Unravelled (8 page)

One day, after being in Auschwitz for almost a month, I noticed a small gypsy girl sitting on the other side of the fence. She clutched a doll to her chest, her spine practically poking through her baggy clothing. They, like us, had been allowed to keep their hair and colorful clothing. But unlike us, they had been allowed to stay with their families. With no work assigned to them, the gypsies stayed awake until all hours of the morning singing and dancing, echoing a strange zest for life while bodies burned and cold, naked corpses laid with their mouths ajar, piled up, just a few meters away.

"Hello," I spoke to the girl in Hungarian. I had no idea where she was from, if she even spoke my language. But I thought I would try.

"Hello," the girl answered back, hugging her doll closer to her chest. It was impossible to tell how old she was because she was so thin. Her black eyes looked far away in the hollows of her eye sockets and a colorful blue and purple headscarf kept her hair out of her eyes. She stood staring, toward the chimneystack, where they were said to burn people. Her face tilted toward the sun, gathering rays on her brown cheeks.

I didn't say anything else to her, but simply stared at her in wonderment. Her mouth was curved down, the way I imagined mine must have been. She hugged herself while still clutching her rag doll and rocked back and forth to silent music. Could she have lost her mother as well?

Weeks went by in Auschwitz, each day bled into the next. A young woman had drawn Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the side of the boys' barracks with the help of the other children. A man they called Twins' Father, who stayed with the boys and had a female twin himself, tried to start a school for us without any supplies and only his own memories from school. Meanwhile, the number of children in the barracks waxed and waned. New children came often, mostly from Hungary. Some children were taken to Mengele and never returned, often after having been taken on a ride in Mengele's beautiful and shiny car around the camp, their eyes wide and hands bracing themselves on the soft leather seats.  It was their last joyful moment in the world, before being unmercifully killed. 

7 CHAPTER SEVEN

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The chill of October had begun to set in when we were finally brought in for more serious experimentation. It wasn't that we were particularly looking forward to it, but we had wondered when it was going to happen. We sometimes worried that Mengele had something "special" cooking in his mind for us. Perhaps he wanted to dissect us alive or give us some sort of new disease to see how we would react to it.

In the three months we were there, before Mengele began his serious work on us, we had had blood drawn several times a week. They had tied us both to cold, metal chairs to make sure they could get the proper amount of blood without us moving and squealing. We were bound so tightly that my forearms began to fall asleep, and just then, one of Mengele's workers would quickly jab a needle into each arm, the blood slurping into the vials until I felt woozy. Hajna had actually lost consciousness a couple of times, her head tilting forward against the restraints, her eyelids lolling shut.

"Hajna!" I would cry, fighting against my own restraints. My father said his patients sometimes passed out when he took blood, and he would quickly stop and give them  smelling salts to revive them. But they didn't stop. They only pumped blood until her veins seemed dry, leaving her to hang limply like a rag doll. At least then, they reasoned, she wouldn't kick or cry. Only when they had taken their fill would they give her smelling salts. She would wake up, blinking her eyes rapidly and looking at me in a state of confusion.

We also had our eyes "changed" once, but not with needles like many of the other children spoke about. Mengele's assistants merely tipped our heads back and dropped some chemicals in our eyes, causing a stinging and burning sensation on contact. Our vision went blurry for a couple of hours and Hajna complained that she couldn't see. I had to lead her to the bathroom and help her relieve herself. Hajna's loss of sight terrified me. If children lost their sight permanently, the child and his twin were often taken away in the truck and never seen again. Our lives depended on one another to stay healthy, to stay strong. The death of one twin meant the execution of the other. They were dissected and parts of their bodies were sent to Berlin for further inspection. To my relief, Hajna's sight gradually came back and we were safe, at least for the time being. Later, Mengele and his workers shined lights in our eyes and even touched the whites of them with their gloved hands. I flinched several times and was hit on the back of the neck and told to be still.

"Ah-ah!" Mengele chastised the woman who had hit me, causing a small bruise on the back of my neck. "Don't ruin them."

No. We were only his to ruin.

We boarded the truck that early October morning, our blankets wrapped around us for a layer of extra warmth. We held one another's hands, surveying the other children who would be delivered to Mengele for his experiments. They were all shivering, too, some of their mouths chattering from a mixture of fright and the chill of the early autumn air.

