Isaac's Beacon Page 5

  Before his spine could touch the dirt, hands raised him upright. Hugo wasn’t annoyed or relieved. If not yesterday or now, death would come tomorrow, or on its own day. That was Buchenwald.

  “Easy, friend, easy.”

  Others in the ring of soldiers retreated. The man on his knees seemed to have taken control. He had a fair-complexioned face and blue eyes. He smelled as dirty as the rest. He wore a “P” armband.

  “You’re going to be alright. Just stay with me. No more dying today, friend.”

  The soldier spoke German. Hugo’s hands came up on their own, recoiling. The Nazis had left the camp; now one was among the Americans?

  “Nein, nein, nein.” Hugo pushed at him. The soldier did nothing to fend off Hugo but endured the pushes, small things. Even with Hugo’s useless mitts on him, the German-speaker said crisply, “I’m going to get you a medic. Stay calm. It’s over, friend. We’re here now.”

  The soldier yelled in English into the crowd of inmates and soldiers, past the growling tank. He waved at one soldier who changed directions and hustled over.

  Hugo dropped his resistance and sat sun-warmed. He didn’t know his fate, swerving as it was between living and dying. The short panic had shifted him toward life for a moment. He’d linger to see what life held. Death was busy with the chimney; it would bide its time and wait him.

  Hugo whispered, marshalling all the voice he could. The soldier leaned closer. A yellow pencil was tucked behind the man’s ear. He carried no rifle, no grenades or bandoleers, only a sidearm. His waistcoat was blank, without insignia or patches. He was long-limbed, scrunched beside Hugo.

  Hugo rasped, “Why do you speak German?”

  “My family’s German. I grew up speaking it.”

  The beckoned soldier arrived. A red cross on his helmet showed him to be medical. He held a canteen to Hugo’s mouth for one sweet swallow. A handful of pills came out of a bag with a tin of milk. The German-speaker said the pills were vitamins. When a passing American offered a chocolate bar, the medical man pushed it away, then had his words translated.

  “Don’t eat anything these men offer you. No rations, no candy. Your stomach won’t tolerate it. Tell someone to get you soup, fluids. We’re bringing up a hospital and a field kitchen. Finish the milk. Hang in there. You’re going to make it.”

  Hugo needed help to tip the condensed milk to his lips. Emptying the can bloated his gut. He belched, a pain that made him clutch his chest. The thin soldier rubbed his back, making Hugo conscious of his own knobby spine.

  The Americans around him, the ones who’d lifted him into the sunny yard, faded into the hurly-burly of the liberation. The medical man jogged off to other cries. More vehicles roared into the camp, and urgency charged the legs churning past Hugo on the ground.

  The soldier remained kneeling at his side. Hugo didn’t ask why, slightly miffed that the others had wandered off. He was pitiable and deserved some attention. Wasn’t he dying? Apparently not. Hugo asked the German-speaker’s name.

  “Vincenz Haas.”

  The milk had loosened Hugo’s throat enough to where his voice began to resemble his own.

  “Why do you have a pencil behind your ear?”

  Vincenz Haas grinned, pleased with Hugo’s curiosity.

  “I’m a reporter.” He tapped the armband. “Press.”

  “Lift me off the ground. I feel like an abandoned pet.”

  Once Hugo was put on his unsteady feet, tall Haas had to stoop to support him. They found a chair against a wall in the sunlight. Camp guards had sat in this chair.

  Haas walked off, leaving him alone again. Hugo drew a breath that he sampled in his lungs as though deciding whether to take another. Life had returned with the milk and the Americans. Healthy prisoners walked past in their stripes, jubilant, and they, too, ignored Hugo. A thousand starved men and women like him stumbled around, many shirtless and without shame, to show the Americans what had been done to them. Buchenwald’s production shacks and barracks, stucco barns and black watchtowers, furnace building and command offices, all were emptied of their guardians. The Nazis had deserted the camp days ago and taken twenty thousand Jews with them, surely to eliminate them.

