scoop, half filling it. Steadying it on the ground, she uses
her cupped hands to fill it to the top. The women attempt
to copy her with varying degrees of success. They all fill
their buckets before attempting to pick them up. None
of them can; they are too heavy.
‘Empty some out and just put in as much as you can
carry. You’ll toughen up the longer you do it,’ they are
advised.
Cilka and Josie can only manage half-filled buckets,
which doesn’t go unnoticed by the guard standing at the
cart. It was one thing to carry them, another trial to lift
and empty them.
The guard monitoring them looks at the half-empty
buckets.
‘You lot don’t get a break. You have to make up for
being such weak bitches, and get moving.’
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At various points, Cilka sees Antonina writing in a little book, conferring with the guards, answering for her
brigade’s productivity.
* * *
The work is so gruelling that Cilka, Josie and Natalya
are beginning to groan and huff out loud. They watch
enviously when the others get ten minutes to down tools
and take a break. There is a burning sensation across
Cilka’s shoulders, neck and back. When the next clanging
bell sounds several hours later, buckets, picks and other
tools are dropped where they are. Men and women trudge
over to the train tracks, sorting themselves out as they
find the others from their brigade – those they share a
hut with and those from the surrounding huts. They
stand, waiting to be led by their brigadiers, waiting for
the signal to walk.
Once they are allowed, they silently trudge back down
the track, stopping again outside the compound gates.
Antonina Karpovna hands her piece of paper to the
administrative guard, who counts the women in. They
follow Antonina back to their hut, shuffling and sore,
where a few embers glow without giving off any heat.
Natalya throws some coal into the stove to reignite it.
Cilka is amazed she can find the strength to even look at
the coal, let alone lift a scuttle of it. They all fall onto
their beds, pulling blankets up over their heads. No one
speaks.
What passes for their dinner does nothing to restore
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their energy. Returning to their hut, many retreat back to bed, but some hover around the stove.
‘What are you looking at?’
Cilka, lying on her bed, recognises the voice. Elena.
‘Not your ugly face,’ she hears Natalya reply.
Cilka pushes up on one elbow to see where the exchange
of words will go.
‘I’ll take you out, bitch, if you don’t keep out of my
face.’
‘Leave me alone, you bully. Leave all of us alone,’ a
defiant Natalya snaps back, standing up from her bed
‘Natalya, sit down. She’s not worth it,’ Olga says.
Elena gives out a hiss.
Exhaustion has flattened Cilka. She understands the
anger, the lashing out. When the rage can’t be targeted at
your captors, for fear of death, it finds other ways out.
She wonders how old Elena is, what has happened to her.
Maybe it is that nothing has happened to her before. Like
Cilka, before that horrible place. She’d had all the love,
food, clothing, comfort she could possibly need. When it
is all taken away overnight . . . Well, no one knows how
they will react.
She must stop herself from thinking back. Tomorrow
. . . Tomorrow will be a repeat of today, and the next day,
and the next week, and for Cilka the next fifteen years.
Despair overwhelms her.
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Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943
Wrapped in a warm, full-length coat, Cilka stands in the
snow outside Block 25. As she had feared, her block contains women who are spending their last days on earth, often too sick to move, the life already gone from their eyes. This is Cilka’s world now, and she exists within it in order to stay alive. Similarly dressed kapos approach her with women
and girls trailing behind – emaciated, wraith-like figures, many holding each other up. Each kapo tells the women
they have escorted that Cilka is their block leader, they are to do as she says. They are instructed to wait outside in the cold for the SS officer who will do the roll call.
Cilka feels as inanimate as the snow. Her eyes blur over
the bony, bowed bodies, but her feelings have been taken
away. It started when Schwarzhuber placed her in that tiny room at the front of Block 25 and began his regular visits.
She found she could become just a series of limbs, just bone, muscle and skin. She didn’t choose it. It just happened. She thinks it might be a bit like when she was a child and badly scraped her knee – though she saw the blood it took a long time to register the hurt.
Cilka stands there, saying nothing as she waits to be told that all the women coming into Block 25 that evening are
present. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day if the Nazis
decide they have something better to do, they will all be taken to the gas chamber that looks like a little white house.
And they will be killed.
A senior SS officer approaches, along with the last group 56
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of ten women. His swagger stick strikes out, randomly hitting unsuspecting women. Something breaks through
Cilka’s glazed state and she hurries over to meet them.
‘Hurry up, you lazy good-for-nothing bitches!’ she calls
out. ‘I’ve got them,’ she says to the SS officer, stepping in front of him as he is about to bring his stick down on the head of a nearby girl. Cilka gives her a hard shove, sending her sprawling face first into the snow.
