If I Should Die Before I Wake (19 page)

I saw someone in front of me fall forward on her face. If she didn't move, she'd suffocate in the mud. Bubbe kept praying and the woman in front of me did not move. I was determined to make it, to remain on my knees, my arms raised as long as it took, if only to shut Bubbe up and to lift that woman out of the mud. If she died, it would be my fault.

At last the whistles blew and
Zäblappell
was over. Dvora and Bubbe got up off their knees and rushed forward to congratulate me. I ignored them and crawled forward on my hands and knees to where the woman had fallen in the mud. She hadn't moved since. I grabbed her shirt and rolled her over onto her back. Her face was plastered in mud, her mouth full of it, her eyes open and muddy. I dug the mud out of her mouth and shook her.

Gerte kicked me in the side. "She's dead, you idiot. You killed her, and that one over there." She pointed to another woman farther away. "You are like me now. How does it feel?"

Before I could speak, Bubbe had rushed forward with Dvora and grabbed me under the arms. Together they pulled me backward, toward the hut.

"Not so fast," came the
Blockälteste
's voice from behind. Her name was Holga and she looked, to my mind, like what every German bully should look like. She was a large, almost fat woman with tiny, deep-set blue eyes and hair down to her shoulders, mocking our baldness. She wore no makeup except lipstick. Always she wore lipstick. We believed she even slept with it, freshly applied each night before going to bed.

"You." Holga pointed at me. "You are on
Scheisskommando.
Get along now."

I looked up at Bubbe. I felt too weak to move. I had hoped I could somehow hide myself away in one of the bunks before they locked the hut, and sleep there all day.

"Be strong, Chana," Bubbe whispered. "You made it through
Sport.
You are not a
Muselman
yet."

"Enough of this! Go!" Holga kicked at me.

At the entrance to the lavatory hut the
Kapo,
work party leader, handed me an empty bucket and a small shovel. She gave me no instructions,
but I really didn't need any. The work was easy enough. I was to scoop out the mess beneath each hole, dump it in the bucket, and haul it away to yet another pit. There were three others working in my row. They had already begun down near the entrance, so I took the center and dug the shovel into the first hole. As I scooped out the mess and dumped it, I thought about the fecal workers in the ghetto. I remembered how we used to pretend they weren't even there when they came along our street to clean up our messes. We knew the people with that job never lasted long because of typhus and other diseases that were easy to pick up, and I wondered if it was the same here. Was this the worst job? Did I already have typhus? Was that why I felt so sick? I didn't care. Just keep moving, I told myself. Move until you can no longer move. Move until you die. Then they won't have the pleasure of kicking the life out of you.

One of the workers on the opposite side came up to the hole in front of me and began digging.

"I'm Matel," she whispered, keeping her face down so the guard at the entrance wouldn't see her talking.

I said nothing. I kept digging. What did I care if she was Matel? I didn't want to make any more friends. I didn't want to care about anyone else. I said nothing to her, but every once in a while I
couldn't help glancing up at her and trying to get a better look. She was slightly taller than I was, but for some reason I had the feeling she was young, very young.

During our lunch break, when they gave us the same meager helping of old sock soup, Matel came up to where I was sitting and sat down.

"I am sick," I said, not even bothering to look up. "You might catch it, go away."

Matel put down her bowl and scooted closer to me. She fingered the edge of my dress, and then saw me watching and pulled her hand away.

I looked into her eyes. She was very young.

"Sorry," she said. "You look like my mother. You are not as tall, or as old, but your face, it is—is gone like hers."

"Gone?"

"
Muselman.
You know the expression?"

I looked away. I could see the guard moving toward us. Our lunch break was almost over.

"If I had been able to stay with Mama she never would have died, but they told her I was dead. They put her to work carrying heavy rocks and one day I saw her, looking even worse than you, dragging herself toward the camp after work. I called out to her, but she did not hear. She looked right at me, but she did not see. Do you understand? I was not real to her. She had dreamed of finding me so many times that when she really saw me, she could not believe I was not just another one of her dreams. That must be what happened. Do you not agree?"

