“Please,” I whispered to Stasha as her efforts inspired a new hole in one of the stockings, “let me have the past, and I’ll take the present too. I just don’t want the future.”
That was how the role of keeper of time and memory came to be mine. From then on, the acknowledgment of days was my responsibility alone.
September 3, 1944
In our former life, I was used to doing the talking for us. I had been the outgoing one, the one with proven methods of getting us out of trouble, the one who negotiated exchanges with peers and authority figures alike. This role suited me. I was everyone’s friend, and a fair representative for us both.
We soon found out that Stasha was better fit for socializing in our new world. A fearlessness had entered her. She set her teeth with severity when she smiled, and she walked with a girlish approximation of a swagger, like a movie cowboy or a comic-book hero.
On our first morning, her chatter was endless. She asked questions of anyone she could, to try to ease our adjustment. The first to receive her inquiry was a man who introduced himself to us as Zwillingesvater, or Twins’ Father. He saw us respond to the oddity of this name with curious faces, but he did not try to explain it except to say that all of the children called him this—the Zoo, we would find, had a habit of assigning people new names and identities, and even adults were no exception to this rule.
“When do we see our families?” Stasha asked Twins’ Father as he sat on a crate recording all our facts for Mengele’s use. We were sitting with him behind the boys’ barracks with an irrelevant globe idling at his feet in the dirt. The travels of this globe—a relic that was usually kept in the storehouse—were much envied by us all, as the object was able to move from camp to camp, while we remained pinned within the Zoo. One of the boys—a Peter Abraham, whom Mengele had dubbed “a member of the intelligentsia”—served as one of the doctor’s messengers, and in this position, he was able to steal this little globe, to tuck it beneath his coat and toddle from block to block as if afflicted with some strange pregnancy. Peter stole it in the mornings, and in the evenings, one of the guards stole it back. In this way, the world was possessed and repossessed, and over time, it grew more battered in its travels. Holes appeared, borders were blurred, whole countries faded away altogether. Still, it was a globe, and it tended to be a useful thing to have around, because during interviews like these, one could focus on its surface instead of Twins’ Father’s face, though I suppose both were equally worn and discouraged in appearance.
“We see our families on holidays,” Twins’ Father told her in his patient way. “Or so Mengele says.”
Twins’ Father was twenty-nine years old and a veteran of the Czech army. He carried himself like a soldier still but had a weariness that was likely exacerbated by his charges. Impressed by his military pedigree and German fluency, Mengele had entrusted him with overseeing the boys’ barracks and processing the paperwork of all the incoming twins, paperwork that was later sent to the genetics department at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
If it could be said that Mengele ever did a good thing, that good thing was appointing Twins’ Father to his post. The boys loved him; they clung to him as he taught them lessons—German and geography, mostly—and he kicked a rag ball around the soccer field with them in odd little fits of games. There were mothers of newborn multiples who were permitted to live in the Zoo in the interest of assisting the development of their babies, and they cooed over Twins’ Father, saying that he would make a fine head of the family someday, but the man winced at this praise, and just carried on in his gentle and resourceful way. We girls were quite jealous of the boys for this ally, having only Ox as our designated authority. We learned nothing of where we were from Ox. From other girls in the barracks, we learned that Mengele’s Zoo had once been near the Romany camp. But now, the Romanies were dead, as every last one had been exterminated on August 2, 1944; their eradication was seen as a necessity by camp authorities, who were appalled by the rampant disease and starvation among them. This was not a problem of proper rations—the adults were clearly withholding food from the children. Romanies would rather sing and dance all day than address their filth. All that could be done with such a people was to end them.
There were rumors that Mengele tried to intervene. Whether this was true, no one knew. We knew only that the Romanies were gassed, and we, the twins of Auschwitz, remained. Directly before our compound, there was an empty plot of land where the Germans collected the dead and the near-dead. This plot filled and emptied in terrible repetition. This was our immediate view.
We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high electric fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else’s in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of the camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada’s structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn’t imagine the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculated it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.
The day after our arrival, Twins’ Father remained efficient and stoic as he approached our paperwork, but there were times in which his uncertainties seemed to surface as he considered the import of every answer and the effect it might have on our lives. I watched his hand waver between one box and another before imposing a hesitant check mark.
“Now tell me,” he asked, “which of you came first?”
“This matters?” Stasha had never been fond of this question.
“To him, it all matters. My sister Magda and I, we don’t know who came first. But we say that I did, just to please him. So tell me, Pearl, who was first?”
“I was,” I admitted.