‘Get up and join the others,’ she screams at the girl.
The SS officer watches, nods to Cilka and walks away.
He doesn’t see Cilka bend down and hoist her arm under
the girl’s armpit, helping her to her feet.
‘Quickly, join the others,’ she says more gently.
Cilka sees the SS officer turn back, and screams out at
the women.
‘Get inside now! I’m staying out here freezing because
you’re too slow and lazy to move. Go, go!’ she calls.
Turning to the SS officer, she gives him a big smile.
She follows the women inside, shutting the door behind
her.
The women have found places to sit or lie down, though
there is barely room. Sometimes they spill over into the
courtyard, stacked like animals. Gaunt faces stare at Cilka
– looks of terror and helplessness. She longs to explain that if she screams at them the SS won’t come in.
The words won’t come.
She is sixteen. Possibly the youngest person in the room
at that moment. And she will live longer than them all.
She sees one woman with sick crusted across her cheek.
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Whatever feeling she let in a moment ago closes back over.
She is as flat and blank as the snow, as the wa
lls. As the women’s noises rise – the wailing and crying and the beating of palms on walls, the praying and calling the names of
the loved and lost, Cilka turns and goes to the front of the block, into her room, and lies down.
* * *
The days have been long and achingly difficult. Cilka is
having to draw on reserves of physical strength she never
knew she had. Cilka and Josie have been trialling different
methods for how they parcel out their bread ration across
the day for best energy efficiency. At night the women
often talk about food. When they broach topics of family,
home, they stay close to this – of meals shared. Sauerkraut
and mushrooms, cottage cheese, sausages, pierogi, fresh
fruit. Cilka has to reach back years into her memory to
join in, and she has to fight a feeling of envy that comes
from knowing these memories are much closer for the
women around her.
It doesn’t seem that any of them are ready to go into
great detail about their arrests, about recent events, about
where their families are now. Or perhaps they haven’t
worked out whether they can really trust one another.
Though they do wonder aloud about the missing.
Margarethe, in particular, a young Russian woman with a
round face and dimples, who, Cilka instinctively likes,
cannot stop worrying about her husband. Josie thinks of
her brothers; and Olga, though she knows where her
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children are, worries she will not hear from them, will not know whether they are all right. Cilka thinks about everyone
she has lost, but she cannot even begin to express it.
One night, Olga says to Cilka, ‘Klein . . . that’s quite
common as a Jewish surname, isn’t it?’
Cilka nods. ‘I suppose it is.’ She stands. ‘I’ll go and get
the coal.’
* * *
As the women return from work one week into their stay,
Elena announces that Natalya is to empty the shit buckets
tomorrow, for the second day in a row. The first heavy
snow has begun, and as Elena says this, she snuggles down
tighter into her coat.
‘I’ll do it,’ Josie says. ‘It’s been a while since my turn.’
‘I’m in charge here,’ Elena says, standing. ‘I’ll say who
does what.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Josie fights back. ‘No one put you in
charge. We’ll share the work.’
Cilka is surprised when Elena doesn’t continue the
exchange. She simply narrows her eyes and sits back down,
huddled in the coat.
The women stand around the stove, letting the heat ease
their aching muscles, waiting for the clanging on metal to
indicate that it’s time to go to the mess for dinner.
From behind, Josie is violently shoved in the back.
She reacts by raising her hand, reaching for something
to brace herself against, and it lands on the stove flue.
Her scream echoes off the walls.
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Josie holds her arm out, like it’s something she wants to shake off. A thousand thoughts run through Cilka’s
head, images of sick and injured women and what happens
to them. No, not Josie. Cilka grabs her, propelling her out
of the building, burying her burnt hand in the snow that
now covers patches of the ground outside. Josie hisses
through her teeth and starts crying audibly.
‘Shush now,’ Cilka says, a little harsher than intended.
After a few minutes, she pulls the hand from the snow
and examines the damage. The palm and all four fingers
on Josie’s right hand are an angry red, her thumb the only
untouched part.
Cilka pushes the hand back into the snow and turns
Josie’s face towards her. It is starkly pale, as white as the ground.
‘Stay here, I’ll be right back.’
Cilka storms back inside, pausing, staring at the women
gathered around the stove.
A plaintive, ‘How is she?’ goes unanswered.
‘Who did this? Who pushed her?’ Cilka had only seen
the quick movement of Josie ejected from the huddle,
falling. She has her suspicions though.
