The women at the front of the queue began to protest, to shy away, and to scream. She did, too, but it was no use. A heartbeat later she was at the foot of the ramp that led to the last of the boxcars. It was full already, but still she was pushed up and along by cruel, mauling hands, and with one last shove she was inside. The door swept shut behind her with a stomach-turning clang.
There were dozens of women in the boxcar, so many that it was impossible to lie down or even to sit. The train lurched forward, startling her. An older woman, her back bent by age, clutched at Nina’s arm, and together they managed to keep their balance.
“I beg your pardon,” Nina said, amazed at how she could remember her manners in the midst of such horror.
“It’s not your fault, my dear.” The woman smiled tremulously and then, her touch ever so gentle, patted Nina’s arm. “Do you think you might be able to see outside?”
“I’ll try.”
It was hard to turn, not without elbowing the others around her, but by slow increments she managed to press her face to the side of the car, where narrow gaps between the planks let in the barest wisps of fresh air. The wood was rough and unfinished, and smelled of the warm earthiness of a barn. Of its animals.
She would not think of what became of those animals when their journeys in such cars came to an end.
“I can’t see much,” she said, and it was true. Only fleeting impressions of trees and rocky slopes and little more. “From the sun I think we’re going north.”
She lost her place by the door when she needed to empty her bladder and had to make her way to the end of the car, only to discover that the toilet was simply an open barrel a little less than a meter high. The women nearby averted their eyes as she used it, and some even smiled encouragingly once she was finished.
They had not lost their humanity. They knew how important it was to restore a fraction of the dignity that had been stolen from them.
She managed to shuffle a little distance away from the stinking barrel, but the elderly woman had taken her spot at the side of the car and she couldn’t begrudge her the relief of a solid surface to rest against, nor the chance for a few breaths of fresh air.
“Do you know where they’re sending us?”
Nina didn’t recognize the speaker, who was young and very pretty. Perhaps she had been kept in another bunkhouse with the older women? She hadn’t been part of Nina’s work kommandos.
Nina shook her head, wondering if she ought to introduce herself. Would it be helpful to cling to such pleasantries? Or would it be salt in an ever-deepening wound?
“No,” she said, leaving the question of names for another time. “I think they’re sending us to a labor camp. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Me too. There were men in my neighborhood in Vicenza, soldiers who were captured last year. Their families got postcards saying they were in labor camps.”
“There you go,” Nina said, but she wasn’t able to put much conviction behind her words.
“They weren’t Jews, though.”
“No,” Nina agreed. “But the Germans need workers. And we’re both young and strong.”
“We are. Only . . .” And the woman looked down, and Nina noticed—how could she have missed it before?—that she was pregnant. So pregnant there was no way of hiding it. Despair pinched at her lovely face, and Nina, try as she might, could not think of a single word of comfort.
So she took the other woman’s hand, and she held it tight, the way you might hold on to a beloved child when crossing a busy road. And she tried to remember what it was to pray.
Chapter 27
The train traveled on, never stopping, through an entire day and night and another day, and as the sun set once more Nina could think of nothing save the maddening thirst that consumed her. The intervening hours had seen her migrate back to the side of the car, a pebble caught up in a turning glacier, and at some point—an hour ago? a day?—she’d noticed a few trembling beads of water on the bolts in the door. Condensation from the women’s exhalations over the past days.
Fear distilled.
She’d licked the metal dry, but it had done nothing save stoke the fire of her thirst. Soon they’d all be dead. To starve a person took weeks; to deprive them of water required only a matter of days.
The oldest and sickest of the women, no longer able to stand, sat huddled together in the middle of the car, and at first they’d talked and wept and prayed together, their voices rising and falling in an achingly beautiful lament. “Lead us in peace and direct our steps in peace,” they sang. “Guide us in peace, and support us in peace, and cause us to reach our destination in life, joy, and peace.”
But now they were silent, their prayers silenced by exhaustion and thirst. It had been hours since anyone in the boxcar had spoken.
The train stopped on the morning of the third day. The door was hauled open.
Around them, an empty plain of fallow fields and skeletal trees stretched to the horizon. A few meters distant, close enough for passing trains to rattle the glass in its windows, stood a house. It was abandoned now, its gardens overgrown, but the fountain in its forecourt was still pumping water. The merry sound it made was so incongruous, so obscene, that a croaking laugh erupted from her mouth.
One of the guards pointed at Nina and beckoned for her to jump down. “Wasser,” he said. Could it be possible their captors were allowing them to have some water?
Two more women, chosen from other cars on the train, had also been ordered to descend. She scrambled down and called out to the women still inside.
“Give me your cups—give me anything that will hold water. I’ll fill them for you!”
They handed her tin cups, an old canteen, even a little saucepan, the sort one used for heating milk, and she ran to the fountain and let the water fill them. And she drank, ducking her head low to the corroded spout, but after only a few gulps she was pulled away and shoved back toward the train.
She handed up the brimming vessels, but more were thrust at her, and the others’ faces were so desperate that she approached the guard, her head bowed submissively.
