by Monica Hesse
The bell rings when I push open the door. The man behind the counter isn’t Mr. Skolmoski; he’s younger and unfamiliar. I hesitate at the entry.
“Can I help you?” the clerk asks.
“Just bread,” I mumble, edging toward the shelves lining the wall and reaching for the nearest loaf, dark seeded caraway, so I won’t have to speak more. But the selection is meager, and as my hand closes around the loaf, so does an older man’s, one of only two other customers in the store.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You were here first.”
He snatches his hand away, gesturing that I should take the bread at the same time I’m telling him to take it, and now I’m not sure whether he’s trying to be polite, as I am, or he doesn’t want the bread because I’ve touched it. What must I look like—the threadbare dress, the uneven gait, my gaunt frame?
My face grows hot. Maybe I should just leave, find another bakery, or tell Dima they were all closed.
“Zofia?”
The hand on my arm makes me yelp in fright.
“It’s okay.” The voice is reassuring as I turn. The woman standing in front of me is a few years older than I am. She’s paler than she used to be, and one of her eyes is bloodshot. But she still has the same throaty voice that I used to admire and traces of the same dimples on her cheeks even though there’s no longer enough fat to properly crease.
“Gosia?”
Before I can say anything else, Aunt Maja’s best friend drops the bag in her hands and throws her arms around me.
I throw my arms around her, and the laughter that comes out of my body is as much from relief as delight.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” Gosia says at the same time I’m stroking her hair, wondering whether I can trust my own eyes.
“I can’t believe it’s really you, either!”
The clerk at the counter has taken a sudden interest in our movements. “Could you lower your voices? You’re disrupting the store,” he says.
“We’re the only customers left,” Gosia protests. She’s right; the store is empty. The older man must have slipped out while I wasn’t looking.
“This is a place of business, not a party.”
Gosia sighs. “We’ll go.”
“I haven’t bought my bread yet,” I begin, but Gosia shakes her head and takes my arm. Outside, in front of the store, she pulls her own loaf from her yarn shopping bag, ripping it in two and handing me half.
“Start from the beginning,” she instructs. “Why haven’t I seen you before now? You’re just back?”
“Just this morning.”
“Where were you?”
“Birkenau first, Gross-Rosen in the end.” She winces when I say these names; she knows by now what they mean. “Where were you?”
Gosia’s color darkens, and she looks down at her shoes. “I had a dispensation. Because I worked in the hospital, I was an essential employee. When the dispensations stopped, one of the doctors let me hide in his cellar. It was safe for all but the last few months. Then, Flossenbürg. But only for a few months.” Her mouth twists uncomfortably; she’s embarrassed by this good fortune.
“A few months is long enough. I’m glad for you,” I reassure her. “I’m glad you stayed safe as long as you could.”
“I’m living with my sister and her husband now. Their hiding place was never raided.” She hesitates, finding the words. “Is Maja—”
“No.”
My answer is complete in itself. No, Maja isn’t. But I make myself continue because Gosia is a friend who deserves to know. “Just after the soccer stadium. All of them except Abek were killed.”
“No.” She closes her eyes, and I let her have her moment of grief. When she opens them again, she lowers her voice. “Almost none of us are left,” she says quietly. “A few hundred at most. I just don’t understand how so many of us can be gone.”
“I’m looking for Abek now. We were separated at Birkenau. I guess this means you haven’t seen him back here?”
“I wish I had. You’ve been to your apartment?”
“I just came from home—from Mariacka. It’s been looted, but nobody else is living in it. Next I’m going to try Środula. Maybe he forgot where we planned to meet. Maybe he thinks of the ghetto as home?”
Gosia is shaking her head. “Gone,” she says. “Bombed. He couldn’t have gone to the ghetto; it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“I went there myself first thing, when I got back in June. You should see it, Zofia, that part of the city—there’s almost nothing left standing.”
