From Ashes Into Light: A Novel Read online

  Oh God. Why has this been allowed to happen? Do you not hear me? We’re not allowed on the streets after 8:00 p.m. We have to wear a yellow star on our clothes at all times. Who can blame me for having lost interest in English studies and even my beloved Martin Buber?

  The news tells of massive transports to Lublin. I conjure up an image of my father, as if it were a special charm to protect me. I picture papa’s face, his dark, sad eyes. I speak to him as though I am saying an unspoken prayer: we have never heard a word from you or anything about you.

  There are more and more suicides everywhere. All around us, horror has taken hold.

  Papa, it is the summer of 1942. Do you want to know what I see? I am eighteen and still alive, but I see little hope. Every day it’s more dangerous to go out. Street patrols arrest Jews on the spot. No reasons are needed. Endless lists have been made. One thousand are demanded for deportation and, just like that, people become numbers. They disappear like apparitions at the market, on the street, from their apartments. There’s no safe place.

  The image of my father fades in my mind. I try to conjure up the feeling of his presence in the room again, but it doesn’t work.

  I drift off, finally, in a state between waking and sleeping. The quiet house creates an empty space and I am suspended for a little while. I hear a noise. I think it’s that terrible hammering again. I had been dreaming of such a noise for a few nights, and though part of me knows I am not dreaming now, I still attempt to divert my attention away from the sounds. When did that dream begin exactly? I’m not sure, but I remember loud noises, like that of rifles pounding on a door.

  I concentrate on this morning. Why did mother have to go to the market, even though I asked her not to go? Our eviction is due shortly. “We must keep up our strength,” she had told me, “we mustn’t arrive at cousin Rosa’s like two destitute relatives.”

  “But we are, Mutti,” I had told my mother. “We are destitute. At least let’s go shopping together.”

  “It’s too risky. Stay here. Stay quiet.”

  I stayed, and I am quiet. Again, something bangs. This is not the recurring nightmare. Or am I asleep and don’t know it? I wait. For a moment, there is silence. I hear a truck motor idling close by. And the banging resumes.

  The nightmare stands outside the front door. Soldiers pound with rifles. I hear two voices, but I don’t answer, don’t open the door. Another kind of pounding takes place inside me. I stay in the guest room that had, for a time, sheltered my uncle, sheltered my parents and me, sheltered my mother and me, but no longer.

  I hide under the bed and the hammering starts again. It keeps right on, until there is a crash. Boots stomp through the foyer. The pounding inside me grows louder and louder. They must hear it, the sound of my fear. And they find me. They pull me out. They stand above me as I crouch on the floor, face to my knees. I lift one hand as though the sight of my palm might stop them, but nothing makes any difference. No pleading, no invocation to honor or humanity helps. I have seen such things before.

  The two SS drag me out. They cross one name off the list. Three numbers were called for—only one is thrown on the wagon to be shoved in the cattle train heading for Theresienstadt after a day’s wait at the station.

  Ruth/Friede

  Metal screams against metal. The train stops and starts, and the guttural voices of those who hate us spit out words that sound like snarls. “Shut up, go, go, go, quick!” They yell again. “Quick, get in!” Dogs snap. We do not know which direction we are going.

  A large crowd, we all wear yellow stars. Guards push us forward, wedging and driving us closer together. People bump each other and cry out. Children wail. A damp mist hovers all around us, obscuring rows of other trains. A long, despondent whistle blows.

  I step up on a cement block to see if I can find anyone I know. No mother. None of my former schoolmates.

  I feel alone and desolate, and yet the sadness I carry is not just for myself. Before being bolted inside the cattle car, jammed in and forgotten, I experience something extraordinary. Light expands out from the shoulder of a woman standing pressed against the train. Light radiates from the top corner of the nearest car already overflowing with Vienna’s unwanted. Light shines around the head of the grandmother weeping into her handkerchief in front of me. Light diffuses everything solid.

