Read But You Did Not Come Back for Free Online

Leipzig, I finally believed what she’d said. Once we got to the station, they threw us into a freight car with thepeople who had typhus, just like they would have thrown us into the gas chamber if we’d still been at Birkenau. That was the beginning of ten very strange days in our locked freight cars. We hardly noticed there weren’t many female German guards anymore; all we did was count the dead bodies that were piling up; there were 120 of us, the disease spread like wildfire, the number of dead grew very quickly, we piled their bodies up against the door, I was alive, breathing, right next to them. But you, where were you? With the dead or among the survivors? In the freight car, that was the only demarcation line that counted while the bombings raged above our heads.
    One day, as the train crawled along, as the days seemed to drag on forever, I felt a bit of bread in someone’s pocket. It took me some time to get it; I’d rummaged through the pockets of the dead in Canada, but their bodies were no longer there. Finally, I stole it from the dead woman and shared it with Renée. Sometimes the trainstopped, they opened the doors, and we begged for some of the water they used to cool the train’s engine; I looked for some dandelions, the only edible plant I knew.
    When we stopped for good, there wasn’t a single German left on the train, just us and the driver. We’d arrived at the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Its remaining inhabitants opened the doors of the freight cars, saw the dead bodies roll out, then saw us, the starving animals, eyes enormous in our emaciated faces, and they understood what had happened to everyone who’d been taken away, and what was going to happen to them. They rushed to find us something to eat. Just like animals, the young women in the freight cars started fighting each other for the food. I just watched it all, I didn’t fight. That doesn’t mean I was better than the others. Or maybe I fought too, but I prefer to forget that. I’m no angel.
    I came out of a car full of dead bodies. Alive. “You’ll come back, Marceline, because you’reyoung,” you’d said. But what about you? Were you still breathing that April of 1945? Typhus took Renée. I had scabies and a bleeding stomach. The Russians finally liberated the ghetto. They immediately decreed that we should be put into quarantine because of the typhus. I fled, because another war was starting that you would never know about, one we could already feel coming. The world was being divided into two blocs—soon the East would be under the yoke of the Soviets and the West under American control.
    I walked toward Prague with some others, sixty kilometers away. Once we were there, someone dressed the wound on my stomach. I took the road toward the American zone; we kept walking without knowing where we were going, without knowing how many days we’d been walking, without understanding or realizing what we’d lived through, we dragged ourselves along. We knew the Nazis had lost, but it was too late, much too late to rejoice, our suffering had been too great, all we had left was a feeling of horror and loss. Wherewere you? All I could think about was you. But I didn’t try to find you among the others. That’s not how we’d be together again.
    We ended up in the Pilsen repatriation camp. There, one of the employees said: “We don’t repatriate Jews, just prisoners of war.” The prisoners stood up for us, refused to leave without us. I’d gotten to Sarre before anyone asked our address; I was given a skirt, underwear, and an official deportee card. And that was the first time I gave the phone number of the château, 58, in Bollène.
    You were already dead. I imagine you looked just like all the corpses I saw scattered along the road as I returned. I can picture your arms outspread, your eyes wide open. A body who’d seen death and then watched himself die. A body no one would ever return to us. When your official