by Monica Hesse
“Was I in where?” He stops now, facing me, and something in his question is a dare.
I can’t finish my sentence. What was I going to ask him? Were you in Birkenau, one of the men forced to dig graves for the bunkmates who died around him every night? Did I see you working in the men’s side of Gross-Rosen, shit streaming down your legs because typhus had made you lose control of your bowels?
Not everybody wants to talk about what happened to them. In the hospital, the woman we called Bissel would talk only about “being away” from her home. As if she were at university or on an extended trip. She talked about wanting to find a present for her little daughter in hiding. She said her daughter was waiting for her in a little German farmhouse somewhere, under the care of a kind old couple. I never knew if the farmhouse or the daughter actually existed. Bissel said this while there were holes in her legs from the medical experiments the doctors performed on her at Ravensbrück; her mind was as cloudy as spun sugar from the torture she’d been subjected to. I never knew really what I could believe.
Mr. Mueller takes off again, and I start after him. He turns another corner. I’m trying to remember all the turns we’ve taken since leaving the main building. I find my words again, but careful ones. “It’s just, something about you back there seemed very familiar. Maybe it was the way you moved, or something you did—”
“I’m not from Sosnowiec, and I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m not Polish, and I wasn’t anyplace I want to talk about.” He’s lost patience. I am making him uncomfortable. I must sound crazy.
“I apologize, then,” I say. “My mind must have been playing tricks on me. I get confused sometimes. It got confused back there.”
“Anything else?”
“Anything—” At first, I think he means, will I be asking him any more questions. But then I realize we’ve stopped in front of a square white cabin with a simple wooden door to the left and a window to the right.
“This is where Mrs. Yost wanted me to take you.” He pushes the door inward and hands me my suitcase. I see he doesn’t intend to follow me in as he nods his head in goodbye. “Miss Lederman.”
“Wait,” I say, not wanting him to leave yet and not having a good reason to ask him to stay. “My name is Zofia.”
I extend my hand in case he wants to take it for a formal greeting.
“I’m Josef,” he says shortly, and when he turns to leave, my hand is still dangling in the air.
AND THEN I’M ALONE AGAIN. ALONE AND FAR FROM HOME, and left with the weight and reality of my decision. My bad foot aches from running after Josef. It’s a spidery pain, the kind that seems to still live in the toes that are no longer there. No amount of warm poultices or aspirin powder can ever fix pain when it comes from ghosts.
I survey the small cottage. Plain wooden floor. Burlap-curtained window facing the dirt path we walked up on. In the room I’m standing in, there’s a sink but no stove or icebox. Instead, two single beds, each covered in faded, neatly tucked quilts, each with a plain nightstand on which are a few personal items: a photograph, a hairbrush, a stack of blank stationery, and a fountain pen. A writing desk lines the side wall. Along the back, a door leads to a second room—three more beds and nightstands, a writing desk, a table with a basin for water on it. On one of the nightstands is a stack of magazines, old ones with yellowed, curling edges; on another is a stack of books.
The third has nothing. I surmise that it must be the one I’m supposed to use, so I empty my belongings into the nightstand’s drawer and sit on the bed. The wall is a dingy white; above the bed I can make out the vague outline of something that used to hang here.
“It was an iron cross.” A tall, auburn-haired woman comes through the door, sits on the bed that goes with the magazines, and begins to unlace her shoes. They’re heavy work boots, awkward-looking on her delicate calves. Her dress is a bleached, worn pink.
“Oh,” I say. “Did you—”
“They were in all the cottages. The UN tried to remove them for us before we got here, but they missed some of the ones in the back bedrooms. I took that one off the wall myself, and some boys threw a pile of them in a bonfire.”
“Are you Breine or Esther?”
She looks up from her laces. “Breine. Yes, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to be rude. And you’ll also forgive me for not shaking your hand.” She lifts her own hands to show me her palms, calloused and covered in dirt. She was one of the girls I saw outside, planting the garden. Her face is red from sunburn, the skin peeling on her nose.
