Dry Bones (12 page)

“
Wer sind sie?
” The voice came from the back of the car. Dunne’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. He made out a form propped against the rear wall.

Van Hull lit another match. Several of the rag piles stirred. He moved forward, careful not to step on any.

There was another moan, louder than the previous one.

The voice from the back spoke again: “
Sie sind nicht Deutsch, sind sie?
”

“
Nein.
” Van Hull stood in the middle of the car. “
Wir sind Amerikaner.
”

“
Amerikaner! Sie sind ein langer weg von zu hause!
”

The tone sounded to Dunne somewhere between surprise and sarcasm. “What’s he saying?” He fingered the pile next to him, took hold of what felt like a stick.

“He says we’re a long way from home.” Van Hull’s match went out.

Dunne ran his hand over a sharp prominence, leaned close, and tried to see what he held. A hollow-eyed, shrunken face—skull-like, fleshless almost—rose from the rag pile. The mouth came so close, the labored, foul breath made him recoil. Tightening his grip, he realized he had hold of a shoulder. He let go, rolled toward the door, and took several deep breaths. The stench lingered in his nose and mouth. “Who are these people?”

Van Hull moved toward him. “You have any cigarettes left?”

Dunne groped in his pocket, retrieved a half-smoked butt and a pack with two bent smokes. He handed the pack to Van Hull.

“This’ll do.” Van Hull lit a match and cautiously retraced his steps toward the rear of the car. He conversed softly in German with the figure in the back.

Dunne crawled into a corner. Several of the piles stirred. The moans spread and grew louder—a chorus interspersed with coughing—then ebbed into silence. The rags, he realized, were inhabited. He touched what felt like a rolled-up blanket; fingered it gingerly, afraid to wake another skeleton. It turned out to be what it seemed: a blanket.

He wrapped himself in it as tightly as could. A wave of exhaustion swept him into the temporary closure of sleep. A foot pushed against his bruised tailbone. He sat up with a start. He half expected the darkened figure hovering above to be an SS trooper.

“Fin, get up.” Van Hull handed Dunne his crutch and helped him out of the boxcar into the stationmaster’s office.

Dunne lay facing a cold, unlit potbellied stove. Van Hull went into the back room and returned with an armful of excelsior. He pushed the material into the stove, took the growths he’d cut from the birch trees, and put them on top. He brought over a shuttle filled with coal, stuck the blade of his knife against the iron grate, rubbed it back and forth, sending a sprinkle of sparks that ignited the excelsior.

Dunne raised himself to a sitting position, his back against the wall. “You’re not a Boy Scout. You’re the Last of the Mohicans.”

“I ran out of matches.” Van placed a few pieces of coal into the stove. “The fungus from the birch will provide enough heat to get the coal started.” He built the coals into a glowing pile.

Groggy, slightly dazed, still wrapped in the blanket, Dunne had no idea how long he’d slept in the boxcar. The molten glow from inside the grate radiated a trembling light on two dozen sleeping bodies spread in a loose circle around it, irregular spokes in a rimless wheel.

Van Hull tossed more coal onto the fire. The heat intensified.

“Did you find out who they are?”

“Jews.” Van Hull threaded his way across the floor and sat beside him on the floor.

“Where are they from?”

“They’re a remnant of the inmates held at Auschwitz.”

“Where’s the one you were talking to?”

“Here he is now.”

A figure wrapped in a brown greatcoat entered from outside. He opened and closed the door as fast as he could. He removed a large earthen flask from inside his coat. He handed it to Van Hull.

Van Hull took a swig. He shook his head from side to side. “Tastes like gin mixed with airplane fuel.” He passed the flask to Dunne.

The liquid burned its way down Dunne’s throat, forced tears from his eyes. He gave it back. “Packs a wallop Joe Louis would be proud of.”

Van Hull swished the liquid around like mouthwash, swallowed. “Fin, this is Dr. Niskolczi. He speaks English and German equally well. I’ve told him our story.” He offered him the flask.

“Be careful. It’s
borovi
cka
. Homemade gin. I found it in the shed beside the tracks. Best taken in small doses.” Niskolczi declined the flask, and spread his coat on the floor on the other side of Van Hull, and sat.

Van Hull removed his boots and peeled off his wet socks. “The doctor is from Budapest. He’s been telling me how he and the others arrived here.”

“Perhaps after all I will have some more of that. Just a bit.” Niskolczi put the flask to his lips, sipped. “I don’t know how much longer we’d have survived if you hadn’t come along.” He returned the flask to Van Hull.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Doctor?”

The steel rims of Niskolczi’s eyeglasses glowed red in the firelight as he bent forward and glanced at Dunne. “What you two need now is sleep.”

“Not yet.” Van Hull drank from the flask. “First the story of how you got here.”

“I’ve already told you some of it.”

One of the figures on the floor groaned.

“Start again. I want my companion to hear as well.”

Niskolczi spoke in a monotone, giving a matter-of-fact account of his career as a physician in Budapest, which led him to the post of assistant chief pathologist at the National Institute for Surgical Research. He was dismissed in 1939 when the Institute was ordered to rid itself of medical personnel of “Jewish blood.”

