25
As it turned out, they were alive, though all quite hungry. There’d been no food for them at midday. The women had left at about noon in a small, tight group—presumably, or so Chaim guessed—to eat lunch. But the children had been locked inside and told to keep on working.
Even Manya wouldn’t let them slow down.
“If we’re too slow, there will be nothing for supper either,” she warned them. “They count what we have done at day’s end, and if the count is even one off from the day before, we all suffer for it.”
“But that’s . . . th-that . . .” Sophie stuttered, searching for a word as if she were Chaim.
Gittel put a hand on Sophie’s arm. “That seems to be how it is,” she said quietly. But even quiet, her voice had steel in it.
Chaim heard, and approved. Not of what she said, but of how she said it. The old Gittel was back. Giving them courage as well as warnings.
What she meant was that they’d all live if they were tough enough. Otherwise . . .
Manya and the other children nodded at Gittel’s quiet reminder. And Manya added, her finger once again making the circular motion, “Protesters don’t last long here.”
Sophie bit her lip, said nothing more.
* * *
• • •
During what would have been lunch, Chaim and Bruno worked side by side with Gregor and the other boys carrying sacks of stuff to feed into a machine that Gregor called the ball grinder. Nobody chuckled when he called it that, though back at school in Łódź, it would have been an everyday laugh among the boys.
The various bags were made of a gray material and each carefully labeled: SALTPETER or CHARCOAL or SULFUR. Mostly it was the large saltpeter sacks that the taller boys carried.
Hauling smaller bags was the job given to Chaim and Bruno. Once shown how to do it by the others, they were on their own, carrying sacks that had been stacked by the door some fifteen steps from the grinder.
Chaim found that if he recited lines from his poetry journal, they were like the old sea chanties. The cadences kept him moving. Also, the more he chanted lines from his poems and poetry starts, the more of them he remembered.
Dance, little Hannahleh, Chaya, Gittel, Rachael.
Guard the small sleepers.
We’re forest creatures now, pledged to silence.
The red of blood, the gold of . . . of a false payment . . .
Not a kosher smell, but tempting.
Just a shudder will do, and a curse.
Lifting the sacks up to the grinder’s mouth was something the taller boys did as well. Gregor and two others named Marek and Meyer had that job. They didn’t talk much.
Actually, even with the Madams out for lunch, nobody talked unless it was to give an order or instruction.
Besides, when they were close to the grinder, no one could have heard a conversation over its noise. But the three taller boys worked with such precision and synchronization, they might have been dancing to a tune.
A mazurka in half time, Chaim thought. As if they had been doing it forever.
Another boy had the job of measuring out water, which was then funneled into the top of the grinder at specific intervals.
“Makes the powder safer,” Gregor said.
Suddenly Chaim remembered Madam Szawlowski saying We don’t want any explosions in the workroom. He shuddered but held in his questions for now, saving his breath for hauling the bags.
Once the mixture was to Gregor’s satisfaction, he would make marks on a piece of paper—the count of each bag that had gone in—then push a button, and the machine would begin its slow grind, the noise deafening.
Chaim forced himself to look away. Not from the grinder. Away from the pencil and paper. If only he could liberate a piece of paper, a stub of pencil for himself, he could write down the lines from his stolen journal before he forgot them forever.
As the machine worked, a grayish dust, slightly grainy, emerged from a slot in its side, and the younger boys took turns spooning it out into boxes through a fine-wire mesh that refined the mixture even further. Then they distributed those boxes to the table where the girls sat funneling the gray contents into individual metal canisters.
The gray mixture stained everything it came in contact with—their hands first, parts of their faces if they’d rubbed their cheeks, their chins, their eyes. The powder made Chaim sneeze, so he suspected his nose, both inside and out, had turned gray.
He wondered idly if they would all turn into gray children.
One boy, thin to the point of emaciation, his hands as gray as a battleship, introduced himself, saying his name—Lev—as if it were a joke, shrugging his shoulders. Then he blurted out, “Gunpowder,” to Chaim and Bruno as if they were too stupid to have figured it out on their own.
Suddenly, Chaim had an idea. Maybe we could blow this camp up. But he quickly realized that was impractical for all kinds of reasons. Dying himself was the one that concerned him least. He had no inclination to become a martyr, but he’d gladly give his life so that Gittel and Sophie might live.
As if reading Chaim’s thoughts, Lev shook his head. “Don’t even think about blowing up the factory,” he said. “First, you’d be rubbish at it. Second, you’d kill all us kids, and the Nazis would find someone else in a few days to do the job. It’s important war work, you know. The commandant who doesn’t even live here gets all kinds of medals from Berlin.” His voice held both amusement and bitterness in equal measure.
Chaim glanced down at the floor, not able to look the boy in the eye.
“And don’t think about blowing up the guards or barracks,” Lev continued. “It’s been tried.”
“But . . . but . . .” Bruno began.
Another of the smaller boys interrupted him quietly. “They killed everyone who was a prisoner here before us as a warning, and started again.”