Nausea, a dropping in my stomach. Abek isn’t at my family’s house. He couldn’t go to our old room in the ghetto. Gosia has been back in Sosnowiec since June, and she’s known my family since she was a child; we have all the same friends. I don’t see any way Abek could have come back without Gosia’s hearing about it, especially not if there are as few of us as she says.
“Who else was with you?” she asks. “On the train to Birkenau—anyone we know?”
“You mean, that day?” I repeat slowly.
“Yes, on the transport. Who was on the transport to Birkenau?”
I knew that’s what she meant. Of course it is. I was just buying time. Answering that question requires me to think back to that day, and that day is something I try to never think about.
“On my transport, there was only—” But before I can continue, I’m slipping back into the horrors of that day: yelling in my ears, the smell of decay in my nostrils, feeling so thirsty and so weak and barely able to breathe. “There was—”
“Zofia? Are you all right?”
I look down, and the bread in my hand is shaking. My hands are shaking. We’re not in a cattle car. We’re on a street. We’re not in a camp. We’re in Sosnowiec. It’s not that day. It’s not that day.
The train station at Birkenau is my black ice, a sleeping black monster guarding the door of my memory. Nudge it too hard and it will wake. If it wakes, it will consume me. I creep around the edges of that memory. Even the edges are hell.
“There was Pani Ruth,” I finish. “With the long gray hair. She was with us. She—”
“Any men?” she interrupts, and now I understand what she’s asking: Do we have any friends who would have been on the men’s side of camp, who could have seen Abek after I last did?
The pharmacist. The pharmacist was praying in the mud, and—No. The pharmacist died in the soccer stadium, I remind myself. The pharmacist died before we got on the train. I need to think about what was after the train, on the platform, on that last day, on that day when—No, no, no.
“Pan Zwieg,” I choke out. “Pan Zwieg, the librarian. He was with us. And the skinny boy from the butcher’s shop. I think his first name was Salomon.”
Gosia grabs my arm. “Salomon Prager.”
“Yes. Salomon Prager.” The name retrieved, I claw my way back out of that memory.
“He’s back. He’s alive. My brother-in-law saw him just last week.”
“At the butcher’s?”
“The butcher shop is closed; he’s working as a farmhand now. After my shift this afternoon, I can find him and ask if he knows what happened to Abek.”
“Can we go now? Let’s go right now.” I’ve already forgotten about bread, and lunch, and Dima, but Gosia is shaking her head apologetically.
“I only have an hour for lunch, and it’s my brother-in-law who knows who Salomon is working for. I promise I’ll find him after work.”
“Come for dinner, then,” I tell her reluctantly. “It will be me and—and maybe a Russian soldier, too. Dima helped me. He’s stationed here now.”
I feel my own face redden as I explain, but Gosia barely blinks. She must have heard of all kinds of arrangements.
“Oh, Zofia, it’s good to see you again.” Gosia puts her hands on my cheeks, and I put my hands on hers; we touch our foreheads together. “I’ll come tonight. I promise.”
She tells me the names of
a few nearby stores that are open and friendly, where I might be able to pick up food to prepare for dinner. When I get home, I climb the stairs again, preparing to apologize to Dima for the length of the errand.
And at the top of the stairwell, I see it. Tucked in Mrs. Wójcik’s flowerpot, where I’m sure there was nothing before, is a tiny flag, the kind children would wave at a parade, and on that flag is a swastika.
GOSIA COMES THAT NIGHT WITH GIFTS: A BLANKET. TWO extra pairs of underthings. A packet of laundry powder for my clothes and a bar of soap for myself, white and medicinal, not like the soft brown bars we used to buy from the shop. “The rationing isn’t as bad as it was before,” she explains. “But everywhere has been out of soap this week. I took this one from the clinic.”
“Thank you.” I’m grateful for what she’s brought, but the overly eager way she hands me the bundle—I can immediately tell the items are an offering to make up for bad news.
“Salomon couldn’t help.”
Her eyes lower. “He didn’t see him. He didn’t remember seeing him at all there.”
“I see.”
