spotted my sister. e guards yell at us, count us, guns drawn. A few
more shots crack. ere’s no sight of Magda. Help me, help me. I
realize that I’m praying to my mother. I’m talking to her the way she
used to pray to her mother’s portrait over the piano. Even in labor she
did this, Magda has told me. e night I was born, Magda heard our
mother screaming, “Mother, help me!” en Magda heard the baby
cry—me—and our mother said, “You helped me.” Calling on the dead
is my birthright. Mother, help us, I pray. I see a Ęash of gray between
the trees. She’s alive. She escaped the bullets. And somehow, now, she
escapes detection. I don’t breathe until Magda stands with me again.
“ere were potatoes,” she says. “If those bastards hadn’t started
shooting we’d be eating potatoes.”
I imagine biting into one like an apple. I wouldn’t even take the
time to rub it clean. I would eat the dirt along with the starch, the
skin.
* * *We go to work in an ammunition factory near the Czech border. It is
March, we learn. One morning I can’t get off the bench in the shed-
like dorms where we sleep. I’m burning with fever, shaking and weak.
“Get up, Dicuka,” Magda orders me. “You can’t call in sick.” At
Auschwitz, the ones who couldn’t work were told they’d be taken to a
hospital, but then they disappeared. Why would it be any different
now? ere’s no infrastructure for killing here, no pipes laid, bricks
mortared for the purpose. But a single bullet makes you just as dead.
Still, I can’t get up. I hear my own voice rambling about our
grandparents. ey’ll let us skip school and take us to the bakery. Our
mother can’t take away the sweets. Somewhere in my head I know I
am delirious, but I can’t regain my senses. Magda tells me to shut up
and covers me with a coat—to keep me warm if the fever breaks, she
says, but more so to keep me hidden. “Don’t move even a ĕnger,” she