  I ascend like a leaf, rising with the breeze. I see more and more—an old man tripped by a guard, a woman shoved, a child hit. A baby falls and is accidentally stepped on. Soldiers in front of the train station have become small, like mechanical toy soldiers wound tight. They move in exaggerated ways, laugh harshly as if to convey indifference, shrug, and make dismissive gestures.

  Several tiny, pink clouds float softly below me. My stunned mind has become a large, silent field. I hurl through space, beyond darkness. Eventually nothing but light remains.

  A powerful charge rushes through my body, and I am propelled into a bright world where there are no machines, no fences, no guns. Standing below, I lift my arms to heaven, and I know there is a power beyond my small self. Without knowing how or why, I call on Bear and Hawk and other helpers.

  I am the mountain river. I am the moving water. I am that which glistens, drop by drop, around boulders along the bank.

  I am Tadpole eaten by Raccoon. I am Fly inside the Frog. I am Coyote, lapping a long thirsty drink along his favorite creek. I howl at the moon. I am things, and I am also the space around things.

  Spaciousness flows through my body. “Friede,” I whisper to the one who comes after me. “Peace.”

  I contract abruptly as the barrel end of a rifle jabs my thigh. I stagger down from the block on which I had been standing. Soldiers prod us inside a car where we are crushed up against each other, hardly able to move, no toilets, no place to sit, without food or water. I smell sweat, fear, and more. Stale air reeks with urine and excrement.

  After some time I hear chanting and a prayer of comfort, Shalom. Then I close my eyes. The intonations remind me of papa. He must be dead. He would have contacted us otherwise, I know.

  The song haunts me. I no longer try to figure things out. Shalom, the song haunts, and I let it.

  I see papa’s hands. I see his eyes and the dark hair on his arm. I see him, once again, and I am grateful.

  A line rises up from the base of his left eyebrow. This line bothers me, so entrenched in his face. Did such intense worry exist when he was alive? I can’t remember. Still, this is the face I love; it gives me strength. Papa! I relish his presence. Eyes still closed, I am uplifted. I can almost rest my head on his chest again.

  A warm hand touches my arm. I want to hold papa, keep him close, but his presence disintegrates too quickly and the contact fades.

  An ache remains in my abdomen much stronger than hunger. I breathe the stench of the world; then, I’m barely able to breathe at all. I raise my head to cry out, but my throat is too dry. The incessant movement underneath my feet becomes more and more painful.

  * * *

  Years later, Friede Mai has the same nightmare again and again. When she wakes, tears flow, along with words she hears in her mind, but she doesn’t know who speaks them. Sometimes she thinks, is this me?

  “I stand inside a box car, among many others. The train jolts and shakes, jams to a halt, and starts again. I am in pain, trapped. The train carries me from one country to another. There’s no room. No food. No place to rest.

  “Wien, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau.”

  Ruth

  Dachau

  Over a small bridge, through an iron gate, I follow the prisoner line. We return to Dachau from a factory outside the camp. I’m very weak. The dirt path inside the heavily guarded and fenced compound is wet and sticky. I can hardly lift my feet up out of the slush created by the disturbed snow where we trudge. We head towards rows of long, narrow shacks, called bunkers. A gray sky hangs overhead.

  I stumble against the woman ahead of me in line. “Sorry,” I whisper, before I
realize this is a mistake. We are not allowed to speak.

  Lasch, the guard, catches the infraction. He heads towards me, tilting from side to side, his heavy legs angled wide. In the early days, when we still had enough strength, my bunkmate Maria had secretly called him, “Locked-kneed.” He is the cruelest guard.

  After ten-hour work days and little nourishment, I hardly care what happens anymore. Still, seeing Lasch coming closer, I get nervous. His stub nose is crimson and bulbous, his red cheeks crisscrossed with broken blood vessels. He wears his usual hunting hat, an irregularity of uniform that is tolerated by his superiors because his taste for brutality is considered useful.

  “It was an accident,” I tell him foolishly. That is all he needs; his pale lips stretch, a long, tight fracture.

  “Shut your mouth.” He pounds the butt of his rifle on my left shoulder so hard my knees buckle. I sense a greater danger. If I can’t walk back to our block, I will be considered unsalvageable. Many have died like this. As I become aware of the possibility, I find the idea doesn’t upset me as much as it might once have.