“And how do you know that, if everyone was killed?” Bruno asked, in an unmodulated voice.
Everyone—even Chaim—immediately shushed Bruno. Though it is, Chaim thought, a very sensible question.
“The guards told us about it when we arrived,” the smaller boy answered, his voice full of a boy’s attempt at sarcasm. “Boasted. Warned us it could . . . would . . . happen again.” His eyes seemed shuttered, even though they were open.
Chaim read caution there. Or resignation. Or perhaps both.
“They knew the names, the towns where the other children had come from,” Lev said. “Some of them were our cousins. Gone, all gone, and they laughed and made the chimney sign until we got it.” He didn’t stop working.
“And the Madams, too,” another boy said. “They told us.” He was thin, too, but not bony. “They keep excellent records, these Germans.” Excellent was a swearword the way he used it.
“But . . .” Bruno began again.
Hearing footsteps near the door, Chaim elbowed him in the ribs, hard.
Bruno shut up, but the look he gave Chaim was a dark one.
However, Chaim understood something that Bruno didn’t: You either worked together or you died together.
The door opened. The women were back from their lunch.
Bruno turned away, shrugging as if he didn’t care about the difference between life and death. Though Chaim was sure that shrug was not so indifferent as it seemed.
I’m the same, he thought. I’m not ready to die. Not just now. Not just yet. But whether he would have any say in that . . . only the future would tell.
* * *
• • •
Up to the middle of that long day, Chaim and Bruno managed pretty well. But the unwieldy sacks seemed to get heavier and heavier as the day wore on. By the time the women returned from lunch, the boys were having to carry a single sack between the two of them, Bruno complaining all the while that his left arm no longer seem
ed to work. Or his right. It changed with the bag or with the hour. Lev usually came over to help. He was thin but able to hoist the bag up.
“It’s in the wrists,” he said, showing them.
Several times Madam Zgrodnik came over to warn Bruno of his attitude. And one time the nearly silent Madam Grenzke came and shook her finger at him. “Watch your mouth,” she said curtly.
“It will get easier as the weeks go on,” Lev told Bruno.
“Weeks!” Bruno proclaimed. “We won’t be here weeks. Surely we’ll be moved on. We’re always moved on.”
“I’ve been here a year already,” Lev said quietly, shrugging in an exaggerated manner. “It’s better than . . .”
“The alternative,” said Gregor, as if that was an old joke in the factory.
A year! Chaim, too, thought such a thing unthinkable.
* * *
• • •
And yet he thought about it for the rest of the day. Thought about what his parents might be doing, while he and the others labored day after day, month after month. Whether they might forget him, forget Gittel. He wondered where Mama and Papa could possibly be. In the forest? In a shelter? In . . . a different camp. He remembered with a shudder Manny saying “death camp,” as if everyone knew about such things.
And worse—he thought—will Mama and Papa recognize Gittel and me when they see us again?
He had to stop thinking that way. It made him soft, brought tears to his eyes. Worst of all, it made him stop working.
Gittel Remembers
The idea of working for war is one that has never left me.
The memory of sitting at that ordinary table, my small fingers stuffing gunpowder into casings. And at no moment allowing myself to think about what we were actually doing. Only later, in dreams, did I let myself understand.
We were making ammunition that would tear into the flesh of our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts. Ammunition that could rip a grandmother’s face to shreds, shatter a friend’s bones, burrow into a neighbor child’s small heart. What we did then—what we were forced to do then—is now even more repellent to me than the idea of holding a gun.
Yes, I have killed, and would do so again if my loved ones are ever threatened. But sitting down day after day, month after month, in that closed room with other girls and boys, making bullets for the Nazis is the one thing in my life that I cannot forgive.
It was so simple then. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work sets you free. That was the sign on the factory wall. Madam Szawlowski made us recite it each morning. Work for your food. Work for the country that has enslaved you. Work or you will be beaten. Work until you drop down tired. Work or you will go up the chimney. Really we had no other choice except to die.
And even that choice was taken from us, because if we chose to die, the other children would die with us. So they told us, and so I believed.
For me, it actually destroyed the meaning of work for a long time.
Made it a dirty concept.
Then I worked not to die.
Now I work for life.
26
So it went for days, weeks: the work, the small amounts of food, barely enough to keep them alive, but enough not to let them slip away without blame.
The young workers complained to one another in whispers but never loudly, and never to the Madams or the guards.
They said, The food is bad, there’s too little of it. The water is brown or gray or stinks. They moaned they had headaches, stomach pains; the girls’ menses stopped; the boys’ legs cramped; there was blood in all their stools. Some of them had teeth that loosened, fell out.
Chaim lost count of how long they’d been at the labor camp, for one day grayed into the next, indistinguishable mirror twins.
Of course, he remembered when they’d arrived. How they’d been frightened, exhausted, confused, unmoored. He remembered the next day as well, when they’d had their heads shaved and gotten their work uniforms. When Bruno had been whipped for the first time, though not the last.
