The Choice Read online

  One winter morning, we stand in yet another line. The cold bites. We are to be tattooed. I wait my turn. I roll up my sleeve. I present my arm. I am responding automatically, making the motions required of me, so cold and hungry, so cold and hungry that I am almost numb. Does anyone know I’m here? I used to wonder that all the time, and now the question comes at me sluggishly, as if through a dense and constant fog. I can’t remember how I used to think. I have to remind myself to picture Eric, but if I think about him too consciously, I can’t re-create his face. I have to trick myself into memory, catch myself unawares. Where’s Magda? That’s the first thing I ask when I wake, when we march to work, before we crash into sleep. I dart my eyes around to confirm that she’s still behind me. Even if our eyes don’t meet, I know that she is also keeping watch for me. I’ve begun saving my bread at the evening meal so we can share it in the morning.

  The officer with the needle and ink is right in front of me now. He grabs my wrist and starts to prick, but then shoves me aside. “I’m not going to waste the ink on you,” he says. He pushes me into a different line.

  “This line is death,” the girl nearest me says. “This is the end.” She is completely gray, as though she’s covered in dust. Someone ahead of us in the line is praying. In a place where the threat of death is constant, this moment still pierces me. I think suddenly about the difference between deadly and deadening. Auschwitz is both. The chimneys smoke and smoke. Any moment could be the last one. So why care? Why invest? And yet, if this moment, this very one, is my last on Earth, do I have to waste it in resignation and defeat? Must I spend it as if I’m already dead?

  “We never know what the lines mean,” I tell the girl nearest me. What if the unknown could make us curious instead of gut us with fear? And then I see Magda. She’s been selected for a different line. If I’m sent to die, if I’m sent to work, if they evacuate me to a different camp as they’ve begun to do to others … nothing matters except that I stay with my sister, that she stay with me. We are of the few, the lucky inmates who have not yet been completely cut off from our families. It is no exaggeration to say that I live for my sister. It is no exaggeration to say that my sister lives for me. There is chaos in the yard. I don’t know what the lines mean. The only thing I know is that I must pass to whatever lies ahead with Magda. Even if what lies ahead is death. I eye the gap of crusted-over snow that separates us. Guards ring us. I don’t have a plan. Time is slow and time is fast. Magda and I share a glance. I see her blue eyes. And then I am in motion. I am doing cartwheels, hands to earth, feet to sky, around, around. A guard stares at me. He’s right side up. He’s upside down. I expect a bullet any second. And I don’t want to die, but I can’t keep myself from turning around again and again. He doesn’t raise his gun. Is he too surprised to shoot me? Am I too dizzy to see? He winks at me. I swear I see him wink. Okay, he seems to say, this time, you win.

  In the few seconds that I hold his complete attention, Magda runs across the yard into my line to join me. We melt back into the crowd of girls waiting for whatever will happen next.

  * * *

  We’re herded across the icy yard toward the train platform where we arrived six months before, where we parted from our father, where we walked with our mother between us in the final moments of her life. Music played then; it’s silent now. If wind is silence. The constant rush of burdensome cold, the wide-open sighing mouth of death and winter no longer sound like noise to me. My head teems with questions and dread, but these thoughts are so enduring they don’t feel like thoughts anymore. It is always almost the end.

  We’re just going to a place to work until the end of the war, we have been told. If we could hear even two minutes of news, we would know that the war itself might be the next casualty. As we stand there waiting to climb the narrow ramp into the cattle car, the Russians are approaching Poland from one side, the Americans from the other. The Nazis are evacuating Auschwitz bit by bit. The inmates we are leaving behind, those who can survive one more month at Auschwitz, will soon be free. We sit in the dark, waiting for the train to pull away. A soldier—Wehrmacht, not SS—puts his head in the door and speaks to us in Hungarian. “You have to eat,” he says. “No matter what they do, remember to eat, because you might get free, maybe soon.” Is this hope he’s offering us? Or false promise? A lie? This soldier is like the nyilas at the brick factory, spreading rumors, a voice of authority to silence our inner knowing. Who reminds a starving person to eat?

