Hanna
Marta was a godsend. I think it must have been her indomitable spirit and innate intelligence that had kept her alive when she was deported to the camp from her home in Warsaw.
She told me she’d grown up in a poor neighborhood and knew what it was like to survive on very little.
She also had a knack for working out how things ran and managing to bend the rules of the system.
Shortly after our arrival, she presented me with a threadbare coat.
“For your sister,” she said. “She looks as if a breath of wind might blow her away.”
I stared in wonder at the miraculous garment. “Where did you get this?”
She shrugged. “It’s from Canada.” And then she grinned at the expression of bewilderment on my face. “Canada is what we call the big warehouse beyond the fence. My boyfriend works there. He’s very good at organizing things.”
“Why is it called Canada?”
“Because it’s a place where they have everything!
You can get anything you want, so long as the guards don’t catch you, that is.
You should see it—piled to the roof with clothes and suitcases and jewelry.
It’s where they put everything people bring to the camp when they arrive.
Zygmunt has a job there, helping with the sorting.
Of course, he has to be careful, or they’d shoot him on the spot.
But he’s managed to get in with one of the German guards, who’ll turn a blind eye now and then, as long as it’s nothing of value he takes.
He gets me a few other supplies, too, like the aspirin tablets and antiseptic cream from the hospital. ”
I winced, wondering where the previous owner of the coat was now, but I thanked Marta.
“Now get your sister and come with me,” Marta said. “I’ve got you both permission to help in the girls’ hut next door. I’ll show you round, and you can give me a hand with their breakfast.”
The children broke my heart, but they filled it, too.
They clustered around us when we walked through the door carrying jugs of coffee and a bag of bread, many pairs of big eyes in pale, pinched faces looking at us with hope.
They were all twins, too. In some cases, they were too ill or too exhausted by starvation to get out of their bunks, so we went round the room trying to help those girls drink a little of the foul-tasting dishwater that passed for coffee and nibble on a morsel of the hard, black bread.
I was worried about Liv’s state of mind, so I watched her anxiously as she surveyed the hut.
But I think the sight of those children galvanized her.
Like me, she was horrified and then angry, seeing how they were being used. And anger can be a powerful force.
Once we’d shared out the meager breakfast rations, we helped Marta gather those who were strong enough beside the stove to comb the lice from their hair.
Liv found a bundle of rags lying in a corner, and she fashioned it into a doll.
It was a poor facsimile of the ones Pappa had once made for us, but the little girls clapped their hands and cooed over it as if it were the most beautiful gift imaginable.
Then I began to tell them the story of the castle to the east of the sun and the west of the moon, on the far side of winter, and the girl who had managed to find it and free those who were kept prisoner there.
They sat and listened without making a sound, transported for a short spell to another time and place.
From outside, we heard other children playing. “Right, time to get some fresh air,” Marta said, shepherding them through the door. On the hard-packed earth of the yard in front of the huts, a group of boys were kicking a worn football, organized by a man who appeared to be in charge.
“Morning, Zvi,” Marta called. He raised a hand in acknowledgment, then turned his attention back to retrieving the ball from the barbed-wire fence that separated our area from the rest of the camp.
I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down to find one of the girls had sidled up to me. “Will you come back tomorrow and tell us another story?” she asked.
I knelt to her level and helped do up the buttons on the thin jacket she wore. “Of course,” I said.
I was about to say more, but the arrival of a group of men made everyone stop in their tracks.
I recognized the one who wore a white coat over his SS uniform, a stethoscope hanging around his neck.
He was the dark-haired officer who’d been at the ramp.
I watched as he greeted the children, noticing how they froze as his gaze swept over them.
Then he caught sight of Liv and me and smiled.
He pointed to several of the children, and the other men stepped forward to round them up.
He beckoned to me and Liv to follow, as well.
In silence, we filed behind him across the yard to a two-story brick building beyond the barracks whose windows were covered with wooden boards.
