Leah's Journey (42 page)
Joe did not salute. The adjutant had turned away, as though too tired to bother with routine military etiquette. It was said that this would be the third such camp he had entered. He came from Bournemouth and his name was Geoffrey Silverstein.
Joe was issued several drawing pads and the familiar thick black drawing pencils of the kind he and Rebecca had used during their sketching walks in Vermont. He caressed the familiar smooth casing of the pencil and ran his fingers across the clean white paper, feeling a sensual surge of excitement at the touch of these new materials. Idly, he drew a small leaf. It was April, the threshold of spring, and small shoots of grass were already thrusting their way through the burned-out war-weary earth. The wild dogwood trees were tumid with buds and the leaves of the silver birch trees were threaded with fragile veins. As they drove, they passed through meadows of newly leafing trees and felt a hint of warmth in the early spring wind. The season’s promise lulled them into a dreamy calm which was startlingly shattered when they approached the place called Bergen Belsen, a forbidding gated enclave over which pale-blue smoke floated in a perpetual somber cloud.
Joe, a BBC broadcaster, two photographers, and a writer were in one of the last jeeps which rolled down a road fringed with barren elms whose leafless arms stretched agonizingly skyward. Tacked to each tree was a white notice reading “Danger! Typhus!” The near-dead trees heralded the truth of the warning, as though they themselves had been stricken, but the lead British tanks ignored the warning and plunged on. They rumbled down a stretch of road carved out of the fir wood whose fragrance filled the air but mingled with an odd putrescent odor. The cavalcade of tanks was followed by scout cars and Bren carriers. When Joe’s jeep finally advanced, the air was thick with petrol fumes and clouds of dust enveloped the single pole across the roadway, lined on either side with wooden huts. This was the entrance to the camp which was being surrendered that day to the conquering British.
Joe took up his sketch pad and rapidly drew the group of smartly dressed German officers who awaited the British forces. They stood at rigid attention on the porch of one of the small huts, their faces frozen, their eyes hard. With deft strokes Joe etched in the forked-lightning badge of the SS, the three rows of medals proudly worn for this historic occasion by a Hungarian colonel, and the elegant epaulettes of the Wehrmacht officers, who alone talked easily with each other, as though today consisted of a boring formality which would be stoically endured before they returned to their clubs and tailors, their homes and families.
Papers were presented and signed and now the British drove another 200 yards to a high wooden gate with crisscross wiring. Irrationally, irrelevantly, the gate reminded Joe of the last afternoon he and Rebecca had spent together in New York; they had visited the Bronx Zoo, wanting to be among children, to briefly lose themselves in innocence and laughter. He realized almost at once why the entrance to Belsen reminded him of that day. The entry was like the entrance to the zoo and from the rows of green wooden huts, fit only for the containment of animals, poured the odors of zoo—the sickening stench of ordure, the dead waste of rotting vomit and excrement, of sour stagnant water.
He stared at the barbed-wire fences that surrounded the compound and fought the nausea that welled bitterly in his throat, but could not conquer it. Bile-bitter vomit filled his mouth. There were people behind those fences. A simian throng of men with shaven skulls, their skeletal bodies enveloped in ragged striped pajamas, gazed at them with huge-eyed stares, their bony fingers clinging to the wire fence. A strange sound arose from them—a half-credulous cheer threaded with a sudden wild weeping.
Joe felt his own cheeks grow wet and the tears stood hot in his eyes and streaked down his cheeks. The BBC broadcaster, weathered by the long war to a hardness of mouth and eyes, stood on the seat of the jeep, stared across the sea of pajama-clad figures, the wave after wave of grotesque moving skeletons that surged toward them, arms outstretched, and wept. He sat down as though his legs would not support him and unashamedly opened a large khaki handkerchief to sponge his tears. A woman dressed in rags came up to him and gave him a budding branch of dogwood. He took it and pressed her fingers to his lips, as though to assure her, to assure himself, that somewhere in the world humanity and tenderness survived. Joe, with trembling pencil, drew the weeping officer and the ragged woman.
There was a sudden silence as the sound of the loudspeaker crackled and the voice of Colonel Taylor, the administrative officer, resounded through the compound.
