The next day too promised to be another hectic one, but then who could keep tabs on each single day, and on every event of each day. What I can relate, in any event, is that the kitchens managed to keep working at their regular schedule throughout, and the doctor was likewise usually punctual. One morning, however, not long after coffee, there were hurried footsteps in the corridor, a strident call, a code word as it were, at which Pyetchka swiftly scrabbled his package out from its hiding-place and, gripping it under his arm, vanished. Not much later, somewhere around nine o’clock, I heard over the box an instruction that was not for prisoners but soldiers: “ An alle SS-Angehörigen,” then twice over, “Das Lager sofort zu verlassen,” ordering the forces to leave the camp at once. I then heard the sounds of battle first approaching then receding, for a while almost whistling about my very ears but later gradually diminishing until finally there was a hush — altogether too great a hush, because for all my waiting, straining of ears, keeping eyes peeled and on the lookout, neither at the regular time nor later did I manage to pick out the by now long-overdue rattling and the attendant daily hollering of the soup-bearers. It was going on 4:00 p.m., perhaps, when the box at last gave a click and, after brief sputtering and blowing sounds, informed all of us that this was the Lagerältester, the camp senior inmate, speaking. “ Kameraden,” he said, audibly struggling with some choking emotion which caused his voice first to falter, then to shrill to an almost high-pitched whine, “wir sind frei!”—we are free, and it crossed my mind that in that case the Lagerältester too, it seems, must have shared the same views as Pyetchka, Bohoosh, the doctor, and others like them, must have been in cahoots with them, so to say, if he was being allowed to announce the event, and with such evident joy at that. He proceeded to deliver a decent little speech, then after him it was the turn of others, in the most diverse languages: “Attention, attention,” in French, for example; “Pozor, pozor!” in Czech, as best I know; “Nyemanye, nyemanye, russki tovarishchi nyemanye!” and here the melodious intonation suddenly triggered a cherished memory, the language that, back at the time of my arrival here, the men of the bathhouse work detail had been speaking all around me; “Uvaga, uvaga!” upon which the Polish patient next to me immediately sat up in his bed in agitation and bawled out to all of us: “Chiha bendzh! Teras polski kommunyiki,” and then I recalled that he had been fretting, fidgeting, and squirming around throughout the entire day; then, to my utter amazement, all of a sudden: “Figyelem, figyelem! A magyar lágerbizottság…”— “Attention, this is the Hungarian camp committee…”— amazing, I thought to myself, I never even suspected there was such a thing. However hard I listened, though, all I heard of from him, as from everyone before, was about freedom, but not a single word about or in reference to the missing soup. I was absolutely delighted, quite naturally, about our being free, but I couldn’t help it if, from another angle, I fell to thinking that yesterday, for instance, such a thing could never have happened. The April evening outside was already dark, and Pyetchka too had arrived back, flushed, excited, talking thirteen to the dozen, when the Lagerältester finally came on again over the loudspeaker. This time he appealed to the former members of the Kartoffelschäler-Kommando, requesting them to resume their old duties in the kitchens, and all other inmates of the camp to stay awake, until the middle of the night if need be, because they were going to start cooking a strong goulash soup, and it was only at this point that I slumped back on my pillow in relief, only then that something loosened up inside me, and only then did I myself also think — probably for the first time in all seriousness — of freedom.
NINE
I reached home at roughly the same time of year as when I had left it. Certainly, the woods all around had already long turned green, grass had sprouted over the great pits of corpses, and the asphalt of the Appellplatz, derelict since the onset of the new age and strewn with the litter of cold campfires, all manner of rags, papers, and food cans, was already melting in the sweltering midsummer heat at Buchenwald when I too was asked whether I had any wish to undertake the journey. For the most part, the younger ones would be making the trip, led by a stocky, bespectacled man with graying hair, a functionary of the Hungarian camp committee, who is to take care of our travel arrangements. There is now a truck, and not least a willingness on the part of the American military, to transport us a stretch eastward, after which it will be up to us, he said, then encouraged us to call him “Uncle Miklós.” We have to get on with our lives, he added, and indeed there was not much else we could do after all, I realized — provided of course one had been given the chance to do so at all. On the whole, I could by now call myself able-bodied, except for a few oddities and minor disabilities. If I dug a finger into the flesh at some points on my body, for example, its mark, the depression it left, would remain visible for a long time afterward, just as if I had buried it in some lifeless, inelastic material like, say, cheese or wax. My face also startled me a bit when I first inspected it in a mirror in one of the comfortable rooms of the former SS hospital, as my recollection from older days had been of another face. Its conspicuously low forehead, the pair of brand-new, amorphous swellings by the oddly broadening bases of its ears, and its loose bags and sacks elsewhere, all under a brush of hair now an inch or so long, were on the whole — at least if I could believe my onetime reading matter — more the wrinkles, creases, and features of people who had gained them in diverse sensual pleasures and delights and aged prematurely on that account, while the beady, shrunken eyes had been retained in my mind as having another, more friendly, not to say reassuring, look. Then again, I had a limp, dragging my right leg a little: never mind, so says Uncle Miklós, the air back home will sort that out. At home, he declared, we would be building a new land, and he promptly taught us a few songs as a start. When we were tramping through villages and small towns, as occurred from time to time during our journey, we were later to sing these as we marched three abreast, in good military order. I personally was very fond of one called “Standing on the barricades before Madrid,” not that I could tell you why that one in particular. There was another too, though for different reasons, that I sang with pleasure, particularly for the sake of a passage that went: “We la-bor a-way all day long, / all but dying of star-va-tion. / But now our hands, hardened by travail, / clutch wea-pons that will pre-vail!” Again for different reasons, I liked the one with the line “The young guard of the pro-le-tar-i-at are we,” after which we were supposed to interject a shout of “Red Front!” since each and every time it rang out I would catch the clatter of a window being shut or the slam of a door, and each and every time spot a figure, German, scurrying under or hastily ducking behind a doorway.