“Someone must have stolen a key, and I cannot see Luise having the skill to perform such a task.” Her eyes are boring into me. They send shivers and sickness into me, and my knees are suddenly not strong enough to hold my legs straight.
Frau directs the guard to take Luise’s body to the back of the house. She will be buried near the forest.
As the guard passes me, my shoulder catches the blanket, and it falls back from Luise’s face, which is blue, and her eyes are closed peacefully. She is wearing her nightgown, and several shards of wood are stuck to it. One arm is positioned slightly forward, stiffened, her hand bent as if she is waving good-bye to me. She looks even smaller in death.
Why couldn’t she wait? Could she tell that I was changing my mind?
Nurse marches after Frau and the guard.
“Did you know she was hiding there?” Nurse whispers to me.
“No.”
“Did you take the key?”
I think of Jacek.
“Yes.”
Nurse nods her head as if she knew this answer was coming. She does not look pleased. She blinks her eyes several times as if she is blinking away my crime, as if she wishes I hadn’t told her this.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
But she does not want to look at me.
They lay the body near the door to the kitchen. Cook is told to bring some burlap from the storeroom, and as they wrap her up, I see that Alice is staring from the window, crying, and Juliane is watching from the door of the hut. There is no sign of Jacek. He cannot look anymore.
“Go to the hut!” says Frau, but I cannot leave Luise. I put my hand on her small chest. As soon as I touch her, tears slip out from the corners of my eyes before I can catch them.
“Did you hear what I said?”
I fall to my knees now because everything has failed; this can’t be fixed. This is an evil place where only bad things happen. Children here die.
“Get into the hut!”
I stand up and punch Frau in the stomach, and both guards grab at me and drag me away. I know where they are taking me. I am screaming and kicking, and they open the door so hard that it bounces back on the wall. They push me in. I turn and rush back out and kick one of them in the shins, but I am pushed back in even harder this time—so hard that I hit the other side of the wall.
They slam and bolt the door before I can try and escape again. I hear the click of the lock.
I scream and hit the door.
“Luise! Luise! Jacek!”
I scream and hit the door until I am so tired I can no longer stand, and my ears are buzzing and my throat burns.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ELSI
I dig for coal beneath the slush and mud in one of their fields. I find nothing. I wonder if the guards have made up this task today so they can watch with amusement. My arms are covered in brown earth. At the end of the day, I come back exhausted and with my sack empty.
Back at the prison yard, Mama is waiting for me again. I fall out of the line to meet her at the fence when the guards move up ahead. The dogs prance proudly alongside their masters, often growling at prisoners and things in the distance that I can’t see. Mama’s face is desperate, fearful, downtrodden—it says that nothing good will come.
Through the holes in the fence, she squeezes some bread, then breaks apart a biscuit. I catch every crumb that falls on my filthy dress. She has an orange, too. I am so hungry, I can think of nothing right now but the food she hands me.
“I will get more food from Lilli. Don’t give up, Matilda. Stay strong. Don’t walk too quickly. Conserve your energy.”
It is not that easy. We have to plow the fields with our hands and carry heavy sacks from the fields that we reap. If we are caught eating the vegetables, we are beaten and then sent to dig for coal instead.
“You don’t look well,” I say, noting that my mother is paler than I have ever seen her.
“I have been bleeding occasionally since the operation, and some days are worse. But do not concern yourself. It is you that is the worry here. You are too thin, my darling. You must demand more food.”
The guards have split up as usual to patrol the various borders. One of them has seen us.
“Mama, please go.”
“I will come—”
There is a cracking sound, and something passes by my ear. Then Mama is sideways in the mud, her head turned slightly, a tiny hole in her temple and blood trickling from the circle. Her eyes are open, her mouth, also, as if she is about to tell me something.
“Mama!”
I crouch low, crushing my face against the fence as I stretch my arm through the wire to touch her face, but she is inches out of reach.
“Mama,” I whimper. “Don’t die.” But I know in my heart she is gone.
The dogs behind me are getting closer, but I do not turn. I cannot lose sight of my mother. I cannot let her die alone.
“If you can hear me, I love you,” I whisper, the words broken with grief. “I will not forget . . .”
The earth moves beneath me from the stomping of guards who are nearly upon me. I can feel the warm breath of the dogs as they smother me, their fur against my skin, the growls deafening. Someone grabs the back of my collar, and I see a blinding light that fades to nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WILLEM
“You cannot do this. I have given you everything!”
My father is shouting at me through the phone. He has received my letter telling him that I plan to remain in Poland, in our apartment: Lena’s and mine.
“Do you know that I put you above someone far more worthy for the Lebensborn job? That I personally vouched for you? Did you know that I risked my reputation to get you that job because you were too weak to deal with research, too weak to do your duty?”
“I will work again in the ghetto until I find something else.”
“The surgery has been closed. There is to be no women’s practice in the ghetto any longer. It was a ridiculous idea in the first place.”
