In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE TRAIN The truck stops by the side of a railroad track. There is a small station house. We are hurried off the truck. Amid pushed, milling people we are to get on open freight cars. To each side of the railroad track I see a long wide trench. In the trench, on each side of the track I see chopped bodies lie. As if a giant hacked apart the bodies; arms, legs, torsos, heads are all jumbled , piled this way and that. My mind, my body are sliding apart. Chunks of my head feel broken off, falling, falling. I can't hold the inside of my head together. Inside me it's growing, filling up like a balloon without the outside skin of a balloon. I myself have to hold the exploding mass together. Like a mudslide that nothing can stop, my mind dribbles, cracks, bubbles out. I can't even think, "Oh God, my God, my God . . . help me. ..." Suddenly, I see two men who are clothed stand up out of the corpses, leap and run across the rail tracks to the other side of the railbed. The Germans shout. I see one man has a turnip under his arm. They run and fall. They get up, run and one goes down into the piled bodies. The other runs. I hope he gets away. The next instant he falls, shot. My mind is breaking. Then terror catches me. The train is starting to move! The sliding doors are already closing. Before my mind begins to work, my body is moving. I run, I run, leap, grab a bar and hang on the outside of the rail car as it begins to speed up. My mind says, "Don't be afraid, you can't be afraid because if you are afraid you'll let go and fall and be killed under the railroad car. As I think this, the sliding door is pushed open and a man reaches for me and pulls me in. To the side of him stands Mama and I recognize the look of utter relief on her face. I feel no surprise . I say, "Of course I'm here." 70 THE TRAIN The train has many cars. The first car is painted white with a red cross. This is supposed to prevent the English or Americans from bombing the train. The people who could still walk are on this train. The others are left behind in Bergen-Belsen dead, or nearly dead. No one knows where the train goes; the grownups try to find out. I listen and try to understand myself where we go. Are we going east? "East" has a terrible, sinister ring. I know and I don't know that east means to be killed. Are they going to drive the train over a bombed-out bridge? Then we will be killed, drowned as the train falls into the water. Is it true one of our people talked to the train conductor and pleaded with him to run the train in the other direction? I don't know, I don't know anything. The first few days I feel a terrible pain in my chest. I want to look at myself to see what is hurting. But I can't even move my arms. There is no room to pull away my clothes and look at myself to see what is hurting. The railroad car is dark, there is just the endless clacketyclack -clack, clackety-clack-clack. I must be sleeping in the same position I've been sitting in for so long. When I awaken I still haven't moved . . . there is no room to move. Sometime at night the train stops, we can open the sliding doors. We can get out and pee. Day after day the train moves along. Sometimes we can keep the sliding doors open and I can look outside at the fields and the trees. I sit by Mama and I curse the German grass, the German sky, the German trees. I hear my voice curse on and on. Mama says, "But darling the trees didn't hurt you." I don't care, I hate them, I hate them. As I curse I feel the hurting emptiness of "Papa is dead." It is an aloneness beyond words. Now even the trees and this sky are not beautiful. This is German land and I hate. While the train moves, the people who stay alive drop the dead...

Share