Chasing the King of Hearts (Peirene's Turning Point Series) Read online

  Daemon

  She has her own bunk, two whole blankets, the roll call lasts half an hour, the soup is free of sand and their guards are not SS but Wehrmacht – men too old for the front and war invalids. In other words, Guben is wonderful.

  They work in a factory on the other side of the river. They sit in front of an assembly belt, each prisoner stationed between two German workers. The objects on the belt need something screwed on or soldered, the German workers make sure things are done properly.

  But there are three things wrong with the camp in Guben.

  The first is the sleepless nights, because of the women screaming for bread. The bread is brought in the evening, the Stubendienst is supposed to cut each loaf into five even pieces. The women crowd around, watchful and wary. The knife is dull, the bread is made with sawdust and crumbles easily, the crowd makes sure everything is fair. They weigh each portion (having constructed a scale from two boxes and a piece of string) and loudly count the crumbs. The tension rises and falls. When the knife plunges into the dough the women concentrate in silence and then scream out loud if one portion is smaller than the others. Janka Tempelhof tries to calculate how many calories are in the crumbs and how many are spent in the screaming. She determines that more are lost in the screaming, but no one wants to listen to her.

  The second thing wrong is the distance from Mauthausen. The front is getting closer and closer and soon she’ll be cut off from her husband for good.

  The third thing wrong is the name Regensberg. She can’t travel across all of Germany and Austria with a Jewish name…

  Do you have a plan, Janka Tempelhof interrupts, or are you counting on a twist of fate?

  She has a plan. First she’ll return to Cottbus, it isn’t far, just two or three stations away.

  She’ll find the nice clerk (who wished her good luck).

  She’ll say she was on a transport from the Warsaw Uprising, but didn’t know where they were headed so she broke off.

  She’ll apologize for escaping from her assigned labour.

  She’ll go back to the canvas mill and figure things out from there.

  Look… Janka Tempelhof explains. Here you have your own bunk. You have two blankets and no sand in the soup. Things are good, why go to Cottbus?

  So I can be Maria Pawlicka, she explains all over again. For ever. No more Izolda Regensberg.

  Janka thinks a moment and says: That’s your daemon again sending you on your way, so you better go. You should listen to what your daemon is telling you.

  (Frankly she doesn’t have any idea what a daemon is, but she’s too embarrassed to ask. She guesses that it’s someone that even Janka Tempelhof doesn’t dare argue with.)

  Armchair. Credit

  …If they hadn’t taken her for a prostitute, she wouldn’t have stopped in on Mateusz the caretaker,

  she wouldn’t have learnt about Mauthausen,

  she wouldn’t have travelled to Vienna.

  If she hadn’t gone to Vienna, she would have stayed in Warsaw. She would have died in the uprising, in the basement, together with her mother.

  If she hadn’t escaped from Guben, they would have sent her on with the other women.

  She would have landed at Bergen-Belsen,

  in the middle of a typhus epidemic.

  She would have died of typhus together with Janka Tempelhof.

  Evidently God had decided she was meant to survive the war.

  Or not. He had decided that she was meant to die and she opposed His verdict with all her strength. That’s the only reason she survived. And no God can claim credit. It was her doing and hers alone.

  Happiness

  She forgoes her daily portion of bread and after five days the Stubendienst gives her a whole loaf. She trades the bread for ten marks and a set of dentures. The dentures have a fairly sizeable gold bridge and part of a gold tooth. It seems they belonged to a woman.

  The factory is some way off and on cold days the women are allowed to take blankets. They wrap them around their heads and before entering the hall they leave them in the cloakroom.

  She walks to the factory. She leaves her blanket. She takes a German worker’s coat off the hook and carries it to the other side of the cloakroom. She feels a little bad, but she can’t make her escape wrapped up in a blanket from the camp.

  They’re done for the day, and go to the cloakroom ahead of the German workers.

  She folds up the stolen coat and covers it with her blanket. Then she joins the column of women prisoners leaving the factory.

