Unravelled (7 page)

The three of us began to walk toward the SS officer, my knees starting to wobble with genuine fright and fatigue. This was the first time I could feel in the pit of my stomach that maybe something could happen to us, that maybe we weren't protected after all.

A mumble of German passed between the man in the striped uniform and the SS officer before the Hungarian man turned back to us. His oversized mouth dropped into a frown, his exaggerated features reminding me of a clown's face.

"Just the girls," he informed us, his face looking to the mud in distress.

"No," my mother protested. "I'm not going without them."

Our arms tightened around her waist protectively. I couldn't think. I couldn't form any words. All I knew was that I could not be separated from my mother in all of this confusion.

"You must go with the other sick people," the man in the striped uniform said tersely, "The girls have been ordered to come alone."

"But where are you taking them? How will I find them?"

"Calm down," he told her, motioning to the SS officer behind her. "It'll be fine. You'll see them later."

And before any of us could exchange another word, two men in striped uniforms lifted us up by the waists and an SS officer pulled my mother back to the band of the sick. She looked resolute, as if she were about to collapse from the sudden realization that she would be without us, alone.

Immediately, I let out a scream so loud that I surprised myself. I kicked my chubby little legs as the uniformed man held me firmly on his hip, the blood from the scrap now dried like a splotch of paint. Hajna cried too, but she didn't scream like I did. Instead, she quietly sobbed and muttered "Mama," between hiccups, like an infant with a babysitter wishing her mother would return.

My heart felt full and heavy, weighed down, like something was sitting on my chest. It was difficult for me to breathe. I could live without Lujza or my father for a night or two, but not without my mother--the woman who had cradled us when we were ill, played with us in the front yard and risked chipping her nail polish to pull us around in sleds on blustery winter days.

When our mother was out of sight, becoming a tiny spec in the distance, we were put down on our feet again and lead by the hands to a small group who appeared to have been plucked from our transport. Waiting among them was a dwarf we had seen selling fruit at the university from time to time. I had never known his name, but sometimes my sister and I would point at him, and Zsolt took immense pride in the fact that he was taller than an apparently full grown man. Mother would always shush us if she heard our whisperings about him, but we often continued anyway, ignorant in our world of childhood bliss.

Next to him stood a pair of toddler twins, both wearing matching sundresses with their light blonde hair in plaid pink bows at the top of their heads, gathering up their hair like a crown. They stood with their right fingers in their mouths and their left arms around their mother's leg. Even from a few meters away, I could smell the stink from their diapers. 

Together, the six of us waited until everyone was gone, swallowed into the camp. The ramps next to the trains looked like a fairground after all of the customers had left, their suitcases, coats, dolls, canes, shoes, gloves, hats, sunglasses and sweaters strewn behind them like unwanted trash. Still summer winds blew life into the clothing and made them dance like ghosts.

"Follow me," a the Hungarian man in the striped outfit ordered, though he was really following the same SS officer with the shiny boots who had ordered us away from our mother.

And with that, we made our descent into hell.

6 CHAPTER SIX



We heard his name whispered through the barracks, in tones that sounded equally terrified and awestruck.  

"Mengele."

The word was like a light wind on an airy summer day. Mengele.

We met him two days after arriving at Auschwitz. The barracks were lined on either side with what looked like oversized shelves meant for storing a vast collection of library books. Instead, the wooden shelves held people. But not just any people: girls and women of all ages, each with a double of herself. The smaller girls peered over the edge of their shelf turned bed, complete with straw, as if they were farm animals instead of little girls. Their eyes were wide as they gawked at the newcomers, following Hajna and my every move until we settled in a free shelf space together, the wood creaking and squeaking beneath our tiny bodies as we tried in vain to make ourselves comfortable.

The first two days, we mostly slept, our eyelids heavy from the journey, our tiny bodies exhausted. We had been given a very cold shower, our clothes had been sprayed with some sort of chemical, and we were brought to a table where women, dressed in striped outfits resembling potato sacks and kerchiefs over their heads, ordered us to bare our arms so that they could etch a number into our skin. I wanted to shout, to scream that I didn't want one, that I wanted my father who would surely object to any kind of permanent marking of his children. Somewhere between my fear and the chill of my cold, wet hair on my back, I stopped and fell limp, letting the woman in front of me put the needle to my arm.  Pain shot all the way up my arm and through my back, originating at the fire of the numbers.

Mengele, it was said, was very busy and wouldn't be able to see the new twins for a while. He had since "discovered" something and was working with a pair of twins named Judit and Edit, neither of whom had come back to the barrack for several days. Their existence was only a whisper on the tongues of those confined to the barracks.

"You know what that means," an older girl shouted across the room to another. She put her finger to her throat and made a slitting of the neck motion, followed by a piercing noise with her mouth.

