The Storyteller (38 page)

One of the guards walked up to me. His eyes slid over me like a frost, settling on my boots. “These are fine boots,” he said, and I tightened my arms around them.

He reached down and plucked them from my grasp, giving me a pair of wooden clogs instead. “Too fine for you,” he pronounced.

With those boots went any chance I had of bribing my way out of here or getting information about my father. With those boots went the Christian papers that Josek had gotten me.

We were moved to a table where Jewish women in striped clothing held electric razors. As I got closer, I saw how they were shaving women’s heads. Some got away with short hair; others were not as lucky.

I was not a vain girl. I had not grown up pretty; I was always in the shadow of Darija or even Basia. Until we moved to the ghetto, I had baby fat, a round face, thighs that rubbed when I walked. Starving had made me skinny, but it hadn’t made me any prettier.

The only saving grace I had was my hair. Yes, it was dull and matted
now, but it was also every color of brown, from chestnut to mahogany to teak. It had a natural wave and a curl at the end. Even when I braided it in a rope down my back, that plait was thick as a fist.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t cut off my hair.”

“Maybe you have something to persuade me to give you just a trim.” She leaned closer. “You look like the kind of person who would smuggle something through.”

I thought of my boots, in that German soldier’s hands. I thought of this woman, who had presumably once been in line like us. If these Germans wanted to turn us into animals, then by all accounts, they had succeeded. “Even if I did,” I whispered back, “you’d be the last person on earth I’d ever give it to.”

She looked at me, raised her razor, and buzzed my hair off at the scalp.

It was at that moment I realized I wasn’t Minka anymore. I was some other creature, something inhuman. Shivering, sobbing, I followed orders and hurried blindly into the shower room. All I could think of was my mother, and the false bathhouse that the boy had told me about; those trucks full of gas that were emptied of bodies in the woods. I stared up at the showerheads, wondering if they would spray water or poison; wondering if I was the only person who had heard these rumors and whose heart was threatening to burst from her chest.

Then, a hiss. I closed my eyes, and tried to picture all the people I had loved in my short life. My parents, Basia, Darija. Rubin and Majer, Josek, Herr Bauer. Even Aron. I wanted to die with their names on my tongue.

I felt a trickle. Water. It was cold and sporadic. The showerheads turned on and off before I managed to turn in a full circle.
No gas, no gas,
I thought, a litany. Maybe that boy had been wrong. Maybe what happened here was not the same as what had happened in Chełmno. Maybe this was what the soldiers had told us: a work camp.

There it was again: that mewling cry of hope.

“Raus!
”
a guard yelled. Dripping, I shuffled quickly out of the shower room and was given clothing. A work dress, a head covering, a jacket with blue and gray stripes. No socks or underwear.

I dressed fast. I wanted to cover up the shame of being naked, indistinguishable
from the other women around me. I was still buttoning my jacket when a guard grabbed me and dragged me toward a table. There, a man rubbed alcohol on my left forearm and another man began to write on me. I didn’t understand what he was doing at first—it burned, and I could smell the sear of flesh. I looked down: A14660. I had been branded, like cattle. I had no name anymore.

We were pushed into a hut with no light, and as my eyes adjusted, I could see bunks, three tiers high, with straw laid on each tier as if this were a stable. There were no windows. The building reeked, and packed inside were several hundred women.

I thought of the railcar, how we had been stuffed inside and had gone for days without seeing the sun or stopping to stretch or go to the bathroom. I did not want to go through all that hell again just to die.
Better now,
I thought.

And before I realized what I was doing, my feet were turning away from the entrance to the hut and I was running with all the strength I could muster, flying across the dirt as best I could in my wooden shoes, toward the electric fence.

I knew, if I got close enough, that I would be free. That Aron and Darija and (please God) my father would remember me as Minka, not as this bald animal, not as a number. My arms stretched outward, as if I were racing toward a lover.

