“Come now,” Zuzanna said as she half-carried me. “Baby steps.”
Block 31 was our new home, an international block: some Poles, including all the “Rabbits,” as we’d come to be known; French women arrested for working in the underground; and Red Army nurses, all political prisoners. This block was even more crowded than our previous one.
Since I’d been in the Revier, there had been a new development. Some prisoners, including the Poles, were now allowed to receive packages from their families. The soup had become even thinner by then, so it was easy to tell who was receiving food packages from home and who was not. Those who got packages walked about relatively healthy. Those who did not were reduced to skeletal wretches who lay in their bunks no longer able to clean the lice off themselves.
I dozed and then woke as the girls were coming in for lunch. Zuzanna knelt by me and held my hand. Her friend Anise, a quick-witted, handsome woman who gave the impression she could solve any problem, stood behind her.
“We missed you,” Anise said. “We have a new Blockova. Marzenka. A tough one.”
“I missed you too,” I said. “What is that smell outside?”
Zuzanna squeezed my hand. “They’ve built a crematorium. Furnaces.”
“For what?”
Zuzanna hesitated. “To burn—” Zuzanna said, not able to finish. I figured it out, of course. To burn those of us unfortunate enough to die there.
“I’m sorry to tell you, sister, but everyone has heard about Luiza,” Zuzanna said. “I thought it best for you to hear it from me. One of the Norwegian girls told me she saw her in the room they use for a morgue—”
“No, it’s a mistake.”
Poor sweet Lou, who never hurt anyone. Pietrik would never forgive me.
“No mistake. She said it broke her heart to see such a young thing lying there. Alfreda too.”
Luiza and Alfreda both dead? It was hard to understand. Why had they killed such loving girls?
“You mustn’t dwell on it,” Zuzanna said. “Only think of getting better. At least you don’t have to work this week. Nurse Marschall issued you a bed card.”
“Such an angel,” I said.
“The whole camp is up in arms over what they did to you all,” Anise said. “There’ve been more than fifty Polish girls operated on now, and word is they’re planning more. The Girl Guides have organized—over one hundred strong now.”
“We call ourselves Mury,” Zuzanna said. The Walls. “Someone found a Girl Guide badge in the clothing brought back from the shooting wall, and we swear in new Guides on it.”
“They’ve collected all sorts of good things for you,” Anise said. “So much bread. And the French girls wrote a play for you all called The Rabbits.”
“Did my mother see it?”
Anise and Zuzanna just looked at each other.
Anise squeezed my hand. “Oh, Kasia.”
“What?” Why was everyone looking so scared? “Tell me. Zuzanna, please.”
“No one has seen Matka since we were taken for the operations,” Zuzanna said. Her eyes were glassy, but how could she be so calm?
I tried to sit up, but a stab in my leg sent me back down. “Maybe they sent her to a satellite camp. Maybe she’s in the bunker.”
“No, Kasia,” Anise said. “She was never there. We think it happened the first day you were operated on.”
How could it be? There’d been a terrible mistake.
“She’s gone, Kasia,” Zuzanna said.
“Impossible. No one saw anything? She was always so good at hide-and-seek. Remember? The time she hid under my bed?”
“Kasia—” Zuzanna said.
“And we spent all morning trying to find her, and she had fallen asleep under there?”
“I don’t think so, Kasia.”
“She is probably with the Bible girls,” I said. “Maybe Suhren has her cutting hair.”
“No, Kasia.”
“You just don’t care enough to look,” I said to Zuzanna.
Zuzanna pressed her homemade rosary into my hand. “Of course I care.”
I threw it to the floor with a clatter. “You never loved her like I did.” A black ink spot grew over my face, seeping into my eyes and nose and taking me down with it. “No wonder you’ve given up.”
Zuzanna retrieved her rosary.
“I will forget you said that, Kasia. It’s just the fever talking, and the shock.”
“Don’t forget it. I mean it. I am going back to the Revier right now to find her. I don’t care if they kill me.”
I tried to get out of bed, but Zuzanna pinned me down. I raged against her until I’d lost all strength. I slept, waking only to fall deeper into despair.
—
IT TOOK A FEW DAYS for it to sink in that Matka was not coming back.
At first I hoped that our Polish network just failed to find her and she was tucked away somewhere safe or transferred to another camp. When I asked girls from the block to help me find her, they were kind, but after a few days, it was clear they all believed she was dead.
There would be no funeral. No birch cross. No black cloth nailed to our door.
Before I learned to use my crutch, I depended on Anise and Zuzanna to carry me to and from the latrine. Janina needed an escort too. Our helpers were gracious, but I hated being a burden. I imagined my own death. What a wonderful, quick death it would have been to throw myself on the electric fence. Of course, no one would carry me there.
Until that time, all through our arrest, our arrival at the camp, and the operations even, I had always found good things to think about and Polish optimism to fall back on, but once Matka was gone, I could not pull myself out of the darkness. I felt like a fish I read about when I was a child, the African mudskipper. Each year when the drought came, it burrowed deep into the mud and lived there for weeks, neither dead nor alive, waiting for the rains to come and bring it back to life.
—
LIFE WENT ON AS USUAL after our release from the Revier—the brutal waking, the endless hours of Appell, and the most terrible gnawing hunger, our bosom companion. The only thing that interrupted this pattern was the terror that accompanied our Blockova reading the names of those in our block to be executed.
The procedure seldom varied. It was preceded by warnings from the prisoner-workers in the front office that the courier had arrived from Berlin with an order of execution and that the male guards who served as executioners had been approved for extra schnapps rations. Then Binz would order certain blocks locked down. Once the noon soup was delivered but before it was served, the Blockova would read the numbers of “the pieces to be called.” The unlucky ones prepared their things, and Binz and friends came to get them shortly. My reaction seldom varied either: The cold fear my name would be called out. The relief it was not. The terrible stabs of sadness watching a blockmate go through her final ritual.
The day the first executions of Rabbits were announced we waited, barely breathing, on the benches of the dining table, packed tight—Zuzanna on my right, Regina to my left. Those of us who’d been operated on had just graduated to eating at table, a big event, for it meant our soup no longer had to be brought to our bunks. There were many rumors that the commandant would schedule the Rabbits for execution, liquidate us to eliminate the evidence of the crime, but could we believe rumors? There was always a new one, like that the Americans were on their way to save us or that there would be steak in the soup.
“Attention,” Marzenka said as two Russian girls struggled the soup boiler into the block. “H?ftlings with numbers called up will finish here, collect their things, and await further instruction.”
Marzenka pulled a square of paper from her jacket pocket and unfolded it, the crinkling of it the only sound in the room.
“Number 7649.”
To my left, Regina stiffened.
Marzenka read the names of three other Rabbits, all still recovering in the Revier.
“No,” Zuzanna said. “There must be a mistake.”
I wrapped one arm around Regina.
“No hysterics,” Marzenka said.
How could this be happening?