My answer is complete in itself. No, Maja isn’t. But I make myself continue because Gosia is a friend who deserves to know. “Just after the soccer stadium. All of them except Abek were killed.”
“No.” She closes her eyes, and I let her have her moment of grief. When she opens them again, she lowers her voice. “Almost none of us are left,” she says quietly. “A few hundred at most. I just don’t understand how so many of us can be gone.”
“I’m looking for Abek now. We were separated at Birkenau. I guess this means you haven’t seen him back here?”
“I wish I had. You’ve been to your apartment?”
“I just came from home—from Mariacka. It’s been looted, but nobody else is living in it. Next I’m going to try Ĺrodula. Maybe he forgot where we planned to meet. Maybe he thinks of the ghetto as home?”
Gosia is shaking her head. “Gone,” she says. “Bombed. He couldn’t have gone to the ghetto; it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“I went there myself first thing, when I got back in June. You should see it, Zofia, that part of the city—there’s almost nothing left standing.”
Nausea, a dropping in my stomach. Abek isn’t at my family’s house. He couldn’t go to our old room in the ghetto. Gosia has been back in Sosnowiec since June, and she’s known my family since she was a child; we have all the same friends. I don’t see any way Abek could have come back without Gosia’s hearing about it, especially not if there are as few of us as she says.
“Who else was with you?” she asks. “On the train to Birkenau—anyone we know?”
“You mean, that day?” I repeat slowly.
“Yes, on the transport. Who was on the transport to Birkenau?”
I knew that’s what she meant. Of course it is. I was just buying time. Answering that question requires me to think back to that day, and that day is something I try to never think about.
“On my transport, there was only—” But before I can continue, I’m slipping back into the horrors of that day: yelling in my ears, the smell of decay in my nostrils, feeling so thirsty and so weak and barely able to breathe. “There was—”
“Zofia? Are you all right?”
I look down, and the bread in my hand is shaking. My hands are shaking. We’re not in a cattle car. We’re on a street. We’re not in a camp. We’re in Sosnowiec. It’s not that day. It’s not that day.
The train station at Birkenau is my black ice, a sleeping black monster guarding the door of my memory. Nudge it too hard and it will wake. If it wakes, it will consume me. I creep around the edges of that memory. Even the edges are hell.
“There was Pani Ruth,” I finish. “With the long gray hair. She was with us. She—”
“Any men?” she interrupts, and now I understand what she’s asking: Do we have any friends who would have been on the men’s side of camp, who could have seen Abek after I last did?
The pharmacist. The pharmacist was praying in the mud, and—No. The pharmacist died in the soccer stadium, I remind myself. The pharmacist died before we got on the train. I need to think about what was after the train, on the platform, on that last day, on that day when—No, no, no.
“Pan Zwieg,” I choke out. “Pan Zwieg, the librarian. He was with us. And the skinny boy from the butcher’s shop. I think his first name was Salomon.”
Gosia grabs my arm. “Salomon Prager.”
“Yes. Salomon Prager.” The name retrieved, I claw my way back out of that memory.
“He’s back. He’s alive. My brother-in-law saw him just last week.”
“At the butcher’s?”
“The butcher shop is closed; he’s working as a farmhand now. After my shift this afternoon, I can find him and ask if he knows what happened to Abek.”
“Can we go now? Let’s go right now.” I’ve already forgotten about bread, and lunch, and Dima, but Gosia is shaking her head apologetically.
“I only have an hour for lunch, and it’s my brother-in-law who knows who Salomon is working for. I promise I’ll find him after work.”
“Come for dinner, then,” I tell her reluctantly. “It will be me and—and maybe a Russian soldier, too. Dima helped me. He’s stationed here now.”
I feel my own face redden as I explain, but Gosia barely blinks. She must have heard of all kinds of arrangements.
“Oh, Zofia, it’s good to see you again.” Gosia puts her hands on my cheeks, and I put my hands on hers; we touch our foreheads together. “I’ll come tonight. I promise.”
She tells me the names of a few nearby stores that are open and friendly, where I might be able to pick up food to prepare for dinner. When I get home, I climb the stairs again, preparing to apologize to Dima for the length of the errand.
And at the top of the stairwell, I see it. Tucked in Mrs. Wójcik’s flowerpot, where I’m sure there was nothing before, is a tiny flag, the kind children would wave at a parade, and on that flag is a swastika.
GOSIA COMES THAT NIGHT WITH GIFTS: A BLANKET. TWO extra pairs of underthings. A packet of laundry powder for my clothes and a bar of soap for myself, white and medicinal, not like the soft brown bars we used to buy from the shop. “The rationing isn’t as bad as it was before,” she explains. “But everywhere has been out of soap this week. I took this one from the clinic.”
“Thank you.” I’m grateful for what she’s brought, but the overly eager way she hands me the bundle—I can immediately tell the items are an offering to make up for bad news.
“Salomon couldn’t help.”
Her eyes lower. “He didn’t see him. He didn’t remember seeing him at all there.”
“I see.”
She moves to take my hand, but since I’m still holding the bundle, she ends up taking my wrists instead. “Salomon asked me to apologize. He said he would have looked out for Abek—he wanted you to know that. If he’d known Abek was there, he would have tried to look out for him.”
I can hear Salomon’s guilt spilling out of Gosia’s mouth. But I don’t blame him. The camp was the size of a small city. Salomon’s not being able to remember seeing Abek didn’t mean anything.
It just means I need to look harder. It just means I need to write more letters. Tomorrow I can go talk to Salomon myself.
Dima walks in from the dining room, broad smile on his face, kissing Gosia’s cheeks in a way I’ve learned is considered merely friendly for Russians, not overly familiar. She startles in surprise but rearranges her face by the time he pulls away.
“You are Zofia’s friend? It’s my pleasure to meet you.”
“Gosia, this is Dima Sokolov, whom I told you about. He’s also invited his commander to join us for dinner. So it will be a little party, if you don’t mind.”
“I am going to meet him now,” Dima says to Gosia. “Zofia, you have everything you need? For cooking?”
I nod, and when he leaves, Gosia raises her eyebrows. “He’s handsome.”
“He’s been nice to me.” I gesture for her to follow me to the kitchen, but she holds back, uncertainty on her face. “Gosia?” I ask. “Was there something else?”