The evacuation had proceeded quickly. The alarm had sounded, and within minutes they were away.
Skinny escaped the night after the S S men shot Smartie because she had laughed. She had muttered something about the clouds being high and the mountains even higher, even higher than the sky. She came from a little town called Ub on the Tamnava River.
Maria-from-Poznan was shot by Sturmmann Friedrich Zeitler. There had been something between them at one time. The group had been given orders to march at a fast pace. Those who couldn’t keep up were to be given a bullet in the back of the neck. Sturmmann Zeitler had ordered her to walk faster. He didn’t do so twice. They were sinking into the snow, exhausted even when they’d set out. They were given nothing to eat. The column waited for no-one, the S S men were in a hurry. They could sense the Russians at their heels. It was Skinny’s worst day. When night fell they were still walking. Now and again a shot rang out. She didn’t have the strength to look back, to see who it was this time.
During the night she and Estelle used the straps from Big Leopolda Kulikowa’s case to tie themselves to each other. The Madam had bequeathed them her warm underwear, 2,000 marks, 10,000 Polish zloty and a gold coin bearing a Russian Tsar’s head. They waded together through snow, ice and mud, walking on the railtracks and tripping over the sleepers. They were like sisters. They had no strength to talk. The thought of the Einsatzkommandos floated through Skinny’s mind. She was lethargic, but she did what she had to do. One of them dragged the other and then they changed places every half an hour. They remained somewhere in the middle of the column before they separated from it. The S S men did not bother to stop them from looking for a place to sleep.
Near Katowice Estelle was torn to pieces by Dobermanns. Skinny hid in a coal truck at a railway station, under a tarpaulin she’d found in a railwayman’s hut. She did not know what would happen. The brothel was behind her. In front of her was nothing.
Fifteen
That was the story of Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, or the part of it which stood before me as if it had happened to me. In Prague after the war she wore a smile on her lips, a smile fed by embarrassment, the incredibility of what had happened, a sense of both shame and guilt, but also of innocence. It was not easy to explain. Perhaps one lives with a certain time-lag, like a clock that is slow. Or an echo. One could say that our bodily “I” moves forward, while our mental “I” has halted yesterday or the day before yesterday. She retained her eyes in front and at the back — her Arschaugen, to use the Madam’s expression. What lay behind her was like a landscape speeding backwards past a train. Sometimes in sleep she would see a pair of colourless clouded eyes. It was not only Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin who had made her accept the morality of the age — kill or be killed. Those who were in the first war, like her father, had brought it home with them. When it came to a bayonet charge it was either you or me.
No-one ever told her of Stefan Sarazin’s death and she made no attempt to find out what had happened to him. The war had buried him like so much else and so many others. Sometimes she would see herself sitting with her back to the stove, sewing his button on, or pouring the powder into his flask. Now she no longer cared.
In the street she would return people’s smiles, like a person greeting neighbours. Good morning, good afternoon. She was like a boat floating on an unfamiliar ocean, drifting from a darkness that only she knew into the light that was common to all.
She wanted to believe that she came from a world which was already gone. From a nameless land to which only she had given a name. A mirror in which she alone saw her face from the other side of time.
In its reflection she also saw Wehrmacht Captain Daniel August Hentschel. He had already left Cubicle 16, and was walking down the long flagstoned corridor which stank of rats. He hadn’t promised her anything he could not fulfil. In retrospect, if she dismissed a lot of things, he now seemed to her better in some ways. She did not wish to seem unjust, and gratitude had something to do with it.
She was always meticulously dressed and made up, the sleeves of her blouses always down to her wrists, and she was determined not to show her stomach to anyone.
It would be simple to say that she survived with the help of her body, that she reached down to the roots of her strength to overcome herself. She was lucky that she was young, healthy and tough, capable of any work including the hardest, that she had had the presence of mind — if one can put it that way — to make the ultimate effort at the right moment. That was all. The body. But the body was never on its own, just as the soul was not. What was a person to do if, having been born into this kind of world, she wanted to survive?
Even in the lives of the happiest of us there is a touch of despair. Even from the worst a seed might spring. But a seed of what? We all have in ourselves contradictory tendencies — for self-destruction and for survival. Explicable tendencies, conscious and subconscious ones. She knew that anyone might cross over, from one day to the next, to become one of those in misfortune. Morality might turn into a labyrinth. She had been through a lot and she was young. It appeared as if her life was still ahead of her. Only yesterday she had stood on her own against a great Reich which had no place for her. A Reich which had confronted the world and which had tried to exterminate those who, through some mistake, had already been born.
She found it difficult to ensure that the echo of the words German or Germany did not immediately conjure up a panorama of burnt villages, devastated towns, shattered families and countless humans murdered, tortured or crippled in the name of racial purity; not just a vision of brothels in the east and in Festung Breslau, or wherever the Herrenwaffe set foot. She realized, as the rabbi had, that to condemn all this in words would not be enough. She absorbed it as the liver and kidneys absorb substances, and she tried to pump it out of herself again as the heart pumps blood into veins and cells. Like the rabbi she was not sure if there was any point in talking about it, in bringing back those echoes, because it would be equally ill-advised and criminal to forget even the smallest part.
She sometimes remembered how Captain Hentschel had walked out to his Horch. She was standing by the frozen window of her cubicle. He had walked to his car with cautious heavy steps, over the swept but ice-covered stones. Before taking his last step he had turned. He could not have seen her. Or was she mistaken? He had aroused something in her. It was only a glimmer of something. Perhaps if he had not turned she would have wiped him from her memory. He would have vanished from her life just as his Horch had vanished into the blizzard. She had stood by her frozen window, almost invisible, and his look remained with her. Why?
I never formed a clear picture in my mind of Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin of the Einsatzkommandos der Einsatzgruppen. I didn’t really want to. But Adler knew why he wanted to be a judge when they were in short supply. Skinny, of course, was entitled to be both judge and executioner.
She felt in her bones that it was better not to know certain things, not to remember certain people. That was easier said than done, as she’d once remarked to Estelle. She remembered Sarazin yawning and telling her that this was how the world would yawn one day if anyone who survived told their story. But what about his eyes, I wanted to know. Did they really have no colour at all? They did, Skinny told me. She just could not remember now. Lies had been like the clothes she put on, like the water she quenched her thirst with, a handrail she held on to. She had not forgotten her fear, just as she had not forgotten her diarrhoea.