by Monica Hesse
“Check the records? Yes,” she says, anticipating how I was going to finish my sentence. “I can sit you down with a secretary. You’re here alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re coming from?”
“Poland.”
“So you said. Your family is from Poland. But I meant, where are you staying? Where have you come from now?”
The impulsiveness of what I’ve done has begun to sink in. I’m not staying with anyone. I have no place to stay.
Suddenly I feel so tired. So dirty. Hungry and thirsty, and wanting to lie down and wondering why I am here. “Poland,” I repeat. “I’ve been on a train from Poland.”
“Today? By yourself?”
“I arrived today. I left—several weeks ago, I think. It took a long time. And yes, alone.”
Mrs. Yost’s demeanor changes. Her eyes soften. A minute passes as she lets this news sink in. “That’s a long way to come by yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Just how long did it take?”
“He’s all I have left.”
She thinks for a minute, glancing over my shoulder, where I see there’s a clock on the wall, then sighs. “Follow me.”
We pass through the main reception area and into a smaller private office with a handwritten sign on the door: Missing Persons Liaison. Inside are a few large desks, messy with papers. A black telephone sits in the middle, half-buried.
“Sit, please.” Mrs. Yost gestures for me to take the more comfortable-looking of the two chairs in the room, taking a straight-backed wooden one for herself and finding a composition book and fountain pen from amid the clutter. It’s leather-bound, with the words I.G. FARBEN embossed in gold on the front. The words are familiar to me, but I can’t place from where.
“Miss Lederman,” she begins. “Why don’t you start by telling me what you’ve done so far to look for your brother?”
“I put his name on the list.”
“All right. Which list?”
“The Red Cross list.”
She makes a note in the composition book. “Which others?”
“I’m not sure.”
“The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association?” she offers. “The AJJDC? The Bureau for Missing Persons in Munich or any other jurisdictions?”
“In the hospital, whenever they asked me to put his name on a list, I did.”
“Miss Lederman.” Her pen was still poised above her book; now she caps it and sets it down. “It’s a very confusing time. But there are many organizations trying to help.”
She lists off more acronyms, but they all run together. I understand what she’s telling me. There are many lists. I was supposed to put his name on many lists, more than I ever could have imagined, and I was supposed to keep track of all of them.
It’s a patchwork, is what she’s saying. It’s the continent trying to sew itself together using a blend of every kind of stitch and knit available.
I grip the armrests of the chair, trying not to let Mrs. Yost go blurry in front of me. My mouth is dry, and my voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. “But waiting to hear from all those places could take months,” I say. And, I’m realizing in horror, even if I did unknowingly contact some of these organizations when I was at the hospital, they would have no way to get in touch with me now.
“It could take months,” Mrs. Yost agrees. “My job is to try to help the refugees here, but it could take months. Are you feeling all right? Put your head between your knees if you’re dizzy.”
“I’m not—I’m not dizzy.”
“You’re dizzy.” She stands and calls through her cracked door to the secretary outside. “Could you bring a glass of water?”
I don’t know if I have months, is what I want to tell her. I am alive in part because I forced myself to be alive to find Abek. I have barely held myself together. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Sending letters that go unanswered isn’t enough.
I hear the rustle of fabric in front of me and bring my eyes into focus. Mrs. Yost has returned with a glass of water. She raises her eyebrows, asking if I can take the glass, and then settles it in my hands.
“I hope you know I’m not saying any of this to dissuade you,” she says, waiting as I force the water down my throat. “But one girl I’ve been working with here has been writing ten letters a day for sixty days straight. She knows for a fact that her sister was liberated from Auschwitz, and she still hasn’t been able to find her. But your chances are still better writing letters than traveling all over Europe by yourself. You can’t visit every place in person. And even if you could, people are still moving around. Even if you find the right place, there’s no guarantee you would be there at the right time. So, if you still have a home, your best option might be to go back there.”
“I don’t have enough money left.”
“You could consider applying to a travel fund, for—”
“No.”
