The Child of Auschwitz: Absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction

by Lily Graham

  ‘Is it you?’ she asked.

  He frowned. Then shuffled forward in his striped pyjamas. ‘You know me?’ His accent was thick, soupy German.

  He had a mole over one lip. He was thin, thinner than in the photograph she had of him.

  ‘In a way,’ she said. She bent down to fetch the small bundle of photographs she’d moved from her underwear to the folded-up roll of her far too long sleeve, and found his easily. The one of the man with the bushy eyebrows, the mole, and the shy girl and laughing boy.

  She looked at it, then smiled a wide smile, for the first time in a very long while. ‘It is you,’ she said, in awe, and gave it to him.

  His eyes bulged, and filled with tears, as he touched the photograph, with shaking fingers. ‘How did you get this?’

  She explained about the warehouse, about going through the men’s coats and what she’d done, how she’d kept just a few of the photographs.

  He blinked, touching the faces of his children. The photograph was small in his thick, gnarled fingers.

  He looked up at her. ‘Why did you keep it?’

  She shrugged a shoulder. ‘I don’t know, I couldn’t bear to see it burnt – there was a rumour that they did that, I didn’t want to take the risk.’

  He swallowed. ‘Thank you.’

  He looked around, in case anyone was listening, then turned back when he saw the coast was clear. ‘They took my girl, Ilsa.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Eva, sitting up.

  ‘From the train. They put the men to one side and the women. I found out later, she went left.’

  Eva closed her eyes: that poor child. People who were fit and able to work – not too young or too old, were taken to the right, they could live and work, like slaves, like them. The ones who went left were killed upon arrival.

  ‘I thought I would never see her again,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Eva frowned, until she realised he was talking about the photograph.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, touching her arm.

  Eva felt something warm and light enter her chest as if the weight of this place had lifted for a moment – the feeling was wondrous.

  She smiled, shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I found you – out of all the people here.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a miracle,’ he agreed. ‘And I must admit I had given up on those. There’s hundreds of thousands of people here. If you had tried to look for me it would have taken you many months.’

  She nodded. It was pure chance, pure luck.

  ‘Can I – is there anything I can do for you in return?’ he asked.

  That’s the way it worked in the camp. It wasn’t a bad thing, favours were the only thing you could offer, the only currency that could end up improving things slightly.

  She nodded. It wasn’t time to pretend that she was above that sort of thing, no one was. A nurse would be here soon and then he’d have to leave, he was one of the few male prisoners she’d seen in months, and the only one she’d spoken to.

  ‘My husband, Michal Adami. I need to know if he’s alive.’

  The light in his eyes dimmed slightly. ‘Like I said, there’s so many people, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find out.’

  He didn’t explain that every woman he met asked him the same thing, and more often than not, without even needing to ask, the answer was that they were dead. And if they were alive, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

  She grabbed his arm, the one with his tattoo, covering it with hers. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Herman.’

  ‘Eva.’

  ‘I believe in luck, despite everything. Look at us, Herman, if that wasn’t luck, I don’t know what is, and a little is all we need.’

  He nodded. ‘Eva, we will need all the help we can get. A few more prayers couldn’t hurt. How will I find you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll find a way to come back here.’

  She wasn’t sure how just yet.

  He nodded, then smiled, touched the pocket of his pyjamas where he’d put the photograph, a gesture of farewell, then he was gone.

  ‘You think he will find Michal, truly?’ asked Sofie on the first night Eva was back in her familiar bunk, after she’d told them about what had happened.

  ‘I don’t know. I have to hope.’

  No one said that it was unlikely, they didn’t have to. They had all lost husbands and brothers, fathers and sons. Very few of them knew who was alive or not in here; but then, the chances of Eva finding the man with the moustache in the tiny bundle of photographs she had found had been slim to nothing.

  ‘I could ask Meier – maybe he knows something, or could find out.’

