guards are in another room, I toast the peels in the oven. When we li
them eagerly to our mouths with our aching hands, the skins are still
too hot to eat.
“We’ve escaped the gas chamber, but we’ll die eating potato peels,”
someone says, and we laugh from a deep place in us that we didn’t
know still existed. We laugh, as I did every week at Auschwitz when
we were forced to donate our blood for transfusions for wounded
German soldiers. I would sit with the needle in my arm and humor
myself. Good luck winning a war with my pacifist dancer’s blood! I’d
think. I couldn’t yank my arm away, or I’d have been shot. I couldn’t
defy my oppressors with a gun or a ĕst. But I could ĕnd a way to my
own power. And there’s power in our laughter now. Our camaraderie,
our lightheartedness reminds me of the night at Auschwitz when I
won the boob contest. Our talk is sustenance.
“Who’s from the best country?” a girl named Hava asks. We debate,
singing the praises of home. “Nowhere is as beautiful as Yugoslavia,”
Hava insists. But this is an unwinnable competition. Home isn’t a place
anymore, not a country. It’s a feeling, as universal as it is speciĕc. If we
talk too much about it, we risk it vanishing.
* * *Aer a few weeks at the thread factory, the SS come for us one
morning with striped dresses to replace our gray ones. We board yet
another train. But this time we are forced on top of the cars in our
striped uniforms, human decoys to discourage the British from
bombing the train. It carries ammunition.
“From thread to bullets,” someone says.
“Ladies, we’ve been handed a promotion,” Magda says.
e wind on top of the boxcar is punishing, obliterating. But at
least I can’t feel hunger when I’m this cold. Would I rather die by cold
or by ĕre? Gas or gun? It happens all of a sudden. Even with human