  The afternoon sun peaked. The day was aging, but the world was new. The notion of death returned to Hugo. His life had been rekindled, but only barely. He rested his head against the wall and stared blankly ahead as if he knew the path death would take. Hugo sat in plain sight, brightly lit, no one addressed him; he might just as well be a ghost. He could believe he was dead. Some small comfort crept alongside that. There was company in death. And life? Was it going to be like this—a can of milk, a Nazi’s chair, and little else?

  Hugo didn’t see the reporter until he strode out of the river of soldiers and prisoners. Haas carried a second chair straight for Hugo. High above, the chimney breathed no more smoke. Near the main gate, under the clock tower and the iron sign that declared Jedem das Seine, To Each as He Deserves, inmates hoisted two Americans onto their shoulders.

  Haas placed his chair next to Hugo. He held out a lukewarm tin cup. Hugo held the aroma of coffee to his nose a long time before drinking.

  Vincenz Haas asked to be called Vince, the American version of his name. This struck Hugo well, the man’s embrace of America. It spoke of change.

  Hugo expected to be interviewed, but the reporter didn’t take the pencil from behind his ear. Vince propped his elbows on his long legs and asked not about Hugo’s time in the camps but his life before. This seemed a way to get Hugo talking, to ask first about his life before he became a victim, before he became the same as millions.

  “You’ll understand,” Hugo said, “if I’m slow to talk about my past.”

  Vince Haas said he would go first. He was thirty-five, three years younger than Hugo. His family had left Munich in 1927 when he was seventeen, landing in New York City. Vince did a youthful turn in the Marine Corps, served two years in Cuba at a base where he did guard duty and sunbathed. After the Marines, he went home to New York where he took a college degree in journalism, then a job at a big newspaper, the Herald Tribune. He worked his way up from night court to crime, to sports, then local politics. When the chance arose to cover the last months of the war in Europe, he grabbed it, a step up from covering the city desk. Vince flew to Paris, hooked a ride on a truck out of France, crossed the Rhine, and caught up with the U.S. Third Army just in time.

  Hugo asked, “Just in time? For what?” He was aware of how he himself must look, eyes sunk in grey sockets, camp eyes. “This?”

  The American tossed away his cigarette to gaze beyond the wire to the easy hills, brilliant in spring light. A train track cut through the rolling Weimar forests to a platform, then to a road that entered the gates of Buchenwald. That was where Vince’s understanding must stop, at the gates. He could not go further on into the filthy barracks that held thirty thousand where there was room for five thousand, or into the workhouses, into the ovens for those who collapsed or were chosen, to the labs for experiments, then up the chimney. Vince the reporter had hurried here, in time for this, because he could not imagine it from America.

  Vince linked his fingers. He spit into the dirt through the ring of his arms.

  Hugo finished the coffee and tossed away the cup. He wanted a beer, the first one he’d thought of in a long time, though he knew a beer might kill him.

  Hugo ran his fingers, thin as tinder, over his own scalp.

  “So, your parents spirited their boy out of Germany before the Nazis could get him.”

  The American reporter did not lift his gaze out of the circle made by his arms, elbows on bony knees, and his long, joined hands.

  “The Nazis wouldn’t have gotten me.”

  “No?”

  Hugo lay a hand, fingers thin as tinder, on Vince’s arm.

  “We have no idea, none of us, what we are
capable of.”

  Vince focused, somewhat unnaturally, on his spit in Buchenwald’s dirt.

  Hugo said, “Help me to my feet.”

  Vince lifted him by one arm. Hugo wavered, but before the American could right him he steadied himself.

  “You’ve told me your story. Now you believe I should tell you mine.”

  “I suppose.”

  “If you want to know something, ask. I’ll tell you if I care to. I’m not a child to be tricked or traded with.”

  “Alright.”

  “I think I can walk a bit. Follow me.”

  The Americans covered their nostrils with sleeves and kerchiefs. The smell seemed to trouble them more than the sight. None of the inmates who guided the soldiers here disrespected the dead like this.

