Landscapes of Memory by Ruth Klüger

Author:Ruth Klüger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

FORCED LABOR CAMP

1

It was a lovely summer day in late June. We got gray, uniform prisoners’ clothes, were loaded into wagons and sent away from Auschwitz. The clothes spelled relief: they meant that we were really going to another camp, not to a place of execution. Whatever awaited us now, I was confident to survive it.

Even our hair had only been cut short, not shorn as was common. Perhaps because we would occasionally have contact with the civilian population, and bald women are bad public relations for the shearers, even in a totalitarian state. Again it was a trip in freight cars, but this time it was pleasant. We were only twenty women, not too many for the space, and everyone was relatively young and relatively fit. And we had no luggage to crowd us. We owned nothing, only our lives, which was perhaps a little less than nothing under the circumstances, but it felt irrationally good. The doors were open and fresh air came in. We were leaving Birkenau behind. I was happy.

And yet everything looked different. I had come from a death camp and was looking out onto a normal landscape. Another girl told me later that she was sure she would live when she saw the first hillside with wildflowers. It was a sort of bet she had with herself: if you see wildflowers again, take it as an omen, you’ll be okay.

It’s a beautiful country. The Germans who were driven out of what they still call Upper Silesia rave about it, much as the Cuban exiles do about their homeland, and on that summer day it was picture postcard pretty, as if time had stood still and I hadn’t come directly from Auschwitz. Bicyclists on quiet country roads between sunbathed fields. How I wanted to join them, though I didn’t know how to bike. Would I ever learn that skill? The world hadn’t changed. Auschwitz had not been on a foreign planet, but part of what lay before us. Life had gone on without a hiccup. I pondered the incongruity of this apparent carefreeness existing in the same space as our transport. Our train, for all our temporary relief, was part of the camps, part of their independent and peculiar world within a world, while out there was Poland or Germany or Silesia, whatever its geographic name, home of the people we were passing, a place where they felt at ease. What I had gone through hadn’t even touched them. Thus I discovered the secret of simultaneity, a mystery that seemed unfathomable and therefore related to timelessness, eternity.

We passed a summer camp for youngsters. I saw a boy in the distance energetically waving a large flag. It was a gesture affirming the sunny side of the system that was dragging us along in the blood and excrement of its underside. So much light out there – how could that be? Later I freely associated this boy, whom I barely glimpsed on my way from Auschwitz, with

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