Every prisoner in camp shuffled out onto the platz, for Appell, a massive, group roll call. We then lined up ten abreast in the darkness next to the Revier, the only sound the stomping of hundreds of clogs echoing around the platz as we tried to ward off the cold. How I wished for a warm coat! The searchlights arced overhead. Surely Appell would be short and uneventful because of Christmas. Didn’t Germans celebrate Christ’s birth? Maybe Binz would take Christmas off? I tried not to look at the pile of bodies, stacked like firewood next to the linen shop, covered in a light dusting of snow. There the bodies waited for the man from town with his morgue car to come and slide each into one of his paper bags with frilly ends and drive them off.
A young guard in training named Irma Grese, Binz’s star protégé, hurried down the rows counting us and marking numbers down on her clipboard. She stopped now and then to enjoy a cigarette, standing there wrapped in her thick black cloak. While Grese and Binz were like truant teenaged best friends, both blond and beautiful, there was no mistaking one for the other. Binz was tall with slightly coarser features and wore her hair in an Olympia roll, teased and rolled up from her forehead. Grese was petite and movie-star pretty, with almond-shaped blue eyes and naturally pink lips. Under her uniform cap, she wore her hair pulled back into two shining ringlets, like rolls of golden coins, one down each side of her neck. Unfortunately for us, Irma had no talent for numbers. Often her hasty head counts failed to match Binz’s, leading to three-and four-hour Appells.
The sun breached the horizon, sending golden rays over the platz, and a collective moan of happiness went up in the crowd.
“Quiet!” shouted Irma.
Despite our best efforts to hang back and stand in the warmer, soft middle of the crowd, all five of us in our little camp family had ended up in the front row that morning. It was a dangerous place to be, since prisoners on the outer edges were more vulnerable, open to attacks from bored and sometimes volatile guards and their dogs. I stood next to Matka, Luiza on her other side. Mrs. Mikelsky, whom we’d all watched decline quickly after losing her baby, stood between Zuzanna and me. Zuzanna had diagnosed my teacher with dysentery and severe depression, a bad combination.
It had been snowing off and on since early November. To help the time go by, I watched the birds shake snow from their wings, and was jealous of them for being able to come and go as they pleased. A bitter wind was slashing off the lake that morning, so we’d helped Mrs. Mikelsky slip two sheets of smuggled newspaper down the front of her thin cotton jacket for insulation. When Irma was not looking, we turned our backs and rubbed up against one another, trying to stay warm. The guards had erected a tall fir in a sturdy wooden base as a Christmas tree at the end of Beauty Road, and it swayed in the wind.
Mrs. Mikelsky swayed as well, and I held her arm to steady her. Even through her cotton coat, I felt the bone of her elbow sharp against my palm. Was I already that emaciated too? Mrs. Mikelsky leaned into me, and the newspaper crinkled and peeped out over the neck of her shift.
I tucked the paper down, out of sight. “You have to stand straight,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Kasia.”
“Count in your head. That helps.”
“Quiet,” Zuzanna said to me across Mrs. Mikelsky’s back. “Binz is coming.”
A wave of dread washed through the crowd as Binz rode through the camp gates and across the platz on her blue bicycle. Had she overslept, warm in her bed with her married boyfriend, Edmund? At least he wasn’t there that morning, kissing her as a prisoner was whipped, their favorite pastime.
As Binz rode, she strained against the wind, one hand on a handlebar, the other on her dog’s leash, her black wool cape fanned out behind her. She reached the Revier, leaned her bicycle against the wall, and navigated the cobblestones with her farm-girl stride, dog by her side, straining at its collar. As Binz walked, she waved her crop in the air like a child with a toy. It was a new crop, made of black leather, from the end of which sprouted a long braid of cellophane.
Binz’s dog was named Adelige, which means “aristocratic lady,” and she was the most magnificent and most terrifying Alsatian of them all, black and tan with a thick shawl of fur around her chest, the type you could imagine a fine coat being made from. The dog responded to a series of commands, which Binz communicated by way of a green metal clicker.
Binz walked straight to Mrs. Mikelsky and jabbed her out of line with the crop.
