Then, a hiss. I closed my eyes, and tried to picture all the people I had loved in my short life. My parents, Basia, Darija. Rubin and Majer, Josek, Herr Bauer. Even Aron. I wanted to die with their names on my tongue.
I felt a trickle. Water. It was cold and sporadic. The showerheads turned on and off before I managed to turn in a full circle. No gas, no gas, I thought, a litany. Maybe that boy had been wrong. Maybe what happened here was not the same as what had happened in Chełmno. Maybe this was what the soldiers had told us: a work camp.
There it was again: that mewling cry of hope.
“Raus! ” a guard yelled. Dripping, I shuffled quickly out of the shower room and was given clothing. A work dress, a head covering, a jacket with blue and gray stripes. No socks or underwear.
I dressed fast. I wanted to cover up the shame of being naked, indistinguishable from the other women around me. I was still buttoning my jacket when a guard grabbed me and dragged me toward a table. There, a man rubbed alcohol on my left forearm and another man began to write on me. I didn’t understand what he was doing at first—it burned, and I could smell the sear of flesh. I looked down: A14660. I had been branded, like cattle. I had no name anymore.
We were pushed into a hut with no light, and as my eyes adjusted, I could see bunks, three tiers high, with straw laid on each tier as if this were a stable. There were no windows. The building reeked, and packed inside were several hundred women.
I thought of the railcar, how we had been stuffed inside and had gone for days without seeing the sun or stopping to stretch or go to the bathroom. I did not want to go through all that hell again just to die. Better now, I thought.
And before I realized what I was doing, my feet were turning away from the entrance to the hut and I was running with all the strength I could muster, flying across the dirt as best I could in my wooden shoes, toward the electric fence.
I knew, if I got close enough, that I would be free. That Aron and Darija and (please God) my father would remember me as Minka, not as this bald animal, not as a number. My arms stretched outward, as if I were racing toward a lover.
A woman’s voice started to yell. I could hear the angry shouts of a guard, who a moment later collided with me, shoving me down on the ground and landing with his full weight on top of me. He dragged me upright by the collar of my dress and threw me into the barracks, so that I landed sprawled on my face on the concrete floor.
The door was slammed shut. I pushed myself to my knees, only to find someone reaching out a hand to me. “What were you thinking!” a girl said. “You would have died, Minka!”
I squinted. One moment I could not see past the low light and the shorn head and the bruises on her face. And then the next, I recognized Darija.
Just like that, I became human again.
• • •
Darija had been here two days longer than I had, and knew the routine. The Aufseherin oversaw the women’s blocks. She reported to the Schutzhaftlagerführer, the male commandant of the women’s camp. On her first day, Darija had seen him beat to death a woman who stumbled out of her straight line during roll call. Inside the huts were the Stubenältesten and the Blockältesten, who were Jews in charge of the individual rooms of the barrack and the entire barracks, respectively, and who were worse sometimes than the German guards. Our Blockälteste was a Hungarian called Borbala, who reminded me of a giant squid. She stayed in a separate room in the hut, and had a chin that ran right into the fleshy sleeve of her neck and eyes that glinted like chips of coal. Her voice was as deep as a man’s, and she would scream at us in the morning, at 4:00, to rise. It was Darija who told me to sleep with my shoes on, lest another prisoner steal them, and to tuck my bowl inside my shirt as I slept for the same reason. She explained the Bettenbau, the military bed we were expected to fashion out of the straw mattress and the thin blanket. It was, of course, impossible to make straw look as precise as a real mattress. This was just an excuse for Borbala to make someone an example for the rest of us. Darija was the one who told me to run to the toilets, because there were only a limited number for hundreds of us, and we had only a few moments before roll call. Being late was, once again, grounds for a beating. Darija touched her head as she told me this, her temple still blooming with a mottled purple bruise. She had learned the hard way.
At Appell, we were counted, sometimes for hours. We were to stand at attention as Borbala called our numbers. If someone was missing, everything stopped while that person was located—usually sick or dead in the hut. She would be dragged into position, and the count would start over again. We were forced to do “sport”—running in place for hours at a time, then dropping to the ground when Borbala commanded us to do frog leaps. Only after that were rations given: dark water that passed for coffee, a slice of brown bread. “Save half,” Darija told me that first day, and I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. It was the only solid food we got. There would be a watery broth with rotten vegetables for lunch, maybe a broth with rancid meat for supper. It was better, Darija assured me, to go to bed on a full stomach.
Sometimes there were exercises, even though there wasn’t enough food to keep us strong. Sometimes we had to learn German songs and phrases, including basic commands.
All of this was done in the shadow of that long, low building I had seen when we first got off the train, the place with the smokestacks that burned day and night. From those who had been in quarantine longer than we had, we learned that they were crematoria. That Jews had built them. That the only way out of this hellhole was as ash through those chimneys.
Five days after I arrived, and after we had finished the morning Appell, Borbala ordered us all to strip naked. We stood in a line in the courtyard while the man in the white coat I remembered from the ramp paraded by us. With him was the same SS officer whose hand shook—the one I now knew to be the Schutzhaftlagerführer. I wondered if he would recognize me, try to speak in German. He did not even flick his glance over me, however, and why would he have recognized me? I was just another skinny, shaved prisoner. I knew better than to speak or to move, especially with an SS man present. If we made Borbala look bad, we would pay for it later.
