She looked down, wondering, and remembered that the bodice of her dress was soaked through with milk. She glanced lower still, to her skirt that was stained with blood. The blood that came after a baby was born.
They found a place for her, one act of kindness to lighten her pain, and the truck lurched forward. She sat, rubbing the life back into her arms, and tried to look outside. But the only light came from above, where a wide rent in the truck’s canvas top lay open to the starry dome of the night sky.
She and Nico had danced under such a sky. They’d sung of love and stardust and the promise of brightening dreams, and she’d been so stupidly certain their happiness would endure. Yet how could goodness endure, let alone flower, in a world that emboldened and embraced men such as Karl Zwerger? And how was she meant to survive when her Nico was no longer a part of it?
Chapter 26
12 October 1944
The stars faded as the night bled into dawn, and still the truck rumbled along, never stopping, relentlessly bearing her away from home and hope. Hour by hour, Nina’s thirst and hunger and grief carved steadily away at the last of her courage, and even the milk in her breasts, so painful in the hours after her arrest, soon shrank to a bittersweet memory.
Nico was dead. He was gone, lost to her forever, and though she tried to still her mind, to close her eyes to the memory of his body hanging from the gallows in that unspeakable place, she couldn’t stop herself from imagining his last moments.
When they’d placed the hood over his head and set the noose around his neck. When Zwerger’s pitiless words had rung in his ears. When Nico had known that death was seconds away, and he’d been frightened, alone, and tormented by fear for her and their baby.
It hurt to breathe, to think, to be. Grief roiled through her, and she was defenseless, drowning, desolate.
Yet her daughter lived. Lucia was safe with Rosa. She was safe, and happy, and Nina would return to her. She had only to survive this one day, and the next, and the next day to come. It was that simple—and that terrifying.
It was growing dark again when the truck slowed, made a series of lurching turns, and then finally, mercifully, stopped. Unseen hands wrenched open its tailgate, followed by a flare of dazzling light. Harsh voices shouted unfamiliar words—but was she meant to stay where she was? Or come forward?
It seemed to be the latter, for the men around her jumped from the truck one by one, some of them so weak they struggled to keep their balance. She was supposed to get down, too, but terror numbed her limbs and froze her in place.
“Bitte,” she begged. Please.
One man, faceless in the dizzying glare of the light, seized her wrist and pulled her out of the truck. She landed heavily, pitching forward onto her knees, but he dragged her up and through a narrow gate, past high fences garlanded with barbed wire, and across a patchily graveled courtyard to a low brick building. Wrenching open the nearest of its doors, he pushed her inside.
They were in an office. It was bright and clean and the air smelled of beeswax and lemon. It held filing cabinets and desks and typewriters, and there were neat stacks of stationery and pots of sharpened pencils on its desks. It belonged to another world.
A high counter separated Nina and the guard from the rest of the space; behind it stood another man in uniform, his attention focused on an open ledger. He looked up as they entered, his face a stolid blank, and rattled off a string of words in German. When she failed to respond he repeated them, and then, his expression hardening, switched to Italian.
“Name. Place of birth. Age. Occupation.”
“Antonina Mazin,” she answered. They were imprisoning her because she was a Jew. Why not give them her true name?
“And?” the clerk snapped. “The rest of it?”
“I was born in Venice. I am twenty-four years old. I am . . .” And here she hesitated again. If she was here to work, they’d want her to be strong. Tough. Used to hard labor. “I am a farmworker.”
The clerk wrote it all down in his ledger, as serenely as if he’d recorded the delivery of a piece of furniture, and then he nodded, his attention still fixed on the page before him, and the guard dragged her along the corridor to another office, this one a stockroom of sorts.
“Nummer?” The clerk here was a woman no older than Nina.
The guard shook his head. “Keine. Jüdin.” No number. Jew.
The woman reached for the topmost of a stack of folded uniforms at her hip. She shook it out, nodded in satisfaction, and flung it at Nina. A moment later the guard grasped her arm, his fingers bruisingly tight, and led her back out to the courtyard.
“Where are you taking me?” she pleaded, and when the guard didn’t slow his pace, let alone respond, she tried again in German, fumbling for the half-forgotten words.
“Wo bringst—” Where are you taking—
“Halt die Fresse!” Shut up.
“Bitte, mein Herr, möchte ich . . .” Please, sir. I want—
He stopped short, pushed roughly at her shoulder until she faced him, and then he punched her in the face, his closed fist landing like a hammer just below her left eye. The pain was stunning, an explosion of agony that sent her to her knees, but before she could catch her breath he’d hauled her up and they were off again.
“Blöde Kuh! Halt deine blöde Fresse!” Stupid cow! Shut the fuck up!
They reached another building, its door open wide despite the chill of the late afternoon. He shoved her through, but her toes caught on the raised sill at its threshold and she fell once more. He marched off, his heavy boots crunching over the muddy gravel, and a little of her fear bled away.
It was a few minutes before she was able to stand, and even then it was an effort to stay upright, for she was so dizzy she might have been balancing on the deck of a gale-bound ship. Instead she stood at the door of what was obviously a cellblock, its gloomy interior taken up by two long rows of three-tiered bunks.
