The Family Behind the Walls

26. Dalia

TWENTY-SIX

DALIA

OCTOBER 9TH, 1943 – O?WI?CIM, POLAND

Throughout the blurry hours and night following Max’s death, I laid awake on the wooden board in my barrack unable to move while tears streaked down my face and soaked my clothes. The stench of sour body odor, bodily fluids, rotting flesh, and oak floated around me, adding to my nausea. The repeated sounds of coughs, moans, and rustling across wood came in patterns and waves, never ceasing for more than a minute. The visions in my head of Max’s last moments, it’s all could see—it’s all I may ever see again…All I can do is consider the idea of giving up.

I’m ashamed of the thought now, as I stare at the clock in the ward, realizing it’s been an entire day since Max died in my arms. I’m already dead inside.

“If we can make it through this, we can make it through anything,” Leo said to me upon returning home after the Great War ended. It was so easy to believe those words. The odds were not in his favor of returning, and yet, he did. Of course, not without telling me it was his lucky compass that got him through the war. I know it’s just superstition, but I should have given the children compasses too. Maybe I wouldn’t be mourning my eldest child’s death right now.

If Leo’s right and that compass does bring him back to me, somehow, it won’t matter because a part of us is dead and won’t ever be coming back. We’ve lost a piece of ourselves. How am I supposed to carry on now?

I’ve watched fellow prisoners purposely run into the electrified barbed-wire fences to rid themselves of misery. If this torture is a test of our strength and endurance, what’s left to confirm? How strong will a person become before a higher power decides it’s enough to move on to whatever comes next after this life? I don’t know if there’s a next one. I prefer to believe there is because it offers me comfort, but no one truly knows if there’s an oblivion of darkness that follows our last breath. At forty-two, I still can’t wrap my head around the meaning of a person’s lifetime in comparison to the duration of eternity.

“Bed eight,” Marie calls out. Another life. Gone.

More patients are dying today than yesterday. Is that my fault too? Our supplies are gone.

A set of hands rests on my shoulders while rearranging an empty bed between two occupied ones. The gesture startles me, and I gasp.

“I’m so sorry,” a woman says from behind me.

I turn around, finding an unfamiliar nurse and fellow prisoner, but not someone I’ve worked with in this ward or triage. By the badge on her smock, I see she’s a Polish political prisoner, not Jewish.

“Is there something I can help you with?” I ask her, staring into her eyes which carry thoughts I’m certain she won’t share out loud.

“Your efforts haven’t gone unnoticed,” she says. “I’m sorry to hear about your son, as well.”

I don’t know how she knows anything about me unless she’s an acquaintance of Marie or Ina who also work in this ward with me. The three of us have formed a nice bond, a quiet one, but a strong one, nonetheless.

“Give me your hands,” she says, speaking in a hushed whisper. I do as she says, confused and unsure what to expect. She dips her hand beneath the collar of her smock and pulls out a small handmade satchel. “Take this, wear it around your neck and keep the satchel between your breasts.”

Her filled hands are already resting in mine, but I cup my palms around her fists this time. She releases the fabric filled with lumps made of different small sizes and shapes.

“What—”

“Put it on now,” she says, pulling her hands from mine. I slip the thin strap around my neck, sliding it beneath my collar and fold the satchel down the center of my chest. “We’re rewarded for reporting infractions, but we’ll live longer if we don’t.”

I don’t know what’s inside the satchel, but I understand her statement. Friendships are rare in Auschwitz because it’s every person for themselves. Survival is a one-person job. We’ve come to learn that reporting unacceptable behavior can result in extra food. We’re rewarded for turning on each other. Desperation can alter a person’s ability to navigate their morals.

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I caused anyone here more pain, grief, or worse for the sake of my personal gain. But I understand when someone else can’t stop themselves from falling victim to desperation. We’re all weak. We all have a breaking point. I might be beyond that but I’m unsure if anyone ever knows where that point is, was, or might be.

“Thank you,” I whisper. I’m thanking her for whatever she’s given me, for her warning. For her sympathy.

“You’re still standing after losing a child. I know strength when I see it, and strength is what many of us need. There are more of us who have gone through the same.” Her eyes narrow but don’t blink, and her words are vague. Yet, I think I understand what she’s saying.

“How can I help?—”

“Notes. I need notes. On everything you’ve seen, experienced, and live through in Birkenau. There is paper and a pencil in the medical supply bin. I can pick up the notes tomorrow.”

The movement of her lips is louder than her voice but somehow, I manage to make out what she’s saying. The hair on my skin rises, fear strikes a nerve, and I don’t know whether I should trust this woman or consider the thought of being set up. “For whom?” It’s my only question.