  It’s getting dark and there is fog.

  The column crosses the Neisse River and turns to the left, towards the yellow light of the lanterns. Izolda turns to the right… She drops her blanket and quickly passes several streets.

  She senses that she’s being followed. She turns around and sees a bicycle and a faint blur of light: the bicyclist is carrying a lantern. The camp guards are equipped with bicycles and lanterns – evidently they’re already looking for her.

  She pushes open a gate, hears the crunch of gravel underfoot and crouches against a fence. She is in a garden and looming behind her is what appears to be a single-storey house.

  The bicycle comes creaking down the street. It stops at the gate. She hears steps… a man has climbed off, he’s walking down the gravel path. She clings to the fence. The man, barely visible in the darkness, passes her and opens the door. Now she has a clear view of him: he has a rifle slung over his shoulder. He doesn’t go in. He must be listening, waiting for some sound, perhaps the sound of her breathing. She waits as well. She hears her heart pounding, just like in the ghetto when she was standing next to the door with the padlock. The gendarme probably hears her heart as well. She can’t bear it any longer and tears away from the fence. I’m coming, she says, under her breath. The gendarme is silent. She takes a step in his direction and says louder: Please don’t shoot, I’m coming…

  She walks up to the house.

  Here I am, she says, to the entrance, but no one answers.

  She’s at the doorstep. There isn’t any gendarme. There isn’t anyone at all. That’s strange, she thinks. I’m probably hallucinating. Out of fear? I’m not scared, but I’m having hallucinations. For the first time. Though I’m really not afraid…

  She leans against the door. She tears a strip from the coat lining and wraps it around her head like a turban, to cover her black roots. The lining keeps sliding down over her eyes, evidently her hands are shaking. That’s strange, she thinks. I’m not afraid and yet my hands are shaking.

  She approaches the station from the back, crossing the rails. A train has stopped on the tracks and she hears banging: a tapper is checking the wheels. She hides behind a wooden goods wagon, and after the tapper passes she climbs on to the raised platform at the back. Inside the wagon is a bench and a small, rectangular window. She stands by the window. The train starts to roll. It passes the tangle of tracks and moves out across the fields, through lashing wind and rain. She stands next to the window and feels a wave of happiness.

  She doesn’t know where the train is headed.

  She doesn’t have any documents.

  She doesn’t have anything but a German worker’s overcoat, a Hungarian Jew’s stockings and a section of Jewish dentures with a gold tooth.

  She’s riding a night train through Germany and feels such joy that she starts to cry.

  I’m free, she says out loud.

  And I’m alive.

  And he’s alive.

  And I am free.

  And everything will be good…

  She picks up the coat and wipes her nose on a piece of lining.

  Armchair. Foreign Languages

  She will try (in spite of everything) to tell her story: daemon – escape – goods train – and to explain how happy she was at that moment, and how happiness can suddenly overcome a person in absurd situations.

  Her daughter will translate into Hebrew, her granddaughter will nod understandingly: H
appiness can surprise you, that’s true… And what happened next?

  Next came a train station and the train stopped. A conductor came in, astonished at what he saw. Was machen Sie hier? he shouted. She answered very calmly: ‘Nothing really, I’m headed to Cottbus.’ (In dangerous situations, she lectures her granddaughter, it’s always good to… how can I explain it… it’s good to maintain a certain air of superiority.) Cottbus? – the conductor was even more amazed. We’re headed in the opposite direction! To which she replied, still calmly: Really? In that case I must have got on the wrong train.

  Her granddaughter will worry: The conductor could have called the gendarmes or even the SS.

  No, he didn’t call anyone. He was a harmless man in late middle age and she always had a way with older men.

  Her daughter and granddaughter will smile and for a moment they’ll talk about her good looks. Her daughter will say that she was beautiful, just like Elizabeth Taylor, and her granddaughter will state that she’s still very beautiful, and then what?

