But fate, which has behaved so badly toward them, determines that just at this very moment, not one of the guards, tired of the docile manner of the prisoners and more concerned with eyeing the younger girls than with being vigilant, actually notices. Nor does Mengele, distracted just then by the registrar, who apparently has not heard one of the numbers dictated to him and asks the doctor for his assistance. Some of the women sent to the left have shrieked and begged and thrown themselves on the ground, and the guards have had to drag them away. But Liesl didn’t complain or protest. She has calmly walked nude in front of Death’s eyes with a naturalness and a lack of haste that would have unnerved even the bravest of the brave.
Dita has to grab her chest to stop her heart from leaping out. She glances at her mother, who is standing behind her and looking at her absentmindedly, seemingly unaware of what she has done. She’s not brave enough to do something like that in a premeditated way … although Dita doesn’t know what to think. Without saying a word, they hold hands tightly and squeeze as hard as they can. And they look at each other and say everything with that glance. Another woman joins the line and places herself behind Liesl to hide from the guards’ line of sight.
The Germans send them to the quarantine camp. Once there, there are joyous hugs among those who find themselves in this group, which has been saved for now, and dejected faces near the entrance waiting for relatives and friends who never arrive. Mrs. Turnovská isn’t in the quarantine camp group, nor are any of the woman who were part of her mother’s conversation group. The children don’t arrive, either. And Dita has heard nothing more of Miriam Edelstein, although it is true that there’s a great deal of confusion. They begin to evacuate the first groups of people toward the station platform before the final selections of BIIb have been completed. Margit isn’t in Dita’s group, either.
It is a fact that they have momentarily dodged death. But survival is a minuscule consolation when so many innocent people are left behind to die.
28.
Another train. Eight months have passed since the liquidation of the family camp, and once again they are inside a stock car traveling to who knows where. Her very first trip was from Prague to Terezín. Then it was from Terezín to Auschwitz. Next, it was from Auschwitz to Hamburg. And now Dita no longer knows where this diaspora by train, which has derailed her youth, is taking her.
On the Auschwitz platform, the Germans had shoved them into a freight train and sent them with a group of women to Germany. It was a voyage of hunger, of thirst, of mothers separated from their children, of daughters without mothers. When they opened the stock car in Hamburg, the SS found a container full of broken dolls.
Exchanging Poland for Germany hadn’t made things any better. There, the members of the SS had more news of the war, and nervousness spread. Germany was retreating on all fronts, and the feverish dream of the Third Reich was starting to crack. The guards vented their rage and frustration on the Jews, whom they blamed for the inevitable defeat.
They’d sent their prisoners to a camp where the working day was so long that it seemed as if the days had far more than twenty-four hours. When they got back to their huts, they didn’t even have the strength to complain. They only managed to eat their soup in silence and stretch out on their bunks to try and recover for the next day.
Dita has one image drilled into her head from the months they spent in Hamburg: her mother in front of a brick-packing machine, sweat dripping from under the kerchief on her head. Liesl was sweating, but her expression was as impassive, focused, and serene as if she were preparing a potato salad.
Dita was suffering because of her mother, who was so fragile that not even the slight improvement in rations compared with Auschwitz had led to her putting on any weight at all. It was forbidden to talk while they worked, but whenever Dita passed with a load of some material near the conveyor belt at which her mother was working, she would wordlessly ask how she was doing, and Liesl would nod and smile. She was always fine.
Dita admits that sometimes her mother drives her mad—no matter how she’s feeling, Liesl always says she’s fine. How can Dita know the truth?
But Mrs. Adler is always feeling fine for Dita.
Right now, in this train, Liesl, her head resting against the wall of the carriage, is pretending to be asleep. She knows that Edita wants her to sleep, although in actual fact, for months now, she’s only been able to sleep off and on during the night. But she’s not going to tell that to her daughter, who’s too young to understand how tragic it is for a mother not to be able to give her daughter a happy childhood.
The only thing that Liesl can do for her daughter—who is already stronger, braver, and more perceptive than she ever was—is to worry her as little as possible, and always to say she’s perfectly well, although since the death of her husband, she feels a wound inside her that is continually bleeding.
Work in the brick factory in Hamburg hadn’t lasted long. The nervousness in the Nazis’ top leadership group had produced contradictory orders. A few weeks later, Dita and her mother were transferred to another factory, where they recycled military material. Defective bombs that hadn’t exploded were being repaired in one of the workshops. Nobody particularly seemed to mind working there, and that included Dita and Liesl: You worked under cover, so when it rained, you didn’t get wet.
One afternoon as she was heading back to her hut after she’d finished her working day, Dita spotted Renée Neumann coming out of a workshop, chatting animatedly with some girls. Dita was really pleased to see her. Renée gave her a friendly smile and a brief wave from a distance, but kept on walking without stopping, utterly absorbed in the conversation with her companions. She’s made new friends, thought Dita, people who don’t know she once had a friend in the SS and to whom she doesn’t owe any explanations. She doesn’t want to stop and talk with her past.
And now the Germans have mobilized the prisoners yet again, without telling them where they’re going, turning them once more into livestock that has to be transported.
“They treat us like lambs being taken to the slaughterhouse,” complains a woman with a Sudeten accent.
“If only! They feed sheep being taken to the slaughterhouse.”
The stock car sways with the sound of a sewing machine. It’s like a metallic oven for baking sweat. Dita and her mother are sitting on the floor together with a contingent of women of various nationalities, but many of them German Jews. Of the thousand women who left the family camp at Auschwitz behind eight months ago, only half now remain. They’re exhausted. Dita examines her hands; they are the hands of an old woman.
Although perhaps it’s a different type of exhaustion. They’ve spent years being shoved from one place to another and threatened with death, sleeping poorly and eating badly, without knowing if there’s a purpose to it all, if they really are going to see the end of this war.
The worst thing is that Dita is beginning not to care. Apathy is the worst possible symptom.
No, no, no … I won’t give in.