But on that day, they would try to turn me over to the Red Cross.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw the preparations for our parting. Miri and Twins’ Father, they were huddled on the kitchen floor, a pile of our many shoes between them. Miri was stuffing the holes with paper, and Twins’ Father was binding them with twine. Shoe after shoe they mended in silence, and with hands that shook, both unsteadied by the nearing good-bye. I saw Miri glance at the packs stationed by the door, one for Peter, another for Twins’ Father. She studied them as if she was trying to gather courage to speak, and then she addressed Twins’ Father, her face downturned, her eyes still low.
“You never questioned my actions, Zvi. Why was this? The others—I would hear stories about myself, what I had done. And the stories, they follow me, even now.”
She sealed the shoe’s injury shut, tied the twine in a final knot.
“You were only ever good,” he said simply. He faced her as he spoke, seemingly hoping that she might welcome this truth, and when she did not, he bent to arrange the mended shoes in rows, as if this could put matters to rights. But when he turned his back, Miri took the opportunity to slip past him, to the door. Spying my wakefulness, she gestured for me to join her, but Twins’ Father was not willing to forgo the formality of a farewell. Looking up from the rows of shoes, he gave her the only one the ex-doctor might accept.
“Your children will miss you,” he said.
Miri’s eyes said that she believed him.
And as I hobbled out on my crutches, I saw Peter’s head rise from where he slept, at the crackle of the fireplace, saw the hair ruffled on the back of his scalp. He looked at me in the haze of a partial dream. I had tried to prepare for this good-bye. “When we see each other again,” I said, but I couldn’t complete the sentence the way I wanted to. I couldn’t say: It will be better, I will be walking, you will be well, all will be found, we won’t be imprisoned or without a country, we won’t be hunted or starving, we won’t be witnesses to pain.
I couldn’t finish that sentence, not then.
Twenty years later, I would have a chance to finish, but there was no need for it. We would be grown adults, waiting in a courtyard in Frankfurt. Peter would show me pictures of his wife, the one who understood why he bolted in the night following the ring of the telephone, why he kept boxes stacked beneath the bed filled with speculations as to the whereabouts of a criminal more slippery than most, a man whose initial escape from Auschwitz led to a transfer to Gross-Rosen, and then a flight into Rosenheim, where he found work as a farmhand, separating the good potatoes from the bad potatoes, putting them into neat little piles for the farmer’s inspection, before settling into the ease of his final hideout in Brazil, where he wrote his memoirs and listened to music and swam in the sea.
But this is not about that man, as much as he would have liked it to be.
This is about Peter. As Miri had predicted, he was good at many things, so many that he found himself a bit lost after the war. He ran away from his guardian’s custody and traveled; he roamed from country to country as if he would never shed the role of a messenger, a delivery boy, but his travels stopped when a woman loved him and married him, despite her family’s warnings that he was damaged beyond repair, that she should not be surprised when their children were stillborn or, worse, born with mutations issued by the doctor’s hands. But they had children. Two boys. They were healthy and beautiful; you could see their father in their faces. I could have studied that photograph all day, but we were in that courtyard with a greater purpose.
Her trial was over. We would be permitted to see Elma in her confines; we would be allowed to confront her with the facts of what she had done. Germany had given her a life sentence plus thirteen years. One of the more severe sentences handed down in the course of the country’s prosecution of the criminals of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it determined that Elma’s death would occur on the cold floor of her cell.
Peter went in first. What he said, I don’t know. When he returned, he simply nodded me forward, without a word. Somehow, he had never stopped knowing what I needed.
Elma’s cage was more spacious than the one I had lived in. And no one drove a needle into her spine, no one hobbled her at the ankles, no one broke into her body and sifted through its insides, seizing her ability to have children while still a child herself, before sealing her shut with a ragged stitch. Her hair was close-cropped, but she had not been shaved. Her fine clothes were gone, but she was not naked. She had been captured, but no one had taken her childhood, as she’d taken mine, and even from behind her bars, she tried to take more from me; she gave a little laugh at the sight of my cane, eager for me to know her defiance. But I knew that she would spend her days hearing nothing but the sound of her own thoughts. She had no Zayde or Mama to soothe her—she had not even the davening of a pigeon at her window. This seemed a rightful misery. I felt no pity for Elma, and yet—the sight of her troubled me. I could have given her a game or two, to help her preserve herself within her cage, but I doubted she would see the value of such things. Instead, I gave her something that was of value to me: my forgiveness. She spat in disgust. I forgave her that too.
Forgiving her did not restore my family; it did not remove my pain or blunt my nightmares. It was not a new beginning. It was not, in the slightest, an end. My forgiveness was a constant repetition, an acknowledgment of the fact that I still lived; it was proof that their experiments, their numbers, their samples, was all for naught—I remained, a tribute to their underestimations of what a girl can endure. In my forgiveness, their failure to obliterate me was made clear.
And after I was finished telling Elma that I forgave her, I reminded her of those who didn’t have the opportunity to do so. I said their names.
Peter, he was the only one of the names on Twins’ Father’s list that I ever saw again.
