“I’m glad you stayed safe as long as you could.”
“I’m living with my sister and her husband now. Their hiding place was never raided.” She hesitates, finding the words. “Is Maja—”
“No.”
My answer is complete in itself. No, Maja isn’t. But I make myself continue because Gosia is a friend who deserves to know. “Just after the soccer stadium. All of them except Abek were killed.”
“No.” She closes her eyes, and I let her have her moment of grief. When she opens them again, she lowers her voice. “Almost none of us are left,” she says quietly. “A few hundred at most. I just don’t understand how so many of us can be gone.”
“I’m looking for Abek now. We were separated at Birkenau. I guess this means you haven’t seen him back here?”
“I wish I had. You’ve been to your apartment?”
“I just came from home—from Mariacka. It’s been looted, but nobody else is living in it. Next I’m going to try ?rodula. Maybe he forgot where we planned to meet. Maybe he thinks of the ghetto as home?”
Gosia is shaking her head. “Gone,” she says. “Bombed. He couldn’t have gone to the ghetto; it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“I went there myself first thing, when I got back in June. You should see it, Zofia, that part of the city—there’s almost nothing left standing.”
Nausea, a dropping in my stomach. Abek isn’t at my family’s house. He couldn’t go to our old room in the ghetto. Gosia has been back in Sosnowiec since June, and she’s known my family since she was a child; we have all the same friends. I don’t see any way Abek could have come back without Gosia’s hearing about it, especially not if there are as few of us as she says.
“Who else was with you?” she asks. “On the train to Birkenau—anyone we know?”
“You mean, that day?” I repeat slowly.
“Yes, on the transport. Who was on the transport to Birkenau?”
I knew that’s what she meant. Of course it is. I was just buying time. Answering that question requires me to think back to that day, and that day is something I try to never think about.
“On my transport, there was only—” But before I can continue, I’m slipping back into the horrors of that day: yelling in my ears, the smell of decay in my nostrils, feeling so thirsty and so weak and barely able to breathe. “There was—”
“Zofia? Are you all right?”
I look down, and the bread in my hand is shaking. My hands are shaking. We’re not in a cattle car. We’re on a street. We’re not in a camp. We’re in Sosnowiec. It’s not that day. It’s not that day.
The train station at Birkenau is my black ice, a sleeping black monster guarding the door of my memory. Nudge it too hard and it will wake. If it wakes, it will consume me. I creep around the edges of that memory. Even the edges are hell.
“There was Pani Ruth,” I finish. “With the long gray hair. She was with us. She—”
“Any men?” she interrupts, and now I understand what she’s asking: Do we have any friends who would have been on the men’s side of camp, who could have seen Abek after I last did?
The pharmacist. The pharmacist was praying in the mud, and—No. The pharmacist died in the soccer stadium, I remind myself. The pharmacist died before we got on the train. I need to think about what was after the train, on the platform, on that last day, on that day when—No, no, no.
“Pan Zwieg,” I choke out. “Pan Zwieg, the librarian. He was with us. And the skinny boy from the butcher’s shop. I think his first name was Salomon.”
Gosia grabs my arm. “Salomon Prager.”
“Yes. Salomon Prager.” The name retrieved, I claw my way back out of that memory.
“He’s back. He’s alive. My brother-in-law saw him just last week.”
“At the butcher’s?”
“The butcher shop is closed; he’s working as a farmhand now. After my shift this afternoon, I can find him and ask if he knows what happened to Abek.”
“Can we go now? Let’s go right now.” I’ve already forgotten about bread, and lunch, and Dima, but Gosia is shaking her head apologetically.
“I only have an hour for lunch, and it’s my brother-in-law who knows who Salomon is working for. I promise I’ll find him after work.”
“Come for dinner, then,” I tell her reluctantly. “It will be me and—and maybe a Russian soldier, too. Dima helped me. He’s stationed here now.”
I feel