Thrilled to be so recognized, Bruno grinned back. “The big boy, Gregor, he’s a twin, too. Though his brother is, well, dead.”
The doctor dug into his pocket once more and pulled out a few more sweets, handing them to Bruno.
Bruno stripped off the papers and tried to stuff all the candies in his mouth at the same time. Obviously he’d already forgotten the doctor’s earlier cautions. Even forgotten that he’d vomited up food. Chaim didn’t bother warning him; he was too horrified at how easily Bruno had told the doctor secrets that weren’t even his to tell.
Information for candy. We all know better than that. Chaim hoped it wouldn’t come back to haunt them.
* * *
• • •
Once the doctor, with Bruno in his wake, turned his attention elsewhere, Chaim stood. He found tall bottles of clear water on a table, not the brownish stuff that came from the pump outside. Carefully he poured two bowls of it into wooden beakers that stood by the bottles, and made his way to the far side of the barracks where Sophie lay.
He searched up and down the rows until he found her, almost unrecognizable. She seemed to have shrunk. The bright spots on her cheeks were even brighter.
“Sophie,” he whispered, but she didn’t open her eyes. He touched her hand. She seemed to be on fire. He thought even if he poured the entire two beakers of water on her, that fire wouldn’t be extinguished.
He tried again. “Sophie.”
This time her eyelids tried to flutter open, but the effort proved too much. She gave a sigh that turned into a groan before sputtering out. There was a cloth by her bedside. It looked fresh and clean. He dipped the end in the water and gently rubbed her forehead with it.
She sighed again, this time without the groan, but didn’t open her eyes.
He dipped the cloth back into the water and patted her lips gently.
One eye opened, and it was clear Sophie recognized him. “Take . . .” she began, then stopped, and her tongue licked her parched lips.
He squeezed a few drops of water into her mouth.
“Take care . . . of . . . Bruno,” she whispered hoarsely. “He means . . . well.”
The few words had exhausted her, and she closed the one eye.
“I will,” he said, perhaps promising more than he could manage. He’d didn’t for a minute think Bruno meant well, but he knew he’d have to talk to Gittel about it. When she was better. He had to remind himself silently that Gittel looked and sounded much less sick than Sophie did.
“Promise,” Sophie said weakly.
She sounded so much like an upiór, a ghost, he felt another chill, but nodded his head. It would have to be enough. He honestly did not have one word more.
* * *
• • •
Half the boys and half the girls were selected by the doctor to stay and clean the barracks. Afterward, they were to wash the sick prisoners, girls cleaning girls, boys cleaning boys and men. Not a particularly difficult task, but it would take them the entire workday to get things as clean as the doctor demanded.
Meanwhile, those on a list that the Madams sent over—Chaim, Bruno, Gregor, Eva, Marek, Meyer, and little Shmuel among them—were sent back to the munitions factory.
“Our best workers,” Madam Szawlowski cooed, though her face was still as sour as ever and the lash could be glimpsed behind her back.
Little Madam Grenzke gave them a nod and a hidden smile, then looked down at her work, a notebook with dozens of marks on its pages.
But Madam Zgrodnik, hand on her belly, neither looked up at them nor smiled.
Chaim realized that he and the others were there by the doctor’s intervention, though he couldn’t understand why. And probably the three women had been warned to be welcoming. So, he nodded, as did all the others. Even Bruno kept his silence, though his face was paler than before. In fact, it was a kind of gray.
Chaim guessed Bruno had thrown up again somewhere. The reward of greed, he thought with quiet satisfaction.
“Your uniforms are disgusting,” Madam Szawlowski said curtly. She looked intently at them, waved a handkerchief in their general direction as if to wave away something foul, then tucked the piece of cloth into the sleeve of her dress. “The doctor warned me. You will find fresh ones in the toilet room. Change quickly. We are two days behind.”
More like one, Chaim thought, but he knew better than to say it aloud.
It took Bruno extra time to change, and Chaim could hear him gagging. So much for that candy, Chaim thought. For some reason—maybe for many reasons—that thought brought him pleasure. Then he immediately felt guilty. After all, he’d told Sophie he would take care of Bruno. He knew it would be bad luck to go against that sort of promise.
“All right, Bruno?” Chaim asked, breaking through their self-imposed silence.
“Mind your own business,” Bruno said before gagging once again.
“I tried, Sophie,” Chaim said under his breath, knowing he hadn’t tried very hard at all, and knowing he’d have to try again.
* * *
• • •
Later, when the Madams went out for their lunch, the children drew out of their pockets and sleeves what they’d scavenged from breakfast and had a grand buffet in the outer room. Everyone ate just a bit, and slowly, except for Bruno, who said he wasn’t hungry at all.
Chaim had put out the apples he’d taken, but not the bread. That he would bring back to Barracks 3 to give to Gittel, tucking it into her hand when he saw her next. He’d no idea if the orders from Berlin covered feeding the sick prisoners. He was taking no chances.
And, I’ll check up on Sophie as well.
