Rena's Promise (19 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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days after it rains; it penetrates everything. How does one measure temperature when there is but one temperature? It is a dull chill, like the numbness in my mindalways there, taken for granted, eventually ignored.
I used to love the warm, sparkling days of summer, but this year it seems to have disappeared. Can it be fall already? How long have we been here? What month is it? There must be trees somewhere in the world that are changing color, preparing to welcome winter with their fiery reds, oranges and golds, but I do not see any changes here. It is always gray. I myself am gray.
We have a calendar in Birkenau. It is hunger.
The emptiness in our stomachs never ceases, just as the chill never leaves. It is our only clock, our only way to discern what time of day it is. Morning is hunger. Afternoon is hunger. Evening is hunger. Slowly we starve until we cannot make out anything beyond the gnawing of our intestines grinding against each other.
A block elder asks me if I want to be a room elder. ''No, thank you," I tell her, but in my head I think, I can't take bread from others who are as hungry as me, I can't hit people suffering just like I am. I repeat my private chant, Be invisible. That is one of the rules I live by. Those who are too visible eventually get struck down, so I stay in the background and try simply to get by.
There is only one thing that exists beyond the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It lies in wait for me like a beacon of light shining through the fog. I hold it before me constantly, every second of every day. It is the only thing that keeps me goingMama and Papa. They beckon to Danka and me from the fringes of my mind. Their hands wave against a backdrop of snow and winter sky.
We're here!
they cry.
We're waiting for you to come home
.
We're coming, Mama
, I remind them.
Don't leave us here alone
. And they don't. I hear Mama's voice comforting my trou-

 

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bled mind, soothing the worries of our existence. The only thing she cannot help is the hunger, but even that dulls in comparison to the knowledge that Mama and Papa are waiting for Danka and me to return to Tylicz. I frame this picture in my mind and hang it on a mental wall where I can gaze at it constantly. I know they are there. I work because they need me. I eat because they are waiting. I live because they are alive.
Mama, I brought you the baby back. I repeat it over and over in my head. It is the refrain to the song that keeps me strong and healthy and spirited: Mama, I brought you the baby back. My one great feat in life, my fate, is to survive this thing and return triumphant with my sister to our parents' house. My dream cannot be marred by German whips or chains or rules. I will succeed because I have no other choice. Failure does not even occur to me. We may die in the interimdeath cannot be avoided herebut even that will not dissuade me from my sole purpose in life. Nothing else matters but these four things: be with Danka, be invisible, be alert, be numb.
I wonder if I will ever wake up to turn over in a real bed again. Will I ever open my eyes without German commands and decide to sleep in because it is raining out and I don't have to get up yet. Will I ever dream again? The days are long and hard but the nights are devoid of even the relief of dreams, the pain of nightmares. I crawl onto my shelf and pull a woolen rag around my collarbones. I pretend that it will warm me. Falling into unconsciousness. I am woken by barking, by gunshots, by nothing at all, . . . by four
A.M
. . .
. . . "
Raus! Raus!
"
The room elders hit the girls who are still sleeping and those who aren't quick enough to scramble off the shelves we lie on. Is this place so different than Auschwitz? The room elders, the block elders, all have an edge in their voices that I haven'y heard before.

 

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For all their privileges, the extra food they pilfer from us less fortunate slaves, they also have a dirt floor beneath their feet. They have cots rather than wood to sleep on, but they are in a converted stable just as we all are.
"Come on, Danka." I shake her gently. "We have to get up and find the bathroom." There is no toilet in the block, as we had in Auschwitz; there is a bucket. The pot-bellied stove sits at the end of the rows of stalls and toward one end of the block, close to the block elder's room. There is a curtain dividing the block and room elders from the rest of us.
"Where's the toilet?" I ask, ducking as the stick strikes for my head. This is not a place for questions. We run outside. The kettle of tea is sitting in its customary place by the door. We hold out our bowls; the ladle splashes lukewarm tea across our hands.
Standing in neat rows of five in the dark, we eat our remaining piece of bread and wait for the SS to arrive. We have noticed that the day goes better if we can eat something before we work, so Danka and I always eat only half our portion at night, saving the rest until morning.
SS men Stibitz and Taube march up and down the rows counting our heads. Wardress Drexler, the head of the women's camp, watches; her buck teeth stick out even when her mouth is closed. Roll call takes at least two hours this first day in Birkenau. We are not used to standing for so long at attention; fighting the urge to shift our feet, we must not even yawn. Every few minutes Taube hits someone for not looking attentive enough, for moving her feet, for no reason at all.
"Dismissed!" The orders crackle through the dawn light. I take Danka's hand, stepping quickly toward Emma. I have had her in my sight ever since she came out for roll call. With all the changes in the past twenty-four hours, I'm determined to keep one thing constant, and getting on Emma's work team is the only thing I have the slightest control over. She spares us a brief smile as we

