"Gross-Rosen," he muttered.
I knew it was another camp, because I had seen the name on documents. It could not possibly be any worse than it was here.
Inside the train car, I moved to a spot near the window. It would be cold, but there would be fresh air. I slid along the wall to a sitting position, feeling my legs burn after the hours I'd spent standing, and I wondered why I had been brought here.
It was possible this was the punishment that had been handed down from the Kommandant for stealing.
Or it was possible that someone had been trying to save me from a worse fate, by making sure I was on a train that would take me far away from the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer.
After what he had done to me, I had no reason to believe that the Hauptscharfuhrer was thinking about me at all, or even wondering if I'd survived the night. That was probably a figment of my imagination.
But then again, my imagination was what had kept me alive all these months in this hellhole.
It was not until hours later, when we had arrived at Gross-Rosen to learn that there was not a women's compound and we would be taken on instead to a subcamp called Neusalz, that I took off my mittens to gently test the tenderness of my jaw, and something fell into my lap.
A tiny scroll, a note.
I realized that the guard who had untied my wrists had not been having trouble with the knots. He had slipped this into my mitten.
It was a strip of watermarked paper, the same kind I had rolled into my typewriter every day for the past few months.
"WHAT HAPPENS NEXT," it read.
I never saw the Hauptscharfuhrer again.
*
At Neusalz, I worked in the Gruschwitz textile factory. My job at first involved making thread--a deep red hue that stained my hands--but because I had worked at an office job and had access to food, I was stronger than most of the other women, and soon I was sent to load train cars with boxes of ammunition. We worked alongside political prisoners--Poles and Russians--who unloaded the supplies that came by rail.
One of the Poles would flirt with me whenever I came close to the tracks. Although we were not supposed to talk to each other, he would pass me notes when the guards were not looking. He called me Pinky, because of my mittens. He would whisper limericks to make me laugh. Some of the other women joked around with me about my boyfriend, and said that he must have a thing for girls who played hard to get. In reality, I wasn't playing hard to get at all. I didn't speak for fear I'd be punished, and because it still hurt to move my jaw.
I had been at the factory for only two weeks when, one day, he came closer to me than the guards allowed. "Escape if you can. This camp is going to be evacuated."
I didn't know what that meant. Would we be taken somewhere and shot? Would we be brought to another camp, a death camp like the one I'd left? Or would I be sent back to Auschwitz, and the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer?
I moved away from the POW as quickly as I could, before he got me into trouble. I didn't tell the other women in my barracks what he had said.
Three days later, instead of being made to report to our work details, the nine hundred women in the camp were assembled and, under guard, marched out of the gates.
We walked about ten miles before dawn. Women who had gathered their meager belongings--blankets and pots and whatever else they had squirreled away at the camp--began to drop them on the sides of the road. We were headed toward Germany, that was all we could surmise. In the front of the convoy, prisoners pulled a wagon that prepared meals for the SS officers. Another wagon at the back of the line held the bodies of those who collapsed from exhaustion and died. The Germans were trying to cover their tracks, I supposed. At least that was the way it worked for the first few days, and then the officers just got lazy, shot those who fell, and left them lying there. The rest of us would simply step around them, like water parted by a stone in a stream.
We hiked through forests. We hiked through fields. We hiked through towns, where people came to stare at us as we passed, some with tears in their eyes, and some spitting at us. When there were Allied warplanes overhead, the officers would slip between us, using us as camouflage. The hunger was worst, but a close second was the condition of my feet. Some of the women were lucky enough to have boots. I was still wearing the wooden clogs that I had been given at Auschwitz. My skin was blistered beneath the multiple stockings I wore; splinters from the wood had rubbed holes in the heels of at least two of the layers. Where snow had seeped into the wool, my skin was nearly frostbitten. And still I did not have it as bad as some of the other girls. One, who had only a single pair of stockings, got such bad frostbite that her little toe snapped off like an icicle from a roof.
