Unravelled

by Anna Scanlon

  In the three months we were there, before Mengele began his serious work on us, we had had blood drawn several times a week. They had tied us both to cold, metal chairs to make sure they could get the proper amount of blood without us moving and squealing. We were bound so tightly that my forearms began to fall asleep, and just then, one of Mengele's workers would quickly jab a needle into each arm, the blood slurping into the vials until I felt woozy. Hajna had actually lost consciousness a couple of times, her head tilting forward against the restraints, her eyelids lolling shut.

  "Hajna!" I would cry, fighting against my own restraints. My father said his patients sometimes passed out when he took blood, and he would quickly stop and give them smelling salts to revive them. But they didn't stop. They only pumped blood until her veins seemed dry, leaving her to hang limply like a rag doll. At least then, they reasoned, she wouldn't kick or cry. Only when they had taken their fill would they give her smelling salts. She would wake up, blinking her eyes rapidly and looking at me in a state of confusion.

  We also had our eyes "changed" once, but not with needles like many of the other children spoke about. Mengele's assistants merely tipped our heads back and dropped some chemicals in our eyes, causing a stinging and burning sensation on contact. Our vision went blurry for a couple of hours and Hajna complained that she couldn't see. I had to lead her to the bathroom and help her relieve herself. Hajna's loss of sight terrified me. If children lost their sight permanently, the child and his twin were often taken away in the truck and never seen again. Our lives depended on one another to stay healthy, to stay strong. The death of one twin meant the execution of the other. They were dissected and parts of their bodies were sent to Berlin for further inspection. To my relief, Hajna's sight gradually came back and we were safe, at least for the time being. Later, Mengele and his workers shined lights in our eyes and even touched the whites of them with their gloved hands. I flinched several times and was hit on the back of the neck and told to be still.

  "Ah-ah!" Mengele chastised the woman who had hit me, causing a small bruise on the back of my neck. "Don't ruin them."

  No. We were only his to ruin.

  We boarded the truck that early October morning, our blankets wrapped around us for a layer of extra warmth. We held one another's hands, surveying the other children who would be delivered to Mengele for his experiments. They were all shivering, too, some of their mouths chattering from a mixture of fright and the chill of the early autumn air.

  Once at the clinic, we were made to undress to our undershirts and panties and strapped to a wooden stretcher, side by side. We turned our heads in a mirrored direction to look at one another, to silently tell our twin that each was there for the other.

  Over the course of the next month, this same scenario repeated itself over and over, like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. Mengele's assistants started IVs, injecting mystery solvents through the tubing. Sometimes I would break out in hives or run a fever, but it was mostly Hajna who seemed to get sick. We would later discover that this was because I was the "control twin" and Hajna, the "experimental twin", the one who received all of the substances and diseases. If she died, Mengele would dissect both of us to compare the damage in her body versus my healthy one.

  Hajna would often shiver with fever; sometimes her body would swell, expanding like a balloon at a birthday party, and then go back to normal. A couple of times, a nurse mumbled that Hajna probably wouldn't live through the night unless the antidote was successful. Thankfully, it always was. Gradually, we became accustomed to the sound of Mengele's boots or his masked assistants. This nightmare, this horror movie, had become our reality and had taken the place of normal. Instead of dreading it, we had come to expect it.

  The paradox of Auschwitz was that our lives gradually adjusted to the routine there, as if it were regular life. We woke up every morning and stood in the mud, rain or shine, and we were counted and recounted, as if the Germans feared one of us would melt away in the night. Then, we'd wait for our numbers to be called. If they were, we braced ourselves for painful injections. Some of my veins collapsed in my right arm and sometimes the staff would then hunt for a vein in my neck. If our numbers weren't called, we merely spent the day watching the gypsies on the other side of the fence, cheering the boys on at soccer, drawing on the walls with coal or searching the other side of the camp to see if any of the ghosts coming to and from work detail could possibly be of any relation to us. Seeing people shot on the other side of the fence was hardly irregular. The first time it happened, I let a hoarse scream out of my throat involuntarily. I whipped my head around to see a man fall limp and loose, like a rag doll on the other side of the barbed wire. The more I heard the popping guns and the more I saw prisoners fall lifeless, the more it became normal, as routine as once eating eggs in the morning or doing arithmetic equations each evening before mother made us hot tea.

