Germany,
2010

The rattle of the train broke Nash Turing’s reverie as the knife in his hands fell with a sharp clang. Seated at the rear end of the coach, he picked it up and smiled wryly.

Even the train wasn’t peaceful enough to die!

Sighing loudly, he toyed with the knife. A journalist by profession, thirty-year-old Nash Turing had come to the conclusion that all of life was a worthless struggle- a struggle for making ends meet with his intermittently paying job; a struggle to find love, which remained unrequited for the woman he had loved had deceived him for no reason. And so, he had decided to stop struggling once and for all, to die peacefully in the rear end of a train coach- unknown, uncared.

The train came to a screeching halt at the Imeilin station. He stared out abstractly from the window at the people on the platform. However, his eyes were soon caught up with an old woman- the very old, dilapidating woman he had been seeing for the past three weeks. Every day, she’d be there at the same time, strangely, wearing the same moth-eaten, tattered clothes and every day, she’d be shooed away by the people who grimaced and mocked her. And still, with the same patience, she’d nod her head and walk to the rear of the platform. What she did beyond this, Nash had never known for the train used to depart at the very time.

One day, while travelling back home in the train, lost in the similar seas of grief and nihilism, he saw the woman again. However, this time, a group of high school boys were heckling her ruthlessly. Nash noticed the fear, the trepidation in her eyes as she took her steps back while the boys kept approaching her. At once, he deboarded the train and rushed to her platform.

“What say, eh? The train from where?” The boys asked, laughing maniacally.

“Auschwitz,” the old woman replied timidly. “Do you know when it’ll come?”

The boys erupted in a fit of laughter as Nash dashed down the stairs.

“What do you care for the train, eh? Who are you, you wacker? How about you offering us some of your services…”

“She’s my mother,” Nash announced to the boys who immediately stopped laughing. “Leave right now or I call the police.”

The boys scurried away.

“I am sorry. Those boys wanted to—”

“Do you know?” the woman interrupted. “Do you know when it’ll come?” Nash raised his brow.

“The train from Auschwitz. Do you know when it’ll come?”

“What?” Nash asked incredulously.

Was this woman deranged?

“Do you know?” The woman approached him, her eyes glittering with hope.

Nash swallowed and shook his head. The woman’s face became sullen with grief, as if her ship of hope had lost sight of the lighthouse again.

Very slowly, she turned around and walked back to near the station master’s office. Nash followed her stealthily; he was suddenly very intrigued to know the reason behind her strange question. He had not known much about the Holocaust, the Nazis and the Auschwitz camps, but this strange request of a woman, who looked a good eighty years old, some half a century after the loss of relevance of the entire affair, was definitely worth an instinctive follow up.

He saw her get into a small room and waited till she came out again and when she did, he sneaked into the room.

Never had he imagined to behold what he did. The entire room, all of its walls were covered with marks- tally marks, all carved from stone. He walked towards the wall and felt them. Several of them looked worn out and eroded.

“We used to do that at the camp. That’s how we kept track of time,” the old woman said, startling him.

“Who are you? And what is all this?”

“My name is Ruth Abelson. Those are marks- 20,068 marks. It’s almost going to be fifty-five years—”

“55 years?!” Nash uttered. This was beyond deranged. “What for?”

“My husband,” she said and suddenly tumbled on the floor as her frail legs gave away. “I have been waiting for my husband- Aaron. Do you know where he is?”

Nash shook his head and helped the woman, propping her near the sitting place in the small room.

“My husband said to me he’d come to meet me on this very platform when the train was leaving, carrying people like me away from Hell. They wouldn’t let him in, but he’s promised me. He’s said this is where he’d come to meet me, that we’d grow old together. But he’s not here. It’s only me who’s grown so old. And when I ask these people when the train from Auschwitz would arrive, they call me a lunatic.”

Nash heard in silence, deeply engrossed.

“My husband,” the woman said, getting up slowly to retrieve a picture of him from the drawers. “He is a janitor. He saved me in every possible way from their atrocities. I was picked up from my bakery shop because I refused to rub my nose before them and offer myself to them. They sabotaged my shop, took away everything and threw me in Hell,” she said frailly; a shiver ran down her spine. “But in that Hell, I met Aaron. He is the most genial, astounding and benevolent person I’ve ever known. When I couldn’t sleep in those small and stuffy wooden bunkers, he’d give me his hand to sleep on. When they scourged the bodies of the old Jews and didn’t give them food for failing to lift the kilos of stones on their senile shoulders, he’d give up his food and get flogged himself. And then, I remember this tattoo.”

She pulled up the sleeves of her tattered clothes, revealing faded numbers. Though they looked worn out, it suggested of some deep hostility. Strangely, it didn’t look like a tattoo at all. Instead, it looked as if those numbers had simply assimilated into her wrinkled skin and become a part of herself, so organic it looked.

“2837- that was my identity in the bunkers,” she uttered, almost whispering to herself. “You know the worst thing about Hell? They don’t just strip you off your clothes when they need you, they strip you off your very identity. Your identity just remains constrained in a few numbers. When they inked me forcefully, he got himself inked too. He loves me a lot,” she said, smiling solemnly and looked at Nash, whose eyes were unconsciously transfixed on her clothes. “Oh! And these clothes, I wear them so that he doesn’t have troubles in identifying me. I just hope I get to see him before life gets the better of me.But who’ll mark these walls lest he should come after I die?”

That day, when he reached home, he researched a bit about the Nazi camps and was shocked to learn the ignorance he’d been living in inspite of being a German himself. He reflected on the multiple times he had turned down the entire thing as a brief period in history which was not worthy of any reflection at all and that it was completely okay to be unaware about it.

He continued seeing her from the train every day while he scoured through the reports of Auschwitz atrocities. Albeit he already knew what would’ve happened to Aaron Abelson, he still wanted to know how he had met his fate- for his wife who still referred to him in the present tense. But there was no record of him whatsoever.

Until one day, he stopped seeing her altogether; there was no sign of her at all. He stepped out onto the platform and dashed into the room of ‘marks’, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you looking for the woman who lived here?” the station master asked. Nash turned around and nodded.

“The woman passed away last night; she was very weak and ill. But she didn’t look at peace. It looked like something troubled her deeply- a very tormented countenance she possessed in her last moments. A few men buried her in the cemetery in the vicinity.”

Nash couldn’t believe his ears. Never in his life had he felt so empty and helpless. The woman was supposed to be nothing to him. Wasn’t she just a stranger? Just like the hundreds of people, we come across and forget the very next instant? But still, on some deep intellectual and emotional level, he had become capable of seeing through her pain and wilderness.

He rushed to the cemetery and placed a bouquet of flowers on her grave. He reflected on the station master’s words and immediately understood the ‘tormention’ in her last moments.

Walking back to the small room, he stood before the wall, holding the stone in his hands. Sighing sadly, he added a tally mark to the wall. “20,074,” he muttered, sobbing silently.

And every day henceforth, he stepped out of the train and visited the room to add the mark for the woman who’d taught him a very important thing.

That in a world morally corrupted by adultery, infidelity and all social evils, true love still exists. It might not come with all the fanfare, but it is extraordinarily pure. In a world where we so easily complain about the small problems in our life and succumb to them, the extraordinary tale of love, patience and devotion of Ruth Abelson remains sadly, unknown.