Chapter 5 #2
She stays crouched, grabbing a hold of large pieces of debris to pull her back in the direction we came. I struggle behind, slower and less steady, commanding myself not to peek over at the standoff again.
We move through the trees and clearing before returning to the road that runs beside the tracks.
I thought I saw him before. I didn’t. But that man told me to run. He didn’t even sound like Noah. Now another man, different, but not different enough catches my eye.
It isn’t possible. My mind is fractured from hunger, sickness, and a head injury.
But if the Soviets are transporting German prisoners along the rail lines…moving them elsewhere… What will they eventually do with them?
The blast of a rifle echoes faintly behind us, just a loud enough response to my thought.
If they decide they’re not worth transporting… I’ll never find out why that man saved me—why he told me to run. Or why he looked so much like Noah.
I keep my eyes on the tracks, knowing the only way to know is to keep moving.
Avi takes my wrist and squeezes gently, not to pull me in a direction again, but to shake the thoughts from me.
She’s staring at me as if I might shatter.
The shouts in the distance fade, but only from the passing wind.
Avi’s younger than what I thought. She’s a girl.
A girl who should still be in school, searching for what she aspires to be when she grows up.
The surrounding whites of her dark eyes are unstained, clear, and wide open.
A scar lines her right cheek, telling a story of a different battle than this one.
“Listen,” she says, “you know what my mama would say? She’d say: war breaks people in different ways. We all want to watch our enemy go down, but we don’t know if there’s a side to this war that would spare our lives. We must remember that. We can only trust ourselves now.”
Avi doesn’t wait for me to respond. She shifts her grip, adjusts her stance, and scans each direction along the road as if mapping out a route in her head.
Every move seems deliberate like she’s already learned what hesitation costs.
It’s as if Auschwitz wasn’t the worst for her, but just another chapter in her life.
I wonder what has made her this resilient.
The railroad constricts the farther we walk, more ruins seeping in toward us as we pass. The snow crackles beneath our feet. It’s too loud. Someone could hear.
They wanted us to keep apace, but the sound of our footsteps enraged them. There was no right we could do. “Move faster, you rat, or every other woman in line will starve because of you today.” It wasn’t a warning. The kapo already decided we would starve.
The memory breaks loose as another sound strikes behind us.
Just keep moving, I tell myself. It’s what we’re supposed to do. Move and breathe, even though my lungs continue to fight.
A deafening blast cracks through the air behind us. I flinch and my back spasms with pain.
Too close. They’re still shooting German prisoners.
Avi drops to her knees, pulling me with her.
We crawl toward a leaning fence with overgrown shrubbery poking out from the brown snow.
My pulse chatters like teeth in the cold.
I dig my fingertips into the snow, ice chips poking beneath my nails as I press my face to my knees, wishing I could disappear.
But if I stop moving, I won’t catch up to that truck.
I’ll never know why any of this happened.
A hand clamps around my arm, and I can’t prevent the scream that rips from my throat, the sound bellowing against the corroded fence stakes.
Avi cups her hand around my mouth, her eyes bulging with shock.
“It’s still me. My God. You’re going to get us killed,” she shouts in a whisper. “Don’t scream again.”
My chest collapses, the scream falling into a whimper, painful behind my ribs. She doesn’t release her grip on me until I find a deep enough breath to stop the panic raging through me.
“I thought…” I cough on the cold air, shaking in a rolled-up ball. I thought it was an SS guard. A guard…
With gray sleeves.
Hands yanking me upright.
I pull in a breath, choking away the panic before it takes a hold of me again. “We keep moving. We can’t stay here,” I whisper, more to myself than her.
Avi hesitates for a moment then nods stiffly.
We barely make it a dozen steps before the sound of boots crunching grows from the other side of the fence.
Voices follow, hoarse and in clipped Russian.
Avi stiffens, staring at the wooden panels, listening to the conversation like she understands what they’re saying.
Their tone is enough of a warning to me.
“Get down,” I whisper, pulling further into the fence’s overbearing shadow. “They’re coming closer.”
Avi heaves armfuls of snow toward us, barricading our area against the broken fence.
Russians are shouting, boots are trudging, weapons clicking and clattering.
A rifle butt jabs into the wooden fence, rustling the frozen shrubbery.
A man laughs nearby, and I squeeze my eyes shut, bracing myself for the repercussions of hiding from a man in uniform.
Uniforms mean order, and language doesn’t matter when carrying weapons.
“If they find us here…” Avi whispers.
“They won’t care who we are or what we’re doing. They’re clearing the area.”
We’re still in prisoner uniforms. They’ll see that much. It’s not wrong to hide. It’s all we know how to do.
The fence creaks again.
Someone steps in closer, and I brace myself for what comes next, something I’ve had to learn the hard way.