  The routine had become such that I barely even feared the injections anymore, with their angry needles pushing a mystery substance through my blood stream. My father talked to us about how chronically sick children gradually became less and less afraid of medical procedures. Instead of crying when they had their blood drawn, the way we used to, they sat stoically and let the nurse pull the life force from their limbs. We had become like them.

  Only a few things marked the passage of time. The gypsy camp was liquidated, another term for killed off, and not a mouse seemed to remain in the once lively quarters. The night before they were killed, the SS sealed off their barracks and locked them inside by nailing their doors shut. The night was punctuated with cries and fists banging on the wooden doorframe, and pleas for mercy. The SS weren't merciful. One evening, the screaming finally stopped and I fell asleep in the respite of silence. In the morning, there was nothing left of the camp but a loud, echoing nothingness. There was no more music and no more singing and the little girl who stood at the fence with her doll was merely a memory.

  While many children seemed to forge friendships with one another in the camp, Hajna and I stayed closed off, becoming more attached to one another. We realized survival depended on each other, so we used one another for entertainment and support. Occasionally, we would join the other children by making drawings on the wooden slats with Twins' Father overseeing us. Once, we had even found a jump rope, probably stolen from another girl who was already ashes, and used it to play with a couple of other sets of twins around our age. Hajna tried to impress them by doing her cartwheels in the middle of jumping, the same way she had tried to impress Daniel and Samuel when she broke the bust. The other girls giggled, impressed with her agility. And then, those girls became but a pile of dust as well.

  One day in the chill of November, the medical experiments stopped. They just stopped, as if Mengele had evaporated into thin air, like a Houdini disappearing act. We had been in the clinic the day before. Hajna had received an injection that had made her lips and neck puffy, but the antidote she was given had made the swelling subside. She walked around a little woozy, but she was at least alive. I had noticed in the night that she had felt hot to the touch, but by morning her fever had broken and she stood next to me in line to be counted with the rest of the twins. To our surprise, no numbers were called, and we were free to do whatever we wanted, within the confines of our cage, of course.

  Rumors began to spread like wildfire, hot on the tongues of the older twins who had information passed to them from the ghosts on the other side of the fence. The Germans were losing the war. They were abandoning Auschwitz, leaving us alone. Words danced on everyone's lips, fear that they would simply kill everyone before they left, or excitement that maybe the Germans would simply disappear, turning us over to our liberators.

  December came and went, and the camp became nothing but chaos. Everyday the SS began herding groups of prisoners away from the camp, toward the great unknown. They looked as if they were marching off to work detail, but never returned. I spent the cold and icy month wrapped in
a lice-ridden blanket, my hair greasy and dirty, as I scanned the crowds for my mother or father or Lujza, but I could never make them out.

  By January, Hajna had fallen extremely ill, her mouth swelling up once more, her feet icy to the touch, but her head dripping with a feverish sweat. I became her nurse, fetching her food and water, stroking her hair and putting my body over hers to try and keep her warm during the chill of the night.

  "We're leaving with the SS," an older boy burst into our barracks and announced. "You can stay here or go with us."

  He delivered the ultimatum briskly, his chest heaving at the words. To stay meant risking death. If we left, Hajna might slip away, too. And there was no Mengele to put me out of my misery if my sister was gone. I put my body over hers and whispered in her ear that we weren't leaving. She nodded slowly, as if it pained her, telling me on a whisper the muscles ached everywhere in her body.

  Some twins chose to stay with us, burying themselves in blankets and straw in case the SS decided to simply burst in and shoot everyone. Others, alarmed by the bombs and firecrackers exploding outside, packed up their meager belongings, made coats out of their blankets and got ready for the journey into the unknown.

