“Bitte, ” I murmured again.
She put down the pitchfork and ran out of the barn, closing the heavy door behind her.
The pigs were chewing on the laces of my stolen boots. The chickens sitting on the railing between the coop and the pigpen flapped their wings and cackled. I reached over the wooden gate and opened the latch so that I could step outside. The farmer’s wife had left because she was terrified, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t on her way back right now with her husband and a shotgun. Hurriedly I filled my pockets with more of the pig grain I’d eaten last night, because I didn’t know when I would have food again. Before I could slip out the door, however, it opened again.
The farmer’s wife stood there with a loaf of bread, a jug of milk, and a platter of sausage. She walked toward me. “You must eat,” she whispered.
I hesitated, wondering if this was a trap. But in the end, I was too hungry to let the chance pass. I grabbed a sausage off the plate and stuffed it into my mouth. I tore off a hunk of bread and tucked it into the side of my cheek, since my jaw was still too sore to chew. I drained the jug of milk, feeling it pour down my chin and neck. How long had it been since I had fresh milk? Then I wiped my hand across my mouth, embarrassed to have acted like such an animal in front of this woman.
“Where did you come from?” she asked.
She spoke German, which meant we must have crossed into Germany by now. Was it possible that there were ordinary citizens who had no idea what was happening in Poland? Had they been lied to by the SS, like we had? Before I could think of what to say, she shook her head. “It is better if you don’t tell me. You stay. It will be safe.”
I had no reason to trust her. It was true that most of the Germans I had met had been brutal terrorists without conscience. But there had also been a Herr Bauer, a Herr Fassbinder, a Hauptscharführer.
So I nodded. She motioned to the hayloft. There was a ladder leading up to it, and a shaft of sunlight spilling through a crack in the roof. Still holding the piece of bread she had given me, I began to climb. I lay down on a bed of hay, and I fell asleep before the farmer’s wife had even closed the barn door behind her again.
It was hours before I awakened to the sound of footsteps below. I peeked down the ladder to see the farmer’s wife lugging a metal pail inside. Draped around her neck was a white towel, and in her free arm was a stack of folded clothing. She motioned, when she saw my face. “Come,” she said gently.
I crawled down the ladder and shifted uneasily from foot to foot. The woman patted a hay bale, so that I would sit. Then she knelt at my feet. She dipped a washcloth into the water in the pail and leaned forward, carefully wiping my brow, my cheeks, my chin. The washcloth, dark with mud and grime, she rinsed off in the bucket again.
I let her wash my arms and my legs. The water was warm, a luxury. When she began to unbutton my work dress, I pulled away, until she cupped my shoulders in her capable hands. “Ssh,” she murmured, turning me away from her. I felt the rough fabric being peeled from my body, falling to the floor in a puddle at my feet. I felt the washcloth on every pearl of my spine, on the angular planes of my hip bones, the fortress of my rib cage.
When she turned me to face her, there were tears in her eyes. I crossed my arms in front of my bare body, ashamed to see myself through her eyes.
After I was dressed in the clean clothing—soft cotton and wool, as if I had been wrapped in a cloud—she brought another bucket of clean water, and a bar of soap, and washed my hair for me. She used her fingers to scrub out the mud, and she cut the mats that could not be worked free. Then she sat behind me, the way my mother used to do, and brushed it.
Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.
• • •
For five days, the farmer’s wife came to me with meals. Breakfasts of fresh eggs and rye toast and gooseberry jam, lunches of sliced cheese on thick hanks of bread, suppers of chicken thighs with root vegetables. Slowly, I grew more alert, stronger. The blisters on my feet healed; my jaw stopped aching. I was able to pace myself so that I did not stuff my face with the food as soon as she set it in front of me. We did not speak about where I’d come from, or where I would be going. I tried to convince myself that I could stay here, in the barn, until the war was over.
I was once again at the mercy of a German, but like a dog that has been kicked so often it shies away from any kind hand, I was slowly being coaxed into believing that I might be able to trust.
In return, I tried to show my gratitude. I cleaned out the chicken coop, a job that took me hours, because I had to keep sitting to rest. I collected the eggs, and had them neatly piled in a pail when the farmer’s wife arrived each afternoon. I cleaned cobwebs from the rafters and swept the hayloft so that you could see the wooden floor beneath the bales.
One night, the woman did not come.
I felt a pang of hunger, but it was nothing like what I’d experienced in the camp or on the march. I had gone without for so long that missing a single meal now almost didn’t register. Maybe she was ill; maybe she had taken a trip. The next morning, when the barn door slid open, I crawled down the ladder quickly, aware that I had missed her company more than I even let myself know.
The farmer’s wife stood with the sun silhouetting her, so it took me a moment to realize that her eyes were red and puffy, that she was not alone. A man wearing a flannel shirt and suspenders, who leaned heavily on a cane, stood behind her. With him was a member of the police force.