"Don't scare them," a woman a bit older than the girl spoke. She was bent over a dress, mending it for one of the younger children. "They've only been here a couple of days. Let the new girls rest."

"We're in Auschwitz," the older girl who had made the slitting motion mumbled, tossing a waist length blonde braid behind her shoulder. "They probably don't even know their parents were burned in the chimneys and-"

"Stop it, Maria. Stop," the woman mending the dress shouted. She looked up at the girl, her face hollow, a hand over her left ear. Her blue eyes seemed distant, lost in the past, a time before Auschwitz or chimneys or barracks full of twins.

"It's true," Maria shouted. "Let's face the truth. You new girls should know your parents are dead. And that smell, well, it's them. They're burning,"

We stared at her blankly, my eyes so wide that I could feel a breeze blowing through them, making them dry and heavy. My jaw fell slack. Was that what that smell was? People? Could Germans really get away with burning people? I didn't even have to look at Hajna to know her face mirrored mine, the left corner of her mouth slightly more lax than her right, the opposite of mine.

"Maria! I told you to stop!" the girl with the sewing needle continued, rubbing her face with her hand and then looking us in the eyes with the same distant expression she had given Maria. Neither of us spoke, our voices frozen in our throats.

I drew a circle on the ground with my white shoe, my entire body weighed down with the possibility that my mother's ashes were floating above me, that she had been burned alive. I tried to hold myself up by clasping my hands onto the shelf-bed in front of me, but I fell to the floor, my eyes brimming with tears.

"Don't cry."

It was the woman who had been sewing. She put her arm around my waist and stroked the top of my hair, the way Lujza used to do when we had fallen while skating on the unforgiving pavement.

"Who is Mengele?" I managed. "Is he nice?"

Hajna looked at the woman, biting her lip. She rubbed her hand over her nose, but this time the gold bracelet our father had bought her didn't dangle down to her elbow. The Germans had asked her to give it to them. In a whirlwind of tears and confusion, Hajna nodded without one of her usual sassy words edgewise.

"He's a doctor here," the woman replied.

"Our Papa is a doctor," Hajna whispered, a feeling of relief seeming to wash over her entire body. She exhaled slowly, her warm breath on my face.

"He's not a good doctor," Maria warned, before the older girl slapped her hand.

There was a knock on the door. Whoever was knocking didn't wait for an answer, but merely walked in, his knock merely serving as a warning. All of the girls, each a pair of twins, stood at attention, like tiny soldiers saluting the one in charge. Each girl puffed out her chest and patted down her hair. I struggled to get to my feet, but felt a pair of hands on either side of me pulling me up so that I stood erect, my posture matching the other girls'.

"I hear we have some new girls today?" the man said. It was the first time I was able to get a good look at him, this visitor to our barracks. He wore an immaculate SS uniform, his boots perfectly shined, his gloves neat and pressed. His face was a bit pinched when he made certain expressions, but he was, overall, quite handsome. He smiled at each girl he passed, asking how their day had been and even giving some of the girls a little piece of candy. The very little girls jumped up and down as they saw him, crying "Uncle! Uncle!" as he bent at the waist to give them a hug. Some of the tiny children took candy from his pockets without asking. He smiled, without protesting.

"And who are you?" he asked, stopping just in front of Hajna and me. His brown eyes were kind, beautiful even. The glint in them made him look like a father or a protector. He spoke slowly and methodically, through an interpreter, a little man with a lab coat and spectacles. He reminded me of Dopey from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
the movie my father had taken us to see not more than a year earlier.

"I'm Hajna and this is Aliz," Hajna spoke for both of us, turning toward the Dopey interpreter with her head held high, her brown hair falling behind her like a majestic waterfall.

"Hajna and Aliz," he repeated with a smile, as if he were trying out the names in his mouth. He bent down to us and opened his hand, revealing two beautiful, smooth chocolates. "I'm Doctor Mengele. But you can call me Uncle Mengele, if you wish."

Without thinking, we took the chocolates right away, our mouths watering and stomachs growling at the mere sight of the candy. The moment I put it on my tongue, my mouth exploded with flavor, my ears and nose about to burst with the sensory overload. I hadn't had chocolate in longer than I could remember, and it tasted sweeter than I had ever dreamed.

"He wants to know if your trip was good," Dopey, the interpreter asked us, turning toward Mengele and back to us.

"It was a bit crowded," Hajna nodded. "And maybe a bit smelly. But we're okay. Where is our mother?"

I looked from Hajna to the interpreter and back to Mengele again.  He smiled reassuringly, revealing a set of beautiful white and straight teeth, and patted both of us on the head.

"You'll be with her soon enough. Don’t worry."

And with that, Mengele strutted off, almost with the gait of a peacock, to speak to the other pair of twins who had arrived on our transport. None of the girls moved from their posts, so we stayed at attention, like little tin soldiers, devouring our candy. My heart leaped slightly, my nerves calming the way they would after a nightmare when my mother handed us hot milk to help us go back to sleep.

