Chapter 15 Rosalie #2
“Shh, don’t speak,” I tell him, brushing my fingertips along his cheek. “Look at me.”
He struggles to lift his eyelids any higher, but it’s enough for me to see unfocused pupils.
“-ei-ure,” he says, his tongue seemingly useless while trying to speak.
“Seizure?” I whisper.
He closes his eyes and nods once.
“Did you bite your tongue?”
He nods again.
“How long ago?” I shouldn’t be asking him questions. Someone is going to hear me, rat me out again.
“-o-ay…”
“I don’t know—” I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. “It’s all right. I need you to focus on me. Take some deep breaths, try to calm your mind.”
He shakes his head, distinctly, refusing. Disorientation can last a while after a seizure depending on how bad it was. I know this. I learned this from him. It must have just happened. He’s not thinking correctly.
I use the sleeve of my smock and wipe away some of the blood on his mouth as the metal from the clipboard pinches between the bunk and my chest. The exterior door creaks. A reminder that Weyman is counting the minutes, waiting for me to move quickly.
“You need to stand. You must.”
His face crumples with pain. “Can’—”
I move my mouth closer to his ear. “You must. There’s no other option. You understand?”
His eyes steady on me, focusing more, as if my words are coming through clearly now.
He struggles to move his hands beneath his chest but manages to push himself up.
The effort steals his breath, possibly every breath in his lungs.
His arms shake as he maneuvers himself to roll off the side of the bed.
I step down and back up, allowing him more space as he nearly crumbles to the ground.
“Efficient.” The word, cold and brazen, traveling from the door. “Preference is unwise, Fr?ulein Kaufman.”
Weyman’s voice hits me like a boulder shattering against concrete. I twist, peering over my shoulder toward the door, finding him watching me, not the line. He scratches something down on a notepad then steps back and slams the door shut.
What have I done?
My lungs grow cold as Stefan catches a wooden beam and digs his fingernails into the soft wood, managing to hold himself upright.
I peel the clipboard away from chest and mark him as “fit” despite Weyman accusing me of giving Stefan preferential treatment.
He couldn’t see which prisoner I was interacting with.
He was too far away. It could have been any one of them.
I must believe this. He will punish me, me alone. I can take it.
“Good. You’re all right. You’ll be fine,” I whisper to Stefan. Will he? Where did he have the seizure? Who saw?
His nostrils flare and lips shiver. He can see the truth in my eyes. I can feel it. We both know he’s not fine.
My eyes close for a blink, imagining him smiling, making a joke, teasing me until I throw an insult back at him. That man is still in this body, but all I see are flesh and bones. “I love you,” I say so softly, I’m not sure even he could hear me.
I turn away as my eyes fill with tears. I can’t wipe them away.
I can’t touch my face. They’ll just streak, leave marks along the ash that’s caked along my flesh throughout the day.
I still need to finish the remainder of the list, but my heart thrashes against my ribcage, knowing Weyman will be scrutinizing my decisions, even though at least half of the men in this barrack didn’t respond to their number.
And there aren’t two lines.
Only one.
Moving back and forth between the Auschwitz compounds and the Weyman residence feels much like straddling a thin line between summer and winter.
Warmth greets us at the front door of his house because there’s never a lack of firewood, or dry heat escaping the kitchen’s oven.
The clamminess along my palms burns from carbolic solution I scrubbed my hands and face with to disinfect after leaving the isolation barrack. My face must be red and splotchy, too.
The scent of clean linen, polished wood, a hint of lemon and lavender, all of which are subdued by a pungent assault of perfume, anger me. It’s all for the sake of living in denial. Perfume can’t conceal death.
I wonder if his wife and children smell Auschwitz on us when we step inside at the end of the day. Musty bodily waste, sweat, blood, and rotting corpses. “After my family’s greetings, you’ll wash,” he utters.
That’s all he’s said to me since leaving Auschwitz. Not a word about preferential treatment.
As usual, I stand back by the entrance as their family’s evening greetings commence in the middle of the foyer. A loving homecoming after a brutally long day of torturing people.
Does Stefan remember the way I used to smell? Can he recall that type of memory? Can anyone there? The sight of his unfocused eyes, and blood seeping out of his mouth flash through my mind, curdling what little remains in my stomach.
Lotte, Weyman’s golden-haired, blue-eyed wife with their infant baby cradled in her arm, doesn’t even twitch upon offering her husband a kiss hello.
Her gaze shifts to me, eyes narrowing ever so slightly before returning her attention to Weyman.
“How was work, dear?” If there weren’t a handful of prisoners from Auschwitz working mindlessly throughout the rooms of this house, I’d think Lotte is an ideal wife and mother of four with how put together she always appears.
Every night, she asks her husband how work was even though she must know exactly what he spends his day doing.
“Good. Productive,” he says, his stare grazing past her to me. His eye twitches, a hint of what he hasn’t forgotten from today. But his words, they’re lies his family expects to hear.
Never mind the bodies. The screams. How many innocent people were sent to their death in a matter of hours. Wouldn’t want the children to know he’s incapable of thinking for himself or being anything but the monster he is.
“I won an award at school today, Father,” Claude, Weyman’s only son says, holding up a brass statue of an eagle with its pointy wings, prodding into his fingers, the swastika shining as if polished the occasion.
“Most prompt salutes this week.” He’s seven and I’ve declared him ill with potato-rot—a deteriorating state-of-mind caused by naive admiration.
“Well done, son. That’s a fine quality to be acknowledged for. But you didn’t salute me upon my arrival.” Weyman raises a brow and crosses his arms over his chest.
