Rena's Promise (15 page)

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Authors: Rena Kornreich Gelissen,Heather Dune Macadam

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #test

BOOK: Rena's Promise
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seem to take a long time as they compare notes and lists. They are not sure of what they are doing.
''Rena, I have to go to the bathroom," Danka whispers.
"That's not allowed. You should have gone before roll call."
"I can't help it."
"You have to wait until roll call is over." Reality is cruel. She holds her legs together.
"Pick your kommandos!" an SS man orders. The kapos come toward us, sizing us up and down. I take Danka's hand, leading her back to our block where Elza is standing on the steps.
"Elza, will you please let my sister inside? She has to go to the bathroom, she has diarrhea."
"I can't do that. You know nobody goes into the block after roll call. There are rules! Besides, the room elders have already cleaned the bathrooms."
"Please, Elza. You know they will beat her if she messes herself."
"I don't care." Her eyes glare at me, defying me to argue with her.
"She has got to go!" I grab Elza's shoulders, shaking her. "How can you be that way?" I nod at Danka to run inside while I distract our block elder. "Don't you have a mother?" I yell. "A sister? Were you born from a stone? Who do you
arghh!
'' The words catch in my throat as the breath is slammed out of me and my collar is pulled back, choking me. Hurled through space, I fall roughly to the ground, seeing only the reddening face of an SS woman before her boot finds my ribs.
"You!
Scheiss-Jude!
" My arms fly across my face, my most precious possession. She pummels my thighs and my back, but I do not scream or cry. I have seen enough abuse in the past few days not to encourage it through pleas to stop. I bear her assault like a stoic as she steps on me again and again and again. When she finally stops, I crawl to my knees looking for someone to help me

 

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up. Danka has returned from the toilet and is crying without any noise. My legs are bruised, my ribs hurt, I can barely breathe, but I have my face, and after a few moments I can walk.
We join the ranks of still unchosen girls. A kapo points at us. "You there! Line up here!" I grab Danka's hand, pulling her with me. We fall in behind the kapo. She must have seen me get beaten and I wonder why she's chosen us. I have never been hit before and hide my eyes, ashamed to look into our kapo's face. I feel so small and insignificant. I feel completely worthless.
"March out!" The fog is rising. We follow the other groups out the gate, toward the fields, to work. Shuffling our feet so as to keep these so-called shoes on our feet, we try to march. Some girls are still holding their pants up; some, like myself, must hold our shirts shut. The wind pierces the bullet holes in our uniforms.
There is a draft at my knee and one by my heart. I wish I were not so sore. After three days of doing little else but cleaning and worrying, I had thought work would be a welcome relief. I want to show them what a hard worker I am and how proud a farmer's daughter can be of her strength. I ache all over.
"How are you feeling?" I manage to ask Danka. I know that worrying about her will take my mind off my throbbing bruises. She nods, afraid to answer. An SS man passes us. They are the monsters hidden in the mist, our nemesis dressed in gray. They are everywhere.
"Halt!" There is a pile of sand and dirt and stones before us. Our kapo orders, "You will sift this sand through these nets and load it onto those lorries.
Schnell!
"
We take shovels from the shed before beginning to dig the rocky soil and toss it through the net. It does not take long for our hands to ache and our shoulders to grow sore. Blisters appear almost immediately, and just as quickly they pop and make the shovel handles slippery. A young girl leans against her shovel to breathe for a moment. The whip cracks across the air, striking her on the cheek. Her cry is spontaneous. Shocked, she returns to her task

 

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with renewed vigor as a welt of blood forms on her cheek. I catch Danka's eye for a split second; we know not to stop.
Once the lorry is full we are ordered to push it up the hill, where we must unload the sand in a separate pile. We line up, four on each side of the lorry. The wheels are steel and made for railroad tracks. Forging forward, we hold onto the cold metal sides, heaving with all of our might. Movement is slow, but once the momentum is built we manage to complete our task. Unloading the carts, we push the lorries back down the hill with relative ease and start all over again. By noon we have completed many trips.
A huge cast-iron kettle is carried into the fields by male prisoners. Other kommandos arrive at the kettle and we line up for the noonday meal. Hungry and eager to have time to eat, Danka and I push our way into line. The kapos serve us. The servings are pitiful. We can see a few vegetables hiding deep in the murky depths of the water, but the ladle does not even graze them. It does not deserve to be called soup; it is barely turnip broth.
"Tomorrow we'll get in the back of the line," I tell Danka.
"Why?"
"Because the less water there is on top, the more likely we are to get a piece of meat or turnip."
We sip our noonday meal slowly, hoping to savor what little there is, hoping it will give us the energy we need to continue. My mind tastes these circumstances like strange food. For a moment I allow myself to brood. This is slave labor we are doing. I cannot accept this thought, though. Maybe it will get better. I am just hungry. Maybe they will give us more food tonight after a hard day at work. We are working toward a goalfreedom. We are helping the Germans build something. These justifications, no matter how small and insignificant, help me get up, get in line, help me continue working.
The weather is not encouraging as the afternoon labors on and a steady drizzle turns to sleet. The mud becomes like cement, grabbing at the wheels of our carts, and as the temperature drops

