by Suzy Zail
“The last guards have fled their posts,” she shrieked, hopping from one birdlike leg to the other. “The watchtower’s empty; the sentry post has been abandoned. No more SS . . .” She ran to the next hut.
“No more food,” a voice whispered from one of the bunks. I looked up and saw a face poking from a blanket: a girl with gray teeth and eyes as big as saucers. She looked sick; her skin was a dangerous yellow. I reached up and took her hand.
“The Russians will come. They’ll bring food.”
She looked frightened.
“No more guards!” The girls at the window stared at each other. “No selections!” They shook their heads in disbelief. “No work!” Their eyes widened. “No roll call!” They pulled the door open and stepped onto the snow.
I pulled my hand from the dying girl’s grip.
The path leading to the main gate was crawling with inmates. They appeared from behind barracks and under carts, from empty sheds and burned-out buildings, blinking at the sun, dragging themselves to the gate, half naked and wrapped in blankets. They came alone and in pairs, young women grown old and old women dying. They shuffled through the snow, laughing, cursing, praying, crying. Mostly they wandered the square in a daze. All of us were hungry, and everyone was weak.
The girl next to me was the first to notice the four men on horseback.
“The Russians are here!” she yelled, running for the gate. “The Russians have come!”
Four soldiers — gigantic men with long green cloaks and fur hats — leaped from their horses. They had guns slung over their shoulders but they didn’t point them at us, and when they stopped at the watchtower and stared into camp, at the burning barracks and the bodies sprawled on the ground, their mouths fell open.
A truck sped through the main gate.
“Friends,” the loudspeakers blared in German, Polish, and Yiddish. “You are free. You have been liberated by the Allied Forces.”
A strangled cheer rose from the crowd. The girl next to me started crying. The man to my left fell to the ground. Someone hugged me. Two officers had words with a group of Russian inmates, and we fell into line again. This time it was to wait for cookies, soap, and chocolate. I stood in front of an officer with red hair and pink skin and held out my hand. He must’ve thought me a creature from another planet, because he stared at me for the longest time. I knew what he saw, though I hadn’t looked into a mirror for days: a sparrow wrapped in a blanket, a pillowcase on her head; a face caked in dirt; bare legs, dirty fingernails.
“What’s your name?” he asked, first in Russian, then German.
“Hanna,” I answered, “but they don’t use names here.” I pulled my sleeve back and showed him my tattoo. He pulled a chocolate bar from a box and handed it to me.
“How old are you?” The question seemed to make him sad.
“Sixteen,” I said, sucking at the square of cocoa.
More officers poured into the camp. They leaped from tanks, armored cars, and jeeps, lugging medical supplies, water, and food after them. They set up tents and tables in front of the watchtower, and a desk with papers and pens. They built a fire in the main square and set a pot to boil over it. They threw a pig into the pot with some potatoes and cabbage. A hungry mob swarmed around the pot.
“Give your stomach time to adjust.” The block leader pulled me from the line. “Start on bread and crackers. Stick to bland foods.” Out of habit, I followed orders, but it was hard reining in my hunger when those around me gorged themselves on meat and cheese. Hard, too, to watch them hours later, clutch their stomachs and soil themselves before they reached the latrines. I’d imagined this moment of freedom so many times, but never like this, never without Erika. I should’ve been glad, but I couldn’t celebrate. Not till I’d found out what had happened to my family. Not until I knew what had happened to Karl.
The Red Army captured their first SS officer that day. They tore off his blue and white disguise, tied his arms behind his back, and threw him against a wall. A group of prisoners gathered around, hissing and cursing and spitting at his feet.
“Let us at him,” they begged. But the guards shook their heads and pushed the men back. The prisoners circled and shouted abuse. They scooped rocks from the ground and hurled them at the man’s head.
The guards marched him to a barrack. I snuck after them. The moon was hidden behind a cloud, so I couldn’t see the officer’s face until he was under the floodlights. He looked tired and pale. His hair stuck out at odd angles, and he had a bruise on his cheek. The guards pushed him into the barrack and locked the door. Two Russian soldiers guarded the hut.
