Part One
Lower Silesia, August 1945
LINES. I AM GOOD AT LINES. I AM GOOD AT LINES BECAUSE YOU don’t have to think in them, just stand in them, and this line is easy because now only a few people are in front of me, and easy because I understand the reason I am in it, and it’s a good reason, and I am good at lines.
At the front of it, an official-looking woman—from the Red Cross, I think—sits behind a table. It’s a nice, indoor table, as though it was carried out to the street from someone’s dining room. Except, instead of sitting on a rug, it sits on cobblestones, and instead of candlesticks, it’s piled with neat stacks of papers and smells of furniture polish, or I imagine it would; it looks like that kind of table. A solitary cup also sits on it, next to the papers at the proper two o’clock of an imaginary place setting like a leftover from the table’s former life. A cup of tea for the official worker.
“Next,” she says, and we move forward because this is how lines work; they move forward.
I look back toward the door, but the other nothing-girls don’t come out to say goodbye. I’m the first one of us to leave the hospital. In the early weeks after the war, there were always goodbyes from the healthier patients, always plans being made. You could look out the ward window almost any time and see a truck grinding past, stuffed with German soldiers on their way home, Polish soldiers on their way home. Russians, a few Canadians, everyone traveling in a different direction, and every direction was someone’s home, as if the world were a board game and all the pieces had ended up scattered in the wrong corners of the box.
But none of the nothing-girls were well enough then. So we don’t have a protocol yet for what to do when one of us leaves. We have no addresses to exchange. We have nothing. We weigh nothing, we feel nothing, we existed on nothing, for years.
Our minds are nothing. That’s the biggest nothing, the reason we are still in the hospital. Our minds are soft. Confused.
“Zofia? I didn’t know if you wanted to keep this.”
I turn to the voice, the little blond nurse jogging out the door, mouth like a red bow. She hands me a letter, addressed in my own handwriting. Return to sender. The sender was me; the addressee was—I’m not even sure who the addressee was this time. For months, from the day I was well enough to pick up a pen, I have been writing letters to everyone whose address I’d ever known. Have you seen him? Tell him to wait for me. But their addresses weren’t their addresses anymore, and the mail wasn’t the mail anymore. And I wasn’t me anymore, but it became clear I couldn’t do what I needed to from a hospital bed. If I wanted to find him, I would have to pull myself out of it.
Even though my mind is still soft, that’s why I’m standing outside and the other girls are still in the window.
Tell him the doctors won’t let me leave by myself until I’m better, I wrote. Tell him I won’t be better until I leave and find him.
“Here, I also made this for you,” the blond nurse says, passing me a bundle of cloth, still warm. Food. The heat feels nice against my stomach. I start to unwrap the cloth so I can hand it back, but she says to keep it.
So now I own this checkered cloth. It is mine, and that will bring the number of possessions I own in this world to six. Later, I can fold it and use it as a kerchief for my hair, or I can cut it in half, in triangles, and have two handkerchiefs; that would bring my number of possessions to seven. I also have a dress, undergarments, a pair of shoes, a donated bill of money in a large denomination, and a document saying I was a prisoner in Gross-Rosen. It’s supposed to connect me with relief organizations, help with food rations. The workers who gave it to me said it would be my most valuable possession.
“Next,” the official woman says. She’s my mother’s age, with lines on her brow that have only begun to soften her face. The queue behind me has grown, as more soon-to-be-discharged patients come out. Another worker arrives to help.
The blond nurse, still watching me. “Did you forget anything else?” she asks. Urbaniak, I remember. Her surname is Urbaniak.
“My shoes. Where are my shoes?”
Why didn’t I realize before? I’ve just looked down at my feet, and the brown leather boots I’m wearing are a stranger’s.
“Those are your shoes. Your new shoes. Remember?” She’s gentle, and then I do remember: These brown boots are mine now, because when I was brought to the hospital months ago, I was wearing the shoes the Nazis had assigned to me, ill-fitting and full of holes. My frostbitten feet were so swollen that a nurse couldn’t pull them off; she had to slice them at the tongue. The nurses said I cried; I don’t remember crying.
It turns out, if you have to lose toes to frostbite, the third and the fourth are possible to lose and still be able to walk and balance.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay longer, Zofia?”
“I remember about my shoes now; I just forgot for a minute.”
“You had already asked me about them once today.”
I force a smile. “Dima is leaving; he’s going to his new post, and he has a car to drive me.”
Dima-the-soldier is the one who brought me to the hospital, which was not a hospital then, just a building crammed with cots and bottles of iodine. Dima’s Red Army jeep was crammed, too, with people. The Russians had liberated Gross-Rosen three days before, but it had finally become clear that none of us, including the Russian soldiers, knew what liberation was supposed to look like. Hundreds of us were still inside the gates, too weak to leave. Dima found me barely conscious in the women’s barracks, he later told me in the broken Polish from his mother. It was lucky I’d passed out, because by the time he stroked life back into my face, all the good rations had been handed out already: waxy chocolate, tinned beef.
Our stomachs were too weak for rich foods. I watched people who’d lived for months on a potato a day eat the beef and never get up again. We were liberated and still dying by the dozens.
“It’s over now,” the soldiers said to us in February. It wasn’t over, not officially, not for a few months, but what they meant was, the SS officers were not coming back to the camp.
“It’s really over now,” the nurses told us in May, spoon-feeding us sugar water and porridge. We could hear cheering and yelling in the corridor; Germany had surrendered.
What did they mean, it was over? What was over? I was miles from home, and I didn’t own so much as my own shoes. How was any of this over?
“Next,” says the official woman, and I take another step forward.
A puff of smoke, the growl of a motor. Dima pulls up in his jeep. He leaps out when he sees me waiting, and I’m struck again by how much he looks like a cinema poster, like the film version of a soldier: Square chin. Nice cheekbones. Kind eyes. Dima, who postmarked my letters for me. Who, when I begged him, asked his soldier friends about Birkenau and found out for me that it had been liberated a few weeks before Gross-Rosen. And who repeated the same thing for me again when I forgot, and then again when I forgot again. Remember, Zofia? We discuss already. My mind is a sieve, and Dima is how I am allowed to leave this place—because he is leaving with me.
“I would have come inside, Zofia.” He places his hands on my shoulders. His hair is shorter above one ear. He must have cut it himself again in the mirror. “You get too tired. You know I worry about you.”