Four Perfect Pebbles by Lila Perl

Author:Lila Perl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

“On the Death Train”

“I don’t remember,” Marion said, “how we covered the distance of three to four miles to the railroad loading platform at the town of Belsen. I am sure that, weak as he was, Papa must have carried me.

“Albert, of course, would have shouldered as many of our belongings as he could, as well as the knapsack in which he always managed to have at least a crust of bread or a raw turnip to share with the rest of us. Mama, too, carried a knapsack with personal belongings and precious documents, receipts, letters, and mementos, including our old family photographs. One good thing about the evacuation from Bergen-Belsen, frightening as it was, was that we were allowed to be reunited as a family and to remain that way.”

The train that awaited the Blumenthals and their fellow prisoners had recently emptied itself of other prisoners who had been transported to Bergen-Belsen from the East. In fact, the ragged, hollow-eyed groups actually passed each other on foot, moving in opposite directions. Later the 2,500 Belsen evacuees learned that they were the last of the three groups to leave the camp. The balance of the 8,000 evacuees had departed earlier, starting on April 6.

The first group had been taken to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, or Terezin, in Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by Soviet Army units on May 8, 1945. The second group had been shunted back and forth across north-central Germany until it was liberated by American troops near Magdeburg, a short distance to the east of Bergen-Belsen. The occupants of the third train were not so fortunate.

“As bad as Bergen-Belsen was,” Ruth recalled, “we were terrified to be going on transport to what seemed like almost certain death. Why would the Germans want to empty the Sternlager so near to the end of the war? Was it because they had so many exchange Jews in the camp who had never been sent to Palestine? We were the evidence of their broken promises to the International Red Cross. Was that why they wanted to have us destroyed before the Allies arrived and learned the truth?”

As ordered, the prisoners climbed into the boxcars. At first, with only about fifty people to a car, there was room to spread out and arrange themselves in their new quarters. It was agreed that the pail of drinking water and the toilet bucket would be kept as far apart as possible, at diagonally opposite ends of the cars.

The prisoners now waited for the doors to be slid shut and bolted from the outside and for the train to start rolling. But oddly, nothing happened. The day was warm and sunny, and soon some of the bolder evacuees ventured down from the cars. A pile of rotting rutabagas, the turniplike vegetables that made up much of the camp fare, lay near the end of the platform. People began to sort through them for those that were the least odorous. Some even wandered into a nearby stream and began to bathe.

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