When I permitted myself to imagine a moment like this—the end of my imprisonment, the end of the war—I imagined a joy blooming in my chest. I imagined yelling in my fullest voice, “I AM FREE! I AM FREE!” But now I have no voice. We are a silent river, a current of the freed that flows from the Gunskirchen graveyard toward the nearest town. I ride on a makeshift cart. The wheels squeak. I can barely stay conscious. There is no joy or relief in this freedom. It’s a slow walk out of a forest. It’s a dazed face. It’s being barely alive and returning to sleep. It’s the danger of gorging on sustenance. The danger of the wrong kind of sustenance. Freedom is sores and lice and typhus and carved-out bellies and listless eyes.
I am aware of Magda walking beside me. Of pain throughout my body as the cart jolts. For more than a year I have not had the luxury of thinking about what hurts or doesn’t hurt. I have been able to think only about how to keep up with the others, how to stay one step ahead, to get a little food here, to walk fast enough, to never stop, to stay alive, to not be left behind. Now that the danger is gone, the pain within and the suffering around me turn awareness into hallucination. A silent movie. A march of skeletons. Most of us are too physically ruined to walk. We lie on carts, we lean on sticks. Our uniforms are filthy and worn, so ragged and tattered that they hardly cover our skin. Our skin hardly covers our bones. We are an anatomy lesson. Elbows, knees, ankles, cheeks, knuckles, ribs jut out like questions. What are we now? Our bones look obscene, our eyes are caverns, blank, dark, empty. Hollow faces. Blue-black fingernails. We are trauma in motion. We are a slow-moving parade of ghouls. We stagger as we walk, our carts roll over the cobblestones. Row on row, we fill the square in Wels, Austria. Townspeople stare at us from windows. We are frightening. No one speaks. We choke the square with our silence. Townspeople run into their homes. Children cover their eyes. We have lived through hell only to become someone else’s nightmare.
The important thing is to eat and drink. But not too much, not too fast. It is possible to overdose on food. Some of us can’t help it. Restraint has dissolved along with our muscle mass, our flesh. We have starved for so long. Later I will learn that a girl from my hometown, the sister of my sister Klara’s friend, was liberated from Auschwitz only to die from eating too much. It’s deadly both to sustain and to end a hunger. A blessing, then, that the strength I need to chew returns to me only intermittently. A blessing that the GIs have little food to offer, mostly candy, those little beads of color, M&M’s, we learn.
* * *
No one wants to house us. Hitler has been dead for less than a week, Germany is still days away from official surrender. The violence is waning across Europe, but it is still wartime. Food and hope are scarce for everyone. And we survivors, we former captives, are still the enemy to some. Parasites. Vermin. The war does not end anti-Semitism. The GIs bring Magda and me to a house where a German family lives, a mother, father, grandmother, three children. This is where we will live until we are strong enough to travel. Be careful, the Americans warn us in broken German. There’s no peace yet. Anything could happen.
The parents move all of the family’s possessions into a bedroom, and the father makes a show of locking the door. The children take turns staring at us and then run to hide their faces behind their mother’s skirt. We are containers for their fascination and their fear. I am used to the blank-eyed, automatic cruelty of the SS, or their incongruous cheer—their delight in power. I am used to the way they lift themselves up, to feel big, to heighten their sense of purpose and control. The way the children look at us is worse. We are an offense to innocence. That’s the way the children look at us—as though we are the transgressors. Their shock is more bitter than hate.
The soldiers bring us to the room where we will sleep. It’s the nursery. We are the orphans of war. They lift me into a wooden crib. I am that small; I weigh seventy pounds. I can’t walk on my own. I am a baby. I barely think in language. I think in terms of pain, of need. I would cry to be held, but there’s no one to hold me. Magda curls into a ball on the little bed.
* * *
A noise outside our door splinters my sleep. Even rest is fragile. I am afraid all the time. I am afraid of what has already happened. And of what could happen. Sounds in the dark bring back the image of my mother tucking Klara’s caul into her coat, my father gazing back at our apartment on the early morning of our eviction. As the past replays, I lose my home and my parents all over again. I stare at the wooden slats of the crib and try to soothe myself back to sleep, or at least into calm. But the noises persist. Crashes and stomps. And then the door flies open. Two GIs careen into the room. They stumble over each other, over a little shelf. Lamplight strains into the dark room. One of the men points at me and laughs and grabs his crotch. Magda isn’t there. I don’t know where she is, if she is close enough to hear me if I scream, if she is cowering somewhere, as afraid as I am. I hear my mother’s voice. Don’t you dare lose your virginity before you’re married, she would lecture us, before I even knew what virginity was. I didn’t have to. I understood the threat. Don’t ruin yourself. Don’t disappoint. Now rough handling could do more than tarnish me, it could kill me. I am that brittle. But it’s not just dying or more pain that I fear. I’m afraid of losing my mother’s respect. The soldier shoves his friend back to the door to keep watch. He comes at me, cooing absurdly, his voice grainy, dislocated. His sweat and the alcohol on his breath smell sharp, like mold. I have to keep him away from me. There is nothing to throw. I can’t even sit. I try to scream, but my voice is just a warble. The soldier at the door is laughing. But then he isn’t. He speaks harshly. I can’t understand English, but I know he says something about a baby. The other soldier leans against the crib rail. His hand gropes toward his waist. He will use me. Crush me. He pulls out his gun. He waves it crazily like a torch. I wait for his hands to clamp down on me. But he moves away instead. He moves toward the door, toward his friend. The door clicks shut. I’m alone in the dark.