After a few more minutes (and candies for the other children), Mengele announced that he was leaving, but would see some of us in the coming days. He tipped his hat, and wished us a wonderful day. And with that, we had our first encounter with the Angel of Death.

It would be almost a week before our numbers, those ones etched on our arms, were called for us to go to the main hospital where Mengele performed most of his experiments. Each morning, the twins were asked to assemble in the mud, next to a barbed wire fence, while we were counted and recounted. Each morning, the numbers of the twins were called and they were put on the back of a truck and driven straight to Mengele, our god. Their faces were awash with fear as they were loaded onto the truck, each of them tightly gripping their other half and mirror image as sweat beaded down on their faces.

Most of the children came back that evening, sometimes with visible bruises and cuts with angry black stitches over them running down their arms and legs. Some children came back several days later. Some never came back at all. Those who never returned, the other twins whispered, had been killed.

"Injection to the heart," an older boy whispered to his twin one late morning after roll call. "Mengele puts it in and bam! You're a goner."

He clapped his hands to emphasize the word "goner", the image conjuring up foreign images of people dropping to the hard linoleum floor of a hospital.

The stories made Hajna and me toss and turn with nightmares and our legs turn to jelly each time numbers were called. Our numbers, of course, were eventually spoken on the lips of one of Mengele's assistant's.

The "experiments" seemed to repeat themselves over and over again for several weeks and it seemed Mengele wasn't interested in us for anything too serious--nothing like we had heard from the other children-- like dissecting twins alive or injecting them with mysterious substances to see how they would react.

Instead, each time our numbers were called, Hajna and I were forced to undress in front of a group of grown, strange German men (and Jewish prisoners) while they poked and prodded us with instruments. They would begin by using a measuring tape, starting from the crown of our heads to the tips of our feet, measuring anything and everything in between. They compared the measurements to charts, to other twins, compared the numbers between Hajna and myself and then repeated the measurements two and three more times to make sure they were correct.  These experiments weren't so much painful as they were utterly embarrassing. Emilia had seen me without clothing on several occasions when she gave me a bath, but now that we were a bit older, we had graduated to soaping up our own bodies, our mother or nanny waiting in the next room over in case we needed help.

Mengele never seemed to want us for the more painful experiments that the other children talked about, at least not right away. We listened intently in the night as they whispered about Mengele and his assistants injecting things into their bodies, of watching other children swell beyond recognition and choke on their own tongues from the unknown elixir Mengele had shoved into their veins. Some children came back to the barracks unable to see, screaming and crying that their vision had deteriorated since Mengele gave them a shot in the eye. He was attempting to change brown eyes to blue, or so they said. Hajna and I swallowed hard at the prospect. I had never liked needles, but the thought of someone sticking one in my eye made my stomach drop into my knees.

Most of our days were spent in the barracks and we quickly learned that we were a privileged group in Auschwitz. We were not like the men and women, indistinguishable from the person next to him, who walked by our block to their work details. Hajna and I scanned the rows of men and women with no hair and sunken cheeks, their bones sticking out of their potato sack clothing. They all looked alike, identical even, as if they were multiples of one another. None of them ever stood out as our mother, father or Lujza. We refused to give up hope that we would spot them one day, simply walking by, and then we would decide on a place to meet when the Germans lost the war.

Instead, we spent our days (when Mengele wasn't using us, of course) in a haze as though we were comatose, closed off to prevent feeling. We spent time watching the boy twins play soccer in a nearby field. Each boy, with a double of himself, kicked around a ball, probably stolen from another boy who had brought it with him to Auschwitz. The boys ran and shouted to one another, laughing and smiling and sometimes taking their shirts off  in the hot summer sun and putting them in their back pockets. It would have been like a scene in any other part of the world, except flames danced behind them and ashes settled on their skin. The sweet smell engulfed us all, as we breathed in the particles of the dead.

Being a part of Mengele's select group meant that no one could touch us. There were no "selections" (which meant no one ever randomly sent twins to their death to make room for more, only Mengele could decide our fate). We were allowed to keep our hair, although none of the other prisoners in Auschwitz were, for fear of lice infiltrating the camp. We weren't issued prison garb or given ill-fitting rags to wear but rather we were allowed to keep the clothing we had in which we had arrived. We even got fed double or triple of the rations the prisoners got because Mengele, who had become the master of our fate, wanted his subjects strong and healthy.

Our camp was also situated next to the Gypsy Camp. Whereas most people in Hungary found gypsies annoying and lazy, my parents had a certain fondness for them and even chastised us when they heard us say anything negative about them. We had always been taught, even in school, that they were part of the "Hungarian problem", that they got special things from the government just for being gypsies while regular Hungarians didn't. Mama had tried to explain to us why it was fair, but as a small child, I couldn't understand.