He and his wife and two young daughters managed to scrape by under the restrictions imposed on Jews until the Germans seized
full control of Hungary. In June 1944, as part of the “general resettlement of the Jewish population in the East,” they were ordered to report to the Keleti railway station.

Instructed to bring one suitcase per person and food supplies for “a journey of several days,” they were packed into sealed cattle cars “with barely enough room to sit and no sanitary facilities.” During a week’s journey across Slovakia into occupied Poland, they were sidetracked for periods ranging from several hours to an entire day. The boxcar was stifling. The supply of water ran out. Several old people and infants died. Their bodies were stacked in a corner until the train reached its destination.

“We learned that our destination was Auschwitz. It was still just a word, a place one old woman remembered by its Polish name: O
wi
cim. When we’d entered the gates, the SS guards opened the car doors and barked at us to leave our luggage, which would be returned after being ‘sorted and inspected.’ We were arranged into two lines and marched past an SS officer wearing the insignia of the medical corps.

“Able-bodied women and men were directed right; the aged, crippled, and women with children under fourteen, left. I attempted to stay close to my wife and daughters, but the SS officer in charge noticed the lapel pin I’d been awarded by the Institute for my twenty years of service.

“He pulled me aside. Annoyed to learn I was a physician—when he’d given specific orders that doctors and pharmacists were to be kept separate from other prisoners—he reprimanded the guards. He introduced himself as SS-Hauptsturmführer Eduard Wirths, the camp’s chief doctor, and questioned me about my credentials. He was correct and polite, as if ours were a casual encounter on a village railway platform.

“I inquired about my wife and daughters. He said not to worry. He would see they were taken good care of. Behind him, what looked like a factory chimney stack spewed a thick column
of black smoke.” Niskolczi drank from the flask. “Wirths said that while there was already an expert pathologist on staff, he had a colleague doing important research in racial biology who could benefit greatly from the assistance of a German-speaking professional. ‘You will be my gift to him,’ he said.”

Dunne resisted sleep by concentrating on Niskolczi’s description of his first impressions of the camp’s “vastness,” a seemingly endless series of enclosures bounded by electrified wire and interspersed with guard towers mounted with searchlights and machine guns; long rows of tar-papered barracks stretching in every direction; hollow-eyed laborers in faded, ragged striped uniforms moving at a half-trot.

After showering and having his head shaved, Niskolczi was disinfected with a “burning solution” of calcium chloride and issued a “clean but worn uniform obviously used to clothe several prisoners before me.” He reported to the hospital barracks, where he was met by Menachem Gertner, a Polish Jew assigned to be his assistant.

A former medical student at the University of Kraków, Gertner dispelled any lingering illusions Niskolczi might have had about the nature of the camp: “Unlike the larger Auschwitz
konzentrationslager
,” Gertner explained, “which is dedicated to intimidating and enslaving Poles and other
untermenschen
, this camp—Birkenau—is a
vernichtungslager
, an ‘extermination camp,’ one of several in occupied Poland dedicated exclusively to the eradication of Europe’s Jews.

“‘For now,’ Gertner said to me, ‘consider yourself lucky. The man to whom you’ve been sent is SS-Hauptsturmführer Karsten Heinz, a fellow of the Institute for Racial Biology and Anthropology. As long as Dr. Heinz finds you useful, you’ll be allowed to live. But you must be careful. Heinz is crafty, demanding, and at the first provocation—whether real or perceived—he’ll dispatch you to the gas chambers.’

“A moment later, I was summoned to meet Heinz. Expecting a tall, blond athlete—the Nordic archetype—I was received by a stout, very short SS officer. He had me stand at attention for several minutes, eyeing me from a distance, as if I were a farm animal. When he came closer, I noticed how the soles and heels of his boots elevated his height.

“Gertner subsequently explained that though Heinz had been too short to serve in the elite SS, his research in racial science so endeared him to SS-Reichsführer Himmler, he was allowed to wear boots that raised him to the minimum requirement of five feet, six inches. Jealous of the favor he enjoyed from the SS hierarchy, his comrades referred to him behind his back as
der Blaue Engel
—the Blue Angel—a scornful allusion to the heels worn by Marlene Dietrich in the movie of the same name.

“When he headed a program at the camp to find the most efficient method of sterilizing Jewish women, the prisoners under his direction, aware of his nickname, altered it to
der Blaue Teufel
—the Blue Devil—a better reflection of his true nature.

“Gertner wouldn’t go into what was involved in Heinz’s ‘research,’ other than to say that he was fanatically insistent about keeping it secret, threatening immediate execution of anyone who so much as mentioned the work to another inmate or to Heinz’s own medical associates.”

Niskolczi paused. The flames in the coal-packed stove emitted a low hum. “I asked Gertner if he could find out what had happened to my wife and daughters. He came back the next day. They were alive, he reported. They’d been put to work. I chose to believe him. What else could I do? Sometimes it seemed as if we’d all been sucked into some mass hallucination, a collective bad dream. But then I’d wake and be instantly confronted with the reality of where I was.”