She moves to take my hand, but since I’m still holding the bundle, she ends up taking my wrists instead. “Salomon asked me to apologize. He said he would have looked out for Abek—he wanted you to know that. If he’d known Abek was there, he would have tried to look out for him.”
I can hear Salomon’s guilt spilling out of Gosia’s mouth. But I don’t blame him. The camp was the size of a small city. Salomon’s not being able to remember seeing Abek didn’t mean anything.
It just means I need to look harder. It just means I need to write more letters. Tomorrow I can go talk to Salomon myself.
Dima walks in from the dining room, broad smile on his face, kissing Gosia’s cheeks in a way I’ve learned is considered merely friendly for Russians, not overly familiar. She startles in surprise but rearranges her face by the time he pulls away.
“You are Zofia’s friend? It’s my pleasure to meet you.”
“Gosia, this is Dima Sokolov, whom I told you about. He’s also invited his commander to join us for dinner. So it will be a little party, if you don’t mind.”
“I am going to meet him now,” Dima says to Gosia. “Zofia, you have everything you need? For cooking?”
I nod, and when he leaves, Gosia raises her eyebrows. “He’s handsome.”
“He’s been nice to me.” I gesture for her to follow me to the kitchen, but she holds back, uncertainty on her face. “Gosia?” I ask. “Was there something else?”
She looks back toward where Dima just exited the door. “Salomon mentioned something—I don’t know if it’s useful. But, he said the Red Army liberated Birkenau in January.”
“I know that,” I tell her. “Dima already found that out.”
“But, listen. Before the liberation, Salomon said, they started to transport people away. The SS knew the Allies were coming, so they were trying to evacuate the camp before they arrived, by sending prisoners farther into Germany. Salomon didn’t go; they left him in the infirmary, and the camp was liberated a few weeks later.”
Evacuated. This is what happened at Neustadt, too. Roused from our beds, told to abandon the looms, told to walk for days in subzero temperatures until we reached Gross-Rosen on the fuzzy border of the Reich. Our evacuation didn’t outrun the Allies for long: the Red Army liberated Gross-Rosen a few months later. But if the camp had been deeper in the Reich—the Allies didn’t reach central Germany until late in the spring.
Now I see why Gosia didn’t begin with this information. There are two ways to read it, a bad way and a good way. Either Abek was in Birkenau for liberation and he should be home, or…
“Abek went to Germany,” I say.
“No, I mean, I don’t know.”
“But Salomon didn’t see him in the infirmary? He didn’t see him left behind?”
“No, but—”
“Gosia, at the time of liberation, was there anywhere else he would be?” I ask. “In the infirmary, as Salomon was, or on a transport west to another camp in Germany. Those were the choices?”
Gosia looks uncomfortable. “Unless—”
“Unless what?” I ask sharply.
“Zofia. I loved Abek. You know I did. But he was so young. He was young, and the work was so hard, and so many people—”
“—And that is why it is lucky he was strong,” I interrupt. “Besides, I had organized something for him. A special position. He was valuable. I made sure he was useful.”
She sees my face. She sees my face, and her next words are careful. “If Salomon is right, then when the camp closed, the infirmary or on the transport are the most likely places he would have been.”
“We know he wasn’t in the infirmary,” I say. “So he was on that transport.”
“So he was on that transport,” she repeats slowly. “Of course he was.”
Commander Kuznetsov is a tall, thin man with gaunt cheeks but friendly, intelligent eyes. He doesn’t speak Polish, but he speaks fair German, which Gosia and I are fluent in but which Dima doesn’t speak at all. Gosia also knows some Russian, and between the four of us, we manage to limp along, languages changing every few sentences, an imitation of a dinner party.
The commander has never been to Poland before, he explains as we sit with plates in our laps, again on the floor. Dima spread a tablecloth between us, and he brought flowers, which are on the windowsill. He also made sure there was a bottle of vodka. The rest of the apartment is as it was when I walked in, peeled and abandoned, which the commander says is the point. He asked for the invitation because he wanted to know something about the region he’d been assigned to, he says, how we’re living and making do.