The man in the white coat picked eight girls, who were immediately taken from the hut and sent to Block 10, the medical facility. Anyone else who had a scrape or a cut or a burn or a blister was weeded out as well. His eyes passed over Darija, and then settled on my face. I felt the touch of his stare sliding from my forehead to my chin to my breastbone. My teeth started to chatter, in spite of the heat.
He flicked his glance past me, and I heard Darija exhale heavily through her nostrils.
After an hour, those of us who remained were told to dress and to get our bowls. We would be moved out of quarantine, Borbala told us, after we had our morning meal. A girl named Ylonka volunteered to carry the giant pot of coffee because with the task came an extra bread ration. “Look at that,” I murmured to Darija, as we stood in line with our bowls. “The pot is bigger than she is.”
It was true, Ylonka was a tiny thing, but there she was carrying the giant steel tub as if it were filled with manna from Heaven instead of swill. She set it down gently, so not a single drop sloshed over the edge.
Borbala, however, was not as careful. When it came to my turn, nearly half of the coffee spilled onto the ground. I looked at the puddle the Blockälteste had made, which was just enough time for her to notice the disappointment on my face. “So sorry,” she said, in a way that let me know she was not sorry at all, and she held out my slice of bread. Except instead of handing it to me, she dropped it into the mud puddle made by my coffee.
I fell to my knees to grab the bread because even mucked in dirt, it was better than losing an entire ration for the day. But before my fingers could close around it, a boot crushed down on the slice, pushing it deeper into the mud, and hesitating long enough for me to understand the action was deliberate. I squinted into the sunlight and saw the black silhouette of a German officer. I
rocked back on my heels, waiting for him to pass.
When he did, I grabbed the bread from the mud and tried to press it against my dress, to get rid of the worst of the filth. I could not see the officer’s face anymore, but I knew who it was. As he walked away from me, his right hand was still twitching.
• • •
Darija and I shared a bunk with five other women. The hut where we lived was no different from quarantine, except there were more of us—about four hundred crammed into the block. The smells were indescribable—unwashed bodies, sweat, festering sores, rotting teeth, and always in the air around us the sweet, charred, sickly scent of flesh burning. What was new, though, was the condition of these other women. Some had been here for months, and they were no more than skeletons, their skin drawn over their cheekbones and ribs and hips, their eyes sunken and dark. At night, the sleeping quarters were so tight that I could feel the hip bones of the woman behind me, pushed like twin daggers into the small of my back. When one of us rolled over in our sleep the rest of us had to do the same.
I had spent the week trying to get word of my father. Was he in a different part of the camp, working, like I was? Was he wondering if I was alive, too? It was Agnat, a woman who shared the bunk with us, who bluntly told me my father was gone, that he had been gassed that very first day. “What do you think is the business of this camp?” she chided. “Death.”
Agnat had been here for a month and had a mouth on her. She would talk back to the Blockälteste—a woman we called the Beast—and get beaten with a truncheon; she would spit at a guard and get whipped. But she had also fought off a prisoner who tried to steal my jacket in the middle of the night when I was sleeping fitfully. For this small loyalty, I was grateful to her.
Two days ago, there had been an inspection in the hut. We had lined up while the Blockälteste and a guard tossed aside the neat covers we had made on our beds and pulled the bunks away from the wall to see what was being hidden. I knew that prisoners had items stashed—I had seen women with a deck of cards, money, cigarettes. I had seen one girl too sick to eat her midday soup carefully hide it underneath the straw that made up her mattress, so that she could save it for later, even though having any food in the barracks was a serious infraction.
When the guard came to our bunk, he began pulling aside the covers and found, to my surprise, a book by Maria Dąbrowska. “What is this?”
He smacked one of our bunkmates, a girl who was only fifteen, across the face. Her cheek started to bleed where his gold ring had cut into the skin.
“It’s mine,” Agnat said, stepping forward.
I wasn’t convinced that the book was hers. Agnat had come from a small village in Poland and could barely read signs, much less a novel. But she stood proudly in front of the guard, claiming the book, until she was dragged outside and whipped unconscious. I thought of my mother’s advice to me, when the Aussiedlung had begun: Be a mensch. Agnat was this, and more.
Darija and I, along with Helena, the fifteen-year-old, were the ones who picked Agnat up and carried her back into the hut. We gave her some of our evening meal when she was unable to stand to get her own. Another woman, who had been a nurse in her former life, did the best she could to clean the open sores made by the lashes and to bandage them.
We lived with lice and rats. We barely had water for washing. Agnat’s cuts grew red and fierce, swollen with pus. At night, she could not get comfortable. “Tomorrow,” Darija told her, “we will take you to the hospital.”
“No,” Agnat insisted. “If I go, I won’t come back.” The hospital was next to the crematoria. It was called the waiting room because of this.
As I lay in the dark beside Agnat, I could feel the heat of the fever in her body. She grabbed my sleeve. “Promise me,” she said, but she did not finish her sentence, or maybe she did, and I had already fallen asleep.