The light leached from my smile. I was rooted to the barn floor, gripping the ladder so hard the wood bit into the skin beneath my fingernails. “I’m sorry,” the farmer’s wife choked out, but that was all she said, because her husband gave her a firm shake. The police officer bound my hands together, then pulled the barn door wide and led me to a truck that was idling in the driveway.
My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool’s gold in the hardest shard of rock. This was certainly true of the deaths of my family—if only because they did not live to see me in this state, to see the world in this state. The murder of another woman had yielded me a pair of sturdy boots. If not for the march from Neusalz, I would never have found this barn and had nearly a week of three square meals in my belly.
And if the farmer had indeed discovered his wife’s secret stowaway, and he had called the police to turn me in, at least it meant that I would travel to this next camp in the back of a truck, conserving strength I would never have had if I’d walked the entire distance. Which is why, when we arrived at Flossenbürg on March 11, 1945—the same day, ironically, as those who had begun the march from Neusalz—more than half of those women were dead, but I was still alive.
• • •
A week later we were put onto trains and taken to another camp.
We arrived at Bergen-Belsen the last week of March. In the cars we had been stacked like cans on a grocery shelf, so that shifting even a little meant a foot in your face or a grunt from someone else, and everyone was trying desperately to get away from the overflowing bucket we used as a latrine. When the train stopped, we staggered out, holding on to each other as if we had been drinking heavily. I managed only a few steps before I sank down.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. I couldn’t describe it, even if I tried. The burning flesh of Auschwitz was nothing compared to this, the stink of disease and piss and shit and death. It got into your nostrils and throat, and left you breathing shallowly through your mouth. Everywhere, there were stacks of the dead, some haphazard, some neatly arranged like building blocks or a house of cards. Those healthy enough to move were hauling the bodies away.
Everyone at this camp had typhus. How could they not, when there were hundreds of people crammed into barracks meant for fifty, when the latrine facility was a hole outside, when there wasn’t enough food or fresh water for the thousands of prisoners who
had been trucked in?
We did not work. We rotted. We would curl like snails on the floor of the barracks, because that was the only way we could all fit. Guards would come in to dispose of the dead. Sometimes they would take the living, too. It was an honest mistake; we didn’t always know which was which. All night long there would be soft moans, skin blistering with fever, hallucinations. Then we would shuffle outside in the morning for Appell, lining up to be counted for hours.
I became friendly with a woman named Tauba, who, with her daughter Sura, used to live in Hrubieszów. Tauba had a prized possession, one she held on to as fiercely as I had once held on to my leather journal. It was a threadbare, lice-infested blanket. She and Sura had used it on the march that brought them here, braving the snow and the elements and surviving the nights when others died of the cold. Now, Tauba used it to warm Sura, who fell sick just days after arriving at the camp. She would wrap her daughter in the blanket and rock her back and forth, singing lullabies. When it was time for Appell, Tauba and I would hold Sura upright between the vise of our bodies.
One night, in her dream-state, Sura begged for food. Tauba held her closer. “What would you like me to cook for you?” she whispered. “Maybe a roast chicken. With gravy and candied carrots and whipped potatoes.” Her eyes were bright with tears. “With butter, a big dollop, like snow on the top of a mountain.” She hugged Sura more tightly, and the girl’s head snapped back on its delicate stem. “In the morning, when you are hungry again, I will bring you my special pancakes, stuffed with cottage cheese, and sprinkled with sugar. Baked beans and eggs and brown bread and fresh blueberries. There will be so much food, Surele, that you will not be able to finish it.”
I knew that some of the stronger women had managed to get to the kitchens and find food in the waste bins. I don’t know why they weren’t punished—it was either because the guards didn’t want to get too close to us and risk illness or because no one cared anymore. But the next morning, after making sure Sura was still breathing, I followed a small contingency to the kitchen. “What do we do?” I asked, nervous about standing around in broad daylight. But then again, it wasn’t as if we were skipping a work detail. There was nothing for us to do at this camp but wait. Did it matter if we were here, underneath a kitchen window, instead of in a barracks?
The window opened, and a sturdy woman tossed a pail of scraps out. Potato peels, ersatz coffee grounds, rinds from sausages and oranges, the bones from a roast. The women fell to the ground like animals, grabbing what they could. In my moment’s hesitation, I lost out on the most valuable bits of refuse, but I managed to get a wishbone from a chicken, and a handful of potato peels. I slipped these into my pocket and hurried back to Tauba and Sura.
I handed the potato peels to Tauba, who tried to coax her daughter into sucking on one. But Sura had slipped into unconsciousness. “Then you eat it,” I urged. “When she gets better, she’ll need your strength.”
Tauba shook her head. “I wish I could believe that.”
I reached into my pocket for the bone I’d taken. “When I was little and my sister, Basia, and I both wanted something very badly—like a new wagon or a trip to the country—we would make a deal,” I told Tauba. “When Mama cooked her Shabbat chicken, and we got the wishbone, we’d wish for the same thing. That way, it couldn’t help but come true.” I held up the bone, curling my fingers around one side of its slingshot neck, letting Tauba curl her fingers around the other. “Ready?” I asked.