  I fall and Maria, behind me, rushes forward. Taller and bigger, she lifts me, pulling my right arm around her neck. She knows it is important for me to remain ambulatory.

  She calls Lasch by his title. “Herr Unterscharführer, Ruth is a good worker, but she’s been sick,” Maria says boldly. Maria is a political prisoner and the red triangle on her sleeve ranks higher than my yellow star.

  “Quiet!” Lasch snaps his fingers and he yells so everyone can hear. “Tomorrow, half rations for this detail…” He pauses before he spits out the rest: “For insubordination.”

  This winter so many have become skeletons. Typhus rages. Untrained prisoners and criminals have charge of the hospital and often hose down the sick with water, so they will take chill and die faster. The night frost, with one thin blanket for two people, is the thing that bothers me the most these days. The burning pain in my shoulder doesn’t override the chill that enters my feet and moves through the rest of my body.

  When we return to our shack, the cold has become the kind of companion one cannot ignore and cannot help. On the wooden plank that is our bed Maria tries to warm me, rubbing my hands, even though she is just as weary, thin, and cold as I am.

  A twenty-nine-year-old German Catholic, Maria had been arrested along with her village priest for “seditious remarks against Hitler.” Her priest is in the snow commando at Dachau. She says, “Keep your hands under the blanket now and I shall rub your feet. How’s your shoulder? Can you bear it if I touch it?” I shake my head.

  A spotlight passes across Maria’s face and her cheeks fall more clearly inward in a drastic slope, the gaunt look of the starved. She slouches down, quickly, since we are supposed to lie still. Her large knuckles and rough fingers move my toes around in circles.

  “I saw my priest today,” Maria whispers. Anyone caught talking has to empty the latrine bucket for the rest of the night and work a full day as well. “They scrape snow onto boards with their bare hands, and then carry them agonizing distances from the camp for no apparent reason. Whether they are elderly or sick, it doesn’t matter. But Father Matheus said he’s more worried about those priests chosen for medical experiments. More than twenty have just recently died terrible deaths.” She adds, “You know, we’re lucky. Instead of half rations, Locked-kneed could have had us transported. You’ve heard the rumors; other camps are worse.” She wraps my feet in a corner of the blanket. “Now, try to sleep.”

  At Auschwitz I hadn’t stayed long enough to find out exactly how bad it was. During selection, at a point where the line divided, people were dispatched left or right, some to live a while longer, most sent directly to their deaths. The doctor in charge received a note and squinted at me. “Just what we need,” he said. I was packed off to Dachau. Once here, however, I was rejected.

  “No,” the Dachau orderly scolded. “What were they thinking? The doctor won’t use a blonde for experiments with Jews. She looks too Aryan. This is completely inappropriate.”

  I respond to Maria with something less than a whisper. “Maria, you’re so good to me, but…”

  “Shhh. Ruth, you’re young. You just might make it.”

  “No...”

  “Where’s your hope?”

  “What hope?”

  “Remember the prayer? ‘Show me a token for good, that they which hate me may see it and be ashamed.’”

  I bit my cracked, dry lips, flicking my tongue along the sores in my mouth. “You are my token for good.”

  “All the more reason not to give up. We shall remain strong, each in our own faith.”

  Though tired to the marrow because we lifted heavy boxes all day on a smidgen of sausage, a piece of thin bread, and watery soup, I still can’t sleep. After the glow from Maria’s touch wears off, cold penetrates like a glacial beast. And this invasive chilling creature, a thing taking over my body, causes me to feel as if I do not belong to myself anymore.

  Something has eroded lately. It isn’t just the fever or diarrhea slowly working on me. Something inside has given up. I am hardly aware anymore of the vultures that hunker by the crematorium. Their triangular eyes had always reminded me of the SS glares. Those hairless vulture heads had made me shudder in the past, but these days I barely notice.

  Still, there’s something different about this night. I remember father, after reading from a manuscript by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, talking about the maturity of the human spirit that rises above conflict and opposition.

