They had sat all night and most of the next day in a siding in marshland, mist swirling off in the pale sunlight, settling again as dusk approached. Through a gap in the boards she could see that they were on the edge of a town or perhaps a factory complex—whatever it was, the Germans were guarding it with barbed wire, floodlights, and machine-gun posts. The night sky had glowed red and three tall chimneys blew flames into darkness some twenty feet high as though releasing an explosion. And when day had broken a grey haze covered everything and blotted out the sky.
Late in the afternoon the train lurched into motion, through gates, past barbed wire, into the factory.
Somewhere, a band was playing. A ludicrous accompaniment to the confusion into which they had been plunged. A strident, vigorous Hungarian march, Liszt’s Rákóczi—it was the sort of thing you played to a youth group as they marched off to summer camp.
The clash of steel on steel as the train stopped.
A babble of voices. Screams from somewhere up the line.
“Raus! Raus!”
“Funf zu funf!”
And still no one moved.
Then the boards on the windows were ripped off as though a hurricane had struck, and rifles smashed the glass.
“Raus! Raus!”
“Funf zu funf!”
They leapt to the ground, one by one, not five by five.
Up the line, the boxcar doors had opened and the living and the dead fell to the ground in dozens, ghostly creatures in blue-and-white striped pyjamas swarming over them like flies upon a corpse.
An SS Sturmmann turned his attention to the group she had travelled with.
“Drop everything. Line up in fives. In fives! Five by five!”
The woman with the bedding dropped her parcel. The woman with the cooking pan clung on and had it knocked from her hands by a rifle butt.
“You’ll get it all back later. Line up. Jews to the left, everyone else to the right.”
This caused more confusion. Some went left, some went right, some stayed rooted to the spot, some dropped their possessions, some held on. They were like skittles struck by a wooden ball. Méret, thinking she was in all probability the only non-Jew there, wondered, To the right of what?
After the static night and a day in the siding everything was suddenly in motion. Right and left meant too little. Space and direction were inadequate. What counted was that that which had been still was now in motion, shifting like sand beneath her feet.
She followed Cresca. He had been a lifeline for almost two days in a cold, dark, smelly railway carriage. A kindly old man who had shared his food with her and tried to share his optimism. Now, in the reduced world, in the shifting world into which they had just descended, he was all she knew.
The pyjama creatures moved among them, crouched and cowed, whispering, as though they might walk through walls with the merest effort.
“Leave it all. Do as they say. Leave it all. It cannot help you now. It shall not help you now.”
An SS Sturmbannführer picked his way among the personal possessions of the Italians, kicking them aside—an elephant in the sitting room, the hooligan at the dining table.
He directed Cresca to the left with a flick of his thumb. Cresca was still clutching his briefcase, his knife, fork, and spoon still stuck out of the top pocket of his overcoat. Telling him to drop the case only made him clutch it more tightly until a rifle butt knocked it from his hand and another knocked him to the ground. The cutlery shot from his pocket onto the trampled slush that covered the earth. With blood streaming into his eyes Signor Cresca at last had vision and seemed to know that where he was going he would have no need of cutlery. He picked up the three pieces of silverware and held them out to Méret. She bent to take them from him but as two soldiers hoisted him up at the armpits to drag him away he dropped them all. She put her fingers into the black snow to retrieve this last gift, and as she did so, a shining black boot placed itself upon her knuckles. She looked up to see the Sturmbannführer smiling at her and as he smiled the pressure from his foot increased.
“You have no yellow star? Why are you mixed in with all this Jew-shit? One would almost think you wished to die.”
The boot pressed the hand into the ground, the cutlery digging into her flesh. Just when she thought her knuckles would crack a voice said, “Really, Bruno, if you break her fingers we shall never know how well she plays.”
A second Sturmbannführer had appeared at the side of the first, one hand upon the arm in gentle restraint, and behind him, lurking, almost cowering, not daring to meet her eyes, was a scrawny figure in a dirty pleated skirt and a lavender-coloured headscarf. Magda Ewald—once a trombonist of the Vienna Youth Orchestra. Méret had not seen her in years.
“It seems she’s a cellist, and the orchestra of the Frauenkonzentrationslager has need of a cellist.”
With this the first Sturmbannführer lost interest.
“Take the cunt, leave the cutlery,” was all he said.