Paul Lewellan
Camp Stories
Esther Zoubek stepped down from the rail car, followed by her father and four sisters. Ruth, Esther’s infant sister, slept fitfully in her mother’s arms while Hungarian guards patrolled the well-ordered rail yard. SS officers watched from the spotless stationhouse, their hands resting on black leather holsters. A fine ash choked the air.
Esther’s friend, Sophie, stepped onto the platform. Even unbathed, in a threadbare brown dress, sobbing from hunger and fear, she was beautiful. A young guard motioned for Sophie to wait beside the rail car until he returned. He handed her a green apple. As the guard walked away, she raised the apple to her lips. An SS captain snatched it from her hand and smashed her face against the rail car. Sophie crumbled between the tracks. The captain bit into the apple as he returned to the stationhouse.
***
Mrs. Zoubek stepped off of the MetroLink bus with two plastic bags of groceries from HyVee. At age 84 she made the trip three times a week. Her granddaughter offered to take her in the Toyota, but she always refused. “We should not spend our time together in the produce aisle.”
She’d entered her kitchen before she realized Samuel Hinkley, the neighbor boy, was there. Sam wore jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. His head was shaved. “You seem upset,” he told her.
Mrs. Zoubek set the groceries on the counter. “I didn’t expect you in my kitchen… I mean….”
“Sure. Technically, I’m breaking and entering.”
She pulled two jars of applesauce from the bags, avoiding eye contact. “I didn’t think you would be… back… so soon.”
“Neither did my mother.” Mrs. Zuobek glanced at the phone across the counter. Sam followed her eyes. “I thought I’d stop by for milk and cookies.” He picked up the phone and smashed it against the refrigerator. He opened the door and looked inside. “Or a beer?” He pulled out a bottle. “August Schell, Pilsner.” He opened it and took a drink. “Shit, that’s good. Germans know their beer.”
“It isn’t German. It’s brewed in New Alm.”
He sat down at the kitchen table. “My father drank a lot of beer, but he never gave a crap about where it was brewed. A beer and a boy. That was his idea of fun.”
She watched him drink. Gone was the child who came after school to pet her cat. “I’m sorry, Samuel. If I had known, I would have stopped him.”
“That’s what Mom said, too.” He lifted the beer to his lips. Sam remembered when he was 6. His father came home late from a ball game, drunk and angry. He barged into the bathroom and saw Sam bathing. His father pissed into the bathtub, cock in one hand, beer in the other. When he finished, he grabbed the boy and sodomized him with the empty bottle. “Tell me, Mrs. Zoubek, how could my mom not know? My butthole was bleeding.” He finished the beer and tossed the bottle on the floor.
***
Esther’s father gathered his family by the side of the tracks. An officer told the prisoners to divide into groups: the men to the right; the women and children to the left. Esther’s father huddled the family together, refusing to leave them, even when two guards threatened him with their bayonets. “You will have to kill me,” he said. An SS sergeant motioned the Hungarians to lower their rifles. “We do not want to frighten the others,” he told the guards. The sergeant turned to Ether’s father. “Such bravery must be rewarded.” He patted him on the arm of his torn suit coat. “I will take care of your family.”
“I thank you,” her father replied.
The sergeant took Esther’s baby sister in his arms, rocked her, and cooed. He looked over at Esther. “How old are you, girl?”
“I’m eighteen.” Esther lied as she had been instructed.
“Do you have a trade?” the sergeant asked.
“I’m a seamstress,” she said. That was a smaller lie.
He motioned to a group of women at a gate at the far end of the tracks. “Join them. The capo will show you the barracks.” Esther complied when he father nodded his consent.
The sergeant turned to Esther’s father. “The guard can take your other daughters to a safer place.” Her father looked at the smiling sergeant still holding the baby. He released his grip on the two girls, and the guard led them away. “Stand here while I attend to things.” The sergeant handed the baby back to her mother.
When the other prisoners had formed their lines and marched off, the sergeant returned to Esther’s parents. “Where are my daughters?” her father asked.
“I will show you.’” He pointed to the guard tower. Standing between two guards at the rail were Esther’s sisters. Hannah, who was five, waved. The sergeant appeared to wave back. Then Esther watched as the guards lifted her sisters over the rail and threw them down onto the tracks. She heard their screams. She saw her father run to the girls. Saw the Hungarian handler release his dogs. Saw the dogs tear her father apart as he struggled to protect the lifeless bodies.