I can’t sleep. I’m sure the soldier will return. And where is Magda? Has some other soldier taken her? She is emaciated, but her body is in much better shape than mine, and there is still a hint of her feminine figure. To settle my mind, I try to organize what I know of men, of the human palette: Eric, tender and optimistic; my father, disappointed in himself and circumstance, sometimes defeated, sometimes making the best of it, finding the little joys; Dr. Mengele, lascivious and controlled; the Wehrmacht who caught me with the carrots fresh from the ground, punitive but merciful, then kind; the GI who pulled me from the heap of bodies at Gunskirchen, determined and brave; and now this new flavor, this new shade. A liberator, but an assailant, his presence heavy but also void. A big dark blank, as though his humanity has vacated his body. I will never learn where Magda was that night. Even now, she doesn’t remember. But I will carry something vital away from that terrifying night, something I hope I never forget. The man who nearly raped me, who might have come back to do what he started to do, saw horror too. Like me, he probably spent the rest of his life trying to chase it away, to push it to the margins. That night, I believe he was so lost in the darkness that he almost became it. But he didn’t. He made a choice not to.
He comes back in the morning. I know it is him because he still reeks of booze, because fear has made me memorize the map of his face even though I saw it in semidarkness. I hug my knees and whimper. I sound like an animal. I can’t stop. It’s a keening, droning noise, part insect. He kneels by the crib. He is weeping. He repeats two words. I don’t know what they mean, but I remember how they sound. Forgive me. Forgive me. He hands me a cloth sack. It’s too heavy for me to lift so he empties it for me, spilling the contents—small tins of army rations—onto the mattress. He shows me the pictures on the cans. He points and talks, a crazy maître d’ explaining the menu, inviting me to choose my next meal. I can’t understand a word he says. I study the pictures. He pries open a can and feeds me with a spoon. It’s ham with something sweet, raisins. If my father hadn’t shared his secret packages of pork, I might not know the taste of it—though Hungarians would never pair ham with anything sweet. I keep opening my mouth, receiving another bite. Of course I forgive him. I am starving, and he brings me food to eat.
* * *
He comes back every day. Magda is well enough to flirt again, and I believe at the time that he makes a point of visiting this house because he enjoys her attention. But day after day, he barely notices her. He comes for me. I am what he needs to resolve. Maybe he’s doing penance for his near assault. Or maybe he needs to prove to himself that hope and innocence can be resurrected, his, mine, the world’s—that a broken girl can walk again. The GI—in the six weeks he cares for me I am too weak and shattered to ever learn to say or spell his name—lifts me out of the crib and holds my hands and coaxes me a step at a time around the room. The pain in my upper back feels like a burning coal when I try to move. I concentrate on shifting my weight from one foot to the other, trying to feel the exact moment when the weight transfers. My hands reach overhead, holding on to his fingers. I pretend he is my father, my father who wished I’d been a boy and then loved me anyway. You’ll be the best-dressed girl in town, he told me over and over again. When I think of my father, the heat pulls out of my back and glows in my chest. There is pain and there is love. A baby knows these two shades of the world, and I am relearning them too.
Magda is physically better off than I am, and she tries to put our lives in order. One day when the German family is out of the house, Magda opens closets until she finds dresses for us to wear. She sends letters—to Klara, to our mother’s brother in Budapest, to our mother’s sister in Miskolc, letters that won’t ever be read—to discover who might still be living, to discover where to build a life when it’s time to leave Wels. I can’t remember how to write my own name. Much less an address. A sentence. Are you there?
One day the GI brings paper and pencils. We start with the alphabet. He writes a capital A. A lowercase a. Capital B. Lowercase b. He gives me the pencil and nods. Can I make any letters? He wants me to try. He wants to see how far I’ve regressed, how much I remember. I can write C and c. D and d. I remember! He encourages me. He cheers me on. E and e. F and f. But then I falter. I know that G comes next, but I can’t picture it, can’t think how to form it on the page.
One day he brings a radio. He plays the happiest music I have ever heard. It’s buoyant. It propels you. I hear horns. They insist that you move. Their shimmer isn’t seduction—it’s deeper than that, it’s invitation, impossible to refuse. The GI and his friends show Magda and me the dances that go along with the sound—jitterbug, boogie-woogie. The men pair up like ballroom dancers. Even the way they hold their arms is new to me—it’s ballroom style but loose, pliable. It’s informal but not sloppy. How do they keep themselves so taut with energy and yet so flexible? So ready? Their bodies live out whatever the music sets in motion. I want to dance like that. I want to let my muscles remember.