“Is he the only one in there?” I approached the soldiers. They looked at me strangely.
“Are there others?” I reached into my pocket and felt for my black C-sharp. My hands were shaking. I closed my fingers around the wood.
“Don’t worry about the prisoners. Concentrate on going home.”
I didn’t want to go home. In the camp there was at least the possibility I might see my parents and Erika, that they might still be alive. If I went home, I’d find out. My father would be in our apartment on the couch, reading the newspaper, and my mother would be in the kitchen, frying fish. Or not. I wasn’t ready to stop hoping. I wasn’t ready to go back.
I wandered back to the women’s camp. Two Polish men walked past dragging huge legs of meat. I followed them to the main square and warmed my hands by the fire that burned in the yard. The men fed the fire with wooden planks, and when they dragged a pot onto the flames, filled it with water, and threw in the meat, I stepped into line and waited to be fed. A woman pushed past me carrying a baby. She stepped to the front of the line and held out her child.
“May I have some?” she asked the man doling out the soup. She pulled the cloth from her child’s face. “It’s for my son; he’s hungry.”
The man looked down at the infant, at his blank eyes and black face and slack mouth.
“I’m sorry, but the child’s —”
“Thirsty, I know.” The woman pressed the shrouded body against the man’s chest. “Please, just a little soup. Then he’ll stop crying.”
The man shook his head, but the woman kept begging.
“If I could feed him, I would, but my milk’s dried up.” The woman started to pull at her top, but the man stopped her. He held the ladle over the baby’s mouth and tipped the broth onto the child’s blue lips.
Two Soviet nurses found me collapsed on the snow. They lifted me from the ground and helped me walk to a nearby tent. They opened a can of vegetables and fed me carrots and peas. I let them undress me and run a warm, wet sponge over my body. They shampooed my short hair and toweled it dry. I lifted my arms, and they pulled a nightgown over my head and led me to a cot with clean white sheets and a woolen blanket. I let them have my cup, but I curled up with my black C-sharp.
I slept for a day and a half.
When I woke, I asked if I could stay. Outside the tent’s draped walls, peasants stacked the dead and dug graves. Farmers hosed down barracks while their wives handed out clean underwear and toothbrushes. I wanted to help, too. I needed to do something while I waited for news about my family, and I owed the nurses and the inmates, too. I’d had extra rations at the villa and a roof over my head while they’d survived on spoonfuls of snow.
I fed water to the sick with medicine droppers, and when they were stronger, I held cups to their lips and fed them soup. I crushed up crackers and fed them crumbs. I washed their bodies and rubbed ointment onto their sores. When the woman who’d begged for soup was brought to the tent, I held her baby while she climbed into bed. And when she woke and asked me to help her bury him, I stood beside her and held her hand while the soldiers lowered his body into the ground.
They buried him behind a stand of birch trees, near a bombed-out brick building. Next to the building, a pile of bodies lay frozen in the snow. Inside the ruins, a bank of ovens lined the walls. A woman walked in after me and stared into a furnace, h
er face smudged with tears. She tore her dress and recited Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Father had torn his shirt and sung Kaddish when I was six years old, except he’d been standing over Opapa’s grave, staring into the hole where his father’s casket lay.
I peered into the oven’s dark cavity to see what she saw. There was ash and soot, but there was also bone. I felt the ground slip from under me. The strange, hovering smog that I’d noticed the night I got off the train, the smell of charred meat, the smoke that belched from the giant chimneys . . . They’d been burning bodies. And the piles of dead outside — they weren’t waiting to be buried. They were waiting to be burned.
I felt like I’d been hit across the head with a piano stool. I pushed past the woman and ran for the door, and when I got outside, I kept running. Past the birch trees and the barracks and the hospital tent until I reached the shower block on the other side of the camp. A boy sat on the steps leading into the changing room. I sat down next to him.
“I’ve just been over there.” I pointed in the direction of the birch trees. “I saw the ovens. I had no idea.”
