by Monica Hesse
“Excuse me. I had never even been on a farm until I came here.”
“I’m w-worse than she is.”
“That’s why we’re practicing now,” says one of Chaim’s roommates, the serious-looking man who introduced himself as Ravid. He clears his throat, quieting everyone down, and then turns to me, raising his glass. “I hope you find your brother soon. May we all find what we’re looking for soon. L’Chaim.”
L’Chaim.
The phrase hits me with such a sharp, unexpected pang it nearly takes my breath away.
We used to toast this way at weddings and birthdays, at happy events. One night in Gross-Rosen, a night when I couldn’t sleep from the gnawing in my stomach and the lice on my skin, one of my bunkmates, a woman I barely knew, threw her arms around me as I writhed in agony on the wooden pallet. “L’Chaim,” she whispered. “It’s my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary today.” Then she laughed bitterly.
“L’Chaim,” the table repeats now. Breine with her mouth full again, and Chaim with his shy blush, and Esther, serious and earnest.
We raise our glasses.
To life.
AFTER DINNER, INSTEAD OF WALKING BACK TO THE COTTAGE with Breine and Esther, I walk to the administration building to check the admission records Mrs. Yost has already told me will have no trace of Abek.
I try to expect nothing. I try to expect less than nothing, if it’s possible to expect that. I remind myself that Miriam’s twin sister was alive, and survived, and was still vanished without a trace, leaving Miriam alone to write endless letters.
The Missing Persons Liaison office, which I thought messy before, is now in complete disarray. Piles of papers teeter not only on Mrs. Yost’s desk but also on the floor—some handwritten, some typed with notes scribbled in the margins. She’s not alone, either. A man is sitting in the chair where I sat before. He’s slender with caterpillar eyebrows, holding some kind of heavy book.
I knock lightly on the doorframe but stay just outside the threshold. “I can come back later.”
“No, come in now,” she says, rising from her own seat and gesturing me into it. “This is Mr. Ohrmann. Mr. Ohrmann, this is Miss Zofia Lederman.”
“How do you do?”
“Mr. Ohrmann works with one of the organizations I mentioned earlier—the Missing Persons bureau in Munich,” Mrs. Yost continues. “He comes here once a week to go over open cases, and I also introduce new ones. Today I told him about yours.”
“Oh?”
“As you might expect, there are a lot of open cases,” she says. “A lot of leads that seem promising but don’t go anywhere at all.”
Mrs. Yost, so direct and frank when I spoke with her this afternoon, now seems as though she’s avoiding something. A nervous swell begins to grow in my stomach.
“Are you saying there is a lead?” I ask.
“Well,” she begins, looking slightly pained. Mr. Ohrmann clears his throat, signaling that he’ll take over.
“Frau Yost probably also told you there is no central system for locating missing persons; it’s not a scientific process. And with your case, we’ve found something that complicates the situation even further. A piece of… ambiguous information.”
My heart is already thudding. “I don’t understand. How can the information be ambiguous? Have you found my brother or not?”
He sighs. “I suppose it’s easiest to just walk you through it.”
He motions me closer to the desk and, as Mrs. Yost sweeps piles of paper out of the way, Mr. Ohrmann lays the book on top.
I can see now that it’s copies of pages from a ledger, with rows and columns. On the page it’s opened to, lacy penmanship travels two-thirds of the way down one page, and then strong, inky script replaces it for the final third. A different person’s handwriting.
“These are arrival records to Dachau, the period of time that trains from Birkenau would have come,” Mr. Ohrmann says.
My mouth is cotton, dry and thick. “Where is he?” I bend in so quickly that I jostle Mr. Ohrmann as I try to make out the names on this page of the ledger.
“Often, the Nazis kept very good records,” he says, moving the book just slightly away, forcing me to look up at him for this next part. “But what we’re learning is, not always—it varies from camp to camp, or from commander to commander. And sometimes it depends on the guard: How much education he’s had. How familiar he was with the languages spoken by the prisoners arriving that day. If he’s not familiar with the language, he’s more likely to spell prisoners’ names wrong.”
