If I Should Die Before I Wake (15 page)

"You have been a comfort to me before," I said to the image before me, as though she were real, "but not now. You are always here when someone leaves me. You bring with you bad news. Go away."

I closed my eyes and began reciting my prayers, but I could tell she was still behind me. Finally, I could take it no longer. I whipped around and shouted, "What have you to tell me then? Bubbe is dead? I know that! Now you can leave. Go away and never return, never! There is no one left. There is no reason for you ever to come back. I'm all alone!"

I crawled up onto the bed and cried, my face buried in the mattress. I was going mad, hallucinating. I could feel my insides boiling up in my throat. I cried harder, trying to block out the presence of that girl. I could feel her drawing closer, feel her standing right next to the bed. I looked up at her and stopped crying. I felt something cold and heavy run through me like an iron, smoothing out all the black knots inside of me. My breathing slowed down until I was hardly breathing at all.
I lay on my back with my eyes closed and felt the stale air inside the cell evaporate, leaving behind fresh air and the scent of grass.

"Thank you," I whispered. "I am all right now." I opened my eyes and smiled at her. "Thank you, my
Shvester.
I—I will call you that,
Shvester,
because sisters have a special bond."

A few minutes later I heard the jangle of keys outside my door. I sat up and saw the wardress signal to me to come with her. I was taken to the same room as before, and as before the two men and the midget were there waiting for me. The only difference was that my violin was no longer there and
Shvester
was. She stood above the two men and smiled down at me. There was no sorrow or hurt in her eyes this time.

I looked at the man with the fat nose. He took a step forward.

"We will not waste time today. Your mother has already confessed. She has told us everything. Now you must confess. If your story is the same as hers, then neither of you will be hurt. What is your name?"

My mother has confessed? Had Bubbe made up some other story or were they just bluffing? I wondered. I had the feeling they were bluffing. Bubbe had told them nothing and they did away with her, as they would do with me, if I didn't tell.

"I told you, I know of no other name. I am Ewa Krisowski."

I don't know why I felt so calm. I stood before these two men and looked above them at
Shvester.
Perhaps I had accepted my fate.

I saw the hand rise up above my shoulder. As it came down upon me, I sank readily to the floor, no resistance. The pain, which had been excruciating before and had made sleeping on my left side impossible, was minimal this time.

"Get up!" the man shouted.

I stood up.

"Where did you get those papers?"

"I have always had them."

This time he slapped my face, and again I moved in the direction of his hand so I felt only a slight sting down the left side of my face.

He asked me the same questions again and again, and I answered, and again and again he slapped me. At last, when he had drawn blood, he stopped.

"You will regret this," he said to me, and then turned to the wardress and said, "Cell D."

I was led away, back down the long corridor, all the way to the other end and up the same stairs we had come down when we had first arrived. Then we walked down another hallway. The wardress stopped in front of a door and held it open for me. It was the bathroom. There were no toilets in the cells, so every once in a while I and the other prisoners were taken to the bathroom. I looked forward to this time more than anything else. It was a chance to get some water. I would go to the sink to wash my hands and face and allow the water to run into my mouth.

I didn't know whether the blood was coming from my nose or my lip, but the wardress allowed me time enough to splash the cold water over my face until the bleeding stopped.

I was then taken down yet another hallway and down three flights of stairs. I could feel the temperature change as we stepped down the last flight. The hallway was wet and cool, the walls made of stone. I could see drops of water oozing out of these stones as though they were being crushed by the weight of the building. The wardress unlocked the door and motioned me into a dark room. As I followed her in, I realized that
Shvester
was gone. Where was I going, I wondered, if she would leave me alone?

The wardress walked across to the other end of the room, unlocked another door, and motioned for me to go in. It was darker still. I could see shadows and movement; other people were already there. The door closed behind me and the key turned in the lock.

"Ewa?"

"Rachela?"

"Ewa! At last it is you!"

