Scheisshaus Luck (37 page)

In Monowitz I had fantasized what my life in Nice would be like with Stella. I would have proudly showed off my prized jewel to family and friends. With the bells chiming midnight, Stella and I would have strolled out of the cinema hand in hand, like movie stars. After dinner at my parents we would have gathered in the parlor and enjoyed my mother’s singing and Stella’s violin. Oh, I saw us with a flock of healthy, red-headed brats and living a joyous life.

Standing next to the open grave, I realized that if my Stella had lived (or was alive), more than likely the memories of our experiences and hardships would have torn us apart, never allowing us to find the innocent hearts that we had in Drancy. I doubt either one of us would have wanted to bring offspring into such a vile, rotten world.

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C H A P T E R 2 5

Arthur and Mrs. Novak were listening to classical music on their shortwave when I returned that night.

‘‘How did it go?’’ Arthur asked.

I shrugged. ‘‘I’m tired. I’m going to make myself something to eat and go to sleep.’’

‘‘I made you dinner,’’ Mrs. Novak chimed.

‘‘Thank you.’’

I braced myself for a barrage of questions, but Arthur must have seen in my face that I wasn’t much for conversation. I went into the kitchen with a familiar ache in my stomach, something I had longed never to feel again. I ate without tasting, then went out to the greenhouse where my exhausted body dragged me to slumber.

If I had nightmares I couldn’t recall them in the morning. I awoke early, but stayed in bed staring out the glass roof at the cloud-filled sky. By the time I forced myself out of bed, Arthur was already attending to his mayoral duties. I visited my traveling companions to make sure our departure was still on schedule. Indeed, it was. Carlos and Ilse had been concerned that I hadn’t stopped for a visit the day before. I told them about Stella.

‘‘What a shame,’’ Carlos said, then he went on and on about 267

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the rumors that one bridge on our route might not be standing. Ilse gave her condolences and went back to making lunch. It seemed that they were relieved that nothing or nobody was going to inter-fere with my will to leave Wustrow. I was stung, but I couldn’t fault them. Like so many in Europe, death was now all too common for Carlos and Ilse. Carlos had witnessed the Spanish Civil War and lived through the camps. Ilse had survived the bombings of Berlin.

To be affected by the death of a person they had never met was pointless, a waste of precious energy. There were more pressing issues to deal with. Those women lying next to Stella didn’t move me emotionally. I didn’t bury them. I didn’t know them. Carlos and Ilse didn’t know Stella. She was just another faceless corpse.

After lunch I loaded some jars of preserves into our wagon, a discarded stroller with one missing wheel, that Carlos had ‘‘organized.’’ To make it a fairly sturdy, I moved the remaining front wheel to the center of the thin axle. Carlos attached a rope to the buggy so we could pull it.

As Carlos helped Ilse pack her belongings in the buggy, I said,

‘‘Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.’’

‘‘How about D’Artagnan?’’ Carlos asked.

‘‘He wasn’t one of the Musketeers,’’ I informed him. ‘‘
Tenemos
que salir manan˜a en la manan˜a
.’’ (We have to leave tomorrow morning.)

Ilse looked at me bewildered.

‘‘
Morgen fru¨h ziehen wir ab
.’’ (Tomorrow morning we pull out.) My next stop was the mayor’s office. Over a game of chess I told Arthur about my dreadful reunion with Stella.

‘‘Of all the things I wanted to be for her, why did I have to be her gravedigger?’’

Arthur sat silent for a moment. ‘‘I thought you said you weren’t sure it was her.’’

‘‘Well, yes. Not absolutely sure, but . . .’’

‘‘But sure enough to bury her.’’

I nodded.

PART VI | WUSTROW

269

‘‘Then I hope you remember her as she was when you fell in love with her.’’

I didn’t think that was possible, but I kept that to myself.

Arthur changed the subject. ‘‘Do you think Ilse is up to the long trip?’’

‘‘I hope so. You know I should apologize to your wife about those remarks about the rapes,’’ I admitted.

‘‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t carry a grudge for long. Besides, some of these Nazi bitches deserved it. Don’t tell my wife that.’’

‘‘Were there many women in the Party?’’ I asked.

Arthur nodded.

‘‘Without their vote he never would’ve been chancellor. I’ll never understand what excited them about that Austrian nobody.’’

Neither of us could remember whose turn it was and we abandoned the game.

I knew Arthur had told his wife about Stella because at dinner she was overly attentive. She kept looking at me while clearing the table. Suddenly she took my hand and expressed her condolences. I thanked her and blurted out, ‘‘If she wasn’t meant to survive, why couldn’t she have been gassed on our arrival?’’

‘‘It’s hard to understand God’s will.’’

I bit my tongue—hard.

I could barely sleep that night. Stella, the anticipation of finally going home, and what I would do with my life from here on had me fidgeting under the blanket. Was my father still fighting off cancer or had he surrendered? I was pretty certain that Claude,
mon
ami
who hid in my family’s outhouse so long ago, had been able to stay one step ahead of the Milice and the Gestapo. I couldn’t imagine Meffre not surviving. He would have a few well-deserved medals on his lapel for his service in the Maquis. I feared that my radio-loving classmate Bernard was dead. I wasn’t able to picture such a sickly boy surviving any Nazi-scripted ordeal.

Would I finish my college prep classes? In France, after you graduated from high school you took a year of either math or philosophy, depending on what you wanted to specialize in at a university. I’d had six months of philosophy classes when I got arrested.