  Eva shook her head. ‘He’s friends with Hinterschloss. I think if somehow Meier let it slip that he was looking for my husband, he’d kill him, just to spite me.’

  Sofie bit her lip. It was all too likely, she hadn’t thought of that, and was glad that she hadn’t asked him yet. She’d wanted to be sure if she could trust him or not before she asked after Lotte and Michal. Meier was better than some of the other guards, but he was young and naive, and had already made the mistake of letting Hinterschloss know how he felt about Sofie, when he told him that he thought she looked like the film star Bette Davis. To the point that the other guard now made it his mission to touch her whenever he did the Appell.

  ‘Just testing the merchandise, I don’t like it when my friends get a better share.’ Then he’d sneered. ‘I think he can keep these little plums though.’

  But it hadn’t stopped him from doing it again.

  Sofie tried not to think of it, of them. ‘I still can’t believe you found the man in the photograph, and that was all he had left of his daughter,’ she said.

  Eva nodded.

  ‘Maybe you weren’t so mad after all, Kritzelei, for keeping them,’ said Sofie with a smile. ‘Maybe others will try to get theirs back too.’

  Eva smiled back. ‘I doubt it.’

  But Sofie was right. After she’d given Herman back his photograph, she began to see on her way to the Kanada – by accident or design, she wasn’t sure which – more men by the fence calling out to her, wanting to know if she had their photographs. But of course she only had the tiniest handful. That she’d had Herman’s was more than likely a one-off, a miracle really.

  Sometimes it was possible to snatch a few seconds to speak to them through the fence, before anyone noticed.

  ‘Here,’ said an older man with greying hair and large blue eyes, pushing through a small piece of sausage from the fence.

  ‘But I might not have your photograph, I only kept a very few,’ she explained.

  He shook his head. ‘No, I know. I didn’t keep any, I wish I did, that’s the thing – I was always too busy working. That’s what I thought a husband and father should do – provide.’ His face looked sad. ‘My wife arranged for a professional photographer to come one morning for a family portrait. It was a Saturday, and I was annoyed, I had stuff to do at the office, so I left. I regret that now.’

  Eva didn’t know what to say. There had been so many moments they had all taken for granted, thinking they had all the time in the world. There were so many things she wished she could have done better too.

  ‘Your family knew you loved them, that’s why you worked so hard.’

  His eyes filled. ‘You think so?’

  She wiped away a tear from her own. ‘I do.’

  He cleared his throat, fighting sudden tears. ‘Anyway. Here, have the sausage. It was such a nice thing you did, keeping Herman’s photo like that, he’s my friend. Eat, please.’

  Eva nodded, and slipped the piece of sausage between her teeth and chewed; it was delicious. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Can you tell me what your husband looks like?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s tall, with curly brown hair and green eyes.’

  ‘No one has curly hair here,’ he said. Eva’s heart plummeted, and he waved a hand in dismissal as he expl
ained. ‘They shaved us all.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eva. ‘Of course.’ It was some time before her heartbeat returned to normal.

  ‘Do you have a photograph of him? We could circulate it, someone might have seen him?’

  She shook her head, his was one of the photographs she didn’t have.

  He nodded. ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry, we’ll still ask around.’

  She looked at him. ‘I could draw him, if I could get paper, a pen.’

  ‘Here?’ He widened his eyes, then nodded. ‘I don’t know if I’d be able to get that. I’ll try though.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Over the course of the next few weeks – despite her belief that it wouldn’t happen again – she managed to track down another one of the men with families from the photographs by the way he’d described his wife’s dotted scarf, and laughing eyes.

  It was heartbreaking to see the man behind the fence begin to cry. ‘She died on the train with me. We were lucky though, before we were taken, we’d got word that our son made it safely to London with my sister, can you believe that – he’s there learning English?’ he smiled at the thought, ‘Maybe even reciting Shakespeare already, eh?’

  Eva smiled. That was a nice thought.

  ‘I will keep this for him,’ said the man.

  She nodded, turned to leave, tears in her eyes.

