Unravelled (9 page)

I secured the tin cups around my waist with a rope and followed her. I had kept the rope around my waist just to make sure I wouldn't lose our tin cups in the craziness. I didn't know why I had decided to follow her, but I planted my feet in the snow and trudged next to her toward a warehouse in the distance, my good white shoes ill equipped for the snow. Along the way, half-dead sexless people lay on the frozen ground, grunting and mumbling. It was like a Haunted House. If it had been out of context, I would have jumped five meters in the air at coming face to face with one of these apparitions. Now, I calmly walked by them, even smiling at them as they reached for me. Some called out names of children. They asked me if I knew their daughter or son. I could only shrug.

The woman opened the door to a giant warehouse where everything that had been taken from the prisoners was stored. I wondered for a moment if I had died and gone to heaven. I pinched my hand to make sure I wasn't dreaming. To the left were massive piles of clothing. To my right were shoes, sorted by size and style. And there were shelves, enormous shelves, with everything from candelabras to vases to pictures of stoic families living inside picture frames. There were eyeglasses, sitting naked without their owners, wine bottles, moldy loaves of bread, dolls, violins and flutes.

"This," she breathed. "is Canada. Take anything you like. And take it back to your sister, too."

I stepped forward gingerly, surveying the room. There was a large pile of children's clothes to the right of the adults', everything from thin summer dresses to mink coats. Not wanting to be greedy, I selected a thick red wool coat for me and a blue coat with fur trim and a large bow for Hajna. I took a modest loaf of bread.

"You can always come back," the woman said. I was baffled by her kindness to a total stranger.  She must have been just as equally stunned at the presence of child in a place where we were seemingly extinct. "Take anything you want."

I nodded and thanked her. I slipped on the coat, which felt heavy and warm, just like the winters by the fire I had spent with my parents back in Szeged. I scurried back to my bunk, like a rabbit scurrying from hunters over the gray landscape of Auschwitz. It felt strange, forbidden to be in a section other than the space that was designated for Mengele's twins. I felt a shiver down my spine as I crossed over the threshold of the barracks, tearing off pieces of stale, brown bread for Hajna.

"Here," I told her, shoving it toward her cracked, white lips. She turned over on her back, her breath weak and labored. The skin on her face had become taut and white, the color of paper. "Take some bread."

"No," Hajna muttered, her mouth so dry I could almost hear her tongue scraping against the roof of her mouth. I picked her up in my arms. She felt loose and limp, like a rag doll, her limbs weak at her side. I stuffed her thin, pale arms through the arms of the royal blue coat I had pilfered from Canada, holding her body up with all of the strength I had.

"It's hot," Hajna complained thinly, her lips beginning to bleed from the parched corners of her mouth. It reminded me of the gypsies Mengele sometimes experimented on. Many of them had a disease called Noma, something that had been all but extinct in "civilized" Europe. Caused by malnutrition, Noma ate right through childrens' faces leaving a gaping hole. I could see their teeth and facial bones through their skin, what was left of their faces, looking frightened and pained. Mengele took them away and they disappeared, gone like ghosts.

"It's actually really cold in here, Hajna," I corrected her, her skin hot to the touch. It was like putting my hand on the pan after Mama had pulled freshly baked bread out of the oven, her skin hot and clammy to the touch.

Day after day, I trudged to Canada to retrieve food and water. She refused to put anything to her lips most of the time. Instead, she shrunk down, and turned away with a moan, whispering about Kiraly or the Tisza or calling for Mama. A pain seared through my chest when she mentioned Mama. Throughout our time in Auschwitz, our life at the mercy of Mengele's gloved hands, I had been so focused on staying alive that I never wanted to think about whether my parents were alive or not. I looked for them each day in the faces of the passing prisoners. In fact, I had never even imagined what would happen if the war ended, where we would go, what we would do. I just assumed that they would be alive, ready to take us back with open arms. As I watched Hajna toss and turn in the stillness of the deserted camp, a searing pain shot through my chest as I began to face the reality that I may not ever see our family again.

I shook it out of my mind with great fervor as I forced water down Hajna's throat. It made a gurgling sound as it went down and she coughed slightly.

"Papa, Zsolt took our…" she mumbled, but didn't finish the sentence. Her eyes closed and she licked her dry lips once again. Her breath continued, steady and slowly. I turned to my side and curled up into a ball next to her.