When Esther’s mother screamed, the baby began crying. “We have no use,” the sergeant told her, “for children in this camp.” He clasped his gloved hand against the baby’s mouth until it stopped crying. “But we have use for Jew women with breasts full of mother’s milk.” He lifted up her chin and brushed tears from her cheeks. “Clean up before I come for you tonight.”
The capo led Esther into the camp. When she went to the latrine the next morning she found her mother, naked and bruised, hung with a rope she’d fashioned from the remains of her dress.
***
Sam grabbed another beer. “You seem tense.”
“I have groceries to put away.”
He looked at the unpacked bag on the counter. “Got anything good?”
“Moose Tracks ice cream,” she told him. It was Helen’s favorite. She glanced at her granddaughter’s photos on the refrigerator door. The first photo showed Helen in her cap and gown at her graduation from Iowa State. In the second, Helen and three friends in matching bikinis mugged for the camera at Sidney’s Manly Beach. Helen stood out with her long dark hair.
“Seen her lately?” Sam asked, pointing to Helen’s picture.
“She doesn’t have much time for me,” Esther said. “She works at Alcoa.”
“You could ask her over for ice cream.”
She pointed to the shattered phone. “How?”
“Who the hell has only one phone?” Sam continued to stare at Helen’s photos.
Esther glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was 2:15. Helen’s shift ended at 4:00. She must deal with Sam before then. She hoped the phone in the bedroom would not betray her.
***
On Esther’s second night in the camp, a drunken guard entered the women’s barracks and tried to rape a prisoner. She resisted, scratching him and clawing at his eyes. The guard told her if she didn’t submit, he would personally drag her to the gas chambers. “We have plenty of seamstress sluts.” Still, she spit in his face. He broke her neck and had sex with the corpse.
The Ukrainian came back the next night and picked another girl. She only made mild resistance. He broke her neck, too, and had sex with the body. On the third night, with no pretense, he selected a girl and killed her immediately. He made the other women watch as he abused her body. Esther and the others pledged that no one else would die.
Two days later the guard was found trapped under the wheel of a truck. It appeared the truck he was repairing fell off the jack. The guards were not fooled. They went to the barracks and picked the twenty prettiest women. They marched them into the square, stripped their clothes off one by one, and then shot them in front of the whole camp. Esther was not one of the pretty ones.
***
“Why don’t you grab me that ice cream. And a big spoon. Where I’ve been, the food made me gag. I lost twenty pounds.”
Esther removed the half-gallon of ice cream from the bag and set it on the table in front of Sam. She pulled a tablespoon from the drawer. He ripped off the lid and began eating from the ice cream carton. “Don’t know how ice cream goes with beer, but, shit, when will I get another chance?”
As Sam ate, Mrs. Zoubek put away the groceries. “I didn’t expect to see you back so soon from….” Mrs. Zoubek hesitated.
“Camp. They called it a camp.”
“A camp?”
“Yes. Boot camp.”
“It was a prison?”
“Hell, yes. And a whole lot more.” He took another drink of beer. “When I was a kid, I wanted to go to camp.” He started on the ice cream again. “I was a stupid kid.”
Esther moved carefully as she put away the groceries. “In my mind, Sam, you’re still a child.”
“I’m a man with a record, thanks to you.” He said it flatly.
“I could not look the other way. I saw what you did.” The image of the little neighbor girl naked in Esther’s garage was fresh in her mind.
“I wasn’t doing anything to Missy that she didn’t want done.” Sam licked the spoon and put it down.
“Did she ask to be tied to that bench?”
“Not exactly. But you saw the getups she wore. She knew what she was doing.”
“She was ten years old, Sam.”
He stood up and slapped her so hard she fell back against the counter. “That’s what the guards said. ‘She was ten years old, you pervert.’ Stuff like that. That didn’t give them the right to….”
“To what . . .?” she asked quietly.
“Nothing.” What they’d done to him had been no worse than what his father did. “It just didn’t give them the right.” He sat down and looked at the ice cream and the beer. He picked up the ice cream carton and lobbed it into the sink. Its contents splattered on the sideboard and cabinets, but Mrs. Zoubek made no move to clean it up. Sam grabbed the beer and finished it. He went to the refrigerator for another.
