by Han Nolan
"We will die," came a woman's voice from the other side of the cell. She spoke in Yiddish.
"Are we all Jews here then?" I asked.
"Who else would they put in a place like this? We will die tomorrow," the woman said.
I heard moaning and sobbing and praying. I held on to Bubbe, and we continued rocking.
We spent what appeared to be the next several days eating (yes, at last they were feeding us), sleeping, talking, going to the bathroom, and being questioned by the men upstairs.
Although I could never get a good look at her, I could tell that Bubbe was not standing up to the beatings very well. When she returned from the interrogations, she would hunch herself into one corner of the cell and ask to be left alone for a while. Eventually, she would come out of this retreat and reach out for me. When I huddled up close, I could feel her chest still heaving and smell the blood on her. Together we would pray for God to end our suffering.
One morning, a large wardress with her two front teeth missing opened the cell and bellowed in at us, "Stehen Sie auf! Stehen Sie auf!—Get up! Get up!"
For the first time since we had arrived, we were led outside into a courtyard. The air was cool and moist, but the sun was out and the day smelled sweet and clean; it was spring! We squinted at one another, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight. Each of us examined the others. We were a bloody, stinking crew. There were five of us; Bubbe was the oldest, I the youngest, and after me a petite Polish woman in her twenties and a set of French twins who claimed they were thirty-two but looked more like fifty-two.
Several guards were there to see that the five of us were loaded without mishap into the waiting prison van. The two tall men who had spent the last few weeks interrogating us came out into the courtyard.
"They want to wish us bon voyage, I am sure," said Dvora, the woman in her twenties.
As usual, the man with the fat nose did the talking. "Entering the Reich with false documents is a serious crime, punishable by death." With that said, he grinned and closed and locked the van door.
We could see nothing through the black-painted windows. We bounced along in silence until Lisette, one of the twins, began her usual whining about how she and her sister were really not Jewish.
" C'est vrai!—It's true! Only our grandmother was Jewish. Why should we be punished for that?"
"Why should any of us be punished for being Jewish?" I said.
Dvora agreed. "The world is crazy now."
Bubbe kept quiet. She knew to argue with the twins was futile and so did I, but it gave me something to do, something to think about besides death.
"We are French ballerinas. We have nothing to do with the Jews."
"You do now." Dvora laughed.
"The Polish are a stinking people. All Poles should be shot," said Liselle.
"You smell as bad as we do, and you look worse. And I think you two are dried-up old ladies. Ballerinas could never look so—so..."
"Chana, that is enough. It will do us no good to fight among ourselves. This may be our last hour alive and you are choosing to spend it this way."
Dvora leaned toward Bubbe. "What do you know?" she asked.
All of them had learned to trust Bubbe completely when it came to her premonitions. When she said we would be fed, we were fed. When she said the interrogators planned to trick us, there was a trick, but we were not trapped by it, and when she said nothing, we knew to watch out, one of us would get an extra beating that day.
"I cannot say for sure," she began, "but I believe we will be all right. It is best we each pray in silence, search out our own souls."
The twins sent up a loud wail.
"She is speaking of death. It is a nice way of saying we will die. I am not fooled," Lisette cried.
For the rest of the trip we listened to the sisters cry and moan at one another. Nothing Bubbe said could calm them down. When the van stopped, I was the first one at the door. Nothing could be worse than being trapped with the twins day after day.
The driver opened the doors and we climbed out and found ourselves outside another prison. New guards led us through the gates and into the building. Once again, they gave us showers and another set of prison clothes. Then they gave us each a piece of bread, and a mug of watery cocoa.
To our delighted surprise, they gave us a cell with a skylight and allowed us to go outside once a day and parade in a circle around the courtyard for exercise.
A few days after we arrived, the interrogations began again. We learned to accept them as part of our daily routine, something to be endured if we were to continue to stay alive. All of us knew, without Bubbe telling us, that if we were to confess to anything, we would be shot.
After a week of daily exercises in the spring air, and regular mealtimes, the wardress—we called her Der Hals, the neck, because of her long neck and small head—assigned us each a job. Bubbe and I were both assigned kitchen duty.
"It will be all right now, Bubbe," I said one night as we were washing and drying the dishes. "It is better than the ghetto. It is not a lot of food—a bowl of soup and some bread and cheese—but we get it every day, and at night we have a comfortable place to sleep. If we cannot be out looking for Mama and Anya, then this is where I want to be. The war will be over soon, anyway."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chana
FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS we worked hard in the kitchen, attended occasional interrogations, and took our daily exercise around the courtyard, watching spring turn into summer, then into fall. We were more able to keep track of the date now that we could see day and night and the changing seasons. On what we guessed was July 16, Bubbe surprised me with a birthday tomato she had somehow managed to get, or steal, from the kitchen. I didn't ask her about it. We split the ripe fruit in half and tried as best as we could to eat it slowly, savoring every juicy, meaty bite.
I was seventeen, the age Mama had been when she had Jakub, her first baby.