The next morning when the Beast came in screaming at us, Darija and I ran to the toilets as usual and then lined up for Appell. Agnat, however, was missing. The Beast called her number, twice, and then pointed at us. “Find her,” she demanded, and Darija and I went back into the hut. “Maybe she is too sick to stand,” Darija whispered, when we saw the outline of Agnat’s form beneath the thin blanket.
“Agnat,” I whispered, shaking her shoulder. “You have to get up.”
She didn’t move.
“Darija,” I said. “I think . . . I think she’s . . .”
I couldn’t say it, because saying it would make it real. It was one thing to see the distant, putrid smoke and guess at what was happening in those buildings. It was another to know that a dead woman had been pressed up against me the entire night.
Darija leaned over and closed Agnat’s eyes. Then she grabbed her arm, which was already stiffening. “Don’t just stand there,” Darija muttered, and I leaned over the bunk and took Agnat’s other arm. It was not hard to maneuver her down; she weighed next to nothing. We put her arms around our necks, as if we were school chums posing for a photograph. Then we dragged Agnat’s upright body between us to the courtyard, so that it could still be counted, because if the number was off even by one prisoner they would start over again. We held her upright for the two and a half hours of Appell, as flies buzzed around her eyes and mouth.
“Why is God doing this to us?” I murmured.
“God’s not doing anything to us,” Darija said. “It’s the Germans.”
When the count was finished, we loaded Agnat’s body into a cart with ten other women who had died during the night in our block. I wondered what had become of the Dąbrowska book. If some German soldier had confiscated and destroyed it. Or if there was still room for beauty like that in a world that had come to this.
• • •
Nothing grew in Auschwitz. No grass, no mushrooms, no weeds, no buttercups. The landscape was dusty and gray, a wasteland.
I thought this every morning as I was marched to work, past the shacks that were the men’s barracks and past the incessant operation of the crematoria. Darija and I were lucky, because we had been assigned to Kanada. It was an area where the belongings that had come in on the trains were sorted. The valuables were tallied and given to the guards, who brought them to the SS officer in charge of getting them to Berlin. The clothing went somewhere else. And then there were the items that no one needed: eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, photographs. These were to be destroyed. The reason it was nicknamed Kanada was that we all imagined that country as the land of plenty, and certainly that was what we saw every day as the suitcases piled up in the sheds with every new transport. In Kanada, too, if a guard was looking the other way, it was possible to steal an extra pair of gloves, underwear, a hat. I hadn’t been brave enough to do it, yet, but the nights were turning cooler. It would be worth the risk of punishment, knowing I had a warm layer under this work dress.
But that punishment, it was real, and it was serious. It was bad enough to have guards that watched over us, telling us to work faster and waving their guns. But the SS officer who was in charge of Kanada also spent a portion of the day weaving among us as we worked, to make sure we did not steal. He was a slight man, not much taller than I was. I had seen him drag outside a prisoner who had hidden a gold candlestick up the sleeve of her jacket. Although we did not see the beating, we could hear it. The prisoner was left unconscious in front of the barracks; the officer returned to walk through the aisles where we worked, with a nauseated look on his face. It made him seem human, and if he was human, how could he do this to us?
Darija and I had talked about this. “More likely he was upset he had to get his hands dirty. Besides, what do you care?” she said with a shrug. “All you need to know is that he is a monster.”
But there were all sorts of monsters. For years I had written of an upiór, after all. But upiory, they were the undead. There were monsters that took over the living, too. We had a neighbor in Łód whose husband had been hospitalized, and by the time he came home, had forgotten the name of his wife and
where he lived. He kicked the family’s cat and swore like a sailor and seemed so radically different from the man she knew and loved that she called in a healer. The old woman who’d come to the house said there was nothing to be done; a dybbuk—the soul of someone dead, who would do whatever awful things it could in this new body that it hadn’t been given time to do in its old one—had attached itself to the husband while he was at the hospital. He had been possessed, his mind usurped by a spirit with squatter’s rights.
Secretly, when the SS officer in charge of Kanada passed by, I thought of him as Herr Dybbuk. A human man too weak to force out the evil that had taken up residence in him.
“You are a silly, stupid girl,” Darija said when I mentioned this to her one night, whispering in the bunk we shared. “Not everything is fiction, Minka.”
I did not believe her. Because this—this camp, this horror—was exactly the sort of stuff no one would ever believe as fact. Take the Allies, for example. If they had heard of people being gassed, hundreds at a time, wouldn’t they have already come to save us?
Today I had been given a pair of scissors to cut up the linings of clothes. There was a pile of fur coats I was working my way through. Inside I sometimes found wedding bands, gold earrings, coins, and as I did I turned them over to the guard. I wondered sometimes who had wound up with my boots, and how long it had been before she found the treasure hidden in the heels.
There was always a little ripple of awareness when Herr Dybbuk arrived or departed, as if his presence was an electric shock. Even though I did not turn around to watch, I could hear him approaching with another SS officer. They were speaking, and I eavesdropped on their German conversation as I ripped open a hem.
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