And the piece about Gregor had one of Chaim’s favorite lines: He eats for one, starves for two, though perhaps only another twin like Gregor would get it.
Chaim understood that the poems might never be heard by anyone but himself. In the end, the yahrzeit candle always burns out. But all that mattered to him was the work in his mind. It kept him alive and sane.
* * *
• • •
“There is a fever,” Gregor commented offhand at breakfast, “runs two degrees hotter than just influenza. Old Manny is down with it. It’s likely to make the rounds. Just a warning.”
“Just influenza,” countered Manya, standing with her now- empty bowl, “killed fifty to a hundred million people around the world in the last war—more than guns and bombs ever did!” She seemed to know things that no one else did. Chaim was in awe of her.
He knew that truth dawdled while rumor went on wings. Yet this rumor of illness was most likely to be true. Manny had not been to breakfast for two days, though no one was worried. Yet. Fevers always burned like lava in the cauldron of the camp. But they were usually confined, and few people lost their lives because of them. But Chaim wrote a poem when he heard the old barber was burning with fever and covered with rose-colored spots. In the poem, he called the roseate spots “a tired old man’s tattoos.”
“That fact alone is surprising,” Gittel said as they lay on the hard slats of their upper bunk that evening talking about the fever. “Especially because we’ve got no doctors or nurses here.”
“I wonder . . .” Chaim’s two words were soft.
“I don’t,” she said. “It’s because we’re all hardened, and the weak ones have already been culled from the herd.”
He nodded, and though it was too dark for her to see it, he was certain she knew he agreed. Maybe she felt the boards shake or a small change in the air. Maybe he’d taken an extra breath. It didn’t matter—she just always knew.
But the words “culled from the herd” rankled. He wanted to argue with her a bit but was too tired to do so. All he could manage was, “Then we won’t be weak,” and his words were done for the day.
He fell to sleep quickly and dreamed lines he didn’t remember after. He called such lines “false poems” and didn’t give them any more thought.
But this time, when he woke hours later, he found Gittel restless beside him and babbling. When he touched her forehead, he realized she was afire with fever.
Manny’s fever? he wondered. Spread so soon? Spread to Barracks 3? But how? Neither of them had had close contact with Manny since well before he’d fallen ill. And that had consisted only of nodding at him in the breakfast line. The grown-ups sat together at several tables, the camp’s child laborers together at their own.
For a moment he didn’t know what to do. He touched Gittel’s shoulder, but she didn’t waken. The nightclothes beneath his hand were soaking wet with her sweat.
He could hear sounds from below. Sophie was moaning about her head hurting in a muffled voice, as if still asleep and dreaming.
Leaping down, he pulled Bruno roughly out of the bed, leaned over, and felt Sophie’s forehead. It was as hot as Gittel’s.
He said quietly, “My sister, yours . . . burning up.” Even he was surprised by the words tumbling out.
“Burning?” Bruno was still half asleep. He turned to look at Sophie in the gloomy light of early morning. “She’s . . . Chaim—I think she’s bleeding.”
“Bleeding?”
“From her nose. It’s . . . it’s all over!” Bruno almost screamed and brushed his ragged sleeping clothes as if the blood might have gotten onto him, spreading its contagion.
Disgusted by Bruno’s reaction to his sister’s illness, Chaim ran over to Manya’s bed to report what was happening with the girls, but she, too, lay there groaning.
“What is it?” he managed to ask.
She whispered, “Nervous fever, I think. It swept our shtetl. I alone didn’t come down with it. Not sure why . . .” And then she put her head over the side of the bed and vomited onto the floor. It was volcanic. Chaim jumped back quickly.
He went from bed to bed till he found Gregor in an upper bunk just rising.
“Girls!” Chaim whispered hoarsely, pulling the words out as if they were knives in his mouth. “Gittel, Sophie, Manya . . . fever.”
Gregor was down in an instant, took one look at each of them, ran outside without even putting on shoes, shouting over his shoulder, “Alerting guards. Get everybody up.”
* * *
• • •
By the time the guards arrived, guns drawn—as if bullets could put an end to the sickness that had taken hold in Barracks 3—the children had sorted themselves out. Those who could stand did, in a small, dismal group of about forty near the door, dressed in their uniforms as if ready to start the workday. They were mostly boys with only eleven girls, all looking ragged and frightened, a few too stunned to even talk.
The rest—some ten in all—including Manya, Sophie, and Gittel—were too sick to get out of bed.
“Manya says ‘nervous fe . . . fe . . . ver,’” Chaim reported, stuttering in the effort to get it out. He’d already expended three times his normal words for a morning.
Marek shook his head. “That’s enteric fever. Very bad.”
“We called it typhoid in our village,” Meyer said.
It was the last word—typhoid—that the guards understood. They passed it around as if it was too hot for them to handle.
For once, Bruno was actually helpful—“a hero,” Madam Grenzke would call him later—because he was able to speak both German and Polish, interpreting even the smallest points. As he boasted, “My father was a doctor in Lublin, and I listened to what he had to say because I am going to study medicine when the war is over.”