Most of the women look away, but Cilka notices Natalya
glance towards the culprit.
Cilka walks up to Elena sitting snug on her bed.
Elena snarls at Cilka, ‘I could break you in two.’
Cilka understands the difference between an empty
threat – a display of power borne of helplessness – and a
true intention to harm others.
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‘Plenty of people scarier than you have tried to break me,’ Cilka says.
‘And I’ve fought men ten times your size,’ Elena says.
The women around them move away, giving them space,
certain a fight is about to start.
‘Get up,’ Cilka demands.
Elena continues staring defiantly. A fire is flaring inside
Cilka.
‘I will ask you one more time. Get up.’
The two women face off for several moments before
Elena slowly stands up, pouting her lip a little, like a child.
‘Elena, I am going to take your blanket off, hope the
sheet underneath is not riddled with lice, and tear the end
off. You will not try to stop me. Do you understand?’
Elena huffs, but nods slowly. The other women have
closed the space again, standing behind Cilka now that
the dynamic has revealed itself to be in her favour.
With one eye on Elena, Cilka pulls the blanket free.
She takes the bottom of the sheet and brings it to her
mouth and tears at it with her teeth until she has made a
small rip. Using her hands, she pulls a strip free.
‘Thank you, Elena. You can remake your bed.’
Cilka turns to the doorway.
Antonina Karpovna is standing there, her arm against
the door frame barring Cilka from leaving.
‘Am I going to have trouble with you?’ she asks.
‘ Nyet.’ Cilka answers ‘no’ in Russian.
Antonina removes her arm. Cilka walks back outside,
where Josie sits in the snow as the sun goes down, her
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body rocking from the cold and pain. Cilka wipes the snow from her injured hand before wrapping it in the torn
sheet. Helping Josie to her feet, her arm around her, she
steers her back inside. It feels strange to be so close to
someone. The last person she had voluntarily touched like
this had been Gita. Those gathered around the stove move
aside to let them get as close as they can to the warmth.
The dinner alarm sounds. Josie refuses to leave her bed.
Cilka feels a beat of frustration, anger, at her helplessness.
She almost leaves her there. Then she thinks of how much
worse it will be if Josie doesn’t eat, loses strength.
‘Josie, come on,’ she says, and helps her up.
In the mess, Cilka hands Josie her mug of soup. She
takes it in her left hand. When a chunk of stale bread is
thru
st at her Josie can’t accept it. It falls onto the floor.
A mess guard watches, waiting to see what Cilka, next
in line, will do. If she helps, she can probably expect to
be punished. If she doesn’t, Josie’s strength will suffer. Josie bends down, holding tight to her mug, looking pleadingly
to Cilka to help. With their eyes connected, Cilka places
her own piece of bread between her teeth, holding it there
– a silent instruction. Josie carefully puts her mug on the
floor, picks up the piece of bread, and grips it between her
teeth before picking up her mug and moving on.
Once they find a place to stand, away from the guard’s
stare, Cilka takes the piece of bread from Josie’s mouth
and helps her tuck it up the sleeve of her coat.
* * *
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Back in the hut, the subdued women all ask Josie how her hand is. She bravely tells them it will be all right. Cilka is glad that eating has made her more hopeful.
Sitting on her bed, Cilka watches as the snow turns
liquid on the outside of the window, tears running down
the glass. She asks Josie to show her her burned hand.
Carefully she unwinds the makeshift bandage, the last
layer sticking to the blistered skin. Josie shoves her other
hand in her mouth to keep from crying out in pain.
‘It looks better,’ she says, trying to comfort Josie with
the words she doesn’t believe herself. She knows how
important it is to not give up.
Natalya comes over and sits down beside Cilka, looking
at the wound.
‘I’ll ask Antonina tomorrow if there is a hospital or sick
bay here. If there is, they will be able to help you and put
a proper dressing on it.’
Cilka knows anyone wanting to get out of work won’t
be looked kindly upon. But if Josie’s hand doesn’t heal,
things will be much worse. She nods.
‘Thanks, Natalya,’ says Cilka.
They all settle in their beds. The night envelops them,
but dawn still arrives early and Cilka wakes with a jolt,
heart racing, before the silence and stillness puts her back
to sleep.
* * *
Antonina arrives in the morning, looking tired. She word-
lessly indicates for them to get moving. Natalya goes to
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say something about Josie but catches Cilka’s shake of the head. As they walk, Cilka whispers, ‘Let her have breakfast first, otherwise she might miss out.’ She’s also very
Cilka's Journey (ARC) Page 6