I stumbled forward, reaching out for my bubbe, and fell at last into her waiting arms. We sat on the floor rocking and holding on to one another, talking, laughing, and crying. Bubbe had told them nothing. They told her I was dead, but she knew it wasn't so. She had been in this dark cell since we had been separated, and had spent her hours between visits to the two men in prayer.

"What now, do you think?" I asked her when we had caught up with each other's lives.

"We will die," came a woman's voice from the other side of the cell. She spoke in Yiddish.

"Are we all Jews here then?" I asked.

"Who else would they put in a place like this? We will die tomorrow," the woman said.

I heard moaning and sobbing and praying. I held on to Bubbe, and we continued rocking.

We spent what appeared to be the next several days eating (yes, at last they were feeding us), sleeping, talking, going to the bathroom, and being questioned by the men upstairs.

Although I could never get a good look at her, I could tell that Bubbe was not standing up to the beatings very well. When she returned from the interrogations, she would hunch herself into one corner of the cell and ask to be left alone for a while. Eventually, she would come out of this retreat and reach out for me. When I huddled up close, I could feel her chest still heaving and smell the blood on her. Together we would pray for God to end our suffering.

One morning, a large wardress with her two front teeth missing opened the cell and bellowed in at us, "
Stehen Sie auf! Stehen Sie auf!
—Get up! Get up!"

For the first time since we had arrived, we were led outside into a courtyard. The air was cool and moist, but the sun was out and the day smelled sweet and clean; it was spring! We squinted at one another, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight. Each of us examined the others. We were a bloody, stinking crew. There were five of us; Bubbe was the oldest, I the youngest, and after me a petite Polish woman in her twenties and a set of French twins who claimed they were thirty-two but looked more like fifty-two.

Several guards were there to see that the five of us were loaded without mishap into the waiting prison van. The two tall men who had spent the last few weeks interrogating us came out into the courtyard.

"They want to wish us
bon voyage,
I am sure," said Dvora, the woman in her twenties.

As usual, the man with the fat nose did the talking. "Entering the
Reich
with false documents is a serious crime, punishable by death." With that said, he grinned and closed and locked the van door.

We could see nothing through the black-painted windows. We bounced along in silence until Lisette, one of the twins, began her usual whining about how she and her sister were really not Jewish.

"
C'est vrai!
—It's true! Only our grandmother was Jewish. Why should we be punished for that?"

"Why should any of us be punished for being Jewish?" I said.

Dvora agreed. "The world is crazy now."

Bubbe kept quiet. She knew to argue with the twins was futile and so did I, but it gave me something to do, something to think about besides death.

"We are French ballerinas. We have nothing to do with the Jews."

"You do now." Dvora laughed.

"The Polish are a stinking people. All Poles should be shot," said Liselle.

"You smell as bad as we do, and you look worse. And I think you two are dried-up old ladies. Ballerinas could never look so—so..."

"Chana, that is enough. It will do us no good to fight among ourselves. This may be our last hour alive and you are choosing to spend it this way."

Dvora leaned toward Bubbe. "What do you know?" she asked.

All of them had learned to trust Bubbe completely when it came to her premonitions. When she said we would be fed, we were fed. When she said the interrogators planned to trick us, there was a trick, but we were not trapped by it, and when she said nothing, we knew to watch out, one of us would get an extra beating that day.

"I cannot say for sure," she began, "but I believe we will be all right. It is best we each pray in silence, search out our own souls."

The twins sent up a loud wail.

"She is speaking of death. It is a nice way of saying we will die. I am not fooled," Lisette cried.

For the rest of the trip we listened to the sisters cry and moan at one another. Nothing Bubbe said could calm them down. When the van stopped, I was the first one at the door. Nothing could be worse than being trapped with the twins day after day.

The driver opened the doors and we climbed out and found ourselves outside another prison. New guards led us through the gates and into the building. Once again, they gave us showers and another set of prison clothes. Then they gave us each a piece of bread, and a mug of watery cocoa.