 

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line up behind her. It is a small comfort to see a familiar face in such terrible surroundings. Emma's is that face.
We work all day and march back to the stables. "We should try to sleep here." I point to an area far enough away from the block elder's room to give us time to get up in the morning without getting struck by her stick. We crawl onto the shelving cradling our bread and clutching our blanket between us. Silently we chew half of our bread, hiding the remainder in our pockets. During the afternoon I have learned that Birkenau is where the Russian prisoners of war were kept. With a shudder I recall the bodies falling into the mud between Block Ten and Block Eleven. They must all be dead now.
These first few weeks we are barely surviving. The food is less than it was, which means it has gone from a crust to half a crust. The soup is so thin there is no use to wait at the end of the line for a piece of turnip or meat, and the tea is practically clear. Every morning that we wake up at least one girl has died in our block. There are no exceptions. We are dropping like flies.
2
You have to have a brain to figure out all that is going on, the tricks to being camp smart: where it's the warmest, who's the most dangerous, who doles out a bit more soup. The new arrivals barely have time to figure out how to survive before they die.
After roll call you don't know about anything else that's happening. You can't keep brooding about what is befalling you and everyone else because then you won't have the energy to go on, and you have to keep going. The work you do may kill you, but if you don't do it you will be killed.
No matter what the detail, we work, we dig, we carry, we sift,
2. "As the history of Nazi Germany so emphatically shows, racism's 'logic' ultimately entails genocide . . . Any consistent Nazi plan had to target Jewish women specifically as women, for they were the only ones who would finally be able to ensure the continuity of Jewish life. Indeed, although the statistical data about the Holocaust will never be exact, there is sound evidence that the odds for surviving the Holocaust were worse for Jewish women than for Jewish men" (Rittner and Roth, 2).

 

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we push, we die. But Emma does not kill prisoners, this one thing I know. Every morning Danka and I run to Emma to get in her detail. Birkenau is bad, but Emma does not make it worse.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
It is Sunday. We stand at roll call, but then, rather than being dismissed, we are ordered into a block where tables are set up. As we step inside we are handed a postcard and a pencil.
"You will write your family and tell them that you are fine and like working here," we are ordered.
I stare at them incredulously, unable to believe that I must write lies to my loved ones.
"Dear Zosia," I scribble at the top of my card.
"You will write exactly as you are told: 'We are being treated very well,' " they dictate to us. " 'We have plenty to eat and the work is not hard. I hope to see you soon. Love, . . .'Sign your name."
I remember Zosia's cries when she said Nathan's card meant he was in Siberia, and on the bottom of my card I jot quickly in Polish,
It's cold here, just the same as Nathan told you
. I pray she sees the truth behind my words. I pray she and her children will not follow us to Auschwitz. We turn our cards in and are excused. I feel weak, shaky from the ordeal. As hard as we toil every day, writing those few words to Zosia has taken more out of me. Danka and I do not discuss the cards we have written. We do not discuss family at all.
My monthly curse wakes me. In the confusion of moving from one camp to another I didn't even think of sneaking newspaper squares with me. I didn't think the latrine in Birkenau would be any different than the toilet in Auschwitz. How naive I am; newspaper is a luxury that we no longer deserve.
Once a month my period still arrives without any prior warning. It is something I dread and wait for, never knowing when it will make its appearance. Will I be working? Will I be in the shav-

 

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