This went on for a week. I no longer told myself I had to survive the day, but just one more hour. All this exercise and no food took its toll; I could feel myself wasting away, weakening. I had not believed it was possible to be any hungrier than I already was, but I had not understood what this march would be like. At rest stops, when the officers prepared their own meals, we were left to melt snow so that we would have water to drink. We'd forage through the melting drifts for acorns and bits of moss that we could eat. We never spoke; we were just too weary to muster up the energy. After each of these stops, there were at least a dozen women who could not get to their feet again. Then, the SS executioner--a Ukrainian with a wide, flat nose and a bulbous Adam's apple--would finish them off with a single shot to the back.
Ten days into the march, at one of the rest stops, the officers made a fire. They tossed potatoes into the flames, and dared us to reach in and grab one. There were girls so desperate to get a potato that they set their sleeves on fire, then rolled in the snow to put out the flames, which made the officers laugh. Some who had been successful in getting a potato would eventually die from the burns. After a while, the potatoes charred to ash, because no one else would reach in for them. It was worse, I think, seeing that food go to waste, than simply starving.
That night one woman who had suffered third-degree burns on her hands was screaming from the pain. I was lying beside her and tried to calm her down by packing her arms with fresh snow. "This will help," I soothed. "You just have to stop thrashing." But she was Hungarian and didn't understand me, and I didn't know how else to help her. After hours of her shrieks, the executioner approached. He stepped over me and shot her, then went back to the spot where the officers were sleeping. I coughed, unable to breathe anything but gunpowder residue, and then wrapped my scarf over my mouth as a filter. The other women around me did not even react.
I reached down and untied the boots that the dead woman was wearing. She would not need them anymore.
They were too big, but they were better than the wooden clogs.
The next morning, before we left the camp the officers had made, I was told to douse the fire. I did, with snow, but noticed the charred remains of the potatoes among the embers. I reached in and picked one up. It crumbled at my touch into a heap of ash, but surely there was still some nutritious value? As quickly as possible, I grabbed handfuls of the ash into my pockets, and for days after that, as I walked, I would stick my fingers into my coat and scoop out bits to eat.
When we had been marching for two weeks, I thought about the POW who had urged me to escape, and now I understood. There were incremental grades of surrender. From the women who kicked off their clogs because the blisters on their feet made it impossible to walk anymore and who then suffered such severe frostbite and gangrene that they died to those who simply lay down and did not get up, knowing they would be dead within minutes--well, it seemed that we were all dying by degrees. Eventually, there would be none of us left.
Which maybe was the point of this march.
And then, it seemed, there was an iota of mercy, in the form of springtime. The days grew warmer; the snow melted in patches. This was a gift in that I knew soon things would begin to grow, and that meant food. But it also depleted our reserve of unlimited water, and created mud bog
s we had to slog through. We marched through villages, where we would sleep in the streets while the SS men took turns sleeping inside homes and churches. Then we would wake up and edge into the forests again, where it was harder for the warplanes to spot us.
One afternoon I was assigned to pull the wagon at the front of the convoy when I saw something sticking out of the mud.
An apple core.
Someone must have thrown it away in the woods. A farmer, maybe. A boy, whistling as he ran through the trees.
I looked at the SS officers walking beside the wagon. If I let go for a second, I could run over and pick up the core and slip it into my pocket without them noticing. I was fully aware that in six steps . . . five . . . four . . . we would be past it and it would be too late. I also knew from the charge that ran through our ragged line that I was not the only one to have seen it.
I dropped the handle of the wagon and ran to grab it.
I was not fast enough. An SS man yanked me upright before my fingers could close around the core. He dragged me from my position at the front of the convoy to the rear, where two more officers secured my arms so that I couldn't blend into the line of prisoners. I knew what would happen, because I had seen it before: when we stopped again to rest, the executioner would take me into the woods and would kill me.
My knees were knocking, making it difficult to walk. When the wagon in the front pulled to the side to make the evening meal, the executioner took my arm and led me away from the other women.
