The Storyteller (39 page)

We lived with lice and rats. We barely had water for washing. Agnat’s cuts grew red and fierce, swollen with pus. At night, she could not get comfortable. “Tomorrow,” Darija told her, “we will take you to the hospital.”

“No,” Agnat insisted. “If I go, I won’t come back.” The hospital was next to the crematoria. It was called the waiting room because of this.

As I lay in the dark beside Agnat, I could feel the heat of the fever in her body. She grabbed my sleeve. “Promise me,” she said, but she did not finish her sentence, or maybe she did, and I had already fallen asleep.

The next morning when the Beast came in screaming at us, Darija and I ran to the toilets as usual and then lined up for
Appell.
Agnat, however, was missing. The Beast called her number, twice, and then pointed at us. “Find her,” she demanded, and Darija and I went back into the hut. “Maybe she is too sick to stand,” Darija whispered, when we saw the outline of Agnat’s form beneath the thin blanket.

“Agnat,” I whispered, shaking her shoulder. “You have to get up.”

She didn’t move.

“Darija,” I said. “I think . . . I think she’s . . .”

I couldn’t say it, because saying it would make it real. It was one thing to see the distant, putrid smoke and guess at what was happening in those buildings. It was another to know that a dead woman had been pressed up against me the entire night.

Darija leaned over and closed Agnat’s eyes. Then she grabbed her arm, which was already stiffening. “Don’t just stand there,” Darija muttered, and I leaned over the bunk and took Agnat’s other arm. It was not hard to maneuver her down; she weighed next to nothing. We put her arms around our necks, as if we were school chums posing for a photograph. Then we dragged Agnat’s upright body between us to the courtyard, so
that it could still be counted, because if the number was off even by one prisoner they would start over again. We held her upright for the two and a half hours of
Appell,
as flies buzzed around her eyes and mouth.

“Why is God doing this to us?” I murmured.

“God’s not doing anything to us,” Darija said. “It’s the Germans.”

When the count was finished, we loaded Agnat’s body into a cart with ten other women who had died during the night in our block. I wondered what had become of the Dąbrowska book. If some German soldier had confiscated and destroyed it. Or if there was still room for beauty like that in a world that had come to this.

 • • • 

Nothing grew in Auschwitz. No grass, no mushrooms, no weeds, no buttercups. The landscape was dusty and gray, a wasteland.

I thought this every morning as I was marched to work, past the shacks that were the men’s barracks and past the incessant operation of the crematoria. Darija and I were lucky, because we had been assigned to Kanada. It was an area where the belongings that had come in on the trains were sorted. The valuables were tallied and given to the guards, who brought them to the SS officer in charge of getting them to Berlin. The clothing went somewhere else. And then there were the items that no one needed: eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, photographs. These were to be destroyed. The reason it was nicknamed Kanada was that we all imagined that country as the land of plenty, and certainly that was what we saw every day as the suitcases piled up in the sheds with every new transport. In Kanada, too, if a guard was looking the other way, it was possible to steal an extra pair of gloves, underwear, a hat. I hadn’t been brave enough to do it, yet, but the nights were turning cooler. It would be worth the risk of punishment, knowing I had a warm layer under this work dress.

But that punishment, it was real, and it was serious. It was bad enough to have guards that watched over us, telling us to work faster and waving their guns. But the SS officer who was in charge of Kanada also spent
a portion of the day weaving among us as we worked, to make sure we did not steal. He was a slight man, not much taller than I was. I had seen him drag outside a prisoner who had hidden a gold candlestick up the sleeve of her jacket. Although we did not see the beating, we could hear it. The prisoner was left unconscious in front of the barracks; the officer returned to walk through the aisles where we worked, with a nauseated look on his face. It made him seem human, and if he was human, how could he do this to us?

Darija and I had talked about this. “More likely he was upset he had to get his hands dirty. Besides, what do you care?” she said with a shrug. “All you need to know is that he is a monster.”

But there were all sorts of monsters. For years I had written of an
upiór,
after all. But
upiory,
they were the undead. There were monsters that took over the living, too. We had a neighbor in Łód
whose husband had been hospitalized, and by the time he came home, had forgotten the name of his wife and where he lived. He kicked the family’s cat and swore like a sailor and seemed so radically different from the man she knew and loved that she called in a healer. The old woman who’d come to the house said there was nothing to be done; a
dybbuk
—the soul of someone dead, who would do whatever awful things it could in this new body that it hadn’t been given time to do in its old one—had attached itself to the husband while he was at the hospital. He had been possessed, his mind usurped by a spirit with squatter’s rights.

Secretly, when the SS officer in charge of Kanada passed by, I thought of him as Herr Dybbuk. A human man too weak to force out the evil that had taken up residence in him.

“You are a silly, stupid girl,” Darija said when I mentioned this to her one night, whispering in the bunk we shared. “Not everything is fiction, Minka.”

I did not believe her. Because this—this camp, this horror—was exactly the sort of stuff no one would ever believe as fact. Take the Allies, for example. If they had heard of people being gassed, hundreds at a time, wouldn’t they have already come to save us?

Today I had been given a pair of scissors to cut up the linings of
clothes. There was a pile of fur coats I was working my way through. Inside I sometimes found wedding bands, gold earrings, coins, and as I did I turned them over to the guard. I wondered sometimes who had wound up with my boots, and how long it had been before she found the treasure hidden in the heels.

There was always a little ripple of awareness when Herr Dybbuk arrived or departed, as if his presence was an electric shock. Even though I did not turn around to watch, I could hear him approaching with another SS officer. They were speaking, and I eavesdropped on their German conversation as I ripped open a hem.

So then, the beer hall?

At eight.

You won’t tell me you’re too busy again. I am beginning to think you’re avoiding your own brother.