"And where am I, at seventeen?" I asked the fat bowl I was scrubbing one day. "I'm in prison, that's where. My life, my dreams, are nothing now. I have spent my years starving, wasting my mind, wasting my talents. I will never be a famous violinist. Think of all I have missed. Think of all I have yet to learn." I let my tears drop into the sink, plinking holes into the soapsuds. I cried some more so that I could watch my tears melt the suds. That was what I had become, someone who found entertainment in tears and suds.
One October morning the wardress did not come to roust us out of our cell. By afternoon, when we had not been fed either breakfast or lunch, we all could sense that something bad was about to happen, and we looked to Bubbe to tell us what it was. Bubbe would only shake her head and remind us to be strong, to be with God. At last, in the evening, Der Hals came to the cell and unlocked the door." Stehen Sie auf! Schneller!—Get up! Faster!" she shouted.
We shuffled through the door and trotted down the hallway after her. We were taken outside, where our interrogators were waiting for us. The night air was cold and blew through my uniform as if it wasn't even there.
"This is your last chance," said Herr Schacht, or Trottel, Nincompoop, as we called him. "Any one of you who wishes to confess will be safe and will be allowed to remain here. Anyone so unwise as to ignore this offer will most assuredly die."
Yes, this man was stupid. Either way we died, we knew that. My teeth began to chatter.
A van rolled into the yard and two men got out.
Herr Trottel stepped up to the van. "Anybody?"
We remained silent.
"Your deaths will be most unpleasant. Shooting would be too easy for you. No, you will be sentenced to hard labor and, believe me, you will not last a week."
The two officers from the van came up behind us and shoved us into the back. Before we could disentangle ourselves, the van was speeding away, the cold air whistling through the doors like tiny sirens.
When we stopped, the officers let us out of the van, and we found ourselves at a train statio
n teeming with people. Our driver told us to stand in the line on the left.
I looked at the long line of bedraggled people surrounded by armed guards. Where were we going? I saw the train, a black monster with black windows and black bars on those windows. Why, I wondered—and not for the first time—did the Nazis always make everything look evil? Why would they be so blatant about it? How could they be? I gazed across the tracks at the people who stood and watched our progression in the line. People who still had lives and families and food to eat. They were the reason Hitler could be so obvious. They were the reason this war against us, the Jews, could be so successful. They knew, they saw, and they did nothing but watch.
At the front of the line was a table with two SS—Defense Corps—officers sitting at it. When I got to them, one of the officers asked me my name.
"Ewa Krisowski," I said.
They didn't even blink. They searched through their stack of papers, pulled one out, and told me to sign it. I looked at the paper and saw my false name, my real name, my true birthdate, and my place of birth written at the top.
Then there were a lot of words I didn't have time to read. Two guards, one on either side, had closed in on me, waiting for me to sign. I bent over the paper and signed it, catching the line "Sentenced to hard labor for life" near the bottom.
"Please, God," I mumbled, "let this war end soon."
The inside of the train was dark and lined with small wire-mesh cells. Bubbe and I were stuffed into one of these small pockets with the twins, Dvora, and two other women. These two women kept staring at me and pushed their way between the others to get closer. They looked as if they wanted to eat me. I took Bubbe's hand in mine and moved toward her. More women were shoved into our cell, and I was stuck pressed up against Bubbe with the two vultures mashed up against my back.
We stood like this for hours, barely able to shift our bodies left or right. I had to go to the bathroom, but there seemed to be no toilets on this train. I felt something wet hit my legs. Had I lost control? I hadn't even felt it, and I still felt as if I had to go, badly.
"Bubbe, I think I just wet myself," I whispered.
" Moi aussi— Me, too," said the woman pressed into my back.
I shuddered.
A guard passed down the aisle and was besieged in several languages by women desperate to go to the bathroom.
"You will wait!" he shouted.
It was fine to say we would wait, but no one could, and puddles began to collect in all the cells. I was ashamed when at last I, too, could hold it no longer and felt myself letting go. I tried to push away from Bubbe, backing myself farther into the French woman behind me.
She spit at the back of my head.
"When will you learn, Chana?" Bubbe said.
I hung my head. When would I learn?
The train slowed down and came to a halt. Guards were suddenly everywhere.
" Alles raus, schneller! "they shouted.
They herded us out into the aisles and as we passed the guards, they took aim at us, beating us on the shoulders and head with their stubby batons.
"You have no self-control. You are animals!" they shouted at us.
As I approached a guard with a baton, I prepared myself for the strike, pulling my arms in close to my body. I saw the guard draw his weapon up over his head, but before he had the chance to hit me, Bubbe slapped her hands on my back and pushed me forward, out of the way of the rod.
Bubbe received several blows to her head and shoulders for her trouble, blows that should have been mine.
They led us out of the train to a field, soft beneath our feet, under the stars, where they ordered us to squat down and do our business.
Would this night of shame never end?
We then climbed back onto the train, and they locked us back up in our cells.
The train lurched forward and we traveled for another five minutes before it stopped again. This time all the noise and commotion was on the outside. We could hear shouts and clomping boots and doors opening and shutting in other sections of the train. We remained there for hours, our hands and feet numb with our stillness. What were we waiting for? The noise outside had ended long ago, and still we waited.