As Twins’ Father and I continued with the details, Stasha directed her questions to Dr. Miri, who was waiting to collect the finished paperwork and deliver it to the laboratory. Dr. Miri was a beautiful doctor—like a lily, people were fond of saying, a solemn and thoughtful kind of flower. She reminded us of Mama a little, with her dark hair and too-big eyes and crooked mouth, but she was more doll-like, and the expressions that crossed her face often struck me as very strange because they were so distant, so far away. They were not unlike the expressions one might have while underwater watching disturbances occur on the waves above.
Even more remarkable than Dr. Miri’s beauty was the fact that Mengele allowed it to remain untouched. Most of the beauties who entered Mengele’s view emerged from it much changed, as he could not bear admiring them. He put beauties on one of two paths—the Ibi path or the Orli path. If you were on the Orli path, you might be beautiful on the day of your arrival, but on the very next you’d be given a disguise; Mengele would puff up your belly and swell your legs to sausages, or he’d turn your skin to wax and set it to run with sores. If you were on the Ibi path, you could go to work in the Puff; you could lean from the window and flutter like a rare, colorful bird and listen to the madam negotiate your price with t
he men knocking at the door. Dr. Miri’s path, the path of a Jewish doctor respected by Mengele, was the rarest one of all.
Orli and Ibi were Dr. Miri’s sisters. She didn’t see them much. If a person wanted to make Miri cry, all he had to do was mention Ibi and Orli. Mengele did this from time to time, whenever he found her work in the laboratory unsatisfactory or wanted to compel her to do things she did not want to do. I would come to witness such exchanges frequently in the days ahead, but on that first day, there was only Dr. Miri, standing there, waiting for our file.
“When do we leave?” Stasha asked her. A pause hung in the air.
“There are plans for that,” Dr. Miri said finally, after exchanging a look with Twins’ Father, the kind of look that adults use when approaching delicate subjects that they’ve approached many times before and still have yet to resolve. “We’ve started the plans but we don’t know—”
She was saved from answering when a woman appeared in the doorway with her infants in her arms, two bundles swaddled in gray cloth, their faces tucked away from view.
Sometimes, when twins were still babies, their mothers were allowed to live in the Zoo alongside them to serve as nursemaids. Clotilde was one such mother. Everyone knew who Clotilde was because her husband had killed an SS man; he’d seized a pistol from the guard, issued a fatal shot, and led a flicker of an uprising. Three SS were felled before the end of this siege, and care was taken to ensure that the hanging of this rebel was witnessed by all. But instead of inspiring fear, his death bred a hero’s tale. Her children would always have that legacy, Clotilde was fond of claiming, but their father’s fame was apparently of little comfort to the babies. They whimpered and kicked their tiny feet against their dingy wrappings, as if to protest their patriarch’s violent end.
Stasha drew close to Clotilde and tried to inspect the bundles. I was afraid she would ask to hold the babies—she tended to think herself more capable than she really was—but thankfully, she remained interested only in her own questions.
“What do we eat?” she asked Clotilde, who passed one of the babies to Dr. Miri to admire. I saw Dr. Miri stiffen at the sight of the child, but Clotilde seemed blissfully unaware of this reaction, too invested in answering Stasha with a tone of educational bitterness.
“Soup that isn’t soup!” she proclaimed with glee.
“I’ve never heard of such a soup before. What’s in a soup like that?”
“Today? Boiled roots. Tomorrow? Boiled roots. After that? Boiled roots and a bit of nothing. Does that sound good to you?”
“There are things that sound better.” Stasha nodded at the babies. “Your twins are lucky not to have to eat soup like that.”
“Pray for better, then,” Clotilde instructed. “And if your prayers aren’t answered, then eat your prayers. Prayer alone can keep a body full.” The babies saw the absurdity of this, and their whimpers assumed the turbulence of ear-piercing bawls.
“We don’t pray,” Stasha told her, raising her voice to be heard above the wails.
We’d stopped praying in the fall of 1939. November 12. Like many who stop praying, it was a familial event, spurred by disappearance. Although, to be most accurate, I should say that prayer experienced a surge for one week, then two, and it wasn’t until the first thaw that it died entirely. By the time the bluebells thrust their heads up in the soil, prayer had become a buried thing.
I wasn’t about to explain this to Clotilde, whose eyebrows were already arching disdainfully at us. She regarded the heads of her babies and covered them with her scarf, as if hoping to protect them from our lack of faith.
“You will reconsider your position when you get hungry enough,” she muttered, and then she and Twins’ Father had a quick conversation in Czech, the meaning of which was unknown to us, but my impression from the blunt ends of their words and their shattered delivery was that each was telling the other to know his or her place. As the fray mounted, a torn and fearful look entered Dr. Miri’s face—not unlike the expression a child has while witnessing her parents fight—and she stepped between the two quarrelers.
“But maybe,” she suggested to us, her voice winsome despite the fact that she had to shout to be heard, “maybe, instead of praying, you will wish. You do wish, don’t you? You can have as many wishes as you want here.”