“Everyone on the other side of these walls. Every chain requires links. And every lock requires a—well, you have what you need if you choose to do so.”

Her words are cryptic, but she speaks so eloquently, and with a form of confidence I haven’t come across here before. The slightest of smiles touches her lips and she places her hand on my shoulder. “Take care.”

As she slips away, a shiver runs down my back and I search around the ward, seeking Ina or Marie, wondering if they saw the woman I was speaking with.

They’re both busy with patients so I turn to face a wall, unfurl my hand and loosen the fabric wrapped ball of goods, finding loose aspirin, a slim box of iodine swabs, Benzedrine sulfate tablets, bandages, a scrap of paper with a combination of a dozen numbers and letters, and hard candy. My eyeballs feel as if they might fall out of their sockets, so I rewrap the package, tighten my fist around it and shove it beneath my smock collar to drop it in the satchel. I’m overwhelmed by the idea of everything I have on my person now. Clearly, I need to find out why this woman just handed it all to me. But the aspirin, the aspirin I so desperately needed for Max—would this have been enough to keep him alive?

Before moving on to the next patient’s bed, I stop at the medical supply bin and take a few loose sheets of paper and a pencil, adding it to the other supplies in my satchel. As I pull my arm back out from beneath my collar, I realize the danger is writing anything down on paper. The possibility of confiscation is higher than the probability of the correct person receiving the note.

I continue working through my rounds of dying patients, jotting down their statuses and trying to focus on what I’m doing rather than trying to figure out what that woman wants from me.

“How are you doing?” Ina asks after I step away from the last bed in the row.

“I feel dead inside,” I tell her. I shouldn’t have said that. We’re all dead inside at this point.

“That means you’re still alive,” she says.

Her words don’t feel like a blessing.

“Di-did you ah—” I press my hand to my forehead, trying to focus my erratic thoughts, “notice the nurse who came in a bit ago, who pulled me aside to talk?”

I glance over at Marie. Similarly to Ina, Marie is a Polish non-Jewish prisoner. Marie was also arrested on account of so-called resistance, really only offering nursing aid to local Jewish people in her town.

Ina lowers her stare to the ground between our feet. “Yes, I know her.”

“She gave me?—”

“Shh,” Ina says. “She’s been made aware you’re trustworthy. We’ve told her you’re one of us—a fighter until the end. She might be able to help.”

Ina walks away, making it clear she doesn’t want to have any further discussion about my interaction with the other nurse, yet she has brought me into a circle of trust and I’m not certain what that might mean. I’m grateful but terrified.

I assume Marie must know her too.

The next row of patients is waiting or lost the battle of waiting, and now need to be moved elsewhere. Some mornings when I arrive, I question if I’m only here to escort people to their death or give them one last inkling of hope before they let go. I’m just watching people die unnecessarily.

Another case of starvation lies before me and the hard candy in the satchel feels heavier as I stare at the person. I couldn’t guess how old they might be. It’s hard to tell whether they’re male or female sometimes. Every skeleton looks the same. The only differentiation between us all now is the cloth badges sewn to our uniforms: Yellow stars for the Jews along with possible accompanying-colored triangles depending on any additional committed crimes. There are red triangles for political criminals, black for anti-social people, pink for homosexuals, blue for emigrants, green for criminals, and purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses. This person dying in front of me has a star made from yellow and red triangles, marking them to be a Jewish political criminal. They must have chosen to stand up for themselves, setting aside the understanding that we Jews aren’t allowed to do that.

I take a moment to check the record, finding their number and an “F” circled. Date of birth: The 7th day of April 1925. She’s only eighteen, born in Le Mans, France.

Malnutrition is the only note listed on her log.

I’m sure that will be altered at some point. Malnutrition suggests she’s starving to death. I would give her one of my hard candies if she were conscious.

A whistling tune drawls and drones down the corridor wards. The sound, though muted by the walls, shrills through my ears, knowing whose lips are forming the celebratory tune. I’ve met him twice, only to answer questions about patients. But Ina and Marie have told me heinous stories of what this high-level doctor is responsible for here at Auschwitz. They’ve warned me to never look at him without being summoned and never ask questions with him standing within earshot. The man never delivers good news, but is always perky and polite.

The whistling stops just outside the ward’s door, and I silently pray he keeps walking. I have stolen items in my satchel, after all.

The whistling continues, the footsteps too, and I release the breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

I lift the young woman’s arm in front of me and check her pulse for an updated number.

“Bed twenty,” I say, my voice hardly loud enough to carry more than a row or two.

Marie passes by, making her way toward the main door. “You’re lucky,” she says to me. “Took me five months before—before that nurse you spoke to earlier, spoke to me. She must see something in you.”

