Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

Amara huddles up into herself. Something is collapsing inside her, reeling and drowning. Something sucking at her from the inside till she feels her face shrinking, her hands weakening, and her heart becoming a piece of calcified meat. Meanwhile he pulls up his shirt revealing ugly scars, red against his meagre white flesh. He strikes himself with flat, trembling fingers. Then angrily shoves his shirt back into his trousers.

‘But I must tell you the truth to the end or I shall suffocate. Even though I already know you won’t understand a damn thing … It wasn’t just by stealing that I saved myself. I accepted the attentions of an officer to escape selection for the experiments. Do you get that, you stupid little tart? Experiments were a speciality at Dachau. Very useful for the pharmaceutical firms. Did a new drug need testing? Abracadabra, we have just the right bodies for that here. No complaints, no arguments. Why not inoculate the enfeebled body of an inmate with blood infected with malaria? His temperature would immediately shoot up to forty or forty-one Celsius. And Dr Schilling, solicitous as always, would be on hand to make you swallow the new medicine to see if it might help cure you from malaria. One subject’s eyes would bulge from their sockets, another would be seized by convulsions and yet a third, the most fortunate, would go stone deaf but survive. And why not immerse a man in freezing water for ninety minutes to find out how to save any of their airmen who came down in the sea. Usually the victims died after an hour from cerebral haemorrhage. But in an attempt to bring them round, the doctor would give them injections in the femoral vein and in the belly and so forth. Most did not respond. Then as soon as they were dead, the hard-working camp doctors would open their cranium to find out what had happened. They’d find the brain soaked in blood and furthermore, something that surprised them, the heart transformed into an aubergine by the effort of trying to get oxygen. Dr Holzlohner was particularly able and occasionally even managed to restore the unfortunate victim to life. In his able hands the body would regain heat. But of course it would have suffered irreparable brain damage. So the drugs were useless. Who cared if eighteen out of twenty Jews died during these experiments? One survived, and that was me. A phenomenon of resistance. Another doctor from Hamburg, you should have seen him, a really able type, courteous, shrewd, with small hands, a handlebar moustache, and good kind eyes, came from Buchenwald where he had specialised in homosexuals. He got hold of those wearing the pink triangle, made them take off their clothes, grafted under the skin of their bellies a gland full of male hormones and stood back to watch. In the morning he would interrogate them: have you dreamed about women? Eh, tell me, what were they like? They would tell him what he wanted to hear and he would happily send in medical reports in beautiful handwriting that claimed that his experiments for the elimination of homosexuality had been successful. But what he didn’t see was that around him, among the blond Aryan SS officers, there were dozens of homosexuals who amused themselves by picking out the best-looking young boys to use as slaves with duty as an excuse. Homosexuality was of course forbidden. Everything was forbidden in that place. But the officers knew how to bend the rules. I beg you, Herr Doktor, let him be no more than sixteen years old and in reasonable shape, he will have to keep the floor clean and look after the laundry. Herr Doktor would nod. But you had to show yourself clean, free of fleas and washed with soap or they were disgusted. I jumped into bed, actually not so much a bed as a latrine, but no matter. The thing was not to be caught and no place was safer than the latrines, which were flowing with dysentery. The SS never went there, they were afraid of soiling their uniforms. But the handsome Untersturmführer Rudolf Heinz did come there, at night, when no one else was about, to make love to me, you understand? I would have accepted this and more not to end up in that icy water again. Once you might survive, twice no. But d’you want to know the funniest thing? Coupling with the Untersturmführer served no purpose at all, because after a bit he got bored and passed me on indifferently to a friend of his, a medical officer who, not satisfied with the results obtained by Dr Schilling, was himself trying to discover an anti-malaria vaccine. Finding me in better condition than the others thanks to the scraps of food my friend Rudolf had secretly passed on to me, he injected me with infected blood. I became delirious with fever, my skin wrinkled and my teeth fell out. Doctor Müller was very fond of me; he was so happy I didn’t die like the others and ruin his experiments. He wrote and wrote, long articles about his vaccine, using me and four other wretches as examples. But in the meantime I had become an old man at seventeen years of age, decrepit, bald, toothless and imbecile. I developed a festering abscess on my right cheek. Good, excellent, let’s try a new type of anaesthesia, let’s