Skeletons at the Feast (33 page)

He nodded. He had, he had. He could feel Anna and Callum watching him, and their gazes made him uncomfortable. He realized he had put them at risk by revealing his identity and began to regret his spontaneity with the Scotsman. "As far as you all know," he told them, "I'm Captain Heinz Bauer."

"Not . . . Manfred?" Mutti asked.

"No. And you've absolutely no idea I'm Jewish."

"Do you really believe anyone cares at this point in the war?" Anna wondered, an eddy of annoyance in her voice.

"Oh, I don't believe it. I know it."

"What? Have you seen something?"

"I see things every day."

"Something specific?"

He rested his fingers on the handlebar of the motorcycle. "Bauer--the fellow whose uniform I'm wearing--had just delivered orders to the commandant of a work camp to march his Jewish prisoners west. Young women, all of them. They could have left them for the Russians to liberate. But they didn't. Even now, the leaders of your Reich are gassing or shooting or walking as many of us to our deaths as they possibly can. Bauer's orders, and the signed receipt from the commandant, were in this coat."

Anna seemed to be absorbing this, contemplating the idea that there were whole camps of female prisoners being marched away from the front. "Where are they now?" she asked finally.

"The women? I don't know. I assume they're on the road somewhere."

"And this Heinz Bauer?"

"He's on the road, too."

"But he's not walking, is he?"

"No," Uri said. "He's not. He's not even breathing."

In the distance they heard planes approaching from the east, which meant in all likelihood they were Russian. Callum looked up, his eyes scanning the flat, gray horizon, and took the lead for one of the horses. Anna took the other. Then, without saying a word, the four of them started their way down the street and out of the city of Stettin.

WHEN THEY HAD FIRsT sTARTED TOWARD WHAT THEY were told would be a new factory in a new town, they had walked four abreast, taking up roughly half the width of the road so vehicles could wind their way around the procession. Now, however, it was their third day and the columns had grown ragged. The length of the parade also had shrunk. Their first night they had been fed some boiled water with celery slivers and spring grass floating atop the surface like pond scum, but otherwise they hadn't eaten since they had left their barracks and begun marching to the northwest. Some of the prisoners had started to collapse yesterday between midday and dusk, perhaps a dozen of the girls, whereupon the one-eyed Blumer or a guard named Kogel would shoot them in the back of the head. Others, as many as six or seven if she had overheard the guards properly, had escaped by simply melting into the woods that bordered some of the towns. Four more had tried to flee and been caught, and the procession had been shaped into a half-circle in a meadow beside the road so everyone could watch Blumer and Kogel and a guard whose name Cecile did not know strip them, whip them, and beat them until the white and pink of their emaciated flesh looked like the remains of animal carcasses. Then they, too, were shot. She guessed when the prisoners had originally left the factory there had been about 150 of them. Now it was closer to 125.

None of them knew where they were going, but Cecile was taking comfort from two realities: The weather was considerably less nightmarish now than it was when they had set off from the camp at the end of January. It was chilly and today they had been forced to march all afternoon in a cold rain so their clothes clung to them, thick and heavy like chain mail made of ice, but the snow was all but gone and only at night did the temperature fall below freezing. It was also clear that they were in a more populated section of the country. There were still stretches in which they would walk through farmland or woods, but those stretches were shorter than they had been in January. She wouldn't use the word civilized to describe where they were--no part of Germany was civilized in her mind, not even Berlin, because it was still filled with people who either would do this to her or would allow it to happen--but the towns were much larger and she never felt as if they were walking in an endless, near-arctic wilderness.

And so an idea formed in her mind that night as she lay down among bales of hay in a cow barn between Leah and Jeanne, the three of them pressing their bodies tightly together for warmth. Even though four of the girls who had tried to escape had been rounded up and beaten to death, at least six or seven others had gotten away. As a result, the guards were being more attentive. But escape might nevertheless be possible because the weather was more accommodating and there was a greater chance they might be able to find shelter or someone to help them. There were rumors--treated by the prisoners with the reverence that small children have for fairy tales--traveling among the girls of a priest in one nearby town who had a way to hide Jews, and of a mayor in another hamlet who actually helped Jews get the papers they needed to pass as Aryans with the necessary pedigree. She also recognized the names of some of the towns through which they had marched, and had the sense that here there had to be Germans--either Germans who were good or Germans who simply could see the end was near and it was in their best interests to help a couple of Jewish girls who were flirting with death--who might feed them. Warm them. Offer them refuge.

