Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.

A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn’t been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and József-he’d assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they’d only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvár, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and József, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer’s wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day’s work, József touched Andras’s shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.

“See that?” József said. “I don’t think we’re going to work today.”

Andras raised his eyes. “Why not?”

“Look.” He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spinning out of control into the ditches. Behind them, as far as Andras could see, a line of sleeker, swifter tanks barreled in their direction: Soviet T-34s, the kind he’d seen in Ukraine and Subcarpathia. That explained why their work foreman still hadn’t appeared, though it was half past seven: The Russians had come at last, and the Germans and Hungarians were running for their lives. At that moment the camp loudspeaker broadcast a command for all inmates to return to their quarters, gather their belongings, and meet at the camp gates to await orders for redeployment. But József sat down just where he was and crossed his legs before him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, “Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I’m going to sit here and wait.”

The announcement raised a shout from the other men, some of whom threw their caps in the air. They stood in the assembly yard and watched their Nazi guards and work foremen flee the camp, some on foot, others in jeeps or trucks. No one seemed to take notice of the few men who’d gathered with their belongings near the gate. No further orders came over the loudspeaker; anyone who might have given orders had gone. Some of the inmates hid in the barracks, but Andras and József and many of the others climbed a low hill and watched a battle unfold in the neighboring fields. A battalion of German tanks had turned to meet the Soviets, and the cannons barked and roared for hours. All day and into the night they watched and cheered the Red Army. After dark, gunfire made an aurora in the eastern sky. Somewhere beyond that peony-colored light was the border of Hungary, and beyond that the road that led to Budapest.

At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp. The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and their captain made an announcement in Russian over a megaphone. The men of the camp had anticipated this moment. They’d made white flags from the canvas sacks that held cement dust, and had tied the flags to slender linden branches. A group of Russian-speaking prisoners, Carpathians from a Slovak border town, approached the Soviets with the branches held high. The absurdity of it, Andras thought-those gaunt and grief-shocked men carrying flags of surrender, as though they might be mistaken for their captors. The Soviets had brought a cartload of coarse black bread, which they distributed among the men. They broke the locks of the storehouses from which the camp officers had supplied themselves; after they’d taken as much as their cart could hold, they indicated that the prisoners should take whatever they wanted. The men walked through the storehouse as if through a museum of a bygone age. There on the shelves were luxuries they hadn’t seen for months-tinned sausages, tinned pears, tinned peas; slender boxes of cigarettes; stacks of batteries and bars of soap. They packed those things into squares of canvas or empty cement bags, hoping they might sell or trade them on the way home. Then the Soviets marched the men to a processing camp thirty kilometers away on the Hungarian border, where they lived for three weeks in filthy overcrowded barracks before they were given liberation papers and released. They were two hundred and fifteen kilometers from Budapest. The only way to get there was to walk.

They trusted nobody, traveled at night, evaded the last few fleeing Nazis, who would shoot any Jews they met, and the Soviet liberators, who, it was rumored, could take away your liberation papers and send you off to work camps in Siberia for no reason at all. József’s injured leg meant they had to travel slowly; he could manage no more than ten kilometers before the pain stopped him. From the direction of the city, reports of horrors drifted across the rolling hills of Transdanubia: Budapest bombed to rubble. Hundreds of thousands deported. A winter of starvation. The part of Andras’s mind that he was accustomed to sending in Klara’s direction had shriveled to a hard knot, like scar tissue. He allowed himself to imagine nothing beyond the moment’s necessary work; he fixed his mind on his own survival. He would not allow himself to remember the first weeks of the year, that gray-blue blur of horror that was January 1945. The surgical wound in his side had healed to a puckered pink seam; the injured spleen, the torn intestine, had resumed their invisible work. He would not think about his parents, about Mátyás; would not think about Tibor, who had disappeared somewhere beyond the Austrian border. With József at his side he slept in the ruins of barns or dug into haystacks and bedded down in the sweet-smelling dark, then woke to nightmares of being buried alive. By night they walked in the thick brush beside a highway that led toward Budapest. One evening, when they stopped at the back door of a large country house to trade German cigarettes and batteries for eggs and bread, they learned from the cook that Russian tanks had entered Berlin. She showed them where they could conceal themselves in a stand of lilacs by an open window and listen to that night’s radio broadcast. Amid the clusters of syringa they listened as a BBC announcer described the events transpiring in the German capital. To Andras the English words were a maze of sharp vowels and rapid-fire consonants, but József knew the language. The Russians, he translated, had surrounded the Reichstag, where Hitler had chosen to make his last stand; no one knew what was going on within.

One morning a few days later, as they slept in a boathouse on Lake Balaton beneath a mildewed canvas sail, they were awakened by the sound of bells. Every bell in the nearby town, Siófok, rang balefully, as though a great emergency were at hand. Andras and József ran out of the boathouse to find the townspeople streaming into the streets, moving toward the center of town in a stunned procession. They followed the crowd to the town square, where the mayor-a war-starved grandfather in an ill-fitting Soviet jacket-climbed the steps of the courthouse and announced that the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead. Germany had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender in Reims. A cease-fire would go into effect at midnight.