Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Maybe, he concluded, it was because they didn't have any troops or tanks or panzerfausts left to move. They only had Jews.

He watched this frightened but enthusiastic boy run back to his family and considered for a moment if the teen would be naive enough to try to stop a Soviet tank with that rifle of his. Probably. He shook his head: They didn't have a panzerfaust to give him.

Uri wondered, as he did often, whether he would be alive now if he hadn't jumped from that train nearly two years ago. Initially he'd presumed he would have died at Auschwitz, because even his youth and his strength would have bought him only so much time. But as he'd survived one normally fatal indignity after another in and out of the Wehrmacht, he'd begun to question this. It was as if he were being spared, his negligible soul cradled time after time by providence. For all he knew, if he'd stayed on that train going east two years ago, he'd be on another one right now going west.

No. Not likely. He'd have died. No one lived nearly two years at Auschwitz. It was why he'd hurled himself along with the slop bucket out the cattle car door that unusually balmy night when the opportunity had presented itself. He had, inevitably, just heard another of those stultifying train whistle blasts.

By 1943, the vast majority of the Schweinfurt Jews were gone, and Uri and his parents and their few remaining friends had a pretty good idea about what was going on at the concentration camps. At least the ones in the east. In his opinion, anyone with eyes in Schweinfurt, Jew or Catholic or Lutheran, had to have figured it out. How could they not have had serious suspicions about the deportations? One afternoon he'd passed the train station and seen the Jews who were being transported that month. They had been rounded up from a different part of the city and so he hadn't known anyone who had been taken that particular day. He'd only wound up near the station because a friend from the factory lived in the neighborhood, and this buddy had an antenna he could attach to their pathetic Volksempfänger radio (“All Nazi, All the Time,” his father would joke cryptically) that would allow them, when the weather was right, to receive the BBC. Still, he was wearing his star and so he didn't dare get too close: He could just imagine himself being accidentally herded onto the train by some Nazi moron, even though he clearly hadn't packed a suitcase and had brought none of his clothing or his valuables with him.

But even from the distance he saw something that caused him to stand perfectly still for a long moment, watching, as the cacophonic sounds of the city around him seemed to vanish. He could hear himself breathing, but nothing more. The Jews were being herded into the first three cars-far too many for each one, it was clear; dozens and dozens were going to be forced to stand-and their luggage was being loaded onto the fourth car. A freight car. And then, as Uri watched, that fourth car was uncoupled, and the first three pulled away. The luggage, he saw, wasn't going with them. Luggage, he realized, never went with them.

When his hearing returned he ran as fast as he could back to the ball-bearing factory. It would be three days before he would have the courage to venture once more to his friend's neighborhood for the special antenna.

Over the following months, more and more of the city's Jews were deported, including Uri's acquaintance who had helped him with the radio, and every evening he and his sister and his parents would crowd around the Volksempfänger in their cramped and dingy apartment-a single room in a shabby hotel that had been converted to Jewish housing-and wait for the four tones that signaled the start of a BBC broadcast. When the broadcast was in German, everyone listened; when it was in English, either Uri or his father would translate it, invariably missing some of the subtleties but usually understanding its gist.

Before the war, the family had lived in an elegant, three-bedroom town house with a yard that looked out upon the gazebo in the city's small park. Now? A dark room in a ramshackle hotel with a squalid bathroom at the end of the corridor that they shared with at least two dozen other evicted Jews crammed onto their floor. And they only had that because his father was a decorated veteran of the earlier world war, and now both he and his father were, more or less, slave labor in a factory the Nazis deemed critical to the war effort. Prior to that, his father had owned a not-insubstantial trucking company. Seven vehicles and twelve employees. The fascists had just drooled when they had forced him to sell it to them for next to nothing. No longer did anyone try to face this stoically or philosophically, to murmur how one didn't blame the ocean for tidal waves. Because, in fact, it wasn't a random act of nature behind this nightmare; it was their neighbors.

Slowly his parents' health began to fail. Somehow his father soldiered on at the factory, but both of his parents were weakened by their steadily diminished rations and the cold and the daily struggle to make do in their squalor. Their Shabbat dinner at sunset on Friday night-already shrunken because of curfews and the reality that as Jews they had almost no food to eat-grew even more intimate, because Uri's aunt and his uncle and his cousins were taken away. And then his grandmother. And, soon, another aunt who never had married. When this last woman-a nurse until the fact she was Jewish had cost her her job, a woman who even as a teenager had been an angel of mercy to wounded soldiers in the previous world war-was deported to the east, his own mother took him and his sister aside and with completely uncharacteristic melodrama told them that they had to live through this nightmare. No matter what, they had to survive. Someone had to let the world know what was going on. What the Nazis were doing.

When they came for him at the factory, he actually asked if he had time to run home to pack a suitcase, even though he knew it would never go with him to the camp. His escort, those two heavy-set men from the SA with eyebrows that reminded him of cater-pillars and oddly similar wattles of flesh dangling under their chins, told him that his mother had packed one for him. Two, as a matter of fact. Uri had considered informing them that he only owned a single valise, but knew there wasn't a point. He tried to find his family at the station but they didn't seem to be there. Someone told him one train already had left for the east, and in all likelihood they were on it. Still, he searched for them in the mob, moving as best as he could among the throng and twice being struck in the back by different guards when inadvertently he had strayed too near to one of the exits.

Most of the time, the Nazis weren't even bothering with passenger cars by then, and so he was herded into an unheated cattle car that still had giant twinelike balls of straw in the corners and along one of the long walls. Though he recognized a half-dozen people in the car with him, it was mostly a surreal and kaleidoscopic pastiche of shapes and faces he might see on any given day on the street or in the park: surreal because the people were crowded-though not, as he would hear often occurred, packed so tightly that the victims could neither sit nor move, and some would actually asphyxiate-and were constantly fidgeting and shuffling as they struggled to get comfortable, and so one moment he would spy a pretty young woman named Rivka in a spot across the car, and in the next he would see standing there a very old woman named Sarah; kaleidoscopic because in the variegated light from the slats high on the walls, light that changed as the day wore on and the train chugged its way (dear God, no) east, their eyes and lips and kerchiefs seemed constantly to be changing color. They were, he guessed, the very last Jews left in Schweinfurt: the labor, the technical help-Jews with some rare expertise-and their elderly parents and children.