 

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the metal we cling to freezes to our skin. Whips snap above our heads, sometimes landing against our backs like stinging wasps. At least we have wool shirts on to protect us from the elements and the rawhide. Like a team of plowhorses we are prodded. A girl pushing the lorry loses her shoe. Our kapo pulls her out of line quickly, before the cart can lose its momentum. The girl looks in the mud for her shoe and then I do not notice what happens to her. We have our own shoes to worry about.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, as the gray sky above us darkens, we hear the blessed order to "Halt! Line up!" We stand in line, muddy and worn out. We are not the same girls who marched to work this morning; our heads hang lower, our eyes do not dart as quickly and alertly. Danka's cheeks are sunken, her eyes almost vacant. We march defeated to the blocks.
Evening roll call lasts forever. We stand in our neat rows watching the other details enter camp. Some of the girls are carrying bodies. I want to shield my sister's eyes from this sight, but I cannot move. An SS guard orders that the bodies be dropped in a pile next to us. They are counted. I am counted. Danka is counted. The living are tallied in a separate column from the dead. I think it is dark but cannot be sure; the lights from the watchtowers are a constant brutal sun which does not warm.
We hurry into Block Ten, our new home, in silent shock. The room elders dole out our crusts of bread. There is no extra food for the hard day of work; there is not a slice of meat or cheese, just a smear of margarine on our dirty hands. Sitting on our beds, we stare at this meal. How did it come to be called dinner? Slowly, gently, we begin to lick our palms.
"I can't take this." "Look at my hands." ''I have blisters." "I'm starving. Why won't they feed us more?" The voices timidly emerge along the rows of bunks. Others are already curled up on their mattresses, weeping in their sleep. A few voices can be heard talking to the air and I wonder if I was right about the men I saw on my first day here. Maybe this is a place for the insane, maybe

 

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it will not be long before we are all talking to the air. It seems so long ago that I thought the men in camp looked like lunatics. It has not even been one week.
I go downstairs after eating, then wash myself. My nipples are raw and red from the scratchy wool shirt and the cold which corrodes my skin as viciously as the bugs I am infested with. Why didn't they let me keep my bra and underwear? I feel as if someone has taken sandpaper across my breasts until there is no skin left. I close the shirt and return to our bunk upstairs. Danka is already fast asleep. I try to lie down next to her but my side is too tender. Pulling my knees under me like a fetus, I crouch over my legs, allowing my shoulders to fall forward. My head rests on the mattress. I wonder how I will ever fall asleep but I am too tired not to. Like a small boulder I slumber.
Four
A.M
.
"
Raus! Raus!
"
We roll out of bed and race to the bathroom before the line is too long. We get our tea and drink it quickly while we wait for the SS to count our heads. The tea is not warm enough to warm our hands or our bellies. We line up behind Emma, our kapo. Somehow we have learned her name in the past two days. She has a black triangle. She is a prostitute. We march behind her in rows of five in the dark to the field where we will sift rocks and sand all day. The mud is so deep now that it is almost impossible to push the lorries. Still we haul our loads through the muck. Like Sisyphus, in the Greek myth, we are punished, forced to push that eternal rock up a hill.
Again at noon we are allowed a few moments of rest and some turnip stock. Even waiting at the end of the line does not assure any pieces of vegetable or meat, but the broth is a little thickeror maybe we just think it is.
On Saturday, our Sabbath, we work. It is just another way that they undermine our faith and challenge our fortitude. We toil in

 

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the mud, forgetting that it is against Hebrew law to lift a hand in labor on this holy day. We shovel and push, sift and haul, from sunup to sundown.
On Sunday there is no roll call. It is the Christian Sabbath and they honor this day of rest, although not out of Christian charity. It is a free day, if anything can be called free in Auschwitz. We sit on our beds, speaking to one another for the first time. "Where are you from? How old are you?" Meaningless chatter that has no place in memory. We do not discuss our circumstances. Bashfully we try to rid ourselves of the lice imbedded in our uniforms and every crevice of our bodies, scratching our heads, brushing out our underarms. I take off my pants and run my fingers along the seams and pockets, pulling the bloodsuckers off and squeezing them between my fingernails until they pop or squish with my blood.
Within an hour my fingernails are black and blue from killing the parasites, so I toss them on the floor, squishing them with my shoes or just ignoring their squirming white bodies. If I think about what I'm doing, if I look at them for too long, I will vomit. It takes all day, this ritual cleansing. I wash my face and hands three or four times, hoping to feel clean again. It is futile. Finally I must lie down and rest. Sleep is not forthcoming, though, for there is the gnawing of the lice I have missed, the voices of Slovakian girls around me, my sister's heavy breath. She slumbers. I must keep watch. I lie on my bunk staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to take me away. Some nights it comes swiftly. Some nights it lingers just on the fringes, out of reach. Sometimes I hear the rifles firing at the wall in Block Eleven. Other nights I hear nothing, but this does not mean there are not Russians being shot. It only means I don't have the energy to hear or think about the dying next door.
I wake in the morning, before anyone else has even opened their eyes, knowing that something has changed in my body. I stare up

 

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