“I know, Sam. The guards shouldn’t have…”
“How would you know?” he asked, twisting off the beer cap. He stared at the picture of Helen in her bikini. He pulled it off the door, scattering the tiny magnets that held it. He stared at the picture. “I thought about Helen a lot.” He shoved the photo into his back pocket.
Mrs. Zoubek chose her words carefully. “When I was your age, I was sent to a camp.”
“Were you a bad girl?”
“I was Jewish.”
“You can’t get arrested for that.”
“You could in Poland in 1942.”
He sat down with his third beer. “How was the food?”
“They starved us.”
“I bet.”
“We were given one slice of bread each day and a watery beet soup. Sometimes there would be pieces of cabbage. No salt. No meat.”
“Poor Mrs. Zoubek,” he said. Sam saw her pantry filled with canned good and jars of food. He looked at her wide hips and her straight back. “You’re not starving now.”
Mrs. Zoubek turned away from him and slowly put away the groceries. She glanced at the clock. “One night before lights out, two young men who worked in the guard quarters brought us a rich dark soup. There were carrots onions, potatoes, and meat. More than our shriveled up stomachs could handle. They had hoarded the vegetables from the guards’ kitchen. ‘But,’ we asked, ‘how did you get this meat?’ ‘Our secret,’ they said. They had cooked the soup by the latrines to cover the smell.
“A couple guys at my camp made a still and traded the liquor for cigarettes.” He leaned back and sipped his beer. “Some punk turned them in. The guards run them until they couldn’t run no more, then they beat them down with boots and hoses. They do stuff that at your camp?”
“Yes. That and more.”
***
Two days later the prisoners were served a savory soup again, this one prepared by the Nazi cook. The guards let them eat beyond the allotted time. And there were seconds. Esther scanned the compound for the two secret cooks. She feared they had been sent to the gas chambers.
Then an SS officer blew his whistle. “Two days ago,” he began, “one of our sentry dogs disappeared from the kennel. Yesterday we learned that this valuable asset was butchered by your fellow prisoners and used to make soup. I was struck by the desperation of this act, so I instructed our cook to prepare you another soup. Like your comrades, our cook used the only available meat, two freshly slaughtered carcasses. Two Jew dogs for one German dog. Now, you will finish the soup, or you will be shot.” No more dogs died.
***
In boot camp, Sam dreamed of walking into Mrs. Zoubek’s house and finding her cowering at the kitchen door. “She’ll piss her pants when she sees me,” he’d thought. But she hadn’t. Neither had his mother, even when he’d cut her. Sam finished the beer. He hadn’t eaten much in the last two days. He felt light-headed. Things weren’t going well.
He watched Mrs. Zoubek put the last of the groceries away. Her house had always been a safe house, if only for a few hours. She’d taught him to play cribbage. She’d paid him to mow the lawn. She had a kind word, when his mother did not.
“Why did you turn me in?” He asked Mrs. Zoubek. “What did I ever do to you?”
“I saw what you did to that girl. I saw her face. Many things I have been powerless to stop. But that I could stop.”
“She called you names. That’s why I did those things to her.”
“I couldn’t let you. You reminded me of them.”
“Them?”
“The Nazis.” She stared at him. “They did things to children, too.”
Sam smiled. “You knew Nazis? Real ones?”
“Yes.”
“In a concentration camp?”
“A death camp.”
“Cool.” Sam didn’t believe it. Could she be that old? He walked to the refrigerator for another beer. He handed one to Mrs. Zoubek. “What did they do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did they do to the children?”
“It is of no importance.”
“Oh, I think it is.”
“I can’t say.”
“You just said I was like them. I’d like to know what they did,” he snarled.
She hesitated. “The guards put rats in the boy’s trousers and beat them if they moved.” Sam smiled as he imagined that. “One doctor believed everyone should have blue eyes He took children and put poisons and dyes their eyes to change their color.” Esther opened the beer Sam had given her. She needed to numb herself.
“That’s it? Rats in the pants? Dyes in the eyes? Shit. My camp could beat that.”
“There was more.”
“Tell me.”
“After his experiments, the doctor would pin the eyeballs on his office wall. Newborns were used for target practice while their mothers watched. Crying children were thrown into boiling vats of human fat used to make soap.”
