“Grab a bucket each and start loading. When it’s full, take it over to one of the carts and dump it in,” he says, indicating the carts sitting on the train rails. Others are already at work, and again it seems a matter of following their lead.
The women pick up a bucket each and start filling them with pieces of coal.
“You better go faster or you’ll find yourselves in trouble,” a woman says. “Watch me.”
The woman takes her empty bucket and uses it as a scoop, half filling it. Steadying it on the ground, she uses her cupped hands to fill it to the top. The women attempt to copy her with varying degrees of success. They all fill their buckets before attempting to pick them up. None of them can; they are too heavy.
“Empty some out and just put in as much as you can carry. You’ll toughen up the longer you do it,” they are advised.
Cilka and Josie can only manage half-filled buckets, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the guard standing at the cart. It was one thing to carry them, another trial to lift and empty them.
The guard monitoring them looks at the half-empty buckets.
“You lot don’t get a break. You have to make up for being such weak bitches, and get moving.”
At various points, Cilka sees Antonina writing in a little book, conferring with the guards, answering for her brigade’s productivity.
* * *
The work is so grueling that Cilka, Josie and Natalya are beginning to groan and huff out loud. They watch enviously when the others get ten minutes to down tools and take a break. There is a burning sensation across Cilka’s shoulders, neck and back. When the next clanging bell sounds several hours later, buckets, picks and other tools are dropped where they are. Men and women trudge over to the train tracks, sorting themselves out as they find the others from their brigade—those they share a hut with and those from the surrounding huts. They stand, waiting to be led by their brigadiers, waiting for the signal to walk.
Once they are allowed, they silently trudge back down the track, stopping again outside the compound gates. Antonina Karpovna hands her piece of paper to the administrative guard, who counts the women in. They follow Antonina back to their hut, shuffling and sore, where a few embers glow without giving off any heat. Natalya throws some coal into the stove to reignite it. Cilka is amazed she can find the strength to even look at the coal, let alone lift a scuttle of it. They all fall onto their beds, pulling blankets up over their heads. No one speaks.
What passes for their dinner does nothing to restore their energy. Returning to their hut, many retreat back to bed, but some hover around the stove.
“What are you looking at?”
Cilka, lying on her bed, recognizes the voice. Elena.
“Not your ugly face,” she hears Natalya reply.
Cilka pushes up on one elbow to see where the exchange of words will go.
“I’ll take you out, bitch, if you don’t keep out of my face.”
“Leave me alone, you bully. Leave all of us alone,” a defiant Natalya snaps back, standing up from her bed.
“Natalya, sit down. She’s not worth it,” Olga says.
Elena gives out a hiss.
Exhaustion has flattened Cilka. She understands the anger, the lashing out. When the rage can’t be targeted at your captors, for fear of death, it finds other ways out. She wonders how old Elena is, what has happened to her. Maybe it is that nothing has happened to her before. Like Cilka, before that horrible place. She’d had all the love, food, clothing, comfort she could possibly need. When it is all taken away overnight … Well, no one knows how they will react.
She must stop herself from thinking back. Tomorrow … Tomorrow will be a repeat of today, and the next day, and the next week, and for Cilka the next fifteen years.
Despair overwhelms her.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943
Wrapped in a warm, full-length coat, Cilka stands in the snow outside Block 25. As she had feared, her block contains women who are spending their last days on earth, often too sick to move, the life already gone from their eyes. This is Cilka’s world now, and she exists within it in order to stay alive. Similarly dressed kapos approach her with women and girls trailing behind—emaciated, wraith-like figures, many holding each other up. Each kapo tells the women they have escorted that Cilka is their block leader, they are to do as she says. They are instructed to wait outside in the cold for the SS officer who will do the roll call.