I point to my own chest. “Zofia. I was assigned to stay in this cottage. Mrs. Yost probably told you I was here.”
“I haven’t seen her since I got back, actually. But I passed Josef on my way in; he said that we had a new roommate and that I was supposed to show you around. So, I’m Breine; Esther sleeps in this other bed, and the front room is two Dutch girls, Miriam and Judith. They’re both nice; Judith speaks German better than Miriam.”
The way she says Josef’s name makes it sound as though they’re friends, or at least that she knows something about him. I want to ask her more, but I don’t want to be nosy or obvious.
“You’re planting a garden?” I ask instead.
She nods, tugging off her boots and wincing as she takes one foot into her hands, kneading the arch and wiggling her toes. “Some of us. Our own little experiment. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, onions. If it all grows. I’ve never done anything like this before, but some of the others have.”
“That will be nice.”
“Better to not have to rely on rationing. We don’t have any fruit, or eggs, or butter, or anything fresh here, really. So we’re planting. Maybe there will be beets by my wedding.”
“You’re engaged? Best wishes.”
Breine’s face turns a satisfied pink; she was hoping I would ask after that. “I’ll show you my ring; I show everyone my ring. They’re all sick of it now.” Turning her attention from her aching feet, she unfastens the top button of her dress where a tiny satchel hangs around her neck, attached to a leather thong. She shakes the contents into her palm: a gold ring, wound with string several times the way one would to make a larger piece of jewelry fit on a smaller finger.
“It was Chaim’s mother’s,” she explains. “He managed to save it.”
She hands it to me, and I can see I’m meant to admire it. “It’s beautiful,” I say, turning it over in my hand. “I hope you have a beautiful wedding.”
“You’ll be there—the whole camp will come to the ceremony.”
“It will be here?”
“Next month, I think. We were going to have it immediately, but last Thursday I heard from an uncle I didn’t know had survived. He’s the only family we have. We’re waiting for him to travel here, and then we’ll have the wedding.” I hand back the ring, and Breine tucks it back into the purse.
“Should we have dinner?” She goes to the table in the corner of the room and begins to scrub her face and neck using water from the pitcher. “Esther and I usually go at five thirty—she should be back from her classes soon—and we meet Chaim and his roommates, except for Josef, who—oh, you already met Josef.”
I pretend to straighten my belongings in my drawer, though I did that before Breine came in, and try to keep my voice nonchalant. “Why doesn’t Josef eat with you?”
She shrugs, running a brush through her hair. “He prefers to eat alone. Chaim says he’s a perfectly fine roommate. He just keeps to himself, mostly.”
“He got in a fight. Just before he escorted me here.”
I look for surprise in her face, but instead, she just sighs. “Josef does that.”
“Josef gets in fights? Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s all—I don’t know his whole story, and like I said, Chaim says he’s a perfectly fine roommate. But some of us aren’t all there. The war ended, and some of us are here, but not all there. Do you know?”
I know—of course I know—and I feel
a moment of wonder that Breine doesn’t immediately realize that I’m also in this category, of those who are here and not all there. But she doesn’t wait for me to answer, turning away from me and relacing her boots.
“Let’s go eat,” she says when she’s finished. “I’m famished; are you?”
I’m not. The bone-weariness I felt earlier has returned; I want to lie on this soft bed under this clean quilt. Breine’s friendliness is kind but also overwhelming.
But I haven’t eaten anything for most of the day, so I let Breine lead me back to the dining hall, where she introduces me to Esther, a small, spectacled woman reading a book as she waits in line. She’s less chatty than Breine, but no less kind, smiling at me shyly and asking where I’m from.
“Sosnowiec?” Breine exclaims when I give the name of my hometown. “I had cousins in Sosnowiec. Distant ones. Did you know any Abramskis? Or maybe, never mind. I think the Abramskis lived in Sochaczew.”
