Under a Cruel Star Read online

  I told the old man in the Russian shirt about the ghetto in Lodz where the cesspool cleaners had whistled Beethoven as they worked and where close to one hundred thousand people had been murdered or had died of starvation. I told him how the trains would arrive from Polish villages bringing men with bloody heads and women wrapped in shawls and how, once the trains were gone, the women undid their wraps and pulled out their babies, some of them dead by suffocation but a few still alive, saved from German bayonets. I told him how, a few months later, the SS would arrive and throw those same babies into trucks and cart them off to the gas chambers. I talked about the public executions, about hangings where the bodies were left on the gallows for weeks while we walked by, about the carloads of bloody clothing that we tore into strips and wove into mats for German tanks so that the soldiers could keep their feet warm. How, when the battlefront had come into earshot of our camp, a German colonel bedecked with gold braid had arrived, assembled all of us, and proclaimed: “We have to evacuate the ghetto now but do not be afraid. I give you my word of honor as a German officer that no harm will come to you. You will be well cared for...” and how, one week later, those who had survived the transport in sealed cattle cars walked through the gates of the electrified wire fence, straight into the black smoke of Auschwitz.

  By then, I had forgotten where I was and who I was talking to. I saw the Auschwitz block again, the barracks that had been horse stables crowded with a thousand half-crazed girls shaved bald, who howled under the whips like a pack of wolves. The guards, just as demented in their fury as the prisoners in their pain and terror, ran up and down the center aisle of the block, lashing out in blind rage at the girls in the stalls. And above all this, Mrs. Steinova from Prague stood on a platform, shaven bare like the rest of us, singing the aria “The moonlight on my golden hair” from Dvořak’s opera Rusalka by order of the block Kommandant who had decided the mood on her block should be cheerful.

  I saw myself as we knelt for a whole day and night, our knees scraped raw against the sandy ground, propping up the girls who fainted because we knew that whoever collapsed would never get up again. That was the time one of the girls had tried to escape. All of Auschwitz had to kneel until they captured her and when they did, they called a roll call, broke her arms and legs while we watched and only then dragged her off to the gas.

  But I did not say much about Auschwitz. Human speech can only express what the mind can hold. You cannot describe hammer blows that crush your brain. Instead, I gave the old man a detailed account of the kind of life we led in the camp from which we arrived every morning in his brickyard. I also told him that there had been girls with us who had arrived directly from home and that a few dozen of them were pregnant. One evening they had all been summoned to the main barracks and we never saw them again. The following morning, a special detail was ordered to clean puddles of blood from the barracks floor.

  I do not remember what else I told him. I only know that he did not say a word for as long as I spoke and, when I heard the shouting of orders outside that meant we were returning to camp and got up to leave, he remained sitting, hunched into himself, his head in his palms.

  That man lived in Nazi Germany and had daily contact with a concentration camp and its inmates, yet he knew nothing. I am quite sure he did not. He had simply thought that we were convicts, sentenced by a regular court of law for proven crimes.

  People often ask me: How did you manage? To survive the camps! To escape! Everyone assumes it is easy to die but that the struggle to live requires a superhuman effort. Mostly, it is the other way around. There is, perhaps, nothing harder than waiting passively for death. Staying alive is simple and natural and does not require any particular resolve.

  The idea of escape began, I think, back when our guard Franz shot yet another girl. At the time we had already been marching for a few weeks. The Eastern front had come so close to our camp that we could hear the rumbling of battle. The camp had to be evacuated. Our guard was reinforced; we received civilian coats – taken, we found out later, from people killed in the gas chambers – and an extra allotment of bread. Then we set out on foot, under twice the usual number of bayonets, toward the west, out of Poland into Germany.

  Our column plodded along, inching its way across the frozen snow. Only a few of us had the strength left to turn our heads and look back as we heard the occasional shot from behind. Redheaded Franz kept close to little Eva from dawn to dusk, taking fatherly care of her, scrounging up food for her, full of affable concern. He turned around only now and then, mostly whenever the column rounded a convenient curve, and fired his gun into the rear where there were always a few stragglers. Whenever he scored a hit, he ran back along with another of our guards. Then the two of them would dig and scrape for a while in the ditch by the side of the road. Franz would then hurry back to fawn over the terrified Eva, who was only fifteen and would sob whole nights through.

  During all these days and weeks of marching, I walked next to Hanka, my head bent, looking at our bare feet sinking into the slush. We talked only a little, softly, and only about one thing: escape. Just as Franz fired the last shot of his that I remember, we passed a crudely-lettered sign which read TO PRAGUE. We slowed down, pressed each other’s hands, and exchanged a solemn and somewhat ridiculous promise not to deviate from that direction. Whatever happened, we would reach Prague. From the moment we had left the camp behind and with it the crackling of gunshots as the SS finished off the girls in the hospital barracks, we had thought of nothing else but escape. Many of the others were thinking the same thing; some even made small attempts. Somewhere along the way, they would slip into the bushes and let the whole column pass by. But then they would always rejoin us. It was just too difficult to face the unknown alone.