“You’re new.”
A girl was sitting on one of the top bunks. She was young, no more than fourteen or fifteen, with fair hair bound in two stringy plaits and a sweetly heart-shaped face.
“Yes,” Nina said. “I’m not sure what to do.”
“Take the bottom bunk over there. By the broken window.”
Nina inched along the central aisle until she spied the broken window. At least it would let in some fresh air.
“Are there others here?” she asked.
“They’re lining up for the latrines. I went before, when we were out in the fields. Stupid to wait. And no one saw, besides.”
“Oh,” Nina said, taken aback by the girl’s candor. “Where am I?” she asked.
“They bring you in by truck?”
“Yes.”
“The locals call it via Resia. The Germans call it the Durchgangslager. Either way it’s awful, so don’t get your hopes up.”
“So we’re still in Italy?”
“Just. Bolzano.”
She’d been to Bolzano with her parents, years ago, on their way to a walking trip in the mountains. It had been a pretty place, almost comically quaint, with a backdrop of towering mountains that kept their snowy tops even in the summer. She’d thought, then, that it belonged in a fairy tale.
Now Nina sat on the bunk closest to the broken window, too tired to think of more questions, and unfolded her uniform. It was a plain sacklike dress, quite large enough to go around her twice, and made of a rough blue fabric that would undoubtedly feel dreadful against her skin. A yellow triangle was sewn to its left breast, and a large red X was painted across its back.
Resigned to wearing the awful thing, she started to unbutton her own dress, by now little more than a fetid rag, but the girl interrupted her.
“Don’t. Keep your clothes on underneath. You’re lucky they didn’t take them away.”
“But they smell awful,” Nina protested.
The girl shook her head. “Everything smells here. It doesn’t matter. Better to be warm.” Her voi
ce was atonal, as if she were a robot rather than a person. As if the work of speaking was enough to exhaust her.
“Thank you.”
Of course the girl was right, not only about staying warm but also about the stench in the bunkhouse. The stables at home were a rose garden in comparison. Before long, she was sure, the odor of her soiled dress would be unnoticeable to her beleaguered senses.
“Get some rest while you can,” the girl added. “And don’t take them off.”
“What? My boots?” Nina asked, pausing in the act of unlacing them.
“If you do, they won’t be here when you wake up. Trust me.”
“All right. Thanks.”
It was strange to crawl into bed, even one as spartan as the straw-matted wooden bunk, while still fully dressed. She lay back, remembering her thin mattress at home with a bittersweet fondness, and pulled the filthy blanket atop her.
She was exhausted, cold, hungry, and achingly sad, but she was alive. She was strong and healthy, and for Lucia’s sake, as well as Nico’s memory, she would endure. She would survive.
SHE HAD ONLY just fallen asleep when the others returned from the latrine. No one said anything to her at first, but as they lined up in two rows along the central aisle another woman took pity on her.
“You’d better get up before the guard comes. It’s time for appell, and she’ll have a fit if she finds you lying down.”
Nina nodded, though it made her blackened eye throb unbearably, and somehow managed to drag herself from her bunk. The others made room for her in the line, and then they marched outside together.
Once in the courtyard, which was fenced off from the rest of the camp, they assembled themselves in neat banks of five women per row, and once they were in place they simply stood where they were. No one talked or even whispered. No one so much as sneezed.
The female guards counted them twice, and marked down their observations on sheets of paper affixed to clipboards, and then, rather than allow their captives to return to the meager warmth and comfort of the cellblock, they simply watched them shiver and shake in the deepening cold.
After about an hour, though it might well have been longer, the guards nodded, and then the women formed another queue, this time for supper: a few mouthfuls of undercooked polenta and a scant cup of watery vegetable soup. The polenta was rancid, and the vegetables in the soup were little more than peelings, but it was enough to ease the worst of Nina’s hunger, if not her misery.
And then to bed. Two other women shared the bunk with her, which meant she was pressed against the suppurating damp of the brick wall. At her feet, frigid night air drifted in from the broken windowpane. The nearest of her bunkmates didn’t even look at her before falling dead asleep, but the woman was as warm as a furnace and would keep Nina from freezing through before morning.
The shrill screech of a whistle woke them when it was still dark. She barely had time to eat the slice of cold polenta she was handed, and then get through the line for the stinking latrines, before it was time to queue up again for appell.
Instead of counting them and making everyone stand for ages, the guard began to call out numbers in German. Dozens of women came forward and were marched away by pairs of guards. After a few minutes only Nina and about thirty others remained.
“Nur Nullen bleiben,” the female guard said to no one in particular, and then she laughed as if she had made a fantastically entertaining joke. Only zeros are left, she had said. But it made no sense.
Nina stared, forgetting to look away, and the woman’s smile sharpened into a menacing scowl. She had an incongruous halo of bright blond hair pinned in thick plaits atop her head, a face that might once have been pretty, and a voice steeped in purest venom.
“You Jews. Nothing,” the woman spat out in halting Italian. “No numbers. All zeros.”