“The forces of the Allied armies have liberated the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. Because of the danger of typhus we ask you to remain here until the disease can be controlled. Food and medical supplies are on their way. You are a free people but please do not leave Belsen while the disease is rampant. For your sake and for your own welfare. We wish you well. We wish you―life.”
There was a great murmuring in the crowd as the announcement was translated into a dozen languages. Women clung to each other and wept. A group of French women linked arms and softly sang the Marseillaise. Then, as though the realization of their freedom had only just penetrated their consciousness, they ran to the gate that separated the women’s camp from the men’s compound and thrust it open by the sheer force of their fragile bodies. There was new weeping and sudden shouting as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even parents and children, found each other.
An old man, wearing the obscene striped pajamas that fell across his skeletal frame like a ragged tent, peered into the face of each passing woman calling, “Are you my Esther, my darling Esther?” Twice Joe passed him and hours later still heard his plaintive call. The woman’s name, the lost Esther, was part of a threnody, a lament of loss and longing, and the searching man’s voice joined other seeking voices as darkness fell. “Moshe—Avremel—Henia—” Their calls were threaded with soft weeping, with a gentle, despairing keening. There was no strength left for savage grief, and the survivors in an agony of exhaustion braced themselves to endure a life they had long since surrendered.
Throughout that long day and longer night, Joe wandered the camp, his nostrils slowly becoming accustomed to the stench of death and decay, his eyes growing used to scenes that belied credence. His pencil moved across the pad automatically, as though independent of his weary body and benumbed sensitivities. Later, looking at those drawings, he could not remember the moment of their execution. That day was splintered for him into fragments of horror, some preserved on paper, some consigned to shocked memory.
There was a potato patch near the kitchen in the men’s compound—a small patch of land covered for the winter with sodden straw. Across it lay a cadaver, its bones shining through the sheerest skin, the fingers frozen around two potatoes that had rotted within the frozen hand. The corpse was that of a woman, they saw, because a limp breast lay exposed, a neat bullet piercing the delicate blue-white flesh that might once have nursed a child. Perhaps it was the corpse of Esther, sought on this day of liberation by a man who might be her weeping lover, her frantic husband, her distraught father. Joe did not know, would never know, but he drew that poor corpse and wrote across the stark line drawing, “Esther?”
There were other lifeless bodies on that bed of straw, and the British soldiers, some weeping still, lifted them and set them gently on the ground, organizing mounds of corpses for burial. Some were still alive, if just barely, and these light bodies they carried, like quiescent children, to the building which had quartered German officers but which was now a hospital for the victims of those officers.
Twice that afternoon, Joe Stevenson put aside his pad and pencil and took up a shovel. In the waning light of that spring afternoon, he helped to dig a mass grave which was quickly filled with the bodies of men and women plucked from barracks which the dead had shared with the living. The earth was spongy, soft with the release of spring, and the bodies, clumps of bone and staring skulls, slid easily into the soft, accepting soil. The British soldiers’ faces were tight with anger and some wept as they worked but they were orderly and organized. The corpses had to be buried at once because of the threat of epidemic. They affixed small placards to each mass grave. One hundred corpses. Seventy-five. One hundred and thirty. There were 13,000 unburied corpses in liberated Bergen Belsen, and the survivors, bony wraiths with haunted eyes, wandered the burial grounds, peering into each yawning abyss. “Esther,” the voice of the searching man called, and other voices joined him, calling yet other names, but there were no answering cries. The spring air smelled of grief and rang with mourning.
Evening shadows moved across the sky and all about the camp small fires blazed, their tongues of golden flame licking the silvery green sky.
“What are they burning?” Joe asked a tall British sergeant, who wiped his hand again and again on a handkerchief black with earth.
“Their huts. Tonight the whole camp will be on fire and a good thing too. Who could have believed this. Is it possible? Did it happen? Is it happening?” He gestured wildly about, his arms taking in the horrors of the camp, the small incidents of a day that would never be forgotten.