“What do you mean by that?” I ask.

“Do what she said. It won’t be long now.” Marie nods her head, as if agreeing with her quiet words. “The scrap of paper you have—solve it first.”

I’ve been staring at this small piece of torn paper for hours. My mind is dizzy from trying to decipher the puzzling meaning of these English words:

FIVE PACK MY LIQUOR JUGS WITH A DOZEN BOXES

brAVE QUEENS FIXED PICKY DAMAGED WAR JETS IN HAZY LOSS

**TVWGCPF NVF QBGVC 15.10.43**

The two lines don’t even make sense. The other nurses might refer to themselves as queens. We’re all brave. Maybe my English isn’t as good as I thought and I’m confusing definitions.

In frustration, I drop my head onto my arms, covering the paper and the hint of light shining in through the window from a nearby watchtower. I didn’t write the notes the woman asked me to because she told me to read this note before doing so. It makes me think of a story Leo once told about the war…

“We intercepted these messages sent through carrier pigeons. That’s the only reason some of us survived. While under that type of pressure, it took us a long time to decode the memos we were able to get our hands on, and most of the time it was too late to shift our directions, but we were at least prepared for what was coming. The enemy certainly didn’t intend for us to know so much,” Leo says, lying awake, staring at the dark ceiling just as he does most nights. It’s been almost a year since the Great War ended but I’m certain he hasn’t slept through an entire night since he’s gotten home. I’ve always told him to wake me up if he can’t sleep. It’s still early tonight. We only just blew out the candles a few minutes ago.

I have a habit of waiting until he falls asleep before I close my eyes. I worry about him so much and I don’t want him sitting up alone with the thoughts and memories that ravage his mind.

“Decode? Were they in a different language?” I ask, resting my hand on his chest.

His heart beats as if he’s been running for an hour. It’s rare to find him in a calm state. I wish I could help him, do something to ease his burdens. He tells me I keep him at peace just by being here, but I know that can’t be true.

“No, the ones we intercepted were written Russian words,” he says.

“You knew enough Russian to understand them?” I clarify.

“Oh, no. It wasn’t that simple. They were written with the expectation that the recipient, another Russian, had a mathematical key to decode the message. They’re in a ciphertext—an encryption.”

“How were you able to decipher it if you didn’t have the key?”

Leo wraps his arm around me and pulls me in closer. “You married a smart man,” he says with a chuckle.

“Thank God,” I say.

“The type of ciphertext the Russians sent used an older method of cryptography which was easier to decode. It was a matter of matching scrambled letters with their alphabet and figuring out how many positions, positive or negative, the alphabet shifted in their original encoding. I’m sure we would have had an easier time with them if they were formulated in Polish or German, of course.”

“I wouldn’t have known where to start,” I tell him.

“We learned some in our basic training. There were only sixty-six possibilities of matching up the letters with the thirty-three letters in their alphabet. Sometimes we found the difference quicker by luck. Other times, it took us nearly sixty-six attempts to finally sort it out.”

“I’m confident you would have figured it out too. You don’t let much get in your way, and your determination—well, I’m proud to be your husband.” Leo kisses my cheek and finally settles into his pillow. “I love you, darling.”

“I love you,” I tell him, falling asleep to letters and numbers floating around in my head.

I gasp from my half sleep state of distress on the wooden plank. I lift my heavy head, staring down at the paper again. The two sentences have nothing to do with each other. That must be the key.

In silence, I recite the English alphabet, finding one of each letter in the top sentence and the bottom sentence. But there are more than twenty-six letters in each. I write out the alphabet on one of the blank sheets of paper I took from the medical bin, trying not to tap my pencil too hard. No one else needs to sit awake through the night. The daytime is bad enough.

All I see are letters swimming across the page. There are more letters in the second line than there are in the first. The numbers on the bottom line match the date.

I only need twenty-six letters and another twenty-six to line up, if I’m lucky, and this isn’t an impossible mathematical equation relying on an actual key I don’t have. But what would the purpose of that interaction have been if so?

I reach down toward my feet, finding my infirmary apron and pull out one of the hard candies and pop it into my mouth.

The tart and sugary sweet taste shocks my taste buds, causing a nerve pain to sting my cheek, but then it’s a small piece of heaven on my tongue. Drool forms on my lips and I cover my mouth. Oh my…I sigh, reveling in a fantasy of tasting sweets again. Nothing has ever tasted so delicious.

I return my stare to the paper, back and forth between my written alphabet and the nonsensical words. I rewrite the two lines on my paper and begin to underline the alphabetical letters as I spot the letters in the top line. The second instance of duplicate letters, I cross out. Then I do the same to the second line.