Of course Bruno didn’t mention that his father had been a dentist and that he, Bruno, hardly ever listened to what anyone else said. This made Chaim worry about how much else Bruno was making up in German as he went along.
But whatever Bruno said, it worked. The guards nodded, and one put a hand on his shoulder and said something quickly and roughly in German to him.
Bruno looked at the standing children, drew himself up as if he’d just been knighted by Herr Hitler. Then he translated what the guard had said.
“You all, head off to breakfast and work.” He sounded very self-important. Chaim refused to meet his eyes, looking at Bruno’s shoes instead, which, he was pleased to see, needed a good cleaning.
“And I,” Bruno continued, puffing his chest out like some addled bantam rooster, “I will help the commandant sort this out.”
Chaim doubted that. The commandant visited the camp only once every month with a phalanx of trucks, to count and collect the munitions. He never even stayed overnight, though the Welcome House by the gates was always ready for him. If there was fever at the camp, he’d hardly even step inside the gate but would send a flunky in, all the while staying comfortable and safe in his car.
* * *
• • •
This one time, Bruno seemed to have been telling the truth. He was to be on the phone to relate in German all the symptoms of the fever that was sweeping the barracks, and so help the commandant organize a doctor to come see what could be done.
After all, as Bruno later reported to the others in his new important voice, the munitions production mustn’t falter. Berlin would not allow it. The Führer would not allow it.
Chaim thought, He’s flung his Jewishness away, like a cap into a dung heap, as if he’s fully German now. Though the Germans certainly don’t believe it. And then he thought, bitterly, “Mischling!” But of course he didn’t say it aloud.
Still, how could he blame Bruno? To stay alive just one day more was the desire of every prisoner in the camp.
Chaim only half listened as Bruno par
aded his conversation with the commandant: There was to be a big push against the enemy. They needed everybody working hard to get the bullets and bombs ready on time. The children remaining on their feet were to be given double rations of food and to work until ten at night to make up for those who had fallen by the typhoid wayside.
* * *
• • •
“Double the rations?” The camp was abuzz about it. Rumors flew faster than they had back in Łódź.
Even the old men were caught up in it.
Double nothing is still nothing, Chaim thought sourly. That’s dream stuff. Next we’ll be given ham and kosher wine! The guards would have their fun with that!
Though even he had to agree that double the rations might keep some of the rest of the prisoners from falling sick.
But double the workload? He wasn’t certain any of them could manage that. Not for long anyway. And he had no idea what the time line was for people ill with typhoid to recover. Or how dangerous it was. With Gittel so sick, he was afraid to ask.
* * *
• • •
As Chaim had rightly guessed, the commandant didn’t come to the camp himself.
“Too important to take the risk,” Manya said in one of her more lucid moments. It seemed typhoid made some patients delirious, but Manya just became agitated and unsettled. Mostly during the late afternoon.
Chaim and two of the kitchen help, middle-aged men in their striped pajama pants, Abram and Shimshon, had been sent back into Barracks 3 with breakfast and cloths soaked in cold water. Also buckets with soapy water to clean up the floor. Too many of the girls had gotten sick in the night, and since most of them were the cleaners, the men now had that job as well.
Chaim managed to get Gittel to eat a little of the gluey porridge, but slowly. One of the other girls had thrown up because she’d gulped it down too fast.
Just holding a spoon to her lips made him aware once again of his own frailty. Without her, how could he live on? She was all he had left of his old life. The best part of it.
But then her eyelids fluttered, and she whispered, “Tired. So tired,” before pulling away from him and lying back down on the hard slats. He sat there stupidly for a moment more, the spoon still in his hand.
“Chaim!” Shimshon called. “You need to get back to the factory. We can take things from here.”
He hated leaving Gittel. She was breathing so shallowly.
Shimshon called his name again.
This time he turned, gave the spoon to Shimshon, a drop of gruel still moving sluggishly in it, like a shell-less snail.
The munitions, as the commandant had indicated, could not wait.
* * *
• • •
A doctor—or so it was rumored—was on his way. And that was a rumor Chaim desperately wanted to believe.
“He’d better come soon,” Gregor said as they worked their second shift well into the evening, though on a better dinner than any of them had had in months.
They ate quickly in the outer room, standing up. Food had to be kept away from the munitions.
“Nights like this . . .” Gregor looked off in the distance, and Chaim knew at once he was thinking about his dead twin.
Chaim put his hand on Gregor’s shoulder, knowing he should say something. Something comforting. Something soothing. Some words. Gittel would have known what to say. He wanted to ask what it was like to be a twin without the other. He wanted to ask if it felt like a limb had been removed. Or one’s heart.
Gregor turned suddenly, looked at Chaim, and said, “We weren’t like you and your sister. Gideon and I were mirror twins. Looked exactly the same, except his hair parted on the right, mine on the left.” He looked into the distance again. “Gideon was much smarter than me. He was going to go to the university to study philosophy and history. Me, I wanted to become a butcher, like Papa. Our parents were horrified. They dreamed something bigger for us both—medicine, the law, even a teacher would do. Gideon was my big brother. Ten minutes older. Ten years smarter.” He didn’t have to say his brother never got those ten years, but Chaim knew by the pain that wreathed Gregor’s bony face that he had to be thinking it.