A woman’s voice started to yell. I could hear the angry shouts of a guard, who a moment later collided with me, shoving me down on the ground and landing with his full weight on top of me. He dragged me upright by the collar of my dress and threw me into the barracks, so that I landed sprawled on my face on the concrete floor.

The door was slammed shut. I pushed myself to my knees, only to find someone reaching out a hand to me. “What were you thinking!” a girl said. “You would have died, Minka!”

I squinted. One moment I could not see past the low light and the shorn head and the bruises on her face. And then the next, I recognized Darija.

Just like that, I became human again.

 • • • 

Darija had been here two days longer than I had, and knew the routine. The
Aufseherin
oversaw the women’s blocks. She reported to the
Schutzhaftlagerführer,
the male commandant of the women’s camp. On her first day, Darija had seen him beat to death a woman who stumbled out of her straight line during roll call. Inside the huts were the
Stubenältesten
and the
Blockältesten,
who were Jews in charge of the individual rooms of the barrack and the entire barracks, respectively, and who were worse sometimes than the German guards. Our
Blockälteste
was a Hungarian called Borbala, who reminded me of a giant squid. She stayed in a separate room in the hut, and had a chin that ran right into the fleshy sleeve of her neck and eyes that glinted like chips of coal. Her voice was as deep as a man’s, and she would scream at us in the morning, at 4:00, to rise. It was Darija who told me to sleep with my shoes on, lest another prisoner steal them, and to tuck my bowl inside my shirt as I slept for the same reason. She explained the
Bettenbau,
the military bed we were expected to fashion out of the straw mattress and the thin blanket. It was, of course, impossible to make straw look as precise as a real mattress. This was just an excuse for Borbala to make someone an example for the rest of us. Darija was the one who told me to run to the toilets, because there were only a limited number for hundreds of us, and we had only a few moments before roll call. Being late was, once again, grounds for a beating. Darija touched her head as she told me this, her temple still blooming with a mottled purple bruise. She had learned the hard way.

At
Appell,
we were counted, sometimes for hours. We were to stand at attention as Borbala called our numbers. If someone was missing, everything stopped while that person was located—usually sick or dead in the hut. She would be dragged into position, and the count would start over again. We were forced to do “sport”—running in place for hours at a time, then dropping to the ground when Borbala commanded us to do frog leaps. Only after that were rations given: dark water that passed for coffee, a slice of brown bread. “Save half,” Darija told me that first day,
and I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. It was the only solid food we got. There would be a watery broth with rotten vegetables for lunch, maybe a broth with rancid meat for supper. It was better, Darija assured me, to go to bed on a full stomach.

Sometimes there were exercises, even though there wasn’t enough food to keep us strong. Sometimes we had to learn German songs and phrases, including basic commands.

All of this was done in the shadow of that long, low building I had seen when we first got off the train, the place with the smokestacks that burned day and night. From those who had been in quarantine longer than we had, we learned that they were crematoria. That Jews had built them. That the only way out of this hellhole was as ash through those chimneys.

Five days after I arrived, and after we had finished the morning
Appell,
Borbala ordered us all to strip naked. We stood in a line in the courtyard while the man in the white coat I remembered from the ramp paraded by us. With him was the same SS officer whose hand shook—the one I now knew to be the
Schutzhaftlagerführer.
I wondered if he would recognize me, try to speak in German. He did not even flick his glance over me, however, and why would he have recognized me? I was just another skinny, shaved prisoner. I knew better than to speak or to move, especially with an SS man present. If we made Borbala look bad, we would pay for it later.

The man in the white coat picked eight girls, who were immediately taken from the hut and sent to Block 10, the medical facility. Anyone else who had a scrape or a cut or a burn or a blister was weeded out as well. His eyes passed over Darija, and then settled on my face. I felt the touch of his stare sliding from my forehead to my chin to my breastbone. My teeth started to chatter, in spite of the heat.

He flicked his glance past me, and I heard Darija exhale heavily through her nostrils.

