Free Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini Page A

sure because no one has ever come back from these expeditions. The story came from a Jewish cook who heard the SS talking about it while they were having a meal after an ‘action’.
    Yesterday I saw an old man refuse to get into a lorry with the others, so they tied his hands and feet and attached him with a hook to the lorry which set off at high speed with his body bumping and rolling behind. It made a strange noise like the rattling of an empty box. You know, I can’t dream any more. What d’you think it means when you can’t dream any more? I wake in the morning with my tongue burning in my mouth. I’m hungry, that’s all I can think about. The bricklayer my father worked for has been taken away too. His hands were covered with sores. He kept them wrapped in two filthy rags. He was about thirty years old, so he told me, but he looked fifty. He had grown old suddenly, his neck wrinkled and his hands covered with ulcers. The Nazis grabbed him and pulled him towards a lorry. He shouted that he could still work, that his hands were only bleeding temporarily, that in a couple of days he’d be able to start working with bricks again, but they took no notice and lifted him bodily onto the lorry. I was watching from the window. I couldn’t feel the compassion I would have expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing at all. Perhaps this is the beginning of the great change. I am in the process of being transformed into a human being made of stone. Stone eyes, a stone brain, a stone tongue and even a stone heart. Even my love for you is becoming cold and mineral. Another stone in the little cemetery of memory. I must say a prayer.
    How can that stone child have survived in that ghetto? Would he have had the strength to survive? Was turning to stone a way of holding on? And what if, after all, he had made it? A boy has his life before him. And it isn’t easy to break a stone.
    Łódź
     
    Dear Amara, one day the ghetto fills with people and the next it’s empty again. They arrive in their thousands, some in good shape, from towns and cities newly conquered by the Führer. Many, already tried and tested, thin and with their stomachs full of parasites, come from other ghettoes. But they soon disappear. The SS bring their lorries every day, collect two or three hundred people and take them away. No more is heard of them. So when people hear the engines of the lorries making their way along the streets, they start running away. But the SS push their way into the houses and grab the children and the old. A monster who specially loves children. Do you remember when we used to read Tom Thumb ? This is the great ogre, greedy for little people. In order to keep in condition he needs to swallow at least a hundred a day. And to make sure they’ll be good about being eaten, and not shout or wriggle too much, he strokes their heads and gives them big friendly smiles and talks to them in a reassuring voice: now take off your little hats, no need for shelter, it’s warm here even though there’s snow outside; it’s nice and warm in here. No, take off your little coats, you don’t need them. There, that’s right. Take off your shoes too and come to me. And the moment they get close, whoomph! he crams them into his mouth five at a time. And if at this point they start kicking what does he do? He crushes their bones with his teeth and swallows them at a single gulp. Little children are so tender!
    I am a little stone man now, watching petrified from my window. My mother fusses behind me, but she doesn’t bother me. Except now and then when I beg her not to move so much because she’s causing a cold draught. She says Uncle Eduard was right, they’re going to kill us all. Or we’ll starve to death, like our neighbour Chaim Bobrowski who knew how to play the violin like a king. His feet and face swelled up till he could hardly walk. But he dragged himself to work just the same, his shoes full of holes, so as not to miss his soup