shouts at me and Magda in German and points us to a different line. I
start to move. Magda stays still. e guard shouts again. Magda won’t
move, won’t respond. Is she delirious? Why won’t she follow me? e
guard yells in Magda’s face and Magda shakes her head.
“I don’t understand,” Magda says to the guard in Hungarian. Of
course she understands. We’re both fluent in German.
“Yes, you do!” the guard shouts.
“I don’t understand,” Magda repeats. Her voice is completely
neutral. Her shoulders are straight and tall. Am I missing something?
Why is she pretending not to understand? ere is nothing to be
gained from deĕance. Has she lost her mind? e two continue to
argue. Except Magda isn’t arguing. She is only repeating, Ęatly, calmly,
that she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand. e guard loses
control. She smacks Magda’s face with the butt of her gun. She beats
her again across the shoulders. She hits and hits until Magda topples
over and the guard gestures to me and another girl to drag her away
with us.
Magda is bruised and coughing, but her eyes shine. “I said, ‘No!’ ”
she says. “I said, ‘No.’ ” For her, it is a marvelous beating. It is proof of
her power. She held her ground while the guard lost control. Magda’s
civil disobedience makes her feel like the author of choice, not the
victim of fate.
But the power Magda feels is short-lived. Soon we are marching
again, toward a place worse than any we have yet seen.
* * *We arrive at Mauthausen. It’s an all-male concentration camp at a
quarry where prisoners are made to hack and carry granite that will be
used to build Hitler’s fantasy city, a new capital for Germany, a new
Berlin. I see nothing but stairs and bodies. e stairs are white stone
and stretch up and up ahead of us, as though we could walk them to