Silent Flight

Germany, 1976

“This way.” Adam, the officious self-appointed leader of our gaggle of chattering Americans, bright plumed birds, called to me.

I sighed at my lack of courage to go alone to the concentration camp. I joined the group clustered around the bus stop in the picture pretty village of Dachau. Marked Americans by our backpacks arrayed like deformed humps, we stared at the line of buses. The door opened on the third one down the line. The young driver, his bronze hair flashing in the sun like a bird’s bright feathers, gestured and called out, “To the camp.”

Adam, getting on first, asked the driver, “How did you know what bus we wanted?”

“You are Americans. You go to the camp. Americans go to the camp.”

After a few miles the towers came into view; looming over the road, their tops covered with rusted barbed wire where swallows swooped in and out. Silent, we stepped off the bus into the museum fronting the entrance to the camp. Here, the dead greeted us. Photographs, blown up to life size, hung from the walls.

Now a frightened flock, we scattered, no longer wishing to look into other living faces.

I stopped in front of one photograph.

Two young girls sat on the upper bunk of a train compartment. The photo must have been taken early, because they were in a compartment, on a bunk, wearing dresses, not rags. One of the girls smiled at the camera. She must have believed her trip would be like a vacation.        

The other girl stared, face flat with no expression. When I looked at her I realized, she knows. She knew she rode a train to an early death.

           I stepped outside to be confronted with a huge empty field, with small markers for each bunkhouse, two rows of tiny tombstones for millions. I walked to the first marker and could force myself no farther.

           It reminded me too much of the memorials I’d seen in German cemeteries, stones carved with the Star of David at the top and long rows of names below the symbol. At the bottom, one word written smaller than the star but larger than the names, verschwunden: vanished, disappeared and gone.

           Lost.

I watched the other Americans wander down the long avenue of the camp, each alone and separate. All of us hunched, except for Adam, who stood arms crossed, chin tucked tight against his chest.

Afterward, we reassembled at the bus station, our bright American chirping gone. Only the birds provided those oblivious notes, as they flew in and out of the shadows of the empty towers.

           On the bus, our silence remained until an older German hausfrau, plump and red-cheeked from the summer heat, lumbered on. Her wrinkled face beamed, a billboard advertising the friendly people of Germany.

Adam stood and stepped back to where she sat across from me. He loomed over her, an angry American eagle. “You knew, right?” He pointed at the nearest tower.

“Adam, please don’t—” I started to say, to stop his ugly American tourist accusations of “Why didn’t you do something,” which I figured would follow.

 “Ja, the sky all ash some days, like fog, not even birds flying,” the woman said, surprising me, surprising everyone. She hadn’t flinched, hadn’t pretended she didn’t know English.

Up at the front of the bus, the driver turned off the engine and turned to look our way.

In the quiet, Adam blinked at the woman for a long moment, and then turned his mouth down again. “If you knew, why didn’t you do something, or at least say something?”

The woman gazed up at the tall young American, her face drawn down and tight. “When first they talked about the Jews and the others, we stayed silent. We are not Jews, they are not Christians. It has nothing to do with us. Verstanden?” Understand?

Adam shook his head, denying, but I knew he did understand. Still, he asked, “What about when they starting rounding up people?”

“We stay silent, of course,” the woman answered.

The bus driver exhaled, a light airy sound. Behind us, another American shifted in her seat, clutching the straps of her backpack tight.

The woman continued, “Who are we to speak? My parents are shopkeepers, no one important to speak. Best to let the government handle it.”

I closed my eyes at the memories of the memorials, those long lists of names, no one important to speak for, till silenced forever.

“And when they built—” Adam began.

“—the camp?” she finished, anticipating his question. “They tell us those who go are bad people.”

Best to let the government handle it.

“And they say is only a work camp, yes?”

The bus driver looked out his front window, away from the walls of the camp.

I leaned closer to the woman and spoke soft and low, almost a whisper, sounding clear in the quiet. “And when the trains arrived with families on board?” I remembered the girl looking out from the photo, looking out from the past. She knew. “When the sky filled with ashes?”

Every American was turned now to look at the woman, sitting all plump and proper, a mother hen perhaps. We waited and watched her for her answer.

The woman compressed her lips and then pulled a tattered envelope from her voluminous purse. From it she withdrew an old black and white photo.  

“My family, early on in the war,” she said.

Adam and I peered at the worn and faded photo.  

It showed a family of five, with the youngest, a boy of around nine or ten, standing in front, with his pigeon-plump mother standing behind him, mom’s hands on the little boy’s shoulders. The husband stood in a crisp new uniform next to mom. Their two older children, both teenagers, one a younger, thinner version of the woman on the bus, stood smiling on the other side of their mother. All blond and beaming, a promotional poster for the Nazi regime.

The woman tapped her father’s face. “Father. He is proud to go to fight. For Deutschland, ja?”

“So you were glad to be Nazis?” Adam asked, his voice betraying his uncertainty.

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “He died, soon, no…quick, no…early. Early. Big battle, never bring back bodies.”  

Verschwunden. Gone.

“Mama cries. Then later, later.” The woman touched the oldest son’s face. “My older brother Frederick. The government say he must be a soldier. Mama says no, nein, bitte, bitte, please. The government say or we go to camp. Frederick become soldier and die. Bomb maybe. No one to bury.”

Verschwunden. Vanished.

“Mama cries and cries.” The woman covered the photo with her hand. “Albert, 14 years, my little brother Albert, he taken for Nazi Youth at end of war.”

Now Adam squeezed his eyes shut.

“Mama say nothing. So I don’t go to the camp. So I live. She go to her bed and say nothing and soon she die. She have funeral, with me only. I say nothing over her grave. What is there to say?” She fell silent.

“And Albert?” I found myself asking, with only the calls of the tower birds to accompany my words.

She raised one shoulder, a hen ruffling a wing, and said nothing.

Verschwunden. Lost.

The bus driver looked down for a long moment, then turned on the bus and began to pull away from the camp.

The woman gently placed the photo back in its envelope. She gazed at the retreating towers.

I followed her sight and watched the tower swallows flying alive and free, tumbling like ashes on the wind. The bus turned a corner and the towers disappeared from view.

In silence, we resumed our small beloved lives.

-End-