“Silence now, my children,” von Schneir said a bit testily, turning toward Gregor, who took a deep breath and with great effort managed to stop moaning.
“There, there, I knew you could do it. My collaborators in this experiment, you need to understand what it’s all about. We will all go down in history . . .”
Chaim looked over at the soldiers standing at attention. They held themselves stiffly but didn’t guard their expressions, which seemed slightly odd. One of them was actually rolling his eyes.
Since von Schneir’s back was turned to the them, he wasn’t aware of the guards’ decidedly unguarded faces.
“In another camp,” von Schneir said, “a place called Auschwitz, my little subjects, I was mentored by the mighty Dr. Mengele.” He gestured with both hands, one of which still held the scalpel.
Suddenly, he appeared to realize that waving the scalpel around did nothing to calm anyone, so he set it down carefully on the cabinet. However, he didn’t stop talking, only drew a quick breath and went on. “Now listen. I will make it as simple as possible.”
Gittel nodded her head, and so Chaim did as well. Anything to keep the doctor from focusing on Gregor.
“I was assisting Dr. Mengele in his work on twins. Important work. You would not believe how important.”
That smile again. Chaim wished he could parse it.
Von Schneir continued, sure of his audience. His captive audience. “He was about to give me control over one of the most compelling parts of his work—figuring out God’s code for splitting or not splitting the egg that makes mirror—that is, identical—twins. But my time there was interrupted by the typhoid epidemic here in Sobanek.” He shrugged.
I wonder, Chaim thought, if it’s that he doesn’t want to advertise any bad notices. Or even acknowledge them.
“After you had saved us, what then?” Gittel asked, to get the doctor back on track.
He turned to Gittel as though she were his prize pupil. “When I returned to Auschwitz, there were others in my place.” Then he looked over at Chaim and spat out a word. “Usurpers!”
Chaim could feel some of the spray. “Usurpers?”
Von Schneir nodded. “I took it as a compliment and said so to Mengele. That he needed several to do the work I alone had been accomplishing.”
Now turning his back on the two of them, he glared at the guards, who had slackened their stance. They stood swiftly at attention, so he turned again to Chaim and Gittel. “Mengele no longer had room for me. I blame the false adjudicators in Berlin. Probably taught by Jews.” He giggled, an awkward and ugly sound.
If Chaim had had the use of his hands, he would have sent Gittel the sign for crazy. All he could do was nod.
Luckily, von Schneir seemed to take that as confirmation of his accusation. “But what if—I thought—I could add to the professor’s glory here with a few well-considered tests? I already knew that Sobanek had twins.”
Bruno! Chaim thought.
“And so, with Herr Doctor Mengele’s permission—”
“What kind of tests?” Gittel asked, the short sentence forced through her teeth by a tremor of breath.
Von Schneir looked annoyed, but said nothing more. The madness suddenly seemed to leave his face. He quickly faced the guards. “Raus!” he growled at them in German, shaking the back of his hand at them. Then he added in Polish and German, “Let no one in. No one. We are not to be disturbed. Schnell!”
“Not even the commandant?” asked one of the guards, the smaller of the two.
“I command now,” von Schneir told them in Polish. “Orders from Berlin.”
The guards didn’t seem to believe this, at least not completely, and they looked questioningly at each other for a moment. But without anyone to tell them differently, they were bound by what von Schneir claimed. So they clicked their heels, did an about-face, and left the building.
The door closed behind them with an ominous sound.
Von Schneir didn’t even look over his shoulder to make certain they were gone. He’d given an order and knew that they had to obey.
Chaim was now focused completely on the doctor, for only there lay escape for the three of them. If . . . if they were smart enough to figure it out in time.
Von Schneir began talking again, rambling really. He spoke about Dr. Mengele, calling him a genius of a medical researcher who was looking into the secrets of heredity. A humanitarian, who’d saved many Jewish children from death in the ovens at the Auschwitz camp by using them in his experiments.
Ovens! At the word, Gittel and Chaim exchanged glances. Even Gregor managed to turn his damaged face in their direction. Chaim remembered something Manny had said about the chimney and people sometimes being burned when they weren’t quite dead. If he’d been cold before, now he felt as if he’d become ice.
Von Schneir fulminated for another five minutes about the good doctor Mengele and what had already been learned from his tests. “He has many twins there in Auschwitz. And now many assistants. I have only you three. But together we’ll bring glory to Mengele, his work—and ourselves.”
He stopped, as if waiting for a response.
Chaim indulged him, hoarsely asking as Gittel had before, “What kind of tests?” Not that he really wanted to know. He was actually terrified of knowing. But to waste more time.
Von Schneir said, “First I’ll take your histories—where you were born. Were there other twins in your family. That sort of thing. I’ll come to know you as well as I know my own relatives. Then I’ll measure you, draw blood.”
Chaim thought, That will all take time. The more time, the more chance for us to escape harm even while marching toward it.