I was the only one assigned to be executed that afternoon. By now, it was twilight, the sky was a dusky purple that would have taken my breath away under any other circumstance. The executioner motioned for me to get down on my knees in front of him. I did, but clasped my hands together and started to beg. "Please. If you spare my life, I'll give you something in return."
I don't know why I made this promise; I had nothing of value. Everything I'd brought with me from Neusalz I wore on my body.
Then I remembered the leather journal, which I had slipped into the waistband of my dress.
There was nothing about this thuggish man that suggested he was a scholar of literature, or that he even knew how to read. But I lifted my arms in a signal of surrender and then slowly reached beneath my coat for the book in which I had written my story. "Please," I repeated. "Take this."
He frowned, dismissing the barter at first. But most prisoners did not have a fine leather-bound journal in their possession. I could see him wondering if maybe there was something important written inside.
He reached toward me. As soon as his hand clasped the binding, I took my other hand, now resting on the ground, and grabbed a handful of dirt, which I threw into his eyes.
Then I ran faster than I'd ever run into the night, which bled like a mortal wound between the trees.
I would not have escaped, if not for several favorable conditions:
1. It was dusk, the most difficult time of the day for my captors to see. Trees became soldiers pointing guns, and the keen eyes of owls could be mistaken for fugitives; boulders resembled enemy tanks, and every animal's footfall made them fear they'd walked into an ambush.
2. The officers had no dogs with them, the march being deemed too grueling for animals, so I couldn't be tracked by my scent.
3. The mud.
4. The fact that the officers were just as weary of this march as I was.
I ran until I collapsed, and by then I could hear the shouts of the SS men who were searching for me. I stumbled, rolling in the near dark down a ravine, landing in a trench at the bottom. I covered my body and my face with the wet mud and drew branches and brush across me. Then I lay as still as I could. At one point, the Germans passed so close that one of the officers stepped on the back of my hand, but I did not make a sound and he did not realize I was hiding beneath his boots.
Eventually, they moved on. I waited a full day before I believed it, and then began to pick my way through the forest. I walked by moonlight, afraid to sleep because of the wild animals that I heard calling to each other. Just when I was certain I would have to lie down and take my chances with the wolves, I saw something in the distance. A looming shadow, a broad-hipped roof, a haystack.
The barn smelled of pigs and chickens. When I slipped inside, the birds were roosting, gossiping to each other like old ladies, too busy to even send up the alarm that I had entered. I felt my way in the slurry dark, wincing when my foot struck a metal pail. But in spite of the clatter, no one came; no lights in the house down the path flickered on, and so I continued to rummage.
A deep wooden barrel filled with grain squatted just outside the fence of the pigpen.
I dug both hands into the barrel and ate fistfuls of the food, which tasted of sawdust and molasses and oats. I tried hard not to eat too fast, because I knew it would only make me sick. Climbing over the low railing, I pushed two large sows out of the way and dug my hands into a trough. Potato peels. Fruit rinds. The heels of bread.
This was a banquet.
Eventually I lay down with the pigs on either side of me, warmed by their bristled backs and shielded by their bulk. For the first time in five years, I fell asleep so stuffed that even if I had tried, I could not have eaten another bite.
I dreamed that I had been shot by the executioner after all, because surely this was Heaven. Or so I thought, until I woke up to find a pitchfork pointed at my throat.
*
The woman was about the same age that my mother had been, with a coronet of braids twisted around her head and lines bracketing her mouth. She poked the weapon at my throat and I scrambled backward, as the animals grunted and squealed around me.
I threw up my hands in surrender. "Bitte," I cried, struggling to my feet. I was so weak, I had to grab on to the railing of the pigpen to do it.
She held the pitchfork aloft but then slowly, so incredibly slowly, lowered the tines, holding it instead across her body like a barrier. She tilted her head, staring.
I could only imagine what she was seeing. A skeleton, with mud caking my skin and my hair. My striped prisoner's coat and my filthy pink mittens and hat.
"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 Hauptscharfuhrer.
So I nodded. She motioned to t
he 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.