The Storyteller Read online

  "Gross-Rosen," he muttered.

  I knew it was another camp, because I had seen the name on documents. It could not possibly be any worse than it was here.

  Inside the train car, I moved to a spot near the window. It would be cold, but there would be fresh air. I slid along the wall to a sitting position, feeling my legs burn after the hours I'd spent standing, and I wondered why I had been brought here.

  It was possible this was the punishment that had been handed down from the Kommandant for stealing.

  Or it was possible that someone had been trying to save me from a worse fate, by making sure I was on a train that would take me far away from the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer.

  After what he had done to me, I had no reason to believe that the Hauptscharfuhrer was thinking about me at all, or even wondering if I'd survived the night. That was probably a figment of my imagination.

  But then again, my imagination was what had kept me alive all these months in this hellhole.

  It was not until hours later, when we had arrived at Gross-Rosen to learn that there was not a women's compound and we would be taken on instead to a subcamp called Neusalz, that I took off my mittens to gently test the tenderness of my jaw, and something fell into my lap.

  A tiny scroll, a note.

  I realized that the guard who had untied my wrists had not been having trouble with the knots. He had slipped this into my mitten.

  It was a strip of watermarked paper, the same kind I had rolled into my typewriter every day for the past few months.

  "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT," it read.

  I never saw the Hauptscharfuhrer again.

  *

  At Neusalz, I worked in the Gruschwitz textile factory. My job at first involved making thread--a deep red hue that stained my hands--but because I had worked at an office job and had access to food, I was stronger than most of the other women, and soon I was sent to load train cars with boxes of ammunition. We worked alongside political prisoners--Poles and Russians--who unloaded the supplies that came by rail.

  One of the Poles would flirt with me whenever I came close to the tracks. Although we were not supposed to talk to each other, he would pass me notes when the guards were not looking. He called me Pinky, because of my mittens. He would whisper limericks to make me laugh. Some of the other women joked around with me about my boyfriend, and said that he must have a thing for girls who played hard to get. In reality, I wasn't playing hard to get at all. I didn't speak for fear I'd be punished, and because it still hurt to move my jaw.

  I had been at the factory for only two weeks when, one day, he came closer to me than the guards allowed. "Escape if you can. This camp is going to be evacuated."

  I didn't know what that meant. Would we be taken somewhere and shot? Would we be brought to another camp, a death camp like the one I'd left? Or would I be sent back to Auschwitz, and the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer?

  I moved away from the POW as quickly as I could, before he got me into trouble. I didn't tell the other women in my barracks what he had said.

  Three days later, instead of being made to report to our work details, the nine hundred women in the camp were assembled and, under guard, marched out of the gates.

  We walked about ten miles before dawn. Women who had gathered their meager belongings--blankets and pots and whatever else they had squirreled away at the camp--began to drop them on the sides of the road. We were headed toward Germany, that was all we could surmise. In the front of the convoy, prisoners pulled a wagon that prepared meals for the SS officers. Another wagon at the back of the line held the bodies of those who collapsed from exhaustion and died. The Germans were trying to cover their tracks, I supposed. At least that was the way it worked for the first few days, and then the officers just got lazy, shot those who fell, and left them lying there. The rest of us would simply step around them, like water parted by a stone in a stream.

  We hiked through forests. We hiked through fields. We hiked through towns, where people came to stare at us as we passed, some with tears in their eyes, and some spitting at us. When there were Allied warplanes overhead, the officers would slip between us, using us as camouflage. The hunger was worst, but a close second was the condition of my feet. Some of the women were lucky enough to have boots. I was still wearing the wooden clogs that I had been given at Auschwitz. My skin was blistered beneath the multiple stockings I wore; splinters from the wood had rubbed holes in the heels of at least two of the layers. Where snow had seeped into the wool, my skin was nearly frostbitten. And still I did not have it as bad as some of the other girls. One, who had only a single pair of stockings, got such bad frostbite that her little toe snapped off like an icicle from a roof.

  This went on for a week. I no longer told myself I had to survive the day, but just one more hour. All this exercise and no food took its toll; I could feel myself wasting away, weakening. I had not believed it was possible to be any hungrier than I already was, but I had not understood what this march would be like. At rest stops, when the officers prepared their own meals, we were left to melt snow so that we would have water to drink. We'd forage through the melting drifts for acorns and bits of moss that we could eat. We never spoke; we were just too weary to muster up the energy. After each of these stops, there were at least a dozen women who could not get to their feet again. Then, the SS executioner--a Ukrainian with a wide, flat nose and a bulbous Adam's apple--would finish them off with a single shot to the back.

  Ten days into the march, at one of the rest stops, the officers made a fire. They tossed potatoes into the flames, and dared us to reach in and grab one. There were girls so desperate to get a potato that they set their sleeves on fire, then rolled in the snow to put out the flames, which made the officers laugh. Some who had been successful in getting a potato would eventually die from the burns. After a while, the potatoes charred to ash, because no one else would reach in for them. It was worse, I think, seeing that food go to waste, than simply starving.

  That night one woman who had suffered third-degree burns on her hands was screaming from the pain. I was lying beside her and tried to calm her down by packing her arms with fresh snow. "This will help," I soothed. "You just have to stop thrashing." But she was Hungarian and didn't understand me, and I didn't know how else to help her. After hours of her shrieks, the executioner approached. He stepped over me and shot her, then went back to the spot where the officers were sleeping. I coughed, unable to breathe anything but gunpowder residue, and then wrapped my scarf over my mouth as a filter. The other women around me did not even react.

  I reached down and untied the boots that the dead woman was wearing. She would not need them anymore.

  They were too big, but they were better than the wooden clogs.

  The next morning, before we left the camp the officers had made, I was told to douse the fire. I did, with snow, but noticed the charred remains of the potatoes among the embers. I reached in and picked one up. It crumbled at my touch into a heap of ash, but surely there was still some nutritious value? As quickly as possible, I grabbed handfuls of the ash into my pockets, and for days after that, as I walked, I would stick my fingers into my coat and scoop out bits to eat.

  When we had been marching for two weeks, I thought about the POW who had urged me to escape, and now I understood. There were incremental grades of surrender. From the women who kicked off their clogs because the blisters on their feet made it impossible to walk anymore and who then suffered such severe frostbite and gangrene that they died to those who simply lay down and did not get up, knowing they would be dead within minutes--well, it seemed that we were all dying by degrees. Eventually, there would be none of us left.

  Which maybe was the point of this march.

  And then, it seemed, there was an iota of mercy, in the form of springtime. The days grew warmer; the snow melted in patches. This was a gift in that I knew soon things would begin to grow, and that meant food. But it also depleted our reserve of unlimited water, and created mud bog