The Plum Tree (41 page)

“What are they doing?” Christine said, her heart pounding. “Tell me they’re not going to shoot them.”

“They’re making them bury the dead,” Heinz said.

Christine gasped and looked around at the other prisoners and the soldiers, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Were they blaming the German civilians for this? For not doing anything to stop it? She thought of Oma and poor dead Opa, her mother, her younger sister and brothers, hungry and hiding in bomb shelters. Would they blame them for the camp in Hessental? When she saw the soldiers direct the old men to start unloading the corpses, she stepped forward.

“Why are you doing this?” she shouted, hoping one of them understood German. The soldiers’ faces snapped in her direction.

“What is she doing?” a female prisoner asked Hanna.

“Christine,” Hanna said. “Let it go.”

“It’s not their fault,” Christine said to Hanna. “What could they have done to stop it? Any of them? What could they have done without getting themselves killed?”

“They kept quiet,” another prisoner said. “They did nothing.”

Someone behind Christine shouted in Polish, another in French. A rock came flying out of the crowd and hit one of the German children in the head. The boy put his hand to his temple and buried his face in his mother’s apron. Christine turned and yelled into the throng of prisoners, “These people didn’t do this to you!”

“Well then,” a female prisoner shouted. “Where is your SS lover, the
Lagerkommandant?
He’s not here to take the blame, is he?”

“He tried to tell people!” she shouted. “No one would listen. What makes you think anyone would have listened to them?” She pointed at the civilians.

“Liar!” a man yelled.

Christine turned around again. The German civilians were unloading the bodies from the wagons and throwing them into the trench, the old men struggling to hang on to the pencil-thin wrists and skeletal ankles of stiff corpses, the women shoveling dirt into the massive grave, sobbing and vomiting into the yard.

Christine’s breath came in shallow bursts. She wished she could remember the few English words Isaac had taught her. But it was no use; her brief lesson had been too long ago. She moved toward the Americans anyway, hoping one of them would understand. “They didn’t do this!” she said.

An American soldier came toward her, his hand up, his gun drawn.

“You don’t know what they’ve been through!” Christine said.

Heinz pulled Christine back. “Come on,” he said to Hanna. “Let’s get her out of here.”

“We have to tell them,” Christine said to Hanna. Heinz tried to drag her toward the barracks. “We have to tell them they didn’t do anything!”

Hanna stopped and turned on her. “How do I know that?” she cried. “How do I know they didn’t turn in their Jewish neighbors for a loaf of bread?”

Christine stopped struggling, and Heinz let her go. “Do you think I’m guilty as well? Should I go over there and help the women shovel?”

Hanna looked away.
“Nein,”
she said, shaking her head.
“Nein.”

“The Americans have no idea how much these people have already suffered!” Christine said. “They need to know about the food shortages and the Gestapo! They need to know about the villages and cities leveled by bombs!”

“They know about the bombs,” Heinz said. “They were dropped from their planes, remember?”

“I guess the
Lagerkommandant
was right,” Christine said, tears running down her face. “Brutal acts only become war crimes if you lose.”

Christine curled up in the back corner of a boxcar, her head resting on her coat, which was folded against the wall like a pillow. She closed her eyes, hoping the steady side-to-side wobble of the train would lull her back to sleep, even though she only dozed in fits and starts. Unlike her journey to Dachau, there was room for everyone to stretch out. The Americans had covered the floor with straw, which provided cushioning and helped mask the odor of death that still clung to the wooden walls and floorboards. Along with the straw, the Americans had provided blankets and had lined the center of the car with crates of food and water. And while all these simple things added to the comfort of their journey, nothing in the world could make up for the fact that most of the women had made their first trip accompanied by parents, siblings, husbands, sons, and daughters. This time they were alone. Contemplating lives without their loved ones, they made the trip in silence, sleeping or staring at nothing, mixed tears of grief and gratitude in their eyes.

