Chapter 7
SEVEN
CURRENT DAY
Babice, Poland
Enemies and allies blur into one. There’s nowhere to hide. Not like the home Noah and I shared in Amsterdam—our safe haven.
Avi and I, pinned together, still lean against the broken fence, hiding and holding our breath as the Soviet soldiers slowly move along the other side of the fence. It’s as if they’re guarding the German prisoners, making sure no one gets close enough to interfere.
The clop of a rifle against a belt jolts me as they rustle through dry brush.
Then, there’s quiet. Painful silence. The footsteps stop. I can only hear my own heart pounding.
I don’t release my breath until the snow crunch of Soviet boots continues. This time, I count the footsteps until the sound fades. I pull myself up along the fence as Avi follows, setting back out along the rails to push forward.
It’s just pain. The kind that has lived inside of me for weeks now.
The road running alongside the tracks finally widens a bit into uneven pitches and dips of snow, then breaks into a trampled path covered in frozen boot markings.
The skeletal remains of homes thin into broken branches and flattened remnants of harvested fields.
Avi keeps her eyes set on the farm rather than the trees ahead.
“A potato field.” She stops then makes a beeline for the snow-covered crops. “If we’re quick, we can get in and out before someone else comes our way.”
We move into frozen thickets and I drop to my knees and scrape through the piles, feeling for potatoes. The fields were likely picked over before the first frost, but the snow did come early this year and there’s a chance…
“I found some small ones,” Avi says, prying frozen potatoes free. “My sister and I used to dig for them before the first frost. They kept longer.”
“How old is your sister?” I ask, forcing my hands into the icy slush, finding a small bunch of bulbs.
“Find any?” she asks, blatantly ignoring my question.
“About six.”
We load up what we can in the extra fabric of our uniforms and return to the rail line heading into another tunnel of towering trees.
The sun is edging the horizon just as we spot another group of Auschwitz prisoners forging through the woods ahead of us.
Of the dozen people, some are limping while others are trudging deeper into the woods toward the thicker wood.
These must be the other prisoners from Auschwitz we were trying to keep up with.
I don’t know where the unbeaten path leads, only that it runs in the same direction as the Soviets. We’re close enough to follow, but far enough away to stay out of direct sight. This group must be following them for a reason—one different to mine though.
“We finally caught up to them,” I tell Avi.
“Yes,” she says, smoothing her short hair behind her ear. “Is the person you were looking for when we left Auschwitz among them?”
I forgot I had told her he might be within this group of people.
I scan the area ahead, craning my neck from side to side, around heads, before letting out a conceding sigh.
“No.” I swallow hard and drop my head. If only I could see the dead.
“I don’t see him.” I press my hand to my chest, the quick beat of my heart contrasting the heaviness in my chest.
“I’m sorry,” Avi says. “He could be further ahead.”
“Maybe,” I utter.
“We shouldn’t announce ourselves to others yet—let’s just fall into step with them for now.”
We’re all survivors of Auschwitz. We should be able to rely on each other.
Though, I won’t forget the ugly treatment I’ve experienced with fellow prisoners, especially earlier today after getting trampled.
Civilization is a lost art, something we will all have to relearn.
And trust… I’m not sure we will ever find that in anyone again.
We stay quiet as we approach the others, falling into place, and tracing footsteps. No one turns around to greet us or acknowledge our existence. This is just an alliance of convenience.
A middle-aged woman stops in her path and falls weakly onto a log, holding her arms around her stomach, lurching forward. She’s starving. We all are.
I approach the woman and sit beside her, pulling out a frozen potato from the bunched fabric of my dress. “Here.”
The woman glances up at me with tears in her eyes, reaching over with a shaky hand. “God bless, you, dear.” Her chin trembles, but all I can focus on is her lips. They’re so pale it won’t be long until they turn blue.
The cold is relentless, and we have nothing but the clothes on our backs.