“Where will they go . . . these women?” I am wondering if this was my father’s decision and whether anyone else has been informed.
“What does it matter?”
“Then I will find work in a hospital or open my own practice.”
“With what? You don’t have a real medical degree. I have covered for you. It wouldn’t take long for people to learn you didn’t complete it. But as your father, in employment that I assign you, no one will dare check.”
He is right, of course. I have been given work in the field of women’s health only because of my father.
He ends the conversation abruptly and hangs up the phone.
It is good that he is gone. It is good that I can be alone to listen to the sound of silence, to remember my life before the war.
I sit at the front window, staring out at the empty stream, at the mist snaking around the straggly trees along its banks. I haunt the halls and rooms, imagining Lena. One night I wake to hear a noise in the kitchen. I creep toward the sound, hoping it is her. But she isn’t there, of course. Only in my mind. She is gone and has taken our child with her.
It is difficult to put into any words, or any type of order, the pattern of grief. It rises and falls unevenly like waves. In those moments when I catch myself thinking of something else apart from Lena, guilt descends like heavy rain, and I turn again to rely on time to ease this pain. I have seen people grieve and wonder why it is they do. It is not until something happens, until someone leaves one alone in this world, that one truly understands the magnitude of loss.
The housekeeper comes and goes silently. She is aware that I am not myself and does not engage in trivial conversation. At least she understands grief, even if she has her flaws. I wonder how much of a raise my father has given her to watch me, to report back.
“Helena!” I call to her one day. I have decided that I don’t want her here, and I dismiss her. I suspect that she is reporting to my father.
“But what am I to do?”
I take out several banknotes from the safe, part of a bottomless well of funds to which I have access, thanks to wealthy, dead Jews who prop up my father’s finances. It is a ridiculously large sum that I give her.
She looks at it, masks any surprise she may feel, nods her head, and leaves. Money is like that. It can make people disappear, though it cannot always make them return.
Christmas came and went while I traveled from Auschwitz. Last year, before the assignment, Lena and I had planned to have a tree.
Several years before I completed my schooling, my father banned Christmas trees in our home and ordered my aunt to organize a Christmas dinner only, and not to buy gifts. Celebrations became bland and uneventful: a time to meet with family and my father’s associates, and always with the topic of politics. The symbolic tree did not reappear in my life until my first Christmas with Lena’s family. Nazi ideology could not strip them of all their traditions.
There is a piece of paper on Lena’s writing desk. I have left it exactly how I found it. It is significant somehow. In the top-left corner she has written Dear Willem, and the rest of the page is blank. I often sit to muse over the paper, trying to imagine what she was thinking or doing when she stepped away from the desk. Was she about to tell me that her pains had started, or perhaps the name she wished for our child? Or perhaps how lonely she was without me? Guilt again rises to the same height as my grief when I imagine how frightened she must have been, unable to contact me, far from her family. To then have to phone another doctor at the hospital.
As the week passes, dirty dishes begin to pile on the table. My apartment has become my shield. If I stay indoors, I do not have to hear gunfire or witness the misery on the streets. I do not see the war. No one knows yet that I am here. My father is unlikely to reveal where I am, since he is so ashamed.
Some of my dreams seem more real. One night, out of habit, I put my arm across the space beside me on the bed. It was so cold that I drew my hand away. The shock of the emptiness hit me, and I began to sob. When I look in the mirror, I see that my hair has grown and there is growth about my chin. I have not changed clothes in days. I have the look of a vagabond: a crushed shirt that I wear both day and night, pants that are now too loose around my hips, shoeless feet.
I have begun to wall up the memories of my time at the camp. Brick by brick, I am building up a defense against the things I have seen, while Lena stands beside me, guiding me.
I choose a blustery day to finally leave the apartment to walk to the store. Around me other people also walk, their heads down as they battle the whipping winds and the rain that flies sideways. They are not proud people, but they are living, and that is all they can ask for here. I do not feel so alone. We share a feeling of entrapment and isolation, though mine is self-imposed.
But the air outside is moving, changing, shouting at me to do something, to move on. I rush to return to the apartment where the air inside has not changed. Trapped in a time that I shared with Lena.
I do not want to move on. I do not want the air to change.
There is a knock at the door. I do not answer it at first, hoping that whoever it is will go away.
Knocks come again, this time more determined.
I open the door a fraction and spy two small boys wearing caps and socks that have lost their stretch.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, sir,” says the older one, in rehearsed German. “We were just wondering if you had any work for us to do.”
They have seen the nice apartments. They know that Germans with money live here.
“No, I do not.” I am about to shut the door when I have an idea. “Wait here!” I say. I do not want them to see, fully, my disheveled appearance.
I return with money and place it in their hands. Their eyes widen in disbelief.
“That is so you don’t come back,” I say, and shut the door softly.
I hear them scurry down the stairs, perhaps afraid I will change my mind.