  Hugo pushed closer into the stench so Vince would have to come with him. Vince screwed up his face but did not cover his nose.

  None of the observers stayed long; they got their fill and turned away.

  The pile extended forty meters down a hill. Every corpse was naked and face up, stacked as neatly as could be done. The bottom row lay oriented north-south, the next east-west, and so on in six layers. The eight hundred starved bodies had been stripped of belongings and identification. Their clothes had been cleaned, stored, then given to German citizens who’d suffered in the bombings. The collection and cleaning detail had been Hugo’s work. A haunted face in the growing crowd was a man who’d done this with him.

  Vince would not walk off until Hugo did. Hugo had no intention of being cruel. He turned away slowly, not to unbalance himself.

  The distance to the furnaces was short, as it needed to be. The stink faded enough for Vince to take a fuller breath. He was a reporter but knew well enough to leave his pencil untouched.

  Barn doors stood open at opposite sides of the two-story furnace building. The brick structure had nothing striking about it, a bland face. A chimney climbed high out of its midsection, but someone had shut the fires down.

  At the entrance, Vince stopped walking. He clamped his lips, visibly closing something inside. He breathed fast, grasping to stop himself from what? Throwing up, screaming, tears? He walked in before Hugo. Vince reached for his pencil and slipped a notebook out of his jacket. He did not write but sketched. Hugo followed, the first time he’d come inside the furnace building without pushing a wheelbarrow.

  The brick wall rose two stories high. Thirty iron doors a meter wide and tall studded it. The tops of the openings were arched in decorative brickwork, like a bakery. A few doors stood open; the metal trays had been pulled out by the curious. Ash heaps covered all the platters, save one where a burnt corpse lay. The fire had exposed the skull, ribs, and arm bones, melted away all hair, boiled out the blood. No other colors hinted that this mound had ever been more than white and black. The ovens could handle a hundred bodies an hour; even so, the Nazis couldn’t keep pace.

  Vince scratched rough images. Hugo left him and walked to the wall, to flatten a palm against the bricks. Warmth lingered in them. Pressing his spindly hand to the bricks, he damned the wall. If he could push this place down, he would willingly die under it; here was where he’d been intended to die. He did push, despising his futility.

  Hugo came close to exhausting himself, and when he turned, he was foggy. Vince was gone outside, smoking in the sun. Other touring soldiers entered the barn doors with their prisoner guides. As Hugo left the crematorium, a spring gust drifted past. A whorl of ash twirled off a tray to filter over him.

  Hugo’s canvas soles dragged on the floor. Of all the noises in Buchenwald, the shouts and wails, vehicles and whispers, the shuffle of his own feet struck loudest, an almost weightless tread.

  Vince didn’t turn when Hugo approached. He ground a cigarette under his heel. The American couldn’t lift his eyes. Hugo stepped close, into his gaze. Vince had shed no tears. Good. His sketches would be of more use.

  “I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

  A cluster of inmate boys walked past, vigorous and looking for some advantage, something more than food, perhaps vengeance. Vince watched them go, and this seemed to animate him to answer, “How so?”

  “I have no story for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A story must have a character. And a character must have a past.”

  Hugo pointed at the boys walking away.

  “See them. See all of us. Every one, tens of thousands, we were all different before the Nazis. We had stories, the kind you want to know. Families and homes. Now there are no families. No homes. No work. No friends. No secrets, every one of us has blurted out everything. All of it was thrown into a bonfire the Nazis lit. Our lives, the things that made us individuals, everything is in ashes now. Indistinguishable. We’re all identical, reduced to one new and terrible thing. None of us has a past, just our own portion of the powder. There’s nothing you can sift out.”

  Vince was likely the tallest man in the camp. When he looked beyond Hugo, he seemed able to see a great distance. He may have been a very good reporter.

  Hugo rubbed his palms together. He patted Vince’s jacket, a drunken sort of gesture.

  “I need to rest.” He would head back to his pallet. “Meet me here tomorrow morning.”