  “You see,” Hanka said, “as long as we march like this, all together, there’s nothing we can do but walk and walk and wait until Franz guns us down somewhere. We can’t reproach ourselves for anything, and nobody can expect us to do more. But once we’re free, everything will be up to us. Then we’ll have to act.”

  She was right I thought. As long as we marched together, we had the comfort of belonging. We all shivered and starved and were abused together. We shared a common destiny, a common journey, and at the end of that journey, maybe even the same death. But should we free ourselves... At that moment, I understood – one single act would be enough. All it would take was one decision and I would reach the greatest freedom that anyone at that time and place on earth could possibly have. Once I slipped out from under the bayonets, I would be standing outside the system. I would not belong anywhere or to anything. No one would know of my existence. Perhaps I would only gain a few days or a few hours, but it would be a freedom that millions of people could not even imagine. No prohibitions, no orders would be of concern to me. Should I be caught, I would be like a bird shot in flight, like the wind caught in a sail.

  Usually we slept under the open sky but that night we stopped in a village. First we stood on the village green where we were watched by curious eyes peeping out from every window, and then later alongside a wall that ran around a large farm. Finally, we marched through a gate of that wall into a vast yard, then through a smaller gate of a picket fence, and we came into an inner yard enclosing a huge barn. Hanka shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well that’s that. Our worries are over for tonight – not even a mouse could get out of here. A barn door, a fence, and a wall!”

  We stamped our feet in the mud for a long while, waiting for our dinner. The villagers provided it from their own stockpiles: two warm potatoes for each of us. Then came the rush into the barn and a fight for a sleeping place where it was least likely that someone would, in the pitch dark, step on your face with a wooden clog.

  For a moment, I lingered by the gate of the barn. Surely by morning there would be no one awake to watch us. The guards would take naps as they always did whenever we could be locked in somewhere. The lock hanging by two rusty nails on the barn
door was an ordinary padlock.

  “Listen!” One of the girls grabbed my hand and pulled me into the shadows behind the door. “I heard we’re turning north tomorrow. We’ll never be as close as today.”

  So it seemed that everybody knew what was on my mind!

  “And look what I found: a pair of shoes! They don’t match and the tops are only tied to the soles with wire but they’re better than nothing.”

  I hid the shoes under my coat. Then I took another look at the lock. Since I owned the greatest treasure a prisoner could have – a knife – and had been guarding it all these months for an occasion such as this, I thought I had better pull out one nail right away. Hanka and I whispered together for a while before we fell asleep, but the leap into freedom still seemed too steep. It demanded a clear decision; we had grown unaccustomed to thinking clearly and had almost forgotten how to make decisions. We fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, without a plan.

  I woke up with a start, with the feeling that I was going to miss something crucial. I had to do something very important in a hurry – oh yes! There was darkness all around me, and the rustle of straw. From time to time, a slight moan, as though a large tired animal was turning and stretching in the dark. The slits in the barnboards were paling. Soon it would be dawn. I shook the knee that dug into my ribs from the right. “Hanka!” I said. “Let’s go!”

  Hanka woke up right away and understood what I was saying but she could not get a grip on herself. “I’m just so cold,” she said, and started to crawl back under the straw.

  “Hanka, I’m going,” I whispered. “If you want, follow me. But make it fast.”

  At the door, I twisted out the second nail and was out. The guard on duty was still snoring somewhere. A premonition of light had already tinged the darkness; daybreak was very near.

  I tied a piece of cloth over my stubby head that had been shaved bald as a knee only six months earlier in Auschwitz. Then I started picking blades of straw off my coat, but still no one came. At long last, the door opened and Hanka ran out. I did not leave her any time to change her mind. I climbed over the fence and ran across the yard to where the outer wall was crumbling and could easily be scaled. Before I could get up from my knees on the other side, Hanka landed beside me. We scrambled up and had not yet reached the corner where the wall turned when another head appeared. It was Zuzka, who whispered hoarsely, “Mana and Andula are right behind me.”

  The three of us squeezed into a recess in the wall of the next farm. Mana came running toward us. As we saw her we heard a gunshot; Andula did not make it.

  We cowered in our little nook, trembling so hard it was almost audible, and someone said, “Let’s go back.”

  “Nonsense. Once you’re out, you’re not going to crawl back, are you? They’re in a big mess now. First the old man’s going to give them hell for slaughtering a girl in the middle of the village – you know he doesn’t like that kind of thing – and then they’ll have to have a roll call. Before they count everybody and think of a way to explain why four of us are missing, we have to be miles away.”

  That sounded logical and we calmed down. The sun was rising. From where we stood, we had a good view of the flat landscape which rose in a slight wave on the horizon. There was not much snow, just earth and bare trees. It was a landscape as open as the palm of a hand, with no forest, no sign of a hiding place. In the distance we could see columns of men flanked by bands of soldiers, probably prisoners-of-war.