“That’s more like it.” He grabbed his beer. “Drink up.” Mrs. Zoubek and Sam drank in silence while Sam processed this information. Sam had always felt safe in her kitchen. He looked at the familiar pot holders and her collection of cookie jars, the fading photos of her late husband, Deiter. “Why didn’t you die?”
“We escaped from Sobibor.”
“Who?”
“All of us. Many died in the attempt, but alive or dead, we escaped.”
“But… how?”
“There were two men, Pechorsky, a Russian soldier, and Feldhendler, one of us. Feldhendler planned to lure the officers into traps. Pechorsky and his men would then kill them. At roll call we would rise up, all 600 of us, overpower the guards and walk out the gate.”
“A small group is better.”
“The escape of a few would mean more pain for those left behind.”
“Hey, if you don’t fight back you deserve what you get.” Esther looked for any sign of sympathy in Sam’s eyes. “Did the plan work?”
The kitchen faded in her mind as Mrs. Zoubek replayed that day’s events. “We failed to complete the killings before roll call. When our fellow prisoners saw the remaining officers, the cowards panicked. They bolted.”
“But you weren’t a coward, were you Mrs. Zoubek?”
“I was not a coward.” She clutched the beer bottle and stared straight ahead. “I led the charge over the barbed wire. I flung myself on it. People used my body as their path to freedom.”
“That was pretty stupid.”
“It needed to be done.” She drank deeply. “A young man, a jeweler by trade, strangled a Hungarian guard and used his gun to hold back the Nazis. When he ran out of bullets, he pulled me from the barbed wire, and we escaped through the minefield. We followed the trail of bodies left by the detonated mines until we were safely in the woods.”
Sam motioned to her husband’s photo on the wall. “So, Deiter was the young jeweler?”
“No. I met Deiter later. In America.”
“What happened to the jeweler?”
“He stayed behind.”
***
A farmer hid Esther and the young man. For five days he fed and sheltered them. At night Esther and the jeweler slept together in the barn. They became intimate on the second night. The fifth night Esther looked up from their lovemaking and saw the farmer watching through the barn’s window. The next day as the young man chopped wood, the farmer came up and shot him in the spine. He turned the body in to the Nazis for a reward.
By day the farmer forced Esther to work in the fields, tied to him by a rope. At night he bound her naked to the barn rafters and satisfied his sexual desires. When the Russian Army neared, the farmer made Esther to dig her own grave. He was surprised by a Russian lieutenant before he could kill her. Esther told the Russian her story. She grabbed his bayonet and demanded an hour alone with the farmer.
When the farmer’s screams were finally silenced, the lieutenant opened the door. Sunlight flooded the bloody barn floor. The farmer was still breathing when they pushed him into the grave Esther had dug.
***
Sam was drowsy. Esther walked to the refrigerator and glanced again at the clock. “Perhaps you have learned from your experience at camp,” she said as she handed him another beer.
Sam shook his head. “My first day the commandant did a health inspection. He shut the door to his office so he wouldn’t ‘embarrass’ me. He checked my arms for tracks, and then made me drop my pants and cough. He just wanted to play with my balls. He rubbed me until I got hard and then he let me go. That night he brought me back to his office. ‘Another inspection?’ I asked. He hit me with his fists, and when I fought back, he grabbed a lead-filled leather sack and beat me until I couldn’t stand any more. Then he bent me over his desk and did me.”
Mrs. Zoubek looked into Sam’s eyes. She recognized the look. She knew the anger he felt. She understood him. “There are evil men everywhere.”
“Well, now there’s one less. For six months I was his Tuesday night ‘date.’ But I cut him pretty good two nights ago when he turned his back on me.”
“But if you…? Why did they release you?”
“They didn’t. You’re not the only one who escaped.”
Any hope Esther had for Sam’s reform faded. “Perhaps, if you turn yourself in . . .?”
He laughed. “I cut his pecker off and shoved it in his mouth.” He’d cut his mother, too, just last night. He’d climbed the oak in his back yard and crawled along the roofline to the light in his mother’s window. She’d come from the shower, wrapped in a towel. He’d watched as she dried herself and began dressing —panties, pantyhose, black lace bra, tight skirt, black sweater. “She’s ready for a date,” he’d thought. He threw open the window and slid in.
