Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

Amara reached out to squeeze the boy’s wrist but her fingers met warm stone. She shuddered. ‘Emanuele!’ she whispered. The only thing occasionally moving anywhere near her was the lizard as it tried to find more sun.

‘You move, please? With signorina in middle no can photograph ruins.’ A guide comes up followed by a little group of visitors. Amara sees from their faces that she is in their way. She is sitting among the ruins of Gas Chamber number 3. But she can’t make herself move. She sees the group with blind eyes. She hears the guide’s voice explaining: ‘Here shower room, really gas chamber. Nazis put bomb before they going away. But only part fall down. You see roof very broken? But walls still standing. Wait peacefully water. But no water, instead gas grains drop from roof touch wet floor become gas, poison. Zyklon B, death certain, in maybe eight, ten minutes. Death sure. And they all dead, all.’

Amara struggles to her feet, her head spinning like a top. She is still looking for the man who has just been talking to her, the person who claimed to be Emanuele. But only the tourists crowd round the guide who continues to explain: ‘Forty thousands Italians deported, thirty-two thousands political and military and eight thousands Jews, only three thousands live. Less than ten per cent.’

You can tell from a mile off that they are Italians, from the disorganised and uncoordinated way they move, and the trouble the Polish guide is having trying to keep them together, constantly chasing some young man or elderly lady who has moved off to take photographs without listening to instructions. For several years now such groups have been able to come directly from Italy by bus.

‘Now, signorina, follow the others, please!’

He has mistaken her for one of his party. Amara obeys automatically. The man has a pleasant voice despite his awkward, comic Italian. The group moves from place to place through Auschwitz and she goes with them.

The Polish guide, guardian of the dead, seems more real than anything else in the camp, with the warm crosswind seeming to sweep aside the ghosts like scraps of paper. ‘Here: gypsy zone. Here: hospital men prisoners. Here, name Mexico, transit camp for Jewish women.’

Amara is holding a booklet published by the camp management with large reproductions of period photographs: a line of naked women, their flesh white with the pallor of skin stripped of clothing in winter. She has never before seen nudity like this. A nudity that in revealing itself terminal has become gentle, transparent and mute. The women’s heads are shrunk into their shoulders and their backs hunched as they try to hide their sex under their hands. The damned moving meekly to final judgement though they know themselves innocent. They are branded with numbers that fix their destiny as martyrs. Their crime is that they are alive, that they are themselves and exist. Even if they never listened to the serpent or bit into the apple of temptation, they must now undergo the humiliation of divine rejection. For ever, say those curving backs, for ever. But why?

‘Here SS homes,’ says the guide, lifting his hand. Humble little houses though with some pretension to elegance. Lace-edged curtains carefully hung to form two waves in the middle, blue and white shutters. In the little front gardens daisies struggle with rubble and coarse grass.

‘Here storehouse for things stolen from Jews, name Canada.’ This was where Amara had seen the mountains of shoes, the piles of cases, the masses of glasses, the heaps of prostheses. She decides to go back into Canada: perhaps first time round her attention was so distracted by the unexpectedness of it that she failed to make a proper check of the huge number of dusty abandoned suitcases. Would she have been able to recognise Emanuele’s? Of course she would; she had seen it often enough on top of the wardrobe in his room. Faded leather with brass bosses and a shiny hook-shaped fastening whose small tongue was made of silver-coloured metal. The lid stamped E and O in gold.

But she has hardly taken a step before the fatherly Pole intervenes: ‘No, signorina, this way, please.’ So she turns back, without even knowing why.

‘Here platform for selection. If you young, can work, this way; if you old, child, mother with children, that way, to gas. Here dead bodies burned. When too many deads and ovens full. Then more ovens made, but later.’ He shows a photograph of corpses hurled at random into a ditch. The tangled limbs make it impossible to tell one body from another. Not even an orgy could entwine legs, arms, heads and pelvises like that. They look strikingly different from the other inmates, from those circulating like spectres in pyjamas looking for something to eat or queuing for roll call early in the morning. The dead are still full and firm, with prominent muscles. They were gassed at once on arrival and it is hard to know whether to grieve over their abrupt extinction or to rejoice that they were spared the torture of camp life.

Vienna. January ’42

Dear Amara, yesterday we opened the door to find two servants in uniform, complete with aprons. ‘We’ve come to clean the house for the new owners,’ they said. My mother, always polite, offered them coffee. ‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ she told them, and added, ‘there really must have been a misunderstanding; this is our house, my father bought it before I was born.’ ‘But now it has been assigned to Consul Schumacher and his family.’ ‘Please, madam, don’t insist, we’ll sort it all out, you’ll see.’ ‘Aren’t you Jews by the name of Orenstein?’ ‘Yes, but Austrians first and foremost, my father lost an arm in the Battle of the Kolubara during the First World War and the Emperor himself pinned a medal on his chest.’ ‘Your house has been requisitioned, here are the papers. You must move out by tomorrow. We start cleaning now.’

My mother made telephone calls in all directions but couldn’t reach any of her friends. Only an employee at the department of social administration who told her abruptly that her house had been requisitioned under the new anti-Jewish laws and assigned to an Aryan family by the name of Schumacher.

‘Please come back tomorrow,’ said my mother very politely. ‘You will find the house clean.’ The woman made a sign to her assistant and they left. Soon after the doorbell rang again. This time it was an SS squad. They searched the house saying they were looking for arms. Of course there were no arms. But when they left they took with them all my mother’s silver, jewellery and furs, an eighteenth-century Venetian mirror and a nineteenth-century English silver teapot.

By now Amara knows nearly all Emanuele’s letters by heart. The words of her little lover echo in her mind, his voice gradually growing more dry and desolate.

‘This, first gas chamber. This, second gas chamber. Here, crematoriums one, two, three, four, five. Bodies gassed by pipe here for burning. Body in, smoke and ashes come out. One load every half hour. Here toilets and baths.’ The guide continues relentlessly, taking them rapidly from one part of the camp to another.

Łódź ghetto. February ’42

They knocked on the door of our house in Vienna at four in the morning. Gave us an hour to pack our bags. One case each, not more than three in all. But where are we going? No answer. They were impatient and bad-tempered. Papà and Mamma began arguing about what to put in the suitcases. Papà wanted to fill them with food. Mamma with clothes: rugs, warm coats. Her furs, jewels and money had already been taken by the other SS. When they came back after an hour we weren’t ready and they started shouting. Finally we left all loaded up; my father with a valuable mat under his arm and my mother with two cashmere jackets. But at the main door they took everything from us except the three cases. We were loaded onto a lorry and then a train. We had no idea where they were taking us. Four nights of hell in an armoured cattle-truck together with about a hundred other Austrian Jews and nothing to eat or drink. Luckily we’d brought some sausages and apples with us. My father kept saying: You see? You see I was right to bring food? We ate a sausage and an apple each, keeping the rest for later. But when we went to get more, Papà’s case was empty. One of those starving people had stolen the lot. Even the Prague ham, the hardboiled eggs, the bilberry liqueur and the biscuits. We were parched with thirst. We arrived dirty and thirsty. Where? At the Łódź ghetto, another Austrian told us in a whisper. Why there particularly? No answer. Only my mother kept asking questions and protesting. My father seemed more dead than alive. They assigned us to a small room in a crumbling building, on the second floor, in an apartment where four families were already living. Only one kitchen. One bath for everyone. Mamma started again on her long lament about her father having won a gold medal for military valour in the Battle of the Kolubara, but no one listened.