“Noch mehr, bitte,” she begged. More, please. He nodded, so she rushed to the fountain, gulping what water she could as the cups filled up, then ran back to the car and handed them over.
But when she turned, hopeful of a third chance at the fountain, a different guard was standing between her and the beckoning water. He shook his head, and when she looked past him she saw how the other guards had advanced, their guns pointing at her and the other women who had been fetching water. Their reprieve was over.
She scrambled back into the car, scraping her shins on the rough threshold. The door slammed shut, the train began to move, the wind began to whistle through the cracks in the wood siding, and Nina realized she was cold, far colder than she’d been before.
Looking down, she saw that the front of her smock and its long sleeves were sopping wet.
“Give me a cup,” she asked the women surrounding her, and right away they understood what she meant to do. She wrung the water from her dress, careful not to spill so much as a single precious drop, and when its bodice and skirt were all but dry she shrugged her arms from her sleeves and let others mine them for even more water. Not until the last drop had been chased from the dirty fabric did the other women retreat, their whispered words of thanks a balm to Nina’s despairing ears.
She’d had more water than the others, but it had made no difference. Her thirst still consumed her. Emptied her. Hollowed her out.
Left her thin and fragile, a scrap of paper crumpled in an indifferent fist, discarded, and left to dissolve underfoot.
ANOTHER DAY CRAWLED by before the train stopped again.
It was dark, and she was on her feet only because there was no room to fall. Outside, beyond, somewhere in the night, Nina heard metal scraping upon metal, the muffled shouts of angry men, and the gruff, staccato barks of agitated dogs.
But the
door did not open.
The train heaved itself forward, then stopped.
Forward, stop.
Forward, stop.
There was a moment of silence, stretching thin and taut, and then a terrifying eruption of noise: barking dogs, men shouting in unfamiliar languages, and all around her the startled screams of the women in the boxcar.
The door was slammed back and the darkness was abruptly obliterated by disorienting beams of light. Nina shielded her eyes, wary of falling from the train. She looked down, blinking, just as a heavy plank was dropped into place between the edge of the boxcar and the back of a large, canvas-topped truck that had pulled up about two meters away.
“Raus! Raus! Schnell!” Get out! Quick!
They wanted her to cross the beam and go into the truck, but she couldn’t see beyond the lights. Couldn’t see where her feet were meant to go, and she dared not imagine what would happen if she fell.
But the other women were crowding forward, unaccountably eager to leave the boxcar, so she stepped into the abyss and lurched across the makeshift bridge. By some miracle she did not fall.
Trucks took them to a huge, echoing shed. One after the other, the vehicles disgorged their passengers and departed, and when the last group of people had been harried inside, the shed doors were slammed shut and bolted.
And still no one came with water.
The concrete beneath her feet was cold and filthy, but Nina could stand no more. She crumpled to the floor, drew up her knees, huddled in on herself, and willed away her dread of what was to come.
This was tolerable. This was something she could survive.
If only someone would give them water.
The first pale glimmerings of dawn crept in through the high, barred windows, painting the people around her with faint stripes of gold. The minutes passed, measured in heartbeats.
She was dozing, dreaming of the fountain at the house on the empty plain, when the doors opened again. Six men entered, each carrying a large bucket, and they were dressed in striped uniforms that looked like something out of a comedy short.
Then one of the men came closer and the sight of him drove any memories of laughter from her mind. He was desperately thin, closer to a corpse than a living man, and he moved as if every step and gesture was infinitely painful.
“Toilette,” he said softly. “Toilet.”
At last someone who spoke Italian. Others gathered around the man, whispering their questions, rightly wary of the guards who still flanked the shed’s open doors. The scant answers they received rippled through the crowd like a tidal wave.
They were in Poland. At a place called Birkenau. Food and water would come later. Later.
“After what?” someone asked.
A selection. People would be chosen for work. To be chosen you had to be strong. Fit. Young.
Her parents had not been young, or fit, or strong.
“What happens to those who cannot work?”
It was the girl who had greeted Nina on her first day in Bolzano, her carapace of toughness peeled back to reveal a solitary and bewildered child.
“They are eliminated,” the man now said, his eyes averted.
Eliminated. Erased. Extinguished.
“Sent elsewhere?” the girl asked, her voice halting.
The man shook his head. And he drew his finger across his throat.
Nina caught the girl before she could fall. Calmed her as best she could. Swallowed down her own pain and fear with a silent promise: Later you will mourn. Later you will rage. Tonight you must remember how to live.
“I’m Nina. What is your name?”
“Ste . . . Ste . . . Stella Donati.”
“I remember you from my first day in Bolzano. I’d have lost my boots if not for you.”
“I wasn’t very nice. S . . . sorry.”
“You were wary. Of course you were.”
“They took my parents before me. I hid in our flat, but I had to go out to buy food, and that’s wh . . . when . . .”
“I know. I know.”
“I just wish I knew where they took my mamma and papà,” Stella wept.
And what could Nina say? How to answer such a question when the truth was more than she herself could bear?