  She was happy to return the handful of photographs she’d kept, but she wished more than anything that she could return the people within them to the past before everything was torn from their lives.

  ‘You, photo-girl! Eva.’

  Eva turned as she was on her way into the Kanada, to see Herman. She looked quickly over her shoulder to see if any of the guards were watching and sidled closer to the fence. ‘Herman, hello! You have news? Have you found Michal?’ she asked, quickly, breathlessly.

  He shook his head.

  Her heart sank, but she reminded herself that no news was good news.

  ‘No, not yet. But we got you this. It might help?’ She looked down and saw in his old liver-spotted hand a small scrap of yellowing paper, and a tiny stub of a pencil. In this place, it was like gold, and if you were caught with it the sentence was death.

  She took it from him quickly, her months of sleight of hand practice with her uncle Bedrich made quick work of hiding the items up her sleeve. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed.

  ‘If you can draw a portrait, I’ll be here tomorrow, the same time, to fetch it.’

  She nodded. She could do that.

  ‘Try to make it as accurate as possible.’

  Michal’s face was etched inside her heart, it would be no trouble.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sofie had found a way to get away from Meier – and thus the increasing, unwarranted attention she was receiving from Hinterschloss, and she grabbed at it quickly.

  Sara, their Kapo, had come in after speaking to one of the doctors outside, wanting to know if any of them had nursing experience, as there was a shortage. There was a new doctor, named Mengele, someone who would be very busy, and they needed as many personnel as they could find. In the weeks to come she would come to realise that the good-looking, well-groomed doctor was the very incarnation of evil, and of Auschwitz, but at that moment she hadn’t known any of this. All she’d seen was a chance to get away from Meier.

  ‘I do,’ said Sofie, to Eva’s surprise, which she tried to hide when Sara turned to look at her.

  Sara furrowed a brow. ‘Really? If you are lying you know they will kill you?’ she said.

  Eva had watched her friend swallow.

  ‘I have experience – five years in Vienna.’

  The Kapo nodded. ‘Good, they need you there now. Some big case. They said you could stay here for now, though you might get moved on to another barrack with the other staff later.’

  When Sofie came back in the early hours of the morning, she snuggled next to Eva.

  ‘How did it go?’ Eva asked.

  ‘It was fine, I think I fooled them. But how long, Kritzelei, before they find out that where I worked wasn’t in a human hospital?’ she whispered. ‘And only as a teenager?’

  As a child, Sofie had dreamt of becoming a veterinarian. She loved animals, and her favourite place to visit in Austria was the zoo, where she would watch the orangutans, the elephants and the Siberian tigers. In her small flat which she shared with her father, above his watchmaking shop in the centre of Leopoldstadt, the Jewish quarter – which had been home to her family for over three generations – she had adopted a little menagerie herself, including a small feather duster of a dog, named Boopshi, as well as several nameless stray cats who were collectively called ‘Shoo’ by her allergic father, and a tortoise, named Freud.

  When she was fourteen she began volunteering at the Schönbrunn Zoo, the world’s oldest zoo, which had once belonged to the emperor of Lorraine. It was a forty-five-minute train ride and she would rush there after school for the briefest of visits, but it was worth it to clean up the pens of elephants and tigers. Her father, Carl, often joked that Sofie liked animals better than people. Sometimes she thought he was right. Animals didn’t pretend. They were simpler, and much nicer at times.

  In any case, he was wrong in one respect, she liked the people she knew. Like her maternal grandparents, who lived in a beautiful apartment around the corner, who she stayed with every Friday for Shabbat dinner.

  She liked plaiting the dough for the challah in the morning with her grandmother, and watching the bread come out of the oven, polishing the silver, and laying the table with the Shabbat candles, which were only lit after sundown. It was always a fine table, with fresh flowers from the market, and always a dessert or two, usually home-made apple strudel or cheesecake, which was her grandfather’s speciality.

