When the World Was Ours

by Liz Kessler

Still. It had been an hour and I was getting bored now.

  I knocked on the kitchen door. ‘Can I come in yet?’

  ‘Two more minutes!’ Annie replied.

  I stood in the hall and counted the seconds. Finally the door opened and Annie beckoned me in with a smile that she saved only for me.

  That smile made my heart flutter and meant that she could banish me for another hour if she wanted to, as long as the waiting would end with another smile like that.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said and I followed her inside.

  Mama was at the sink, finishing the washing-up. She turned and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Ready?’ she asked Annie.

  Annie replied with a nod, and Mama opened the door of our tiny oven. ‘I’ll let you do the honours,’ she said, passing the oven gloves to Annie.

  Annie put the gloves on and reached into the oven. And then she brought something out on a tray.

  At first, I thought I must be seeing things.

  Maybe it was a mirage, a hallucination. But even if my eyes were deceiving me, my other senses weren’t. I knew that smell. I had known it and loved it my whole life.

  I stared at them both, my jaw open.

  ‘It’s Sachertorte,’ Annie said.

  ‘I know what it is!’ I said. ‘I just don’t know how you did it. The ingredients are impossible to get! Sugar, butter… real chocolate?!’

  ‘Remember those shoes you grew out of last month?’ Mama asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, wondering what shoes had to do with anything.

  ‘I swapped them for the chocolate!’

  ‘You what?’ I burst out laughing.

  ‘And remember I told you I’ve been doing some sewing but I didn’t tell you what it was for?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Ye-e-e-s?’

  ‘Well, it was for this,’ she confessed. ‘I was doing it to buy flour and sugar.’

  ‘I even managed to get the Stewarts in on it,’ Mama went on. ‘They found some almonds in an old tin and gave them to us.’

  I stared at them both. ‘But – but I don’t understand. Why did you do all that for me? It’s not my birthday or anything.’

  Annie came towards me and slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Not yours,’ she said. ‘Ours. It’s our anniversary today. We’ve been together for a whole year.’

  I was too choked up to speak. Instead, I put my arm around her shoulders and beckoned Mama over. Putting my other arm around her, I kissed first Annie’s cheek and then the top of Mama’s head.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’ I whispered to them. ‘Thank you.’

  We stayed like that for a minute, each of us only too aware of the people in between us who were missing.

  ‘Right, come on, then,’ Mama said, pulling away before those thoughts crystalized and ruined the moment. ‘Let’s eat it while it’s warm.’

  The three of us sat together at the table and Mama cut us each a big slice.

  I closed my eyes as I ate. I had never eaten anything so wonderful in all my life.

  Afterwards, as we washed up together, and laughed and played games around the table, and talked until the room grew dark, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

  Bowled over by the beautiful thing they had done for me, I couldn’t stop watching the two women in my life.

  Mama and Annie.

  My heart, my world, my everything.

  ELSA

  I remember a routine I had, back when I was a child, in a time before Auschwitz, where I had to say one good thing each day.

  The memory is like thinking of someone else’s life and it hurts like a kick to the stomach. No. I have got used to those. It is worse. It hurts like the final kick, the one you don’t get back up from.

  I’ve seen plenty of those, too. They like us to see it. It’s part of our discipline. A reminder.

  My mind wanders so much nowadays. It is the only part of me without borders made of electric fences. I envy its freedom.

  Can you envy your own mind?

  My mind is like those cats Greta and I used to care for. What were their names? I strain my thoughts to remember. These moments are like little tests; I’m pushing myself to check that I am still in there somewhere.

  Thereza! Felix! That’s it. They would wander in and out at will.

  At Auschwitz, there is only one way out.

  And there is only one good thing.

  Greta.

  She is my miracle. She is my good thing every day. She is the only thing keeping me alive. She came here even before we did, and yet she has outlasted so many. She will outlast me. There is barely anything of me.

  I lie in the night with my thoughts. Four of us packed so tightly on this bunk and I mustn’t move, not even a twitch, or the whole shape becomes impossible. We only move when all of us are ready to move, and the only gift I can give to anyone now is to let them have their dreams for a few more minutes.

  We are like feral animals, huddled into each other for warmth. Babies surviving in the wild with no mother.

  Mother.

  I cannot even think that word without pain. Too late. I see her in my mind’s eye, her hunched shoulders as she walks away from me for the last time. Vati and Otto somewhere ahead of her in the same line. My last moment of having a family.

  I have to change my thoughts before they break me.

  My sleeve. My dress. Touch it. Touch it now.

  Being careful not to disturb my bunkmates, I stretch my hand across to the sleeve of my dress. The crinkle of soft card under the material. I run my fingers over it like a blind person reading braille, and my thoughts are calmed.

  My boys.

  He came to me again, just once. Mr Grunberg. He stole a minute while the guards weren’t looking. As he came towards me, he reached out as if to shake my hand.

  ‘Well done on your display yesterday,’ he said.

  Display? What was he talking about? I knew that the SS officers brought girls in to dance for them sometimes. Those who did it always came back to the barracks in tears and never spoke about it. But I had never been called.

  I was about to tell him he was mistaken when I realized he had something in his hand.