  "They're blowing up the place!" Maria, the girl who had warned us about the chimneys, announced from her perch on the top row of bunks. She scrunched closer to the window as several other girls crowded around her. I turned my head to see one of the chimneys explode. This was the second time it had happened, the first time was during a revolt back in October. We had heard whisperings about it. Then, there was screaming and yelling before the crack and sounds of gunfire in the distance. Now, there was just a "Boom!" and it was all over.

  The twins who had chosen to leave were swept away in the chaos of the camp, prisoners leaving left and right, SS leading them away on foot as the officers rode comfortably in sleds or on horseback. The twins silently joined the ranks of those we had watched on the other side of the fence, marching away from Auschwitz and into the woods. It felt like the world was ending.

  After a few days of madness, the gallop of horses' hooves, screams and gunshots, it all went still. There were no more shouts in German, no more blocks of ghostly prisoners marching away into the woods. There were no more gunshots, no more firecrackers and no more explosions. The smoke stopped bellowing from the chimney, the sky turning to a more natural winter gray.

  Gradually, those of us who had been left behind crawled out of our hiding places, like woodland creatures in the springtime. Hajna remained in her bunk, delirious and blabbering about oatmeal and langos while I lay on my back, drawing on the bunk above me with a pencil Twins' Father had given me, forcing myself in and out of sleep. Finally, I, too, stepped out of the bunk to see what had happened. There were no more rations of bread and soup, no morning roll call. Our stomachs did hungry flip-flops, having gone without food for more than two days.

  On the third day, I told Hajna I would be right back. She gave an "mmmm" of acknowledgement, although I wasn't quite sure she understood. I picked up our tin cups in an effort to melt enough snow to give us something to drink. As I wandered outside the barrack, I noticed emaciated prisoners, dressed in nothing but rags wandering around and tripping over the banks of snow. They were wearing even less clothing than I was, some of them completely naked except for the blankets full of holes over their bony bodies. I suddenly felt guilty to be wearing as much as I was, even if it was still insufficient for the harsh Polish winter.

  "Little girl!" a voice called to me from afar in Hungarian as I busied myself filling snow into the cup, scooping it like ice cream. After meager rations became none, the ice and snow seemed like a veritable feast.

  "Little girl!"

  The voice came closer and closer. I saw it belonged to a woman. She was running toward me, the fat completely melted off of her body, her eyes hardly visible in the canyons of her eye sockets. Her hair was cut extremely short, what she had flailing about as though it had never been brushed.

  "I didn't know there were children here! I thought they were all gone," her thin, purplish hand gestured toward the sky, her meatless fingers flickering like falling snowflakes.

  I shook my head, continuing to scoop up the snow on the ground

  "Come with me!" she shouted. Her eyes were wild, crazed with hunger and something else I couldn't quite identify.

  "No!" I cried as she weakly pulled me by the arm. "My sister is in our bunk. She's sick and I need to bring her something to eat."

  "Come!" she urged, as if she hadn't heard me. For the first time in months, tears ran down my face. They were warm, almost hot, against my frozen cheeks. "I'll give you anything you want."

  I secured the tin cups around my waist with a rope and followed her. I had kept the rope around my waist just to make sure I wouldn't lose our tin cups in the craziness. I didn't know why I had decided to follow her, but I planted my feet in the snow and trudged next to her toward a warehouse in the distance, my good white shoes ill equipped for the snow. Along the way, half-dead sexless people lay on the frozen ground, grunting and mumbling. It was like a Haunted House. If it had been out of context, I would have jumped five meters in the air at coming face to face with one of these apparitions. Now, I calmly walked by them, even smiling at them as they reached for me. Some called out names of children. They asked me if I knew their daughter or son. I could only shrug.

  The woman opened the door to a giant warehouse where everything that had been taken from the prisoners was stored. I wondered for a moment if I had died and gone to heaven. I pinched my hand to make sure I wasn't dreaming. To the left were massive piles of clothing. To my right were shoes, sorted by size and style. And there were shelves, enormous shelves, with everything from candelabras to vases to pictures of stoic families living inside picture frames. There were eyeglasses, sitting naked without their owners, wine bottles, moldy loaves of bread, dolls, violins and flutes.

