by Monica Hesse
“Am I… all right?” I cannot even begin to think of how to answer that question. A sound comes out of my mouth, something between a yelp and the emptiest laugh in the world.
“Zofia?” Now he senses something must really be wrong. He crosses the room and kneels beside me on the floor. I feel the heat of him, just inches away, and I’m glad he’s here. I want him here, the reality of another body.
“Hold me,” I say. I don’t mean it in a romantic way. I mean it like, Hold me together. I mean it like, Am I really real? Is any of this really happening? Josef doesn’t take it in a romantic way, either. When we climb onto the bed and he puts his arms around me, it’s with the urgency you would use to warm someone with hypothermia. Or someone who’d had a bad shock. The kind of holding you do when your goal is to keep them alive.
He wraps his arms around me tightly enough that it’s almost hard to breathe, and this discomfort is inexplicably comforting. It reminds me that I’m here, tethered to this earth. The labor of my breathing reminds me that I have a body at all.
“Something happened, something you’re not ready to talk about,” he says. Mutely, I nod. “I’ll stop talking. I’ll stay here with you until you want me to leave, but I’ll just remain silent.”
He wedges his chin over my head, firmly and deliberately. I feel as though he’s burrowing in for a storm with me, readying us both against the wind. I try to steady myself against the beat of Josef’s heart. I try to match my breaths to his. I try to feel grounded by this, the comforting pressure and weight.
I try to feel grounded, but the feeling of Josef’s arms right now is competing against six years of misery swirling around my head with nothing to drown them out since Josef has promised to remain silent.
Remain silent.
A is for Abek. B is for Baba Rose. They’ll be gone soon, Baba Rose said about the Nazis in their tanks, but then they weren’t, they weren’t, they stayed for years. Remain silent. My neighbor Mrs. Wójcik’s dogs barked in her apartment, and the Nazi dogs were barking at Birkenau. I unloaded the pellets of Zyklon B, and Bissel fell out the window, and I sewed Breine’s wedding dress, and I sewed the Nazi uniforms, and my arm was throbbing from the shuttle, and I worked every day because we all worked every day because we didn’t want to die, except some days I wanted to die. Some days I did.
I walked to the soccer stadium because we weren’t allowed cars. I walked from Neustadt to Gross-Rosen in a frozen, frozen winter, when I could not begin to fathom how one foot was continuing to go in front of the other. And my toes were amputated by a doctor in white, and my father ran to help the pharmacist in the mud. And the soldier used his hand to break my father’s windpipe. Remain silent. I ate a plum with Josef, and I plucked a plum-colored dress from the donation box, and I buried a turnip in the ground, except maybe I didn’t, maybe I didn’t do that at all.
I waited in lines. I waited in lines to be discharged from the hospital. I waited in line for moldy potato skins. I waited in line for bread. I waited in line to get on the train for Foehrenwald. I waited in lines with all the other Jews of Sosnowiec to learn our fate on the twelfth of August in 1942, and my father ran to help the pharmacist in the mud, and Josef punched Rudolf’s windpipe in the courtyard. And the soldier punched my father’s windpipe in the soccer stadium, except that neither of them were punches, they were slices at the throat with the meaty L of a hand. Remain silent.
I slip back into focus. The room slips back into focus. Josef slips back into focus, his arms still wrapped around me.
“Silent killing,” I whisper.
“What?” Josef asks. But his breath catches; I’m close enough to be able to tell.
My voice is unnaturally calm. “It’s what the German soldiers called their combat training. Silent killing.”
Stilles toten. The German Army had its own hand-to-hand fighting style. Just the basics, the dirtiest of basics: A knee to the groin. A jab in the eyeballs. Or, hand flat like a knife, a vicious stab to the throat, before your enemy was paying attention, before he even knew you were fighting. It’s what brought my father to his knees in the stadium. When he tried to help up the pharmacist, a soldier jabbed him in the neck, then they shot him.
I had never seen fighting to kill until the German Army arrived in Sosnowiec.