The boy shook his head.
“Please tell me this is a shower block.” I tugged on his sleeve. “It looks like a shower block.” The boy remained silent. “Please,” I whispered.
“They’re not showers,” he said.
I shifted closer to the boy. I should’ve left. I should’ve walked away.
“Not showers?”
“No.” He chewed on a fingernail. “They didn’t pipe water through the showerheads. They piped gas.”
“No, you’re wrong,” I said, standing to leave.
“I’m not.” He spoke slowly, as if to a child. “I worked here.” His shoulders slumped. “I locked the doors.”
I threw up on the snow. Why had no one told me? Karl knew about the ovens. He must have known about the showers, too. Why didn’t he tell me? Erika had said she’d heard rumors, but I hadn’t let her tell me. Why didn’t she make me listen? Did they think I was too weak? I walked to the nearest hut and flung open the door. I walked from one end of the camp to the other. I climbed through windows and saw bodies crammed into cupboards, and storehouses bursting with shoes. I saw walking sticks and spectacles and canvas bags full of hair.
Hitler meant us to die! We weren’t here to dig trenches. We were brought here to die. How had I not seen it in all my months in the camp? The women saying Kaddish, the emptying beds, Lili and Agi.
And me, putting on lipstick and playing piano for the commandant.
I lined my pockets with rocks and stormed from the camp. I wasn’t the only one. There were dozens of us looking to even the score. We smashed windows and broke chairs and tore curtains from the walls of the SS officers’ quarters. We rampaged through the villages circling the camp. We stole chickens from their coops and threw eggs at farmhouses. We drove nails through truck tires and drove cattle from their paddocks. We pulled washing from lines and pulled down fences. I didn’t feel guilty; I felt entitled. I’d passed those farmhouses hundreds of times. Their owners had seen me march through the snow with a gun at my back and they’d done nothing. I wanted them to taste fear. I wanted them to be scared.
We weren’t allowed to return to Hungary. The guards told us it wasn’t safe. Hungary was still under siege. The Red Army had surrounded Budapest, but the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross gangs still ruled the streets. They roamed the capital, robbing Jews. They beat them in their homes and threw their bodies into the Danube.
The Russians moved us from Birkenau to the nearby Auschwitz camp. We slept in the SS officers’ quarters on beds with thick mattresses. It took me a long time to sleep well on those clean, white sheets, to turn on a tap and not be surprised by the gush of clean water. To be called by my name and have people smile at me. I looked down at my arm, at the number in blue ink etched into my skin. I might have survived, but I wasn’t free. No matter how hard I tried to erase what happened, I was still marked. Nothing could rub out the past, not even Karl. Especially not Karl. Maybe he was right. Maybe every time I looked at him, I’d be reminded of what his father had done to us. Maybe we couldn’t help but drag each other back to this place.
I tried not to think about Karl, but every time I heard someone hum a tune or speak German, I was reminded of him. I hoped working at the camp hospital might help. Anything to keep me busy and stop me from thinking about Karl. And worrying about my parents. And fretting over Erika. On my third day on the ward, I ran into Vera. I was washing the dormitory windows, staring out at the navy sky. I heard her voice before I saw her.
“Has anyone got a sponge they can spare?” she called out, and without even looking, I knew it was her. I jumped down from my ladder and grabbed her by the arm.
“Vera! You’re alive!” I wrapped my arms around her.
“Hanna!”
We stood there looking at each other until we both believed it was true: we’d survived. I took her hand and led her outside.
“Did you know?” I asked her, my smile fading.
“Know what?”
“That Mengele sent babies and pregnant women straight from the train to the gas chambers?”
Vera nodded. “Old people, too. My grandmother was one of them. My mother and I were sent to the right and my grandmother to the left.” She took a deep breath. “Two weeks later, they took my mother.”
“At a selection?”
Vera nodded. “All those men and women picked off, one by one.” She shook her head.
“They weren’t all sent to the showers?” Not my mother, not Anyu.