“Or I could set you up with a liaison closer to where your family—”
“No,” I bark. “Not without my brother.”
I’m picturing the spindly, broken chairs in my abandoned dining room, the carpet that wasn’t ours, the bakery with unfamiliar faces. That place will not be home again until Abek and I make it into one.
Mrs. Yost opens her mouth again, but I interrupt before she can speak. “Can I look at the admission records now?”
She looks like she wants to say something else, but instead nods once, efficiently. “A secretary will pull them for you; you can look right after dinner.”
Dinner. The mention of the evening meal makes me realize I have no other plans for the evening. Nowhere to stay, nowhere to go. Mrs. Yost has already mentioned that the camp is overcrowded.
“And then—and then after dinner could I stay here?” I ask. “Just while I figure out where to go next. If you don’t have a bed for me, I’ll sleep on the floor.”
Mrs. Yost sighs. “I’m not going to put you on the floor. Follow me. I’ll tell the person in charge of housing assignments, then find someone to get you settled.”
I pick up my bag, and she picks up her composition book, the one with the gold-embossed I.G. FARBEN. Something about the name still nags at me.
“What’s that?” I ask. “The name on your notebook?”
She glances down. “Before this site was a camp, it was a pharmaceutical factory. I’m still using some of the office supplies they left until our own shipments arrive.”
“I’ve heard of I.G. Farben, and I’m trying to figure out why.”
“Zyklon B,” she says finally. “I.G. Farben made Zyklon B.”
So that’s where I heard the name. Sometimes, in Birkenau, before they found out I could sew, I would be assigned to unload supply trucks. The yellow containers of Zyklon B had small logos at the bottom identifying the maker, I.G. FARBEN.
Zyklon B was a pesticide. It came in pellets that dissolved into gas. I heard it was originally designed to kill rodents. In Birkenau, I unloaded these canisters, and then guards would take them to the buildings they called the showers. There they would pack hundreds of people inside and use the Zyklon B, and it worked on people, too.
I’VE LOST ALL SENSE OF TIME AS MRS. YOST LEADS ME OUT OF HER office. It’s hard for Foehrenwald to feel real, for any of this to feel real. I half expect that if I blink, I’ll wake up back in my family’s apartment, still sleeping next to Dima, or back in the hospital, still in the ward of broken girls. But I’m not; I’m hundreds of kilometers from home. The doctors said I wasn’t well enough to even leave the hospital on my own, but I’ve managed to get all the way here by myself. My devastation over Abek’s not being here is colored by a small bit of pride.
The sun is low in the sky as we step out the back door. It opens onto a dusty courtyard of sorts, between the administration buildings. A few wooden benches line the perimeter, and behind them are the green sprigs of an herb garden, the smell of dill and parsley. Behind those, throug
h an open set of double doors, I can see round tables in a building that must be the cafeteria. Michigan Street, the road I walked in on, is now filling with people, presumably coming from the fields I passed. Not just the dozen or so I saw tilling the land, but many, carrying hoes and shovels, gathering around the courtyard while talking and laughing. Other groups, not in farming clothes, are approaching from different streets.
“Mrs. Yost?” As soon as we exit the building, a man in a checked shirt appears, picking his way across the dusty courtyard and extending his hand. “I’m from Feldafing.”
“Of course you are.” Mrs. Yost turns to me. “Zofia. My apologies. I’ll find someone else to show you to your bungalow.”
She scans the crowd. “Mr. Mueller,” she calls, gesturing toward a lone figure sitting on one of the benches.
The man who looks up is lean and angled. Suspenders hold up pants that hang low on his hips; a cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth. He’s working with something in his hands, using a sharp metal tool to bore holes into a leather strap. A horse’s bridle, I think. He sets it down when Mrs. Yost beckons him. “Could you come and carry Miss Lederman’s bag to Breine and Esther’s cottage?” she asks.