Cilka feels as inanimate as the snow. Her eyes blur over the bony, bowed bodies, but her feelings have been taken away. It started when Schwarzhuber placed her in that tiny room at the front of Block 25 and began his regular visits. She found she could become just a series of limbs, just bone, muscle and skin. She didn’t choose it. It just happened. She thinks it might be a bit like when she was a child and badly scraped her knee—though she saw the blood it took a long time to register the hurt.
Cilka stands there, saying nothing as she waits to be told that all the women coming into Block 25 that evening are present. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day if the Nazis decide they have something better to do, they will all be taken to the gas chamber that looks like a little white house. And they will be killed.
A senior SS officer approaches, along with the last group of ten women. His swagger stick strikes out, randomly hitting unsuspecting women. Something breaks through Cilka’s glazed state and she hurries over to meet them.
“Hurry up, you lazy good-for-nothing bitches!” she calls out. “I’ve got them,” she says to the SS officer, stepping in front of him as he is about to bring his stick down on the head of a nearby girl. Cilka gives her a hard shove, sending her sprawling face-first into the snow.
“Get up and join the others,” she screams at the girl.
The SS officer watches, nods to Cilka and walks away. He doesn’t see Cilka bend down and hoist her arm under the girl’s armpit, helping her to her feet.
“Quickly, join the others,” she says more gently.
Cilka sees the SS officer turn back, and screams out at the women.
“Get inside now! I’m staying out here freezing because you’re too slow and lazy to move. Go, go!” she calls.
Turning to the SS officer, she gives him a big smile.
She follows the women inside, shutting the door behind her.
The women have found places to sit or lie down, though there is barely room. Sometimes they spill over into the courtyard, stacked like animals. Gaunt faces stare at Cilka—looks of terror and helplessness. She longs to explain that if she screams at them the SS won’t come in.
The words won’t come.
She is sixteen. Possibly the youngest person in the room at that moment. And she will live longer than them all.
She sees one woman with sick crusted across her cheek. Whatever feeling she let in a moment ago closes back over. She is as flat and blank as the snow, as the walls. As the women’s noises rise—the wailing and crying and the beating of palms on walls, the praying and calling the names of the loved and lost, Cilka turns and goes to the front of the block, into her room, and lies down.
* * *
The days have been long and achingly difficult. Cilka is having to draw on reserves of physical strength she never knew she had. Cilka and Josie have been trialing different methods for how they parcel out their bread ration across the day for best energy efficiency. At night the women often talk about food. When they broach topics of family, home, they stay close to this—of meals shared. Sauerkraut and mushrooms, cottage cheese, sausages, pierogi, fresh fruit. Cilka has to reach back years into her memory to join in, and she has to fight a feeling of envy that comes from knowing these memories are much closer for the women around her.
It doesn’t seem that any of them are ready to go into great detail about their arrests, about recent events, about where their families are now. Or perhaps they haven’t worked out whether they can really trust one another. Though they do wonder aloud about the missing. Margarethe, in particular, a yo
ung Russian woman with a round face and dimples who Cilka instinctively likes, cannot stop worrying about her husband. Josie thinks of her brothers; and Olga, though she knows where her children are, worries she will not hear from them, will not know whether they are all right. Cilka thinks about everyone she has lost, but she cannot even begin to express it.
One night, Olga says to Cilka, “Klein … that’s quite common as a Jewish surname, isn’t it?”
Cilka nods. “I suppose it is.” She stands. “I’ll go and get the coal.”
As the women return from work one week into their stay, Elena announces that Natalya is to empty the shit buckets tomorrow, for the second day in a row. The first heavy snow has begun, and as Elena says this, she snuggles down tighter into her coat.
“I’ll do it,” Josie says. “It’s been a while since my turn.”
“I’m in charge here,” Elena says, standing. “I’ll say who does what.”
“No, you’re not,” Josie fights back. “No one put you in charge. We’ll share the work.”
Cilka is surprised when Elena doesn’t continue the exchange. She simply narrows her eyes and sits back down, huddled in the coat.
The women stand around the stove, letting the heat ease their aching muscles, waiting for the clanging on metal to indicate that it’s time to go to the mess for dinner.