“Breine,” Esther sighs. “You walked her all the way here. Didn’t you ask her before this where she was from?”
“I did,” she insists. “I thought I did.” I shake my head. “I didn’t?”
“Did you ask her any questions, or did you just talk?” Esther asks.
“I talked,” Breine says. “I fully admit it; I just talked.”
“Breine.” Esther shakes her head, but there’s love in the gesture: she as the sensible nanny and Breine as her flighty charge.
The cafeteria is the building I’d seen before, long and low. We line up for mushy meats and vegetables from cans: C rations, Breine explains, provided by the occupying American soldiers.
After our plates are filled, she and Esther lead us to a round table in the corner where Breine’s fiancé is saving seats. Chaim, a thin, light-haired man with a stutter in his consonants and a Hungarian accent in his German, introduces me to his housemates, whose names I almost immediately forget.
There must be hundreds of people in here. Breine said she and Esther liked to go early to avoid the crowds, but a long line still snakes almost to the door. I wonder if everyone comes early; I wonder if all of us still fear the food running out.
I follow my eyes to the end of the line, where the last person waiting is Josef. Hair still wild. Trousers still skimming over his lean hip bones. Hand running over his jawline, where he must have been injured in the fight.
It’s peculiar: I assume Josef is at the end of the line because he’s just arrived, but as I stare at him longer, I see that he’s not moving forward. Every time a new person walks through the door, Josef gestures them ahead so he’s always the last one in line.
Eventually, when nobody else comes through the door, Josef gets his own plate and takes it, as Breine predicted, not to us but to an unoccupied table. He eats quickly, shoulders hunched over his plate, eyes down.
Whatever familiar thing I thought I saw in him has disappeared. He’s just a boy now. But I’m trying to square the excessively polite boy keeping himself to the back of the line with the one I saw earlier, viciously punching another man’s throat. I would wonder if I’d imagined it, but he’s wearing the same shirt, rust-colored bloodstain on the hem.
Breine notices me watching all this and nudges Chaim. “Zofia says Josef got in a fight.”
“He d-did. B-but it was with Rudolf.”
The rest of the table groans; this information means something to them it doesn’t to me.
“Who is Rudolf?” I ask.
Breine squeezes Chaim’s arm. “Tell her,” she encourages.
“Y-you can.”
“I like your voice better.”
Chaim shakes his head, but he’s smiling. I see him reach for Breine’s hand under the table. She waits another beat to be sure Chaim isn’t going to speak. “All right. Nobody cares if Josef got in a fight with Rudolf, because he’s a collaborator. He volunteered his house to the Gestapo. They kept him fat the whole war. He’s only here now because his street was bombed when the Allies came. Honestly, that’s the thing about Josef’s fights. You know they’re terrible. But then you find out whom they were with, and you wish you’d done it first.”
I’m confused. “The Germans let Rudolf stay in his house? They didn’t just take it over? Did he bribe them?”
In my town, even at the very beginning of the war, if the Gestapo wanted something a Jewish family owned, they didn’t ask to share it with you. They just decided it was theirs.
Breine has taken a mouthful of cabbage, so she motions for Esther to answer instead. “Rudolf isn’t Jewish,” Esther says, cutting her food into small, neat bites.
“What do you mean?”
Breine coughs. “Several people here aren’t. Technically, this isn’t a facility for Jewish people, it’s only a facility for displaced people. Technically, Rudolf has been displaced from his home. And so have other Germans whose homes were bombed in the Allied invasion.”
“Do all of them—did all of them…”
“No,” she says, sensing my question. “They didn’t all work for the Nazis.”
My mind’s still reeling from this. Maybe they didn’t all house the Gestapo, but some might have turned us in, revealed our hiding places in exchange for money or a favor. Or placed swastikas in their potted plants. Some might have been surprised we were back, because they thought they’d never have to see us again.
