much anyway. But then where do I go? This is a place for adults; is there a camp for children? A different displaced-persons camp I could go to?”
This is rude; I sense that at some level. And overly demanding of a woman I barely know. But I can’t go back and just write letters. I’ll have too much time to think, and my brain will get stuck. I can’t be left alone with my thoughts.
Mrs. Yost looks at Mr. Ohrmann, her face saying, I told you about this one. “There are a few camps for children,” she says. “But they’re just like here—children pass through them. They arrive, and then they’re reclaimed or they’re adopted or they move on.”
“Still,” I insist. “Where is the one that children from Dachau would have been sent?”
Her mouth sets in a thin line; it’s Mr. Ohrmann who answers. “There are a few in the American zone. The closest is forty or fifty kilometers from here.”
“Good.” I find a blank sheet of paper on that mess of a desk, and a fountain pen, leaking and sticky with the ink that has spilled out around the nib. “Tell me the name of the closest, please. I’ll find someone to take me tonight.”
“You can just as easily write a letter to that place, too.”
“I have to go in person.”
“Zofia, I promise you, most people are writing letters.”
“And if most people are just writing letters, doesn’t that mean I should go in person?” I press. “Mr. Ohrmann here, learning about Alek Federman—would he have gone to that trouble for me if I was one of a hundred letters he’d received this afternoon?”
She knows I’m right. She’s proved my point by inviting me in to see Mr. Ohrmann instead of adding me to the long list everyone else must be on.
“You won’t find someone to take you tonight. We’re down to one working vehicle at the moment, and even if we had more, we’re rationing gas for emergencies only.” She raises one finger, silencing the protest she can tell I’m about to make. “But, if you still want to, you can go the day after tomorrow; that’s when we send one of our wagons on a supply run. Sometimes we trade supplies with other camps. You can wait two days.”
“I—”
“You can wait two days, Zofia,” she says firmly. “And I promise you, it’s your fastest option.”
My heart hasn’t stopped pounding since Mr. Ohrmann showed me the ledger. I know I should try to manage my expectations. But how can I not hope?
BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED AT BIRKENAU, THERE WERE LESS OF US still. We smelled of sweat and urine but also of death. When the train stopped, through spaces between the slats that passed for windows in the cattle car, I could see swarms of soldiers, all of them with guns. They unloaded the cars one by one; they came to the cars screaming, with dogs straining at their leads, biting anyone who didn’t move quickly enough. The guards pulled women by their hair. They brought whips down on their backs and legs, and they shoved families apart to send them to separate lines. Lines. Just as we were sorted at the soccer stadium, we were going to be sorted again.
“We will be okay,” I said to Abek. “The other guard promised. I made him promise to wire ahead and recommend you be an errand boy. You tell them that when we get to the front of the line. You tell them that you are twelve, not nine, and that the guard in Sosnowiec said you have come to be the commandant’s errand boy.”
While we waited, rumors traveled down the line: We would have to strip completely naked and give up our own clothes. We would have to go through showers and, when we came out, put on different clothes that didn’t fit. A girl wondered why we had to do it that way. I assumed it was just to degrade us, because there was never a lost opportunity to degrade us. But then another woman whispered, no, it wasn’t just that. The reason we couldn’t keep our own clothes was because the Nazis were going to cut them apart at the seams in case we tried to sew valuables into the linings.
I didn’t have any silver or jewelry sewn into my clothes, but the thought of their being ripped apart felt like another death. All the careful stitches sewn by Baba Rose and the other seamstresses. All