Long Way Home(77)

The journey took several days, measured only by the slivers of sunlight or darkness that were visible between the boards of the boxcar. My mind wandered into dark places as I remembered and grieved for everything we had lost. I recalled how we’d emptied our apartment, whittling away our precious furnishings and possessions to raise money for our escape. Now I had no possessions at all—and I hadn’t escaped. My faith had been pared to the bone as well. I had grown up reading the tale of Queen Esther every Purim and how the wicked Haman, like Hitler, made plans to exterminate every Jew in the world. Yet God had intervened. We had been saved. Jews around the world also celebrated God’s miraculous delivery from slavery every year at Passover, and we remembered how the Red Sea had parted and we’d been set free. Had those stories been mere fairy tales? Where was our deliverance now?

I thought about how life could turn on a hinge of fate. If Vati hadn’t run out to save the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, he wouldn’t have been arrested and sent to Buchenwald. He wouldn’t have become ill with tuberculosis. He and Mutti might have escaped together instead of dying together. If the St. Louis had been allowed to dock in Havana and if the Cubans hadn’t rejected our landing permits, my family and Sam’s would be living safely in Cuba. If the United States had offered us refuge or if we had been accepted by the English representative instead of the Belgian one, we might all be alive and still together. And if Lina Renard had gone to work at a different hospital or if she had remembered to attach the patient’s IV bottle or if she’d never seen the yellow star on my sweater, I wouldn’t be on this train on my way to Buchenwald. There had been so many chances for fate to take a different path, but it hadn’t. The Nazis had chased my family and me across an ocean and back, and they’d captured me at last.

We arrived in Buchenwald on a warm August morning, just after dawn. A breeze raised the layer of gritty gray ash that seemed to have settled on every surface and swirled it into the air like snow. The stench of decay and burning flesh that hovered above the massive camp overwhelmed me. I was herded together with the other women and made to strip naked. They shaved my head and tattooed a number on my arm. I was given a striped uniform several sizes too large for me and assigned to a barracks that already overflowed with women. I was the envy of all the others when I was put to work in the camp infirmary instead of in one of the camp workshops. But the others didn’t know what went on in that infirmary.

I soon learned that the Nazi doctors were testing their experimental vaccines on prisoners, vaccines that were supposed to prevent contagious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria. Our patients usually became gravely ill. I did what I could to ease their suffering, but most of them died horribly. Sam had once said there was a reason why I had become a nurse, but surely this couldn’t be it.

“You’re wondering if you’re going to survive, aren’t you?” a nurse named Ada asked me one afternoon about a month after I had arrived. Four of our patients had died that day, and Ada, myself, and another nurse named Lotti had all stepped outside the infirmary for a moment as we waited for the cart that would carry the bodies to the crematorium. By then, I had been in this place long enough to know what went on behind Buchenwald’s walls and gates and barbed wire fences. “Everyone wonders the same thing when they first arrive,” Ada said.

“And will we?” I asked. “Will we survive?”

“That depends. Do you want to? Do you really want to keep on living if the people you love are all dead?”

I still had Ruthie. And maybe Sam.

“Do you want to live in a world where people treat their fellow human beings the way we’re treated here?”

I knew there were kind people in the world like Sister Veronica, people who had risked their lives to hide us. And Allied soldiers were fighting and dying to set us free. “The Allies have landed in France,” I told Ada. “And the Soviets are winning battles in the east. Everyone says that the Nazis are losing the war.”

“So you still have hope? That’s good. That’s what you’ll need to survive this place. Hope.”

“That and luck,” Lotti added. “If we don’t starve to death, we could die like our patients from typhus or dysentery or pneumonia. Who knows what else the doctors have cooked up to kill us with?”

“Or maybe one of the guards will decide to shoot you one day because you make him mad,” Ada said. “Or because he felt like shooting someone.”

“Don’t scare the poor girl,” Lotti said. “It’s hard enough to survive when you’re not shaking in your shoes every day.”

Sam and I had promised to find each other. I had promised Ruthie I would come back for her. Those were reasons enough. “I want to survive,” I told Ada and Lotti. “No matter what.”





19


Peggy





JULY 1946

I was so excited about working all day with Mr. Barnett that I was awake with the chickens the next morning. Mrs. Barnett kept a few in her backyard coop so she would always have fresh eggs, and her rooster faithfully serenaded the dawn. Mr. B. and I spent all morning at two different dairy farms, testing their cows for tuberculosis. We enjoyed riding around the countryside together and didn’t need to talk much in order to be content. When we got back to the clinic, Buster was sitting on the Barnetts’ back steps waiting for me. He greeted me like a long-lost friend. I quickly apologized to Mr. Barnett.