  ‘Take it,’ he whispered.

  I took his hand, as if to accept the handshake. Between our palms was a piece of card I knew so well – even without looking at it. I knew the creases and the shine and the corner that was frayed.

  ‘I rescued it from Canada,’ he said.

  Canada: the first lie I was told here. The lie handed to an innocent version of myself, a naïve girl who had stood on a platform thinking that the nice men were going to bring us our luggage.

  We never saw any of it again.

  And yet, here was my one precious possession, being given to me by the very person who had taken the photo in the first place!

  ‘Hide it,’ Mr Grunberg had urged. ‘Hide it well.’

  A moment later he was gone.

  Greta had found me a week later. Two gifts in one week. Our reunion was like – I cannot even say what it was like. It was like finding part of myself again. An essential part. I have known since the moment she found me that I cannot survive a day in here without her.

  I don’t know what she did but she managed to get moved to the same barrack. She is one of the three beside me now. We are inseparable. She is my twin.

  When I told her about the photograph, she pursed her lips tightly.

  ‘Where is it now?’ she had asked.

  I’d pointed at the bed. The flea-ridden, moth-eaten scrap of filthy, lumpy mattress we share each night. ‘Under here.’

  ‘Elsa, you have to move it!’ she had said. ‘People have been killed for less!’

  A day later, she had somehow found a needle and cotton. Greta manages things like that. She never tells me how. ‘I promise, it is safer that you don’t know,’ she had said. ‘And believe me, you don’t want to have to do what I do to get these things.’

  The haunted look on her face when she sa
id that was enough to stop me questioning further.

  That night, we sewed the photograph into my dress. It has stayed there ever since.

  Greta is whispering in my ear now. She lies behind me in our night-time formation. Her arm lies across my body. What there is of it. ‘Body’ feels too grand a word for the walking skeletons that we have become.

  ‘Elsa, are you awake?’ she whispers. ‘Squeeze my hand for yes.’

  I reach for her hand and squeeze it.

  In an even lower voice, so quiet I have to stop breathing to hear her, she says, ‘We are escaping. Tonight.’

  I have to fight every impulse in my body not to leap out of bed and scream, ‘What?’

  Or I would if my body had the energy to leap anywhere. Still. I do not know how to respond, and so I lie there, silent and stiff.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Greta asks.

  I squeeze her hand.

  ‘I hadn’t told you yet because I didn’t want you to be part of the plans. Too dangerous.’

  I twist my head round as far as I’m able without disturbing the other women in the bunk. ‘They will kill you,’ I whisper.

  ‘We will die either way,’ Greta replies. Then a pause before she adds, ‘Elsa, we’re dead in here anyway. This is not living. Don’t answer me now. Think about it, but it’s happening tonight and I want you to come.’

  Only a few minutes later, our day has begun. Bright lights, screaming and shouting from the kapo, the woman in charge of our barracks. Dragging ourselves out of bed.

  I feel like a woman of ninety years old. Every cell in my body aches: with hunger, cold, muscles too weak to move.

  But move we must and, half an hour later, we are out in the yard for the first roll call of the day. My feet are bleeding and covered in scabs as I force them to drag me across the uneven concrete so I can stand in a puddle for hours. Sometimes it is less. Usually more. One time, they kept us out here all day. There were three changes of guard during that roll call. Three times they came to work, did their full shift and went home.

  Home.

  Just imagine.

  They will find any reason to keep us standing out here longer. If someone hesitates before calling their number: start again. If there is any discrepancy in the numbers: start again. If one person does not call out their number loud enough: start again. If the guards are bored and feel like toying with us: start again.

  I have seen people literally die in front of me during these roll calls. When your body has nothing inside it to keep you warm and not enough strength to keep you standing, it is hard to resist the relief that would come from giving up. Giving in. Release.

  But today, something other than hunger is making me dizzy. A new form of release.

  Escape.

  Can we do it? I would trust Greta with my life. I know that. We are each other’s lives. And I know that she is right, I will die here whatever happens. So what do I have to lose?

  And just like that I have decided. I will join them.

  My body feels alive with hope and longing. The feeling lasts for – I don’t know – maybe minutes? Seconds? I want it to last longer. But this is Auschwitz and we are not allowed hope. The mere suggestion of it is enough for punishment.

  And the punishment for this hope, it seems, is instant.

  An SS guard has come to join the others in front of us. He whispers something to the two guards already there. One of them bends his head forward to listen. Then he nods sharply. Both soldiers click their heels together and give their ‘Heil Hitler!’ salutes.

  Then the guard who has just joined the others unfolds a piece of paper and turns to us. ‘The following numbers, come forward!’ he shouts.

  A sudden premonition grips my stomach, filling me with terror as women step forward. Even before he calls out Greta’s number.

  No. No!

  I watch my friend raise her shoulders, lift her chin, straighten her back. I watch, as if through a mist, as she walks through the crowd to the front. I watch one guard take hold of her while another kicks her in the stomach.

  And then I cannot watch any more. I cannot listen. I cannot comprehend. My small act of rebellion is that I refuse to believe what is happening in front of my eyes.