cut open the cheek and conduct an operation in acrobatic dentistry, that was how they put it. And here’s the result: a hole that constantly fills with mucus. I could hear planes passing over and bombs falling and I knew the war was nearly over. I had to survive, I just had to hold out … But what for? To bite into a slice of bread. Not just any old slice, no, a whole loaf, just for me, that was my dream. I didn’t give a damn about the others who were dying like flies, about those hanged each morning at dawn, or still arriving in the trains. We were laying new railway tracks in a hurry, schnell schnell you filthy swine, damn bloody Jews! We must hurry with these new tracks to take the trains straight to the undressing rooms. A brilliant idea, don’t you think? So that the moment they came out of the cattle trucks they could be stripped of everything, even their underpants, and the fittest ones be sent to work in pyjamas filthy with the shit and blood of those who had died. The rest would be either shot or gassed in lorries or sent on to another camp. Schnell schnell ; no longer any time to cut off women’s hair or strip gold teeth out of the old, the allies were barely a hundred kilometres away and no witnesses must survive, you understand, not a single one. Meanwhile in the offices they were burning papers, you could detect the smell over and above that of the crematorium ovens. Eight humdred, nine hundred, a thousand bodies a day, were thrown into those ovens. Their problem was they couldn’t kill as fast as they needed to, so that with bayonets at our backs we were forced to drag the bodies of those just shot to a great ditch and throw petrol over them, for an SS officer to set fire to the lot with a burning torch. Some would still be moving, calling, slobbering or groping about. But if the rifles had not killed them, the fire would. What a grand spectacle: one more, one more, schnell schnell ! What about that newborn baby saved and wrapped in a blanket? Throw it in the air so I can hit it in flight. Lagerführer Christopher Schöttle was an expert at clay-pigeon shooting. It would be easier still with a newborn child, wouldn’t it? Meanwhile the big guns could be heard getting nearer and nearer. Those who understood German as well as I did could hear them discussing what to do with the surviving prisoners? Have Himmler’s orders arrived yet? What was that cretin waiting for before giving precise orders! But then one morning the order seemed to have arrived, the actual order written by Himmler that stated in so many words: kill the lot. No witnesses, is that clear? Not a single survivor to say what happened in the camps, that’s what the Führer wants. But how could thousands and thousands of people be killed in two or three days? There was no more petrol for firing the ovens. Meanwhile some officers had very quietly disappeared. There was no more ammunition for the machine guns and pistols, but the trainloads were still arriving and where to put the people they brought? How to dispose of them all. Then came another order: round them up and take them away. But away where? Where the hell you like, just away. By now the authorities were out in the open, they were nervous and discipline was suffering: all they wanted was dead people, more and more dead bodies. But didn’t the order contain anything else? Didn’t it explain where to take these damn Jews who were so pig-headed as to insist on continuing to stay alive? What did the order say? It said: since the allies are at the gates, and since it would take time to get rid of so many people, form up the remaining prisoners in fives and drag them to another camp, further away from the enemy front line. The death marches, do you know about them, little Alice in Wonderland? D’you know what they were? Luckily it was April by now, maybe that saved some of us: the temperature had risen five or six degrees, that was already something, wasn’t it? Our clothes were still the same, French elegance: striped pyjamas and clogs. But at least our feet were no longer enclosed in a grip of ice. We had air to eat and rainwater to drink. We just had to march and move quickly. If you stopped, even for a moment, if you sat down, you were instantly shot. I don’t know how I managed, I really don’t know. I kept walking and thinking: look, I must get as far as that post, just to that post and then I’m there. And at the post I said: come on, one more post, keep going, one more post and we’re there. That’s how I did it, post after post, hundreds of posts, blinded by sleep, twisted by hunger. Every so often I heard a shot. Some couldn’t make it, got out of step, or stopped a moment to catch their breath. Towards evening we would be given some soup: hot water with a few beans in it. And then, if there was a stall and some hay, fine; if not, lie along the road in the ditch. We collapsed and fell asleep anywhere, one on top of another to keep warm. Many never rose again next morning. So much the better, one mouth less! I overheard one SS man say to another, where the fuck are we supposed to take them, have you any idea? And the other said: they’ll all die on the road anyway. But they hadn’t taken into account the will to live of a boy of seventeen.’