And I had never seen it anywhere else until I arrived in Foehrenwald and saw Josef do it to the man in the courtyard on the morning I arrived.
“You weren’t in a camp,” I whisper.
“Zofia.”
My skin begins to crawl. I slowly ease out of his arms. “That’s why you don’t like to talk about where you were during the war.”
“Zof—”
“You’re not Jewish; you weren’t in a camp; you were in the German Army.”
I’m still edging away on the bed; he reaches out to pull me close again, and I move farther.
“Were you in the German Army? Just answer my question.”
The words are a command, but my voice comes out as a plea. I’m waiting for him to tell me it’s not true; I’m just confused. He doesn’t.
“Say it, Josef.”
“Zofia.” He says my name for the third time, a name that I have loved hearing him say before, whispered in the dark. But now my name only sounds like Josef not wanting to tell me the truth.
And I already know the truth.
I back away more quickly now, stumbling over the desk chair, nearly falling. Josef rises to help me, but before he can take half a step forward, waves of nausea roll through my stomach. I lurch for the washing basin and heave into the bowl.
“Don’t you dare come near me, you sick, sick—” I heave again, my hands tight on the bowl, and Josef finally stops in his tracks. “Why didn’t you tell me? You wanted to torture me some more? You didn’t think I’d been through enough?”
“I swear it wasn’t,” he says, stricken. “Zofia, I swear it wasn’t that.”
“You were just looking for someone to take to bed? You thought what Rudolf did when I arrived—that maybe I’d fuck for a scrap of bread?”
“I tried to stay away from you. I was going to tell you, I tried to tell you, that night in my room. I should have,” he says. “I should have told you.”
I straighten up again. “What you should have done is turned yourself in.”
A bitter bark of a laugh comes from Josef’s mouth. He spreads his arms wide and looks around the room. “Turned myself in to—where? I didn’t commit any crimes, Zofia. I was an eighteen-year-old boy who was drafted to fight.”
“And now you’re a twenty-two-year-old man.”
“And I’m different now than I was then.”
Outside, I hear a peal of laughter, a group returning from dinner. The noise rouses me enough to realize I want to get out of here. Finding my footing, I push past him toward the door. “I will tell everyone. I will tell every single person here who you are.”
“Tell them.”
My hand on the knob, I turn back to see if Josef’s last sentence was a dare, if he doesn’t believe I’ll actually do it.
“Tell them,” he says again. “Please.”
The Josef behind me is a Josef I’ve never seen before, wild-eyed and desperate. “Please, tell them. I haven’t known how to for months. Tell them; do whatever you want to do. But could you listen to me first, just for one minute?”
He rushes on, without giving me a chance to refuse. “I was in the army. But after a while, I knew I didn’t want to be. I was a deserter, do you understand? I ran away. In the middle of the night, I just left, with the clothes on my back. I slept in empty barns, in the cellars of old women. The SS would have shot me if they’d learned who I was; I was a deserter, an enemy to them, too.”
Everything is falling into an awful place. Josef isn’t Jewish. When he said he didn’t want to dance at the wedding, it was because he didn’t know the wedding dances. When he said he didn’t belong on the boat with Breine and Chaim, it wasn’t because he’d lost his faith, it was be
cause he never had it to begin with.
I reel against the doorway, glad my hand is already on the knob, because I need it to hold me up. Is there any way this isn’t happening? That’s what I’d prefer. That this conversation we are having right now isn’t happening. That I am sitting in another room somewhere while my brain is having this delusion. I would prefer my brain spin. Let me be broken. Let me be broken; I would prefer it.
“But you showed me,” I yell at him, my voice breaking in tears. “Your injuries. You showed me where your teeth had fallen out because the soldier hit you.”
“The injuries—they’re all true,” he says quickly. “The soldier did hit me. I saw him harassing a girl, and I tried to stop him. He hit me with the butt of his rifle, and my teeth flew out. It happened; it just didn’t happen in a camp. I did have flea bites. I did lose my hair. My shoulder was dislocated because some men beat me for not handing over my food. I suffered like you did.”