  When she turned seventeen she began training as a veterinary nurse, and met another student, named Lucas. He was a kind soul who, like her, preferred animals to humans. It wasn’t a great love. More of a summer romance, but unfortunately by the end of it, it was one in which she was left rather compromised, with the result that she was pregnant. A fact she realised long after the short-lived romance had fizzled out.

  Lucas offered to do the honourable thing, even though by now, a few months later, he had given his heart to another, but Sofie refused. Despite the scandal, and the disappointment and shame she would be bringing onto her family, she couldn’t commit herself to a life with a man she didn’t love.

  ‘You’re being far too idealistic,’ her father had reprimanded her after she’d told him the news, shaking his head at her in his disappointment. Then he put his head in his hands and wished once more that his wife had lived long enough to help raise her. ‘I let you go wild – your mother would have known what to do – she would have told you about these things!’ It was a frequent lament. He looked at her and sighed. ‘She would have prepared you better, explained properly about men.’

  Despite herself, Sofie had laughed, her dark eyes alight. ‘Oh, Papa, that has been explained to me, a lot – by Granny – and Lucas wasn’t like that, we should have known better, I do know that. Especially now. But I just don’t see how marrying him would make this situation any better.’

  Her father had stared at her in amazement, his eyes huge, as if the answer was obvious.

  ‘He could provide a life for you – and the child.’

  Sofie had frowned, crossing her arms, and Babooshi jumped into her lap. Sofie stroked his wiry fur. ‘Are you kicking me out of the house?’

  He blinked. ‘No, of course not.’

  She stared at him, eyes penetrating. ‘Then I don’t understand – is it that I would be a burden?’

  Sofie was perhaps always a little too blunt. She didn’t believe in wasting time sugar-coating things. She couldn’t really see how she would be a burden as the shop did well, and they didn’t live extravagant lives.

  Her father pinched the bridge of his nose, not sure how to explain that marriage was often the right thing to
do, even if it’s not what one wanted. ‘That’s not what I mean – you know this is your home, always. I’m worried about what people will think, Sofie.’

  She gave him a look. ‘Well, don’t.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple!’

  Sofie was genuinely puzzled. ‘It should be. If I am free to stay here, then please let me be free to make this decision, Papa.’

  ‘It’s not like we can force her to marry him, can we?’ her grandfather said later, sounding a little hopeful.

  ‘No, unfortunately not,’ agreed her father.

  A week later though, they tried something else. Her grandmother suggested that the two women go out for a chat. She took her out to a nearby café and beseeched her over a pot of coffee the two barely touched.

  ‘Look, Sofie, I know what you’re saying makes sense, I have known enough young women who found themselves trapped in loveless marriages, having children with a man they don’t respect. Living a life they never envisioned for themselves when they were young. I understand that, so I won’t try to persuade you to change your mind on this. You’ve always had strong opinions, and the kind of backbone to stick with them, which you’ll need now more than ever. But allow this old woman to offer you some further advice, all right?’

  Sofie nodded, taking a sip of her cold black coffee and setting it down with a grimace.

  ‘If you have the baby here it’s going to cause a fallout, for everyone, not just yourself.’

  Sofie stared. ‘A falling out?’

  ‘No, a fallout – like a bomb, which sounds dramatic, I know. But trust me, this will ricochet in all our lives and cause all kinds of problems. For your father’s business, for you – for the family. In this neighbourhood, we all know each other’s business, unfortunately. I’d love to live in a time when an unwed woman who gets pregnant is not seen as a blot on her family or herself—’

  Sofie gasped. ‘But that’s ridiculous, when a man does it – gets some girl pregnant…’ she protested hotly, tears springing to her eyes.

  Her grandmother raised a hand, and agreed. ‘Nothing happens to him, not really, I know. There are a few whispers and maybe some people will make a fuss, maybe not, but that’s about it. It’s not fair but that’s the world we live in. It’s always been this way – and even if people get used to it, think of the child, raised as a bastard – being teased, being judged – you know they will.’