Once at the clinic, we were made to undress to our undershirts and panties and strapped to a wooden stretcher, side by side. We turned our heads in a mirrored direction to look at one another, to silently tell our twin that each was there for the other.

Over the course of the next month, this same scenario repeated itself over and over, like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. Mengele's assistants started IVs, injecting mystery solvents through the tubing. Sometimes I would break out in hives or run a fever, but it was mostly Hajna who seemed to get sick. We would later discover that this was because I was the "control twin" and Hajna, the "experimental twin", the one who received all of the substances and diseases. If she died, Mengele would dissect both of us to compare the damage in her body versus my healthy one.

Hajna would often shiver with fever; sometimes her body would swell, expanding like a balloon at a birthday party, and then go back to normal. A couple of times, a nurse mumbled that Hajna probably wouldn't live through the night unless the antidote was successful. Thankfully, it always was. Gradually, we became accustomed to the sound of Mengele's boots or his masked assistants. This nightmare, this horror movie, had become our reality and had taken the place of normal. Instead of dreading it, we had come to expect it.

The paradox of Auschwitz was that our lives gradually adjusted to the routine there, as if it were regular life. We woke up every morning and stood in the mud, rain or shine, and we were counted and recounted, as if the Germans feared one of us would melt away in the night. Then, we'd wait for our numbers to be called. If they were, we braced ourselves for painful injections. Some of my veins collapsed in my right arm and sometimes the staff would then hunt for a vein in my neck. If our numbers weren't called, we merely spent the day watching the gypsies on the other side of the fence, cheering the boys on at soccer, drawing on the walls with coal or searching the other side of the camp to see if any of the ghosts coming to and from work detail could possibly be of any relation to us. Seeing people shot on the other side of the fence was hardly irregular. The first time it happened, I let a hoarse scream out of my throat involuntarily. I whipped my head around to see a man fall limp and loose, like a rag doll on the other side of the barbed wire. The more I heard the popping guns and the more I saw prisoners fall lifeless, the more it became normal, as routine as once eating eggs in the morning or doing arithmetic equations each evening before mother made us hot tea.

The routine had become such that I barely even feared the injections anymore, with their angry needles pushing a mystery substance through my blood stream. My father talked to us about how chronically sick children gradually became less and less afraid of medical procedures.  Instead of crying when they had their blood drawn, the way we used to, they sat stoically and let the nurse pull the life force from their limbs. We had become like them.

Only a few things marked the passage of time. The gypsy camp was liquidated, another term for killed off, and not a mouse seemed to remain in the once lively quarters. The night before they were killed, the SS sealed off their barracks and locked them inside by nailing their doors shut. The night was punctuated with cries and fists banging on the wooden doorframe, and pleas for mercy. The SS weren't merciful. One evening, the screaming finally stopped and I fell asleep in the respite of silence. In the morning, there was nothing left of the camp but a loud, echoing nothingness. There was no more music and no more singing and the little girl who stood at the fence with her doll was merely a memory.

While many children seemed to forge friendships with one another in the camp, Hajna and I stayed closed off, becoming more attached to one another. We realized survival depended on each other, so we used one another for entertainment and support. Occasionally, we would join the other children by making drawings on the wooden slats with Twins' Father overseeing us. Once, we had even found a jump rope, probably stolen from another girl who was already ashes, and used it to play with a couple of other sets of twins around our age. Hajna tried to impress them by doing her cartwheels in the middle of jumping, the same way she had tried to impress Daniel and Samuel when she broke the bust. The other girls giggled, impressed with her agility. And then, those girls became but a pile of dust as well.

One day in the chill of November, the medical experiments stopped. They just stopped, as if Mengele had evaporated into thin air, like a Houdini disappearing act. We had been in the clinic the day before. Hajna had received an injection that had made her lips and neck puffy, but the antidote she was given had made the swelling subside. She walked around a little woozy, but she was at least alive. I had noticed in the night that she had felt hot to the touch, but by morning her fever had broken and she stood next to me in line to be counted with the rest of the twins. To our surprise, no numbers were called, and we were free to do whatever we wanted, within the confines of our cage, of course.

Rumors began to spread like wildfire, hot on the tongues of the older twins who had information passed to them from the ghosts on the other side of the fence. The Germans were losing the war. They were abandoning Auschwitz, leaving us alone. Words danced on everyone's lips, fear that they would simply kill everyone before they left, or excitement that maybe the Germans would simply disappear, turning us over to our liberators.

