Briar Rose (20 page)

Once the three vans had been emptied, off they were driven again toward Cheh-nno, leaving the shackled workers and their guards behind. Every two hours they returned with another full load.

That first day Josef and his friends watched from sunup to sun-down, seven trips for the vans, three vans each time, twen"ne bads. Josef did the arithmetic for them. "Between eighty and one hundred dead each time means they have killed over eighteen hun-IU dred to almost two thousand men and women and children today
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alone. It is worse than Sachenhausen." He had thought i could be worse.

The men did not respond to his mathematics, but simply swiftly back into the deep woods.

That night, by mutual consent, they said nothing. They even plan for the morning. But Josef could hear one man or weeping far into the night. Near midnight, Rebbe came to I did not speak but handed Josef a bottle of cognac. Josef did how he had come by such a treasure, he just drank fully a of the bottle straight before the man took it from him and alone. It was then he thought of Alan, whom he had never of in Sachenhausen or in the six years since his desertion.

" 'Tis a far, far better thing," he quoted to himself wi passion, meaning it was better to go down fighting in z dispute, better to be cut down in a hail of bullets on a raid, be gassed in a six-meter van, fighting eighty relatives and fri a last breath of air. Better to be a resistance legend than to be away like an old rag into a vast, unmarked grave.

In the morning they returned to the forest's edge. It was a could not believe what they had seen the day before, that to see it again for it to be real. And so for a second day, overcast with a sky as grey as the river, they counted va trips this time, despite the threatening weather, and the ad a round of machine gun fire.

"They have shot the shackled prisoners," Rowan said. H

best eyes. "There are to be no witnesses."

By evening the field was totally deserted and they chan(

across it. Not all of them and not all at once. The boy, B

Josef drew the short straws and went first. They ran wa over, and Josef kept turning to stare at the river growin every minute, but they were alone in the harrowing field They came to the side of the pit in the deepening dar enormous, full of shadows: shadows of arms, of legs, thrown back, mouths open in silenced screams. Lines of I through Josef's mind but, he realized, not even the great could touch the horror of what lay at his feet. The smell-a fog of exhaust fumes, the stench of loosened bowels, t sickly odor of the two-and three-day dead-drenched thi

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Josef stared down at the bodies, but only one in the thousands did he really see-a child, no more than three or four, fair-haired, on the very top of the heap. Its thumb was firmly in its mouth, like a stopper.

He wept.

They all three wept, loudly and unashamedly.

Then Avenger cried out, "Look! Someone is moving!"

At first Josef thought it must be because of the dark, because of the shadows, because of their fear. Then he had an even darker thought that the gasses bodies exude when decomposing must be rising from the earlier dead. But Avenger was, after all, a medical student and surely he would know all that. Besides, he had already leaped down into that hellish pit, pushing the stiffening
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bodies aside. And when he stood up again, shakily, on the backs and breasts and sides of slaughtered people, he held a single body in his arms.

It was a young woman and, even in the quickening dark, Josef could see that her arm was moving sluggishly, that her face had an odd pattern of roses on the cheeks.

Avenger handed up the body to Josef and Birch helped the boy climb out himself, But by that time the girl had stopped moving, had even stopped breathing. Josef could feel her die in his arms. So he laid her down on the ground and, putting his mouth on hers, the taste of vomit bitter on his lips, he tried to give her breath.

They took turns trying to revive her, Avenger using the medical school method, lifting her arms up and down and, when he was bred, Josef breathing into her mouth. And it was into Josef's mouth that she, at last, sputtered and coughed. By the time she was able to breathe on her own, the field was completely dark. There was no moon. There were no stars. They could all have been dead and in the pit for all that they could see.

The girl did not speak, did not say her name, did not ask where she was or who they were. She only put her hand to her head as if it ached, as if she were dizzy and could not stand. So Avenger took off his jacket and wrapped it tenderly around her. Then he picked her up and carried her, as if she were a child, going unerringly back to the -woods, though there was no light to see by.

Josef and Birch followed them into that darker dark.

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In the morning she was still alive, still silent, though the ro longer bloomed so brightly on her cheeks. Her body was s with feces and vomit, her own and that of the other victims. F

hair was matted and tangled. There were three scratches on h, and neck, and one on her left leg.

Occasionally she coue phlegm and then, embarrassed, turned and spat it on the gi Avenger gave her his jacket and Birch his shirt. When she t return one or the other, they shook their heads and Avenger that tender smile of his. She buttoned the jacket carefully oi shirt, and the tails hung below the jacket and half down her

The next night, flushed with the victory of her life, and th(

after as well, they went back to the pit, sorting through the ing bodies, trying to find someone else alive. The girl stayed in the protection of the dark forest.

Though they found two men and one woman who w(

breathing, the men both died, raving, in the forest before m It was, Avenger explained to them, a normal complication (

gassing. The woman lived till noon the next day, wrapped in coat. She complained of starbursts, of shadows moving towai

Before she died, she told them how she had come to Ch her voice never rising above a hoarse whisper, as if it had died. Later the men pieced together her story. She spoke castle-the schloss, she called it-a manor house with an old i and two wooden huts. She and her family had been brought I

from the Lodz ghetto, then by truck, into the schloss cot There they had been reassured by a handsome German cc dant, in passable Polish, that they were only going to a worl

"Only a place to work where our labor would help the (

fatherland," she whispered, then pointed. "See the shado'A there were none.