From behind, Josie is violently shoved in the back.
She reacts by raising her hand, reaching for something to brace herself against, and it lands on the stove flue. Her scream echoes off the walls.
Josie holds her arm out, like it’s something she wants to shake off. A thousand thoughts run through Cilka’s head, images of sick and injured women and what happens to them. No, not Josie. Cilka grabs her, propelling her out of the building, burying her burned hand in the snow that now covers patches of the ground outside. Josie hisses through her teeth and starts crying audibly.
“Shush now,” Cilka says, a little harsher than intended.
After a few minutes, she pulls the hand from the snow and examines the damage. The palm and all four fingers on Josie’s right hand are an angry red, her thumb the only untouched part.
Cilka pushes the hand back into the snow and turns Josie’s face toward her. It is starkly pale, as white as the ground.
“Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
Cilka storms back inside, pausing, staring at the women gathered around the stove.
A plaintive, “How is she?” goes unanswered.
“Who did this? Who pushed her?” Cilka had only seen the quick movement of Josie ejected from the huddle, falling. She has her suspicions though.
Most of the women look away, but Cilka notices Natalya glance toward the culprit.
Cilka walks up to Elena sitting snug on her bed.
Elena snarls at Cilka, “I could break you in two.”
Cilka understands the difference between an empty threat—a display of power borne of helplessness—and a true intention to harm others.
“Plenty of people scarier than you have tried to break me,” Cilka says.
“And I’ve fought men ten times your size,” Elena says.
The women around them move away, giving them space, certain a fight is about to start.
“Get up,” Cilka demands.
Elena continues staring defiantly. A fire is flaring inside Cilka.
“I will ask you one more time. Get up.”
The two women face off for several moments before Elena slowly stands up, pouting her lip a little, like a child.
“Elena, I am going to take your blanket off, hope the sheet underneath is not riddled with lice, and tear the end off. You will not try to stop me. Do you understand?”
Elena huffs, but nods slowly. The other women have closed the space again, standing behind Cilka now that the dynamic has revealed itself to be in her favor.
With one eye on Elena, Cilka pulls the blanket free. She takes the bottom of the sheet and brings it to her mouth and tears at it with her teeth until she has made a small rip. Using her hands, she pulls a strip free.
“Thank you, Elena. You can remake your bed.”
Cilka turns to the doorway.
Antonina Karpovna is standing there, her arm against the door frame barring Cilka from leaving.
“Am I going to have trouble with you?” she asks.
“Nyet.” Cilka answers in Russian.
Antonina removes her arm. Cilka walks back outside, where Josie sits in the snow as the sun goes down, her body rocking from the cold and pain. Cilka wipes the snow from her injured hand before wrapping it in the torn sheet. Helping Josie to her feet, her arm around her, she steers her back inside. It feels strange to be so close to someone. The last person she had voluntarily touched like this had been Gita. Those gathered around the stove move aside to let them get as close as they can to the warmth.
The dinner alarm sounds. Josie refuses to leave her bed. Cilka feels a beat of frustration, anger, at her helplessness. She almost leaves her there. Then she thinks of how much worse it will be if Josie doesn’t eat, loses strength.
“Josie, come on,” she says, and helps her up.
In the mess, Cilka hands Josie her mug of soup. She takes it in her left hand. When a chunk of stale bread is thrust at her, Josie can’t accept it. It falls onto the floor.
A mess guard watches, waiting to see what Cilka, next in line, will do. If she helps, she can probably expect to be punished. If she doesn’t, Josie’s strength will suffer. Josie bends down, holding tight to her mug, looking pleadingly to Cilka to help. With their eyes connected, Cilka places her own piece of bread between her teeth, holding it there—a silent instruction. Josie carefully puts her mug on the floor, picks up the piece of bread, and grips it between her teeth, before picking up her mug and moving on.