There were guards here in the barn with them, as well as guards just outside. And so Cecile had no illusions that it might be possible to merely slip away that moment into the night. The next morning, however, might be a different story. There would be those first minutes when the girls would be herded from the barn into their lines to march--she had no expectations they would be fed--and there was usually chaos as they all maneuvered from wherever they were expected to communally empty their stinging bladders and diarrheic bowels to their spot on the road. Moreover, the sun probably would not yet have risen. Perhaps in those brief moments of bedlam, she--she and Leah and Jeanne--could melt into the woods. And here, on the northern side of this barn, there were woods, a forest of evergreen, oak, and birch. The guards would thus have them stand to the south, but still . . . still . . . there would be that brief frenzy as they exited, the guards themselves sleepy and hungry and anxious.

The key to her plan? Leah, the girl from Budapest who had once been a seamstress. Leah's German was impeccable. If she and Jeanne kept their French mouths shut, Leah might be able to pass as a refugee Christian from the east until they could find a sympathetic household. She could ask the right questions of the right people. Find a kind priest. Or a convent. Anyplace that might provide asylum. It was a long shot, of course, because how did you know whom to ask? But were the odds really any worse than simply continuing on yet another death march? In three days their group had shrunk by a sixth, and no one--at least none of the prisoners--had the slightest idea where they were going or when they would get there.

Consequently, she gently tapped the girls on either side of her, poking first Leah and then Jeanne, and whispered to them what she wanted to do.

"This is your plan?" Jeanne grumbled, her soft voice near a whimper. Occasionally her body would spasm against the cold. "We run into the woods and find someone to help us?"

"There are people here. Lots of people. You've heard the rumors about priests and mayors who are hiding Jews."

"And I don't believe them. If we've heard those tales, so have the Nazis. Any priest who helps us is hanging by his neck somewhere or is long dead in the ground."

Outside in the night there were great whistles of wind, but there was no longer the sound of the rain on the roof of the barn. "You're probably right," said Leah, and briefly Cecile's heart sank. Then, however, the seamstress continued, "But the people here have seemed a little more uncomfortable when we've passed them. A little sickened, even. That's a good sign. Maybe we could find someone."

"All we'd have to do is pass long enough to get a name--or an address."

"Why not? We're just going to die if we keep on this way."

Beside her Jeanne snorted. "For months you kept telling me to be strong. Be patient. All fall and all winter, that's all you kept saying. The Russians will get to us, the Russians will save us. Now you've changed your tune. Why?"

"Because I have a sense of where we are in Germany."

"Oh, we're in Germany now, instead of Poland. That makes me feel much better. Much more confident."

"This war is going to be over soon. The Americans and the British have crossed the Rhine. All we need is a place to hide for a little while. Till the summer, maybe."

"Do we stay together tomorrow morning or do we separate?" Leah asked.

"I think we separate. Scatter."

"Ah," Jeanne muttered. "Very good. Then we will use our compasses and our radios to make sure we rendezvous at the same point in the woods."

"We agree to return to this barn tomorrow night. At dusk. How's that? Then we walk back to the town we passed through earlier today. There was a church there. And so there must be a priest."

Cecile felt Leah pressing her chest against her back, trying to spoon ever more tightly against her for warmth. "Do we have a signal?" Leah asked.

"You mean in the morning?"

"Yes. For when we escape."

She contemplated this for a moment. "I don't think we need one. But in that moment when the guards are screaming for us to go to the bathroom and line up, that's when we leave."

"We should go in different directions," Leah offered. "And not at exactly the same second."

"Yes, that makes sense," Cecile said, pleased with all that the woman was contributing to the plan. "And so we'll do this? We'll leave?"

"Absolutely," said Leah.

"Jeanne?"