Von Schneir’s voice was soft now, almost fatherly. “And you’ll call me Uncle Schneir, as the Auschwitz children call Dr. Mengele ‘Uncle Mengele.’ He used to give the littlest children piggyback rides, you know. You three alone can leave off the von!” He said that as if it were a great concession. Or as if he were giving them a huge gift.
Gittel looked up and said softly, “Thank you, Uncle Schneir.”
He gave her such a big smile, Chaim decided to try the title as well.
“We’ll work hard, Uncle Schneir.”
Another smile.
Gregor was silent. Possibly because his face hurt too much. Or because he was preparing himself for the coming trial.
Gittel Remembers
Sometimes I’m asked, “Is it true?” And then they add, “How can it possibly be true? None of you wrote any of this down at the time.” As if no one is ever brutalized in a war. As if the Nazis handed us pen and paper to take notes. As if the photographs of the ovens and the chimneys, the few stick-figure survivors, the skeletal remains in mass graves aren’t truth enough.
As if we who were witnesses falsified our memories.
For what motive? For what gain?
Yes, there are novels about that time, poetry, movies that fictionalize and make prettier what was—and is still—too horrible to look at with unblinkered eyes.
But even if every single report is entirely inaccurate—as to date, place, weather, and time; did this atrocity happen in the morning or the evening or in the dead of night—I know one thing.
It happened.
My skin testifies, my bones testify, my hair testifies. My eyes and ears and mouth all testify.
And if all that isn’t enough, if all that is shrugged off as untrustworthy testimony, then turn to the Germans’ own accounts. They kept hundreds of notebooks about what they did, detailing the amount of deadly gas in their ovens, the numbers of people who died each day, the houses taken over, the bodies shoveled into graves.
They were very thorough.
And they were unapologetic, for they were making a harvest of death, and keeping accounts for the Führer, that satanic tax man.
What is less
clear is what the Polish people, the ordinary ones who had been our neighbors, our teachers, our doctors and nurses, did. Our dairy men and our bus drivers, our farm workers and our policemen. Some became members of the Resistance, risking their own lives to save children like Chaim and Sophie and Bruno and me. The biggest resistance movement in all of Europe, I’m told.
But even more of them simply moved into our houses. Took over our businesses. Shut down our schools. Burned our synagogues. Stole our furniture and paintings and silverware. Destroyed our photographs and books. Tore children from mothers, husbands from wives. Killed us in showers that sprayed gas instead of water. Burned us alive. Shot us or starved us or used us for bayonet practice or worked us to our deaths.
Or experimented on our bodies without anesthesia or pity.
Does that balance?
And if it does, whose thumb is on the scale?
33
Chaim was right. The information gathering and the tests took time. Lots of time. Days went by as they spun out the tales of their short lives to the doctor. Who their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were. Where they’d lived. What their people had worked at. By what route they’d come to Sobanek.
This is not history, Chaim thought. It’s story.
Gregor’s life was especially fascinating to Chaim because it was mostly unknown to him, though they’d been working side by side for months. The butcher’s son, living in a large Jewish town on the far side of Warsaw with his father, mother, and twin brother. When the Nazis marched into the town—a full company of them, the sound of boots on the ground was like an avalanche.
Gregor and his brother were rounded up with other family members and shoved into boxcars pulled by a slow locomotive.
“Squeezed in like cattle going to the slaughter,” Gregor said.
The two boys managed to escape from the train, jumping to what seemed freedom. His brother stumbled, hurting his leg. He ended up walking for miles on what they later learned was a broken ankle.
Because Gregor wouldn’t leave his injured brother, they were captured by a band of wandering Polish soldiers, who sold them to the labor camp.
His brother’s death came at the hands of a brutal guard later transferred to another camp because he’d damaged an important cog in the munitions work. That they were “important” did not ease Gregor’s pain or his guilt, only made it worse.
“Still,” he said, “being in Sobanek has given me time to mourn. For that I’m grateful.”
Von Schneir looked up from the notebook where he was writing this down. “But why feel guilt? Why mourn? There is still one of you left. Is this a twin thing?” He seemed puzzled.
It is a human thing, Chaim thought, astonished at the man’s question.
Gregor turned his face away and refused to say anything more.
* * *
• • •
Gittel did most of their telling, of course. She left out the part about Irena, which was smart, and said they’d met up with Karl the Wanderer, a giant of a man, at the edge of the forest. She told the doctor that their parents had been killed along with the partisans and Karl, killed by the men who brought the two of them to Sobanek.
If von Schneir had been smarter, he might have sniffed out inconsistencies in her story, but he was eager to get it down just the way she told it. So he never questioned her words.
Chaim knew she was safe as long as the doctor didn’t also talk to Bruno.
And why would he? Bruno isn’t a twin, after all. So there’s nothing to connect him to the doctor’s work.
Having fewer words available to him, Chaim needed more sessions than the others to complete what little he had to add to Gittel’s story. It stuttered out so slowly and painfully that, in disgust, von Schneir handed him a sheaf of paper and a pen.
