wall where it had been hanging, and I quickly sewed it into the lining of Abek’s jacket.
I sewed it into his jacket, and then a few hours later we left for the stadium and a few days after that, the Nazis made us remove all our clothes and put on new, shapeless ones that didn’t fit. And all our old clothes were placed in a pile, where they were checked for money or valuables and then sold or repurposed.
The point is that Abek would not have been in possession of this cloth. That’s why I don’t have any of my old clothes or photographs or mementos—because we weren’t allowed to keep anything at all after that day.
The point is that the most likely person to have discovered this letter is the prisoner with the job of sorting through the clothes, of ripping our lives apart at the seams, stitch by stitch.
I BROUGHT YOU SOME TEA.”
I gasp at the sound of knocking and, without thinking, ball the cloth into my fist. But it’s not Abek; it’s Josef standing at the door, knuckles still on the frame.
“I told you, you didn’t need to come with me,” I manage, bringing him into focus, his curly hair, his sharp eyes, his slender frame.
“And I promise I won’t make a habit of thinking I know better than you what you need,” he says. He sets his mug of tea on the nightstand. “But in this one instance, I really wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Am I… all right?” I cannot even begin to think of how to answer that question. A sound comes out of my mouth, something between a yelp and the emptiest laugh in the world.
“Zofia?” Now he senses something must really be wrong. He crosses the room and kneels beside me on the floor. I feel the heat of him, just inches away, and I’m glad he’s here. I want him here, the reality of another body.
“Hold me,” I say. I don’t mean it in a romantic way. I mean it like, Hold me together. I mean it like, Am I really real? Is any of this really happening? Josef doesn’t take it in a romantic way, either. When we climb onto the bed and he puts his arms around me, it’s with the urgency you would use to warm someone with hypothermia. Or someone who’d had a bad shock. The kind of holding you do when your goal is to keep them alive.
He wraps his arms around me tightly enough that it’s almost hard to breathe, and this discomfort is inexplicably comforting. It reminds me that I’m here, tethered to this earth. The labor of my breathing reminds me that I have a body at all.
“Something happened, something you’re not ready to talk about,” he says. Mutely, I nod. “I’ll stop talking. I’ll stay here with you until you want me to leave, but I’ll just remain silent.”
He wedges his chin over my head, firmly and deliberately. I feel as though he’s burrowing in for a storm with me, readying us both against the wind. I try to steady myself against the beat of Josef’s heart. I try to match my breaths to his. I try to feel grounded by this, the comforting pressure and weight.
I try to feel grounded, but the feeling of Josef’s arms right now is competing against six years of misery swirling around my head with nothing to drown them out since Josef has promised to remain silent.
Remain silent.
A is for Abek. B is for Baba Rose. They’ll be gone soon, Baba Rose said about the Nazis in their tanks, but then they weren’t, they weren’t, they stayed for years. Remain silent. My neighbor Mrs. Wójcik’s dogs barked in her apartment, and the Nazi dogs were barking at Birkenau. I unloaded the pellets of Zyklon B, and Bissel fell out the window, and I sewed Breine’s wedding dress, and I sewed the Nazi uniforms, and my arm was throbbing from the shuttle, and I worked every day because we all worked every day because we didn’t want to die, except some days I wanted to die. Some days I did.
I walked to the soccer stadium because we weren’t allowed cars. I walked from Neustadt to Gross-Rosen in a frozen, frozen winter, when I could not begin to fathom how one foot was continuing to go in front of the other. And my toes were amputated by a doctor in white, and my father ran to