They Went Left: Prologue–Part One

This guard would hit you for such an infraction, any of them would.

I also have a dress, undergarments, a pair of shoes, a donated bill of money in a large denomination, and a document saying I was a prisoner in Gross-Rosen.

And who repeated the same thing for me again when I forgot, and then again when I forgot again. Remember, Zofia? We discuss already. My mind is a sieve, and Dima is how I am allowed to leave this place—because he is leaving with me.

“Miss?” says the matronly woman.

I know what she’s asking must make sense, but my brain is fogged again; it can’t parse the words.

We were accustomed to arbitrary orders that sometimes became terrifying and sometimes benign.

We were accustomed to arbitrary orders that sometimes became terrifying and sometimes benign.

They were taken, but they were returned, ashen and not wanting to speak of what they’d seen.

“Look anyway,” he says proudly. “Surprise.”
Obligingly, I feel under my car seat.

He was so pleased with himself to have thought of this, and so crestfallen that I might not need it.

Broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms. Each item, I think, is a family that couldn’t walk any farther before they were stopped, or taken, or just too tired to carry more.

Possessions were left behind this way, the frivolous things first, like music boxes and silk shawls and then everything but what a body needs for its own survival.

But there’s a large plot of upturned earth, brown and mealy, and I can’t stand to look at that, either.

Is it possible that right now I can smell something beneath this earth, something fetid and terrified?

My eyes fly open, get my bearings.

A wooden sign with painstaking calligraphy.

“Train station. There used to be a market there on weekends. We call it—” I break off, because even this inconsequential memory makes me feel a pang of familiarity.

I know—or I heard later—that there was a revolt in Warsaw, that the city rose up for more than sixty days to protest the Nazis, and I know that this is why there essentially is no more Warsaw: The Germans punished the city by razing it.

In the store, staples like bread were already scavenged.

What was left behind were delicacies. Paper-thin nalesnikis, waiting to be rolled with minced meat. Bright jars of rhubarb preserves, in rows beside the dazed-looking grocer.

The fabric draped over the palace’s front gate isn’t the usual brocade representing the Dietel family’s fortune, but a billowing red with a yellow star and sickle.

He’s stunned, I think, by my sudden fortitude, and I’m stunned, too.

My feet remember to take off my shoes, and my hands remember to deposit my parcel where a credenza used to be.

On the shelf above, an upholstered valise I don’t recognize. I pull it down and upturn it, but nothing falls out. It’s empty, and the clasp is broken, a beaten-up piece of luggage the previous occupants couldn’t even bother to take.

Since then, just vagrants. I’ve had to chase them off. They make the building unsafe.

Whole stories in the tiniest handwriting on the thinnest pieces of muslin. I folded the cloth half a dozen times and sewed it inside the label.

But the selection is meager, and as my hand closes around the loaf, so does an older man’s, one of only two other customers in the store.

What must I look like—the threadbare dress, the uneven gait, my gaunt frame?

I had a dispensation. Because I worked in the hospital, I was an essential employee. When the dispensations stopped, one of the doctors let me hide in his cellar.

Commander Kuznetsov is a tall, thin man with gaunt cheeks but friendly, intelligent eyes.

Gosia purses her lips, reticent to translate.

Next to me, Gosia slides her hand across the floor until her fingers are splayed over mine.

On the commander’s plate, a piece of meat, mostly gristle, which he must have discreetly spit out.

It’s blobby and chewed there on the plate, swimming in congealed tomato.

But then I’m putting those desiccated morsels into my own mouth.

The gristle sticks in my throat; I force it down.

Stupid, I chastise myself as soon as this sentence passes my lips.

But now the original man’s face is leering in the lantern light at this discovery that I’m alone.

Baba Rose would stroke my hair in this room, intently and reassuringly, as if she had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.

Please don't send us to Auschwitz, I begged the soldier in charge of guarding us when my family had left the stadium, when we'd been sent to tenement apartments on the outskirts of the city to await the next leg.