around again and again. He doesn’t raise his gun. Is he too surprised
to shoot me? Am I too dizzy to see? He winks at me. I swear I see him
wink. Okay, he seems to say, this time, you win.
In the few seconds that I hold his complete attention, Magda runs
across the yard into my line to join me. We melt back into the crowd
of girls waiting for whatever will happen next.
* * *We’re herded across the icy yard toward the train platform where we
arrived six months before, where we parted from our father, where we
walked with our mother between us in the ĕnal moments of her life.
Music played then; it’s silent now. If wind is silence. e constant rush
of burdensome cold, the wide-open sighing mouth of death and
winter no longer sound like noise to me. My head teems with
questions and dread, but these thoughts are so enduring they don’t
feel like thoughts anymore. It is always almost the end.
We’re just going to a place to work until the end of the war , we have
been told. If we could hear even two minutes of news, we would know
that the war itself might be the next casualty. As we stand there
waiting to climb the narrow ramp into the cattle car, the Russians are
approaching Poland from one side, the Americans from the other. e
Nazis are evacuating Auschwitz bit by bit. e inmates we are leaving
behind, those who can survive one more month at Auschwitz, will
soon be free. We sit in the dark, waiting for the train to pull away. A
soldier—Wehrmacht, not SS—puts his head in the door and speaks to
us in Hungarian. “You have to eat,” he says. “No matter what they do,
remember to eat, because you might get free, maybe soon.” Is this
hope he’s offering us? Or false promise? A lie? is soldier is like the
nyilas at the brick factory, spreading rumors, a voice of authority to
silence our inner knowing. Who reminds a starving person to eat?
But even in the dark of the cattle car, his face backlit by miles of