To our delighted surprise, they gave us a cell with a skylight and allowed us to go outside once a day and parade in a circle around the courtyard for exercise.

A few days after we arrived, the interrogations began again. We learned to accept them as part of our daily routine, something to be endured if we were to continue to stay alive. All of us knew, without Bubbe telling us, that if we were to confess to anything, we would be shot.

After a week of daily exercises in the spring air, and regular mealtimes, the wardress—we called her
Der Hals,
the neck, because of her long neck and small head—assigned us each a job. Bubbe and I were both assigned kitchen duty.

"It will be all right now, Bubbe," I said one night as we were washing and drying the dishes. "It is better than the ghetto. It is not a lot of food—a bowl of soup and some bread and cheese—but we get it every day, and at night we have a comfortable place to sleep. If we cannot be out looking for Mama and Anya, then this is where I want to be. The war will be over soon, anyway."

FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS
we worked hard in the kitchen, attended occasional interrogations, and took our daily exercise around the courtyard, watching spring turn into summer, then into fall. We were more able to keep track of the date now that we could see day and night and the changing seasons. On what we guessed was July 16, Bubbe surprised me with a birthday tomato she had somehow managed to get, or steal, from the kitchen. I didn't ask her about it. We split the ripe fruit in half and tried as best as we could to eat it slowly, savoring every juicy, meaty bite.

I was seventeen, the age Mama had been when she had Jakub, her first baby.

"And where am I, at seventeen?" I asked the fat bowl I was scrubbing one day. "I'm in prison, that's where. My life, my dreams, are nothing now. I have spent my years starving, wasting my mind, wasting my talents. I will never be a famous violinist. Think of all I have missed. Think of all I have yet to learn." I let my tears drop into the sink,
plinking holes into the soapsuds. I cried some more so that I could watch my tears melt the suds. That was what I had become, someone who found entertainment in tears and suds.

One October morning the wardress did not come to roust us out of our cell. By afternoon, when we had not been fed either breakfast or lunch, we all could sense that something bad was about to happen, and we looked to Bubbe to tell us what it was. Bubbe would only shake her head and remind us to be strong, to be with God. At last, in the evening,
Der Hals
came to the cell and unlocked the door."
Stehen Sie auf! Schneller!
—Get up! Faster!" she shouted.

We shuffled through the door and trotted down the hallway after her. We were taken outside, where our interrogators were waiting for us. The night air was cold and blew through my uniform as if it wasn't even there.

"This is your last chance," said
Herr
Schacht, or
Trottel,
Nincompoop, as we called him. "Any one of you who wishes to confess will be safe and will be allowed to remain here. Anyone so unwise as to ignore this offer will most assuredly die."

Yes, this man was stupid. Either way we died, we knew that. My teeth began to chatter.

A van rolled into the yard and two men got out.

Herr Trottel
stepped up to the van. "Anybody?"

We remained silent.

"Your deaths will be most unpleasant. Shooting would be too easy for you. No, you will be sentenced to hard labor and, believe me, you will not last a week."

The two officers from the van came up behind us and shoved us into the back. Before we could disentangle ourselves, the van was speeding away, the cold air whistling through the doors like tiny sirens.

When we stopped, the officers let us out of the van, and we found ourselves at a train station teeming with people. Our driver told us to stand in the line on the left.

I looked at the long line of bedraggled people surrounded by armed guards. Where were we going? I saw the train, a black monster with black windows and black bars on those windows. Why, I wondered—and not for the first time—did the Nazis always make everything look evil? Why would they be so blatant about it? How could they be? I gazed across the tracks at the people who stood and watched our progression in the line. People who still had lives and families and food to eat. They were the reason Hitler could be so obvious. They were the reason this war against us, the Jews, could be so successful. They knew, they saw, and they did nothing but watch.