Oh, Gittel, he thought miserably. I’m minutes older but not—
Gregor put the bowl on the shelf, next to some bullet casings. “I . . . I should have saved him.”
“I’m the oldest,” Chaim said suddenly, letting the moment between them extend by spending his few words.
“How much?” Gregor asked.
Chaim held up seven fingers. Then he looked down at his wooden bowl. “Minutes,” he said.
In the bowl were actual potatoes and carrots in a kind of stew, a bit of meat (no one questioned what kind; better not to know), and a slice of dark bread each. It was an unheard-of feast!
“Maybe we should have gotten sick sooner,” Marek remarked as he walked over to them, a stew bowl in hand.
A quiet laugh ran around the three of them, but when Chaim looked to see if any of the guards had noticed—they were there to be sure the children kept working—all he saw was their backs in a corner of the room. They were staying as far as possible from the prisoners . . . just in case all the children were carriers of the disease.
“Don’t look,” Gregor advised quietly. “Don’t antagonize them, don’t give them any excuse to kill.” His spoon scraped the last of the stew out of the bowl. “I think if they were allowed to just shoot us, it would be all over in seconds.”
Rachael, a mousy girl who rarely spoke above a whisper, said, “We’re important, didn’t you hear? The Führer loves us. And our munitions.” With Manya sick, Rachael had been elevated to head girl, and with it had come this new, sarcastic voice. But she spoke the last sentence loudly, and the guards noticed.
Chaim shook his head at her, to get her to quiet down, but she was in full cry and didn’t stop.
“Munitions are important,” she ranted.
The guards didn’t come to yell at her, and they didn’t shoot either. Luckily for Rachael—their orders from Berlin didn’t include killing anyone in the munitions room.
Or, Chaim thought, at least not on this day.
* * *
• • •
When the children had finished their second shift, the guards led them out and to another part of the camp, where a dark building hulked in the moonlight.
A guard shone his flashlight at the door.
Barracks 4 was scrawled across it in new white paint.
“Not even a proper sign,” Gregor said.
“Not even a proper light outside,” Marek added.
Who lives here? Chaim wanted to ask, but refused to say it aloud.
One of the guards said something quick in German to Bruno, who translated quickly, “Not a sick person in sight.”
Chaim’s heart stuttered, almost stopped. “Are they . . .” He was thinking of Gittel and Sophie. “Are they still . . .” He wanted to say alive and couldn’t. He found himself trembling.
Bruno chattered with the guards in German for a bit more. One of them gesticulated wildly with his hands as he spoke. He was laughing loudly at the same time.
Chaim wasn’t sure if the laughter was a good or bad thing.
Finally, Bruno turned toward the others and said in his important voice, “Hans here says that the doctor is with the sick ones now. The doctor, his name is von Schneir, arrived in a touring car when we were in the factory. He’s staying in the Welcome House and will organize a cleaning and nursing squad for the morning.”
Hans waved his hands about some more and spat out something in German that had the sound of bullets hitting flesh.
Bruno added, “Oh, yes—we must stay in this barracks, which is clean and has no germs in it. Barracks 3 is now the hospital. It is called . . . oh, what is that word . . . ah, quarantined. They are quarantined.
”
“Hospital,” Meyer breathed. The word terrified them all.
“Can we get our . . . other clothes?” Gregor asked. “Our nightclothes?”
The answer came back straight from Hans, who evidently knew some Polish. “Nein. Zay must be laundered first. Cleaned. No . . .” He thought a minute. “No . . . germs.” The g was harsh, guttural, which made the word angry-sounding.
“Where will we sleep?” asked Rachael.
Hans smirked. “Vere you like.” He pointed to the door. “As long as she is inside.”
He meant, of course, you. As long as you are inside.
Then the guards left, and the children all had to figure out their sleeping arrangements in the dark.
Bruno once again grabbed a lower bunk close to the door. Chaim took the bunk above him. Not because there weren’t other beds farther away, but Bruno—for all Chaim disliked him—was the closest thing to mishpocheh, family, he had.
The only light in the barracks was a convenient full moon poking its way through a couple of windows that were, surprisingly, cleaner than the ones in Barracks 3.
Once they’d all climbed into their new bunks—slats, no mattresses again—they were asleep in minutes, all too exhausted for dreams.
* * *
• • •
Chaim woke in the middle of the night, put a hand out for Gittel, and remembered anew that she was in the barracks hospital. He stared into the blackness, and the void stared back.
What if she dies? he thought. The very idea of it made him cold. Not the cold of lying in a barracks without linen or blanket, but a cold that seemed to come from the inside out.
He couldn’t stop shivering.
When he couldn’t bear to think of Gittel, flushed and exhausted in her bunk, any further, he spared a moment to consider Sophie as well.