Earlier that morning, American officers had announced that the women would be released first, the men left behind until tomorrow. A train would take them to a village, where they would be housed in a temporary barracks until the Americans could help them return home. An hour later, when the first train pulled in, a nervous hush had settled over the crowd. They watched in silence as the lumbering locomotive braked and screeched, braked and screeched, pistons hissing longer and slower until it came to a shuddering stop. Then the boxcar doors slid open, American soldiers jumped out, and everyone cheered. When the young soldiers saw their skeletal welcoming committee, they reached into their pockets for gum and candy, giving the prisoners everything they had.

Now, countless hours later, Christine pictured the thin, hopeful faces of Hanna and her brother Heinz, smiling as they waved good-bye beside the shrunken men watching silently as the women left the camp. Understandably, Hanna had chosen to stay behind with her brother so they could travel together. She’d memorized Christine’s address, with promises to write when they were finally settled, wherever and whenever that might be. The only thing that she and Heinz were certain of was that they would be leaving Germany forever.

Christine couldn’t get the wretched image of Dachau out of her head. The watchtowers, the electric fences, the long, dark barracks, and the soot-stained chimney would be forever painted in her mind, like a monochromatic portrait. Even if she lived to be a hundred and ten, she’d never forget the gray stone colors of Dachau, colors that reminded her of crumbling bones and ancient tombstones on a bleak and rainy January day.

Later, when they arrived at the train station, Christine woke up as the train braked and throbbed to a shuddering stop. She sat up, her throat and chest burning, her neck stiff, the hip she’d been leaning on screaming in pain. When she could breathe without coughing, she stood, put on her wool coat, and climbed down from the boxcar with the other women.

Clutching bread and clothes collected from the Dachau storage rooms, the somber, newly released prisoners exited the boxcars and lined up without complaint, waiting patiently on the platform to give their information to the Americans. Christine found herself trying to help a confused woman remember where she was from.

“My name is Sarah Weinstein,” the woman cried. “My husband’s name was Uri . . . but he’s dead. I can’t remember the name of the town where we used to live. I can’t remember anything!” She waved her hands in the air as if swatting at an invisible swarm of flies. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me; my whole family is dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“Some of your relatives must have survived,” Christine said. The woman ignored her. Christine tried naming every town she could think of, but the woman kept shaking her head.

“May I help?” an American soldier asked in broken German.

“She can’t remember where she’s from,” Christine said. She thought about adding that the woman had lost her mind, but kept quiet. There was no need to state the obvious.
Maybe we’ve all lost our minds,
she thought.

The soldier shrugged and shook his head, and Christine realized he hadn’t understood. He spoke some German, but not enough. Again, she tried to remember the few English words she knew, but nothing came to her. She couldn’t think straight. The soldier was smiling at her, but his grin looked forced, below eyes filled with unprocessed horror and pity. She tried to imagine what she looked like to him, blue eyes staring out from a pale, skeletal face, a walking dead woman with only a few inches of matted hair on her head.

“English?” he said.

Christine shook her head.

“
Namen?
Name?” he asked, pointing at the older woman.

“Sarah Weinstein,” Christine said.

“Sarah,” he said to the woman, bending over to look into her eyes. “
Bitte, kommen,
come.” He was self-assured and muscular, a perfect blue-eyed Aryan for Hitler’s army. Beneath the edge of his helmet, clean, blond hair was trimmed short around his ears. For the first time, Christine noticed that the Americans filled out their uniforms. They looked nothing like her father had when he’d come home, his grimy, ripped pants and jacket hanging off his skin-and-bone frame, his cheeks sunken and pale. The Americans looked well fed, their cheeks rosy, their eyes shiny and clear.

