Our Darkest Night

by Jennifer Robson

  Her name was replaced with a number.

  She could only stare, astonished, at the blank-faced man with his needle and pot of ink. At the marks he was driving into her skin. The pain was nothing compared to the sight of those indelible digits.

  She had been reduced to a number. A line in a ledger. A piece on an assembly line, only here, in this place of death, she was being taken apart, layer by layer, until nothing but her soul remained.

  The soul unto its star returns.

  Onward they were driven, and those who stumbled or fell were harried to their feet with threats and kicks. “Sauna,” someone said.

  The guards were shouting, and around her women were undressing, removing even their underwear, and those who balked or moved too slowly were punched or kicked or forcibly stripped.

  So Nina shed her clothes, and when she tried to shelter herself from the guards’ leering eyes her hands were slapped away by a dead-eyed man who first shaved her head and then every part of her body.

  And the worst of it wasn’t her nudity in front of rabidly staring men, awful though it was. It was the loss of her beautiful hair. The glossy ringlets that Nico had so loved had been shorn away, stolen, and her stubbled skull felt cold and unfamiliar beneath her questioning fingers.

  Again they were propelled forward. Naked, shivering, she stood in a tiled room and waited. Stella was at her side once more, the smallest of consolations, and they held hands as they waited . . . for what?

  A blast of cold water came streaming from the ceiling. Nina looked up, squinting, and for the first time noticed the shower heads set into the ceiling. The water grew warm, then scalding, and in an instant was frigid again.

  She didn’t care. She didn’t think of washing herself, begrimed as she was. All that mattered was the water. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth wide and was grateful for every drop she swallowed. Nothing would ever again taste as good as that water.

  Long before she was able to drink her fill, though, the water ceased and they were hustled onward once more.

  Now they were given uniforms. Hers was a striped tentlike dress, even dirtier and rougher than the one she’d had in Bolzano. By sheer chance she was handed a proper pair of shoes. The soles were nearly worn through and they were a size too large, but most of the women had been given zoccoli to wear. Any sort of shoe, no matter how worn-out, was better than those rough wooden clogs.

  Then food, the first meal she’d had since leaving Italy, and it was dreadful: a few mouthfuls of thin and bitter soup and a slice of hard black bread that only scraped against the void of her hunger.

  Just as she was reaching the last of her strength they were led to a hut. It was many times more wretched than the cellblock in Bolzano had been. It was colder and dirtier and packed with twice as many women, and the stench inside was insufferable even to her benumbed nostrils.

  She and Stella hadn’t even found places among the bunks when a bell began to clang.

  “Appell! Appell!”

  “That’s the blockowa,” someone muttered. “Get yourselves moving, or we’ll all catch it from that bitch.”

  “What’s a blockowa?” Nina asked, exhaustion clinging to her like a shroud.

  “She runs the block here—hurry!”

  So they rushed outside to a muddy yard and arranged themselves in neat rows, hundreds of women, all of them shorn and pale and trembling from the cold, and anyone who was so much as a millimeter out of line was pushed into place by the blockowa, who didn’t hesitate to use slaps and pinches to punish anyone who moved too slowly for her liking.

  When everyone was arranged just so, a young woman in a smartly tailored uniform came to stand before them. She was slight and rather small, with delicate features, smooth and shining dark hair, and staring eyes that missed nothing.

  Her gaze swept over the assembled formation, her nostrils flaring for an instant, and then she looked down at the clipboard in her hands and began to call out numbers at a ferocious clip. It took Nina a moment to realize that she was calling out their numbers, the ones they bore on their arms, and she was still staring at her own number, vainly trying to remember its translation, when the blockowa grabbed her arm and hoisted it in the air.

  “Hier, aufseherin,” she shouted, and then she slapped Nina across the face. “Blöde Sau.”