After a few hours, I heard something in the distance. It sounded like an advancing army. There were heavy sounds of Jeeps rolling and crunching on the ice and snow. My heart did a flip and I took I deep breath. Perhaps the SS had come back to kill us all. After counting to ten, I sat up as straight as I was able under the confines of the bunk and looked out of the foggy window. Men with rough faces and buzz cuts marched forward, brandishing rifles and guns. But their guns weren't drawn. They were reaching their strong arms out to the twig-like creatures unable to move. Some of the men were wiping their eyes.  I saw one duck behind a Jeep, probably praying that no one would see him as he threw up.

It was then that I felt shame wash over me once again. The familiar hot feeling started in my stomach and rolled up to my face, flushing it and no doubt making it red and splotchy. We were disgusting, so foul that someone vomited at the sight of seeing us. I wanted to melt into the bunk with the lice and vermin, or simply disappear.   But instead, I turned to my sister and shook her. Her chestnut eyes blinked three times and then they began to focus on my face.

"Hajna!" I called. "The Russians or the Americans or someone is here! We're free!"

Hajna smiled as if she understood what I had said and then rolled her head back against the hay. Her eyes closed again and her breath became short and terse. I laid my hand over her frail frame and hugged her close.

"Stay here with me. We're free."

8 CHAPTER eight



Instead of running to our liberators, like many of the twins in our bunk had done, leaving the door wide open, I sat with Hajna in my arms. I couldn't lose her too, I wouldn't. Periodically, I sat up and watched the scene outside. Prisoners were flinging themselves at the army, tears in their eyes. Those who were able were jumping up and down and hugging them, although many of the soldiers seemed a to hold back just a little bit, a curl of disgust on their lips at the sight of the prisoners' unkempt bodies. Other prisoners collapsed on the ground perhaps from joy or acute shame, their thin matchstick legs giving way under their frail bodies.

A few hours later, a camera crew descended on the camp, rolling up their cameras and filming prisoners as they lay in their own filth on the ground or helping them up and showing off their bony bodies. The prisoners looked down, their eyes mixed with gratitude and humiliation. They had once been teachers, doctors, lawyers. Now they were a sack of bones, many naked for the world to see.

Finally, a soldier opened the door to our barrack. He was well-built, athletic looking, his army-issued shirt tight across his chest. He had a blond buzz cut and piercing hazel eyes. He wasn't any older than 18 or 19, young enough to have even gone to school with Lujza. Tears welled in his eyes as soon as he saw the children who hadn't moved from their beds. Some were ill and crying out, their stench overwhelming. Others jumped out of their bunks and ran to him, throwing their small, dirty arms around him.

He murmured something in Russian and I held Hajna tighter.

"They're Russian," I whispered to her. I hadn't noticed the smell before, but as I moved closer to her, in the presence of an outsider, it infiltrated my noise. Hajna had soiled herself several times as she hadn't had the strength to go to the latrine. Weak myself, my arms weighed down with starvation, I couldn't carry her. And I, her sister, her other half, had laid in the mess with her. It was only now, in the shadow of an outsider, a clean outsider, that I felt like an animal who didn't know better.

Some of the children who understood Russian conversed with the man. They tugged at his shirt and then he tentatively put his arms around them, allowing two of the smallest ones to sit on his lap. Their tiny hands against his chest reminded me of the small twins that had come with us into Auschwitz, their blonde hair shining under the midnight lights. They were gone now, I hadn't seen them for months. They went away with their mother to the clinic one day and didn't come back. We assumed once the twins died, their mother was tossed away, too, like old rancid garbage.

"He wants us to come with him," one of the children about my age cried. I hadn't gotten to know her well, I didn't even know her name. But I knew she had red hair and freckles, and a male twin with the same rust-colored hair. Their father was Russian, but they hadn't seen him since they were tiny. The SS had taken him at the beginning of the war, during an expulsion of foreign Jews in Hungary.

"Come on!" she called, banging on my bunk. "Come on!"

"I want to stay here with my sister," I told her evenly. The truth was, I didn't want to get up, to reveal my skirt slick with my sister's mess.

"He says he wants us to come outside because he has a treat for us."

I sighed and looked at Hajna. Her breath continued, her eyelids fluttered.

"I'll get help," I told her. "I will tell them to come get you."

I jumped down onto the floor with a thud, the white shoes my father had given me not so long ago now almost too small for me. They were worn thin, my right toe threatening to come out at the top.

And now,
I thought shaking my head,
I have raggedy clothes and shoes like the boy from the lunchroom who called the Jews evil and blamed us for making him poor.