Over my shoulder, I peeked. It was rare to hear two officers talking in such a friendly manner. Mostly, they just yelled at each other the way they yelled at us. But these two, they were apparently related.

“I’ll be there,” Herr Dybbuk vowed, laughing.

He was talking to the SS officer who oversaw
Appell.
The man in charge of the women’s camp. The one with the tremor in his hand.

The one who was not inhabited by an evil spirit. He was just evil, period. He had ordered Agnat’s beating and ran hot and cold when it came to overseeing
Appell.
Either he seemed bored and the count went quickly, or he was on a rampage and took his fury out on us. Just that morning, he had raised his pistol and shot a girl who was too weak to stand upright. When the girl beside her jumped in response, he shot her, too.

These officers were related?

There was a passing similarity, I supposed. They both had the same jaw, the same sandy hair. And tonight, after they had beaten and starved and demeaned us, they would go share a beer together.

I had paused, thinking about this, and the guard who was watching me sift through the suitcases and satchels shouted at me to get to work. So I reached into the pile that never seemed to get any smaller and pulled out a leather valise. I tossed away a nightgown and some brassieres and
underwear, a lace hat. There was a silk roll with a string of pearls. I called to the officer, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the wall of the shack, and handed it over to him to record and inventory.

I lugged another piece of luggage out of the heap.

This one, I recognized.

I suppose several people might have had the same overnight case as my father, but how many of those would have had the handle repaired with a length of wire, where it had broken after I used it, years ago, as part of a pretend fort to play in? I fell to my knees, turning my back on the guard, and opened the straps.

Inside were the candlesticks that had come from my grandmother, wrapped carefully in my father’s tallith. Beneath that were his socks, his undershorts. A sweater that my mother had knit for him. He’d told me once that he hated it, that the sleeves were too long and the wool too itchy, but she had gone to so much trouble, how could he
not
pretend that he loved it more than anything?

I could not catch my breath, could not move. No matter what Agnat had said, no matter what evidence I was confronted with daily as I marched past the crematoria and the long line of new arrivals waiting blindly to go inside, I had not believed my father was truly dead until I opened this suitcase.

I was an orphan. I had nobody left in the world.

With shaking hands I took the tallith, kissed it, and added it to the pile of trash. I set the candlesticks aside, thinking of my mother saying the prayer over them at Shabbat dinner. Then I lifted the sweater.

My mother’s hands had worked the needles, looped the yarn. My father had worn it over his heart.

I couldn’t let someone else wear this, someone who didn’t know that every inch of it told a tale. This yarn lived up to its second meaning—a tale—with every knit and purl part of the saga of my family. This sleeve was the one my mother had been working on when Basia fell down and hit her head on the corner of the piano bench, and needed stitches at the hospital. This neckline was so tricky she had asked for help from our housekeeper, who was a much more accomplished knitter. This hemline
she had measured against my father’s midsection, joking out loud that she had not meant to marry such a long-waisted gorilla of a man.

There is a reason the word
history
has, at its heart, the narrative of one’s life.

I buried my face in the wool and started to sob, rocking back and forth, even though I knew I was going to attract the attention of the guards.

My father had trusted me with the details of his death, and in the end, I was too late.

Wiping my eyes, I started to pull the hem of the sweater, so that the weave unraveled. I rolled the yarn up around my arm like a bandage, a tourniquet for a soul that was bleeding out.

The guard closest to me approached, screaming, jerking his gun at my face.

Do it,
I thought.
Take me, too.

I kept pulling on the yarn, until it lay in a nest around me, crimped and rust-colored. Somewhere, Darija was probably watching me and too afraid for her own welfare to tell me to stop. But I couldn’t. I was unraveling, too.

The commotion attracted some of the other guards, who came over to see what was happening. When one leaned down to grab the candlesticks, I snatched them in one hand and then took the scissors I had used to cut up fur coats and opened their legs wide, pressing the blade against my throat.

The Ukrainian guard laughed.

Suddenly a quiet voice spoke. “What is going on here?”

The SS officer in charge of Kanada pushed through the crowd. He towered over me, taking in the scene: the open suitcase, the sweater that I had destroyed, my white knuckles on the necks of the candlesticks.

On his orders, just this morning, I had seen a prisoner hit so hard in the back with a truncheon that she vomited blood. That woman had refused to discard tefillin that were found in a suitcase. What I was doing—destroying property that the Germans believed was theirs—was much worse. I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow, welcoming it.

Instead, I felt the officer pry the candlesticks out of my hands.

When I opened my eyes Herr Dybbuk’s face was only inches from mine. I could see the tic of a muscle in his cheek, the blond stubble of his beard.
“
Wen gehört dieser Koffer?
”
To whom does this suitcase belong?

Meinem Vater,
I murmured.

The SS officer’s eyes narrowed. He looked at me for a long moment, then turned to the other guards and shouted at them to stop staring. Finally, he glanced back at me. “Get back to work,” he said, and a moment later, he was gone.

 • • • 

I stopped counting the days. They all ran together, like chalk in the rain: shuffling from one side of the camp to the other, standing in line for a bowl of soup that was nothing more than hot water boiled with a turnip. I thought I had known hunger; I had no idea. Some girls would steal tins of food hidden in the suitcases, but I had not been brave enough yet. I would dream sometimes of the rolls my father made me, the cinnamon bursting on my tongue like gustatory fireworks. I would close my eyes and see a table groaning with the weight of Shabbat dinner; would taste the fatty, crisp skin of the chicken, which I used to peel from the bird when it came from the oven, even though my mother would swat at my hand and tell me to wait till it was on the table. Then in my dreams, I would taste all these things, and they would turn to ash in my mouth—not the ash of coals but the ash that was shoveled from the crematoria day and night.