  One after the other they were counted, dozens upon dozens, and nearly everyone earned a blow or worse for failing to respond as promptly as their captors required. And then, when the last number on her list had been found and checked off, the dark-eyed woman in the smart uniform—the aufseherin?—nodded at the blockowa, and then . . . nothing.

  They stood in place and waited, and the moon rose, and still they waited, and those few who were unwise enough to shuffle or scratch at a louse bite or rub their frozen hands against the fabric of their uniforms were rewarded with more slaps, more pinches, and even, once, the sharp crack of the blockowa’s club against defenseless shoulders. That was the punishment for a woman who had fallen to her knees.

  The moon rose ever higher, but its light was dimmed by spiraling drifts of smoke from the looming chimneys.

  “Ovens,” came a whisper.

  The guards were only meters away. What if they heard?

  “Where the bodies are burned,” the same voice added.

  “Alive?” Stella asked, and her clear child’s voice carried across the yard.

  The aufseherin looked up from her clipboard, her sharp eyes moving over them, judging and assessing, much as a crow might look at carrion when considering how best to pluck out its eyes.

  When she spoke, it was in Italian overlaid with a heavy Austrian accent.

  “No. Not alive when they burn.” A pause, another birdlike tilt of her head. “They gas them first. Those who fail selection. Lazy ones. Sick. The troublemakers. They all go to the gas.”

  Nina’s world shrank to the aufseherin’s mouth and the poison she spoke and the calamitous truth embedded in her words. They all go to the gas.

  Her parents were dead.

  Since the day Nico and Father Bernardi had told her of their deportation she had known, but she hadn’t been brave enough to face it. And now she could shut her mind to it no longer.

  She knew.

  The guards would have separated them. Mamma would have been alone. Defenseless, unable even to stand. Would she even have survived the journey?

  But Papà would have been alive when they had torn him from his beloved’s arms. When they had pushed him onto the train. When they had led him to the gas.

  He had known what was being done to him and the woman he loved.

  Nina looked up, hoping for a glimpse of the sky beyond the swirling plumes of smoke. It was a clear night, the moon a delicate, gleaming crescent, and the stars hung low and bright and almost close enough to touch.

  Mamma and Papà were waiting for her. Nico, too. They had already made this journey; they knew what it was to die. And they were with her, still, in the starry dome of the heavens. They were with her.

  She would not be alone at the end.

  Chapter 28

  30 October 1944

  Another day ground by, endless and enervating, its every hour made rancid by fear.

  Apart from the few survivors from their train, no one else in their block spoke Italian. The languages all blurred into one homogenous and frightening mystery to Nina, but Stella recognized some of them and was even able to converse, after a fashion, with a handful of the others.

  “Most of the women here are from Hungary,” she told Nina after evening appell, “and I only know enough Hungarian to say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you.’ So that’s not much help. But there are women here from all over Europe. Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, even Denmark.”

  “How do you know so many languages?”

  “I don’t. I mean, not really. My parents had a company that published guidebooks for tourists, and they included little phrase books with each guide. I used to read them,
just for fun.” There was a hitch in Stella’s voice at the memory of fun.

  “Were you able to learn anything else from the others?” Nina pressed. “Apart from where they’re all from, I mean.”

  “A little. I was able to understand quite a lot of what the Frenchwoman told me.”

  “And?”

  “She said that most newcomers aren’t here for very long. A few days, maybe a week or so, and then their numbers are called and they leave. She’s been here since September.”

  Nina had to force her next question past her lips. “Does she know what happens to them?”

  “No. But she did say no one is sent out to work in this part of the camp. We just have the two appells each day and that’s it.”

  Because Stella seemed cheered by her discoveries, and because Nina didn’t think either of them could face the stark truth of what happened to those who were called away, she nodded and climbed onto her bunk.

  Women were being called away—but why, if there were no kommandos? Simply thinking of it made her stomach churn.

  “It will be lights-out soon,” she said, and patted the narrow strip of bare bunk next to her. “Climb on up while you can still see.”