December came and went, and the camp became nothing but chaos. Everyday the SS began herding groups of prisoners away from the camp, toward the great unknown. They looked as if they were marching off to work detail, but never returned. I spent the cold and icy month wrapped in a lice-ridden blanket, my hair greasy and dirty, as I scanned the crowds for my mother or father or Lujza, but I could never make them out.

By January, Hajna had fallen extremely ill, her mouth swelling up once more, her feet icy to the touch, but her head dripping with a feverish sweat. I became her nurse, fetching her food and water, stroking her hair and putting my body over hers to try and keep her warm during the chill of the night.

"We're leaving with the SS," an older boy burst into our barracks and announced. "You can stay here or go with us."

He delivered the ultimatum briskly, his chest heaving at the words. To stay meant risking death. If we left, Hajna might slip away, too. And there was no Mengele to put me out of my misery if my sister was gone. I put my body over hers and whispered in her ear that we weren't leaving. She nodded slowly, as if it pained her, telling me on a whisper the muscles ached everywhere in her body.

Some twins chose to stay with us, burying themselves in blankets and straw in case the SS decided to simply burst in and shoot everyone. Others, alarmed by the bombs and firecrackers exploding outside, packed up their meager belongings, made coats out of their blankets and got ready for the journey into the unknown.

"They're blowing up the place!" Maria, the girl who had warned us about the chimneys, announced from her perch on the top row of bunks. She scrunched closer to the window as several other girls crowded around her. I turned my head to see one of the chimneys explode. This was the second time it had happened, the first time was during a revolt back in October. We had heard whisperings about it. Then, there was screaming and yelling before the crack and sounds of gunfire in the distance. Now, there was just a "Boom!" and it was all over.

The twins who had chosen to leave were swept away in the chaos of the camp, prisoners leaving left and right, SS leading them away on foot as the officers rode comfortably in sleds or on horseback. The twins silently joined the ranks of those we had watched on the other side of the fence, marching away from Auschwitz and into the woods. It felt like the world was ending.

After a few days of madness, the gallop of horses' hooves, screams and gunshots, it all went still. There were no more shouts in German, no more blocks of ghostly prisoners marching away into the woods. There were no more gunshots, no more firecrackers and no more explosions. The smoke stopped bellowing from the chimney, the sky turning to a more natural winter gray.

Gradually, those of us who had been left behind crawled out of our hiding places, like woodland creatures in the springtime. Hajna remained in her bunk, delirious and blabbering about oatmeal and langos while I lay on my back, drawing on the bunk above me with a pencil Twins' Father had given me, forcing myself in and out of sleep. Finally, I, too, stepped out of the bunk to see what had happened. There were no more rations of bread and soup, no morning roll call. Our stomachs did hungry flip-flops, having gone without food for more than two days. 

On the third day, I told Hajna I would be right back. She gave an "mmmm" of acknowledgement, although I wasn't quite sure she understood. I picked up our tin cups in an effort to melt enough snow to give us something to drink. As I wandered outside the barrack, I noticed emaciated prisoners, dressed in nothing but rags wandering around and tripping over the banks of snow. They were wearing even less clothing than I was, some of them completely naked except for the blankets full of holes over their bony bodies. I suddenly felt guilty to be wearing as much as I was, even if it was still insufficient for the harsh Polish winter.

"Little girl!" a voice called to me from afar in Hungarian as I busied myself filling snow into the cup, scooping it like ice cream. After meager rations became none, the ice and snow seemed like a veritable feast.

"Little girl!"

The voice came closer and closer. I saw it belonged to a woman. She was running toward me, the fat completely melted off of her body, her eyes hardly visible in the canyons of her eye sockets. Her hair was cut extremely short, what she had flailing about as though it had never been brushed.

"I didn't know there were children here! I thought they were all gone," her thin, purplish hand gestured toward the sky, her meatless fingers flickering like falling snowflakes.

I shook my head, continuing to scoop up the snow on the ground 

"Come with me!" she shouted. Her eyes were wild, crazed with hunger and something else I couldn't quite identify.

"No!" I cried as she weakly pulled me by the arm. "My sister is in our bunk. She's sick and I need to bring her something to eat."

"Come!" she urged, as if she hadn't heard me. For the first time in months, tears ran down my face. They were warm, almost hot, against my frozen cheeks. "I'll give you anything you want."