“If you warm it under your arm, it will thaw faster.” She still won’t be able to bite into it.
She’s so frail I’m not sure how she made it out of the camp.
I search around the log, finding nothing more than snow-covered everything, but I know there is gravel and stone beneath.
I reach down into the grainy snow, the cold slashing through my skin once again.
I grab a handful of earth and pull it out before inspecting it in my palm.
The woman watches, curiously at first but then understands what I’m trying to find. She takes a small, jagged stone from my hand and uses it to scrape against the potato. “We need to keep moving. You’ll freeze, sitting here.”
Avi, who’s been watching without any emotion on her face, comes toward us and loops her arm around the woman’s back to help her up to her feet.
“She’s right. We mustn’t stay still.” Noah would always remind me of the same.
People become targets when they stop moving; whether by nature’s elements or the hunters themselves.
He never stopped planning and was always staying ahead of whatever could come next.
Most of the others have continued pushing ahead, leaving the woman behind. A few straggle, but not for the woman’s sake.
We walk until darkness devours the woods, leaving us with only glimmers and shadows.
“There’s no use in trying to keep going at this hour,” one of the few men says. “We can rest in shifts, wait until sunrise, and continue northwest to Germany behind the Soviets.”
They are following the Soviets. It wasn’t just a coincidental direction they took when leaving Auschwitz. Northwest is most logical for the Soviets, especially with German prisoners in tow. They wouldn’t be bringing them south to the Czechoslovakian border.
“Why would we want to follow the Soviets? They’re no less dangerous than the German soldiers,” Avi pushes.
Everyone turns to look at her as if she’s just arrived and disrupted their plan with her opinion. Which she has.
“She’s just a girl. Leave her be,” a man says, turning away from Avi. “The Soviets have supplies and food. We want to survive. We need them to lead us to where we’ll find what we need.”
“But…” Avi speaks out.
I grab her hand and jerk her toward me. “You can’t tell them what to do,” I whisper. “He’s right in what he’s saying.”
“We’ll be walking straight into a death trap,” she argues just as quietly, but with spit flying from her mouth.
“We’re already in a death trap, Avi.”
She rolls her eyes and pulls her arm away from me.
“We’re losing time,” a woman says. “We might lose sight of the Soviets if we stop now.”
“If we keep moving, we’ll need a source of light—a torch, something,” someone else says.
“No.” Avi doesn’t hesitate, again. “Light makes us visible. The snow gives off just enough reflection to keep us on our feet. We can move slower but shouldn’t stop.”
I’m surprised when no one argues with her, but thankful we can continue moving. Feet begin to shift against the coarse snow, unsure at first, then steadier after a moment.
An abrupt blast tears through the air. Most of us drop instinctively, hands over our heads. One of us screams—too loud, too long—flagging our location to whoever is stalking through the woods. A hand clamps over her mouth.
Then I remember that the SS are still out here somewhere. Most of them fled, but no one knows what direction they went.
“They’re coming closer. Silence,” someone whispers.
Another shot fires into the night. A warning.
“Show yourself!” a man shouts in German, his voice quivering with unease.
The group breaks apart at once, and scatters into thicker brush off the path. Avi grabs my arm and yanks me from the path too. We stumble until a boulder rises out of the dark—solid enough to hide behind, but barely.
A scuff of snow from heavy footsteps and a metallic clink.
“Nein. Keep moving,” someone mutters.
“This way—” another voice cuts in, then softens. “It was probably a fox. That’s what we must have heard.”
They aren’t hunting us. They’re hunting for food, and we were standing in the way.
I don’t breathe again until the glow of the flame sinks into a low dip in the woods and drains away from us.
Back-to-back, we sit on a pile of broken branches, leaning our sides against the boulder.
I lost a few potatoes in our scurry, and it looks like Avi lost some of hers too, as she’s no longer cinching the fabric of her smock so tightly.
I pull my coat tightly over my chest and sink my chin and nose inside, peeking out, keeping a watch for a flame.
