Most of those surrounding him were either much older or much younger than he was: the wagon was full of children, their parents and the elderly. Slovak Jews his own age had been deported in the initial wave, when Walter had made his first attempt at escape. The presence of children changed things. All it had taken at the station was for the guards to hit one of the adults ; after that, stillness reigned. The sight of that single blow had so distressed the children that from then on, instinctively and collectively, the adults had understood that they needed to restrain themselves, obey whatever instructions they were given and maintain the illusion of calm. They needed to reassure the children that what had happened was an aberration, that it would not happen again.
At first, those jammed in the wagon tried to adjust to their new situation. There was co-operation, even camaraderie. The deportees shared what food they had, Walter passing around the salami that had been a parting gift from his overnight cellmate. There was even an attempt at a wedding toast for a newly married couple who, like many young sweethearts, had married in a hurry, prompted by Father Tiso’s pledge that no families would be separated by deportation. And, as the train jerked along for hour after hour, the human cargo tried to observe human decencies. An unspoken convention demanded that they look away from, and give a pretence of privacy to, whoever took their turn at the single bucket.
This, Walter realised, was the fate he had tried so hard to escape. He had crossed borders, waded through water and hiked through forests to avoid being packed like a calf in a crate. And yet here he was.
In those first hours, there was conversation, mostly about the new lives that awaited them. Where exactly were they going? What would this new place be like? Children asked their parents if there would be schools and playgrounds. Others guessed that their destination would prove to be a glorified labour camp or else a ghetto. Life would be hard but it would be endurable. Besides, this resettlement would surely prove to be temporary, a strange and unwanted consequence of a war that would not last much longer.
A key exhibit in these deliberations, conducted by people who were standing for hours on end, barely able to turn to those who might be speaking on their left or right, were the letters home sent by those who had been deported first. Several in the wagon had heard from a son or daughter, cousin or niece, who had been deported early and had written to say all was well. These letters were consistently positive, praising the food the deportees had to eat and the housing they had been allocated, assuring those who had been left back in Slovakia that resettlement was not so bad after all.
And yet there was a recurring motif to these letters, besides the comforting note of good cheer. Not all of them, by any means, but several included an oddity, a detail that did not fit. One woman described a note from a cousin that signed off with a chirpy insistence that the cousin’s mother sent her love. And yet the mother in question had died three years earlier . Another woman said she had been similarly puzzled by a reference to an old neighbour apparently thriving in his new home, even though both letter writer and recipient knew the old man had been in the ground for years.
Walter listened, but had little to add. He had received no letters, let alone any with unexplained errors. Besides, he was preoccupied, staring out of the opening that passed for a window, watching the landscape as it went by. He was trying to memorise the route, so that he would be able to work his way back. He was thinking, as always, of escape. The thought did not leave him even when, in the late afternoon of that first day, towards 5 p.m., the train pulled into Zwardoń on the frontier that separated Slovakia from Poland, the wagons were emptied and the Jews were forced to line up and be counted. The Hlinka Guards now gave way to the Nazi SS, the Germans taking charge of the train, replacing the driver with one of their own. Even then, Walter was trying to plot a way out.
Except the route after that point made no sense that Walter could divine. The train was going so slowly, then making long stops when it seemed to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. The wagon remained shut so they had no way of looking around. Were they in Kraków? Or was this Katowice? Perhaps it was neither; perhaps they had reached Cz? stochowa. It was so hard to tell. The train seemed to be taking a roundabout route, long and winding, perhaps even doubling back on itself. Walter looked for the logic in it, but could find none.
Time seemed to stretch. Unbelievably, his wristwatch said he had been rammed into that wagon for twenty-four hours. Plenty of the deportees, Walter included, had come with food, which they had eaten, but few had thought to bring enough water. So now, after one full day in the cattle truck, the children complained of a terrible thirst. Their lips were parched, they were becoming light-headed. Before too long, the need had become desperate. They craved water. A mere glimpse of a river, or of a billboard promoting beer, through the slats of the cattle truck became a torment.
The camaraderie of the first hours, of the wedding toast and the shared food, was long gone. There were fights, including over access to the bucket in the corner that was now spilling over. The thirst drove people to distraction, stripping them of the layers of courtesy or charm they had worn when they had left Nováky. With the water supply dried up, the recriminations and accusations grew.
And still Walter could see no logic to this journey. They were heading east, then he would glimpse the sign of a station they had already passed and realise they were now heading west. Sometimes the train would be shunted into a siding, to make way, Walter presumed, for a military transport deemed a higher priority. The delay in that siding might last twenty minutes or it could last sixteen hours, you never knew how long until it was over. But, every time, water was out of reach. Or, if it were within reach, there was no system for fetching it, no person who was allowed to get off and collect it: the cattle truck would remain shut.
One of those times, Walter could see through the slats of the wagon that their train had pulled up alongside a locomotive which was, at that moment, having its water tanks refilled. He could see the hose, gushing with water, gallons of it, some of it going into the train engine, the rest splashing on to the tracks. The sight of it was too tantalising. Walter stuck an arm through the gap, held out his mug and asked the locomotive driver for some.
The man ignored him, so Walter asked again. The engine driver did not even make eye contact as he replied, ‘I’m not going to get myself shot for you bastards .’
They had been on the train for twenty-four or forty-eight hours by then, maybe longer, and yet it was that moment that perhaps shook Walter most. The Jews in the wagon were not only being degraded in front of each other, they were being rejected by the outside world. That driver could see and hear sick children begging to drink and he could not even look in their direction. Bastards, he had called them, while he stared into the middle distance.
Walter cursed him as a selfish, heartless swine. Only later did he understand that the SS had issued an edict that anyone caught helping deportees would be shot on sight. Only later did he appreciate that, before their train had crawled its way across the Polish countryside, another would have come and another; perhaps a man had given water to the people on those transports, only to pay with his life or with the life of his wife and children, as the Nazi SS mowed them down with machine-gun fire. Maybe the engine driver had witnessed the meting out of such instant punishment and had learned that, if he wanted to stay alive, it would be best not to see the human hands poking out of the cattle trucks holding out empty cups, best not to hear the cries of children gasping for water.