But the rest of the days were unremarkable enough, except for a very few. He could count those on his fingers.
There was the day he’d washed his uniform in the cold, brown water of the camp’s one pump, then hung it to dry over the side of the bunk he shared with his sister. The night had been chilly, and in the morning, the uniform’s jacket and pants were still slightly clammy.
He put them on anyway. He had no choice. They clung in patches to his body, making him shiver as he worked. Madam Szawlowski had raised her whip but hadn’t struck him, mostly because he’d kept out of her way. Or perhaps she didn’t dare interrupt the rhythm of his work. It turned out he was good at what he did, swinging the heavy bags to the lines of poetry in his head, lines he added to on a daily basis, some of them remembered from his journal, others brand-new.
Madam Grenzke, almost as silent as he, gave him a compliment that day, saying, “There’s a rhythm in what you do,” as she walked by. It was the only time she spoke to him there. But occasionally thereafter, when only the two of them were in one section of the workroom, she gave him a brief smile, almost a tic. He didn’t dare answer with one of his own, but he nodded to let her know he saw.
He was liked by the Madams—as far as they liked any Jews—because of his silence and because he made no complaints, unlike Bruno and some of the others who grumbled endlessly, though usually out of their hearing. Yes, he remembered the day of the clammy uniform when the first of Madam Grenzke’s small smiles began.
* * *
• • •
He also remembered the day Gregor’s hand got stuck in the grind-shaft as he tried to loosen some stuff caught there. It had been touch and go, but he and Lev managed to pull Gregor free, using warm water and some soap. Madam Grenzke supplied the soap.
Gregor had laughed. “So we held hands,” he said to them. “Better or worse than holding your sweetheart’s hand?”
Chaim shook his head. Lev said, “Where would I find a sweetheart?”
Chaim understood. Joking served as armor against fear.
Gregor’s hand was scraped and bruised but still usable. That batch of gunpowder, though, was ruined. Gregor was whipped for that, but he was too knowledgeable for them to kill him outright. The orders from Berlin were that the work had to go on and that good workers were not to be punished in a way that made them unusable. But just in case such a thing should happen again, the Madams had Gregor train Bruno in his duties.
It made Bruno a cock-of-the-walk, and he strutted around practicing his newfound tasks, letting everyone know how important he was. It didn’t make him popular. And it didn’t stop Madam Szawlowski from lashing him occasionally with her whip.
“To keep you in line,” she’d say, her voice uncompromising and like chalk on a slate.
* * *
• • •
Another day seared into Chaim’s memory was the morning that Lev couldn’t be shaken awake. Couldn’t be roused, even when Manya slapped his face hard, the snap of it loud in the still-dark morning.
He’d died sometime in the night, without uttering a word or a sigh, without asking for help or alerting his bunkmate, who then wept silently into the dawn.
The other boys called him by name as they tried to shake him back to life. “Levi!” they cried, “Levi Baum! Come back, Levi.”
Chaim had only known him as Lev. He’d never bothered to learn Lev’s full name or anything about him till the morning of his death.
And then poor dead Lev was left alone, the others not daring to hang around lest they share his fate. Instead, they rushed off to the thing that was called breakfast and then went to work.
Manya had said, without any show of emotion, “I’ll report it, and that will be the end of it.” Her finger made the chimney smoke sign. “He’ll be gone by the time we return from work. It wil
l be as if he’d never been. We won’t even see the smoke.”
Though he had been. Indeed, Chaim knew Lev as one of the few who was a welcoming, outspoken, even helpful presence to newcomers. In the days and weeks working at the factory, he’d become to rely on Lev’s steadiness, even more than Gregor’s.
Chaim had thought Manya cold before Lev’s death, like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story who had a shard of ice in his heart.
But then she’d added, “Maybe it’s for the best,” her voice shaking ever so slightly when she said it, as if even she didn’t believe such a thing—just offering it to the others.
In that moment Chaim warmed to Manya, to her bravery, her leadership, her attempt at a coolness that was obviously false.
Still, thinking back on that day, Chaim wondered what had led to Lev’s death—a bad heart? Had he been whipped too often by Madam Szawlowski? Since Bruno was the boy on whom she rained the most blows and he was still standing up, it seemed unlikely that the riding crop or Madam was to blame.
He shrugged. Some people live and some die under the same conditions. Probably Lev just starved to death. Starved of food, starved of affection, starved of laughter, and—in the end—starved of hope.
Chaim made a pledge to himself at that moment that he would not go quietly in his hard bunk. He would fight to his very last breath. Then he bit his lower lip, wondering about how long it might be before the same thing happened to him. Or—more horrible to contemplate—to Gittel.
He would never say, Maybe it’s for the best, if she died here in this gray place.
And suddenly his own death, which had been his constant silent companion for months and months, seemed real for the first time. This was the first Sobanek death he had witnessed, and somehow he knew it would not be the last.