would be collected and then blown up. Daniela thought Mauthausen was in Austria, near Linz. That would be south and east, but they were sure of nothing. They set one bloody foot after the other bloody foot.

Every day there were less of them. At night she slept on her boots to keep them from being stolen, and Daniela slept on the crude wooden clogs that cut her feet bloody, but were better than nothing. One night when they were locked into a bombed church, Rysia fought another girl for the shoes from a dying girl. They were big, but she tore off part of the shift on a corpse and made bindings around her feet. None of them were afraid to touch the scrap of bread or the clothing of the dying, because they were all dying. They all had fever and diarrhea. What there was to catch, they had. The bodies fell on the earth which no longer was covered with snow, which no longer was frozen but fresh and green. Little white flowers twinkled in the grass. The grass was coming up soft and sometimes they grabbed up quick handfuls to chew. Blossoms floated and lay soft, soft, on the earth.

At night in the barns, always someone was weeping. All day they marched with a break at noon, for the guards to eat. She began eating buds from the trees, scratching at the bark. She ate flowers and leaves. One day she had weak watery shit running down her thighs from something she had eaten, but she continued to eat whatever alive she could grab. One day there was no more bread. Every day more women were shot where they fell. Now they were a shorter line and only four abreast, the SS men with rifles prodding them. They were no longer counted at morning and evening.

Daniela could not walk without help. She was burning up with fever, her skin a dull purple, her mouth open, her tongue dark. She kept passing out. She kept begging to be allowed to rest and sleep and be quiet. “My head hurts so bad I just want it to stop. I'm on fire. I have to lie down. Just for a minute. I have to.”

“Beloved, you must walk. You must continue. Hear the guns,” Jacqueline begged. “The war is coming to us. The war will set us free. Live a little longer. Just a little longer, my darling, my Daniela.” It went on and on. Women fell. Women were shot. Women lay down and died of fever, of starvation, of exhaustion, of old injuries.

“I'm too tired. It doesn't matter anymore.”

“We can escape,” she muttered to Daniela, but Daniela fell. Quickly Jacqueline picked her up, hissed at Rysia to bear her between them. Daniela's feet were infected and swollen horribly. She was delirious now. “Daniela, Daniela,” she begged her, chafing her hands. “Listen to the artillery. Daniela, hold on.”

Between them they managed to get her to the end of the day. They were exhausted and she was unconscious. Jacqueline lay with her arms around Daniela, who was hot, too hot. Her skin felt like sticky leather.

It was grey predawn. Daniela's eyes fluttered once. “I can't. Poor children. Shma yisroel, adonai elohenu, adonai echod.” Her breath shuddered out and she was still.

Jacqueline let out a great cry that ripped her open. She fell on Daniela's body. She remained there weeping until Rysia pulled her off. They were being driven out onto the road again.

They had been on the death march on the roads for at least three weeks, maybe four, maybe forever. The sound of shelling got louder and louder. Several women SS guards disappeared that evening. The next morning, the remaining guards seemed furious and clubbed two women to death. Jacqueline said to Rysia, “I'm going to break when I can. Stay with me, watch me. Go when I go. They're going to kill us all.”

She watched all the morning, praising with each step her good boots and her aunt whom she had not seen since Auschwitz. The guards were nastier than usual. Women faded into the woods, but they went after them and brought them back to shoot. Explosions sounded from ahead of them on the road as well as to their right. The SS bunched up arguing. The column of ghastly dying women staggered out of the woods by a farmhouse that had been struck by a bomb or a shell. It stood with its barn behind a chest-high fence. In the road an overturned army truck still burned. A corpse in uniform lay on his back in the ditch. As everyone was pushing toward it, Jacqueline turned, grabbed at the fence, dragged herself up slicing open her knee and flung herself over. She did not even bother to look. She fell to the ground with a hard bruising jolt and ran, bent over. She ran into the barn and plunged into a haystack. She felt as if she would suffocate. Her blood roared in her ears.

Rysia had not come after her. She was briefly furious. Then she slid into a faint. She came to again hearing the harsh voices of the SS men searching. Someone must have seen her go over. They fired into the haystack and a bullet tore through her arm. She bit through her lip but did not utter a sound. The hay would absorb the blood. She heard them leaving. Again she faded out.

When she came to she was covered with blood, a high dangerous whine in her ears. Slowly she kicked her way out of the stack, crawling forward. The shadows were long toward the west. The sun was just rising. She had been unconscious since the day before. She examined her arm. The bullet had passed through. The arm was red and throbbing, but she must ignore it. She crept to the barn door and listened. There was heavy traffic on the road. She must strike across land. She had lost so much blood she could not stand. She watched the house. There seemed to be nobody in it. She watched it until the sun had climbed about a foot. She was raging with thirst. She must move or die where she sat.

Still she could not make herself move. This would not be a bad place to die, quiet and alone and free of terror for a moment, with the spring sun mellowing the mud and the buds. All the chickens had obviously been stolen already, but there might be something left to eat in the house. She must make herself crawl to the bombed house.

Then she heard her name called, just once, hoarsely, and the door of the house opened a crack. She began creeping along, dragging herself. Rysia ran on all fours like a dog and dragged her inside. Rysia had taken off her shift and put on a man's shirt and wrapped an apron around herself. She was so thin it made a complete skirt. She had been eating a jar of jam she had found, her mouth bright red with berries. She pushed it quickly toward Jacqueline, exclaiming over her arm.

