was stilled, and I knew what was happening: the now-free prisoners were looking for their former guards, and executing them.
I kept hearing doors being kicked in, one after another, each time coming closer. A second guard was found in his quarters, and shot; then another door was splintered, and another. I took off my kerchief, opened my coat, unbuttoned the top of my shift, stood with a hip out—anything to make it clear at a glance that I was female. Because most men, not all—most men, no matter how evil, will hesitate before killing a woman. Something in the bones and blood says no, speaks more quickly than even the desire for revenge. So there is sometimes a moment, the merest slip of a second, during which one might turn or lunge or shout and somehow fool death one more time.
They destroyed the door of the room next to mine. Then they came to me.
I shouted, in the highest voice I could manage, a wail, a puppy-dog cry. Either they did not hear or their thirst for killing had closed their ears. They heaved themselves against my door, once, twice. With a crack, the frame gave way. And they tumbled into the room.
Three men, one rifle, pointed at me.
Hungarian whore! shouted the man with the rifle, in Polish.
Kill her! shouted the second man, in Yiddish.
I had my hands up. No, no, I am a Jew, I said in Polish, then in Yiddish. No, I am a Jew!
Liar!
Shoot her!
We were all shouting at once, and I thought I would be killed in all the confusion. I could smell their bloodlust—they had just come from killing, and they smelled of it. Any moment the trigger would be pulled, inevitably—I nearly laughed that I had come this far, survived this far, only to be killed by fellow prisoners—really, such a thought went through my head. They kept shouting “Hungarian whore!” and “Kill her!” They were shaking. Possessed. Hungry for revenge. I kept repeating, I was raped! He took me and kept raping me! Finally I yelled out, Do you want me to show you the damage, the bruising, the blood?
They fell silent. In that terrible moment I realized I had put the wrong thought in their heads. I could see in their eyes that they did want to see the damage, wanted to undress me, that they were imagining … And I thought, Oh, God! I am going to be raped again, but this time gang-raped, a fate I had managed so far to escape.
Then a voice outside the room shouted in Yiddish, What’s going on in there? And someone pushed his way into the room.
He wasn’t a big man, but there was something powerful about him, his solidity, his bearing. He stood with his back very straight, holding a rifle. His eyes were dark, and as he turned intently to each of the men, he seemed to draw all the light out of the room and into his eyes—what little light there was, so that it seemed to grow even darker around us—which put a sort of spell over the other men. Their emotions were suddenly rearranged, calmed, flattened. The rifle pointed at me fell. All three men turned to this new man. And in measured voices—thank God! I thought; they sounded sane—in measured voices, in Yiddish, they discussed me. Was I a collaborator, a kapo, a whore?
The man who had just walked in—he was clearly a leader; the others were deferring to him—turned to me and asked me what I was doing there.
I told him my story, in broken Yiddish—the one language I understood but did not speak well. I told him my story, that I had come on a transport, had been taken immediately by the guard and raped for three days, that I had heard the announcement “Ihr seid frei!” in the afternoon, but had been locked in, wondering—afraid of—what was happening. Then these men …
He said nothing for a long time, seconds, which seemed to me a pause in time itself, a cavernous room in which my fate was being decided. No one moved. I could hear the men breathing, their breath almost echoing, so vast seemed this hole in time.
Then he suddenly shouted, Let her go! Then: Let’s go!
The three men left. I pulled my coat around me and was about to go out the door when the leader said to me, Stay close. Things are very … the word he used meant something like “fluid” or