  Just then, from around the corner of the wall, appeared a skinny little girl of about twelve holding two large slices of bread.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” she said in Czech. “I know who you are.”

  When I recovered from shock, I stammered in panic, “Little girl, for God’s sake, you must not talk to us. Go home! Run!”

  The little girl only smiled and pushed the bread into Mana’s hand.

  “Take it,” she said. “We have plenty. And I’ll lead you out of here. I’m sure you want to go home and don’t know how.”

  “Run along! What would your mother say? Run!”

  But the child only glanced over to her side where an older woman, her head wrapped in a scarf, was standing nodding.

  “That’s my mother! She sent me. We’re also Czechs, you know.”

  We stared at her in amazement for a moment, but then set about ripping off the striped squares of cloth from the backs of one another’s coats, the squares that marked us as concentration camp inmates. Seconds later, we were on our way, running after the little girl across a field. It was high time.

  By then the countryside was wide awake. Fortunately for us, the roads were crowded. Wagons piled high with evacuated families and their household implements lumbered slowly by, alongside detachments of prisoners under guard and local people hurrying to work. Some of them turned to look at us but we walked rapidly, our eyes to the ground. Our temples pulsed with the beat of an almost insane joy. Free at last! No bayonets! No electrified or barbed wire!

  Hanka was once again walking beside me, musing, “You know, there’s just one thing about this situation that bothers me: the fact that, right now, we exist totally outside of the law.”

  I looked at her and exploded with laughter. I laughed until I wept. I laughed as I had not laughed in at least five years.

  It was getting dark. Our little girl had left us long ago, with a lot of useful advice as a farewell – which way to go, where to find reliable people, whom to avoid. Thanks to her we made it to the demarcation line that separated the German Reich from the truncated territory of the former Czechoslovak Republic, now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Protectorate had been occupied by the Germans since 1939.

  Hungry and exhausted, we barely dragged ourselves along, chilled to the bone by the wind blowing through our rags. But those first few hours of freedom had changed us a great deal. The apathetic, worn-out shadows who had made an escape out of sheer hopelessness were now gripped by a fierce will to live. It was no longer enough for us to spite death with a few extra hours or days of freedom. Now we began to believe we had found the road back to life. Fear and hope drove us down this narrow path that unwieldy common sense would never have dared to take; fear and hope had saved us so often in the years when there was so little opportunity for courage or ingenuity.

  The road turned and began to slope into a valley toward a village with a large factory. We stopped a little boy and asked, “Where does Mr. Cermak live?”

  “There is no Mr. Cermak here.”

  “I must have gotten his name wrong then. He’s Czech. Are there any Czechs you know who live here?”

  “There are no Czechs here,” said the little boy.

  What now? We retreated into the bushes by the side of the road for a conference. There was the blast of a siren: the shift at the local factory was over and a group of women, workers there, began to come toward us on the road. We could hear them talking in the distance. Poles! We stayed in our hide-out until we saw one woman walking alone. She looked tired but not much older than us. Zuzka got up her courage and crawled out of the bushes: “Prosze pani...”

  Without hesitation, the woman invited us to her home. She lived a little bit farther down the road in a miserable, run-down cottage. Her little girl was already standing in the doorway waiting. As soon as we sat down we began telling her the tale we had concocted on the way: that we had been in Germany, assigned to a work camp, that there had been an air-raid during which all our possessions and documents had been destroyed and that now we were trying to get back home. Finally, one of us dared to blurt out what we needed to know: How could we cross the demarcation line?

  The young Polish woman listened to us in silence. Did she believe anything we were telling her? It was hard to say. But she had a suggestion: There was a Czech woman living at the far end of the village who might be able to help. We should wait until dark and then she would take us there.

  Silently, on tiptoe almost, we hurried along the whole
length of the sprawling village. Our guide knocked on the closed shutter of a cottage that gleamed white in the darkness. A resolute female voice answered and, after a few whispers, the door opened. We realized by the speed at which our Polish friend disappeared that she had not believed one word of our story and had been well aware of the dangers of accompanying us.

  Plump and energetic, Mrs. Nemcova did not wait for us to explain anything. She seated us in her sparkling-clean kitchen around a table covered with a white tablecloth and placed a loaf of bread in the center. Clenching our teeth, we bit into that bread with our eyes. Surely, we thought, this could only be a symbol of hospitality. Who, in the middle of a war, could afford to give away a loaf of bread? But Mrs. Nemcova took out a knife and cut off so large a slab for each of us that half the loaf disappeared. At that moment, everything faded, the whole world stood aside. There was nothing alive in the whole universe but the four of us and that huge, sweet-smelling, wonderful loaf of bread.

  Mrs. Nemcova had obviously had some experience with people like us. She knew of a border crossing and told us that, as a matter of fact, the evening we had chosen would be a convenient time to cross because there was a party planned at the local pub. By ten o’clock all the policemen would be drunk. At ten-thirty, we sneaked out of her house. Not a light flickered anywhere. We could hear distant music, voices, the barking of dogs.