  But even in the dark of the cattle car, his face backlit by miles of fence, miles of snow, I can tell that his eyes are kind. How strange that kindness now seems like a trick of the light.

  I lose track of the time we are in motion. I sleep on Magda’s shoulder, she on mine. Once I wake to my sister’s voice. She is talking to someone I can’t make out in the dark. “My teacher,” she explains. The one from the brick factory, the one whose baby had cried and cried. At Auschwitz, all the women with small children were gassed from the start. The fact that she is still alive can mean only one thing: her baby died. Which is worse, I wonder, to be a child who has lost her mother or a mother who has lost her child? When the door opens, we’re in Germany.

  * * *

  There are no more than a hundred of us. We’re housed in what must be a children’s summer camp, with bunk beds and a kitchen where, with scant provisions, we prepare our own meals.

  In the morning, we are sent to work in a thread factory. We wear leather gloves. We stop the spinning machine wheels to keep the threads from running together. Even with the gloves on, the wheels slice our hands. Magda’s former teacher sits at a wheel next to Magda. She is crying loudly. I think it’s because her hands are bleeding and sore. But she is weeping for Magda. “You need your hands,” she moans. “You play piano. What will you do without your hands?”

  The German forewoman who oversees our work silences her. “You’re lucky to be working now,” she says. “Soon you will be killed.”

  In the kitchen that night we prepare our evening meal supervised by guards. “We’ve escaped the gas chamber,” Magda says, “but we’ll die making thread.” It’s funny because we are alive. We might not survive the war, but we have survived Auschwitz. I peel potatoes for our supper. Too accustomed to starvation rations, I am unable to waste any scrap of food. I hide the potato skins in my underwear. When the guards are in another room, I toast the peels in the oven. When we lift them eagerly to our mouths with our aching hands, the skins are still too hot to eat.

  “We’ve escaped the gas chamber, but we’ll die eating potato peels,” someone says, and we laugh from a deep place in us that we didn’t know still existed. We laugh, as I did every week at Auschwitz when we were forced to donate our blood for transfusions for wounded German soldiers. I would sit with the needle in my arm and humor myself. Good luck winning a war with my pacifist dancer’s blood! I’d think. I couldn’t yank my arm away, or I’d have been shot. I couldn’t defy my oppressors with a gun or a fist. But I could find a way to my own power. And there’s power in our laughter now. Our camaraderie, our lightheartedness reminds me of the night at Auschwitz when I won the boob contest. Our talk is sustenance.

  “Who’s from the best country?” a girl named Hava asks. We debate, singing the praises of home. “Nowhere is as beautiful as Yugoslavia,” Hava insists. But this is an unwinnable competition. Home isn’t a place anymore, not a country. It’s a feeling, as universal as it is specific. If we talk too much about it, we risk it vanishing.

  * * *

  After a few weeks at the thread factory, the SS come for us one morning with striped dresses to replace our gray ones. We board yet another train. But this time we are forced on top of the cars in our striped uniforms, human decoys to discourage the British from bombing the train. It carries ammunition.

  “From thread to bullets,” someone says.

  “Ladies, we’ve been handed a promotion,” Magda says.

  The wind on top of the boxcar is punishing, obliterating
. But at least I can’t feel hunger when I’m this cold. Would I rather die by cold or by fire? Gas or gun? It happens all of a sudden. Even with human prisoners on top of the trains, the British send the hiss and crash of bombs at us. Smoke. Shouts. The train stops and I jump. I’m the first one down. I run straight up the snowy hillside that hugs the tracks toward a stand of thin trees, where I stop to scan the snow for my sister, catch my breath. Magda isn’t there among the trees. I don’t see her running from the train. Bombs hiss and erupt on the tracks. I can see a heap of bodies by the side of the train. Magda.

  I have to choose. I can run. Escape into the forest. Scavenge a life. Freedom is that close, a matter of footsteps. But if Magda’s alive and I abandon her, who will give her bread? And if she’s dead? It’s a second like a shutter’s flap. Click: forest. Click: tracks. I run back down the hill.