From the front window, I watch them run across the street, coins jingling in their pockets. Their legs busy, faces eager and innocent, and I envy the autonomy that is felt only by the young in these times. I sift through memories of my youth. Did I ever have those feelings?
I stay by the window for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boys again, to perhaps share what I have never known.
I am the one who has never been free.
The air has grown stale. The warm, perfumed aromas of the apartment have been replaced with stale air: the stench of rotting food.
I fall asleep in the chair and dream of Lena. She is telling me, as she always did, that we must live the one life as if it is our last. When I wake up, I am suddenly ashamed. My grief has turned me into someone else, someone I don’t recognize.
Life is something I still have. It is time to move forward.
I put on my uniform and call for a car to take me to the ghetto. Perhaps it is inherent, this will to continue on as before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ELSI
I am taken to a courtyard, where I must await a truck that will take me away from the ghetto. A guard shouts at me to wait in a line.
I hear a familiar voice calling to me from somewhere, but it sounds far away. My head hurts, and I am shivering. The view around me is foggy, perhaps imagined. I have on a dress but no coat. I do not know what happened to my shoes.
Then I hear the voice again. It fades in and out. The ground feels aqueous, as if pulling me downward to where I can sink away, unseen—a place where I will be safe and warm, where I can dream.
“Elsi,” the voice calls.
My vision clears, briefly. Yuri is standing on the footpath on the other side of the road.
“Elsi, I have Leah! I will look after her. I’m sorry I can’t do any more for you.”
I close my eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WILLEM
The sight of the ghetto instills in me a sense of failure. That I should heal people only so that they will die of starvation or disease or, worse, at the camps. Oddly, though, perhaps desensitized, the sight of women and men, very thin, in threadbare clothing, does not touch me so much now. As if there is nothing more within me to touch. It is a process perhaps that every German serviceman must go through—some quicker than others—the peeling back of every ethical layer that must happen before one can perform to the Führer’s expectations.
I call into Administration, dreading the possibility that I will have to speak to Hermann Manz and hoping that I can avoid it. He is there, however, and greets me with superficial Nazi nationalism—Heil Hitler. I respond with feigned enthusiasm, aware that these two spoken words are meant to stifle original thought until there is no more.
Manz says that I am missed, and that many of the women have had to be examined elsewhere. Elsewhere is something I don’t want to know about. But I don’t doubt that he misses me. It is in his best interests that I am there to take care of his victims.
“I have put in a request for you to return. I have yet to hear,” he says.
I shrug. I could tell him the answer now if I wanted to. I no longer care that I won’t be returning, though I express the opposite out of politeness. It is a veneer that I slip into too easily. I will need to wear it more if I am to return to Berlin to carry on the good name of my father. Where I must carve out some existence: but only that.
I stop by the ghetto surgery to retrieve some personal items I had left in a drawer. The patient files are still there, but it is likely that Manz will destroy them before he leaves.
The car arrives to take me back to my apartment. Its wheels jolt uncomfortably over tram tracks, and ghetto dust swirls outside my window. Near the entrance to the ghetto is a line, of sorts, of dozens of Jews, waiting to be taken to the camps. They were there when I first came in, but then I had looked the other way. Now I scan the faces, my soul impervious to their despair and loss of hope. A girl,
a familiar face, comes fleetingly into view at my side window before disappearing into the colorless haze behind us.
I am curious.
I have the time.
“Stop!” I say to the driver. “Wait here!”
I cross the street and patrol the line of people until I find her. The girl, Elsi, does not look up. She sits, knees against her chest, arms crossed, staring at the footpath. Even my shadow across her does not stir her curiosity.
“Elsi?”
She turns her head to look at my boots and raises her head slowly. I recognize in the color of her eyes, ringed in black, the infection within her. Her hair has barely grown to cover her ears. Hers is a small elfin face and a dangerously thin body. She is even smaller than I remembered, a tiny yellow flower wedged between others who appear similarly devoid of comprehension—too sick to care. The stamp on the back of her hand tells me she is to be deported.
“Stay away,” says a guard. He holds a handkerchief over his face.
“Where are your mother and sister?”
“My mother is dead.”
I feel some odd feelings surface again, a tingling of compassion that I always felt around Lena when she spoke—something I thought I had left behind me at the camp. My chest opens slightly, and, just briefly, a delicate hand reaches in to squeeze my heart.
In those seconds a thought, a plan, has come to light. A touch of madness, a touch of sun.
A butterfly with broken wings.
I turn to the guard. “What is your name?”
“Baimgarten,” he replies carelessly.
“Bring this girl to my car!”
“She is to go on the truck of the dead. She is contaminated.”
She will never arrive anywhere. The trucks will be filled with gas. I look up the line. It is also full of sickness. I have learned many things in Auschwitz in the short time I was there. Most never reach the camps. It is doubtful that these people would last the drive anyway.
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