Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

Amara scatters the letters on her lap. There are so many of them. But there’s a familiar break between those written before 1941 and the later ones. The early letters are all about excursions, good dinners at home, nannies, school, and that obsession with flying that kept Emanuele shut up at home struggling with ever more varied kinds of hand-built aircraft. After 1941 everything changes. Even the paper he writes on, even the ink that from being black and smooth becomes clotted and pale, and is finally replaced by pencil. His letters got less frequent, in fact they became so few and far between that she can remember the anxiety of waiting for them to come. ‘Has the postman been?’ she would ask the moment she woke, knowing perfectly well he never came before ten. Why can’t he change his route, she would ask herself, when he does his round on his bicycle, ringing his bell when he gets to the corner of Via Alderotti. If instead of first going to Via Segato he turned round in Via Incontri, he’d reach her home at nine-forty. But postmen are mysterious, and choose routes no one can understand.

Vienna. November ’41

Dear Amara, I haven’t written for some time because I’ve had no paper or pen. Everything’s changed since last time. The SS came to my school. They read out a list of names. Including mine. ‘Starting tomorrow, you can’t come to school here any more.’ Our teacher, Frau Schadhauser, was furious and protested. They handcuffed her and took her away like a criminal. ‘It’s not that we’re stopping you going to school,’ explained a little soldier with short red hair, the nicest of them, ‘it’s just that you can’t be with Aryans. You’re Jews and you have to be with Jewish children, in a Jewish school, with Jewish teachers.’

Mariska has gone from our house. I’ve done all I can not to cry and I’ve succeeded. She was with us for so many years. She was my nanny and a mother to me too. She held me in her arms when I was little. The law says Jews can’t keep Aryans as domestic servants. Mariska cried her eyes out. Mother gave her a ring with a precious stone which consoled her a bit. Before she left she made me the bilberry tart I like so much. She was crying while she beat the eggs. I think I ate Mariska’s tears with the cream. Why aren’t you here? I so much need to talk to you. To tell you I don’t understand what’s happening to us, I’m so frightened I can’t sleep at night. Papà says we should go back to Florence. But he does nothing to get tickets, or to ask for our passports which they’ve taken away. Anyhow I don’t think they’d give them back. They’re Jewish passports. Mamma’s more of an optimist, more self-confident. She wraps herself in her fur coat, puts on a worried frown and says we’re more patriotic than they are, that her father was a general and the Emperor Franz Josef in person pinned a medal on his chest after he lost an arm in the battle of the Kolubara in Serbia, under the command of General Potiorek on 25 November 1914. ‘What can they do to us? Are we or are we not Austrians? We’ve been Austrian for longer than any of them,’ Mamma states, most of all, it seems, to convince herself. Meanwhile on the radio we hear Hitler’s voice thundering and screaming that all Jews are communists and Bolsheviks, that the Jews are secretly arranging to hand over Austria and Germany to the Soviets, and at the same time conspiring with the world’s great international bankers to accumulate in their own bank accounts all the money that belongs to honest citizens.

But was this really Emanuele writing? So grown up, so wise and serious. He had always been a studious child, with an adult mind, meticulous in his use of language, but now he seemed to have grown more mature. Nearly two years had passed since he left and he would certainly have needed to grow up quickly to understand and face up to what was happening in his country. If only he had stayed behind in Rifredi with his father, leaving the beautiful Thelma to set off in her furs by herself for the house on Schulerstrasse! He would be twenty-eight now. Who knows what he might be like? And would she recognise him if she saw him?

We’re in Auschwitz, Amara tells herself, we’re here to find out about Emanuele, stick to the point! She has lost herself in a letter. One of those letters she is never without, that she carries folded in her bag as her most precious possessions. Her feet move forward slowly, almost unconsciously, as if familiar with these corridors, as if she has walked here before.

Now Amara is in Hall number 5, facing a confused disordered mountain of prostheses: wooden legs, iron joints, halters, elastic belts, and hands made from ceramics, chalk and cork. Made-to-measure prostheses could hardly be of much use to the Nazis. They couldn’t sell them as they could hair, but nonetheless prostheses had to be detached from the bodies and piled up to await orders from Berlin. To be accepted by death, even a mutilated corpse had to be stripped of all its possessions. Many came from soldiers wounded in the First World War when they had fought against Germany’s enemies in the name of a country that now brutally tore away their prostheses as it sent them to be butchered. Certainly Frau Orenstein had some reason to be proud of her furs when she remembered that her father had received a medal from the Emperor. Emanuele’s grandfather, Georg Fink, had climbed down alone under a bridge to disable an explosive just before it went off. In doing so he had lost an arm. Emanuele had told her the story several times: when he was little he had been fascinated by that empty sleeve that, always tidy and ironed, had been kept elegantly tucked into a jacket pocket. ‘Grandfather, tell me the story of the bridge,’ he would ask, and the old man would begin: ‘We knew it had been mined, but we had to get across the river. No one dared to go and search for the mines because there were snipers watching. I waited for night. Then dressed entirely in black I climbed down under the bridge. The iron was smooth and slippery, and I was in constant danger of falling into the water from a height of sixty metres. I doubt I would have survived. But I was so quiet the snipers never heard me. Alone with a small pocket torch in my mouth. I could see where the TNT was rigged up, its cords not as thick as I had feared. Who would have thought it possible to climb all that way down! Directly above the dark water, on a starless night. Luckily I’d done a lot of rock climbing when I was young. I was wearing a sling to keep my hands free. I took my knife and, sweating and swearing, I cut the cords, releasing the dynamite which fell into the river. The moment it hit the water it exploded with a great roar. I felt something hit my arm, but paid no attention at the time. I managed to get back to my post safe and in one piece. Our men took advantage of the confusion caused by the explosion and firing of guns and crossed the bridge. Unfortunately my wound was infected causing gangrene and they had to cut off my arm.’ Emanuele watched him with wide-open eyes. Was that heroism? Would he too be capable of doing something like that?

‘The Nazis made full use of everything they could extract from the Jews, just as people do with pigs: their poor gassed, hanged or poisoned bodies were not thrown away until they had been stripped of clothes, shoes, watches, hair, gold teeth, prostheses, and sometimes even their skin, as is said to have happened in Buchenwald.’ So says a survivor in a booklet Amara is reading in the camp bookshop.

All that remained was sad bones of no value. And even these were burned so as to leave no evidence. Besides, burying them would have caused more work and more trouble. The strength of young prisoners was needed for heavy work like cutting firewood, building huts, pulling the dead from the gas ovens and stripping the bodies of their possessions both natural and artificial. A few privileged prisoners, trained in some useful trade, worked on those poor tortured bodies: with skilled movements they would extract gold teeth, cleaning them of organic material and throwing them into bucketfuls of formalin. Later they pulled out the disinfected gold, melted it over small burners kept permanently alight and formed it into small rectangular bars that still preserve something of the hastily improvised work of those amateur goldsmiths who had invented a trade for themselves to escape the gas chambers and mass shootings. Unaware, or discovering too late, that they themselves must in any case meet the same end as witnesses of this infamy. Each gold bar was individually checked by the SS before they were carefully packed in cardboard boxes and sent to Berlin.