Her manner was so even, so practiced, that I realized that much of Dr. Miri’s work in the Zoo had to involve easing similar conflicts to a halt. She was successful in this case. Clotilde spat on the floor, signaling her surrender in the argument, and Twins’ Father smiled a little at the fanciful nature of this proposed resolution before returning to our interview.
“Where have you lived?” he asked us. “Any other siblings? Your parents—both Polish Jews, yes? Your birth—natural? Cesarean? Any complications?”
We could hear the travel of his pen as he sorted out all the details we gave him, and then, right as we were nearly finished, a troop of guards flooded past; the dust rose, the dogs barked, and Twins’ Father threw his pen to the ground with a force that made us jump a little. The babies’ wails increased. The man put his head in his hands, and we thought he might be going to sleep forever, that he’d decided to stop living altogether, just like that. We’d heard that such phenomena had a habit of occurring in this place. But after we’d watched the top of his prematurely gray head for a minute, he looked back up at us, thoroughly alive.
“Forgive me,” he said with a weak smile. “I ran out of ink. That’s all. I am always running out of ink. I am always—” For a second, it appeared as if he might sink again, but then he righted himself, just as suddenly as he had before, and smiled at us broadly while waving his hand. “Go, now, for roll call.”
We began to turn away from him, obedient, but then he gestured for us to wait. He made a point of looking directly into our eyes. It was obvious that what he said to us was something he repeated often, to any child who would listen.
“Your first assignment for class is to learn the other children’s names. Recite them to each other. When a new child comes, learn that name too. When a child leaves us, remember the name.”
I swore I would remember. Stasha swore too. And then she asked after his real name.
Twins’ Father stared down at the papers for one minute, maybe two. He seemed lost in the answers he’d so carefully composed, as if all the check marks and little boxes he’d inked in black had blacked him out too, and then, just as we’d resigned ourselves to leaving without an answer, he lifted his eyes to us.
“It was Zvi Singer once,” he said. “But that is not important now.”
We stood for roll call in that early-morning light, our noses twitching in an effort to shake the stench of ash and the unwashed. September’s heat lingered in the air. It bounced off us in waves, haloed us with dust. This roll call was the first time I saw all of Mengele’s subjects gathered together: the multiples, the giants, the Lilliputs, the limbless, the Jews he’d deemed curiously Aryan in appearance. While some regarded us innocently, others held suspicion in their stares, and I had to wonder how long we would be considered zugangi. We did our best to ignore these looks as we sawed through our hard heels of breakfast bread and drank our muddy, fake coffee. Most of my bread I gave to Stasha. But I drank all of my fake coffee, which was very sour, like it had been brewed in an old shoe at the bottom of the river, according to my sister. When Stasha drank her coffee, her throat took offense and she was compelled to spit into the distance. Unfortunately, the Rabinowitzes were contained in that distance—they were all lined up to receive their breakfast—and Stasha’s spittle insulted the eldest son of the family, as it landed squarely on the lapel of his suit coat.
The Rabinowitzes were Lilliputs. There was a whole family of them, complete with a baton-wielding patriarch, and they all still dressed in the velvets and silks of their performance costumes, colorful garments edged with gilt and lace and swinging with tassels. The hair of the women was pompadoured high, and the wavy beards of the
men streamed behind them like banners in a parade. They were an ostentatious sight, and though I didn’t share the sentiment, I could see why others resented them. For one, where else could one find an intact family in Auschwitz? And for two, they were among the grandest beneficiaries of Mengele’s attentions. His marvel over the family not only put them in a superior state of mind but blessed them with a spacious room to themselves in the infirmary, and their quarters brimmed with elusive comforts: Tables draped with lace and a window frilled with pink voile curtains. A full tea set painted with a willow-tree pattern. A miniature armchair in plush leather, big enough to seat a lamb. Mengele had even given them a radio, which Mirko, the eldest son, a teenager, was entrusted with. Mirko always sang along with that radio, even when there weren’t words to the music; he’d invent words, just to have something to sing. He was the one Stasha was unfortunate enough to strike with spittle.
“You take care who you spit on, zugang,” Mirko said to her through gritted teeth.
I tried to wipe the spittle from his coat as I apologized, but he withdrew, as if doubly insulted by my efforts, and addressed the fabric with a swipe of his hat brim. Stasha stared at him all the while, mesmerized, her eyes spreading themselves wider than I’d thought our eyes could go. They grew as if to make more room to inspect the curiosity before her, and her appraisal was obvious, verging on ill-mannered.
“Haven’t seen my kind before, have you?” Mirko challenged.
“You are not our first,” Stasha lied. “We’ve seen shows, lots of shows. We used to go to the theater all the time. We saw a whole troupe of people like you once.”
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