stands still, is a constant present, and duration has no meaning.
Eventually the train stopped, and we were ordered to march down a road. Ahead I saw barbed wire. I thought: another imprisonment, yet another. The guards pushed us through the gate and left. No one led us to a barracks. No one said when food would be given. No one ordered us to do anything. We were just left there.
Nothing, not even the labor camp or the transport, could prepare me for what lay before my eyes. At least the camp had had rules. There were boundaries, duties, orders, lists. People were used up systematically. The evil was deliberate, conscious, human.
But here …
Before me there seemed to be a field of corpses. Arms, legs, feet, heads protruding from the mud. Wisps of cloth, the remainders of clothing, shivering in the breeze.
Then I saw the blink of eyelids, the tremor of a hand. And I realized there were still living people among them—no, not living exactly. Here a man, there a woman, sitting, staring, vacantly, not turning a head, not a shred of attention for us, the new arrivals, we who had been tossed in among them. They simply fell, as if their joining the dead were inevitable. A process that began with being dropped into the camp, sitting down in exhaustion, falling to one side, dead.
I do not know how long I stood there. But suddenly there was a commotion at the gate. Shouting, screaming, then gunshots—shots fired into the air. Burly guards, not in German uniforms, came rushing toward us. They spoke Hungarian, a language I understood. And after the scene had quieted down, one of the guards came over to me. He stared at me, looked me up and down. His eyes slithered over me like an anxious Midas counting his possessions. Neck, breasts, belly: all mine. And then he circled me, once, twice: a snake sliming around me. And then he said—slowly, I will never forget it—he said:
You are as fat and rich and yellow as a big stick of butter. And I want to lick you.
Michal paused. The tape wound on. There was a cough, a sniffle—was she crying? Suppressing tears?
Then she laughed.
Do you know how hard it is to learn Hungarian? It has no relationship to Romance languages, none to Slavic languages. I stood there with the stupidest thought. I thought: I wish I did not understand what that man had just said.
He took me to his barracks, where he raped me for the full day. No sense describing it. It was like all the other rapes, all the other times I had to give up my body to survive. Yes, I slept with them all: guards, inmates, kapos, jailors, kitchen help, it didn’t matter. You see, because I was taken later in the war, and had done what I could to keep eating, I still had breasts. Real, full, suckable breasts. Among all the skeletal women, there I was with two round, soft breasts. What gold I had in them! What I could not exchange for sucks at those nipples!
Finally he brought me food. Then he kept me for two more days, raping me and, in between, feeding me. It was only because of him—and my breasts, and I had those only because Albrecht had kept me safe—for those reasons I am still alive. Outside there was no food, not even any water, as my tormentor kept telling me, saying how lucky I was he had taken me. A typhus epidemic was raging. Hundreds were dying by the hour. See? he said. Compared with death, what is being here with me?
On the third day after my arrival, I was alone in the barracks—locked in—and I heard the rumblings of heavy trucks, maybe tanks. I was afraid it was the German army, and they would come into the camp and just shoot us all. These rumblings went on for some time—hours—then a loudspeaker came on with a screech of, what do you call it, feedback. A howling screech of feedback. And then a big booming voice said:
Ihr seid frei!
You are free, said the patient.
Ah, said her mother, at least you understand a little German. Yes, the voice said we were free.
So it was April 15th, said the patient. The day the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. The day of your liberation.
Liberation! said her mother. You Americans, with your idea of liberation. Sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. Ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue. Happy families moving to Levittown.