Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  Sara closed her eyes and I was afraid that she was lost among her memories. Dr. Levinsohn made a sign for us to leave, but I was not ready to go without hearing everything that had happened to my sister, so although Gustav got up from his chair, ready to follow the doctor, I stayed still and waited for Sara to open her eyes again. She did so, but looked at me for a while as if lost, as if she didn’t know who we were or where she was.

  “If you’re tired . . . ,” I said.

  “I am tired, yes, very tired. But you need to know what happened to be able to rest, so I will forget my tiredness to help cure you of yours.”

  “Thank you.” I don’t know what else I could have said.

  “After that first night Dalida did not cry again. She made herself keep quiet. She didn’t want those swine to see her scared or beaten. ‘They will kill me all the same, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of laughing over my distress,’ she said in an effort to keep her spirits up. We worked in the arms factory during the day. We were woken as soon as dawn had broken and they took us to the factory where we worked until afternoon, when they took us back to the barracks. It didn’t take long for a guard to come with his piece of soap. Then we washed ourselves as best we could before they took us to where the men were waiting for us in the canteen. Allowing ourselves to be raped became a routine with us. They treated us like pieces of meat and we made no effort to be anything else. Some of the guards tried to make us drink and we drank. Sometimes they offered us food and although at first I refused because I didn’t want any special treatment from them, your sister convinced me to take this food; it was nothing special, gherkins, black bread, pickled onions, but we kept what we could and took it back to the barracks to share with our comrades. Some of them . . . Well, some of them looked at us with disgust. The Jews in the camp hated the kapos and they hated us who were their prostitutes. They did not dare say anything to us directly, but their looks . . . There was not a day that went past without some group being taken to the gas chambers. We were saved by having been chosen to work as whores. We bought time for ourselves involuntarily with our bodies, but if we had been given the choice we would surely have opted for death instead of the use that those pigs put us to. Another sergeant became enchanted by Dalida. He called for her every night and even paid his comrades for them to allow her to stay with him all night. Dalida hated him as much as she hated the rest of them, she said that he used her for his most degrading fantasies. Sometimes she came home with bruises all over her body because he enjoyed hitting her. He tied her to the bed and . . . Well, I’ll spare you the details, they are not necessary. You can’t imagine what we had to deal with . . . I don’t know why, but one day they took your sister to Dr. Mengele. He had asked for young women for his experiments. They sterilized her and irradiated her, but they miscalculated the time and she suffered burns that left her maimed. She could no longer work in the factory, much less be of any use to the guards, so . . .”

  Sara burst into tears. She looked at a distant point, where surely she was seeing Dalida. My legs started to tremble.

  “I never saw her again, they took her to the gas chamber with other women who were no longer of any use to them. I didn’t find out until two days later, when I insisted to the guard who had taken a liking to me that he tell me what had become of Dalida. He was drunk and started to laugh. ‘She’s where you’ll end up soon. You get uglier every day and you’re no comfort to a man.’ And then he pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the back. I got up, expecting him to do it again, because that is what he liked to do. And he did it. When I got back to the barracks I knew that I would never see Dalida again. When they set us free I insisted that they tell me what had happened to my sons. The doctor . . .” She looked straight at me. “The doctor looked in the archives and found out what they had done to my sons. They had injected something into their eyes to try to change their color . . . They were blinded . . . They were not happy with that . . . They sewed them together, yes they sewed them together; Mengele wanted to know how Siamese twins were put together . . . They tortured my children to death. They only lived a few months. My little ones couldn’t bear it.”

  I had been crying myself for some time now. I didn’t mind, I didn’t care if anyone saw me crying. Also, Sara was not impressed to see a man crying. Her tears had dried up a long time before, and she could no longer feel compassion for others.

  “You should go.” The doctor’s words were more an order than an invitation.

  “He promised to get me out of here,” Sara said.

  “I will, I won’t leave without you.”

  We followed the doctor to his office. I was ready to fight to take Sara with me.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea.” The doctor seemed worried on my behalf. “She is ill, ill in her body and ill in her mind. She was rescued from hell, and I don’t know how she can return to any kind of normality. Also, I would have to fill out lots of forms to let you take her.”

  “Yes, I know, the Jews are still a problem, and no one knows what to do with the survivors of the camps. Everyone regrets what has happened but they won’t even let them emigrate. America won’t take them in, France won’t, Britain won’t . . .”

  “Mr. Zucker, I am an American and a Jew. My parents were Polish, they left for the States at the end of the nineteenth century, and now I, their son, the son of a pair of peasants, am a doctor. When I was a child my mother told me about the pogroms, about how it was to live and feel yourself different. I don’t ever forget that I am a Jew and I promise you that I do all that I can for the people who are here,” Dr. Levinsohn said.

  “Help me take Sara with me,” I begged.

  “You have to think about what the doctor says,” Gustav dared say.

  I turned around angrily, and raised my voice as I replied.

  “Just imagine for a moment that it was Katia, or my own sister, and that someone could save them, get them out of here . . . How do you think they would be if they were still alive? They would be ghosts like Sara. I need to help her. I need to.”

  It was hard to find Colonel Williams. At the British Military Government headquarters in Berlin they told us that he had gone back to London and would be gone for at least a week. His adjutant told me that he would try to track him down and tell him that I urgently wanted to speak with him. Then I insisted that the operator put me through to the Soviet headquarters in Berlin.

  Boris listened to what I had to say without interrupting and didn’t seem to be surprised when I asked him to help me get Sara Cohen out of the Red Cross camp. He promised that he would talk with his colleague, Captain Anatoly Ignatiev.