Claude snaps upright, straightens his shoulders and slices his hand through the air, fingers and arm straighter than an arrow. “Heil Hitler,” he barks.
“Very good, son,” he praises with laughter. “What more could a father ask for?”
This is what pride looks like to Weyman. A child trumpeting on command. An emotionally gutted boy honoring ignorant discipline. Within the secured boundaries of this SS neighborhood, power is pride. But outside these guarded boundaries—before all of this…pride meant something much different.
Pride was keeping the clocks of Sanok running on time. It was running a family factory, then surrendering the deed to protect loved ones. Pride was teaching children the weight of a promise, the importance of integrity, and how to hold on to the good, even when there wasn’t much of it left.
Weyman doesn’t know how to love his children, let alone teach them how to love.
He doesn’t even glance at Greta, who at just eight years old refuses to raise her hand like her brother.
She just stares—questions pooling within her sad blue eyes, trying to understand a world that doesn’t make sense.
I’ll also venture to guess no one knows where Hilde is now.
“Is Hilde in her bedroom?” I ask from behind them.
“I believe so. I’m sure that’s where she is…” Lotte replies, unsure, as if reasonable not to know where her own three-year-old is.
“How do you not know where our daughter is?” Weyman scolds her.
“I’ve been busy,” she says, turning to seek her reflection in their framed mirror.
“With what?” he presses.
“What type of question is that? What do you think I do all day?”
“I honestly can’t imagine, Lotte.”
I rush up the stairs toward the children’s quarters to check on Hilde, but barely make it halfway before catching Lotte’s stabbing recoil: “Well, I certainly don’t spend my day ogling Rosalie—the servant you brought here to help me. That’s for you to do, isn’t it?”
Her words steal the wind from my lungs, confirming what I wish I was wrongly imagining. His wife sees it. She knows.
I fling myself away from the stairwell and into the corridor outside of the children’s bedrooms, clutching my chest, forcing air back into my lungs.
I could follow every rule, never complain, never even speak, but it wouldn’t stop what’s happening. What’s completely out of my control here.
The only control I’m allowed is over the children, and even that is conditional.
Hilde.
I grip the skirted fabric of my dress, push their cutting words to the side, and move quicker. I need to make sure she’s all right.
She’s three and curious. She shouldn’t be left alone.
The drawers of her walnut bureau are pulled out, clothes toppling out in every direction.
She’s perched on the top, in nothing but bloomers, one hand gripping a frayed rag doll in one hand, the other dragging her fingernails down her chest that rises too fast with each breath.
The floor creaks as I lunge to grab her.
I scoop her up just before she releases a shallow rusty exhale and hold her against my chest, feeling the flutter of her rapid heartbeat.
“You can’t climb like that anymore, sweetheart,” I whisper, but her head has already fallen to my shoulder, limp from exhaustion.
“That must have been a lot of work to climb all the way up to the top of your bureau?”
I can’t scold her for not knowing. She doesn’t understand that even childish play can tire a weakened heart.
The murmur began months ago following an untreated case of Rheumatic fever.
But no one in this household believes or perhaps trusts doctors.
Doctors can turn them in to the Reich. Mark them as “unfit” in a different way than I’m forced to do.
Though I suspect the outcome is the same for anyone who doesn’t live up to the Aryan standard of perfection.
I slip her dress back over her head and settle her on my hip to carry her downstairs. “Frau Weyman?” My words echo through the corridor just before entering the dimly lit elegant dining room. “What did Hilde have for lunch today?”
“For lunch,” she asks, her red painted nails fiddling with the pearls on her necklace. “Is something wrong?” Her question doesn’t follow with a typical response of jumping up from her seat to check on her child. “We had herring, slaw, and pickles, I believe.” Her words are emotionless and flat.
“I told you she can’t have that much salt.”
“Well, it slipped my mind. You said she would be fine, did you not?”
I suggested limiting her salts and avoiding extraneous activity because I don’t have medical equipment to give her a more finite answer. “I said I’m sure she’ll be fine, but she should see a doctor.”
Weyman slams his fists against the table, silverware clattering, chandelier clinking. “Perhaps you’d like to consult that admiring doctor in Auschwitz?” he sneers. “He seems utterly fascinated by you.”
“I don’t understand,” Lotte says with an easy chuckle, setting her fork down, a shiver of a clink to follow.
Yes, she does. She knows how her husband looks at me, like I’m something more than a servant to him. That his words speak of jealousy rather than annoyance.
“Never mind, Lotte,” Weyman grunts, his casual manner gone. “No doctor is going to offer us a desirable solution. Not for Hilde. Not for anyone. All they’ll do is mark her as disabled. I won’t let that happen.”
He shifts his narrow glare from his wife toward me. “Understood,” I reply, stepping back from the table.
“Perhaps that’s the problem, Fr?ulein Kaufman. You don’t understand as much as you should by now.” He shakes his head and leans back in his chair, clenching his napkin within his fist. “You seem to think there are exceptions to rules when there aren’t.”
He stops speaking, but I dare not blink.
“Not for my daughter…” his words sink into a ghostly hiss, “and not for the prisoner you favor. Lingering over a certain man, calling a number twice…” I knew this wasn’t over.
Weyman’s stare burns through my head, and soul—every one of my nerve’s frays, still pondering consequence that lies ahead.
“You forget I see everything.” I’ve done anything but forget.
The look in his eyes, it’s the one he has before he strikes me for disobedience, but there’s more fury now. More rage.
He won’t punish me with his hands this time.