The Lost Wife (42 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
We were told to dig on our hands and knees and sift through each discarded item. We were told to open up seams and look for hidden pieces of gold, and diamonds sewn secretly into suit linings, and to check for pockets that still contained money. We also checked inside the heads of dolls, searching for a string of pearls or a bracelet that might have been stuffed inside their ceramic craniums.
Every day we worked from dawn until dusk. The gas chambers and the crematorium burned seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. In the morning we’d arrive and the clothing would be piled almost to the ceiling. Our fingers learned to work nimbly, to feel the hem of a skirt, not for the precision of the stitches, but with the questing touch of a blind person feeling the letters of a book in Braille.
I tried to put myself into a trance as I worked. I did not want to think of the poor, desperate woman who sewed her wedding band into the lining of her coat, the diamond earrings that were stitched inside a collar, or the small pieces of gold I found inside the brim of a fur-lined hat.
Marta and I were ordered to drop everything we found into boxes. I did as I was told. I did not even look up from my work as I tore open seams and cut through silk linings. I worked like a person who was already dead. How could I not work like that, when I heard the screams of the most recent transport passengers lining up outside, shrieking when they knew they were about to be gassed? And the cries of the children, or the mothers begging for mercy? For every piece of gold I unstitched from the cloth, one of those cries is stitched into me. Until I take my last breath, I will never, ever get them out of my head.
As weak and nearer death as my sister seemed to me with each passing day, there was a defiance to her that I could never quite fathom. As we worked side by side, I would sometimes see her take a piece of jewelry she found and throw it into the latrine.
“What are you doing?” I hissed at her. “If they see you, they will shoot you!”
“I would rather they shoot me than give them any of this!” She was clutching a woman’s velvet skirt and the sight of her hands was ghastly. They no longer looked like the hands of my sister, but like claws. All tendon and bone.
“If the Jew who cleans the latrine finds that diamond, maybe he can barter with it and save his life . . .”
“They will shoot you,” I told her. “If they knew we were sisters, they’d shoot me first. Make you watch and then shoot you.”
But Marta did not back down. “Lenka, if I give them everything . . . my life is already lost.”
That night I huddled even closer to my emaciated sister. I felt the thinness of her pelvis next to mine, the near weightlessness of her arm as she flung it over me in her fitful slumber. It was as if I was clasping an empty birdcage, her ribs like wire, her body hollow and without song.
Had I known it would be the last time I would touch her, I would have embraced her so tightly that her bones would have sprung from beneath her thin sheath of skin.
The next morning one of the SS saw my sister throw a brooch into the latrine. He yelled out at her, asking her what she was doing. Marta stood there like a frozen swan. Her white legs poked out from the hem of her brown sack dress, but I did not even detect a shiver. “Go in and get it, you filthy Jewish whore,” he shouted. She did not move at first. My beautiful redheaded sister. He came closer to her, his rifle sticking right into her face. “Get into that latrine now, you Jewish piece of shit!” I saw her standing there, looking him straight in the eyes, and not in a whisper, not with a single tremor to her voice, my little sister said her last word, uttered with defiance. “No.”
And then, right in front of me, with the swiftness that only evil can deliver, Marta was shot in the head.
CHAPTER 54
My parents vanished into the air of Auschwitz and my sister into its blood-soaked earth. A few weeks after Marta’s death, the Germans, sensing that the Soviets would arrive at the camps any day, began moving us by the thousands to other camps farther west. Entire barracks would vanish overnight.
In early January 1945, we were roused just after midnight and forced into the freezing cold. We could see the burning factories in the distance. Even the crematorium seemed to be smoldering.
“They’re burning the evidence,” one of the girls whispered. “The Soviets must be at the borders already.”
After the Germans called out each of our numbers, they began yelling at us to start walking. We were half asleep and were completely emaciated, and many of us stumbled in the snow. Every person who fell was shot. Their bodies did not make a sound as they hit the frozen earth. The only evidence of their deaths was the ribbon of blood snaking from their skulls.