All those innocents—I didn’t wonder about their futures that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn’t know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn’t get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn’t marry because they had nothing to offer a marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to burn the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.
They were children, once.
When the truck bearing a true red cross came, I hid.
I heard the attendants collect the children. Some shrieked, kicked, clung to the doorposts. All thirty-two were forced to surrender their bread knives, and the blades clanged as they joined a pile on the floor. I wished I could have hidden them with me, but I could not risk discovery. I was in the yard, behind a snowdrift, with my wheelbarrow over me. I peered around the hedge to see the children shuffle into the truck. I saw Sophia jaunt merrily, a doll given to her by the attendant beneath her arm. I saw Erik and Eli Fallinger regard the attendants skeptically, their feet rooted to the ground. The Aaldenberg triplets hid behind Miri, and she coaxed them into the attendants’ arms, her blank expression shifting with grief. And then—I watched her count the children, call their names, register my absence. I heard her cry out for me. The attendants tried to soothe her, but Miri protested that Krakow wasn’t safe, the assaults were happening every day, no one could tell her that the girl would be fine, especially after what the girl had been through, and the girl, she continued, she was crippled besides, the easiest of prey for anyone who might hunt her.
I would listen to my guardian call for me till her voice deserted her.
It was cruel to make Miri wait, especially with such dangers in her mind, but I knew I could stir only once there
was no risk of the Red Cross’s return. Only without the interference of their presence could I convince her that we had to stay together. After a good hour of caution, I picked up my crutches and hobbled into the abandoned house. It was dark. I lit a candle. But I did not have a free arm to carry it. So I stood in the middle of the room and looked about at what I could see in this scant light. I wanted to tell Miri that we could start again now. But Miri was not herself; she was not even the version who sought forgiveness. This Miri was folded in the corner near the birdcage. She was awake, but absent. I thought that the game that brought me back could bring her back too, that it could make her recover from this want of death.
I dwelled on fish. I thought about species first, then genus, and then I reached the third classification, the one I truly wanted.
Family was my first thought.
But even family ends was my second. It was not a thought I wanted. I assured myself that Miri would continue to live simply because I needed her to—but when she would not shift her gaze from the thirty-two injurious reminders of all she’d lost, I recognized that she would end her world if I did not act—this possibility, it made me forget my crutches, and I stumbled forth for help. Desperation alone carried me, two steps, then three, and then I fell and cried out to the city, I cried for all of Krakow to hear.
Stasha
Chapter Nineteen
The Sacred Curtain
Here and there, lost, upended things: a bird’s nest on a puddle of ice, shattered spectacles on a locket dangling from a fencepost. I opened that locket. One half held a lock of hair, the other rust. I knew how that half felt. I felt that way whenever I looked at the tree trunks and saw those many names, all of them loved and searched for, and mine not among them.
The beggars here were certain it was February 11, 1945. They wanted no payment.
We were in Wieliczka, just outside of Krakow, according to the signs I no longer trusted. Like many a place, we never should have been there at all. Leaving Poznan, we found the roads obscured by tanks, interrupting our path to Warsaw. Whether they were Russian or German, not one of us could tell; the darkness carried too much risk. We told ourselves that the roads would clear in only a moment, any moment, but we rode on Horse’s back as we waited, and soon enough, our waiting turned into wandering.
Horse was annoyed; he did not care for the circuitous nature of our travels. Feliks accused me of stalling. While I was usually eager to accept blame, I could not fault myself for this. In all three of us, I knew, there had arisen a hesitation. Our fragile army couldn’t possibly be up to such a task. Defeating Mengele! Even my new pistol had taken to mocking me, and its bullets chorused in terrible agreement.
My aim will never be true enough, the pistol said. My aim will never be sweet or accurate or good.
But you have your bullets, I pointed out. You are not alone. And you have me besides. We are family, all of us. See how much Feliks and I have accomplished already, as brother and sister?
What does it matter? the bullets murmured to one another. Stasha’s rotten eye has made her aim rot too—she is bound to miss. I wanted to tell the bullets that they couldn’t think this way, they couldn’t question me, they had to dream themselves into the heart or the head of our enemy.
Hearing this, the bullets snorted. Pistol remarked on the presence of smoke in a manner of turning the conversation.
The smoke over the city smelled as smoke should—a tang of pine, a touch of balsam. The threads of it didn’t write out a welcome, but they weren’t the red furies of Auschwitz either. Still, there was evidence that our kind had been endangered there in the days that the Wehrmacht ruled. We stumbled over this evidence while rooting for a place to sleep.
Why had no one defended it? Or had its defenders been overcome? This wooden synagogue—I could only imagine the flames it had seen. I am not sure that we would have known our shelter to be a synagogue at all if it were not for the singed parochet—the curtain of the ark; blue velvet, its lions smote by soot, its Torah crown still agleam—that lay in the snow some feet away, as if it had managed to flee the pillage under its own power. When Feliks saw the parochet, he said not a thing, he didn’t even say what his father the rabbi would have said, but he stooped and kissed it and he draped it over a singed post in the midst of the collapse to protect it from the earth. But the parochet fell once more, leaving us with no choice but to carry its sacred length with us.