Everything was fallen down and dusty within, looted already. Drawers, dishes were tossed all around the burned area where the bomb had fallen. Rysia pumped water for them to drink and then washed Jacqueline's wound.

“I thought you were dead, my Jacqueline, I thought you were dead and I was all alone in the world to die like a mouse. I couldn't find you. I looked everyplace. Where were you? I didn't know what to do. I just sat here and looked for something to eat. There was a cabbage but I ate it all, it was a little one, I'm sorry. But here are some potatoes.” Rysia started to slice them with a knife she had found. “A real knife,” she pointed out.

“Find one for me too. But no, we do not eat them raw. We eat them cooked. Who's on the road?”

“People running. Families with carts and horses and sometimes a truck, all fleeing. It must be something good if the Boches run from it.”

“We'll make a little fire and cook the potatoes and eat them with forks like human beings. We'll boil water, and I'll clean out my wound.”

“Jacqueline, I want to live. If only the Russians or the Americans would come!”

“If they don't come to us, we must go to them. We must go carefully alongside the road and run toward them. Pack up a knife for each of us so we have something to protect ourselves and what food we can and something to carry water in, and we'll set out.”

“Can you travel?”

“While there's life in me, I can go toward freedom.”

About noon, they began to walk through the fields, keeping the road to their right. They carried with them the four last potatoes they had found in the farmhouse, roasted with a little salt. Rysia kept kneeling to touch the ground. She broke off a buttercup and put it behind her ear. Jacqueline smiled to see it. They looked like skeletons dragging across the plowed fields, both with hair close cropped and grey, with their skulls and huge eyes and open sores, Jacqueline with her arm wrapped in a bloody shirt, with a tablecloth around her shoulders for a shawl, her grey shift still on under it and a man's woolen cap jammed on her head.

People were fleeing along the road and after a while they walked near it, because they did not see any SS men and nobody was paying attention. Alongside the road lay the bodies of women from their group, with ravens feeding on them. Also scattered along the side of the road were things the evacuating Germans had thrown away, another jar of jam, a bottle of kirsch and knapsack full of silver spoons. They kept a spoon apiece, threw the rest back and put the jar of jam and the kirsch in the knapsack, which Rysia carried. Jacqueline drank some kirsch. It burned all the way down and then she felt better. She washed her wound with it.

Now there were corpses of German soldiers and occasional civilians. Rysia took a rifle from a dead soldier, but as she did not know how to shoot and Jacqueline could not use her arm, they threw it away. Instead they kept a grenade so they could kill some SS if they came back.

They heard the sound of engines, so they hid behind a stone wall. Jacqueline lay down, letting herself slide partway into the black red swamp of nothingness. She hoped the SS was not about to appear. Maybe she would kill herself with the knife, after she armed the grenade for Rysia to throw. She must not faint.

“It's not the Boches,” Rysia said. “Are they Russians?”

Jacqueline dragged herself up. A man crossing the field toward them raised his rifle. “Non, non,” she shouted, trying to stand.

“It's two old women,” the soldier said to the one behind him. He was speaking English.

“We're not old, we're haeftlings, we're prisoners, Jews. She is sixteen.”

The men stared at them as if they were monsters. “You speak English,” the first one said. “You sound like an American.”

“I'm French. She's Hungarian. I've been shot.” She sat down abruptly.

“Did we shoot you?”

“No, the SS.”

“I speak English too,” Rysia said and abruptly began to cry. The soldier gave her a chocolate bar.

“You were prisoners? What did you do?” the second man asked. He stood back from them, frowning. He did not like their smell, perhaps.

“We were Jews. That was enough. I was in the Resistance in France.”

“You just stay here. Hey, Sarge, these two old women we found, one says she's sixteen and they speak English and escaped from one of those camps. One's been shot. What'll we do with them?”

“Just leave them for the time being. Somebody'll be along. The medics can deal with it. Let's go.”

“Do you have bread?” Jacqueline asked the first man as he was turning to leave. “Anything, please! Even a bite!”

He gave her a piece of hardtack and then they were off. Jacqueline lay propped against the wall like a rag doll with stuffing leaking. They both chewed the hardtack slowly. She felt like laughing, for their liberators had not seemed thrilled with them. They were free and helpless. She slid into unconsciousness. When she came to, she was being lifted into a truck full of women who looked like herself.

“Who has us?” she muttered in various languages, randomly.

“The Americans are taking us to hospital,” a voice answered in Yiddish. Jacqueline reflected as she passed out again that her Yiddish had markedly improved. Someone was holding her hand in a frantic grip, so she assumed Rysia was still with her. Oh, Daniela, she thought, I did not follow you into death, not into that country, even after I promised. But maybe I am coming along behind: slowly following after you along the red road of my blood flowing out.

ABRA 10

When the Lights Come On Again

Abra had grown used to sleeping with her coat and flashlight, which the British called a torch, just beside the bed in the event a rocket bomb hit nearby, knocking out the electricity, starting a fire or demolishing the ceiling. Sergeant Farrell in the office had been trapped for eighteen hours under a stairway—which was lucky, because everything else had been smashed. He told her the darkness had been the worst of it, not knowing if he had gone blind. That had led her to keep the flashlight nearby. The V-1s had not tended to knock the power off, but the V-2s did.