  Magda sits in the ditch, a dead girl in her lap. It’s Hava. Blood streams from Magda’s chin. In a nearby train car, men are eating. They’re prisoners, too, but not like us. They’re dressed in civilian clothes, not in uniforms. And they have food. German political prisoners, we guess. In any case, they are more privileged than we are. They’re eating. Hava is dead and my sister lives and all I can think of is food. Magda, the beautiful one, is bleeding.

  “Now that there’s a chance to ask for some food, you look like this,” I scold her. “You’re too cut up to flirt.” As long as I can be angry with her, I am spared from feeling fear, or the inverted, inside-out pain of what almost was. Instead of rejoicing, giving thanks that we are both alive, that we have survived another fatal moment, I am furious at my sister. I am furious at God, at fate, but I direct my confusion and hurt onto my sister’s bleeding face.

  Magda doesn’t respond to my insult. She doesn’t wipe away the blood. The guards circle in, shouting at us, prodding bodies with their guns to make sure that those who aren’t moving are really dead. We leave Hava in the dirty snow and stand with the other survivors.

  “You could have run,” Magda says. She says it like I’m an idiot.

  Within an hour, the ammunition has been reloaded into new train cars and we’re on top again in our striped uniforms, the blood dried on Magda’s chin.

  * * *

  We are prisoners and refugees. We have long since lost track of the date, of time. Magda is my guiding star. As long as she is near, I have everything I need. We are pulled from the ammunition trains one morning, and we march many days in a row. The snow begins to melt, giving way to dead grass. Maybe we march for weeks. Bombs fall, sometimes close by. We can see cities burning. We stop in small towns throughout Germany, moving south sometimes, moving east, forced to work in factories along the way.

  Counting inmates is the SS preoccupation. I don’t count how many of us remain. Maybe I don’t count because I know that each day the number is smaller. It’s not a death camp. But there are dozens of ways to die. The roadside ditches run red with blood from those shot in the back or the chest—those who tried to run, those who couldn’t keep up. Some girls’ legs freeze, completely freeze, and they keel over like felled trees. Exhaustion. Exposure. Fever. Hunger. If the guards don’t pull a trigger, the body does.

  For days we have gone without food. We come to the crest of a hill and see a farm, outbuildings, a pen for livestock.

  “One minute,” Magda says. She runs toward the farm, weaving between trees, hoping not to be spotted by the SS who have stopped to smoke.

  I watch Magda zigzag toward the garden fence. It’s too early for spring vegetables, but I would eat cow feed, I would eat dried-up stalk. If a rat scurries into the room where we sleep, girls pounce on it. I try not to call attention to Magda with my gaze. I look away, and when I glance back I can’t see her. A gun fires. And again. Someone has spotted my sister. The guards yell at us, count us, guns drawn. A few more shots crack. There’s no sight of Magda. Help me, help me. I realize that I’m praying to my mother. I’m talking to her the way she used to pray to her mother’s portrait over the piano. Even in labor she did this, Magda has told me. The night I was born, Magda heard our mother screaming, “Mother, help me!” Then Magda heard the baby cry—me—and our mother said, “You helped me.” Calling on the dead is my birthright. Mother, help us, I pray. I see a flash of gray between the trees. She’s alive. She escaped the bullets. And somehow, now, she escapes detection. I don’t breathe until Magda stands with me again.

  “There were potatoes,” she says. “If those bastards hadn’t started shooting we’d be eating potatoes.”

  I imagine biting into one like an apple. I wouldn’t even take the time to rub it clean. I would eat the dirt along with the starch, the skin.

  * * *

  We go to work in an ammunition factory near the Czech border. It is March, we learn. One morning I can’t get off the bench in the shed-like dorms where we sleep. I’m burning with fever, shaking and weak.

  “Get up, Dicuka,” Magda orders me. “You can’t call in sick.” At Auschwitz, the ones who couldn’t work were told they’d be taken to a hospital, but then they disappeared. Why would it be any different now? There’s no infrastructure for killing here, no pipes laid, bricks mortared for the purpose. But a single bullet makes you just as dead. Still, I can’t get up. I hear my own voice rambling about our grandparents. They’ll let us skip school and take us to the bakery. Our mother can’t take away the sweets. Somewhere in my head I know I am delirious, but I can’t regain my senses. Magda tells me to shut up and covers me with a coat—to keep me warm if the fever breaks, she says, but more so to keep me hidden. “Don’t move even a finger,” she says.

