“Polish?” she said, her voice almost drowned out by the music.
“Yes,” I said. “All of us.”
The spider monkeys stopped playing and watched us, fingers fisted around the cage bars.
“They will take any food you have, so eat it up quickly,” she said and walked away to line up.
“Give us everything you have—you won’t need it,” said an older woman passing by, her hand out as she walked the length of the column.
We clutched our coats around us tighter. Why would we give up the few things we had? I glanced at Matka. She reached out, and her hand trembled as she squeezed mine. I wanted only a bed for sleep and something to end my terrible thirst.
The guards herded us into the utility block: two big open rooms with low ceilings and a shower room off to one side. A tall blond guard we later learned was named Binz stood at the door, as frantic and exercised as Hitler himself.
“Hurry, hurry!” she cried, as she stung my bottom with her crop.
I came to a desk, and a woman sitting behind it in a striped dress took down my name. In German she told me to empty my pockets, and she dumped the few possessions I had—a handkerchief, my watch, some aspirin, the last vestiges of normal life—into a yellow envelope and placed it with the others in a file box. Next I was ordered to strip while a prisoner-guard watched.
“Move along!” she said once I was naked.
I saw Matka, behind me, stop next at the table. They wanted her ring, but she was having trouble twisting it off of her finger.
“Her finger is swollen,” said a woman doctor standing nearby, tall and blond in her white doctor’s smock. Binz lifted Matka’s hand, spat on the ring, and tried to work it off. Matka turned her head.
“Try petroleum jelly,” the woman doctor said.
Binz spat on the ring again and finally twisted it off. The woman behind the desk dropped it into a yellow envelope and placed it in the file box.
Matka’s ring was gone. How could they just take a person’s things with no feeling at all?
I saw Janina Grabowski, far ahead of me in line, wrestling with a guard and crying out. She was undergoing the hairdresser’s exam. A second guard came to assist the first and held Janina by the shoulders.
“Stop, no—please,” she said as they tried to cut her hair off.
A guard pushed me along, and I lost Matka, who was swallowed up in the crush of women. I tried to cover my nakedness as a prisoner with a green triangle on the shoulder of her striped jacket pushed me to a stool. Once I felt a toothpick touch my scalp, I knew I was about to follow Janina’s fate, and my heart tried to escape my chest, it thumped so.
The scissors were cold against the back of my neck, and the woman swore in German as she hacked through my braid. Was I to blame for my thick hair? She threw the braid onto a pile of hair so high it reached the windowsill and then, as if in payment for making her work harder, shaved my head roughly. I shook all over as every click of the trimmers sent hunks of hair sliding down my bare shoulders. She pushed me off the stool, and I felt my head—smooth, with just tufts of hair here and there. Thank God Pietrik wasn’t there to see that. How cold it was without hair!
A prisoner with a purple triangle—a Bible girl, I later learned—pushed me back onto a table used to examine gynecological parts. She held my legs apart while a second prisoner shaved me with a straight razor, leaving me cut and scraped.
When that was finished, they sent me on to the woman doctor, who said, “On the table,” and took a cold silver instrument, put it in me, and opened me up, all without even toweling it off! She spread me out for all the world to see and jabbed her rubber-gloved fingers inside me and felt around. She was not at all horrified by her job and might just as well have been washing a dish. She acted with no regard for the fact that I was young and she was violating me in a way that could never be undone.
I had little time to mourn my lost virginity, for guards lined us up naked,