He hesitates, looking to Mrs. Yost for confirmation before continuing. “I just want to explain all this. I’m not sure any of it is worth raising your hopes. We don’t have a record for an Abek Lederman arriving to Dachau,” he says.
Only now does he push the ledger back toward me again. His neatly manicured index finger travels down the page until the line before the spidery handwriting stops. Toward these last rows, the end of the guard’s shift, the writing becomes messier; the dots of the i’s become smudged and uneven.
“Here,” he says. “Alek Federman. Age fourteen.”
The realization comes to me slowly. “You think the guard spelled the name wrong?”
Mr. Ohrmann doesn’t say anything.
“A cursive l can look like a cursive b,” I say.
“And Alek is a far more common name, at least in Germany,” he breaks in, though his voice is reluctant, like he doesn’t want to give false hope. “And Federman is an equally common last name. It might be possible for someone to misspell it that way.”
Is this my brother? My brain doesn’t leap to embrace the possibility as quickly as I thought it would. Part of me thinks this sounds too desperate: People shouldn’t be able to find or not find their brothers based on whether they can know or not know Alek is the more common name in Germany.
But I want to believe it. At the very least, I know it’s possible. If the arrivals at Dachau were anything like the arrivals at the camps I was sent to, of course there would be room in that hell for a mistake. It was all a mistake.
I run my own fingers over the dry, finicky handwriting. “What happened to him next? Where did Alek Federman go?”
Mr. Ohrmann lowers his head apologetically. “I don’t know. So far I’ve found only the reference to his coming into the camp. He’s not in the roster of prisoners present for the liberation.”
“So he came in, but he didn’t go out?”
“He’s not included on lists of the dead,” he adds quickly. “He’s just not on other lists at all.”
“So he could have gone anywhere. He could have gone to any other camp in Europe?”
“Not anywhere,” Mr. Ohrmann carefully corrects. “By the time these arrivals happened, Russia had moved through eastern Poland, America had come through France. The Reich was shrinking. Alek Federman, if he was transferred to another camp before Dachau was liberated, he couldn’t have gone to any of them.”
“I see.” In my mind, I picture a map of Europe with a circle lain over top. And then I try to picture that circle getting smaller. I only have to look inside the circle. I only have to figure out how much land is inside. “So where do I go next?”
Mrs. Yost now leans forward to rejoin the conversation. “Next, you should write letters. I’ll give you a list of all the organizations we know of. The one for Mr. Ohrmann’s organization, you can leave with him tomorrow, but then we can get you started on—”
“I’ll do that tonight, but then where do I go next?”
“The letters are your best solution.”
“Like Miriam?” I break in, more pointedly than I meant to. “Like Miriam writing all her letters about her sister? I’ll write the letters. I’ll write letters until my fingers are raw. I don’t sleep much anyway. But then where do I go? This is a place for adults; is there a camp for children? A different displaced-persons camp I could go to?”
This is rude; I sense that at some level. And overly demanding of a w
oman I barely know. But I can’t go back and just write letters. I’ll have too much time to think, and my brain will get stuck. I can’t be left alone with my thoughts.
Mrs. Yost looks at Mr. Ohrmann, her face saying, I told you about this one. “There are a few camps for children,” she says. “But they’re just like here—children pass through them. They arrive, and then they’re reclaimed or they’re adopted or they move on.”
“Still,” I insist. “Where is the one that children from Dachau would have been sent?”
Her mouth sets in a thin line; it’s Mr. Ohrmann who answers. “There are a few in the American zone. The closest is forty or fifty kilometers from here.”
“Good.” I find a blank sheet of paper on that mess of a desk, and a fountain pen, leaking and sticky with the ink that has spilled out around the nib. “Tell me the name of the closest, please. I’ll find someone to take me tonight.”
“You can just as easily write a letter to that place, too.”
