if I gave you the impression I would tolerate any kind of slur. I don’t know how they do things in Germany, but I don’t do business with anti-Semites.”
I rolled up the brown cloth with my forks inside.
“Please, Miss Ferriday. I misspoke. Do forgive me.”
“This country was founded on principles of equality and fairness, and you would do well to remember that. I don’t think it would help your business to have people think you harbor negative feelings toward any one group.”
“I certainly will remember that,” he said and gently pulled the forks from my hands. “Please accept my deepest apologies.”
“Apology accepted. I don’t hold grudges, Mr. Snyder, but I do hold the people I do business with to high standards.”
“I appreciate that, Miss Ferriday, and I’m sorry I offended you.”
I left Snyder and Goodrich that day with renewed optimism and enough cash in my pocket to post both my comfort packages and a case of donated Ovaltine. I comforted myself with the idea that sometimes one must make a deal with the devil in order to help those in need. I’d done business with an anti-Semite, but it was in the service of the beleaguered.
Thanks to Mr. Snyder, fifty parentless French children would know they’d not been forgotten.
1941–1942
Binz sent me to the bunker for two weeks for my insubordination toward Irma Grese. The punishment block lived up to its reputation: Solitary confinement in a cold, dark cell furnished only with one wooden stool. Armies of cockroaches. I spent my time mourning Mrs. Mikelsky and plotting revenge scenarios against the Germans, the blackness growing in my chest. They would pay for what they did to Mrs. Mikelsky. I played out scenes in my head there in the dark cell. Me leading a mass escape. Me murdering Binz with a stool leg. Me writing coded letters to Papa, naming names. I would have to be patient, but that day would come.
The following spring, Matka visited us one Sunday, a gift from heaven since she’d been moved to the elite barracks and we rarely saw her. She surprised us at our bunk before bedtime, as Luiza, Zuzanna, Janina, and I gathered to play a silly game. We called it What I’d Bring Down Beauty Road. Beauty Road had taken on another meaning by then. In the event of an execution, this was the road one was forced to walk down to the shooting wall. If a girl was lucky, she had time to have her camp family fix her hair and arrange her clothes so she’d look beautiful taking that final walk.
In this game, each of us competed to come up with the funniest thing we’d bring if marched to our death at the shooting wall. Strange as it may sound now, we took comfort in many such morbid games then, such as Pink Smoke, Blue Smoke, where we would predict the color of a girl’s smoke at the furnaces in town. Tired and terribly hungry as we all were, after twelve hours of work, it helped to laugh at it all.
Matka climbed into my bunk and kissed me on the forehead. She wore the electric yellow armband of those privileged prisoners who could roam the camp. I ran my finger across the raised, red script embroidered on the cloth band and felt a queer chill run through me.
I shook off my bad feelings. How good it was to see her! My eye caught the little length of blue string she’d tied around her ring finger. To remind her she was still married to Papa?
“I can only stay a little while,” she said, out of breath from running all the way from Block One. The doors were locked at nine each night, no exceptions. Even with her yellow armband, if Matka was caught outside her block for the night she would face the bunker or worse. Plus, there were new rules to eliminate friendships, especially among the Poles: No visiting through block windows. No assisting one another at Appell. No speaking to one another without permission.
Matka hugged each of us in turn, and I breathed the sweet scent of her in. From under her skirt, she produced a bundle, wrapped in clean white linen, and opened it to reveal a whole loaf of white bread. The top of it was browned golden and flecked with bits of salt. The yeasty smell of that bread! We each touched it in turn.
“Another loaf?” asked Zuzanna. “Where are you getting it?”