As the blue-eyed soldier led the distraught woman toward the other side of the platform, Christine took the opportunity to sit on a nearby bench. She was light-headed, trembling, and every breath provoked a coughing fit. Gripping the edge of the wooden seat, she suddenly became aware of her child-sized legs. As if seeing them for the first time, she noticed the sharp angles and awkward protrusions of her knees, as though her brittle bones were trying to break through her skin. For some reason, seeing a dead girl’s brown stockings on her skeletal legs made her heart race. The crazy woman had put horrible fears in her head that spread and festered like poison, taking off with her hope like a feather in a windstorm.
What about my family?
she thought.
How do I know if they’re still alive? What if a bomb landed on our house and killed them all?

On the platform in front of her, black army boots appeared. The blue-eyed soldier squatted down to look at her.

“Namen?”
he asked.

“Christine,” she said, teeth chattering.

“Home?” he said in English, his voice soft. Home. She understood that word. She tried to answer, but her throat seemed blocked. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. She coughed and tried again.

“Hessental,” she croaked.

To her surprise, the soldier’s face broke into a wide grin, his cheeks ruddy, his teeth white as snow. Somewhere in the back of her mind, it registered that it’d been forever since she’d seen a genuine smile.

“Fräulein,”
he said, pointing at the concrete between his boots. “Home. Hessental.”

C
HAPTER
28

C
hristine stared at the blue-eyed soldier for a moment, unable to believe what she’d just heard. Did he mean she was already home? The wide grin on his face remained unchanged. She bolted upright, nearly knocking him off his feet, and pushed past the other prisoners on the platform. Her heart hammered against her weak lungs, and she coughed as she hurried toward the central wall of the railroad station. While inside the boxcar, she’d had no way of knowing which direction they were headed. And when they’d arrived, it hadn’t entered her mind to look for the station sign. She couldn’t have dreamt that home would be her first stop. At first glance, this train depot looked like a hundred other train depots. But there, centered in the middle of the red brick wall, was the sign: H
ESSENTAL
.

She clasped her hands over her mouth, a rolling surge of elation and fear running through her all at once, so strong it caused her to cry out. The blue-eyed soldier appeared at her side. “Home,” she cried, pushing past him.

He hurried to block her way.
“Nein, Fräulein,”
he said, shaking his head. She stopped, and he made a writing motion, pretending to scribble on his open palm. “Name and address,” he said in German. She ignored him and forged ahead, trying to skirt past him, but he caught her arm with a gentle hand.
“Bitte,”
he said. He tapped his chest, made a steering motion, and pointed at her.

She groaned and stepped back, wrapping her arms around herself. The soldier trotted over to an officer and saluted, then gestured toward Christine. The officer turned and scrutinized her for several seconds, then gave a stiff nod. The blue-eyed soldier grabbed a clipboard and hurried back to where she waited.

After she wrote down her information, he took the paper over to his superior and waited. She watched, hands gripping her elbows, trying to keep herself from falling apart. When she saw him coming back, she held her breath.

“Kommen,”
he said. “Home.”

They hurried to the other side of the station, where he lifted her effortlessly into the passenger seat of a green army truck, then took his rifle from his shoulder, climbed in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, put one in his mouth, lit it, and offered her the pack. She shook her head. He reached into his pocket again and held out a small, yellow rectangle filled with flat strips wrapped in silver paper.

“Nein,”
she said, trying not to scream. “Home.” She sat up, straining to look out over the oversized dashboard, black spots floating in front of her eyes.

He looked at her, a question on his face, asking which direction to go by signaling with his hand. She gestured to go forward, then left.

They drove away from the train station, past the long, wooden barracks previously used to house prisoners working on the air base. The first women to get off the train were milling about, leaning against buildings, or sitting on the ground with their heads in their hands.

The American saw her looking. “Jews,” he said, the cigarette dangling from his lips. He pointed at the barracks, then made walking motions with his fingers. “To Dachau.”

Christine moaned and shook her head. Farther along the street, a wooden gallows had been built, tattered bits of knotted rope still hanging from the scaffold, the German word for cowards,
Feiglinge,
painted across the main rafter. The soldier pointed at the gallows.