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So they needed to wash, the commandant had told th while they washed their clothing would be disinfected from I

and horrible ride. Those had been his words, such words of c

"the long and horrible ride." They had to disrobe, therefore, their valuables, their papers, and other items of identificat lockets and rings, in baskets especially marked with their:

"Then we went into the cellar at the schloss," she w]

hoarsely. "I held my little daughter's hand. We were both s(

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rassed being naked in front of strangers. Even naked in front of family members. It is not done, you know. It is not done." Her eyes fflled with tears. "I would have picked up my child, but she said

'No, Mama. Not skin on skin.' So I held her hand and read the signs out loud to her as we walked down the hall. To the washroom said one sign over a stairway, To the Doctor another. I told her not to be afraid. Oh . . . " She had silently then, whispering through the tears, "that I had held her that one last time."

She told them that all the prisoners were sent down the stairs and to an enclosed ramp that led into a van. They had to run from the

blows the Germans had suddenlv bezun to rain uoon their heads.

Almost one hundred people had been crammed in.

"My little daughter was buried in the crush," she said. "I heard her cry out once, and then not again. I came the very last into our van and the doors slammed after me. The floor was of tin and latticed. It hurt my bare feet. We were all screaming, crying out. I called my daughter's name over and over and over but she did not answer. Then the van started up and that is all I can remember."

They did not tell her that everyone else in the van was dead, dead from the exhaust piped in, dead in the crush of so many people scrabblin2 for air or dead from a final bullet in the brain.

Thev did

not have to

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Later that morning, just before she died she cried out the name

"Rachel." Josef knew-they all knew even without being told- at it was her daughter's name. They buried her there, in the woods, with a simple stone to mark the place. Josef stood with the others around her rave

"There are only eight of us," Holz-Wadel said, "And one is not a Jew. Not enough for a real mini n."

"Nine," the girl said suddenly. "And God will not care. It was the first time she had spoken. She joined them, hugging herself.

Josef was not sure if she meant God would not care whether they had the proper number of men for the funeral or that if she meant

He simply no longer cared about anyone at all. He did not ask.

After they realized she could speak, they questioned her: what was her name, where had she come from who had been with her

She shook her head. "I do not know."

Avenger took her hand in his. "You mean you do not remem-166

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ber." He was worried. He knew that gas poisoning brought choses, brought deterioration of personality.

She shook her head. I do not know. I have no memories in head but one."

"What one?" Holz-Wadel asked.

"A fairy tale."

"Mishuganah!" Rebbe said, shaking his head and walking o

"What fairy tale?" Josef asked.

She shrugged. "I do not know its name. But in it I am a prin in a castle and a great mist comes over us. Only I am kissed aw

I know now that there is a castle and it is called 'the schloss.' B

do not know for sure if that is my castle. I only remember the tale and it seems, somehow, that it is my story as well."

"She means 'Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,' " Josef said.

The woodcutters nodded and Avenger smiled, almost as i were simultaneously amused and charmed. And relieved.

"Then we will call you Princess," Josef said. "Princess Briar after the storv." But he used the Polish word: Ksifiniczka.

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Tag-ein tausenit " (he said). It was something Josef heard years later from his friend, the priest of Chelmno. That was what the guards used to say to one another, and to the people of the toVVM:

"Ein Tag-ein tausend~ " It means One day-one thousand, the numbers of people to be killed. A tally stick. A rota.

t Jose and his comrades had saved one. One in a thousand.

they knew their chances of saving one more were shm, And dangerous.

"We must get her away," Josef said to them. "We must find her clothes. Shoes. Real food."

"Oxygen if we can," added Avenger.

Clothes and shoes and food were possible. For oxygen she would have to breathe the air. They all knew that. They had been eating mushrooms and berries and many greens that the woodcutters knew were safe. They had caught fish from the Narew, but eaten them raw, Bu d dan do~

not willing to chance a fire. They themselves wore old clothes, old shoes. Josef remembered a pair of boots he had given to a servant because they had not fit properly. What he would have given for those boots now. He dreamed at night of the gateau he had eaten with Alan in Paris.

Or Vienna. Or Berlin. He was no longer sure. He didn't dream of Alan, just of the cake. One morning he had awakened, certain he

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"Food first," Josef said to them. "And shoes next." F

surprised when they agreed, when they asked for his advice how, by breathing life into the girl, by naming her, he had I

a person of consequence, had all unwitting become their leai was-and he was not-pleased by it.

"And we must report this back to the others. This messag the vans and about the camp. We must pass it on." How c, have known that the news of the place was already known, r as a rumor in a ghetto, but substantiated by one of the two eE

passed on to the Polish underground, from there to the government-in-exile. How could he have known that alre

June of that year all the details were known even in London knew was that the men agreed with him, nodding to cong themselves, though the boy Avenger was the slowest and Jc not the only one to notice that his eyes were, the entire time girl.

They moved through the forest only at night, and silen

AWenger carrying the girl over the roughest parts to save I feet, allowing no one else to hoist her up. And she, in turn, to want only his hand in hers, his arm about her waist, embarrassed that she wore nothing on her legs, They let her bathe one night at a turning of the river, Ash and Birch and Rowan posted a half kilometer upstreai Wadel Rebbe and Josef posted a half kilometer down. No oj exactly where the Avenger stationed himself. In the morni could all see how springy and clean her red hair was, how her
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face, and that the scratches on her cheek and neck werE

beginning to heal to three thin red lines. The roseate blooi the gas poisoning had been replaced by a constant blush.

It took them three nights of travel to come around to th the other partisan groups. Josef and Holz-Wadel and the t

Ksiqiniczka to the leadership and told them the story of \,V

had seen. The others thought her name a code, like thi approved of it. They found her clothes: a peasant skirt, a shi only a size too large which she stuffed with rags for the

"We can send her on," a small man with round glasse them.

Ksiqñniczka clung to Avenger's arm. "I have nowhere to ras