Chapter Eleven

Urania

I

On an unusually warm day for October the Urania, a steamship, backed out of the harbor at Liverpool. The passengers lined up for deck chairs, wearing shorts, or trousers without any shirts. Children ran about, shouting. Young men and young women played on guitars. The war, on all fronts, was over.

At the end of the third day this weather changed. The ship rolled from side to side. All night long came the sound of glassware sliding and breaking. Then, halfway across the ocean, the sky cleared and the sun came out again. But it was not the same as before. A cold wind, a cold sea spray, kept people indoors. The rest of the trip was like winter.

Two passengers, boys, remained on deck no matter the weather. They sat in the same spot, toward the back, near the rail. After the storm they covered themselves with a blanket, a brown one, and huddled together with the material to their chins. You already know them: Nachman Kipnis, Lipiczany.

What a sight! Kipnis, totally blind, was wearing a large pair of smoked glasses. He looked, under his woolly blanket, like a little nocturnal animal, a tree shrew, a lemur, with enormous black eyes. Now Lipiczany. His head, with the hair cropped, was pale and somehow transparent. It was like your own hand when you hold it over a light: there were the blue veins, the green veins, the shadows from bones. The doctors said it was because of his swollen heart. At the railing, Kipnis spoke to Nisel:

“A boat is coming.”

Lipiczany squinted. He could see the whole gray globe falling away on every side. The Urania was alone on the ocean.

“No,” he replied.

“Wait.”

Lipiczany stared. In a quarter of an hour, on the horizon, he saw a line of smoke. A moment later the dark shape of a ship appeared.

“Do you see it?” asked Kipnis. It was amazing, really. He knew it was there because of the pressure of the waves.

“Yes,” said Nisel.

The boys clutched each other. They clung together. The boat got nearer. Then it passed them, going in the other direction, and the smoke from its smokestack spread out behind it like a cloak.

II

Ladies and gentlemen, a natural question. How did these Ghettoites, on board a train for Oswiecim, end up on an ocean liner? There is no miracle here—only confusion, only luck. When the transport arrived at the camp, the death house was already full—with Slovaks, mostly, and Jews from Terezin. There was no selection on the platform: all our citizens, even children, got safely in.

Then, in November, when the killing machine was once again vacant, the order of choice was by barracks, not by age or sex or the state of one’s health. What point in saving strong people, if the front was drawing near? But almost as soon as this process started, it stopped. Someone—they say it was HH, the Schoolmaster—gave a command to blow the baths and the chimneys and the whole business up. Two months later, when the ground was frozen, all the prisoners were marched away.