“Write it down,” the doctor growled.
Chaim was thrilled, for though he was comfortable remembering his poems, now he could record them for the future. Especially as these experiments might mean an end to his very future.
He was thinking this as he wrote and crossed out whole sections, started on another and another piece of paper with his life story, crumpling the spoiled paper.
Then—as if in sudden revelation—he realized he wasn’t just stalling for more time. He was stalling for more paper.
If he was to be a real witness to what happened here, all the poems had to be saved. They needed to live, even if he didn’t. So he wasted both time and paper solely so that he could stuff two precious clean pieces of paper down the back of his pants while the doctor was busy with Gittel and Gregor.
He wrote carefully, remembering where Gittel had deviated from the truth, repeating it in slightly different words. Since he looked as if he were working diligently, von Schneir let him keep the pen and extra paper in the room where he slept, with only the nonwriting arm cuffed to the bedpost. Luckily, the doctor didn’t count the pages.
* * *
• • •
The next day, after handing what he’d written to von Schneir, as well as several pieces of balled-up paper, Chaim asked for a pencil as well. “With an eraser. To make a draft of the next bit, Uncle Schneir,” he said. “So as not to waste your good paper.”
In barely controlled fury, the doctor gave him a pencil and another handful of paper.
When they were locked up that evening and the light had almost faded entirely, Chaim managed to scribble down as many of his poems as he remembered. Then he tucked them into the underside of the mattress in a slot he made with the pencil, though it took quite a bit of acrobatics to do so.
The next day and four others after that one, he actually managed to spin out more time for the three of them.
As Gittel remarked quietly when Gregor was being questioned, “Every day we’re alive, no matter how uncomfortable, is another day of life.”
Another day of life, Chaim thought, and at that moment a new poem began in his head.
* * *
• • •
But of course, the last day of their modest freedom finally came—though almost a week later than von Schneir had planned. That was when the real tests began. Blood drawings were done quickly and roughly. There was so much blood decanted into various bottles that all three of the children felt weak from its loss.
To make things worse, von Schneir ordered their food rations cut. First by a quarter, then by half.
“Interesting,” he mused, “to see how little you can eat and still function.”
He recorded their pulses, lifted their eyelids, checked their heart rates and the plasticity of their skin.
After each reduced meal, he drew even more blood from each of them, later spending hours staring at the slides as if they were worlds he was exploring. All the while, the children, half fainting from blood loss and lack of food, sat cuffed to their chairs.
By this time, Gregor’s face had mostly healed, though he complained about some loose teeth to Gittel and Chaim when the doctor had gone out to speak with the guards.
“Don’t say anything about your teeth,” Gittel cautioned, “or he’ll have them all yanked!”
“As an experiment,” Chaim added. Gallows humor, he thought.
Gittel was looking so pale, Chaim dreamed three nights in a row that she was a ghost. He was beginning to feel like a ghost himself. His hands often trembled, but he didn’t speak to Gittel about it, didn’t want to spend his few precious words on whining.
* * *
• • •
Suddenly one morning, as the doctor was drawing even more blood and having trouble finding a vein, Chaim realized that in fact what he was feeling wasn’t pain, or anger, or fear. Or even blood loss. What he felt was boredom.
Boredom!
In hindsight, the work at the factory now seemed positively inviting. The trek through the forest—first with Karl and
the partisans, later with the Nazi soldiers—a walk in the park. Always something happening.
But these endless tests were enough to drive anyone crazy. Strange as it sounded, he was beginning to think about asking von Schneir for some more paper and a pencil, or a book to read. Or to be let out during the day to work in the factory.
In the end, it was fear that kept him from asking. Every day we’re alive . . . is another day of life repeated in an endless loop in his head. As did the first verse of a new poem:
Every day I can wake is another day of life.
Every day I can walk is another day of hope.
Every day I can sing is another day of grace.
Every day I can write a poem is another day.
* * *
• • •
Then, two weeks later, the food they were given suddenly changed once again, seemingly doubled. The odor as it was brought into the makeshift laboratory proved overpowering. Chaim felt faint from the smell.
Gittel warned them in a whisper, “Eat slowly, and only a little bit. Till your stomach has time to adjust.”
Chaim nodded; Gregor looked down at his feet. Neither of them answered her aloud.
But as good as it smelled, the food was strangely spiced. Perhaps to cover up something rotten.
Either that, Chaim guessed, or as part of another test. The idea that the food might be tainted with drugs wouldn’t leave him. So he followed Gittel’s lead and left most of his food on the plate, though of course they had to eat some.
But Gregor gobbled down everything given to him that first day and was loudly sick in the night. The sound of his vomiting woke Chaim up.
That was the night Chaim realized that—as bored as he was—he hadn’t thought of a single line of a poem since the “Every Day” poem, and he feared he was losing his mind. Or the part of my mind I mind losing the most. And that wordplay, feeble as it was, made him giggle and tremble uncontrollably until sheer exhaustion led him back into sleep.