Fallen rafters black as pitch thatched themselves across a floor that shimmered with broken glass. A corner of this structure remained intact, and it was into its shelter that we retreated, hitching Horse to a charred birch at the perimeter. Horse looked as if he could restore the synagogue to its former glory with his beauty alone. Though the protrusions of his ribs upheld their prominence, so, too, did the black spark of his eye, which he fixed on us with a vigilant stare, and whenever the slightest sound arose on the wind, his ears shifted with worry. In the sweet protection of Horse’s observance, we were comforted.
We huddled together beneath the blue velvet and guarded ourselves. If one were to look in our distant direction, all he might see was a thatchery of torched wood, a luminescing horse shifting from foot to foot, and the briefest field of azure that was our parochet. It felt as if no harm could ever come to us. I was about to ask Feliks what his father would think of us using the parochet as a blanket, if he would praise our endurance or curse us for blasphemy, but already, he was fast asleep.
And so it was decided that Horse and me would keep watch. Feliks snored while we counted stars to stay awake. There were too few that night to outpace my thoughts, so I expanded on the usual by giving them names, and then futures. I gave them futures in all sorts of places that I’d never seen, and when these futures were complete, I took them away, because why should a star have a future when Pearl did not?
Eventually, the watchfulness of Horse’s eye convinced me that it was safe to sleep.
A simple belief, the kind I needed.
I would like to say that although we woke to find Horse gone, nothing else was amiss, but more than his absence struck us in the morning. Where our pale hero should have stood, nodding his head while sleepily rousing, a red ribbon began. This trail of blood wove itself around the ruins and escaped across the field like a loose serpent, and we followed its path, all the stops and starts of it, for half a mile, until it flurried to finale before the arch of a stony-mouthed tunnel. Into the ensuing darkness, we peered.
“It continues,” Feliks said. I was not sure if he was referring to pain or to the red path. He caught me by the arm and made an attempt to hold me back, but his grip was not earnest. He wanted answers as much as I did. We didn’t care that it was to take place in the depths of a salt mine, that we were to follow a red path neither narrow nor straight into a briny underground, a place beneath the earth that seemed most hospitable to evil.
We were both blinded, I think, by this bloody ribbon that stretched before us, or, rather, we were blinded by what it might mean to our many losses. I took it as a message even as it was leading me toward horror. I knew I would not find my sister alive, I knew violence had seized Horse, but I thought perhaps I was being led toward understanding and restoration. How could I not think that while surrounded by such beauty?
Because the entry of this salt mine—imagine stepping into the tilted entry of a lily; consider slipping into coils of white, luminous beyond compare. Following the mine’s wooden staircase, we turned into one gleaming corridor after another; we dead-ended ourselves in tiny cells strewn with tinsel; we stumbled into frosted dens of sodium that hosted flutteries of bats. Through these subterranean halls, we walked in witness to awe at the core of our world.
But even awe bottoms out. At the end of the wooden staircase, we saw that the lily that we traveled in held some nectar that had attracted an army of ants. The soldiers were all so alike in their uniforms and their misery. One would think, after all their crimes, that some godly, glowering hand might descend from the
ceiling and lay them out, one by one, like gray dominoes. But no hand descended. Even if it had, it was far too late for Horse.
Because I was never an expert in bones, but I knew, seeing the scatter and the threads of red ribbon that led to a boiling pot propped on a primitive lattice of bricks, that we would not be riding into Warsaw on horseback, that Horse, this dear animal that had lent us his service had met with the same ineloquent brutality we knew so well.
The depths of the salt mine repeated my horror to the center of the earth.
Some people, they have heard so many gasps, screams, cries that they are deaf to them, no matter how much a salt mine enlarges their volume or reach. This seemed to be the case with these Wehrmacht soldiers. The six of them were too busy squatting here and there, picking at their plates, drinking. They had no fear or interest in bears and jackals. Only one turned to acknowledge us, the one manning the stew pot. He had a shuffled, disorganized bearing and metallic eyes that stood in his face like medals rewarded for terrible deeds.
“He wasn’t yours to take,” I whispered. I was certain that Horse had alerted his captors to this fact. After all, it is known that all animals speak while in the throes of de-creation. Horse must have shrieked that he belonged to us, that the three of us were on a sacred mission for the restoration of our souls, the taking of another’s, and the avenging of Pearl.
I stumbled forward in rage. Feliks tried to pull me back.
The soldier tending the pot was dazed on horse meat and drunk on whiskey. He staggered forward and drew his pistol and then took another step. He tilted his head to regard us. He couldn’t understand why we didn’t run; he appeared to find our behavior novel, and he treated us like we were curiosities sent to interrupt his boredom and doom. I knew why I didn’t run. I had nothing to fear. But Feliks—why was he so rooted to the floor? He stood as if he had no choice but to stand by me. Both of us, we’d dropped our sacks, and we should have been lifting them in our arms and running, we should have been bolting up those stairs. The soldier stepped forward to inspect their contents.
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