The Plum Trees by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE GIRLS WERE LINED UP by last name, and then slowly moved up toward the tables, where two prisoners, older women, sat. One had a book in which she wrote their names, and the other had what looked like a fountain pen with blue ink and an injection needle at the end. Magda had to fight off the urge to bolt. Tattoos were barbaric, hateful to her. Her hair could grow again someday, but they were marking her arm forever. She didn’t look as they took her arm and started pricking. Told herself that this pain and desecration, here in this place of dark reversals, meant that she might live instead of die.

“Don’t cry!” she said to her sisters. “It’s nothing,” but she couldn’t bring herself to look for a while. And afterwards, when her sisters added up their numbers and found good luck in the sums, Magda just shook her head.

“TRY, AND MAYBE YOU CAN SURVIVE,” Aranka had said. Not “Try and you can,” but “Try and maybe.” That was the best you could do here.

Magda was hit with dysentery that night, seized with stomach cramps at the start of the evening roll call, but she knew that they weren’t permitted latrine till it was over. She knew, too, there was no such thing as asking for that privilege, to use the so-called bathroom even just this once, as if she were a human being. But the thought of soiling herself—no, she would hold out, hold it all in somehow. She breathed in, breathed out, looked up, and thought about the stars that must still be in the skies, somewhere. Here you couldn’t see them through the smoke.

She tried to remember the names of the constellations. If the guards let them go soon, she could still make it. If that was even permitted. Because they’d had one latrine—was there another one at night? She tried to remember. There were some buckets, though, in the barracks. If she could get there—but the counting was never-ending, and finally, she felt the warm, stinking trickle start down her legs.

“Nazi stockings”—but even so, could she live like this? With her own shit on her legs?

“But that’s part of it,” Aranka told her. “They’re good at this.” Not only do they want to kill you, but they want to make you wonder if they might be right. If a girl with her own shit on her legs should be walking the earth anyway.

“But if you let them make you feel that way, then they’ve won.”

WHEN MAGDA FINALLY GOT TO the latrine that night, there was some shouting and crying, a sort of scuffle going on. A woman had collapsed, eyes open but barely conscious, into the filth, and a sobbing girl was trying to pull her up. She’d been her teacher, the girl was saying, in Budapest, at school. She’d taught them Faust, and Shakespeare’s sonnets—

“Leave her!” the girl’s friends were crying.

“In English! The poems were so beautiful!”

Her friends dragged her off. “Do you

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