Chapter 34 Rosalie
THIRTY-FOUR
ROSALIE
SS RESIDENTIAL ZONE, AUSCHWITZ PERIMETER
Sneaking out of the Weymans’ house at a late hour should be the most frightening part.
I’m more afraid it won’t be.
The air is wet and cold. The skeletal trees in the woods have shed for the winter, concealing less.
A chill clings to my skin as I run from the sound of my own footsteps through the sunken wooded path.
Branches crack, and leaves scrape. Somewhere, an owl hoots with warning, but my pulse drowns out the surroundings.
Three more letters to and from Stefan, slipped through the Polish resistance and their alternate postal routes. Each one felt like a severing lifeline. He knows where I am. He wrote me his plan. I wrote not to come.
But he’s on his way now.
He had the last word, just three days ago, when I received his last letter that said:
“No amount of words will keep me from coming for you.”
The rest of his note was in cipher with the date, time and place for us to meet—a ribboned tree near the factory wall.
Papa’s watch reads 8:39. I’m early. Too early to know how this will turn out.
My breaths are ragged, as if I’ve run the entire way here. My heart is lodged in my throat.
Something could go wrong.
Or it could go right.
We could leave this place together and I could hide alongside him.
The minutes crawl and my gut twists into knots. I lean into the tree bark until it pokes through my coat.
Not far in the distance, a weapon fires. The wind carries a whispering cry through the trees. It’s just nature, I lie to myself.
Headlights sweep across my face, blinding me before I drop into shadow. A lorry with a tarp wrapped bed groans to a stop, exhaust choking out black smoke.
My face burns, heat sears through my cheeks, tingling before my skin turns cold. Panic. My brain and heart are fighting, one screaming to run toward the truck, the other demanding I hide, and prepare for danger.
A silhouette slips from under the tarp and keeps low, coming closer.
What if it isn’t Stefan?
A wet leaf skids beneath my heel, but I catch myself.
A hand grabs my wrist.
“You’re here,” a whisper breaks the chill, and then I’m folded into his chest that smells of wool, petrol, and—just him. The scruff of his chin grazes my forehead. There’s no question this is real. We’re together.
I break. An overwhelming sob fires through me as my arms tangle around his body, clasping my wrists to hold onto him as tightly as I can. I smother my face in his chest, masking the sound of my cries. The release of everything I’ve been holding in since we were torn apart.
“I’m here. I’ve got you,” he whimpers into my hair. Both of us shaking like the first breath after suffocating.
He cranes his neck down, kissing my cheek then my lips, holding us in a moment I wish could be an eternity. I have dreamt of his lips against mine. His arms around me. His breath on my neck.
“I missed you so much. I’ve imagined this moment so many times every day since we’ve been apart,” I utter, brushing the tip of my nose against his. “Even though I told you not to come here.”
“You’re so stubborn sometimes. Your dad warned me about that the first time we met, I believe.” He sniffles and laughs. “Everything is going to be fine. We’re in good hands.”
I step back a bit to take his hands in mine, the light from the factory catching the side of my face. “Tell me what we need to do, and I’ll do it,” I say, taking a deep breath.
“What the hell happened to your face?” Stefan snaps, tracing his fingertip along my cheek.
“I’ll be all right. We’re getting out of here, right?”
“Was it that Nazi who took you from the house?” he grits.
I shake my head. “They’re all like this. This is nothing, trust me.”
Stefan takes in a shuddered breath, and I realize I should try to keep him calm rather than enraged right now but I can’t hide the truth of what Weyman has done to me. I’m his punching bag, which has likely saved his wife from being one for the time being.
Stefan closes his eyes and takes another long breath, blowing it out slowly through pursed lips.
“We’re going to get into that truck the same way I came out.
It’s a delivery truck. They come through and leave all the time.
I happen to know this driver. This is a new route for him, but he knows what he’s doing. ”
“I’m scared,” I tell him, my voice cracking under the pressure.
“You’re never scared,” he reminds me.
“I don’t know who I am…”
Fear surges through my veins. My stomach aches. My throat closes tight.
Stefan takes my hand and slides something metallic into my palm. He curls my fingers around it. “This will remind you.” My fingers tremble as I unfold them, finding a heart-shaped winding key. “Remember what you told me about this type of key?”
Under the Prussian blue sky, painted with streaks of pale moonlight, his lips find mine.
With the tall spruces as our only witness, his fingers weave through my wavy strands as he speaks a lifetime’s worth of silent promises.
His heart beats against mine, hard, heavy, an unresolved note.
He isn’t as confident as he said. I can feel it.
This is a kiss goodbye—not one that speaks of our wishful second chance, or the impending moment we escape this hell. Something inside of him knows.
“A winding key is a promise to time. One won’t work without the other,” I utter, staring up into his misty green eyes.
A smile that deepens his dimples captures the quiet seconds between us. “That’s what you are to me,” he says. “Like time—for as long as you hold this key, time will find us. Together and always.”
I begged him not to come for me because a Jewish man should not be anywhere near these woods, especially not after his family was taken away, and he was spared. Neither of us belongs here, but I can survive if needed.
“The truck’s waiting for us,” he says, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“I’m ready,” I utter, fighting against the gnawing ache in my stomach. He takes my hand and holds on tightly as we pad carefully through the leaf covered path until the headlights of the truck bleed through the branches.
“Stop here. When you hear three taps against metal, run to me,” he whispers.
His hand slips from mine, an invisible thread unraveling between us as he races for the truck.
He’s close, within reach of the canvas tarp covering the back end.
The clatter of a rifle shuffles, echoing between the trees.
Not three taps on metal.
“Halt!”
A gasp, thud, and groan follow.
A voice inside of me screams out in agony as I peek through clenched eyes, finding Stefan face first on the ground.
Tears stream down my cheeks as a German guard kicks Stefan repeatedly while holding a rifle to the back of his head.
They prod through his pockets for papers, but I can’t see what they find before they yank him to his feet and shove him into the truck.
I cover my mouth with all the strength left in my hands, smothering the cry threatening to burst from my lungs and stumble back into a tree. Before I can take a mouthful of air, the truck moves out of sight.
“No,” I cry out. “No. Wait!” My voice is garbled, scratched, hardly making a sound.
With my arm curling around my stomach, I lunge forward, insistent on following to see where they’re taking him.
But I already know. He’s at the foot of the lion’s den, the entrance of Auschwitz. Because of me.
Breathless, throat burning, heart stammering, I watch as the guards drag Stefan toward the tall black iron gates—the ones that scream of torture and murder.
My pulse throbs between my ears while I pinch the winding-key into the flesh of my palm.
He’s gone. And I didn’t move.
Not again.
Is anyone watching from above? It feels like no one. Again.
When the darkness swallows me within its cold abyss, the crumbs of bread and barley soup I’ve been surviving on purge into a pile of brush between trees.
The tears follow, leaving me helpless, curled into a ball next to my own bile.
I hold my arms around my knees until I lose feeling, until my fingers unclasp.
I drag my limp body back to the Weymans’ residence, climb up the pergola, and shove open the window enough to slither into the cold, dark room I sleep in.
I wrestle my way onto the straw filled mattress as the tears continue to spill from my eyes, leaving me with blurry images of Stefan, face down on the ground with a rifle pressed into the back of his head.
He’s all I have…
All I had…left.
“Goddamn Pole,” his voice spits from the hallway outside the room. Heavy footsteps thud through the first floor until the stairwell creaks and moans before silence refills the house.
Weyman. Outside my door at this hour.
“You think I didn’t see you sneak in? I know where you were…” his quiet, grating words seep through the seam of the door.
What does he truly know?