“No, not all of them.” She spoke quietly. “But the SS could only squeeze so many bodies into the barracks and we kept coming, week after week. They had to make space for the new inmates, the ones who could work.”
“I was thinking about going home to see who . . .” Bile rose in my throat. “I won’t see my mother. That’s what you’re trying to say, aren’t you? That she’s dead.”
“Your mother . . .” Vera’s hand flew to her throat. “I’m so sorry, I forgot.” Vera shook her head. “My mother was weak. I think it was typhus. She was dizzy, and when they asked her to hop up and down . . .” Vera covered her face with her hands. “She could barely walk. If she’d been a little stronger, maybe they would have sent her to the infirmary. Maybe your mother . . .” Vera looked up at me. “I don’t know, Hanna.”
I buried my face in my hands.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Go home.” Vera pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped my nose. “Go back to Debrecen. If your family’s alive, they’ll be waiting for you.”
I shook my head.
“Miracles happen.” She blotted my tears. “The day Mengele pointed you to the right, that was a miracle. Winning the audition, watching the Red Army walk through those gates . . . Maybe there’s a miracle waiting for you in Debrecen. You need to go home and find out.”
“What about Karl?”
“Karl’s in a prisoner-of-war camp, being interrogated.”
“What?” I stumbled backward. “He was captured? But I was with him. We said good-bye. I came back to camp. The SS were still here.” I stared at Vera “He had time to get away.” I counted the days in my head. “He had a week.”
“The commandant got away.” Vera pressed her handkerchief into my palm. “If the Red Army stormed the villa and found Karl there, it was because he wanted to be found.”
I left Auschwitz the day the German troops surrendered Budapest. It was a sunny day in February; the snow had finally begun to thaw, and the sky was blue with possibility. I left with a toothbrush, a spare pair of underwear, and the promise of a new beginning. I had a coat, a pair of secondhand boots, Karl’s scarf, and a train ticket to Debrecen. I kissed Vera good-bye and promised to keep in touch.
I stopped at the gates of Birkenau on the way to the station, looking through the gaps in the barbed-wire fence at a place I didn’t recognize. There were no bodies lying in the snow, no scarves
of smoke spiraling from the chimneys. Grass sprouted in the cracks between bricks. Last time I’d stood at the fence, the sky had screamed with fighter planes. Now bees buzzed overhead. Last time, my head had been covered with bristles. Now my hair skimmed my ears. I was wearing a dress without a yellow star on it, and in my bag I had three plums, a loaf of rye bread, and a thermos of water.
The barracks had been flattened, but I didn’t need the windowless walls and corrugated iron roofs to navigate my way through the camp. I could still see the imprint of the shower block where I’d scrubbed myself clean and the burned-out remains of the barrack I’d shared with Erika. I knew the exact spot where the orchestra had plucked their strings, and in which corner of the yard the SS had erected their gallows. I ran to the shower block where they’d stripped us of our clothes and stopped at the step leading into the showers. I bent down, reached under the wooden slats, and pulled out Erika’s film canister. The tin was rusted, but its lid was fixed firm, so the film inside was dry.
I had one more stop before I could board the train. I walked to the commandant’s villa, my heart hammering against my ribs. The cobblestone streets of Oswiecim were deserted. Coils of black smoke filled the air, bricks littered the pavement, and doors hung smoldering on their hinges. I picked my way through the rubble to the commandant’s house. I headed straight for the music room. I don’t know what I was looking for or what I expected to find, but it wasn’t there. The room was a mess. The curtains reeked of urine, and the walls were doused with wine. The piano stool lay on its side, its black leather seat slashed. Beside it, the piano sloped on three legs, its hammers and strings wrenched from its frame. I climbed the stairs to Karl’s room. The last time I was in the house, we’d kissed. I didn’t want the memory distorted by shattered glass and splintered wood, but I had to say good-bye. If I couldn’t say good-bye to Karl in person, then I’d say it to his paintbrush and easel, to his music and the books that he loved.