  The factory is nearby, across a little bridge over a fast stream. I lie under the coat, pretending not to exist, anticipating the moment when I will be discovered missing and a guard will come into the shed to shoot me. Will Magda be able to hear the gunshot over the noise of the machines? I am no use to anyone now.

  I swirl into delirious sleep. I dream of fire. It’s a familiar dream—I have dreamt for nearly a year of being warm. Yet I wake from the dream, and this time the smell of smoke chokes me. Is the shed on fire? I am afraid to go to the door, afraid I won’t make it on my weak legs, afraid that if I do I’ll give myself away. Then I hear the bombs. The whistle and blast. How did I sleep through the beginning of the attack? I pull myself off the bench. Where is the safest place? Even if I could run, where would I go? I hear shouts. “Factory’s on fire! Factory’s on fire!” someone yells.

  I am aware again of the space between me and my sister: I have become an expert at measuring the space. How many hands between us? How many legs? Cartwheels? Now there’s a bridge. Water and wood. And fire. I see it from the shed door where I finally stand and lean against the frame. The bridge to the factory is ablaze, the factory swallowed in smoke. For anyone who has lived through the bombing, the chaos is a respite. An opportunity to run. I picture Magda pushing out a window and dashing for the trees. Looking up through the branches toward the sky. Ready to run even as far as that to be free. If she makes a run for it, then I’m off the hook. I can slide back down to the floor and never get up. What a relief it will be. To exist is such an obligation. I let my legs fold up like scarves. I relax into the fall. And there is Magda in a halo of flame. Already dead. Beating me to it. I’ll catch up. I feel the heat from the fire. Now I’ll join her. Now. “I’m coming!” I call. “Wait for me!”

  I don’t catch the moment when she stops being a phantom and becomes flesh again. Somehow she makes me understand: She has crossed the burning bridge to return to me.

  “You idiot,” I say, “you could have run.”

  * * *

  It’s April now. Grass bursts green on the hills. Light stretches each day. Children spit at us as we pass through the outskirts of a town. How sad, I think, that these children have been brainwashed to hate me.

  “You know how I’m going to get revenge?” Magda says. “I’m going to kill a German mother. A German kills my mother; I’m going to kill a German mother.”<
br />
  I have a different wish. I wish for the boy who spits at us to one day see that he doesn’t have to hate. In my revenge fantasy, the boy who yells at us now—“Dirty Jew! Vermin!”—holds out a bouquet of roses. “Now I know,” he says, “there’s no reason to hate you. No reason at all.” We embrace in mutual absolution. I don’t tell Magda my fantasy.

  * * *

  One day as dusk comes, the SS shove us into a community hall where we’ll sleep for the night. There’s no food again.

  “Anyone who leaves the premises will be shot immediately,” the guard warns.

  “Dicuka,” Magda moans as we sink onto the wooden boards that will be our bed, “soon it’s going to be the end for me.”

  “Shut up,” I say. She is scaring me. Her despondence is more terrifying to me than a raised gun. She doesn’t talk like this. She doesn’t give up. Maybe I’ve been a burden to her. Maybe keeping me strong through my illness has depleted her. “You’re not going to die,” I tell her. “We’re going to eat tonight.”

  “Oh, Dicuka,” she says, and rolls toward the wall.

  I’ll show her. I’ll show her there’s hope. I’ll get a little food. I’ll revive her. The SS have gathered near the door, near the last evening light, to eat their rations. Sometimes they’ll throw a scrap of food at us just for the pleasure of seeing us grovel. I go to them on my knees. “Please, please,” I beg. They laugh. One soldier holds a wedge of canned meat toward me and I lunge for it, but he puts it in his mouth and they all laugh harder. They play with me like this until I am worn out. Magda is asleep. I refuse to let it go, let her down. The SS break up their picnic to relieve themselves or to smoke, and I slip out a side door.