A Curable Romantic (103 page)

It wasn’t a far walk. The entrance to the Umschlagplatz was at the point in the road where what had once been Zamenhof Street met Dzika Street. People were being herded in through the station’s many doors. Trucks roared up in fleets, and the Jewish policemen turned their captives over to the Ukrainian and the Lithuanian guards. I won’t say they herded us in like sheep. Rather, let me say that we were herded in like men and women who had no weapons of their own. The rain had turned to snow again, and the sky was frozen an iron grey. I was jostled in through the entrance along with everyone else. Inside, hundreds of people were milling about. I shivered and hugged myself. I had no idea when the last train had departed, nor how long anyone had been waiting, but it seemed a long time. People were clearly running out of food.

“The next train?” I asked a man sitting on his suitcase, but he only stared into space. As I looked about for someone else to approach, I began to regret my decision to turn myself in. In one area, a man and a woman and two small children were lying in a puddle of blood. The children’s skulls had been smashed in and their shoes stolen. Had they tried to escape? I wondered. Or were they shot merely as a warning to the crowd, which, I realized, had begun to outnumber its guards.

I rubbed my arms, hoping to get warm. I had no idea where I’d left my gloves. My clothes were covered in mud, and I’d apparently forgotten my coat at the rebbe’s. At uneven intervals, trucks drove up to the gates, and new crowds were deposited. There was no concealing anyone’s despair now. As the hours lengthened, women began wailing, children began
shrieking, and the guards began shooting anyone who wasn’t moving quickly enough. Because they’d turned off the water that supplied the trains, we were all mad with thirst. Outside in the streets, I could hear gunshots and shrieking. Inside, people were begging for water and moaning. The elderly sat on boxes or lay next to one another on the ground. Children were losing their strength, their heads nodding on their necks, their eyes glassy, their lips dry and cracking.

As the crowd swelled, people were getting lost in the crush, calling out for one another. I couldn’t stop sighing. A young man was selling yesterday’s newspapers at exorbitant rates. A cordon of soldiers marched through, taking the strongest-looking among us, firing their guns overhead or sometimes even into the throng. Eventually, a train huffed into the station, and we all surged towards it. There was more shooting and screaming and wailing. The guards pushed at us with their rifle butts. The doors of the cattle cars opened and the tangy scent of chlorine made it difficult to breathe. No one, I realized, had given me the three loaves of bread and the kilogram of beet marmalade that had been promised to anyone who turned himself in. One more lie, I supposed. Was I ready to die? I didn’t know. I only knew that I was hungry and tired and thirsty and too weary to resist. I attempted to make my way to one of the cars but couldn’t make it through the crowds. In fact, I was knocked back and pushed to the ground. “Please! Someone!” I cried, shielding my head with my hands. A shoe clipped my cheek, I was kicked in the ribs, someone stepped upon my hand. Through the legs of the people walking over me, I saw a figure dashing towards me, a doctor in a white medical smock. Bending over me, she took hold of my arms. “Hurry! This way,” she said.

I STRUGGLED TO
my feet, grasping her smock. “This way,” she said, and her voice forbade contradiction; nevertheless, I said, “But, Doktershe, I was hoping to board that train.”

“Follow me.” I hadn’t the will to resist, and so I followed her away from the tracks and the crowds. It was only after I’d begun to calm down that I realized — mostly because of her limp — that this was Ita, or not Ita, but the young doctor
and
had so unrelentingly tried to convince me was Ita.

“Wait here,” she said, and she left me in a part of the Umschlagplatz inhabited only by the dead. They were transported to the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in carts used for that purpose exclusively. Perhaps, I thought, I’d been crushed by the mob and was now dead myself. But if I were dead, I reasoned, the dead themselves probably wouldn’t appear dead to me. Or would they? I didn’t really know.

An hour passed, and the train I’d tried to board roared out of the station. I peered into the crowd left behind, wondering what to do next, when I saw her again, this Dr. Ita — to this day, I don’t know her true name — moving briskly towards me with (I had to squint to make sure I was seeing this correctly)
and
in her train. I laughed a bitter little laugh. Ah, so here it is then, at last, the long-promised, long-deferred reunion between
and me. One more of Heaven’s cruel jokes. We were once again alive at the same moment and in the same place, and this slaughterhouse is the venue Heaven has chosen for our reunion? One kiss — is that what was to be granted us? — before the angel of death bludgeons us both with his truncheon?

However, the doktershe didn’t offer to kiss me. Instead, she gave me an order: “Climb onto the cart and pretend you’re dead, and do it quickly, before somebody sees.”

“Do as she says, Dr. Sammelsohn,”
told me, gazing at the soldiers behind us, one hand on his revolver, the other upon his truncheon, poised and ready, if need be, it seemed, for battle.

“It’s all been ordained,”
assured me. “There’s no getting out of this, my friend.”

“Hurry, hurry!”
barked.

I didn’t hesitate. Choking back my sense of revulsion, I clambered onto the cart. The figures there were cold and hardened. They didn’t move against my weight as one might have expected. Horrified, trembling, I found a small depression among them and lay down within it and pretended to be dead.

“Keep perfectly still,” the doktershe whispered into my ear. She even stroked my hair a little bit. “Keep your eyes closed, and don’t move a muscle until you’ve made it to the cemetery.”

“If she knew who you really were,”
whispered to me as well,