* * *
• • •
Except he didn’t get any chances that evening to check on Gittel, for they were force-marched from the factory directly to Barracks 4.
As soon as the guards left the vicinity, most of the children gathered in a small circle in the center of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. They talked about the day, but very quietly, in case a guard had been left within hearing range.
The ones who’d been in the factory spoke about their new uniforms.
Two of the older girls—Rachael and Hannah-of-the-bluest-eyes, as Gregor sometimes called her—described washing the patients. “When we were done, we had to wash the floors. At least they gave us mops. The mops had hair. Well, sort of hair—stringy stuff.”
“More hair than we have,” Rachael said, laughing, and running her hand over her wisps of curls.
It’s good they are able to laugh, Chaim thought. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened to him.
“Gittel?” he asked.
“She’s doing the best of them all,” Rachael said. “Responding the quickest to the medicine.”
Bruno hadn’t asked about Sophie, so Chaim did.
“She’s a fighter,” Hannah said. “I think she’ll be all right. If . . .” She didn’t say the what after the if, and neither Chaim nor Bruno asked. Perhaps Bruno didn’t really care. As for Chaim, he was done with speaking for the day.
* * *
• • •
Just before they turned in, Bruno blurted out, “It was all our fault, you know. We didn’t listen. It was a test, and we all failed.”
“How can you say such a thing?” Gregor began. “Fault? Is it our fault we’re here?”
Meyer agreed with him, but not Marek.
“It could be our collective fault,” Meyer said. “Like the people in Sodom and—”
“This is not Sodom,” Marek said.
“This is hell,” Chaim said, recalling them to the first thing the other children had ever said to them that early morning he and Gittel and the Norenbergs had awakened with the crowd of gray children around them.
Pretty soon the barracks rang with both condemnation and prais
e for what Bruno had said.
Chaim knew Bruno didn’t mean that typhoid was their fault, or being prisoners was their fault. Certainly starving wasn’t their fault. Bruno probably just meant getting sick on the new rich food was their fault because they hadn’t listened to the doctor.
But Chaim wasn’t about to waste good words on a bad argument. Besides, everybody would figure it out soon enough.
Meanwhile, a small windstorm of comments kept swirling around the idea of failure with Bruno in the center. Chaim noticed that he was eating up the attention that his so-called confession had brought him.
May he get as sick on the attention as he did on the rich food, Chaim thought, walking to his bunk.
The conversation soon spun out of control. Some sided with Bruno, confessing themselves unworthy and saying that it was God’s punishment. Others—marginally more rational, in Chaim’s opinion—kept saying over and over it was the Nazis’ fault, not theirs. Frankly, Chaim thought the absolute randomness of deaths in the camp argued against both sides, but still he remained silent. It was useless to spend his few words on an unproveable argument. As silence was his regular mode, none of the others noticed that he was staying out of the conversation.
But he’d given a lot of thought to what had actually gone on in the kitchen that morning. He was certain that von Schneir had known all along what would happen. Though he’d warned them, he didn’t really try to stop their gorging. It was as if he didn’t care how many of them would get sick from overeating. It hadn’t been a test at all. Just—a demonstration. Von Schneir had even admitted as much.
A poem Chaim had been formulating all day began to write itself in his head. This one was very different from the others. But he couldn’t put his finger on just how different. Maybe it was his first real poem. A grown-up poem. His fingers trembled with the need to write it down. He could almost see the yahrzeit candle flicker, the shadows thrown.
Camp Doctor
There is no wisdom, just cunning:
wolf’s quiet padding on the trail,
snake curled fernlike
at the turning of the road,
spider hiding in the web’s shimmer.
There is no conscience, just patterns,
camouflage, the watcher in the hide.
Sharp teeth at the throat,
venom in the ankle’s bend,
sticky filaments sewn into a shroud.
There is no atonement, just growling
in the belly of the wolf,
a narrow parting of the grass,
spider’s larder silently shutting,
after death has done
its deed.
Gittel Remembers
Being sick at home meant Mama coming in with warm milky tea and fresh-baked challah. The house smelled of it, which helped the healing. A bit of honey spread thin over the slice, filling in the tiny air pockets. Later, a cup of homemade chicken soup with matzo balls so light, they could have floated like a dirigible, plus carrots and potatoes from our backyard garden. Who could not get well fast?
I had the usual childhood illnesses—chicken pox, measles, sore throat. Nothing life-threatening.
Chaim was even healthier. We were lucky that way.
“Good bones,” Mama always said.
“Her side, not mine,” explained Papa, who’d broken many bones along the way to becoming an adult.
But in the labor camp, actual starvation broke down all the body’s defenses. The lack of food, bad water, cold housing, open sewers, nonexistent cleansing practices both for the prisoners and in the camp kitchen could lead only in one direction—illness.
So, when typhoid hit the camp, we prisoners had very few resources of body and no medicines to face it.
