“I have to stand in this line now.”
“She has to be processed,” Nurse Urbaniak explains. “The aid organizations are keeping records.”
A tap on glass, like a bird. I look up. In the second-floor hospital window behind me, the nothing-girls have woken; they’re touching the glass and waving. To Dima as much as to me; they love him. He waves back.
“Next,” the Red Cross woman says. I wait for a minute before realizing it’s finally my turn. Her uniform is a single-breasted blue suit. My dress is also pale blue. The nurse who gave it to me said it went with my hair and eyes. Kind lies. My hair then was patchy and scabbed over, short as a boy’s. It’s grown back almost to my chin, but a thin, timid brown instead of lustrous curls. My eyes are still the color of empty. “Miss?” says the matronly woman. “Miss?”
“Zofia Lederman.” I wait for her to check me off on her papers.
“And you’re going home?”
“Yes. To Sosnowiec.”
“And who would you like me to put on your list?” I stare at her, and she reads my confusion. “We’re asking if you have any names.”
“Names?” I know what she’s asking must make sense, but my brain is fogged again; it can’t parse the words. I start to turn back to Nurse Urbaniak and Dima for help.
The worker places her hand on mine until I look back at her. Her voice has softened from its clipped, official tone. “Do you understand? We’re logging where you’re going, but also the family you’re looking for. Is there anyone who could be looking for you?”
Names. I did this once already, months ago, with some charity workers as soon as I was conscious. Nothing ever came of it, and now his name hurts in my throat.
“Abek. My brother, Abek Lederman.”
“Age?”
“He would be twelve now.”
“Do you know anything about where he might be?”
“We were both sent to Birkenau, but I was transferred twice, to a textile factory called Neustadt and then to Gross-Rosen. The last time I saw him was more than three years ago.”
I watch her make careful notes. “Who else?” she asks.
“Just Abek.”
Just Abek. This is why I need to go home. Birkenau was liberated before Gross-Rosen. Abek could already be waiting.
“Are you sure that’s all?” Her pen hesitates over the next blank line. She’s trying to figure out how to be delicate with me. “We’ve found that it’s better to cast as wide a net as possible. Not just immediate family, but cousins, distant relations. All will improve the chances of your finding someone.”
“I don’t need to add anyone else.”
Distant relations. She doesn’t mean it this way, but it reminds me of when my old teacher would bring candy to lessons. Don’t be choosy, he’d warn, walking around with a bowl.
Don’t be choosy. You’d be lucky to have any relatives at all; just pick something.
“Look at all these empty rows.” The worker gestures to her paper, patient, as you’d talk to a baby. “There’s plenty of room to add as many people as you’d like. If you’re looking for only one person—one on this entire continent—it could be impossible.”
One person. Impossible.
I look at her empty lines. There aren’t enough of them, not even close. Not nearly enough space for me to tell the story of the people I’m missing. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to keep my thoughts from leaking, because I know the nurses have been wrong all along: Sometimes it’s not that I have trouble remembering things, it’s that I have trouble forgetting.
Behind me, Dima shifts his weight, concerned. I can tell he wonders if he should help.
If there were enough empty lines on that sheet of paper, this is how I would start:
I would start by telling her that on the twelfth of August in 1942, all remaining Jews of Sosnowiec were told to go to the soccer stadium. The instructions said we were to be issued new identification. It seemed suspicious even then, but you have to understand—I would tell her, You must understand—the Germans had already occupied our city for three years. We were accustomed to arbitrary orders that sometimes became terrifying and sometimes benign. I would tell her how my family had been moved from our apartment to another across town, for no other reason than imaginary boundaries had been drawn on a map, and Jews could now live only inside them. How Baba Rose and I had already made stars to pin on our clothes, cut from a pattern in the newspaper.
Papa had already reported to the stadium once: The Germans made all men report. They were taken, but they were returned, ashen and not wanting to speak of what they’d seen. They returned.
I would tell this Red Cross worker that our identification cards were how we survived: Without one, you couldn’t buy food or walk in the street. So we had to go, and we wore our best clothes. The instructions told us to do this, which we took comfort in, because maybe they really were going to take our pictures for identification.
But then we got there, and there were no cameras. Just soldiers. And all they were doing was sorting us. By health. By age. Strong-looking into one group; weak or old or families with young children in another. One line to work in factories. Another line to camps.
It took hours. It took days. Thousands of us were on the field. All of us had to be sorted. All of us had to be queried about whether we had special skills or connections. The SS surrounded the perimeter. Behind my family, an old man I recognized from the pharmacy was praying, and two soldiers came over to jeer. One knocked the pharmacist’s hat off; the other kneed him to the ground. My father ran over to help him up—I knew he would; he was always kind to old people—even while my mother and I begged him not to, and I thought, What’s the use?
My mother and I took turns curling our arms around Abek and telling him fairy tales: The Frog Princess. The Bear in the Forest Hut. The Whirlwind, his favorite.
Abek was tall for his age, which made him look older. When we realized how the soldiers were sorting us, we told ourselves that would matter. Abek, Mama said. You are twelve, not nine, all right? You’re twelve, and you’ve been working in your father’s factory for a year already.
We made up these reassurances for all of us. We looked at Baba Rose, my sweet, patient grandmother, and we told ourselves she looked much younger than sixty-seven. We told ourselves nobody in Sosnowiec could sew half as well. Customers who bought suits and skirts from my family’s business did so because of the embroidery done at Baba Rose’s hand, and surely this counted as a special skill.
We told ourselves my mother’s cough, the one that had made her weak and gasping over the past months, the one Abek was starting to get, too, was barely noticeable. We said nobody would even see Aunt Maja’s limp.
Pinch your cheeks, Aunt Maja told me. When they come to you, pinch your cheeks to make them full of life.
Beautiful Aunt Maja’s face was so pretty and her laugh was so gay, none of her suitors ever cared that she was born with a mangled hip that made her lurch instead of glide. She was much younger than Mama, just nine years older than me. She used to tell me to pinch my cheeks so I would be as pretty as she was. Now it was so we would both be safe.
Darkness fell; it started to rain. We opened our mouths to catch the drops; we hadn’t eaten or drank in days. The water on our now-sunburned skin felt nice for a minute, and then we were cold. Next to me, Abek tucked his hand in mine.