From a distance, I’d thought Mr. Mueller was much older, but as he approaches, I can see he’s actually just a few years older than me: dark curly hair, gray eyes, a lean sinew to his body. He takes one last drag on his cigarette before flicking it to the side.
The way his full lips curl around the cigarette paper, the way his hips swivel as he grinds the butt into the dust, the way he rubs a crick out of his neck using one long-fingered hand—I feel myself blush, followed immediately by the surprise of realizing I still know how to blush. There’s a quick, urgent pull low in my stomach, and this, too, is a sensation I thought had disappeared. There wasn’t enough left of my body, I thought, to manufacture the feeling.
Mr. Mueller raises his eyebrows in a brief greeting when he reaches me. “Hello,” I manage, and then I am immediately certain that the blush is in my voice, too, and that everyone around me can hear it.
He’s just leaned over to take the handle of my valise when I see his neck stiffen. “What did you say?” he asks quietly, in German.
“I—I didn’t—” I stammer.
But he’s not talking to me; he’s talking to another man whom he passed in the courtyard, barrel-chested with nice white teeth. “What did you say?” Mr. Mueller repeats, this time turning to the man.
Mr. Mueller drops my valise and walks back toward the larger, barrel-chested man. His messy curls stick to the back of his neck; his collar is damp with perspiration. I can’t hear what the two men in the middle of the courtyard are saying, only that the man with white teeth looks angry and dismissive, while Mr. Mueller is unreadable. Around me, other people have noticed the conversation, and a few yards away, Mrs. Yost, who had started off with the representative from the other camp, pauses, trying to decide whether to intervene.
The bigger man makes a rude gesture. Mr. Mueller returns it but then begins to step away. It looks like the conversation is over, and I unclench fists I didn’t know I’d tightened. But then, without warning—with something barely perceptible traveling across his face—Mr. Mueller whirls back again. It happens too fast for me to register the full motion; all I know is that I see a blur, and then blood pours out of the bigger man’s nose.
The bigger man lunges forward with both arms outstretched and hits Mr. Mueller with his full body weight. Mr. Mueller stays upright, but barely. He ducks the first punch, but the other man’s second one lands just below his eyebrow. He takes a third to the rib cage. He’s not an intuitive fighter, even I can tell that, and the other man outmatches him by at least ten centimeters.
Around the perimeter of the courtyard, doors and windows open as people lean out to see the source of the commotion. Now they’re on the ground, the big man on top of Mr. Mueller, straddling his chest and pinning his arms to his sides. The bigger man’s hand grinds the side of Mr. Mueller’s face into the ground, and Mr. Mueller’s legs scramble helplessly, wildly scuffing in the dirt.
Get up, I think.
I don’t know why he threw the first punch, I don’t know why he started this fight, I don’t know why he doesn’t give up and beg for mercy.
“Gentlemen!” Mrs. Yost yells, and then to someone I can’t see, “Go get a policeman.” But it will be too late. By the time an officer gets back, Mr. Mueller will have run out of oxygen, will be dead.
I should help him, but I can’t move. Close your eyes, I instruct myself, but my eyelids don’t work. Cover your eyes, I try. Pick up your hands and physically cover them. Do it now.
I should help him, but I can’t move, because if I could have moved, I would have helped him, and I didn’t help him, so that must mean I couldn’t move, and all I can do is stare and stare, like the fight is far away, like it’s happening in the movies.
I’m fading, I’m falling into myself, I’m unable to get my brain to stop, and then, just when I think I’m going to witness something horrible, Mr. Mueller frees one of his arms. He draws it back and, his thumb and index finger making the shape of an L, slams his hand into the bigger man’s windpipe.
The big man’s hands fly to his neck; his face turns purple-red, and his breath comes in pig squeals as he tries to find air. Mr. Mueller scrambles out from under him. Chest heaving, he staggers to the bench, to the sharp, leather-boring tool he was using before. He doesn’t pick it up but leaves his hands on the handle, a warning that he’ll use it if he needs to.