We walked through the door, above which a sign was inscribed with the words Block 10.
We were told by a guard to sit on the hard chairs that lined the corridor until our numbers were called.
All the other prisoners there were women and girls, I noticed.
The doctor disappeared into his office, leaving a faint smell of disinfectant in his wake.
Doctors and nurses came and went, calling prisoners’ numbers and taking them to the various rooms along the hallway.
After some time, Liv and I were ushered into a sort of laboratory halfway up the hall.
There we were stripped naked, weighed, and measured, while a nurse wrote everything on a clipboard, having first checked the numbers on our arms. She seemed a little kinder than the others.
When the other staff were out of the room, she told us her name was Olga, and I smiled, reminded of the OLGA wireless I’d been trained to use.
She explained she was a prisoner, too, who’d been spared in the selections because they’d been looking for qualified nurses.
Glancing into the corridor to make sure no one was coming, she took a bottle of aspirin from a cupboard and handed it to me.
“For the others in your hut,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry it’s not much, but I do what I can. ”
She stuffed it quickly into the pocket of my shift draped over the back of a chair as two doctors came into the room.
They took samples of our blood and urine, and several X-rays, then led us to another room.
Here, they compared the blue of our eyes against a color chart.
A woman sitting in a corner of the room made some sketches, and a man with a camera came to stand uncomfortably close as he took photographs of our eyes.
I clenched my teeth, my body as tense as fence wire, anticipating what they might do to us next.
Then I breathed a big sigh of relief when we were told to get dressed and go back to our hut.
Nothing worse happened to us that day. But I heard the cries from behind other doors along the corridor, and I knew it was only a matter of time until we found out what else went on in those rooms.
Several of the women were absent when we got back. And some still hadn’t returned by the time evening fell and we climbed into our bunks for another night of restless sleep.
*
“I have a job for you,” Marta told me one morning. “You’re to take little Miriam back to the tattooist to have her number redone. She wriggled so much the first time that it’s not clear enough.”
I cringed at the thought of having to be a party to the pain that would be re-inflicted on the child, but then another thought occurred to me, and a plan hatched in my head.
It would be risky, but here was an opportunity…
. “Perhaps I should have mine redone, too, while I’m there.
I was another who couldn’t keep still.” I showed her the final digit of my number, the 1 that had gone a little awry when Liv had fainted behind me in the queue and I’d twisted away from the tattooist.
Marta shook her head. “Don’t bother. It’s clear enough. And, anyway, we know who you are.”
I took Miriam’s hand and told her a story about a brave and cunning mouse as we walked through the camp, trying to distract her from what was to happen.
“I’m scared, Hanna,” she whispered, when we reached the door of the building.
“I know, my darling,” I said. “But if you keep as still as you can, like the mouse did, then it will be over more quickly. I’ll go first, to show you. If I can be brave, do you think you can be, too?” She nodded, her brown eyes wide in her anxious face.
I marched over to the woman at the tattooing station. “Two to be redone,” I said, telling her the numbers. I pushed up my sleeve, gritting my teeth as she set to work.
When we got back to the children’s hut, I used a little of the precious antiseptic ointment on Miriam’s arm to soothe the rawness and gave her a hug. “You were a very brave girl. And now you can go back and play with your sister and the others.”
“All done?” asked Marta, as I handed the ointment back to her.
I nodded, keeping my arm covered with my sleeve, then went back to help Liv with the children again.
*
It was Liv who asked Marta if she could get her boyfriend, Zygmunt, to “organize” a few extra things for us from the warehouse.
And so it was that she began to stitch names onto another scarf.
She collected the children’s names and the names of the women in our hut, and she sewed them into the fine woolen shawl he procured, using the needle and thread he’d also managed to obtain for her.
She kept it hidden beneath the blanket in our bunk so the guards wouldn’t find it.
It was a small act of defiance that gave her a sense of purpose.
And the children loved seeing their names there—a vestige of life before they became numbers on a list, reminding them who they really were.