“We should stay put until dawn,” the man who spoke out to Avi earlier says. He must be the leader of this pack. “The Soviets will have to stop too. No one will travel blindly through the night.”
I don’t know if he’s right or taking a guess, but I choose to believe him as exhaustion presses down on me, hard and relentless. My eyes blur. A scrape against bark snaps me alert. My heart stutters. It could be ice cracking.
Or a hand.
A shape shifts beside a tree. Not a face—just a hint of one, and a shoulder. I strain to see more, craning my neck as far as it will reach.
Promise me you’ll live.
“Noah?” I breathe, leaning my body forward, fingers scraping the boulder. The shape is already gone, swallowed by the dark.
“Celina,” Avi grunts, her back still leaning against mine, and no longer upright. “Who are you talking to?”
I shake my head, still staring at the tree. At the bark where a hand might have been. Where the words that kept me alive came from.
Or where my mind put them.
“No one.”
“Don’t let your mind turn on you,” she says firmly. “I need you to stay here.”
“I—I know.”
“With me,” she adds.
* * *
The darkness splinters into threads of light between tree branches, but morning only brings a hazy fog and a heavy sogginess.
I right myself against the boulder, feeling a sting along my palms. Dried blood.
My stomach burns, but not from sickness, just hunger.
Avi’s weight is heavier against my back than it was when we settled on this pile of broken branches.
“Are you awake?” I whisper.
She grumbles and presses her feet into frozen leaves, crackling the broken branches beneath us.
Being still in the daylight is more dangerous than being still at night.
My body is stiff, frozen, and sore from walking, but I manage to pull myself up, noting the world is not spinning around me as it has any other time I’ve stood in the last week or so.
I spot the potatoes I’d dropped, like breadcrumbs leading to the indented path.
I collect them and drop them into my coat pockets this time, rather than trying to warm them against my body.
Others in blue-and-white stripes, and a coat if they’re lucky, stumble out of the woods as well. I don’t know how many of us there were last night when we stopped, but when I look around, I don’t see the woman I gave the potato to.
“Where’s that woman?” Avi asks, stepping up beside me.
“Did any of you see the woman who was sitting on the log last night? She’s missing,” I call out to the others.
No one responds. Most shrug their shoulders.
“We can’t worry about anyone who went off on their own. There’s no time for that,” a man says.
The rest stare at me, but their eyes don’t meet mine.
Avi straightens her shoulders and clears her throat. “If she went somewhere else, she didn’t intend to come back.” Her words aren’t unkind, just fact.
I move from one side of the path to the other, scanning the woods, searching for a hint of this woman. I can still see her hands, the way they shook when she scraped at the potato. The stone she used lies in front of the log.
We start moving behind the others, slower than needed, but faster than I can manage.
My eyes settle on a patch of grayish-green fabric mounded on a shallow snow pile. I step out of line from the others and reach down for the stiff fabric, tugging at it just hard enough that the snow falls to the sides, exposing a body in a German uniform. His face is as white as the snow.
Avi grabs me from behind, pulling me away. “Why would you touch him?”
I need to see his face.
I wriggle out of her grip and clamber to my knees, crawling toward the dead man, my heart burning from within.
That’s not the man who saved me.
Everyone must be staring at me as I inspect the German soldier, wondering what I’m doing. “He might have tools on him—something we could use.” My throat tightens, questioning my sanity. What am I doing?
A couple of the men in the group approach my sides and flip the dead soldier onto his back and search his pockets as I step away. “A wallet, knife, and a hard candy. It’s something,” one of them states.
“There’s smoke up ahead. Does anyone else see that?”
I spot the charcoal smudge pluming above the trees. It looks contained. Not from a fire pit.
Avi’s hand locks around my wrist and squeezes. “It looks like it’s coming from the other side of the tracks, but I don’t think that’s shelter,” she utters.
She’s right. That smell doesn’t belong in the woods.