FIVE PACK MY L I QUOR J U GS W I TH A D O Z E N B O X ES

brAVE QU EE NS FIX E D P I CKY DA M A G ED W AR J E T S IN H A Z Y LO SS

F|I|V|E|P|A|C|K|M|Y|L|Q|U|O|R|J|G|S|W|T|H|D|Z|N|B|X

____________________________________________________

B|R|A|V|E|Q|U|N|S|F|I|X|D|P|C|K|Y|M|G|W|J|T|H|Z|L|O

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

____________________________________________________

Q|L|U|T|V|B|Y|J|R|K|N|I|S|Z|P|E|X|C|W|G|D|A|M|O|F|H

I stare back at the original note, wondering how I’m supposed to know for sure that I’ve decoded this correctly. I could be so very wrong.

This part doesn’t quite fit in with the other two lines:

**TVWGCPF NVF QBGVC 15.10.43**

I know the last part is the date, but I match the other letters up to the rough key I just created on my extra paper.

**DESTROY KEY AFTER 15.10.43 **

All I can do is stare in disbelief. I thought for sure I was out of my mind, but I wasn’t. This is how she wants me to write my notes. Using this mismatched alphabet that can be decoded later.

I have dedicated the past two hours to writing as much as I can on these pieces of paper, all coded per the alphabetical key. Once I hear people stirring, I tuck everything away, remembering what the note said about destroying the key. I tear off the top part of the paper with the mismatched letters in the two rows.

I crumple the thin strip of paper and jump when the gong sounds across the compound, shaking the walls and the wooden bunks. Most everyone around moves quickly when the gong rings. I panic and shove the paper into my mouth, hoping I can dampen it enough with my dry, dehydrated tongue—the candy. My mouth isn’t as dry as usual. I chew the paper and grab my belongings.

I turn to leave with the others, but I’m sideswiped and thrashed into the wooden posts. “Watch it,” Brygid yips after shoving me. She clearly hasn’t warmed up to me at all, despite my attempts to greet her twice a day. She always seems annoyed with my behavior no matter what I do.

I hurry to the latrines and washrooms. With the paper in my mouth, for a moment, I tell myself I am chewing on a piece of meat, something savory I just pulled out of the oven for dinner. My stomach craves to feel something in my hollow stomach, and I swallow the piece of meat, allowing the secret to disappear within me. I tuck the other papers under my smock, now understanding how deadly my words could become if someone knew how to decipher them.

What if this was all a trap? To see if I would comply. Ina wouldn’t let that happen to me. We’ve shared far more secrets than anyone else I’ve met here. Ina wants justice after losing everything before arriving here. She’s made it clear she will continue to fight until all of our lives are put back together, somehow. Except, I don’t know if her life could ever be put back together.

The relentless thoughts gnaw at me as I trek through the chilly wind over to the main camp, following a new block elder I’m not familiar with. People come and go from this place as if it’s a train station, except the people aren’t typically going to a different destination. They’re dying and being burnt to ashes. It’s a secret that isn’t quite a secret.

The orchestra is playing at full capacity this morning, making me wonder what German official must be making an appearance here. The SS officers are under the impression that some lovely music can set a different tune to the torture and suffering endured by everyone here.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to hear music the same way I once did. The scene of a living hell in the backdrop of Bach, Beethoven, and Zimmer’s compositional pieces is a dramatic paradox.

Before entering the ward, a cold hand tightens around my wrist and jerks me in the opposite direction. I find the unfamiliar nurse from yesterday to be the one who has a hold of me. “Where are you taking me?” I huff at her, keeping my voice down.

“Be quiet,” she snaps under her breath. She pushes me into a small room and closes the door. “Do you have the notes?”

She holds her hand out, a tremor obvious. She’s nervous. “Who will be receiving it?”

The woman drops her head. “Did you write them or not?”

“Do you mean, did I solve the code?” I reply.

“Yes,” she hisses.

“I will answer you when you answer me.”

She leans toward me to whisper in my ear. “I’m a small part of a much larger resistance. We have help on the outside.”

I swallow hard, feeling as if the paper has risen back up to my throat. “How dangerous is this?” It’s a silly question seeing how each day we’re still here is another day longer than we expected to survive.

“No more dangerous than going to sleep at night,” she says.

I reach under my smock and retrieve the folded notes. “I followed your instructions,” I say, placing the papers in her hand. “Thank you for the?—”

“Enough. No thank you is necessary. Our work here is far from complete.”

“What ward do you work in?” I ask.

“The one where people return to work later in the day.”

“The people with hope?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s what we should call it.”

“I’d prefer to work there than where I am.”

“We all move around. You’ll be out of there soon, I’m sure.”