  The lights went out, the dark closed in, and Stella first began to shiver and then to cry, her shoulders heaving silently, her scrap of cheer vanquished by the bleak and bitter night. Nina held her close, and rubbed her hand gently over the girl’s naked scalp, and she tried to think of something to say that wasn’t a lie.

  But the words stuck in her throat. She had no comfort to give.

  “Sleep,” she whispered. “Go to sleep.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Will be here before you know it. So sleep while you can.”

  APPELL! APPELL!

  It was the middle of the night, the moon still bright in the sky. There was no reason at all, save malice, for them to have been woken so early.

  As they had the night before, and the morning before that, the women assembled themselves and were counted, and by the time the aufseherin was satisfied, the sun had begun to rise. Yet she made no move to dismiss them.

  Nina was very nearly asleep on her feet when the aufseherin began to call out numbers for a second time. Not everyone was being summoned, she realized—only about one in three. As their names were called, the blockowa pulled them from the formation and had them stand in a queue to one side. But why?

  Stella was hauled to the side, and then the snarling blockowa came stomping over and Nina realized that her number, too, had been called, and before she had wrapped her mind around the truth of it, her feet had carried her across the yard to the end of the waiting queue.

  It was for a kommando, she told herself. The Frenchwoman had been wrong. They were being sent out for work and they would be back in their bunks by nightfall.

  So why did the aufseherin seem so pleased? Why did her eyes spark with malice? Why had her mouth curled into a knowing smirk?

  Their route as they left the yard took them very near to the aufseherin, and as Nina passed she turned her head, just for an instant, so she might look the woman in the eye.

  “Störenfriedin,” the aufseherin spat out, and her smirk broadened into a noxious smile, and Nina took another half-dozen steps before she realized what the woman had said. Troublemaker.

  Troublemakers were not sent out for work. Troublemakers were sent—

  No.

  She could protest. She could resist. She could run back to the aufseherin and scratch out her eyes and show her what it was like to be hurt. To be afraid.

  It was tempting, but they would shoot her like a dog, as Zwerger had once shot Selva, and that would leave Stella alone at the end. Her friend did not deserve to die alone.

  So Nina kept walking, though her legs had turned to water and she had forgotten how to breathe. Stella was just in front of her, no more than an arm’s length away, and Nina was desperate for the touch of her hand, the warmth of her skin, the knowledge that she was not alone.

  How long? How many minutes were left to them?

  She shut her eyes to the leaden sky above and the mud beneath her feet and the stench of suffering that enveloped her. She remembered, instead, the sound of birdsong, the scent of flowers in bloom, and the delicious heat of a sun-drenched day. She inhaled every sweet and vanishing moment of life, her one precious life, even as she swallowed down her howls of despair.

  Suddenly she could bear her memories of loveliness no longer. There was so much she had yet to see and feel and do, and it was being stolen from her, and she could do nothing—nothing—to save herself.

  “Nina.”

  It was Stella, risking a goodbye while the guards were near enough to notice.

  “No,” Nina whispered, shaking her head, her eyes clenched shut. “Not yet.”

  “Nina. Look where we are,” Stella persisted. Her voice was trembling, but not with fear.

  With hope.

  Nina opened her eyes. They were back at the railhead, and the scores of women ahead of them were climbing steep wooden ramps into one boxcar after another, and then she and Stella and the remaining women were urged inside and Nina waited for something awful to happen.

  Instead the door closed behind them. The train began to move.

  “I listened to the guards as we were walking,” Stella said. “They’re sending us to Germany. One of them was angry that we’re going there while he has to stay in this ‘shithole to end all shitholes.’”

  “How would you know a word like that?” Nina asked, and in spite of everything she had to suppress a laugh.

  “From one of the other prisoners in Bolzano. She was Austrian.”

  “What else did the guards say? Why are we being sent to Germany?”