  "This," she breathed. "is Canada. Take anything you like. And take it back to your sister, too."

  I stepped forward gingerly, surveying the room. There was a large pile of children's clothes to the right of the adults', everything from thin summer dresses to mink coats. Not wanting to be greedy, I selected a thick red wool coat for me and a blue coat with fur trim and a large bow for Hajna. I took a modest loaf of bread.

  "You can always come back," the woman said. I was baffled by her kindness to a total stranger. She must have been just as equally stunned at the presence of child in a place where we were seemingly extinct. "Take anything you want."

  I nodded and thanked her. I slipped on the coat, which felt heavy and warm, just like the winters by the fire I had spent with my parents back in Szeged. I scurried back to my bunk, like a rabbit scurrying from hunters over the gray landscape of Auschwitz. It felt strange, forbidden to be in a section other than the space that was designated for Mengele's twins. I felt a shiver down my spine as I crossed over the threshold of the barracks, tearing off pieces of stale, brown bread for Hajna.

  "Here," I told her, shoving it toward her cracked, white lips. She turned over on her back, her breath weak and labored. The skin on her face had become taut and white, the color of paper. "Take some bread."

  "No," Hajna muttered, her mouth so dry I could almost hear her tongue scraping against the roof of her mouth. I picked her up in my arms. She felt loose and limp, like a rag doll, her limbs weak at her side. I stuffed her thin, pale arms through the arms of the royal blue coat I had pilfered from Canada, holding her body up with all of the strength I had.

  "It's hot," Hajna complained thinly, her lips beginning to bleed from the parched corners of her mouth. It reminded me of the gypsies Mengele sometimes experimented on. Many of them had a disease called Noma, something that had been all but extinct in "civilized" Europe. Caused by malnutrition, Noma ate right through childrens' faces leaving a gaping hole. I could see their teeth and facial bones through their skin, what was left of their faces, looking frightened and pained. Men
gele took them away and they disappeared, gone like ghosts.

  "It's actually really cold in here, Hajna," I corrected her, her skin hot to the touch. It was like putting my hand on the pan after Mama had pulled freshly baked bread out of the oven, her skin hot and clammy to the touch.

  Day after day, I trudged to Canada to retrieve food and water. She refused to put anything to her lips most of the time. Instead, she shrunk down, and turned away with a moan, whispering about Kiraly or the Tisza or calling for Mama. A pain seared through my chest when she mentioned Mama. Throughout our time in Auschwitz, our life at the mercy of Mengele's gloved hands, I had been so focused on staying alive that I never wanted to think about whether my parents were alive or not. I looked for them each day in the faces of the passing prisoners. In fact, I had never even imagined what would happen if the war ended, where we would go, what we would do. I just assumed that they would be alive, ready to take us back with open arms. As I watched Hajna toss and turn in the stillness of the deserted camp, a searing pain shot through my chest as I began to face the reality that I may not ever see our family again.

  I shook it out of my mind with great fervor as I forced water down Hajna's throat. It made a gurgling sound as it went down and she coughed slightly.

  "Papa, Zsolt took our…" she mumbled, but didn't finish the sentence. Her eyes closed and she licked her dry lips once again. Her breath continued, steady and slowly. I turned to my side and curled up into a ball next to her.

  After a few hours, I heard something in the distance. It sounded like an advancing army. There were heavy sounds of Jeeps rolling and crunching on the ice and snow. My heart did a flip and I took I deep breath. Perhaps the SS had come back to kill us all. After counting to ten, I sat up as straight as I was able under the confines of the bunk and looked out of the foggy window. Men with rough faces and buzz cuts marched forward, brandishing rifles and guns. But their guns weren't drawn. They were reaching their strong arms out to the twig-like creatures unable to move. Some of the men were wiping their eyes. I saw one duck behind a Jeep, probably praying that no one would see him as he threw up.