Nine Suitcases A Memoir

So, here I am, lying on my mattress in the middle of the synagogue at the foot of the Ark of the Covenant. The light that consultant Nemeti inked hospital-blue the day before yesterday flickers. Outside, foreign aircraft are flying over the town, but this doesn't bother us. The star, our stigma, excludes us not only from life's amenities but also from its fears. We aren't afraid of air raids, or any other kinds of death. The dead are lying here next to me: on the mattresses to my right and left there are diabetics in a coma, angina patients, uraemics, people with galloping TB who haven't been looked after during the last few weeks, and suicides who are being brought in on stretchers day and night, generally in pairs, mostly couples, including doctors who had poison at hand and knew the exact doses. Next to the terrible WC there is a laundry turned into a morgue, but by yesterday half a dozen legs, naked and waxen, were hanging out of the half-open door. The gendarmes allow no funerals. 'They'll all be taken care of together,' the gendarmerie colonel says with icy humour, and the bodies continue to pile up. At the top of the pile, as high as the ceiling, are the naked bodies of two children. That is why nine dead men and women have been left in the synagogue, decomposing in the stifling heat. My neighbour on the next mattress, Uncle Niszel, the old leather merchant, went with great difficultyat home in normal circumstances, according to his doctor, he would have had the 'beautiful death' his heart disease had been promising him for yearsfalling peacefully off his chair, surrounded by his family. Here, in the synagogue of the wonder-rabbi of Wisznice, which is now the ghetto hospital, weighed down by his ordeals, he kept puffing for a day and a half, with his mouth open, rhythmically, like the small steam engine at the timber yard. The whole ward was bored with the poor devil, the amateur nurses shook their heads in disapproval, and three impatient patients, who were after his mattress near the Ark of the Covenant and closer to the window, inspected him every quarter of an hour, interrogating the dazed doctor in his white coat as to how much time the old boy had left. Finally he died at about ten o'clock, but wasn't carried out, because there was no room in the morgue. Even so, the three patients, in their pants and vests, who had hoped to grab his mattress, fell out over the succession, although they eventually contented themselves with sharing out the old man's possessionshis felt slippers, brown blanket and personal bedpanand slunk away in the blue darkness, each with his booty. The nurses fluttered ineffectually, before huddling together again in the corner. They were middle-class girls from good families, who hadn't been trained for the work but had fought to get it, because those who sported a nurse's bonnet were able to move freely in the ghetto. The other girls, in groups of sixteen, were stuck in dirty, unfamiliar rooms, where they weren't even allowed to go near the window and every gendarme was entitled to use his weapons against them. Here, in the wonder-rabbi's two-storey synagogue with its large courtyard, the ghetto was freer and more cheerful. On the mattresses unwashed patients lying in their own filth puffed, panted, moaned, prayed and swore, and during the first two days caused a lot of trouble: they needed to be washed, to be given bedpans and enemas, to have their temperature taken and to be fitted with compresses. During the first two days the doctors too fought with all their strength: they administered injections, flushed out the stomachs of suicides, carried out operations and, on the top floor, even carefully delivered babies. Then the rumour spread that the ghetto wouldZsolt, Bela is the author of 'Nine Suitcases A Memoir', published 2004 under ISBN 9780805242041 and ISBN 080524204X.