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Could I fit back in? Would I be able to tolerate the carefree snickering and giggling of the other students? I couldn’t imagine sitting at a desk and having the patience to listen to philosophical lectures.

As far as I was concerned now, philosophy was a study for sissies with their heads in the clouds or up their asses. Learning a trade might be the best way to go. Damn, I had become an old man in a junior’s body.

The next morning, after a hearty breakfast of catfish and potatoes, I hugged and kissed Mrs. Novak and Arthur goodbye with tears in my eyes, grabbed my knapsacks, and headed into town. Ilse and Carlos were anxiously waiting in front of her house. I put one of my knapsacks over my shoulder and the other into the stroller.

None of us was concerned that our provisions were bending the rear axle. Carlos and I grabbed the rope and Ilse got behind the stroller and raised her arm like a coachman cracking his whip.

‘‘
Vorderman und Seitenrichtung
,’’ (Line up, front and side) Carlos mumbled in his coarse Spanish accent.

It was the only German he knew. It was what the
Kapos
bellowed every morning when we marched out the gates. I turned to Ilse.

‘‘Okay
Kapo
, let’s get rolling.’’

This was the first time that I heard them laugh.

Outside Wustrow we turned off the highway to Reinsberg and followed a road that would take us to a train station, the first leg of our journey to Berlin. Except for the carcasses of a few German tanks, the road was deserted. In an outlying field, a Soviet soldier was tilling the ground with a plow pulled by ten German women.

Ilse whispered to us to move faster.

We went around a bend and I looked back. The hill where I left Stella was gone. What unforgettable memories she gave me.

Memories that my imagination embellished while I laid in those infested bunks, dug those ditches, froze during those roll calls, and withered with hunger. Stella had given me strength when I was at the end of my rope, and in those months that rope nearly slipped from my grasp every day. I had a good grip on the rope now, and it was going to get me home.

E P I L O G U E

It took us three days of walking and hitching rides to reach Berlin.

Although the sector had been carpet-bombed, by some miracle Ilse’s apartment building was still in good shape. Carlos and I visited the newly opened French Information Office. The officer in charge wouldn’t issue Carlos a visa, advising him to return to Franco’s Spain and apply there. Okay. The only way to the Spanish border would be to either sprout wings or cross through all of France, and the only thing Carlos could have applied for in Franco’s Spain was his death certificate. It was reassuring to see that stupid bureaucrats survived the war unscathed.

Two days later Carlos and I said goodbye to a tearful Ilse, and ten days after that we managed to reach the American zone. We hopped on an Army truck with some GIs from Texas to get to a Red Cross train. On the way to the station Carlos was in his glory, chatting up the Spanish-speaking soldiers. I thought of butting in with the story of how Carlos became a Red Army coat hanger, but he just had too big a smile on his face. Maybe I had finally mastered biting my tongue.

♦ ♦ ♦

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The Red Cross train, stuffed with soldiers, displaced persons, and Red Cross nurses, snaked through Holland and Belgium. Eight days later I was in a Paris military hospital, where I finally wrote my parents that I was alive and would be home soon. Four weeks after the letter, a friend of the family arrived to see why I was still in Paris. My parents were quite upset when the friend phoned and said the reason was a young waitress, which was not quite the truth. I was in no hurry to get home because I was afraid of what I would find, or more exactly what I wouldn’t find, in my hometown.

The train to Nice was crowded with Allied servicemen heading for a well-deserved furlough on the French Riviera. I rode in first class, courtesy of the French government, and was the only civilian in the dilapidated compartment. I sat next to a husky, barrel-chested U.S. Navy officer and remarked on all his medals and battle ribbons. The officer replied, ‘‘If Hirohito doesn’t throw in the towel pretty soon, I may still see some action and then I’ll run out of space on my chest.’’

I stood alone on the Nice train platform that had been the start-ing point of my odyssey. There was no welcoming party for me.

Wanting to put off the inevitable tears, hugs, kisses, smiles, and questions as long as I could, I made sure no one knew I was arriving home that day. On the way to the streetcar stop I passed the Hotel Excelsior. What room had Stella and her parents been locked up in before the Nazis marched them to the train? I wondered. The hotel windows were broken and bullet holes pockmarked the walls.

‘‘The Resistance killed some of those bastards when they stormed the building during the liberation,’’ an elderly gentleman with a red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his lapel volunteered.

He noticed the tattoo on my arm, shook my hand, and saluted.

Walking up my street, I found my apprehension compounded by the sight of our front yard overgrown with weeds. The front door was ajar and the doorknob was missing. I entered the vestibule and then the living room, both rooms bare of furniture. What had happened? A noise came from the dining room. My father was eating at a ramshackle table. We stared at each other in silence for EPILOGUE

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a very long time. He raised himself painfully from his chair. Tears were running down his cheeks.

‘‘You just missed Claude.’’ He said in a trembling voice.

My mother came in from the kitchen. She stood open-mouthed in the doorway and dropped the pan she was holding.

I was home.

♦ ♦ ♦

At that time I had no desire to put my ordeal down on paper, no need to purge myself of Nazi-induced nightmares. Frankly, I’d re-acclimated rather nicely to my former life in Nice. I attended a branch of the University of
Aix-Marseille
so I could finish my philosophy degree (even though I still believed it was all crap), and took a night course in jewelry making (something practical). My parents had weathered the war relatively unscathed except for having our house looted and occupied by Gestapo goons.