After an hour, those of us who remained were told to dress and to get our bowls. We would be moved out of quarantine, Borbala told us, after we had our morning meal. A girl named Ylonka volunteered to carry the giant pot of coffee because with the task came an extra bread ration.
“Look at that,” I murmured to Darija, as we stood in line with our bowls. “The pot is bigger than she is.”

It was true, Ylonka was a tiny thing, but there she was carrying the giant steel tub as if it were filled with manna from Heaven instead of swill. She set it down gently, so not a single drop sloshed over the edge.

Borbala, however, was not as careful. When it came to my turn, nearly half of the coffee spilled onto the ground. I looked at the puddle the
Blockälteste
had made, which was just enough time for her to notice the disappointment on my face. “So sorry,” she said, in a way that let me know she was not sorry at all, and she held out my slice of bread. Except instead of handing it to me, she dropped it into the mud puddle made by my coffee.

I fell to my knees to grab the bread because even mucked in dirt, it was better than losing an entire ration for the day. But before my fingers could close around it, a boot crushed down on the slice, pushing it deeper into the mud, and hesitating long enough for me to understand the action was deliberate. I squinted into the sunlight and saw the black silhouette of a German officer. I rocked back on my heels, waiting for him to pass.

When he did, I grabbed the bread from the mud and tried to press it against my dress, to get rid of the worst of the filth. I could not see the officer’s face anymore, but I knew who it was. As he walked away from me, his right hand was still twitching.

 • • • 

Darija and I shared a bunk with five other women. The hut where we lived was no different from quarantine, except there were more of us—about four hundred crammed into the block. The smells were indescribable—unwashed bodies, sweat, festering sores, rotting teeth, and always in the air around us the sweet, charred, sickly scent of flesh burning. What was new, though, was the condition of these other women. Some had been here for months, and they were no more than skeletons, their skin drawn over their cheekbones and ribs and hips, their eyes sunken and dark. At
night, the sleeping quarters were so tight that I could feel the hip bones of the woman behind me, pushed like twin daggers into the small of my back. When one of us rolled over in our sleep the rest of us had to do the same.

I had spent the week trying to get word of my father. Was he in a different part of the camp, working, like I was? Was he wondering if I was alive, too? It was Agnat, a woman who shared the bunk with us, who bluntly told me my father was gone, that he had been gassed that very first day. “What do you think is the business of this camp?” she chided. “Death.”

Agnat had been here for a month and had a mouth on her. She would talk back to the
Blockälteste
—a woman we called the Beast—and get beaten with a truncheon; she would spit at a guard and get whipped. But she had also fought off a prisoner who tried to steal my jacket in the middle of the night when I was sleeping fitfully. For this small loyalty, I was grateful to her.

Two days ago, there had been an inspection in the hut. We had lined up while the
Blockälteste
and a guard tossed aside the neat covers we had made on our beds and pulled the bunks away from the wall to see what was being hidden. I knew that prisoners had items stashed—I had seen women with a deck of cards, money, cigarettes. I had seen one girl too sick to eat her midday soup carefully hide it underneath the straw that made up her mattress, so that she could save it for later, even though having any food in the barracks was a serious infraction.

When the guard came to our bunk, he began pulling aside the covers and found, to my surprise, a book by Maria Dąbrowska. “What is this?”

He smacked one of our bunkmates, a girl who was only fifteen, across the face. Her cheek started to bleed where his gold ring had cut into the skin.

“It’s mine,” Agnat said, stepping forward.

I wasn’t convinced that the book was hers. Agnat had come from a small village in Poland and could barely read signs, much less a novel. But she stood proudly in front of the guard, claiming the book, until she was dragged outside and whipped unconscious. I thought of my mother’s
advice to me, when the
Aussiedlung
had begun:
Be a mensch.
Agnat was this, and more.

Darija and I, along with Helena, the fifteen-year-old, were the ones who picked Agnat up and carried her back into the hut. We gave her some of our evening meal when she was unable to stand to get her own. Another woman, who had been a nurse in her former life, did the best she could to clean the open sores made by the lashes and to bandage them.