  Chapter 8

  Hugo

  April 12

  On a pallet with no cushion, in a body with no fat, Hugo slept well. Everyone in the barrack did, the first night in years that they were certain they would not be murdered the next day.

  No one shared Hugo’s pallet, no one mumbled or whimpered beside him. He arose, blanket across his shoulders in a cape. He padded outside; the morning sun peeked over the farmland and hills, too early to lift the dew. The camp at sunrise had already begun to quicken; Americans sipped steaming coffee, scooped eggs off tin plates, hunkered against the chill.

  Hugo’s legs felt surer. One of the first inmates awake, he moved among the soldiers at half their clip. With an appetite, he passed a field kitchen, then a truck from which soldiers uncrated food and supplies for the camp’s remaining ten thousand. He’d return later to ask for soup and perhaps something to chew, like white bread. Hugo felt nothing of the cold.

  The noise of a big engine drew him through the camp. He shambled along a row of barracks, a hundred meters to the furnace building. Hugo followed the motor noise around back of the brick walls, to a small field at the bottom of a slope.

  A bulldozer had dug a fresh pit and was busy shoving hundreds of naked bodies into it. The machine spit exhaust as black as the task. The American at the controls worked alone. No one but Hugo had come at first light to see what he and his earthmover were doing. Could this soldier not sleep? The sorrow on his face touched Hugo, who hadn’t wept in a long while. When the driver noticed Hugo, he stopped working and let his bulldozer growl. The man’s jowls were dark; he needed a shave. He nodded at Hugo, then shifted into gear and continued. Hugo dragged back to the barracks.

  By the time Vince caught up with him, Hugo had eaten a boiled egg and a warm bowl of gruel, followed by a tin of condensed milk. He’d visited the latrine for the first time in two weeks; his released bowels pained him. Other prisoners were sick in the toilets, in worse agony than him.

  The Americans who’d flooded Buchenwald yesterday had put up posters today with their own rules: no one but them could carry weapons, curfew at sundown. Medical help and food were available in the camp only.

  A handful of journalists walked the grounds searching out inmates who could speak English for interviews and photos.

  Vince waved at first sight of Hugo. He bore the gift of an Army jacket. Hugo dropped his blanket to put it on; he could get as many blankets as he wanted.

  He pointed at Vince’s “P” armband. “Take that off.”

  Vince did without question.

  “Give me your pencil.”

&nb
sp; Vince handed it over. “Okay. Why?”

  “Because if you want to report, put on your armband and go report. If you want to try to understand, come with me.”

  Hugo led the way, stopping every few minutes to catch his breath. He spoke little passing the fifty barracks, dozen workhouses, and storage sheds. They crossed open yards where inmates had assembled for roll calls and a wooded area where guards had tied the arms of prisoners behind their backs to hang them by their wrists, which the inmates named the Singing Forest. In a dark cement building, doctors had conducted experiments and autopsies. Hugo said only, “The labs.”

  Vince was smart and stayed quiet. As they walked, the questioning looks on his face came less frequently, his shrugs of disgust quit. He stopped trying to figure Buchenwald out piece by piece, a step at a time. Buchenwald could not be encompassed by a tour, gathered by the senses, or expressed in words. The camp was not a collection of buildings and guards, days and years, trains and trucks, scraps and smoke, Jews, Russians, Roma, homosexuals, communists, criminals, despair, acceptance. No part of it could be considered separate from the rest. Buchenwald was a totality, a monolith, an inseverable thing. Buchenwald was not the story of any life or death, place, or moment, but all of it, and only someone who’d lived it could fathom it completely.

  At the main gate sat an American vehicle, a small open two-seater. No one seemed interested in it, and the key was in the ignition. Aching at the hips, Hugo climbed into the passenger seat. When no one told him to get out, Vince got in behind the wheel. Quickly they drove through the main gate, beneath the clock tower.

  Not far beyond the wire and the SS barracks, blossoming trees bracketed the road. In the open car, Hugo pulled tight the Army jacket.