Hanna #2
One morning, though, we found that two pairs of twins had disappeareds from the girls’ hut. Marta made some inquiries of one of the prisoners who worked as a nurse in the hospital block. “They won’t be coming back,” she said, tight-lipped.
Another of the children overheard. “Will you have to unpick their names now?” the little girl asked Liv.
She swallowed hard, her face strained with emotion.
“No,” she said. “Here’s what we’ll do.” She produced a needle and a small spool of white thread from her pocket and carefully stitched a little flower beside their names.
It was a daisy, just like the ones we’d sewn on the bodices of our bunads back in Norway, in those days that felt like a lifetime ago now. Mamma’s flower.
As the weeks went by, the shawl became a meadow scattered with more and more daisies, each one telling its own story.
*
A pair of guards would appear in the hut most mornings and read out pairs of numbers from a list. One day, it was our numbers they called.
It had been almost a month since we’d been marched to the women’s hospital block, and I’d known it would be only a matter of time before we’d be summoned back there and separated.
I was ready. I took Nurse Olga aside and showed her the number on my arm.
She looked at her clipboard, shook her head, her eyes filling with sadness.
But I was insistent until, realizing how determined I was and what it would mean if she exposed my plan, she reluctantly directed Liv toward the upper floor.
And then I learned what they did to twins in those laboratories down the corridor in Block 10.
*
Life shriveled to its barest bones that winter, the weeks and months blurring into a grim routine.
As the “treatments” in the doctor’s laboratory continued, the simple task of staying alive took what little energy we had: trying to find a little warmth beneath the blankets; bearing the pain within ourselves and in the others around us; tending one another as best we could; forcing ourselves to eat and drink.
I suppose all of us were lucky to have our twin to stay alive for, not only because of concern for our sisters, but also because we knew if one of us died, it was a death sentence for the other.
Because the doctor and his team would then perform simultaneous autopsies to compare the two bodies.
I think Liv and I would not have survived that ordeal if it hadn’t been for the tiny kindnesses shown to us by Nurse Olga.
She risked her life by bringing us water and soup as we lay in separate rooms upstairs, suffering the results of the latest “experiments.” The “control” who had not been experimented on was kept isolated, while they waited to see whether the other twin survived.
I have few memories from that time, and even fewer I care to let myself recall.
But I do remember how, between our spells in the hospital, the rumors of German defeats began to grow, whispered from hut to hut through the camp, and how we’d glimpse planes in the skies above and hear the muffled boom of bombs dropped on distant towns.
“They’re American,” someone said, pointing.
“They’ll be coming to free us soon.” But then another day would go by, and another night would fall, and the glow from the chimneys in the neighboring camp would continue to light the sky with those terrible, livid flames.
On the days when we could manage it, we still helped Marta with the children, encouraging them to eat and trying to make those who were suffering as comfortable as possible.
Zygmunt even managed to “organize” a big bottle of cod liver oil at our request, taken from one of the Red Cross parcels that occasionally made their way into the camp, and we doled it out a teaspoonful at a time.
The children were so hungry, they didn’t even complain about the taste.
I’d been sitting by the stove in the children’s hut, telling them stories, and afterward, little Miriam got up from the floor where she’d been sitting and tottered over to the window, unsteady with exhaustion and the sickness that was a perpetual, unwelcome guest. “Look,” she said.
“It’s the great white bear. Do you think he’s come to save us? ”
It had been snowing, flakes falling like feathers from the steel-grey sky.
I looked where she was pointing. The handcart for collecting the day’s dead had been left outside the barracks beyond the fence, and the snow had blanketed it, mercifully covering the huddled corpses that lay upon it.
From the distance, it did look a bit like the bear from the story they so loved to hear.
Two prisoners appeared, carrying another body, which they heaved onto the cart.
I took her hand and led her back to the faint warmth, drawing her onto my knee as I smoothed her hair from her feverish forehead.
“Remember those planes we saw yesterday dropping their bombs?” I said.
“The American planes and the British ones? Well, they are fighting for us. And, yes, one day they will come, just as the girl in the story did, to free us. We have to wait a little longer, my darling, but they will come.”
We had to cling to that hope. It was all we had left.