  “My friend Anatoly has already told me that you want to get this woman who was a friend of your sister’s out of Auschwitz. I won’t get in your way, I’ll do what I can, but give me a couple of days at least. It takes longer to get a piece of paper from one office to another than it does to win a war.”

  I never imagined that the friendship between me and Gustav would be so intense. We had known each other as children and had found each other as men after the war, but we had little in common. He was an aristocrat, you knew it just to look at him, while I had grown up free as a bird at Hope Orchard, free of all conventional upbringing. However, in the course of those days that we had gone looking for Katia and my sister and my father, we had gotten to know each other and had come to feel a sincere affection for each other. So while I was trying to get Colonel Williams and Captain Stepanov to try to use their influence and get Sara out to be with us, Gustav, without saying anything, was putting the whole Foreign Office in motion to try to get the relevant recommendations to hurry up the necessary permissions. We managed to get them, all of us working together, but Gustav’s contribution was decisive.

  We took Sara to Berlin and from there we traveled to London. None of us felt any desire to remain in Germany. I had to make an effort to control the anger that I felt
toward the Germans. Sara could never forgive them, and Gustav was desolated by the loss of his Aunt Katia, although he seemed more in control of himself and did not lose his equanimity.

  Vera was relieved to see us. She had been scared for her son. She knew Gustav better than anyone, and was aware that behind his apparent imperturbability was a sensitive man to whom no suffering was alien. If she was surprised to see Sara she did not show it, and she immediately welcomed her as if she were an old friend. She set her up in the guest bedroom, and offered to take her shopping. Sara lacked everything, even the most basic necessities.

  Her screams woke us up some nights. She called for her sons, for the twins she had barely had time to hold in her arms. Vera would immediately go into her room and hug Sara like a child until she managed to calm her down. Gustav and I would normally stay in the doorway without daring to say anything. We did not know how to console her. Sara seemed to find a certain degree of comfort in Vera’s company.

  “What are you thinking of doing?” Vera asked me when we found ourselves alone together one day.

  “I will go back to Palestine. I have to tell my mother that Dalida and my father are dead. I didn’t think I could write it down. I want my life back. I couldn’t live anywhere that wasn’t Palestine; my mother is there, my family, my friends, my house. I miss opening a window and seeing the olive trees. I was raised as a peasant, subject to the cycle of nature. Suffering when the trees got blight or when it didn’t rain or when it rained too much.”

  “You should study when you go back, it’s what your father would have wanted.”

  “Maybe I could go to the university and become an agricultural engineer, but I don’t want to make any plans.”

  “And Sara?”

  “She will come with me to Palestine. Gustav has promised to help me get the permissions I need. The British have placed restrictions on immigration, they want to stop the survivors from going to Palestine, but where else can they go? Do you realize, Vera, that they don’t want us anywhere, that they think we’re a problem for them, that they don’t know what to do with the survivors?”

  “Have you asked her? Maybe she wants to go back to Thessaloniki, maybe she still has family there . . .”

  I hadn’t thought of asking her. I took it for granted that she would come back to Jerusalem with me, that she would live at Hope Orchard and that when the wounds to her soul were healed we would get married. But Vera was right, Sara had to decide. She didn’t belong to me.

  You should try to recover your father’s property in France. Your house in the Marais, the money in the bank. Some of that is here in London, though. Your father made a will.”

  “Yes, Gustav told me, tomorrow we will go to the notary.”

  I knew that my father had never been very interested in money, but even so he had had a talent for making it. He didn’t have an excessive amount, but the business he had been in with Konstantin had borne fruit. If Konstantin had left Vera and Gustav well off, then my father had done the same for Dalida and me. All that he had was for Dalida and me, except Dalida did not exist anymore, and so I was the sole owner of shares in one of the main City banks, as well as cash and, what was most surprising, a good handful of diamonds. Yes, my father had bought diamonds and had kept them in a safety deposit box in London. He had a fortune in precious stones that I could have sold, but Gustav told me that “it was not a good moment to sell precious stones. The best thing would be to keep them. You would lose money on them now.”

  In the notary’s office I signed a document giving Gustav power of attorney so he could deal with my inheritance in London and act in my name in front of the French tribunals. The collaborationist government had confiscated the laboratory. The notary told me that it would be difficult to recover what had been expropriated, but at least I should try. Gustav thanked me for trusting him. This surprised me. If I trusted anyone in the world, it was Gustav. I was sure not only of his honesty, but also that he was a pure and good person.

  When we left the notary’s office, Gustav seemed more melancholy than on other occasions. I asked him why.

  “I would like to be like you, able to do whatever I want.”

  “What’s stopping you?” I asked.

  “The education I was given, the sense of duty I feel. If it were up to me I would go and retreat to a monastery. To pray, to think, to read, to be silent . . . But I have to marry and have children, and teach them the values of our traditions, the pride they should have to bear our name. Also, I couldn’t leave my mother alone. She has some family left in Russia, but it is unimaginable that she should live under Stalin’s boot. She and my father were lucky to be able to flee in time. They have friends in London, good friends of my father and of his family, but really the only person she has is me. I couldn’t be so selfish as to choose my own path and simply walk away. What sort of man would I be if I were not able to make sacrifices for the person I love the most? I think God puts us to the test.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear of Gustav’s religious concerns, but it was difficult for me to imagine him in this light. I wondered if I would be able to sacrifice myself for my mother and my duty as Gustav was doing. I didn’t really know what my duty was, and anyway, my mother had Daniel. He was her oldest son, from her first marriage, so I had an advantage over Gustav; as I was not an only child, I could do what I wanted in my life without my conscience pricking me.