fence, miles of snow, I can tell that his eyes are kind. How strange that
kindness now seems like a trick of the light.
I lose track of the time we are in motion. I sleep on Magda’s
shoulder, she on mine. Once I wake to my sister’s voice. She is talking
to someone I can’t make out in the dark. “My teacher,” she explains.
e one from the brick factory, the one whose baby had cried and
cried. At Auschwitz, all the women with small children were gassed
from the start. e fact that she is still alive can mean only one thing:
her baby died. Which is worse, I wonder, to be a child who has lost
her mother or a mother who has lost her child? When the door opens,
we’re in Germany.
* * *ere are no more than a hundred of us. We’re housed in what must
be a children’s summer camp, with bunk beds and a kitchen where,
with scant provisions, we prepare our own meals.
In the morning, we are sent to work in a thread factory. We wear
leather gloves. We stop the spinning machine wheels to keep the
threads from running together. Even with the gloves on, the wheels
slice our hands. Magda’s former teacher sits at a wheel next to Magda.
She is crying loudly. I think it’s because her hands are bleeding and
sore. But she is weeping for Magda. “You need your hands,” she
moans. “You play piano. What will you do without your hands?”
e German forewoman who oversees our work silences her.
“You’re lucky to be working now,” she says. “Soon you will be killed.”
In the kitchen that night we prepare our evening meal supervised
by guards. “We’ve escaped the gas chamber,” Magda says, “but we’ll
die making thread.” It’s funny because we are alive. We might not
survive the war, but we have survived Auschwitz. I peel potatoes for
our supper. Too accustomed to starvation rations, I am unable to waste
any scrap of food. I hide the potato skins in my underwear. When the