I made holishkes, with tinned tomatoes and the only meat available at the butcher: a graying, tough mutton. I tried to enjoy the cooking, with the army-issued pots Dima brought along. I tried to enjoy being in my family’s kitchen again.
“Zofia?” Dima says gently. “Commander Kuznetsov asked you a question.”
“Yes, it’s a traditional dish,” I say, pulling myself back into the conversation.
If Abek was sent to Germany, will he know how to get back? Where in Germany—the country is huge. Will he have been given the same letter I was, to allow him to board a train?
“We eat it at our harvest holiday sometimes,” Gosia adds because I’ve gone silent. “We also have, oh, apple cake and potato kugel.”
We eat it because it’s Abek’s favorite meal, I add to myself. We eat it on his birthday, and as I bought the ingredients, I hoped somehow I would be making it for him. That Salomon would have known where he was, and Gosia would have brought him home tonight.
“You have known Zofia’s family for a long time?” the commander asks Gosia, the more talkative of his dinner companions. “And what are you doing for work now?”
“I’m a nurse at a medical clinic. And yes. Zofia’s aunt and I went to the same primary school. I’ve known Zofia since she was born, which means—” She nudges my shoulder, tries to draw me into the discussion.
This isn’t how I wanted my first night home to be. This isn’t how I wanted anything to be.
“It means eighteen years, doesn’t it, Zofia?”
Dima looks at me, worried. This isn’t how he wanted the evening to go, either.
“I apologize, Commander,” I say quietly. “I’m very tired. As Dima might have told you, I’m looking for my younger brother. I had hoped he would be waiting for me here, but he wasn’t.”
The commander nods at me, but it’s Dima he speaks to next, in rapid-fire Russian I can see Gosia struggling to keep up with. By reading their faces, I think I make out the basics. He’s asked Dima whether my brother was in a camp, like me, and Dima has said he was. The conversation continues to the point that I can’t follow it, until Gosia at last cuts in.
“He says there are helpers. Organizations, I think he said,” she tells me.
“I know. I’ve talked to the
m; I’ve written letters.”
The men keep talking, and when Gosia cuts in the second time, her voice has an edge to it. “He says he wonders if Abek is in Munich.”
Dima and Commander Kuznetsov stop midsentence and look at her. The commander seems humbled, and he switches to German. “I apologize for leaving you out of the conversation,” he tells me.
“Why would he have gone to Munich?” I ask.
“As we understand it, the prisoners from Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the end of the war, went mostly to two camps: Bergen-Belsen and Dachau,” the commander explains. “For Dachau, the city it’s nearest is Munich.”
“Why not Bergen-Belsen? Is that also near Munich?”
Commander Kuznetsov looks confused, but it’s Dima he turns to, not me, asking him something in Russian. Dima answers him softly, lowering his voice to almost a whisper, his eyes darting periodically over to mine. There’s something I don’t like in the language of his body—something protective but also secret.
“What are you telling him?” I ask, my voice rising. Then, to Gosia, “What are they saying, Gosia?”
Gosia purses her lips, reticent to translate. “The commander said—he said that—he was made to think Abek was not in Bergen-Belsen.”
I shake my head in confusion. “Why would he think that?”
Again, the three of them exchange glances I don’t understand. I pick up my cup and bang it against the floor to get their attention. “Who would tell him that?”
After an eternity, Dima drags his face to meet mine. “I tell him that. I tell him Abek was not in Bergen-Belsen. Because when I write the camp, he is not in their records.”
“When you wrote to—” I repeat the words slowly, trying to make sense of what he’s saying. “When you wrote to the camp?”
“The helpers,” he tries to explain. “The soldiers who are there now.”
“But you knew there was a chance he could be in this place and you already wrote to them? Without telling me?”
Dima flushes a deep red. “He was not there,” Dima continues. “So I did not want—so I did not want to worry you, Zofia. I am trying to help. You need to rest. I thought, if I could find him for you—”