And then, her rancorous gaze sweeping over the rest of the group, the guard switched back to German, barking out a series of orders so quickly that Nina couldn’t decipher a single word. The prisoners formed a queue, with the nasty female guard at its head and a male guard, his rifle held at readiness, at the rear, and they set off across the open ground, back in the direction of the gate Nina had passed through the day before.
No one was panicking; no one seemed particularly fretful or frightened. Perhaps it really was nothing more sinister than a work detail. The girl from the bunkhouse was there, not far ahead, walking calmly enough. She’d mentioned working in the fields. That was something Nina knew how to do.
They walked on and on, kilometer after kilometer, nearly the entire way uphill, and if there were other living souls about they remained hidden behind closed doors and impenetrable hedgerows. At last they turned onto a private drive, its gravel pockmarked with puddles and dead weeds. At its terminus was a fine old palazzo, its many windows shuttered tight, though men in uniform were coming and going from its main entrance.
The guards led them inside, into an echoing ballroom where the least movement cast up flurries of dust, and pointed at a jumble of buckets. A few of the women seemed to know what to do, for they gathered up their buckets, plucked a few rags from a pile on the floor, and filed through a door at its far end. Nina collected her own bucket and rag and followed them along a gloomy corridor to a scullery, where they each filled their buckets from a single cold-water tap. Back to the ballroom they went, and one by one they dropped to their knees, a meter or so apart, and began to scrub the floor.
It was thankless work, not least because they’d been given no soap, but Nina, thanks to Rosa, did know how to scrub a floor properly. A few of the women had no notion of what to do, or worked so slowly that they angered the guards. One poor old lady’s hair was pulled savagely by the female guard for failing to wring out her rag with sufficient vigor.
It was torture to hear and witness such things and be too afraid to intervene. Nina’s heart bled for those who were being treated so awfully, but she knew she would be beaten if she tried to stop any of it. And she didn’t think she could bear for anyone to hit her again.
Instead she worked. She stopped her ears and averted her eyes and thought only of each single square of parquet before her. She worked and worked, and when they were told to empty their buckets and queue up again for the journey home, she reminded herself the way back to camp was downhill. It would be an easy walk, and there would be something to eat after appell, and when she was at last in bed she wouldn’t fall asleep straightaway. Instead she would think of her baby.
She would remember how delicious it felt to hold Lucia in her arms. How her whispery lashes curved upon her cheeks as she slept. How her rosebud mouth trembled when she was hungry. She would remember that her baby was safe and loved, and that alone would be enough to carry Nina through another cold night and another wretched day.
She and the other Jewish women—not zeros; never zeros—worked for a few more days at the hotel, and then they were sent to a nearby apple orchard. At first she was elated, for the walk there was far shorter and the smell of the apples in the late autumn sunshine was ever so pleasant. As one of the strongest in her group, she was given the work of collecting the baskets of fruit once they were full. The baskets were heavy and awkward to carry, though, and after only a few hours she was faint with hunger and fatigue.
She was ravenous, but she knew better than to sample even the most flyblown piece of fruit. One woman took a bite of half-rotten windfall, one single bite, and she was beaten almost to death for it. The sound of her piteous cries, together with the sickly-sweet smell of the overripe apples they labored to harvest, were enough to turn Nina’s stomach—and yet she wolfed down her supper of gritty polenta and moldy vegetable scraps that evening without a moment’s hesitation.
THE WHISPERS STARTED a few days later. In the queues for the latrines, in the fleeting moments as they assembled for appell, in the coldly blanketing night when the guards had retreated to their comfortable quarters, the women spoke of one thing only: the threat of another
transport.
“The guards were talking about it. They say it’ll happen any day now,” Nina overheard in the queue for supper.
“What do you mean by ‘transport’?” she asked.
“What do you think?” came the answer. “People are transported away from here. They line up and they march away and they never come back.”
“Where?”
“North, across the Brenner Pass. And from there no one knows. No one’s ever returned.”
Her last day in camp began no differently from the rest.
She and the other Jewish women waited as the others, the ones with numbers, were organized into work kommandos for the day. She waited patiently, hoping they would not have to walk too far. Hoping the blister on her heel wouldn’t burst.
Their guard, the same awful woman who persisted in calling them zeros, was in a good mood; that was enough to set Nina’s nerves on edge.
“Today you go to via Pacinotti,” the woman said, and her smile was feral in its intensity.
Nina chanced a glance at the other prisoners surrounding her, but no one seemed to know what the guard meant. Perhaps it was a road they were going to repair? Or the address of a building they were meant to clean?
She joined the queue that was forming. It was far larger today, at least a hundred strong, and it included dozens of women she’d never seen before. Some were still dressed in civilian clothes; some were elderly and had been absent from the work kommandos.
None of the women had numbers.
They marched out of the camp and along a bridge, and after they’d been under way for ten minutes or so they came around a corner, to the edge of an open swath of scrubland, and though they weren’t anywhere close to the Bolzano station, a train was waiting.
It was made up of boxcars, their doors drawn wide, and the men guarding it, the same men who were now coming forward to surround the women, wore the black-and-gray uniforms of the SS.
It was too late to run. Too late to hide.
Our Darkest Night Page 22