  She jumped out of the car and changed trains. She made her way to Cottbus. She found the clerk with the notebook and apologized for running away.

  (What’s the Hebrew word for war? she asks all of a sudden. Milchama. Clerk? Pakid. Notebook? Machberet… Such bizarre words, how can anyone learn such a language? They’re extraordinary words, her daughter will say. Listen: machberet… You think desert and sand and cliffs, and it’s nothing more than a notebook.)

  The clerk asked where she was coming from. Izolda told her she’d been on one of the transports out of Warsaw after the uprising. They were headed in this direction but she wasn’t sure where to and feared it might be to a camp, so she broke away…

  Her daughter will interrupt, telling her to explain about the Warsaw Uprising. Of course her granddaughter had learnt about it in school, but it’s easy to get all the uprisings mixed up…

  Unfortunately, the nice clerk was only in charge of farm workers, but Izolda had been assigned to the canvas mill and someone else was in charge of the factories. And that person was eating supper.

  Why so many details, her daughter will grow impatient. What difference does it make which clerk and what they ate?

  It makes all the difference in the world! The nice clerk remembered that my name was Pawlicka, don’t you understand? Maria Pawlicka and not Regensberg! She remembered, but she couldn’t help me, and the person who could help me was eating supper, she’d finished work and had gone home!

  What are you arguing about? her granddaughter will ask.

  Her daughter will explain the difference between the clerks, and her granddaughter will start to look at her watch.

  They sent me to their superior…

  Wir beide sollen das Gesetz achten, hab’ ich nicht Recht? he said. Which means: We both ought to respect the law, isn’t that right? And the law, my dear, stipulates that people who desert their place of work are sent to the penal camp.

  Schwetig an der Oder

  In the morning they braid straw (shoe coverings for use on the front).

  After that they pump water. The water spills, their toes freeze to the ground because their shoes are full of holes, the iron pump handle burns their hands. I can’t take it any more, she cries out, and Irma, who is carrying full buckets to the cistern, has the presence of mind to ask her what she plans to do instead. Are you going to run away again? Stop grousing and pump, there’s nothing a person can’t take.

  Irma has a degree in forestry. She escaped from a subcamp of Ravensbrück, they captured her as she was washing her legs in a stream. They didn’t let her put on her shoes and brought her barefoot to Schwetig. Every day she wraps her feet in rags and straw.

  They sleep on the ground, on straw mattresses. Irma lies next to her and tells stories about trees and how clever they are.

  Do you know that maple keys spin in different ways? Half of them spin to the right and half to the left, so that the wind carries the seeds in all directions. (Izolda wants to make Irma feel good and is suitably amazed.)

  Do you know why sequoia bark doesn’t burn? That’s how the tree protects itself in case of forest fire (really? that’s amazing).

  And do you know why aspen leaves quake? It’s not because they’re afraid…

  After pumping water they’re told to form two concentric circles and forced to run. A female guard uses a whip on the women in the smaller circle. For the big circle another guard goads the runners with a dog. The prisoners can choose between the whip and the dog.

  After running comes exercise with Aufseherin Piontek. Alles raus! she shouts, and the women have to run out of the barracks. Alles rein! and they have to run back. Alles raus! – they run out. Alles rein! – they run back.

  Piontek loves her work, she doesn’t go home until dark.

  At morning roll call they read out over a dozen names, including Maria Pawlicka (Auschwitz, adds the Aufseherin) and Irma Jabłońska (Ravensbrück).

  Izolda tells Irma what they do at Auschwitz with captured escapees. They hang a plank around their neck saying: Hurra hurra ich bin wieder da – Hooray hooray I’m back today. And then they are marched to the gallows.

  Irma consoles her: You escaped from Guben, not Auschwitz, but they both know she could easily be eligible for the plank.

  Izolda tears the fur collar off her German coat.

  She trades it for a pair of shoes.

  Very decent leather lace-up shoes – which she gives to Irma Jabłońska.

  You see that, don’t you? she asks God. I’m helping her. And in return, you… She hesitates. You do what you think is right.