But they do. And now we’re supposed to live with people who either wished for our deaths or looked the other way while it happened.
I sneak a glance at Josef, head still down, mechanically finishing the food on his plate.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Esther offers.
“Zofia is here looking for her brother,” Breine tells the table. “Abek. All of you ask your friends here if they know any boys named Abek.”
“And you—are any of you still looking for people?” I ask, thinking of the binders and papers spread over Mrs. Yost’s desk.
A hush falls over the table. Chaim and Breine look down at their plates; she already told me her uncle was the last family they had.
“I haven’t seen my wife since they separated the women at Dachau,” says one man who looks too young to have a wife. “Her brother and I are both staying here until I learn what happened to her.”
“My father was going to send for my mother and me when he got to England,” says a pretty woman who introduced herself to me as Judith, an occupant of the front room of our cottage. “I’m trying to send word that my mother is—that he can still send for me.”
“You know that he got there, though?” I ask.
“The last round of visas,” she says. “I haven’t been able to talk to him yet, but I saw him get on the boat myself.”
We go around the table. Esther’s parents are dead. A boy named Nev is still trying to find his. A man named Ravid has stopped looking, and so has his fiancée, Rebekah, whom he protectively places his arm around.
“It happens sometimes, though,” Breine says. “Zofia, the girl who stayed in your bed before you—Chaya. She found her mother and a brother. It happens, for some people.”
A chair squeaks. It’s Miriam, Judith’s roommate from our cottage, a short, freckled girl about my age, abruptly rising from her chair. “I need to write my letters,” she mumbles, hastily grabbing her tray. “Please excuse.”
“Miriam,” Judith starts, reaching out a hand and speaking quickly to her in Dutch.
“No, I must go,” she insists, and though the rest of her sentence is in a different language, I can understand the guilt and panic on her face, the sense that she hasn’t written enough letters.
She walks off quickly, heels clicking on the floor. The mood at the table—I’ve ruined it with my question. We all watch Miriam leave.
“I shouldn’t have asked that,” I say. “She didn’t want to talk.”
Judith clears her throat. “Her twin sister,” she explains. “Doctors did experiments on both of them. Miriam was the control; her sister was the one they hurt.”<
br />
My throat starts to close. The one they hurt.
“At liberation, her sister was taken to a hospital to get better,” Judith continues. “But Miriam was given the wrong information about where, and she hasn’t been able to find her since. And now she writes—”
“Ten letters a day,” I finish.
Ten letters a day. Miriam must be the woman Mrs. Yost mentioned earlier. She saw her sister only months ago, but now it’s as if she vanished.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Esther says again.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I shouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t know.” She puts her hand on my arm.
“Don’t apologize,” Breine reaffirms. “We all want to talk about it and not talk about it all the time. We hate talking about it, and we don’t know how to talk about anything else.”
Chaim puts his arm around her and smiles at his fiancée through watery eyes.
“For now, we’ll just talk about something else, though, yes?” She looks around the table for approval, and everyone nods. “I could, for example, tell you about my wedding.” The table groans; Breine’s joke has the intended effect of lightening the mood. “Or, we could play the happier game: What are you going to do when you leave here?” She turns to me. “Zofia, you’re newest. You start.”
“When I leave here,” I start slowly. “When I leave here, it will be with Abek, and we will go home to Sosnowiec.”
“Where I may or may not have distant cousins,” Breine supplies.
“Where will you all go?” I return the question. “Chaim and Breine, after your wedding, whose homeland will you return to?”
Breine glows as she looks at Chaim. “As soon as Britain loosens the immigration laws, we’re going to Eretz Israel. Most of us are, actually—most of us at the table.”
“Palestine?” I ask.
She fans her soil-filled fingernails in front of me. “That’s why we’re learning to farm. We want to be ready to farm our own land when we get there.”
Chaim affectionately brushes his knuckles under Breine’s chin. “She’s b-bad at it.”