“I have to go in person.”
“Zofia, I promise you, most people are writing letters.”
“And if most people are just writing letters, doesn’t that mean I should go in person?” I press. “Mr. Ohrmann here, learning about Alek Federman—would he have gone to that trouble for me if I was one of a hundred letters he’d received this afternoon?”
She knows I’m right. She’s proved my point by inviting me in to see Mr. Ohrmann instead of adding me to the long list everyone else must be on.
“You won’t find someone to take you tonight. We’re down to one working vehicle at the moment, and even if we had more, we’re rationing gas for emergencies only.” She raises one finger, silencing the protest she can tell I’m about to make. “But, if you still want to, you can go the day after tomorrow; that’s when we send one of our wagons on a supply run. Sometimes we trade supplies with other camps. You can wait two days.”
“I—”
“You can wait two days, Zofia,” she says firmly. “And I promise you, it’s your fastest option.”
My heart hasn’t stopped pounding since Mr. Ohrmann showed me the ledger. I know I should try to manage my expectations. But how can I not hope?
BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED AT BIRKENAU, THERE WERE LESS OF US still. We smelled of sweat and urine but also of death. When the train stopped, through spaces between the slats that passed for windows in the cattle car, I could see swarms of soldiers, all of them with guns. They unloaded the cars one by one; they came to the cars screaming, with dogs straining at their leads, biting anyone who didn’t move quickly enough. The guards pulled women by their hair. They brought whips down on their backs and legs, and they shoved families apart to send them to separate lines. Lines. Just as we were sorted at the soccer stadium, we were going to be sorted again.
“We will be okay,” I said to Abek. “The other guard promised. I made him promise to wire ahead and recommend you be an errand boy. You tell them that when we get to the front of the line. You tell them that you are twelve, not nine, and that the guard in Sosnowiec said you have come to be the commandant’s errand boy.”
While we waited, rumors traveled down the line: We would have to strip completely naked and give up our own clothes. We would have to go through showers and, when we came out, put on different clothes that didn’t fit. A girl wondered why we had to do it that way. I assumed it was just to degrade us, because there was never a lost opportunity to degrade us. But then another woman whispered, no, it wasn’t just that. The reason we couldn’t keep our own clothes was because the Nazis were going to cut them apart at the seams in case we tried to sew valuables into the linings.
I didn’t have any silver or jewelry sewn into my clothes, but the thought of their being ripped apart felt like another death. All the careful stitches sewn by Baba Rose and the other seamstresses. All the attention and work and long hours and sore fingers—and now someone would undo it in the hopes of finding a few pieces of silver. The dismantling of the Lederman name happened every time a person wearing our clothes walked into a camp.
Later I would view this slicing of clothing as a good job. The prisoners chosen to sort through the clothing piles got to spend most of the day indoors instead of performing manual labor. If a guard wasn’t looking, they might be able to slip away a sweater or trade the shoes they’d been assigned for a better-fitting pair.
We have to take off our clothes, I told Abek. I was talking as fast as I could because I knew the showers were separated for women and men, and I wasn’t sure which line young boys would be sent to.
It’s not important, I told him. They’re just going to give you new clothes.
I knew it was important. I knew it was important because when they took Abek’s clothes, they would also take his jacket. They would also take the family alphabet story I had sewn inside it, the way he was meant to remember me and find me after the war. But I couldn’t tell him that; I had to be strong.
I remember all this, and I am strong up until the moment I realize that this, too, is just another dream version of the last time I saw Abek. A dream version, not the real version, and as soon as I realize that, I open my eyes.
I WAKE TO THE SOUND OF SHUSHING, ESTHER AND BREINE tiptoeing around the cottage and warning each other not to wake me. My face aches, pressed against something hard. I’d fallen asleep at the desk, arm as a pillow, nostrils filled with the heady scent of ink.
