She looks back toward where Dima just exited the door. “Salomon mentioned something—I don’t know if it’s useful. But, he said the Red Army liberated Birkenau in January.”
“I know that,” I tell her. “Dima already found that out.”
“But, listen. Before the liberation, Salomon said, they started to transport people away. The SS knew the Allies were coming, so they were trying to evacuate the camp before they arrived, by sending prisoners farther into Germany. Salomon didn’t go; they left him in the infirmary, and the camp was liberated a few weeks later.”
Evacuated. This is what happened at Neustadt, too. Roused from our beds, told to abandon the looms, told to walk for days in subzero temperatures until we reached Gross-Rosen on the fuzzy border of the Reich. Our evacuation didn’t outrun the Allies for long: the Red Army liberated Gross-Rosen a few months later. But if the camp had been deeper in the Reich—the Allies didn’t reach central Germany until late in the spring.
Now I see why Gosia didn’t begin with this information. There are two ways to read it, a bad way and a good way. Either Abek was in Birkenau for liberation and he should be home, or…
“Abek went to Germany,” I say.
“No, I mean, I don’t know.”
“But Salomon didn’t see him in the infirmary? He didn’t see him left behind?”
“No, but—”
“Gosia, at the time of liberation, was there anywhere else he would be?” I ask. “In the infirmary, as Salomon was, or on a transport west to another camp in Germany. Those were the choices?”
Gosia looks uncomfortable. “Unless—”
“Unless what?” I ask sharply.
“Zofia. I loved Abek. You know I did. But he was so young. He was young, and the work was so hard, and so many people—”
“—And that is why it is lucky he was strong,” I interrupt. “Besides, I had organized something for him. A special position. He was valuable. I made sure he was useful.”
She sees my face. She sees my face, and her next words are careful. “If Salomon is right, then when the camp closed, the infirmary or on the transport are the most likely places he would have been.”
“We know he wasn’t in the infirmary,” I say. “So he was on that transport.”
“So he was on that transport,” she repeats slowly. “Of course he was.”
Commander Kuznetsov is a tall, thin man with gaunt cheeks but friendly, intelligent eyes. He doesn’t speak Polish, but he speaks fair German, which Gosia and I are fluent in but which Dima doesn’t speak at all. Gosia also knows some Russian, and between the four of us, we manage to limp along, languages changing every few sentences, an imitation of a dinner party.
The commander has never been to Poland before, he explains as we sit with plates in our laps, again on the floor. Dima spread a tablecloth between us, and he brought flowers, which are on the windowsill. He also made sure there was a bottle of vodka. The rest of the apartment is as it was when I walked in, peeled and abandoned, which the commander says is the point. He asked for the invitation because he wanted to know something about the region he’d been assigned to, he says, how we’re living and making do.
I made holishkes, with tinned tomatoes and the only meat available at the butcher: a graying, tough mutton. I tried to enjoy the cooking, with the army-issued pots Dima brought along. I tried to enjoy being in my family’s kitchen again.
“Zofia?” Dima says gently. “Commander Kuznetsov asked you a question.”
“Yes, it’s a traditional dish,” I say, pulling myself back into the conversation.
If Abek was sent to Germany, will he know how to get back? Where in Germany—the country is huge. Will he have been given the same letter I was, to allow him to board a train?
“We eat it at our harvest holiday sometimes,” Gosia adds because I’ve gone silent. “We also have, oh, apple cake and potato kugel.”
We eat it because it’s Abek’s favorite meal, I add to myself. We eat it on his birthday, and as I bought the ingredients, I hoped somehow I would be making it for him. That Salomon would have known where he was, and Gosia would have brought him home tonight.
“You have known Zofia’s family for a long time?” the commander asks Gosia, the more talkative of his dinner companions. “And what are you doing for work now?”
“I’m a nurse at a medical clinic. And yes. Zofia’s aunt and I went to the same primary school. I’ve known Zofia since she was born, which means—” She nudges my shoulder, tries to draw me into the discussion.
This isn’t how I wanted my first night home to be. This isn’t how I wanted anything to be.
“It means eighteen years, doesn’t it, Zofia?”
Dima looks at me, worried. This isn’t how he wanted the evening to go, either.
“I apologize, Commander,” I say quietly. “I’m very tired. As Dima might have told you, I’m looking for my younger brother. I had hoped he would be waiting for me here, but he wasn’t.”
The commander nods at me, but it’s Dima he speaks to next, in rapid-fire Russian I can see Gosia struggling to keep up with. By reading their faces, I think I make out the basics. He’s asked Dima whether my brother was in a camp, like me, and Dima has said he was. The conversation continues to the point that I can’t follow it, until Gosia at last cuts in.
“He says there are helpers. Organizations, I think he said,” she tells me.
“I know. I’ve talked to them; I’ve written letters.”
The men keep talking, and when Gosia cuts in the second time, her voice has an edge to it. “He says he wonders if Abek is in Munich.”
Dima and Commander Kuznetsov stop midsentence and look at her. The commander seems humbled, and he switches to German. “I apologize for leaving you out of the conversation,” he tells me.
“Why would he have gone to Munich?” I ask.
“As we understand it, the prisoners from Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the end of the war, went mostly to two camps: Bergen-Belsen and Dachau,” the commander explains. “For Dachau, the city it’s nearest is Munich.”
“Why not Bergen-Belsen? Is that also near Munich?”
Commander Kuznetsov looks confused, but it’s Dima he turns to, not me, asking him something in Russian. Dima answers him softly, lowering his voice to almost a whisper, his eyes darting periodically over to mine. There’s something I don’t like in the language of his body—something protective but also secret.
“What are you telling him?” I ask, my voice rising. Then, to Gosia, “What are they saying, Gosia?”
Gosia purses her lips, reticent to translate. “The commander said—he said that—he was made to think Abek was not in Bergen-Belsen.”
I shake my head in confusion. “Why would he think that?”
Again, the three of them exchange glances I don’t understand. I pick up my cup and bang it against the floor to get their attention. “Who would tell him that?”
After an eternity, Dima drags his face to meet mine. “I tell him that. I tell him Abek was not in Bergen-Belsen. Because when I write the camp, he is not in their records.”