Instead she made Stella a promise. “I’m alone, too. I’ll be your friend.”
Stella nodded, and her thin arms tightened around Nina. “There were dead people in my boxcar. One of them was standing next to me almost the entire way. She cried and cried, and I remember wishing that she would stop. Just stop making so much noise. And then she did stop, and I looked at her, and she was dead. Her eyes were open but she was dead.”
“Hush,” Nina told her, and held the child even closer, and she rubbed her back. Just as she’d once soothed Carlo when he’d been frightened or upset.
The men in the striped uniforms left.
The sun rose.
The doors of the shed burst open once more.
Soldiers came in, hard-eyed men armed with rifles and clubs and vicious dogs, and they quickly moved to encircle the desperate crowd. Among them were three officers. The soldiers began to nudge people forward, using their rifles as prods.
One by one they came forward to stand before the officers and be judged.
A nod, a barely discernible gesture, and the person was sent to join one of three groups. Young men, young women, and everyone else. The third group was by far the largest, and among it were children, elderly people, the infirm, and the sick. Nina knew that she did not want to be put in that last group.
But Stella—if she didn’t act quickly the girl would be sent to join them. She was nearly as tall as Nina, but her schoolgirl plaits made her look terribly young.
“You need to look older,” she hissed in her ear. “Be older. If they ask, tell them you’re sixteen. What’s your birth date?”
“May sixteenth.”
“Yes, but what year?”
“Nineteen thirty.”
“From now on, it’s 1928. We’ve only changed the year. Can you remember? You were born in 1928.”
“Yes,” the girl whispered.
As they spoke, Nina unraveled Stella’s plaits, combing through the lank strands with her fingers, her hands steady in spite of her fear. She twisted it back off the girl’s face and used a ribbon from her plaits to secure it.
“Look at me? Yes—that’s better.” She pinched Stella’s cheeks, just enough to add color, and did the same to her own. “We need to look healthy. Bite your lips, too.”
“How do you know what to do?” Stella asked.
“We’ve a better chance of surviving if they believe we can work for them,” she explained. “We don’t want to end up with the old and sick, or the children.”
The look on Stella’s face made Nina regret her honesty. “Not now,” she cautioned. “Don’t let yourself feel anything now. You need to be strong. Just stand tall and do whatever they tell you to do. Don’t look them in the eye—they won’t like that. And remember that you’re sixteen. You were born in 1928.”
They held hands until they were at the very front, and when Stella passed the selection Nina forced herself not to respond in any way, for these were the sort of men who would send a woman to her death for the sin of a smile.
And then it was her turn. She came forward and stood in front of the officers in their black-and-gray uniforms. She did not look up, for if she did they would surely see the hate in her eyes. So she focused instead on the shining buttons on their uniform jackets.
One of the officers beckoned her with a single, lazy curl of his gloved hand. She tottered forward, breathless with fear. He grasped at her upper arm, feeling for the muscles there. Then he took hold of her right hand and turned it over. Rubbed his thumb over her calloused palm.
He nodded in approval. “Dieser Transport hat starke Tiele.”
She was still puzzling out what he’d said as she was pushed toward the group of young women. Something about the pieces being s
trong?
Of course. She was one of the pieces. An insensate object to be assessed, inventoried—and discarded if found lacking.
When everyone had been sorted there were fewer than two dozen women in her group, about the same in the group of young men, and hundreds of people in the third group. Among them were the old lady who had steadied Nina on the train and the pregnant woman whose name she’d not dared to learn.
She would never learn it now.
NINA AND THE other young women were driven outside and across a barren plain, mud sticking like glue to their boots. The air was thick with fog and a throat-clogging sort of smoke that, breath by ragged breath, grew ever more intolerable.
A building rose from the mist. They were led inside and made to queue.
They did so dutifully, quietly. Nina did the same, all thoughts of protest evaporating. She only wanted some water and a chance to sleep. She would save her resistance for another day.
If she behaved they might give her some water.
Soon she was at the front of the queue. Before her was a table, and behind it sat a clerk. He was dressed in a striped prisoner’s uniform, just like the men they’d seen in the shed, though he was less gaunt than they had been.
He barely looked at her before posing the same questions she’d been asked in Bolzano.
“Name. Alter. Geburtsort. Beruf.”
She had to dig deep to remember enough German to answer. “Antonina Mazin. Vier und . . . vierundzwanzig? Venedig. And, ah, Landwirtin?”
Another room. Another queue.
The women were searched by men with rough, grasping hands. Nina had nothing but her clothes, no money or jewelry or any other belongings, and she was glad of it. Glad beyond measure that she’d left her wedding ring with Rosa.
The woman next to her cried out when her earrings were snatched from her pierced lobes, leaving them torn and bleeding. The man who’d hurt her was a prisoner, too, but shrugged away the woman’s shock and pain. What sort of man had he been, Nina wondered, before he had come to this place?
They joined the end of another snaking queue.
Nina reached the front. Her arm was pulled forward.
Our Darkest Night Page 23