That’s why when the doctor came—and I will never say his name again, for it dignifies him too much—he seemed such a savior. He arrived heroically in a touring car packed with hampers full of the medicines we needed. With his flamboyant mustache and beard, and the fine suits he wore, a different one for each day of the week—he looked more like a figure out of the moving pictures. Even small, he was bigger than life.
And he was bigger than life as long as he was saving ours. But not when he became Malakh Ha-Mavet, our Angel of Death.
29
Morning came much too soon for Chaim, with neither warmth nor light. Still, it didn’t come with a hammering on the door, so he concluded it had the markings of a good day. In Sobanek terms, that meant that it might not be necessarily bad.
They had all slept nearly nude, wrapped in sacking the doctor had provided, so their work clothes would remain relatively clean.
The long hours of work had sapped Chaim’s ability to dream of another poem. Or perhaps it was that the doctor’s poem had emptied him of any other poetry. On wakening, he tried to force a few lines, but nothing worth remembering came out.
So much, he thought, for being the daily witness.
Getting dressed was a gingerly affair, the boys quickly in the front part of the barracks, as if guarding the door, the girls way in the back. Even if they’d wanted to peek, it would have been too dark to see much.
As they walked to the kitchen, a cold wind on the back of their unprotected necks, no one spoke about breakfast. Everyone was hugely aware of the doctor’s warnings.
I could write a warning poem, Chaim thought. But his head didn’t respond.
Once inside, the food at their table seemed more like a feast. They sat down in silence. No one wanted to pick up the first wooden spoon. Close to half of them had been adversely affected by eating too much rich food the day before, so they’d become very cautious.
Finally, Bruno led the way, but even he was careful, chewing slowly and not bolting his food. The others followed his lead.
The result was that no one got sick at breakfast—though little Eva complained about not feeling well. The hot red spots on her cheeks may have been an indication of another reason for that. She went voluntarily to Barracks 3 just in case.
Six more—Marek among them—were sent there after breakfast by von Schneir, who conducted quick examinations at the table. Barracks 3—now dubbed the Krankhaus, the sick house, seemed to shudder as the newly diagnosed prisoners entered without being escorted in by any guards.
Von Schneir explained before the rest left for their factory work, “Do not worry, my children. The blush of typhoid is just starting to bloom on their cheeks. I’ll watch them closely for any other signs of the disease and give them a preventive course of the medicine. If, after several days, the sickness has not progressed, they will be sent back to work.”
He stood up at the end of the table he’d been sharing with the children, but did not stop talking. “Catching and identifying typhoid early,” he said, his right hand rolling an invisible pill, “is the secret to wiping it out. Vigilance leads to victory. It is the same in war.”
Chaim thought, Gittel and Sophie weren’t treated early. Yet neither of them had died. Yet.
“The rest of you,” von Schneir said, “off you go to the factory. It will be another long day for all of us. Well into evening, of course. Wash your hands carefully as often as you can, with the soap that I have provided. Eat a bit at regular intervals—I will have food sent in so you can eat there. Remember, Berlin is counting on your contribution to the war effort, so do not shirk your duties!”
There was a general nod around the table, though not everyone was enthusiastic enough. The doctor’s sharp eyes took it all in.
Chaim thought von Schneir’s remarks had sounded like a prepared lecture for a Nazi conference. Any minute he expected the doctor to click his heels, raise his right hand in a high salute, and call out, “Seig heil.”
“Do not fail me,” von Schneir was saying, as if the children were to blame for the disease. “If we get back up to speed, there will be further induce
ments for the best of you. And not just food.”
“Food will do,” one of the men in the back mumbled.
If von Schneir heard it, he ignored it. Then he ran his hand along the top of his luxuriant mustache and smiled. Chaim realized the smile played all about von Schneir’s mouth, but it never quite reached his eyes.
The doctor leaned over and whispered something to Hans in German, and then he was gone.
Chaim turned quietly to Bruno. “What did he say?”
Bruno shrugged, almost as if he hadn’t heard what Chaim asked, or didn’t care, still so enamored of the doctor or the man’s relationship to a royal family—or perhaps thinking about the inducements.
Chaim pinched the underside of Bruno’s arm.
Bruno replied, a bit distractedly, “He said something about flies not being caught with vinegar but . . . Honig . . . er, honey.”
Zaide used to say that, Chaim thought. I guess the doctor means we are the flies. Which makes him the swatter. But of course, he didn’t say that out loud.
* * *
• • •
Once back at the munitions factory, Rachael whispered to Chaim, “Madam Zgrodnik is not here.”
Chaim looked around, wondering how he’d missed that. “Birth?” he whispered back.
“I think she’s only eight months along.”
The blank look on his face was rewarded with a soft giggle. “Boys!” Rachael said witheringly. “Babies are born at nine months. Otherwise they are in much danger, both mother and child, especially here where there no hospitals close by except—maybe—a mobile army hospital. Only a few doctors. No midwives.”
“Von Schneir . . .” Chaim whispered.
“Not that kind of doctor.”
With that answer, he had to be content. How he wished Gittel were here to explain it to him. He didn’t want to expend more words on Madam Zgrodnik’s condition.