  She says goodbye to Irma.

  A gendarme takes her to the train along with a group of prisoners.

  The train moves out.

  The train stops.

  Hours pass, the train doesn’t move.

  The train reverses direction.

  The train gains speed.

  Now there’s no question about it: the train really is heading back, it really is.

  Is it possible that God liberated Auschwitz especially for her? In return for the shoes she gave Irma Jabłońska?

  That’s impossible. That’s just absurd. But the train was turned back and Auschwitz was free.

  The March Out

  The last prisoners are given bread, coarse undergarments and heavy canvas clothing.

  Prisoners, guards, Aufseherinnen and dogs line up five abreast and march west towards Berlin.

  A stream of German refugees moves down the middle of the road, on bicycles or horse carts or else on foot, loaded down with rucksacks, suitcases, bundles, carpets, blankets, bedsheets… No one is guarding them with dogs and no one is shooting at them and no one does them any harm.

  Do you know anyone in Berlin? asks a girl marching next to her. I can give you an address, but how about you? You don’t even have a collar on your coat.

  But I do have this… Izolda reaches for the dentures with the gold bridge that she’s kept hidden in her underwear. She breaks off the tooth. The girl looks at it, puts it in her pants and whispers: Eichenallee, the last house on the corner. Head towards the Olympic Stadium… Say hello from Edyta Baka. Mention the kayaks at Luttensee…

  They sleep in empty stables by the side of the road. Izolda gets up before dawn and listens. Nothing is happening, the dogs are quiet (they’re either asleep or have simply decided there’s no use guarding any more). She goes on to the road and mixes with the stream of refugees.

  Maria Hunkert

  Izolda gives Edyta’s friend the rest of the gold dental bridge in exchange for a little money, a dress that’s too short but warm, and a ball of string. She ties the string around her waist and thighs and fashions a perfectly serviceable suspender belt. The dress doesn’t cover it completely, but her coat does. The friend’s husband repairs her shoes and now she’s ready for the road.

  She goes to the Görlitzer Bahnhof. At the counter they ask for her travel permit, she can obtain one at the National Social
ist League of German Women.

  She tells the German Women that she’s an ethnic German from Poland, that she was escaping on foot with the refugees, that she lost her bag in an air raid and that her name is Maria Hunkert. The German Women believe her and she’s authorized to buy a ticket all the way to Vienna.

  She has to change trains in Dresden: she arrives in the evening, her connection is in the morning. Boys from the Hitler Youth are standing by to assist the refugees, carrying their belongings and helping them on to trucks. One of the boys asks her why she doesn’t have any bags. That’s a long story, she says, and sighs. I understand, whispers the boy from the Hitler Youth. You went through hell, didn’t you, ma’am? – and squeezes her hand in sympathy. Beds for the refugees have been set up in schoolrooms. She is given coffee, bread and a clean towel, and goes to bed. In the morning they issue her sandwiches for the road (‘Food Rations’) and cigarettes (‘Care Rations’). The trucks take everyone to the station, and the serious, concerned boys from the Hitler Youth escort them to the trains.

  In a cheap Viennese hotel she trades her cigarettes (‘Care Rations’) for a room for three days, as well as some food coupons. She buys a newspaper. She scans the ads for two notices: a dental technician and employment for a young, energetic woman, to begin immediately.

  Zimmermann

  The restaurant belongs to a Herr Zimmermann (which is made clear by a sign spanning the entire room: ‘Herr Zimmermann reminds his guests that the table settings are his property only’). Izolda sits down at a table. A waiter takes her order: two bowls of soup, two portions of meat, two desserts… The waiter cuts the coupons from her ration card and asks how she would like to be served. Everything at once, she says. Everything? You must be very hungry, he smiles. She ought to smile back but she can’t, since she’s still missing her front teeth. She’s lucky her mouth is shaped the way it is: her lips conceal her upper teeth completely – at least as long as she doesn’t smile.