The InvisibleBridge

Sometime later he woke in the boxcar. József Hász was bending over him, urging him to sit up. “Give it a try,” József said, and lifted him from beneath the shoulders.

Andras sat up. Black ocean waves seemed to close over his head. Then, like a miracle, they receded. Here was the familiar interior of the boxcar. Here was József kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.

“You’re going to have to stand now,” József said.

“Why?”

“Someone’s coming to gather men for a work detail. Anyone who can’t work will be shot.”

He knew he wouldn’t be selected for a work detail. He could scarcely raise his head. And then he remembered again: “Tibor?”

József shook his head. “Just me.”

“Where’s my brother, József? Where’s my brother?”

“They’ve been desperate for workers,” József said. “If a man can stand, they take him.”

“Who?”

“The Germans.”

“They took Tibor?”

“I don’t know, Andráska,” József said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him for days.”

Outside the boxcar, a German voice called men to attention.

“We’re going to have to walk now,” József said.

Tears came to Andras’s eyes: To die now, after everything. But József took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. József swayed and yelped in pain; his shattered leg, freed from its cast, could only have been half knit. But he caught Andras around the back and led him toward the door of the boxcar. Slid it aside. Took Andras down a ramp and out onto the cold bare dirt of the rail yard. Thin blades of pain shot up from Andras’s feet and through his legs. In his side, along the surgical wound, a dull orange burning.

A Nazi officer stood before a row of labor servicemen, inspecting their soiled, ribbon-torn overcoats and trousers, their rag-bound feet. Andras’s and József’s feet were bare.

The officer cleared his throat. “All those who want to work, step forward.”

All the men stepped forward. József pulled Andras, whose legs buckled. Andras fell forward onto his hands and knees on the bare ground. The officer came toward him and knelt; he put a hand to the back of Andras’s neck, and reached into his own overcoat pocket. Andras imagined the barrel of a pistol, a noise, an explosion of light. To his shame, he felt his bladder release.

The officer had drawn out a handkerchief. He mopped Andras’s brow and helped him to his feet.

“I want to work,” Andras said. He had managed the words in German: Ich möchte arbeiten.

“How can you work?” the officer said. “You can’t even walk.”

Andras looked into the man’s face. He appeared almost as hungry, almost as ragged, as the work servicemen themselves; his age was impossible to determine. His cheeks, slack and windburned, showed a growth of colorless stubble. A small oval scar marked his jawline. He rubbed the scar with his thumb as he looked at Andras contemplatively.

“A wagon will be here in a few minutes,” he said at last. “You’ll come with us.”

“Where are we going?” Andras dared to ask. Wohin gehen wir?

“To Austria. To a work camp. There’s a doctor there who can help you.”

Everything seemed to have a terrible second meaning. Austria. A work camp. A doctor who could help him. Andras put a hand on József’s arm to steady himself, pulled himself to his bare feet, and made himself look into the Nazi’s eyes. The Nazi held his gaze, then turned sharply and marched off through the rows of boxcars. Exhausted, Andras leaned against József until the wagon arrived. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and József into the wagon bed, then put the boots into Andras’s lap.

“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.

A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn’t been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and József-he’d assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they’d only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvár, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and József, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer’s wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day’s work, József touched Andras’s shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.

“See that?” József said. “I don’t think we’re going to work today.”

Andras raised his eyes. “Why not?”

“Look.” He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spi

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, “Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I’m going to sit here and wait.”

The a

At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp. The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and their captain made an a