ARNOST LUSTIG
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moment my own fate is decided? What will happen, will happen. What
awaits us awaits everybody.
On top of everything, everybody was exhausted. The wheels of the
rain periodically banged up against the connector along the track.
Sometimes the tracks would shift slightly and the train would jump like
we were traveling through empty air or across a deep pit. Being quiet
and resting simply meant gathering strength for what was to come. The
direction to the east could only augur bad.
It
was either luck or bad for–
tune that nobody knew anything for sure. Even with the changes in
tracks and pauses, the train kept heading in the same direction. The
track was a funnel that the whole world, the time and the meaning of
everything gushed out of. Endless ties of rail. The world disappeared
behind us with every turn of the wheels.
Men and women traveled separately. Two thousand five hundred men,
two thousand five hundred women. Fifty wagons, two engines, one in the
front and the other at the end. The women that had been convicted of
something while they were at the fortress, from petty offenses to theft or
disturbing the peace through fights or arguments with other occupants, or
among themselves, Bible-toters and such, all rode in the first three wag–
ons. They crammed a hundred of us into a freight wagon for forty men or
eight horses. We got a place above on the top of the suitcases under the
roof of the cattle car. A little light and air made their way through and one
night when it rained a few drops of rain came in by the little wire window.
People in the middle and down on the bottom of the car almost went mad
from being crushed. They didn't have any light or air, they only hampered
on another. Everybody handled it the first day and night. By the second
day and night, they loathed one another. They beat a man who had
dared to say that Adolf Hitler had an unknown grandfather whom his
grandmother from his father's side, Maria Anna Schickelgruber, never
talked about and who was thought to be either Johann Nepomuk
Hiedler or his brother, Johann Georg Hiedler or a Jewish businessman
from Graz by the name of Frankenberger or Frankreither.
We longed for each other's deaths. We traveled three days and four
nights. We didn't have any place to go to the toilet.
It
was the worst for
the people under us. I thought about the marathon runners that Adler
claimed later on pissed in their pants so they wouldn't lose time. Ours
was a ridiculous race or trip where the participants got to the end and
then died. The last place we stopped was in Krakow for a whole night.
Other trains came in and went out on the track next to ours; the wheels
would screech and the whistles would blow. The local announcer would
call out departures to Berlin, Warsaw, and Sophia, to the icy seaside in