I didn't answer. "Do you want my soup?" I asked her. "The break will be over in a minute. I cannot drink this today. You have it."

Matel paused only a second before grabbing my bowl and pouring the soup into her dish. She drank it down, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and smiled.

The whistle blew. It was time to get back to work.

 

When I returned to the hut that afternoon, Bubbe was not there. I searched for Dvora and found her in the crowd making their way to the lavatory.

"Dvora, please, what has happened? Where is Bubbe?" I asked when I caught up with her.

"A woman named Sora came and got her. You remember, the clerk? The one from Lodz, who said she would help us?"

"Yes, yes, but where is she? Where have they taken her?"

"It is good, Chana, she has inside work. She is a nurse at the
Revier,
camp hospital. It is where she needs to be."

"But I need to talk to her. I need to see her. I need to tell her that I am feeling a little better. It must not be typhus."

"She will try to see you. She said for me to tell you that." Dvora paused just outside the lavatory. "You do look better. Your face—your eyes look better, I think."

"I met a girl. A real girl, only twelve years old. She wants ... It is silly, but she wants me to be her family, her mother. She wants me."

I left Dvora at the lavatory entrance and walked back toward my hut, wishing that I could have something to eat. I did not look forward to standing through another
Zäblappell
today without food in my stomach, and for a moment I wished I hadn't given my soup away, but then, on second thought, remembering Matel, I was glad I had.

In front of me, I saw one of the non-Jewish prisoners walking with a package under her arm. Non-Jews were able to receive care packages from home. There was something odd about this package, though. It almost looked as if something were leaking out one of the ends. I ran forward and crept up behind the woman. Sure enough, white granules were pouring out of the bottom corner of the package. I stuck my bowl out in front of me and trotted along behind her, collecting the little granules in my bowl. When the woman with the package turned around I quickly headed in the opposite direction, my bowl gripped between my hands.

When I had a chance, I stopped, licked my finger, and dipped it into my bowl. I then poked my finger into my mouth and tasted the sweetest, most delicious taste in all the world—sugar!

BY THE END OF THE SIXTH WEEK,
very few of the group of women from our train were left. Those of us who were were taken to the sauna, or shower hut, and given cold showers, our first since we had arrived. We had learned to be wary of showers since we discovered that the Germans used the pretense of showers for gassing thousands of the prisoners who arrived by train each day. We were never sure what they had in store for us at any moment. They counted on our confusion and fear to keep us off balance, which was easy to do in our deteriorating condition. We never knew when the end was at hand.

This time, though, we really had showers and then got mopped with disinfectant and handed clean, although worn, clothes. I grabbed some knickers and a heavy shirt and threw them on before anyone could yank them out of my hands. In the past few weeks I had begun to see myself in a different light. I was an animal. I gave myself the eyes and mind of an animal, watching, waiting,
listening. At last I understood what Rivke and Bubbe meant when they said, "Don't think." With animals, survival is by instinct, and by instinct I, too, would survive. I no longer tried to reason. I no longer held out any expectations. If at any moment I was alive, that was all that mattered. It was enough to eat, sleep, stay warm, and visit the lavatory hut twice a day. For that, I lived.

I was no longer on
Scheisskommando
but was put to work digging trenches, along with Dvora, Matel, and Rivke, whom I had not seen since she had left quarantine four weeks earlier. The twins were not in our block. They had been given a "special assignment."

It happened one afternoon, a week before the end of quarantine. Whistles blew throughout the camp and we heard the dreaded shouts of"
Lagersperre! Lagersperre!
"Everyone was confined to her block until "selection" was over. When the
Blockäl-teste
entered our hut with a clipboard in her hands, we knew that our group was to face selection. From the single window at the front of our hut I could see four men marching down the
Lagerstrasse
, main road. One of them was an armed guard who stepped inside and ordered us to remove our clothes and line up outside."
Schneller!
"he shouted before ducking back out and entering the next hut. Always it was"
Schneller!
"

Naked, I stepped outside into the icy damp behind Dvora, clutching my arms over my breasts. I saw
Rapportführer
Taube standing beside the guard and prayed he wouldn't recognize me.