We were driven in the January snow, like cattle they hoped would die before reaching pasture. I watched as nearly each person walking in front of me fell down and did not get up. Others were shot for walking too slow, and some were shot just for glancing at a Nazi with a despairing look. I only survived because there was a woman directly behind me who, in her grief, thought I resembled her dead daughter. When I fell down, she picked me up. When I was near dead from starvation, she made me eat snow. The few times we were allowed to stop for a break, she cupped my frostbitten feet with her hands and tore her head scarf to bandage my bleeding toes. I have no idea what became of her, and to this day, I wish I had had a chance to thank her. Because it was this nameless woman, who wrongly believed I was her daughter, who kept me walking when it was so much easier to die.
We marched for three days before arriving in Ravensbrück, where the SS continued to beat us and shoot whoever was too weak to stand. I remained in Ravensbrück for only three weeks before being transported by train to another, smaller camp called Neustadt Glewe. There, fifteen other girls and I were taken to an airplane factory. For three months, I dug anti-tank ditches, standing in the cold with nothing more than a brown burlap dress and a pair of wood-and-canvas shoes. Every day and every night, the other girls and I would look up at the sky and hear the sound of the American or Soviet airplanes circling above, and do you know, we did not even think about liberation. We just assumed that they would bomb the factory and we would be unfortunate casualties.
But in early May the unthinkable happened. We woke up one morning to a camp that had been completely abandoned overnight by the SS. They had snuck away like cowards, so when the Americans arrived, all they saw were piles of the dead and those of us who were as near death as the still living could be.
We remained there for a few weeks before the Soviets took over the camp, directing us to displaced persons camps that were being erected throughout Germany. And it was there, in a small camp, outside Berlin, that I first met an American soldier named Carl Gottlieb.
The same way a mother can love an orphaned child or a child a motherless kitten, that is the way Carl fell in love with me.
I could not have been anything much to look at. I was no more then eighty pounds, and though we in the Czech barracks had not had our heads shaved, my black hair was now so dirty and infested with lice that it looked like an old matted rug.
Carl told me that he fell in love with my eyes. He said they were the color of the Arctic. That he saw many a journey in their pale light blue.
I told him, years later, that only with the birth of our daughter had they finally learned to thaw.
I cannot tell you that I loved my husband at the time I married him. But I was a widow, an orphan, and completely alone. I allowed this warm, handsome man to take me under his wing. I let him spoon me soup. I allowed him to escort me to the infirmary for my checkups. I even allowed myself to smile when he danced with his fellow soldiers to the music on their radios.
And when he told me he wanted to take me home to America, I was so tired I did the only thing I could still manage.
I gave him my hand.
CHAPTER 55
I returned to Prague in the spring of 1945. Carl was unable to go with me because he was not granted leave in Germany, but I insisted that I was strong enough to travel by myself, and he had no choice but to let me go.
How strange it was to travel through war-torn Germany and then to arrive in Prague, which had suffered far less from the bombings and blitzes that blighted much of the rest of Europe. Here was my old city, seemingly untouched. The lilacs were in bloom and the intensity of their scent brought tears to my eyes.
I walked as though in a trance to our old apartment on the Smetanovo nábřeži embankment, and discovered it was occupied by the family of a government official. The wife, who answered the door, had an expression that was close to horror.
“It is our apartment now,” she said, without offering to invite me in. “You will have to speak to the relocating committee to get new housing.”
I did not know where to go for the night and it was already getting cold. And then I remembered my beloved Lucie.
I walked back to the station and took the next train to her village on the outskirts of Prague.
In a small house, not far from the station, I was greeted not by Lucie but by her daughter, Eliška, my mother’s namesake, who was now almost ten. The little girl was the spitting image of Lucie, with the same white skin and black hair. The long, almond-shaped eyes.
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