I joined the other twins outside in the snow, each of them crowded around a different strong and valiant young man. Some of the Russian men looked forlorn, perhaps remembering children they had left at home. Others merely smiled, handing out chocolates and sugars as the children jumped up and down, like dogs begging for a bone.

A soldier came forward with a wad of striped shirts, like the ones the prisoners on the other side of the fence used to wear.

"He wants us to put these on," the same red-headed girl yelled, wiping her face with her hand, sucking on her candy. "For the camera."

She pointed with a purplish finger to the film crew, closing in on us, brandishing their cameras and winding them up ready to capture the moment. Grateful for their presence, most of the children complied without asking, draping the frocks meant for men around their shoulders. I picked mine up, limply and stuck my arms through the holes, the striped outfit making me look big and chunky despite my stick-thin frame.

With the children speaking a babble of languages, almost every country in Europe represented, the film crew was faced with the task of trying to organize us in order to get the perfect shot to show the world what had happened at Auschwitz. After a series of pantomimes and instructions shouted in Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian and German, several of us gathered together to roll up our sleeves on cue and show them off to the camera crew. They focused in on the series of numbers, etched into our pale, white skin.

Next, they arranged us in lines and asked us to walk through parted barbed wire, in what would become a legendary shot, splashed all over Holocaust memorials in the coming years. The war reporters asked us to keep going back and come out again and again, in order to get the shot just right. I tried to look grateful as I grabbed the clammy hand of a strange child in the long pajamas next to me, but all I could think of was getting back to Hajna, and getting help to her as fast as possible.

When we finished, I tugged on the sleeves of one of the men. He looked down at me through piercing green eyes, the stinging smell of alcohol on his breath. Unable to speak Russian, I took him by his winter-blistered, dry, callused hand and lead him toward the barracks wordlessly. I pointed my small hand toward my sister, my double, who lay moaning amid the straw, words that made no sense dangling in the air around her mouth. He nodded at me and slid her small, filthy frame into his arms and kissed her forehead. I could finally exhale.

9 CHAPTER NINE



Many of the adults stayed behind in Auschwitz, but all of Mengele's children, and those who had been found stashed in the adult bunks scattered throughout the camp were taken to a convent in Katowice, just a few towns over.

They loaded us wordlessly into a car, where the throngs of smelly, ragged children were ushered to their new temporary homes. Some children cried and clung to siblings or older friends. Others asked where their parents were. Others still, said nothing at all.

As we descended into the daylight, on the other side of the fence of Auschwitz for the first time in several months, I could feel the stares from locals on my back. They whipped their heads around, their eyes lingering on us, their noses turned up just so. Their eyes seemed to radiate a mix of disappointment, disgust and pity. But they refused to let their feelings marinate for long, as they quickly turned on their heels, trudging toward the market or church or wherever they needed to be on this crisp winter morning.

I narrowed my eyes just slightly before we were ushered into our new quarters. Had work crews marched through this tiny town? Had farmers and townspeople seen the packs of ravenous, dirty, bald prisoners marching through their streets? And if so, why hadn’t they whispered about it or told someone? I swallowed hard, scanning the faces of those nearby, wondering silently if they had seen my mother or father or even Lujza marching by toward work detail.

We children were ushered inside the cool and damp convent, each of us assigned to a room to share. Hajna was in the hospital nearby, clinging to life, so my roommate was someone I didn't know. She was a strange child, with long curly black hair, who spent the nights scratching on the wall and mumbling in Yiddish. Our nights together were punctuated by her cries. I kept painfully silent, pushing my pain and worry somewhere underneath my stomach. I hoped I would find my mother and father and that Hajna would get well come out of the hospital soon. We could move to Budapest or America and live as we did before the war, like none of this had ever happened.

The Polish nuns had a few Hungarian speakers among them, but not many, which made for issues right at the beginning. Those who did speak Hungarian were in high demand. They floated from child to child, the wings of their wimples sometimes catching the wind and making them look as though they were flying away.

One such Polish nun took my hand to help give me a bath. As her soft, powdery hand grabbed mine, a new feeling came over me. Complete numbness. In Auschwitz, I had felt as though I were in a blur or a haze, shutting down my mind to continue moving forward. Here, I was numb, even down to the tips of my fingernails and ends of my hair. I swallowed hard to try to feel something, anything. I dug my fingernails into my arm to see if my body would react. It didn’t. I felt stuck to the floor, like my feet suddenly weighed a million kilograms. 

