That road really was beautiful. It started at the vast cobblestone plaza known as the platz and ran straight back through camp, covered in black, shiny sand and chunks of black slag that glinted in the sun. A honey-sweet scent caught my nose and drew my attention to the trees, which lined the road as far as the eye could see. Linden trees. What a comfort it was to see this, the favorite tree of the Virgin Mary. The linden is revered in Poland, and it’s bad luck to cut one down. In front of each block was planted a cheerful little garden of flowers, and at each block window hung a wooden flower box, planted with geraniums. How bad could such a neatly kept place be? Oddest of all, an ornate silver cage stood at the beginning of Beauty Road, filled with exotic animals—yellow-winged parrots, two brown spider monkeys who swung about the cage playing like children, and a peacock with an emerald-green head who fanned out his feathers. The peacock shrieked, and a shiver went through me.
Matka gathered us close, as we took it all in. Across the platz, rows of women in striped dresses stood at attention, five to a row, not one looking in our direction. A female guard pulled a revolver from the holster at her hip and asked the guard next to her a question about it. Matka spied the gun and quickly looked away.
A girl in a striped dress passed near me.
“Polish?” she said, her voice almost drowned out by the music.
“Yes,” I said. “All of us.”
The spider monkeys stopped playing and watched us, fingers fisted around the cage bars.
“They will take any food you have, so eat it up quickly,” she said and walked away to line up.
“Give us everything you have—you won’t need it,” said an older woman passing by, her hand out as she walked the length of the column.
We clutched our coats around us tighter. Why would we give up the few things we had? I glanced at Matka. She reached out, and her hand trembled as she squeezed mine. I wanted only a bed for sleep and something to end my terrible thirst.
The guards herded us into the utility block: two big open rooms with low ceilings and a shower room off to one side. A tall blond guard we later learned was named Binz stood at the door, as frantic and exercised as Hitler himself.
“Hurry, hurry!” she cried, as she stung my bottom with her crop.
I came to a desk, and a woman sitting behind it in a striped dress took down my name. In German she told me to empty my pockets, and she dumped the few possessions I had—a handkerchief, my watch, some aspirin, the last vestiges of normal life—into a yellow envelope and placed it with the others in a file box. Next I was ordered to strip while a prisoner-guard watched.
“Move along!” she said once I was naked.
I saw Matka, behind me, stop next at the table. They wanted her ring, but she was having trouble twisting it off of her finger.
“Her finger is swollen,” said a woman doctor standing nearby, tall and blond in her white doctor’s smock. Binz lifted Matka’s hand, spat on the ring, and tried to work it off. Matka turned her head.
“Try petroleum jelly,” the woman doctor said.
Binz spat on the ring again and finally twisted it off. The woman behind the desk dropped it into a yellow envelope and placed it in the file box.
Matka’s ring was gone. How could they just take a person’s things with no feeling at all?
I saw Janina Grabowski, far ahead of me in line, wrestling with a guard and crying out. She was undergoing the hairdresser’s exam. A second guard came to assist the first and held Janina by the shoulders.
“Stop, no—please,” she said as they tried to cut her hair off.
A guard pushed me along, and I lost Matka, who was swallowed up in the crush of women. I tried to cover my nakedness as a prisoner with a green triangle on the shoulder of her striped jacket pushed me to a stool. Once I felt a toothpick touch my scalp, I knew I was about to follow Janina’s fate, and my heart tried to escape my chest, it thumped so.
The scissors were cold against the back of my neck, and the woman swore in German as she hacked through my braid. Was I to blame for my thick hair? She threw the braid onto a pile of hair so high it reached the windowsill and then, as if in payment for making her work harder, shaved my head roughly. I shook all over as every click of the trimmers sent hunks of hair sliding down my bare shoulders. She pushed me off the stool, and I felt my head—smooth, with just tufts of hair here and there. Thank God Pietrik wasn’t there to see that. How cold it was without hair!
A prisoner with a purple triangle—a Bible girl, I later learned—pushed me back onto a table used to examine gynecological parts. She held my legs apart while a second prisoner shaved me with a straight razor, leaving me cut and scraped.
When that was finished, they sent me on to the woman doctor, who said, “On the table,” and took a cold silver instrument, put it in me, and opened me up, all without even toweling it off! She spread me out for all the world to see and jabbed her rubber-gloved fingers inside me and felt around. She was not at all horrified by her job and might just as well have been washing a dish. She acted with no regard for the fact that I was young and she was violating me in a way that could never be undone.
I had little time to mourn my lost virginity, for guards lined us up naked, five across, in the shower room. A shower attendant in white coveralls hit the women in front of us with a truncheon, leaving red welts on their backsides, as they ran to the showerheads. I stayed near Mrs. Mikelsky and braced for the sting of the rubber. She held baby Jagoda close to her, shivering so badly it was as if cold water were already running over her. A prisoner with a green badge on her sleeve came to Mrs. Mikelsky, put two hands around the baby’s skinny, naked body, and pulled. Mrs. Mikelsky held Jagoda tight.
“Give it to me,” the prisoner-guard said.
Mrs. Mikelsky only held tighter.
“She’s a good baby,” I said to the guard.
The guard pulled harder at the child. Would they tear her in two?
“It can’t be helped,” the guard said. “Don’t make a scene.”
The baby cried out, which caught the attention of the nasty head wardress, Dorothea Binz, who came, almost at a run, from the front of the building, a second guard close behind. The name Dorothea means “God’s gift,” and a name could not have been more wrong for a person.
Binz came to a stop next to Mrs. Mikelsky and pointed her leather crop at little blond Jagoda.
“Is the father German?”
Mrs. Mikelsky glanced at me, her brow creased.
“No, Polish,” she said.
“Just take it,” Binz said with a wave of her crop.
The guard who had come with Binz held Mrs. Mikelsky from behind while the first guard pried Jagoda from her mother’s arms.
“I made a mistake,” Mrs. Mikelsky said. “Yes, actually the father is German…” She glanced at me.
“From Berlin,” I said. “A real patriot.”
The green badge held naked Jagoda to her shoulder and looked at Binz.
“Just take it,” Binz said with a jerk of her head.
The guard hiked the baby higher on her shoulder and walked back through the incoming crowd.
Mrs. Mikelsky crumpled to the floor like a burning piece of paper as she watched her baby be taken away. “No, please, where are you taking her?”
Binz poked her crop into Mrs. Mikelsky’s ribs and pushed her toward the showers.
I folded my arms across my naked chest and stepped closer to Binz.
“That child will die without her mother,” I said.
Binz turned to me, her expression bringing to mind a bubbling teapot.
“There is no greater cruelty,” I said.
Binz raised her crop to me.
“You Poles…”
I closed my eyes, bracing myself, waiting for the sting of the leather. Where would the blows land?
Suddenly I felt arms slide around me. Matka, her naked body smooth on mine.
“Please, Madame Wardress,” she said in her prettiest German. “She is out of her head to speak to you this way. How sorry we are—”
Was it my mother’s German that caused Binz to take a step back? Her gentle way?
“You tell her to keep her mouth shut,” Binz said, shaking her crop in my direction. She retreated through the crowd.
The guards shoved me dazed into a shower, my tears for poor Mrs. Mikelsky mixing with the sting of cold shower water.
—