Once they find a place to stand, away from the guard’s stare, Cilka takes the piece of bread from Josie’s mouth and helps her tuck it up the sleeve of her coat.
* * *
Back in the hut, the subdued women all ask Josie how her hand is. She bravely tells them it will be all right. Cilka is glad that eating has made her more hopeful.
Sitting on her bed, Cilka watches as the snow turns liquid on the outside of the window, tears running down the glass. She asks Josie to show her her burned hand. Carefully she unwinds the makeshift bandage, the last layer sticking to the blistered skin. Josie shoves her other hand in her mouth to keep from crying out in pain.
“It looks better,” she says, trying to comfort Josie with the words she doesn’t believe herself. She knows how important it is to not give up.
Natalya comes over and sits down beside Cilka, looking at the wound.
“I’ll ask Antonina tomorrow if there is a hospital or sick bay here. If there is, they will be able to help you and put a proper dressing on it.”
Cilka knows anyone wanting to get out of work won’t be looked kindly upon. But if Josie’s hand doesn’t heal, things will be much worse. She nods.
“Thanks, Natalya,” says Cilka.
They all settle in their beds. The night envelops them, but dawn still arrives early and Cilka wakes with a jolt, heart racing, before the silence and stillness puts her back to sleep.
* * *
Antonina arrives in the morning, looking tired. She wordlessly indicates for them to get moving. Natalya goes to say something about Josie but catches Cilka’s shake of the head. As they walk, Cilka whispers, “Let her have breakfast first, otherwise she might miss out.” She’s also very aware of Antonina’s mood. She has learned to read the faces of captors, guards, those with power over the rest.
When all names have been checked off at roll call Natalya looks over to Cilka. Cilka and Josie have had their gruel, and both have bread tucked up into their sleeves. Antonina’s face has a little more color, too. Cilka nods to Natalya.
“Excuse me, Antonina Karpovna,” says Natalya. Cilka hears the formal use of first name and patronymic.
The brigadier gives
Natalya her full attention.
“As you may know from your visit in the evening, Josie has acquired an injury on her right hand. Is there a sick bay she can go to?”
“How did it happen?” asks Antonina.
Natalya looks reluctant to reveal who is at fault. Despite the nastiness of the act, they don’t want to get anybody thrown in the hole—the punishment cell. Starvation, disease, madness could result. Despite Cilka’s fury at Elena—particularly at her cowardice; a push in the back—she thinks she deserves another chance.
It seems Josie does too.
“I tripped near the stove,” Josie says, “and put my hand out to break my fall.”
Antonina beckons Josie over to her, chin raised.
Josie approaches the brigadier, her bandaged hand outstretched.
“How do I know you’re not just trying to get out of work?”
Josie understands her. She begins unwrapping the bandage. She can’t stop the tears that accompany the pain as she removes the last layer, revealing the raw blistered hand.
Cilka steps forward so she’s beside Josie, not wanting to stand out but wanting her to know she is there, to comfort her. Antonina looks at the two of them, sizing them up.
“There’s not much to either of you zechkas, is there?” She looks at Cilka. “Take her back inside. I’ll be back for you.”
Cilka is startled. Worried. But she does what she’s told. They hurry back inside the building, Cilka casting a backward glance at the others as they shuffle off to work. The snow whips up, enveloping them, and they disappear from sight. What has she done now?
Cilka and Josie huddle by the stove, blankets wrapped around their shivering bodies. Cilka desperately hopes they will acclimatize. It’s not even winter yet. An icy blast smacks them from their contemplation. Antonina stands in the doorway.
Cilka nudges Josie and they walk quickly to the door and follow Antonina out, Cilka making sure the door is securely closed behind her.
She has often seen Antonina with another brigadier—with whom she shared a hut in the cluster of huts that make up their brigade—so she supposes they must share responsibility for the women. Or perhaps the other woman was an assistant to Antonina. Either way, she must be the one keeping track of the brigade in the field while Antonina takes on this duty.
Cilka's Journey Page 5