help the pharmacist in the mud. And the soldier used his hand to break my father’s windpipe. Remain silent. I ate a plum with Josef, and I plucked a plum-colored dress from the donation box, and I buried a turnip in the ground, except maybe I didn’t, maybe I didn’t do that at all.
I waited in lines. I waited in lines to be discharged from the hospital. I waited in line for moldy potato skins. I waited in line for bread. I waited in line to get on the train for Foehrenwald. I waited in lines with all the other Jews of Sosnowiec to learn our fate on the twelfth of August in 1942, and my father ran to help the pharmacist in the mud, and Josef punched Rudolf’s windpipe in the courtyard. And the soldier punched my father’s windpipe in the soccer stadium, except that neither of them were punches, they were slices at the throat with the meaty L of a hand. Remain silent.
I slip back into focus. The room slips back into focus. Josef slips back into focus, his arms still wrapped around me.
“Silent killing,” I whisper.
“What?” Josef asks. But his breath catches; I’m close enough to be able to tell.
My voice is unnaturally calm. “It’s what the German soldiers called their combat training. Silent killing.”
Stilles toten. The German Army had its own hand-to-hand fighting style. Just the basics, the dirtiest of basics: A knee to the groin. A jab in the eyeballs. Or, hand flat like a knife, a vicious stab to the throat, before your enemy was paying attention, before he even knew you were fighting. It’s what brought my father to his knees in the stadium. When he tried to help up the pharmacist, a soldier jabbed him in the neck, then they shot him.
I had never seen fighting to kill until the German Army arrived in Sosnowiec.
And I had never seen it anywhere else until I arrived in Foehrenwald and saw Josef do it to the man in the courtyard on the morning I arrived.
“You weren’t in a camp,” I whisper.
“Zofia.”
My skin begins to crawl. I slowly ease out of his arms. “That’s why you don’t like to talk about where you were during the war.”
“Zof—”
“You’re not Jewish; you weren’t in a camp; you were in the German Army.”
I’m still edging away on the bed; he reaches out to pull me close again, and I move farther.
“Were you in the German Army? Just answer my question.”
The words are a command, but my voice comes out as a plea. I’m waiting for him to tell me it’s not true; I’m just confused. He doesn’t.
“Say it, Josef.”
“Zofia.” He says my name for the third time, a name that I have loved hearing him say before, whispered in the dark. But now my name only sounds like Josef not wanting to tell me the truth.
And I already know the truth.
I back away more quickly now, stumbling over the desk chair, nearly falling. Josef rises to help me, but before he can take half a step forward, waves of nausea roll through my stomach. I lurch for the washing basin and heave into the bowl.
“Don’t you dare come near me, you sick, sick—” I heave again, my hands tight on the bowl, and Josef finally stops in his tracks. “Why didn’t you tell me? You wanted to torture me some more? You didn’t think I’d been through enough?”
“I swear it wasn’t,” he says, stricken. “Zofia, I swear it wasn’t that.”
“You were just looking for someone to take to bed? You thought what Rudolf did when I arrived—that maybe I’d fuck for a scrap of bread?”
“I tried to stay away from you. I was going to tell you, I tried to tell you, that night in my room. I should have,” he says. “I should have told you.”
I straighten up again. “What you should have done is turned yourself in.”
A bitter bark of a laugh comes from Josef’s mouth. He spreads his arms wide and looks around the room. “Turned myself in to—where? I didn’t commit any crimes, Zofia. I was an eighteen-year-old boy who was drafted to fight.”
“And now you’re a twenty-two-year-old man.”
“And I’m different now than I was then.”
Outside, I hear a peal of laughter, a group returning from dinner. The noise rouses me enough to realize I want to get out of here. Finding my footing, I push past him toward the door. “I will tell everyone. I will tell every single person here who