Dacia Maraini: Train to Budapest

A yellow liquid issued from his mouth and his eyes showed their whites as if he was tired of studying the outside world and wanted only to turn towards the muddy black well inside his sick body. The doctor helped him to lie down again, pulling the sheet up to his neck.

‘Is he dead?’ she had asked in a tiny voice.

‘He’ll be fine in ten days or so.’ Then, as if aware of her for the first time, the doctor pulled her by the hand towards the stairs. ‘He needs rest now,’ he added hurriedly, cleaning his hands on a wad of cotton steeped in alcohol. ‘Come on, go home, off you go!’

Amara headed quickly for the door. As she turned to say goodbye to the sick boy she saw him give a slight smile. There was in that exhausted face a desperation greater than the body that contained it, deeper and more relentless than the illness at that moment serving him as a shield. He had used his feeble power as a child to attempt a last opposition to that foolish departure in the direction of death. Although probably well aware he could not escape and that, weak and exhausted as he was, he would have to follow his energetic parents who, victims of who knows what impetuous leap of Teutonic patriotism, had decided to return to Austria to ‘face the enemy together at home’. Both felt entirely Austrian. For them, being Jewish was a fact of culture and religion that in no way interfered with their belonging to the country in which they had been born and grown up and in which they had their roots. Besides, they were used to being respected and admired for the intelligent use generations of their families had made of money, and for the loyal and faithful manner in which for a century they had served the Austrian state in these parts.

That smile was the last thing she had seen of him. A smile of grieving love. A smile of fear but of promise too. As though he wanted to say: I’m here, and even if I move I’m not moving. I’m waiting for you.

Instead it had been she who had waited, for days, weeks, months and years. Most often in the branches of the Villa Lorenzi cherry tree. That was where she liked best to wait. Perched on a branch, half blackbird half child. She had grown into a girl, then a woman. But she had never stopped waiting for him. Whenever she could she climbed the cherry tree with a book in her hand. She would read, content to stare at the branches. Every now and then she would raise her eyes and study the dusty little path along which she had so often seen Emanuele come, hopping and skipping in his sandals and kicking the dust up round his knees.

The bus drops Amara right in front of a tower she has often seen in photographs. A rail track overgrown with grass passes under her feet on its way to penetrating a massive building and high gateway crowned by the square tower with a long narrow loophole under its roof. Auschwitz. She steps through the damp morning grass, wetting her shoes. On the horizon are birch trees with shining leaves. New trees and new earth everywhere. As if the will to forget is emanating from the earth itself. An atmosphere of enigmatic peace resting on what still remains of the horror.

Then she walks along a soil path, towards the great gate of the main camp with the famous phrase in wrought-iron letters WORK SETS YOU FREE. A delicate script in capital letters, subdued and dark against the clear sky, framed by two metal strips for insubstantial, reassuring emphasis. The parallel strips are not brutal, but seem to follow an almost subtle path, broken in the middle by the dancing leap of a small arch. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Along the camp the sun caresses the steel barriers, curved at the top, that hold metal nets and still taut barbed wire. The effect of the dark bars is softened by the many little white ceramic caps whose purpose was to maintain and control the electric current passing through the wire. The buildings that survived the mines with which the Germans did their best to hide their places of death, now have their doors wide open. A few tourists in coloured jackets move peacefully in and out with cameras and notebooks, hats pressed down to shield their heads from the sun.

‘Through me you come into the grieving city, through me you come among the lost people.’ Dante’s words come spontaneously to mind as she climbs the stone steps to the main entrance. From the warmth outside she passes into a damp and disquieting darkness. This was one of the camp’s clearing and assembly stations. A white arrow indicates the entrance to this sinister museum of memory.

Amara passes down a long corridor, its walls decorated with thousands of photograph portraits side by side, each protected by a sheet of glass and a slim wooden frame. Under each head is a name. Identification photographs that show the faces of men and women caught in a moment of confusion and total loss of all affection. At this very moment when their identity was fixed on paper, they were about to lose it. From that instant, a process would have begun to depersonalise them not only physically and psychologically, reducing them to bodies without gender or flesh, mere ghosts consumed by terror and the ferocious laws of survival, their names replaced by a number on an arm.

The expressions on their faces show they have not yet fully understood where they are and what is about to happen to them. They know their prospects are not good, that they have left behind all security and power of ownership. A strange and cruel process, this photography, bearing witness to the insane precision of the Nazis as they pedantically catalogued each new admission. A mania that lacerated the heart of the system of punishments of the Reich. The SS knew perfectly well they were acting as assassins and bandits and tried to conceal their crimes by exterminating those who had witnessed them. Even so they were unable to stop themselves cataloguing, registering and recording on paper names and dates that were to be unequivocal testimony to these crimes.

Amara examines the faces on the wall, one by one, slowly, trying to hear them speak to her. She has almost forgotten that the one face she is looking for is Emanuele’s. These portraits are vivid proof of what it means to arrive in a camp after long days in an armoured train. They also tell of people not yet marked and wounded by camp life. People who have only just left their homes and their cities. People whose cheeks still carry the bloom of a normal life when they were still able to delight in an exam passed, a walk in the woods, or a letter sent by a distant love.

They have passed day after day crammed in a train with no food or drink, sitting side by side on the floor without toilet or water, forced to perform their natural needs in front of everyone. But their eyes still have a touch of confidence. They think they have reached a work camp, brutal perhaps but ready to give their thirsty bodies a home. They think they will have to work hard like others they have seen here dressed in pyjamas with vertical stripes. But they know nothing of the gas chambers, nothing of the fear which will transform them into living dead, or ‘muselman’ as they are called in the camp or, if they are selected to work for the guards, will transform them into ferocious and treacherous slave-drivers, often even forced to kill their own brothers.

There are workers’ faces among these photographs, prematurely marked by hard toil: peasants in patched shirts, family women with discoloured headscarves. Poor Jews from the villages of Eastern Europe: Germans, Poles and Hungarians. And contrasting with them are the refined faces of prosperous citizens: girls with light fair hair and school-uniform collars, boys with proud frowns and open-neck shirts, old men in jackets with velvet lapels, eyes staring in astonishment.

As Amara turns away from the last portrait she realises more than an hour has passed without her coming across either the face or name of Emanuele Orenstein.