The Boxcar

By David L. Hertz

He lifted his head and panned the universe of refugees. He had counted sixteen boxcars while waiting to board. After the men and women settled into their places he counted five wide and twelve deep and estimated that close to a thousand living remnants of Hitler’s failed, final solution were being transported from Poland into Occupied Germany, seeking a new home. Now some quietly slept while others struggled to find shelter in sleep. Cries and whimpers sounded the slow passage of time while Hersch gazed silently, expressionless, into the emptiness.

He was thirteen when his family fled the atrocities of the Russian pogroms to live and prosper in Poland until the first bombs exploded over Warsaw. He and his family were among the last survivors of the Jewish Ghetto. In the final uprising Hersch’s past was extinguished in a flash of enduring pain - his wife Rebecca, his son and his daughter, were killed before his eyes. Caught by the Nazis, then managing his escape from the march of Jews being led to a Treblinka-bound train, he hid in the boiler room of a fire-torched building before running through the charred ruins to the doorstep of Helena Rymut, a Catholic widow who had worked for him before the war. She took him in, protected him, and helped him assume a Catholic identity. They lived together for two years, first comforting each other in their losses and later, naturally and mysteriously, embracing each other with love.

But the end of the war redirected his fate and he was again a refugee, now with a new wife, Stasha, who lay asleep at his side. He looked at her, blanketing her with the shadows of his past before lifting his hands up against his temples to stifle the chorus of whys bellowing through the open mouths of ghosts that lived inside him, refusing to die.

The train lurched as it rounded a curve. Hersch kept his balance by thrusting his hands out against the floor. The human cargo stretched across the boxcar was tossed about as the train wheels bounced over an irregular stretch of track. Stasha’s eyes sprung open and a convulsive shake rippled through her. She quickly drew her fisted-hand up against her pursed lips. Her throat tightened as she fought to contain deep coughs within her clenched mouth. A trickle of saliva traced down her chin. Finally, she lifted her colorless face and after a number of cleansing coughs regained control of her breathing.

"Are you okay?" He pulled a piece of cloth out of his back pocket and wiped her chin.

"I feel like I’m going to throw up."

"They said we would stop at dawn and they’d give us water, and something to eat." Hersch spoke loudly enough to overcome the steel-on-steel clanging of wheels turning against the rails. "I’m sure you’re okay. It’s the motion of the train, the heat and an empty stomach. That’s all. Sleep. Go back to sleep."

Her eyes grew wide and with a surge she swung her body around and squared herself to face him.

"What if I’m pregnant? What will we do?"

Why must a man’s yearnings, great and small, exact a price larger than he is prepared to pay?

Hersch placed his hand against an outside pocket of his rucksack that held a photo of his son Lieb, the lone artifact he carried out of the ruins of the ghetto. Helena had it framed and placed it on their bedroom bureau. It was the one personal possession he took when he left her.

"Like everyone on this train we will make a new life. Nothing will matter but the baby."

These same words were unspoken, submerged by his desire for revenge on the day he told Helena he had joined the reconstituted Polish Army. She took his face in her hands and directed his eyes into hers. She was three months pregnant. Hersch knew that Helena understood he would not return. "Tell me why leaving me or dying is better than the life we promised each other? Tell me why your hate for the Germans is greater than your love for me, greater than your love for your baby? "

"Helena, I have lived as a Catholic but I am still a Jew. Every other Jew in Warsaw, in Poland, is dead or gone. I must fight. Already I feel like I am going crazy. You are strong and so the child will be strong, not weakened by my lie. Are you going to tell our child your father is Jewish?"

"Then go. Go to hell. May God punish you for the rest of your life."

The following morning Hersch placed what money he had on the kitchen table. At the door, he threw his arms around her. She held her arms to her side. He rested a kiss on her cheek. "I love you," Hersch whispered. Helena stood motionless and said nothing.

"I love you for what you said," Stasha said, snapping Hersch back into the present. "Thank you."

"Don’t worry so much. Everything will be fine. Go to sleep. You need to sleep." Hersch heard the hollowness in his voice. Can I still trust my mind after all I have lost?

Stasha fixed her eyes on him and reversed her position to lie back against him. Hersch raised her collar to cut the summer drafts etched by the train’s motion seeping through the sidewalls of the boxcar. He stroked her shoulder and waited for her to return to sleep. He watched for the rhythm of her breathing then looked up to the ceiling for the morning light, wondering if the sun would ever rise in the sky. Wincing hard, he squeezed the muscles in his face and shouted at himself, Fool! You damn fool!