Finally the train began to grumble and clank and we started to creep forward. A few minutes later we were on our way again.
I had shifted my position so I was now beside Bubbe and the two women were facing us, their cheesy breath suffocating me.
"Auschwitz," the taller woman said to us, her head bobbing on her neck.
We ignored her.
"We are going to Auschwitz," she said in German.
Bubbe nodded. "I know the place, Óswi[ecedil]cim, we call it. It is in Poland. Chana, we are returning to Poland."
"We die in Poland then," said the other woman.
"Why are we going to Óswi[ecedil]cim?" I asked Bubbe. "There is nothing there but swamp."
"To work, to starve, to die," said the shorter woman. "I have heard it is so. No one returns from this Auschwitz. Zola, over there"—she poked her finger through the mesh and pointed at a stiff, sticklike woman across the aisle—"she knows everything. She is a murderer."
I didn't know how to take this last piece of information. Did she know everything because she was a murderer? Had Zola really killed someone? Why was I believing these two women, one of whom had spit on my head?
"We are not all political prisoners then?" Bubbe asked.
"No. Many are thieves, murderers, true criminals. We are mishy-mashy, all mixed together."
We rode on, stopping again to go to a field, then filing back into the train, but never were we given food or water. We hadn't eaten since the night before.
Again we stopped, and the guards hurried down the aisle shouting, unlocking the cells, and yanking us out.
"We could not be stopping to go to the bathroom so soon, could we?" I asked Bubbe as we shuffled down the aisle.
"This must be Auschwitz," she replied.
We stumbled out of the train. Above us was a white station sign with black gothic lettering. I could only make out a few of the letters in the early dawn but, yes, this was indeed Auschwitz.
The guards charged forward, herding us into lines, beating us with their sticks, and using barking dogs to keep us moving. All was noise and confusion as we scrambled along with hundreds of others as disoriented as we were.
The air was thick and sticky, the sky unnaturally pink. We could smell something cooking, burning. It must be some horrible animal, some fatty, rotten meat, I decided. I hurried forward with Bubbe, hoping that we'd soon pass through this thick, blanketing stench, but it was everywhere.
"Halt!" the guards shouted down the line as we approached a gate with letters strung across the top of it.
" Arbeit Macht Frei, "Bubbe read. "Work Will Set You Free."
All around the gate was a high wall of electrified wire. We waited as people were pulled away from our lines and men were separated from the women and led through this gate. The rest of us were pushed on until at last we arrived at another gate, the entrance to a place they called Birkenau. Here the smell was even stronger, the pink sky almost red, the air closing in on us, feeding on us.
The guards marched us through this gate in rows of five and led us to the front of a long, low building, where two SS women in full uniform were waiting. They pushed us inside a room that smelled of disinfectant, reminding me of the time, now so long ago, when Estera Hurwitz and I were scrubbing the stairs for the Nazis. Whoever could have guessed then how great and cruel the imagination of a human full of hate could be?
"Remove your clothing and queue up for showers!" the SS women shouted.
I glanced over at the two men standing by the entrance. Bubbe stepped forward and spoke to one of the women.
"Please, she is modest, can she not...?"
"How is it that you were not selected?" the officer asked before Bubbe could finish her sentence. "You are too old. You will not live a day."
I studied Bubbe for the first time in a long while. Yes, it was true, she did look old, my youthful bubbe. She had lost so much weight that her skin hung on her bones like an empty burlap sack, and her hair, so black just three years ago, had gone gray like ashes—dull and dead.
"For what was I to be selected?" she asked them.
The two women smirked at one another.
"I am a nurse. Were they wanting someone to do a job? In prison I worked in the kitchen but I am fully qualified—"
"You were a prisoner?"
"Yes, political. We were sent here, sentenced to hard labor."
"Prisoner? Good. It was why you were not selected, but still you will not last. Now you will remove the rest of your clothes."
"But my—"
"Everyone!"
I thanked Bubbe for trying and removed my clothes, cowering behind her as we filed into a brightly lit shower room. The door closed behind us and the showers came on, a cold spray that felt better in my mouth than on my skin. We tried to drink as much as we could.
A door opened at the other end and a voice shouted," Heraus! Heraus!"
Following orders, we hurried, dripping wet, out into another large, bare room where women in striped uniforms grabbed us by the hair and chopped it off. Another woman used a razor and ran it around the crown of our heads. Without time to think, I was shoved forward, where two women grabbed my arms and shaved my armpits. Another woman kicked my legs apart and shaved between them. Again I was pushed forward, where I was doused with a shower of disinfectant that stung like needles on my bare skin. Before I could figure out what was happening, I was outside in the cold October air, wet, naked, and shivering. I looked out in front of me and saw the barbed wire everywhere, and beyond it, nothing, no trees or grass or bushes. Like a warning it spoke to me—"Nothing can grow here, nothing can live here."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chana
WHEN I TURNED AROUND, I found Bubbe standing behind me. We took a second to examine each other and then broke into hysterical laughter.
"You look like a baby bird, Bubbe."