“You haven’t, Josef. Suffered like I did. I nearly died. Everyone I knew was tortured and starved and beaten, every day, for years. Years.” My voice is trembling at the audacity of his comparison. “You cannot imagine suffering like that. Was your whole family ripped away from you and led to slaughter like mine? Is your whole family dead?”
“Whether or not they are dead, I would be dead to them,” he says. “They supported the Reich; they believed in it.”
Klara. He told me after his sister died, his family became something he didn’t recognize. Is this what he meant?
“They must have been so proud,” I say. “So proud of their soldier son.”
He takes a cautious step toward me.
“Zofia, I swear, I’ve thought and I’ve thought about what I could have done differently, but I did the only thing I could do—I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it. I didn’t try to refuse my conscription, and you’re right—it had to do with my parents. But I started thinking clearly almost immediately, and then I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it.”
He’s looking at me, with his deep, beautiful eyes and his hungry expression, and he’s begging me to understand.
Can I understand? Was leaving enough? Was deserting enough? What would I consider enough? Would I have asked him to shoot his superior officers before he deserted? Go into hiding rather than enlist at all? Try to spy for the Allies? What’s the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war that was entirely inhumane?
For a minute, I’d like to rewind the clock. I’d like to go back an hour when Joseph followed me from the dining hall and kissed me. I’d like to feel that again. Or I’d like to find an entirely different timeline: one where I accept Josef’s explanation that he did the best thing he could think of in what he saw as impossible circumstances. I’d like to forgive him.
For a minute, I feel my grip loosen on the handle. Josef draws in a quick, hopeful breath.
But he never told me. I keep coming back to that.
We have lain on our stomachs in barely any clothes in the dark of his room, and we’ve talked and we’ve laughed and he never once said, I’m not who I’ve led you to think I am. The memory of these nights brings on a new wave of nausea, a new depth to my horror. This man has kissed me. This man has been inside me.
“Zofia.” He reaches a hand out to touch me, and I shrink back, my resolve steeled.
“No.”
“Please.”
“You are never allowed to touch me again,” I hiss. “You lied to all of us, to every single one of us, because you knew that would make it easier for you. And that was more important to you than—” Here, my voice begins to shake with emotion. “Making life easier for you was more important than understanding that it was hell for us.”
“You’re right. You are,” he says softly. “I was a coward.”
I feel like I’m not even looking at Josef anymore. I’m looking at someone who slightly resembles someone I used to know, and I’m realizing the whole thing was a disguise.
“Go away,” I say finally, removing my hand from the doorknob, realizing something. “You should be the one to leave now; it’s my cottage.”
“Zofia—”
“Go away. Don’t ask me to forgive you.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says bitterly. “I probably shouldn’t even forgive myself.”
“You shouldn’t,” I say. I hold the door open for him, and when he leaves, I finally cry.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MY MOTHER WAS UNSPEAKABLE AND SAD.
The last time I saw my father was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I saw Baba Rose and vivacious Aunt Maja was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I see Josef is unspeakable and sad. I think that was the last time. How could that have been anything other than the last time?
I am exhausted by unspeakable sadness, by wearing it like a cloak.
The first time I saw Abek, he was seven pounds and four ounces. My father and I paced up and down the street outside our house. He said we could walk to buy ice cream, but we never made it to the shop. Every time we reached the end of the block, he would decide we should run back, quickly, in case there was news. We would get back to our building, and then Aunt Maja or Baba Rose would lean out the window and shake their heads. Not yet.
Were you this nervous when I was born? I asked Papa. I was too young to be nervous, he said. With you, I was only excited. I couldn’t wait to meet you.