Watching him, something pushes in on my brain. A thought, a memory, trying to break through my spiraling, to bring me back to myself. Mr. Mueller. Sosnowiec in the summer. Heat, the hottest days, standing in lines. My father.
Do I know this man? Surely I don’t—I couldn’t—but something I’ve just seen him do reminds me of—what? Sosnowiec in summer, standing. The images are too vague for me to grab onto; I’m not even sure if they’re real.
I replay everything that just happened, every moment since I first saw Mr. Mueller get up to take my valise, to this moment, now, as he dabs his bloody eyebrow with the hem of his shirt while warily eyeing the courtyard. But it’s lost. Whatever I thought seemed familiar about him has disappeared again, if it ever existed at all.
I bite back frustration. Just when I congratulated myself on making it all the way to this camp, just when I dared to think I was showing progress. Why is my brain so broken and battered? Why does it betray me?
Back in the middle of the courtyard, the bigger man is on his hands and knees. The two friends he’d been standing with rush over, grab him under the arms, and hoist him to his feet.
I look up. Mr. Mueller is back in front of me again, his hand outstretched. There’s a scrape across his knuckles. His shirt is smeared with dust, two buttons have been ripped off, and his breast pocket hangs, half-ripped. He motions with his hand again.
“Your luggage.”
He’s taller than me by an inch. His eyes, which I’d thought just gray, I can now see have a pebbly mix with brown in them, too, a dark, flinty color that’s hard to read. I should be disgusted by him now, after watching him start the fight. The pull in my stomach should have disappeared. It hasn’t, though. I’m cautious around him, but I still can’t stop staring.
“My luggage?” I repeat dumbly.
“Mrs. Yost asked me. To carry. Your luggage.” He says it very slowly this time, with one eyebrow raised.
“Oh. But you don’t have to,” I start. “Not after—”
“I said I would,” he says simply, taking the bag before I can protest again. He doesn’t wait for me to follow, and when I don’t see Mrs. Yost around to provide instructions to the contrary, I quickly dart after him.
He weaves through rows of cottages, checking once to make sure I can keep up, but not again. I speed up my steps so I can walk next to him, panting a little from the effort.
“Did that man do something to you?” I a
sk, breathless.
Not breaking stride. “Didn’t you just see the fight? I’d say he did something to me.”
“Yes, what I meant was—”
“He bruised my chest. And he smells like piss, and he was all over me, so he probably made me smell like piss, too.” He stresses the word piss. To shock me, I think, or repel me, to get me to stop asking questions.
As we hurry, I try to pay attention to the route and everything along it: A wooden structure where women carry out baskets of laundry. A larger building, with a sign reading VOCATIONAL TRAINING. Foehrenwald is more like a town than I even realized.
“What I meant—and I think you know it—was, did that man do something to you before the fight?” I clarify. “Was there a reason you hit him? Or do you try to beat up all piss-smelling things?”
His mouth twitches. “Piss-smelling things? What is a piss-smelling thing that I could beat up?”
“A—a goat. You could beat up a goat.”
“A goat,” he repeats flatly.
“Or a latrine itself,” I say stubbornly. “A latrine would be a very piss-smelling thing for you to punch.”
“How, exactly, would I punch a latrine?”
“Wetly,” I say. I can’t explain why his indifference is making me so bold, but I feel the need to show him that I’m not cowed or intimidated by his swearing or his fight. “If you punched a latrine, it would probably splash.”
Mr. Mueller laughs, sharp and staccato, as though the sound and the act surprise him. It’s a nice laugh, wry but rich, but then it stops almost immediately. He’s arranged his mouth back into a serious expression before I even smile myself, as if he’s hoping I won’t notice the laugh at all.
“I’m sorry, but have I met you before?” I ask.
A glance from the side of his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“You seemed familiar to me, but it was very fleeting. I thought for a second I might know you from home—I’m from Sosnowiec—but your German doesn’t have a Polish accent.”
“I’m not from Sosnowiec.”
“I thought not. You’re German? Do I know you from somewhere else? Were you in—”