  And then it is over.

  She is gone. And my last shred of belief – in humanity, redemption, survival, in anything – all of it has gone with her.

  Eventually, they dismiss us. I cannot walk. I have nowhere to go. I have nothing to hold me in place. The anchor that connects me to the world has gone.

  A woman from my barracks takes my arm. ‘Come, Elsa,’ she says. Her voice is warm but I cannot be comforted.

  I am the walking dead.

  MAX

  Max started his work shift late in the day. As always, he felt a swell of pride as he marched through the gates and looked up at the words over them: Arbeit Macht Frei.

  Work certainly had made him free. So much so that he didn’t even mind working on his birthday. What better way to serve Hitler than to show commitment like that?

  He headed for the quarter that he had started patrolling recently. At first, he’d worked in the offices, helping out with whatever was required of him, dealing with paperwork, even making drinks for the officers. Recently, his father had managed to get him posted to perimeter duty. He liked the feeling of importance it gave him, and the fact that he had to be alert and ready at all times.

  Max listened as Karl, the guard he was taking over from, caught him up on the day’s events before handing over to him. There had been some trouble with a couple of the women. They’d been hatching a plan to escape. Luckily, they’d been caught and dealt with.

  They wouldn’t be any more trouble.

  Max and Karl faced each other to give their ‘Heil Hitler!’ salutes and Karl started to move away as Max prepared himself to take up position.

  Rolf, another guard Max was friendly with, was calling to him from across the path. ‘Hey, birthday boy,’ he said.

  How did Rolf know it was his birthday? And did he know that Max was only sixteen today?

  Max had done what his father had instructed before they came and never told anyone his real age.

  As if he’d asked the question out loud, Rolf said, ‘Your father tells us it’s time for you to handle one of these.’ With that, he pulled out a pistol from its holster and handed it to Max.

  The pistol felt heavy in his hands. As Max studied it, Rolf went on. ‘You want to see some real action? Not just sitting behind a desk or pacing up and down the perimeter?’ he asked.

  The tiniest shiver went through him. Rolf and Karl were both in their twenties. They’d been here longer than Max. They talked a lot about things like ‘real action’. Always keen to show how brave they were, how strong, how violent. Max was used to men like them. In many ways he admired them. In many ways, he aspired to be like them.

  But sometimes he couldn’t stop himself. Sometimes he wondered how much of the talk was real, how many of their words they truly believed – and how many were for the benefit of others.

  Sure, he joined in with the talk himself, laughing at jokes he didn’t always get, talking louder than came naturally to him, sneering at the prisoners as they lumbered by, heads bowed, ragged clothes hanging off them.

  But just occasionally, it was as if the veneer slipped and Max caught a glimpse of something underneath it all. He wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t a little boy any more. They might not tell him directly, but he knew what happened over at the other camp where the chimneys blew out smoke every hour of every day.

  He also knew what Karl meant when he said there wouldn’t be ‘any more trouble’ with the prisoners who’d tried to escape. What ‘real action’ was likely to mean.

  Sometimes, before he managed to check himself, Max allowed a tiny voice in his head to ask questions: Was this what he had yearned for? Was this what being the greater race truly meant?

  Then he wondered if he was the only one to think those questions. Or if so
ldiers like Rolf and Karl sometimes thought the same? Soldiers like his father, even, who had always been committed to Hitler and the Reich? Did he ever question it all?

  He would never know the answers as he knew he could never voice any of his questions. He could never show he had moments of doubt. He could never even hint at it. He was in far too deep for that now.

  So he plastered a grin on his face and turned to his colleague. ‘Absolutely!’ he said.

  ‘Attaboy!’ Rolf patted Max on the back and returned his smile. The camaraderie melted Max’s thoughts and he felt his body relax. He was one of them again.

  Rolf shouted to Karl. ‘You all right to hang on here for a bit longer before Max takes over?’ he asked.

  ‘My wife’s cooking my favourite dinner!’ Karl complained.

  ‘Ah, come on. We won’t be too long. It’s a treat for Max’s birthday.’

  ‘Okay. But I need to be gone in the next fifteen minutes.’

  Rolf waved a hand. ‘That’ll be plenty of time,’ he said.

  Max and Rolf walked together to Block 11 at the far end of the camp where another guard, Thomas, was waiting to join them in the courtyard.

  Max had never been to Block 11 before, but he knew what happened here.

  He forced his legs to march and not betray him by shaking noticeably. He forced his heart rate to slow and his palms to stay dry. And he forced his mind to draw a veil across the thought of what they were about to do.

  Instead, he reminded himself how lucky he was to be here at all. This was his chance to take another step closer to the heart of the regime; another opportunity to serve Hitler.

  And Max knew one thing for sure: there was no greater honour than that.

  ELSA

  It’s late in the day when they come. It isn’t even a surprise. I know how it works here. I have known all day that I would be under suspicion. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t part of the plan, that I didn’t even know of it till this morning.

  All that matters is association; retribution; punishment.

  A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed any of this could be possible. A week ago, I would have fought it. Even a day ago, when I still had Greta, a tiny beating pulse in a hidden corner of my heart would have urged me to resist.