The nun lifted me into a tub of water before I even had time to look at myself in the mirror. I had never gone more than a few days without a proper bath, and certainly not more than a week without washing my hair. But it had been six months since I had been properly scrubbed and the feeling of filth had become a part of me. My greasy hair hung around my face without a second thought and I had become accustomed to itching all over. I looked down in the final moment before my naked, white body was submerged in the tub of water and noticed I still had traces of Hajna's filth on my knees and legs. I looked into the water, ashamed to meet the nun's somber brown eyes.

Our life in the convent in Katowice was even and placid. We were given breakfast, lunch and dinner, daily baths and warm beds for as long as we needed them. The nuns helped us draft lists of our family members, their descriptions and ages to hand to the soldiers. We tried to conjure up pictures of old aunts and uncles in our minds, those who might still be alive, or who could take us in if our parents had died. I could only vaguely remember my mother's two sisters and my father's brother. My father's sister, who I had never met, had gone to America when she was only 18 and lived in a strange, foreign place called San Francisco. I knew next to nothing about her, only what she looked like from photos she would mail to us, her black hair pinned up and sporting a smart shirtdress. My favorite picture she had sent was an image of her on roller skates, smiling at the camera shyly, the sun shining on her hair. She held the hand of a little girl who stood on her own skates, her legs at an awkward angle and her two left fingers in her mouth. Her name was Leah, I had told the nuns, but I couldn't remember her last name now that she was married nor the name of her husband or daughter. I shook my head as I spewed out the information, sure it wouldn't matter. I wanted to find my parents. I had to find my parents.

I visited Hajna as often as they would let me. She lay among other survivors of all ages, their emaciated bodies hooked up to IVs and machines that made loud, creepy noises as they breathed. The hospital was so overcrowded with liberated prisoners and wounded soldiers, that there were beds brandishing the ill in the hallways. There was no partition to separate her from anyone else. She lay in her hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, exposed.

Her heart was so weak that the last injection Mengele had given her had almost stopped it, they said. They couldn't figure out what it was he had put into her, but they knew whatever it was had weakened her immune system. She was suffering from dysentery as well. The doctors and nurses avoided my gaze when I asked questions, not wanting to slap me with the entire truth of the situation. They looked over my head or knelt down and explained her health to me in kiddie words, with a singsong tone and simple vocabulary, wanting to soften the blow.

By the second week of her hospitalization, I could tell she was fading. But I wanted to believe she would eventually get well. I sometimes asked to spend the night with her, but they never let me. I continued to ask anyway, hoping someone's eyes would soften and allow me to crawl into bed next to her. Her face was drained from the last bit of color left in it, her eyes sunken into their sockets. Still, I came by everyday with a story to read her or updates on how the search for our parents was going. There were no new leads, still, but I had hope, I told her. I just knew they'd find me at the convent, scoop me up and take us to Balaton in our father's car and he'd take the top off, the naked wind kissing our faces as we would race toward our destination.

On the first day of the third week, her heartbeat began to slow, like a song winding down before the record stopped. During her time there, she would sometimes turn to look at me, her brown irises small underneath her heavy eyelids. She would mumble something incoherent, or sometimes ask me where her teddy bear was.

"Delirious," the nurse would say when she heard it. "It's her fever. It's getting higher than it should be"

I put my hands to my face, watching her breath become slow and methodic. I grabbed her hand. It was ice cold in mine. She turned to look at me and opened her eyes for just a moment.

"I'm going," I thought I heard her say, licking her cracked lips.

"What did you say?" I asked her to repeat herself, poised on the balls of my feet. My toes were pinched in the shoes the nuns had given me, donated by a church member and at least a size too small for me.

But she didn't respond. Instead, her breath became a rattle in the back of her throat before it stopped altogether. I shook her small, thin shoulders, as if doing so would bring her back to life. Her body was limp. A stinging sensation pierced through my chest, and then again, harder and heavier this time. My throat tensed and it felt like someone had reached into my mouth and ripped out my voice.

I wanted to scream, to cry out, to tell someone to come help my sister. But nothing came out but a dry croak. Nurses and doctors shuffled to and fro, helping the various patients, soldiers and concentration camp survivors alike. They took their patients' pulse, listened to their hearts and looked down their throats like nothing had happened, like my entire world hadn't just been shattered.

I curled up into a ball next to her.

Hajna and my voice were gone. I didn't exist any longer.