  I had questioned him: “But why don’t people recognize this, if it’s true what Rabbi Kook says, that the same essence exists at the heart of all religions?”

  “People are often ignorant,” papa had answered, “or they are blinded by emotions which they project out onto another group of people who become their scapegoats.”

  “But that isn’t fair.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t fair, yet we each must remain vigilant. We may easily become that which we hate, especially when we get stuck in our own narrow opinions.”

  Papa, I want to cry out. What happened to you? I wish I could see him once again. On this night I can’t see anything. Fog swirls in my mind as I twist and turn.

  Maria moves to accommodate my restlessness. She places a hand on my forehead as if to see if I have a fever again or to quiet me, but nothing does any good. Perhaps I sense what is about to arrive.

  The next night our bunker is “cleared.” In an atmosphere of numb trauma, past all feelings of regret, we are told to undress, line up, and march to the yard that faces a stone wall, one row behind the other. Maria and I manage to stay next to each other. We hear sounds cracking behind us.

  Bodies fall in back of us like the faint sounds of hollow reeds falling, row after row. We stand at the front and the charred wall before us appears to shift as if it will no longer hold together. Shivering, Maria and I hold hands. She squeezes hard, whispering, “Have courage. We will meet in a better place.”

  I can’t say anything. If I feel anything, for I no longer know if I do or don’t, it’s surely the feeling of the totally wretched. There is a strong, bitter taste in my mouth. I remember telling Maria once, “You chose your fate. I didn’t. That’s the difference.”

  She had said, “Possibly, we choose more than we know.”

  “No, no,” I argued then. “I didn’t choose to be a Jew.”

  Before us the wall continues to change, and suddenly I see that this wall, in the future, would be washed white, new buildings would imitate the old, and tourists would walk through. Old hatreds would be transferred to new hatreds and few would notice the similarity.

  Now, the wall grows a hole. The hole in the wall fills with light as the wall becomes more and more lucid and transparent.

  A well-wisher behind me says, “Die fast.” Maria squeezes my hand once again, softly. I am barely able to feel her touch. An exquisite light flows through me. My entire being pulses in a way I have never expe
rienced before. Is this the ecstasy of which papa used to speak?

  I squeeze Maria’s hand in return, but I can’t tell where her hand begins and mine ends. No earthly power commands us. Already we are in a better place. There are no Jews, no Christians, no Muslims here. Our bodies stand naked and cold at the brink of death, yet inside us burns a freedom nothing can destroy.

  The row behind us drops with fumbling, crumbling sounds, as if there’s hardly any mass to the bodies. I hear other noises between gunshots, a moan, a quick cry ended with a shot, the cracking of bones. Bullets whirl fast and close.

  Something hits my back hard. So many shots fly at us, we bloom like red roses, our limbs falling to the ground. We spray in every direction, and the wall floats away. Holding hands, even after falling, I thrust my other arm towards Maria, but the force of gravity goes against me. My body can do nothing more; physical movement ceases. I forget the body. I forget the mind.

  Silence settles around us, timeless, endless. Out of the dark comes a light of awareness. I am free. I am floating. I don’t need the body. The light grows and grows. Light pervades every fiber of my spirit.

  Stillness fills me. How long does this last?

  Perhaps time doesn’t pass. Perhaps everything happens all at once. I might be dreaming or I might be awake, gazing like a stranger at the globe that was once my home. Below, bodies are burning. Wings have risen from the ashes.

  The Phoenix / Saqapaya

  I have come out of fire and ashes to fly through a place where the past, present, and future are one. I arrive at a long ago past. I perch on the crown of white oak, the spirit of incarnation, and watch who I once was long ago.

  Saqapaya and Hew sit at the point where a deep canyon split begins. Gray haired now, they look westward along the rift to the farthest coastal point, miles away. The Western Gate, Kumqaq, greets the Pacific Ocean as it has for generations, still receiving the people as they leave the middle world. I know what Saqapaya is thinking: is my work done? I see wisdom, and I am reminded of Maxiwo who passed through Kumqaq years ago.