The third or fourth time we returned from our failed ice-cream mission, Aunt Maja leaned out the window and said, Don’t leave again; we think it will be soon. Then she leaned out the window again and said, It’s a boy, and then we both ran inside and all the way up the stairs, to where Abek was redder and smaller than I’d imagined his being, wailing like a kitten, wrapped in white. My mother passed him to my father, who gave Abek his pinky finger to suck on, and I watched him to figure out what to do when it was my turn.
Make a cradle with your arms, Mama told me as Papa shifted the small, hot bundle into my awkward, outstretched hands. This is your brother, she said as I stared at his wrinkled fingers and the fine smattering of hair covering his scalp. It’s your job to protect him, she said. That’s what big sisters do; they protect their little brothers and sisters from the beginning to the end.
I tried, Mama. I tried, Papa and Aunt Maja and Baba Rose. I am so sorry I failed.
The last time I saw Abek wasn’t when I left Auschwitz-Birkenau, gripping his fingers through the barbed wire fence. It wasn’t when we walked toward the showers and I told him not to worry about taking off his clothes, because he was going to be issued new ones. It wasn’t when I left him a turnip and he left me a mud drawing in return. Those things didn’t happen. They never happened.
By the time we arrived in Birkenau, the old and the sick among us had died on the trip. Baba Rose had died on the trip. She was in the car with Abek and me; my mother and Aunt Maja had been shoved into the next one, and I didn’t know if they were alive or dead.
Abek was begging me for water. I don’t have any, I kept saying. I wish I did, I wish I did. The cough he’d caught from Mama, the one that was just a tickle when we were in the stadium, had gotten worse and worse. It racked through his body—violent coughs. He coughed up bile, and then he coughed up nothing. He cried because of the pain it caused his ribs, and I knew his ribs must be broken.
And then he wasn’t begging for water with his voice, he was only begging with his eyes. He’d become too weak to talk.
A bucket of water was finally shoved in, but by the time it reached us in the back of the car, it was empty.
And then he wasn’t begging at all.
He could barely lift his head. I said his name, and he blinked, slowly. I don’t even know if he registered me. He disappeared so fast; he became unrecognizable so fast.
A second bucket was finally shoved in, but by the time I spooned some through Abek’s mouth, it dribbled back out his chin. He wasn’t able to swallow.
A hundred years passed
in that moment, in realizing my brother was too weak to swallow, and I didn’t know how I could make him. I must have been thirsty myself; I must have been in pain, but all I can remember is that my brother couldn’t swallow and I lived a century in that moment.
There were slats toward the top of the car. I could see through the slats what was happening. I could see a guard line up three people, front to back, and shoot a bullet through them all at once to use only one bullet. I could see, in my mind, the memory of my own father receiving a bullet to the head, and the soft way he crumpled to the ground. How long would it be before they shot us?
I could see the future. They would finally open the door to our car. They would unload us, and I would have to carry Abek out because he couldn’t walk. And I would be carrying him to his death. I would be laying him at the feet of the Nazi guards who would separate him from me and then kill him alone.
I knew that his ending, at that point, was inevitable. He was too weak. His death was the finishing stitch on a garment that is mostly complete. The only control I had in the matter was what kind of stitch should be used.
I’d taken off Abek’s jacket to use as his pillow, and now I bunched it up in my hands. I started to tell his favorite stories. I put the jacket over his nose and mouth. He didn’t struggle. He wasn’t conscious anymore. I don’t even know if he was alive anymore. He might have gone already; he was so still, I could no longer see his chest rise and fall.
It still took away pieces of my soul with every passing second. It was still, I think, a mercy.
That’s what I told myself, what I had to believe was true. It was a mercy. It was protecting him. It was an impossible thing that was more horrible than every other choice in the universe, except for the choice of letting the guards do it. At least this way, he wouldn’t be alone.
When it was finished, I made a space for him on the floor of the train car. I kissed his cheeks. I covered him with his best jacket, because we had all worn our best clothes, and I had sewn my best message into it. It was Abek’s life story, written in my smallest, neatest handwriting: my name, and our parents’ names, and the songs we sung, and the stories we told.
