the corners of her eyes but right on her pupils, and not on her lips but right inside her mouth. Trudi Pelikan stumbled. When she fell, the wagon rolled over her toes.
A motley crew
Trudi Pelikan and I, Leopold Auberg, came from Hermannstadt. We didn’t know each other before we had to climb inside the cattle car. Artur Prikulitsch and Beatrice Zakel—Tur and Bea—had known each other since they were children. They came from the village of Lugi in the mountains, in the Carpatho-Ukraine, where three lands meet. Oswald Enyeter came from the same region, from Rachiv. And so did the accordion player Konrad Fonn, from the little town of Sucholol. My truck companion Karli Halmen came from Kleinbetschkerek, and Albert Gion, with whom I was later in the slag cellar, came from Arad. Sarah Kaunz with the silky hairs on her hands came from Wurmloch, and Sarah Wandschneider with the wart on her ring finger came from Kastenholz. They didn’t know each other before the camp, yet they looked as if they could be sisters. In the camp they were nicknamed the two Zirris. Irma Pfeifer came from the small town of Deta, and deaf Mitzi—Annamarie Berg—from Mediasch. Paul Gast the lawyer and his wife Heidrun Gast were from Oberwischau. Anton Kowatsch the drummer came from the Banat mountain region, from Karansebesch. Katharina Seidel, whom we called Kati Sentry, came from Bakowa. She was feebleminded and for all five years didn’t realize where she was. The mechanic Peter Schiel, who died from drinking coal alcohol, came from Bogarosch. Ilona Mich—Singing Loni—came from Lugosch. Herr Reusch, the tailor, from Guttenbrunn. And so on.
We were all Germans and had been rounded up at home. All except Corina Marcu, who arrived at the camp with bottle curls, a fur coat, patent-leather shoes, and a cat brooch on her velvet dress. She was Romanian; the transport guards had picked her up the night we stopped in Buzău and stuck her in the cattle car. Presumably they had to fill a gap in the list, replace a woman who had died during the trip. Corina Marcu froze to death in the third year while shoveling snow on a railroad embankment. And David Lommer, known as Zither Lommer because he played the zither, was Jewish. Because his tailor shop had been expropriated, he traveled around the country, plying his trade, stopping at the better homes. He had no idea how he wound up as a German on the Russians’ list. His home was in Dorohoi, in Moldavia. His parents and his wife and four children had fled the Fascists. He didn’t know where they were, and they didn’t know where he was, even before he was deported. He was sewing a woolen suit for an officer’s wife in Grosspold when he was picked up.
None of us were part of any war, but because we were Germans, the Russians considered us guilty of Hitler’s crimes. Even Zither Lommer. He had to spend three and a half years in the camp. One morning a black car pulled up in front of the construction site. Two strangers wearing fine karakul caps climbed out and spoke with the foreman. Then they took Zither Lommer away. From that day on, his bed in the barrack was empty. Bea Zakel and Tur Prikulitsch probably sold his trunk and his zither at the market.
Bea Zakel said the men in the karakul hats were high-ranking party officials from Kiev. They supposedly took Zither Lommer to Odessa, and from there shipped him back to Romania.
Because he came from the same region as Tur Prikulitsch, Oswald Enyeter could get away with asking why Odessa. Tur said: Lommer had no business being here, and from Odessa he can go wherever he wants. Addressing the barber, and not Tur, I said: But where is he supposed to go. There’s no one left for him at home. At that point Tur Prikulitsch was holding his breath, to keep still while Oswald Enyeter pruned his nose hairs with a rusty pair of scissors. The barber finished the second nostril and brushed the snippets of hair off Tur’s chin like so many ants, then turned away from the mirror so Prikulitsch couldn’t see that he was winking. Are you satisfied, he asked. Tur said: With my nose, yes.
Outside in the yard the rain had stopped. The bread cart came clattering up the drive, through the puddles. Every day the same man pulled the cart with the large loaves through the camp