As they stood there a woman clad only in a loose envelope of potato sacking and carrying a tiny bundle in her arms approached. When she saw them standing there she started and they realized uneasily, but too late, that it was the uniforms they wore that had awakened the electric fear in her great dark eyes. She scurried past them and they saw that the burden she sheltered within her arms was a child, stiffened in death, its ivory exposed bones gleaming brightly with eyes still open and the small mouth gaping wide in a scream which would never be articulated. The British sergeant knelt and vomited and Joe walked quickly on, falling into a procession that wound its way to the last grave to be dug that day.
The weary group was led by an old man whose gray beard trailed down his trembling chin. He had been a famous rabbi in his native Hungary, someone had told Joe, and he had been allowed to keep his beard and the tattered prayer shawl he wore about his shoulders because the Germans often used him as a figure to ridicule. They would stand him on a platform with a sign reading “]ude” hung about his thin neck.
“This is a Jew,” they would tell visitors and they allowed small children to pull his beard and throw the prayer shawl over his head, as though the old rabbi were an animal on exhibit at a zoo for their amusement. All this the man, to whose synagogue in Budapest thousands had swarmed to share his wisdom, had endured with stoical dignity. It was a dignity that the Germans could not shatter and which was visible on this day of liberation. The rabbi walked very slowly, and holding his arm in gentle support was a British soldier on whose uniform the six-pointed star of the Jewish Brigade glistened. He was, Joe realized, a member of the famous Palestinian unit which had fought with such heroism throughout the European theater. The two men, the soldier and the rabbi, were followed by other shadowy figures, soldiers and prisoners, and together they ringed the chasm hollowed out of the earth which would be the burial place for nameless, faceless dead.
They stood briefly in silence, and then the old man’s voice, strangely melodic, rose in the ancient chant of mourning, the Kaddish.
“Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He has created according to His will.… May there be abundant peace from heaven and life for us and for all Israel…”
His frail voice gathered strength and was joined by the deep basso tones of the Palestinian soldier and then by other voices. Feeble men, in the ragged pajama uniform of the inmate, their lives ravaged by war, prayed for that elusive “abundant peace.” British soldiers, their eyes bright with the pain of all they had seen that day, swayed in that prayerful attitude of centuries, and prayed in the hesitant Hebrew learned long ago in the back rooms of English synagogues. The women who rimmed the semicircle of worshipers moved their lips silently but remained dry-eyed until finally a small boy with a high sweet voice sang the final plea: “May He who maketh peace in the heavens, spread His peace over us and over all Israel and say ye all Amen.”
“Amen,” they intoned and tears fell then, and they clutched each other and watched as the British soldiers tossed shovelful after shovelful of earth across the corpses. It was a children’s grave they filled and the bodies were very small.
Joe’s voice too rose in that final “Amen” that resonated through the area and seemed to shatter the sad blue mist of smoke that hovered so persistently over them.
He woke the next day to the foul stench of death and realized, with horror, that it no longer nauseated him. No sudden seizure of vomiting or revulsion overtook him and he was able that day, and during the days and weeks that followed, to wander the camp with his pad and pencil, stopping now and again to do what was necessary—to assist in carrying a sick woman from the vermin-infested prisoners’ barracks to the hospital created from the officers’ quarters, to help with the digging of a grave, to make a small drawing of a cowboy for a small boy who sobbed and sobbed but was wondrously silent when Joe gave him the picture.
One day he saw a small girl holding her smaller brother on her lap. Both children were covered with layers of filth and large blood-encrusted scabs scaled their bodies. But their faces were clean because the small girl had wet a scrap of cloth from her ragged dress with her own saliva and had scraped her own face, and then her brother’s, free of dirt. She had fashioned a comb from a fallen twig and was determinedly pulling it through the boy’s tangled mass of dark curls. Joe took out his own pocket comb and offered it to her. She looked at the black plastic comb as though it had magic powers and ran her fingers across its teeth. For a moment Joe feared she might cry but instead she smiled and the sudden brightness of her small face was the first sign of gladness he had seen in this expanse of death and grief, bounded by barbed wire, cut now but still threatening with its message of evil and hate. The girl turned back to her task, passing the clean new comb through her brother’s hair but singing now—a sweet song in Yiddish, remembered perhaps from some distant day when loving hands had combed her own tousled curls.