“You. Out.”
I tried to follow, but Matka held me back.
“What were you talking about?” Binz asked, dog at her hip.
“Nothing, Madame Wardress,” Mrs. Mikelsky said.
Irma stepped to Binz’s side. “The tally is complete, Madame Wardress.”
Binz didn’t answer, her gaze trained on Mrs. Mikelsky.
“My baby Jagoda—” Mrs. Mikelsky began.
“You have no baby. You have nothing. You are only a number.”
Was Binz showing off for Irma?
Mrs. Mikelsky held one hand out to Binz. “She’s a good baby—”
Binz reached for the newspaper under Mrs. Mikelsky’s shift and yanked it out in one motion.
“Where did you get this?” Binz asked.
Irma slid her clipboard under her arm and lit another cigarette.
Mrs. Mikelsky stood taller. “I don’t know. I have nothing. I am only a number.”
Even from five paces away, I could see Binz’s whole body tremble. “You’re right,” she said, then drew back her arm and sent her crop across Mrs. Mikelsky’s cheek.
The cellophane slashed Mrs. Mikelsky’s cheekbone, and after a quick look at Irma, Binz bent at the waist and unleashed her dog. Adelige sat motionless at first, then at the chirp of Binz’s clicker lunged at Mrs. Mikelsky, ears pinned back, teeth bared. The dog clamped her mouth around Mrs. Mikelsky’s hand, shook it side to side, and pulled my teacher to her knees. The dog’s growls echoed around the square as she lunged and bit the neckline of Mrs. Mikelsky’s shift and brought her down onto the snow.
Matka took my hand in hers.
Mrs. Mikelsky rolled to her side and tried to sit but the dog clamped her jaws around her throat and shook its head back and forth.
I held back the urge to retch as the dog dragged Mrs. Mikelsky away from us, like a wolf with a freshly killed deer, leaving a cherry stain along the snow.
The chirp of Binz’s metal clicker echoed about the platz.
“Adelige, release!” Binz called out.
The dog sat back on her haunches and panted, her golden eyes trained on Binz.
“Seven seven seven six!” Binz shouted.
Irma tossed away her cigarette and let it lie there on the snow, a lazy blue spiral rising from it, as she wrote on her clipboard.
The dog trotted to Binz, tail between her legs, and left Mrs. Mikelsky lying motionless.
Binz turned and waved me out of line. I stepped one pace out.
“Your friend?”
I nodded.
“Yes? How so?”
“My math teacher, Madame Wardress.” Tears blurred my sight, but I held them back. Tears only inflamed Binz.
Irma touched her fingers to her pretty mouth and smiled. “Polish math.”
Binz tossed me a violet grease pen.
“Write it,” she said.
We’d all witnessed the process. Binz wanted me to write the number on Mrs. Mikelsky’s chest, the final indignity for every dead or dying prisoner. My heart hammered as I stepped along the dark cherry trail Adelige had left in the snow to where my teacher lay. I found Mrs. Mikelsky on her back, the flesh at her throat ripped to the bone, and there was blood smeared across her bare chest as if painted there. Her face was turned toward me, eyes partially open, the gash across her cheekbone like a gaping smile.
“Write it,” Binz said.
With my jacket sleeve, I wiped the blood from Mrs. Mikelsky’s chest and wrote in grease pen, 7776.
“Remove that piece,” Binz said.
She wanted the body dragged to the pile beside the linen shop.
I took hold of both of Mrs. Mikelsky’s wrists and dragged her, still warm, across the snow, exhaling the white fog of my breath like a plow horse. The horror of it. The hate grew black in my chest. How could I live without revenge?
By the time I reached the stack of bodies, snow covered and shoulder high, my face was wet with tears. I tucked Mrs. Mikelsky along the side of the pile with great care, as if she were sleeping there. Our lioness. Our hope. Our North Star.
“Poles,” Irma said to Binz as I walked by her, back to lineup. “Why do they even try to teach them math?”
“True,” said Binz with a laugh.
I stopped and turned to Irma.
“At least I can count,” I said.
This time I didn’t have to wait for the sting of Binz’s crop.