When I returned to the cottage last night, Breine had moved the small rug beside her bed closer to me so neither of us would have to step on a cold floor in the morning. Esther gave me a mug of coffee to help me stay awake while I wrote my letters. They were both such specific, immediate kindnesses from these girls I barely know. I’d earlier passed Miriam in the front room, huddled over her own letters, with her own cup of coffee.
“Good luck,” I told her, and she said it back to me, too, in her lovely Dutch accent.
I wondered if I should apologize for earlier at dinner, for asking everyone about their families, but I didn’t know if that would make things even more awkward. “You have enough paper?” I asked instead, nodding down to the sheaf in my hand, provided by Mrs. Yost.
Miriam nodded to her own pile, and we shared the most imperceptible of smiles.
Now, my finished letters sit nearby, and I blink them into focus.
“You’re awake,” Breine says when my wooden chair squeaks across the floorboards. “She’s awake,” she says unnecessarily to Esther, and then their voices rise to a normal volume.
Last night they allowed me to keep the lantern burning until the soft orange of the morning. It’s burning still, and Esther reaches over my head to deftly turn it down. I’m sure kerosene is rationed; it was selfish of me to use so much of it. I stretch my arms and legs, cramped from my night of sitting sleep, as Breine and Esther’s morning routine unfolds around me. Breine sweeps the floor while Esther makes both of their beds. They wash their faces in the bowl, then Esther brushes Breine’s hair while Breine talks through plans for the day.
Trade school. Breine is asking me something, and I’m trying to wrap my foggy brain around her sentences. Do I want to learn a new trade? she repeats. There’s job training here.
“It doesn’t have to be farming. If you don’t want to farm, they’re adding courses,” Breine explains. “Bookkeeping, sewing. Esther’s doing a stenography course.”
“Sewing?” I repeat. My voice is thick and scratchy. As soon as I fell asleep, I had nightmares about Abek.
“Do you want to learn to sew? The supplies are terrible now.”
I shake my head. I haven’t done anything with clothes since Neustadt. Nazi uniforms, coarse and brown. The work took something I loved and poisoned it. “No, thank you.”
“It can be good to keep busy,” Esther says gently. I see Breine encouraging her; I wonder if I was screaming in my sleep again and what they heard me say. “Breine and I have both been the new person here, sleeping in a new bed, trying to figure out what to do next. We all h
ave. And we’ve all been helped by the people who came before us. It can be strange to be here, and it’s good to have something to—”
“Oh, just come out with us,” Breine breaks in. “If you don’t want to get muddy with me, go to Esther’s stenography class. One hundred and sixty words a minute!”
Esther gives her a look; the bluntness of Breine’s invitation is not how Esther was trying to communicate. But then she turns back to me. “I could help you catch up on what you’ve missed.”
“I already have something to keep busy,” I say. “Thanks for your concern, but I already have something to do.”
Breine looks as though she wants to say something else but doesn’t.
They have so much energy, Breine and Esther, in constant motion in our small bedroom. It’s early yet, not even fully light, but I hear the noises of a morning routine happening on the other side of the door, too, from Judith and Miriam, who must have been up like me, writing her letters.
I feel a hundred years older than all of them. The four of them are nothing like we nothing-girls, with the vacant, tired way we moved and sat and talked.
But then again, we were still in the hospital three months after the war ended. We, who had trouble keeping track of the days, who sometimes needed gentle reminders not to wander in the hallways with our blouses half-buttoned, who laughed and cried at inappropriate times.
Bissel, the woman with the gashed, angry holes in her legs, the one from Ravensbrück, swore she would one day go to her daughter living on a farm. She sat on the windowsill one morning and laughed and laughed, and then suddenly she hurled herself outside, and we heard screams from passersby when her body hit the pavement.
But last night at dinner, I learned Breine was at Ravensbrück, too. And Esther was made to disassemble batteries with her bare hands in a camp somewhere in Austria. How have some of us healed so much faster than others? How are some of us better?
Esther finishes brushing Breine’s hair and separates it into three plaits. I worry I’ve offended them by declining to go along to any of their training programs.