  “I think we’re meant to work for them. They said we’re going to an ‘arbeitslager.’ A work camp.”

  “Doing what?”

  Stella shrugged, and then she hugged Nina tight. “Who cares? Anything has to be better than this place.”

  THEY WERE ON the train for three days, and this time they were supplied with water and the latrine bucket was emptied twice a day. They weren’t given any food, but Nina had been hungry for so long she hardly noticed. The car wasn’t too horribly crowded, and it was possible to sit at times and even catch glimpses of the passing landscape from a gap at the edge of the door.

  As the train carried them west, the weather grew steadily more damp, if not objectively colder, and the plains were replaced by hills and then foothills. Surely they would be in Germany before long.

  The train halted at dusk on the third day, its doors opening onto a forested valley. On the opposite side of the train was a fast-flowing river; before them was a small camp, its scattered buildings surrounded by high fences.

  The women scrambled down from the boxcars, their clogs and ill-fitting shoes slipping on the snowy ground, and the guards led them through the gates and across a stretch of open ground to a long and low wooden building, its few windows crisscrossed with iron bars. It smelled of diesel fumes and machine oil, as if it had once been used as a drive shed, and its concrete floors were cracked and buckling. The walls were in even worse condition, with wide cracks between their roughhewn wooden planks. Just looking at them made Nina shiver in anticipation of the arctic nights ahead, for it was a barracks, filled end to end with tiered wooden bunks.

  But the bunks were made of new wood that still smelled of the lumberyard, and they were lined with straw mats that had yet to grow foul, and at the foot of every bunk was a blanket, an actual wool blanket. Nina went over to the nearest of the bunks, and she touched one of the blankets, and it was clean, or something close to it, and that alone was enough to bring sudden, stinging tears to her eyes.

  The male guards from the train had vanished, presumably along with the train itself, and now a pair of female guards brought in pails of rough black bread that had been torn into chunks and adorned with dabs of watery jam. They ordered the prisoners to form a queue, and
one by one the women received their supper, and one by one they wolfed it down in mere seconds.

  There was just enough time for everyone to visit the latrines, newly dug and as fresh as a field of daisies compared to the stinking pits at Birkenau, before the call came for appell.

  At the direction of the guards, the women arranged themselves in formation on a stretch of flat ground between the barracks and other camp buildings. The last of the sun was fading, and everyone quieted and waited to be counted.

  A woman came to stand before them. Her face was pink and round, her figure just well fed enough to pull at the seams of her crisply tailored uniform. She looked almost pleasant. Someone who might, in another life, have masqueraded as a decent person.

  The woman cleared her throat and waited until the only sound to be heard was the wind in the trees, and then she began to talk, her voice high and weirdly atonal, and she spoke so quickly that Nina couldn’t manage to unravel one single syllable from the next.

  Nor, from the look on their faces, could most of the other prisoners, and the aufseherin, or whatever she was, just kept droning on, a slowly deflating balloon, oblivious to the bafflement on the faces of those she was addressing.

  At last she finished, and whatever she said next seemed to be some kind of dismissal, for the guards who had carried in their supper earlier now shooed the women back to the barracks, returning minutes later with a bucket of lukewarm tea and a stack of tin cups. Once again each woman stood in line and gulped down a few unsatisfying mouthfuls of tea and ceded her place to the next woman in the queue. The brew was bitter and tannic, and Stella protested at her first sip, but Nina urged her to drink it down.

  “The water in this was probably boiled,” she explained quickly, fearing the guards would push Stella aside, “and that means it’s clean. Go on.”

  “But there’s a tap in the latrines,” Stella protested. “Some of the others were drinking from it.”

  “Yes, and they’re the ones who’ll get sick first. I promise they will. So drink that tea. Hold your nose if you have to.”

  As soon as the tea was gone and the cups were handed back, the guards retreated to the doors, but not before issuing one final round of instructions.