His thoughts resumed their troubled watch. Hersch shivered at the strangeness of Stasha sleeping next to him, this woman who carried his name and who now may be carrying his child. During their escape to the Allied Forces, their time together held little talk. The waking hours spent traveling on foot, finding food and rudimentary shelter in the mountain villages through which they passed were marked by his constant urge to press on and her frequent pleas to stop and rest. Each night they went to sleep exhausted, too tired to speak. They avoided touching upon the pain of the past or the uncertainty of the future except for answering, each for the other, the question of their respective means of survival. Hersch learned that after she was separated from her parents upon their arrival at the Gross-Rosen labor camp, she was selected by the camp commandant to be a servant in his officer-quarters and to be his mistress. As Hersch now recalled Stasha talking about Herr Commandant Hoffman, it was not the ceaseless beat of coal-fed locomotion that he heard, but rather the sound of treetops rustled by the wind on the night she shared her story.

"Hoffman called me Jewish trash. I acted my part by being colder than him, just letting him have his way. My mother, God bless her, made me swear just before the Germans took her away that I should do whatever anyone wanted to stay alive. So I would lay under him thinking of a young man I loved before the war. Hoffman used to grunt like a pig. It was over in seconds."

"He never hurt you?" Hersch had asked, imaging that she still had not told him the worst of her story.

"No." Stasha cast her eyes down at her feet. An owl hooted. They both looked up and scanned the darkness before she broke the silence. "In fact, he swore he never hurt anyone. I once heard him boast to one of his lieutenants, No Jew ever died by my hand."

Stasha laughed. Hersch was dumbfounded, perplexed by her laughter until she said, "I’ll bet Hitler said the same thing."

He had never known a woman who possessed the quick and rough wit of a man. When he met Stasha in the chaotic aftermath of the war’s end, her good figure and saucy demeanor gave her a sex appeal that sparked a proposal to marry and flee to America, a proposal more quickly offered than taken, but taken nonetheless. However, in the past several weeks, her behavior left him cold as her mood swings – sullen weariness to tearfulness to unprovoked sarcasm – grew more frequent than glimpses of the same he noticed during their trek through the mountains. Increasingly, he counseled himself not to think of Stasha as heavy baggage containing a flawed personality but rather to hold on to his initial intuition that she would fuel the irreversible streak of optimism that propelled him forward.

Looking across the boxcar, Hersch spotted a young couple locked in an embrace, exchanging kisses. They seemed unable to exhaust each other until the girl gently pushed away and raised a hand to signal the boy to rein in his affection. They sat looking into each other’s eyes, stroking each other’s hand. Hersch imagined them happy and in love, causing him to feel a recognizable emptiness within himself. With Rebecca he had known the happiness of family, but never experienced the reckless, boundless love of youth. It was in the shelter of Helena’s arms he discovered love emerging, poised to mature and take flight, and with it the fear that struck against the stone of his Jewish pride. Yes, he told himself, I had to leave her; but the reasons sounded false, a discredit to her and pitted with his own shame.

He turned towards Stasha. The nearness of her revealed neither love nor happiness nor any emotion he could name. Confused, his untethered thoughts suddenly ground to a halt. The train had stopped. He saw a hint of purple coloring the sky. In the motionlessness of the train’s dead weight an uncommon nervousness began to beat in his heart. He flattened his ear against the wall, anxious to hear and feel the power of the train return. Why did no one have the common decency to walk down the tracks and shout out an explanation? He only heard the stirrings and low murmurs of the other passengers. He guessed that the dawn was less than a half-hour away. He closed his eyes but his senses were too on edge. He felt suffocated by both the still bog of summer heat that clung through the night and the caustic human odors compressed within the boxcar’s walls. His nostrils burned.

Turning back to look at Stasha his mind locked on to the question of her pregnancy. Then what? From the other corner of the boxcar, Hersch heard a young boy sobbing. "Momma. I’m so hungry. Please, Momma." Hersch began to cry. For months, never in Stasha’s presence, he wept to purge the past, to release the drowning waves of sorrow and guilt. The fight against the accidents of origin and fate resolved nothing. He desperately wanted to wrap himself in the comforts of ordinary life and bring to an end the tiring journey of his long, continuing escape. He still thought of himself as strong, but he could not pretend that he did not feel his energies stripped by uncaring forces larger than him, as unnoticing of him as of a pebble bouncing down the bottom of a storm-swollen river.

Sleep. He needed sleep. A rough, uncontrollable cough from the other end of the boxcar punctured the low audible cloud of exhaled sounds that spread across the boxcar floor. He could not sleep. He sat up, hoping to spot someone he knew, family or friend, as he tried earlier that day during the interminable wait to board the train. The light in the boxcar was dim. He craned his neck and scanned the faces. The devastation of the past lay in their eyes. He saw no one whose life he had touched before.

After a few minutes he grew frustrated, emptied of expectation. It was then that he noticed the thin band of light etched across the stained sidewall of the boxcar by the sun rising over the horizon. He watched the light widen, lengthen and cover the weathered wood with a golden wash. Despite all the doubts, the days when he thought he would never again see the sun, here it was. Unknown to him, the train crossed the Polish-German border. Soon he would help Stasha climb out of the boxcar, lift his head to the sky, and breathe the morning air.