There was a pause. "Jeanne?" She put her ear against her friend's chest, afraid that the woman had, once and for all, stopped breathing. But the chest rose and then fell, and with her head against her friend's body, she heard Jeanne informing her, "Don't worry, I was only thinking. Not dying. At least not immediately dying. But, yes, I'll go. I've thought I was going to die for six or seven months now, and I'm still here. Still starving. Still cold. At this point, I might as well expedite the process by trying to escape."

n the female guards were screaming at them to get up and get out, cursing them for either dawdling or moving too slowly, when most of the girls were moving as quickly as they could, and Cecile stood and started to stumble toward the wide barn doors, open now for the first time since they had been herded in here the night before. She could see that the skies were overcast and it was drizzling outside, and the sensation of proceeding toward the great square of light from the dark of the barn was reminiscent of walking through a tunnel. She glanced once at Leah, their eyes met, and she nodded. She tried to capture Jeanne's attention, but she couldn't find her: Already her friend had fallen behind. At least two girls were either incapable of rising or they had died in the night, and the female guard kicked once at each of their bodies and then bellowed for Blumer. He wasn't far away and Cecile passed him as she approached the entrance, shrinking against the door so she would not be in his way, while anticipating the sound of his pistol, two shots, in the coming moment. Then she looked back and saw Jeanne: The woman was plodding with the gait of a sleepwalker toward the entrance, her arms wrapped tightly around her frail frame and her hollow eyes blinking against the daylight. Cecile tried to catch her attention, too, because--and she felt guilty for even thinking such a thing, but it was a reality--the additional chaos that would occur when Blumer shot the women left in the barn might be exactly what she and Leah and Jeanne needed to disappear successfully into the woods.

Already the other prisoners were starting to squat in a line in the field to the south of the great structure, some silently and some straining. Others didn't bother to crouch, but simply stood where they were and allowed their pee to run down their legs. At this point, what did it matter? All of them seemed oblivious of the rain that was continuing to fall.

She saw Leah was moving to the end of the line, fading behind the woman at the very end, and then squatting. Sitting. Then--and here she felt her heart starting to pound--Leah was rolling along the wet grass, away from the prisoners and the guards. Inside the barn she heard the first shot and the birds on the peak of the barn flew high into the air from their perch. Cecile watched everyone reflexively turn toward the sound, and when she looked back toward the end of the line she saw that Leah was rising to her feet and starting to run toward the woods, her legs moving as they hadn't in years.

Quickly Cecile followed her lead. She went to the end of the line, took a spot beside--and then behind--the very last woman, and crouched like a toddler. She closed her mind to the smells all around her and breathed, as she did always at this moment of the day, only through her mouth. She had to pee badly, she felt pressure and pain in her groin, but she didn't dare start because she knew she wouldn't be able to stop. She realized that she had lost Jeanne-- hadn't actually seen her emerge from the barn--and so she scanned the lines and the meadow, but she didn't see her friend anywhere. She guessed it was possible that for some reason the woman had remained inside, but it seemed that by now all of the prisoners who were living had been marched outside into the field.

The guards were hollering for them to finish their business and line up so they could be counted, and the woman before Cecile stood and started away, the back of her ragged trousers moist from the grass and brown with her feces. Cecile moved in the opposite direction. A foot, then two, crabwalking toward the woods. Still, however, she kept her eyes open both for Jeanne and for the guards. She honestly wasn't sure that she would be capable of rising to her feet in a moment--and in a moment she would indeed have to--and scurrying toward the woods if she didn't know for sure that Jeanne was escaping, too, because she was convinced that without her Jeanne would die. Her friend would simply give in to the pain and the hunger and the cold. Why not? Many of the prisoners did. Jeanne had given up perhaps a half-dozen times already and it was Cecile's encouragement alone that had kept her going. But any time now she would hear Blumer's second shot, and that would be her chance to run for the woods--and run she would, she told herself, regardless of whether she had seen Jeanne. She had to hope that her friend was already scuttling through the brush somewhere, scampering far from this motley column with whatever energy she could muster.

"You there! Stop, stop now!" It was one of the female guards roaring, and Cecile stood perfectly still, fearful that they had seen the way she had edged just a bit toward the forest. But it wasn't her they had noticed. Why would they? She was, essentially, still with the group. It was Leah. The guard had seen Leah.