"
Stellen Sir an!
—Line up!" he ordered.

My kneecaps began to jiggle up and down with a mind of their own as we shuffled into our rows of five.

Standing a few feet away from Taube were two other men:
Lagerfübrer
Hössler, in charge of camp discipline, and a man I had never seen before. This stranger was in full uniform, right down to his white gloves, and he stood before us like a fairy-tale prince, majestic and handsome. He stepped forward and ordered the first row to parade before him, left arms out so their numbers could be checked off as they passed.

They were a sorry sight, trying hard not to shuffle or stumble or slouch as they passed before this man. Their hair and bodies were caked in dirt and blood, infested with lice, and coated with a frozen layer of sweat. I glanced down at my own body. I was no better.

Row after row paraded before this man, and as each woman stood directly in front of him, he would run his eyes over her body and point either to the left or the right. I saw Jutka, an older woman like Bubbe, shuffle forward. She had been miserable without her husband, who was in the men's camp, and tried to get on any work party that was going out, in the hopes of seeing him pass by. The work had taken its toll on her. Her back was bent forward in spasms that only rest could mend, but she was not allowed to rest. As she stood before the man, she pulled herself up, her whole body trembling. He hardly glanced her way. He pointed to the left.

Most of the women were being sent to the left, so I was determined to go to that side as well. When Lisette stepped before him, our
Blockälteste
stepped forward with her clipboard and whispered something in the stranger's ear. His face lit up and he took Lisette by the hand and pulled her to his side. Liselle was next and again he pulled her away from the group and stood her on his other side. They looked like bookends, and the stranger looked delighted.

When our row was called forward, I took a deep breath, stood up as tall as I could, and stepped forward with every ounce of confidence I could muster. This handsome man would see I was worth keeping around. As I approached him, however, I saw both Dvora and Mat el get sent to the right. I didn't know what to do. They looked as fit as anyone. They looked better than the twins, far better than Jutka. I looked at both lines again, the one on the left, then the one on the right. Everyone on the right, all twenty of them, appeared far healthier than most of the women on the left. But it was impossible! There were at least three hundred women standing to the left. Three hundred women who had spent the past six weeks struggling to stay alive, fighting starvation, going forward, picking themselves up again and again no matter how many times they had been beaten. They couldn't all be "going up the chimney," as our
Blockältedte
liked to say when she was sure no official could hear. Perhaps this was not a selection for death but for some different kind of work. I no longer knew which side to choose—as if I would be given a choice.

It was my turn to stand in front of the stranger. I looked down at my feet as I felt his gaze upon me and then, holding my hands in tight fists, I looked up, all the way up, into his eyes. There was nothing there. I couldn't even say what color they were. They were like smoky diamonds, facetless and cold. I was reminded of the stories Zayde used to tell me when I was six years old and already learning that I was quite good at the violin. He would hold me in his lap and rock me in the hush of his bedroom, where he liked to sit, and he would whisper in my ear, warning me about the evil eye and how its dark forces sought to possess any beautiful or especially talented child. I used to imagine that singular eyeball staring down at me while I slept, staring at me the way this stranger did now. I could not give in to the evil eye. I held my head even higher and put my hands on my hips. I would stare him down.

The stranger opened his mouth to say something, stopped, chuckled, and pointed to the right.

When the selection was over, more than four hundred women had been chosen for gassing. I didn't watch them leave, I didn't look over toward the tall chimneys that coughed up smoke day and night. If I looked, if I accepted this as real, I knew it would happen to me, the evil eye would look my way.

Later that evening, as we drank our coffee substitute and gnawed on the remains of our bread, Rivke told me about the stranger.