His mother screamed and cursed him, but when he pulled out the knife she’d shut up. “Take off your clothes,” he’d told her. She shouted obscenities until he’d slashed the knife across her chest, slicing open the sweater and drawing blood on her left breast. At camp he’d imagined her dancing a seductive tease and then gently removing his clothes. In reality she’d fought him and bled.
When he was finally naked and ready to take her, he lost his erection, and she had laughed. “You always were a limp-dicked little faggot boy,” she hissed. “You don’t know what to do with a woman.” That’s when he cut her again, and then again. He cut her face and her breasts and her belly and her legs and when he could no longer stand her screams, he’d cut her throat. And when his erection returned, he satisfied himself and left.
“So, what will do you?” Esther asked.
“I figured I’d drink another beer. Maybe two. Then I’ll tie and gag you in a chair so when Helen comes, you’ll have a front row seat. And if the beer holds out, and Helen is very nice to me, then maybe I’ll only hurt you a little.”
“Helen isn’t coming. She’s out of town.”
Sam slammed the beer bottle down on the table. The bottle shattered, spilling beer on them. “Everyone lies to me.” He pushed the chair over, picked up the neck of the bottle, and flashed the jagged glass in front of her.
She stared at him and did not flinch. She showed no fear. “Young man, I have been beaten with clubs, whipped, burned with cigarettes. Guards shoved foreign objects into my body. They pointed guns at my head as their fingers reached for the triggers. I saw my sisters killed before my eyes and been forced to strip the clothing off my dead mother. I have been raped by my enemies and by men I thought were my benefactors.” Sam trembled as she spoke. “All you can do to me, that has not already been done, is to kill me. And that would be a blessing.”
“Well, maybe after I fuck Helen, I’ll just do that.” Esther betrayed no emotion. Sam looked at the broken glass and smelled the stink of beer. “Now clean this up. I want the kitchen spotless when Helen comes in the door. We don’t want to worry her.”
“Helen isn’t coming.”
He tossed the bottle neck on the counter. “Oh, I think she will.” That’s when Esther noticed the light blinking on her answering machine. Sam leaned over and pushed the play button. “Grandma, I have some disturbing news. I’ll be over right after work.” Esther looked at the clock. She did not have much time.
She slumped her shoulders. “That changes things,” she said. “I will clean the kitchen.”
He picked up the chair and righted it. “Screw the kitchen. Get me another beer.”
She went to the refrigerator and got another beer. She opened the bottle and set it in front of him. She stared at his face, but could see no trace of the polite young man she’d befriended five years ago. In her bedroom the phone rang. That would be Helen calling on her cell phone to say she was on her way. “What are you staring at?” Sam asked.
The answering machine clicked in. “Grandma, please pick up. I’m leaving the plant now.”
Mrs. Zoubek went to the closet and got a broom. She walked over to the counter and began sweeping up the glass. On the counter was the broken bottle. Sam lifted his beer, imagining Helen naked under him. Esther leaned the broom against the counter and picked up the broken bottleneck. The broom slid along the counter and fell to the floor. Sam turned to the noise and began to rise. Esther plunged the jagged edge of the bottle into his left eye and twisted. She retracted it and sliced his hand as he moved to protect this face. Then she plunged the glass into his right eye and stepped back before he could grab her. She was not quick, but he was now blind and in agony. She thought of the children’s eyeballs pinned to the doctor’s bulletin board, but shook the image from her mind. She grabbed a pan from above the stove. Holding it with both hands, she struck him. She prayed for the strength of her youth. The strength had allowed her to hold the Hungarian guard under the truck as the other women released the jack. She struck Sam again and then a third time until he sunk to the floor, motionless. Convinced he would not escape, she walked to her bedroom breathing heavily and paused before she called 911. How would she explain this to them? How could she explain it to herself?
Author Bio
Paul Lewellan taught high school speech and debate for 33 years in Bettendorf, Iowa. For the last six years he’s been an Adjunct Professor of Speech Communication and Business Administration at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He is working on his third novel, Twenty-seven Unreasonable Demands, about a retired government assassin who tries to complete his college degree without killing anyone. Paul’s publications include short stories in South Dakota Review, Rose & Thorn, Big Muddy, Word Riot, Iconoclast, Timber Creek Review and Porcupine Magazine.