The bone broke in her favor. But it would not have mattered either way.
That night, when the kapo came to sort through the dead, Sura’s body was the first one taken.
I listened to Tauba keening, turned inside out by loss. She buried her face in the blanket, all she had left of her daughter. But even muffled, her cries turned into shrieks; I covered my ears and still could not block them out. The shrieks became knives, poised like daggers around the crown of my face. I watched with wonder as they pierced my sunken skin, releasing not blood but fire.
Minka. Minka?
Tauba’s face swam into my vision, as if I were lying on the bottom of the sea and staring up at the sun. Minka, you’ve got the fever.
I was shaking uncontrollably now, my clothes soaked in sweat. I knew how this would turn out. In a few days’ time, I would be dead.
Then Tauba did the most amazing thing. She took that blanket, and she tore it in half. She wrapped part of it around my shoulders.
If I was going to die, I wanted to do it on my own terms. In this, I was like my sister after all. It would not be in a fetid hut, surrounded by the sick. I would not let the last person who made a decision about me be a guard, hauling my corpse somewhere to decompose in the midday sun.
So I staggered outside, where the air was cooler against my skin. I pulled the blanket tight around me, and I collapsed on the ground.
I knew I was saving someone the trouble of carting my body out in the morning. But for now, I shook in the throes of my fever, and I looked up at the night sky.
There had not been many stars in Łód. It was too big and dynamic a city. But my father had taught me the constellations when I was a girl and we had traveled to the countryside on vacation. There would be just the four of us, staying at a rented cottage by a lake, fishing and reading and hiking and playing backgammon. My mother always beat the rest of us at card games, but my father always caught the biggest fish.
At night, sometimes, my father and I would sleep on the porch, where the air was so fresh that you drank it instead of simply breathing. My father taught me about Leo, the constellation directly overhead. Named for yet another mythical monster, the Nemean Lion, a giant, ferocious beast with skin that couldn’t be penetrated by knives or swords. Hercules’ first task was to slay it, but he realized quickly that the lion couldn’t be shot with arrows. Instead, he chased the monster into a cave, stunned it with a blow to the head, and strangled it. As proof of his victory, he used the lion’s own claws to skin its pelt.
You see, Minka, my father would say. Anything is possible. Even the most terrible beast might one day be a distant memory. He would hold my hand in his, tracing my finger along the brightest stars in the constellation. Look, he would say. There is the head, and the tail. There’s the heart.
• • •
I was dead, and I was looking at the wing of an angel. White and ethereal, it swooped and dove in the corner of my vision.
But if I was dead, why did my head feel as heavy as an anvil? Why could I still smell the horrible stench of this place?
I struggled to sit up and realized that what I had imagined as a wing was a flag, a strip of cloth fluttering in the wind. It was tied to the guard tower that stood across from the barracks where I’d been housed.
That guard tower was empty.
So was the one behind it.
There were no officers walking around, no Germans, period. It was like a ghost town.
By then, some of the other prisoners had begun to figure out what had happened. “Get up!” one woman yelled. “Get up, they are all gone!”
I was swept in a tide of humanity toward the fence. Had they left us here to starve to death? Were any of us strong enough to tear down the barbed wire?
In the distance were trucks with red crosses painted on the sides. At that moment, I knew it didn’t matter if we weren’t strong enough. There were others, now, who would be strong for us.
There is a picture of me from that day. I saw it once on a PBS documentary about April 15, 1945, when the first British tanks approached Bergen-Belsen. I was shocked to see my face on the body of a skeleton. I even bought a copy of the video so that I could play it and stop it at the right moment, and make sure. But yes, that was me, with my pink hat and mittens, and Sura’s blanket wrapped around my shoulders.
I’ve told no one that this was me, in someone’s camera footage, until now.
I weighed sixty-seven pounds on the day the British liberated us. A man in a uniform approached m
e, and I fell into his arms, unable to stand any longer. He swung me up and carried me to a tent that was serving as an infirmary.
You are free, they said over the loudspeakers, in English, in German, in Yiddish, in Polish. You are free, be calm. Food is coming. Help is on the way.
• • •
You will ask me, after this, why I didn’t tell you this before.
It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.
You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn’t so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.
Truth is so much harder than fiction. Some survivors want to speak only of what happened. They go to schools and museums and temples and give talks. It’s the way they can make sense of it, I suppose. I’ve heard them say they feel it is their responsibility, maybe even the reason they lived.
My husband—your grandfather—used to say, Minka, you were a writer. Imagine the story you could tell.
But it is exactly because I was a writer that I could never do it.
The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.
What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?
Love isn’t the only word that fails.
Hate does, too.
War.
And hope. Oh, yes, hope.
So you see, this is why I never told my story.
If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it.
And if you didn’t, you will never understand.
PART III
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
The Storyteller Page 37