* * *
Magda goes to take a bath one morning and returns to the room shaking. Her hair is wet, her clothes half off. She rocks on the bed with her eyes closed. I’ve been sleeping on the bed while she bathed—I’m too big for the crib now—and I don’t know whether or not she knows I am awake.
It’s been more than a month since liberation. Magda and I have spent almost every hour of the last forty days together in this room. We have regained the use of our bodies, we have regained the ability to talk and to write and even to try to dance. We can talk about Klara, about our hope that somewhere she is alive and trying to find us. But we can’t talk about what we have endured.
Maybe in our silence we are trying to create a sphere that is free from our trauma. Wels is a limbo life, but presumably a new life beckons. Maybe we are trying to give each other and ourselves a blank room in which to build the future. We don’t want to sully the room with images of violence and loss. We want to be able to see something besides death. And so we tacitly agree not to talk about anything that will rupture the bubble of survival.
Now my sister is trembling and hurting. If I tell her I am awake, if I ask her what is wrong, if I become witness to her breakdown, she won’t have to be all alone with whatever is making her shake. But if I pretend I am asleep, I can preserve for her a mirror that doesn’t reflect back this new pain; I can be a selective mirror, I can shine back at her the things she wants to cultivate and leave everything else invisible.
In the end, I don’t have to decide what to do. She begins to speak.
“Before I leave this house, I will get my revenge,” she vows.
We rarely see the family whose house we occupy, but her quiet, bitter anger compels me to imagine the worst. I picture the father coming into the bathroom while she undressed. “Did he …” I stammer.
“No.” Her breath is jagged. “I tried to use the soap. The room started spinning.”
“Are you ill?”
“Do you have a fever?”
“No. It’s the soap, Dicu. I couldn’t touch it. A sort of panic came over me.”
“No one hurt you?”
“No. It was the soap. You know what they say. They say it’s made from people. From the ones they killed.” I don’t know if it’s true. But this close to Gunskirchen? Maybe.
“I still want to kill a German mother,” Magda says. I remember all the miles we walked in winter when this was her fantasy, her refrain. “I could do it, you know.”
There are different ways to keep yourself going. I will have to find my own way to live with what has happened. I don’t know what it is yet. We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we find our freedom to, we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.
Later there will be doctors to help us repair our physical health. But no one will explain the psychological dimension of recovery. It will be many years before I begin to understand that.
* * *
One day the GI and his friends come to tell us we’ll be leaving Wels, that the Russians are helping transport the survivors home. They come to say goodbye. They bring the radio. Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” comes on, and we let loose. With my broken back, I can barely manage the steps, but in my mind, in my spirit, we are spinning tops. Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. I can do it too—keep my arms and legs loose but not limp. Glenn Miller. Duke Ellington. I repeat the big names in big band over and over. The GI leads me in a careful turn, a tiny dip, a breakaway. I am still so weak, but I can feel the potential in my body, all the things it will be possible to say with it when I have healed. Many years later I’ll work with an amputee, and he’ll explain the disorientation of feeling his phantom limb. When I dance to Glenn Miller six weeks after liberation, with my sister who is alive and the GI who almost raped me but didn’t, I have reverse phantom limbs. It’s sensation not in something that is lost but in a part of me that is returning, that is coming into its own. I can feel all the potential of the limbs and the life I can grow into again.
* * *
During the several hours’ train ride from Wels to Vienna, through Russian-occupied Austria, I scratch at the rash, from lice or rubella, that still covers my body. Home. We are going home. In two more days we will be home! And yet it is impossible to feel the joy of our homecoming uncoupled from the devastation of loss. I know my mother and grandparents are dead, and surely my father too. They have been dead for more than a year. To go home without them is to lose them again. Maybe Klara, I allow myself to hope. Maybe Eric.
In the seat next to ours, two brothers sit. They are survivors too. Orphans. From Kassa, like us! Lester and Imre, they are called. Later we will learn that their father was shot in the back as he walked between them on the Death March. Soon we will understand that out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war.
“We have one another,” they say now. “We are lucky, lucky.”
Lester and Imre, Magda and me. We are the anomalies. The Nazis didn’t just murder millions of people. They murdered families. And now, beside the incomprehensible roster of the missing and the dead, our lives go on. Later we will hear stories from the displaced persons camps all over Europe. Reunions. Weddings. Births. We will hear of the special rations tickets issued to couples to obtain wedding clothes. We, too, will scour the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration newspapers and hold our breath, hoping to see familiar names among the list of survivors scattered over the Continent. But for now we do nothing but stare out the windows of the train, looking at empty fields, broken bridges, and, in some places, the fragile beginnings of crops. The Allied occupation of Austria will last another ten years. The mood in the towns we pass through isn’t of relief or celebration—it’s a teeth-clenched atmosphere of uncertainty and hunger. The war is over, but it’s not over.
* * *
“Do I have ugly lips?” Magda asks as we near the outskirts of Vienna. She is studying her reflection in the window glass, superimposed over the landscape.
“Why, are you planning to use them?” I joke with her, I try to coax out that relentlessly teasing part of her. I try to tamp my own impossible fantasies, that Eric is alive somewhere, that soon I will be a postwar bride under a makeshift veil. That I will be together with my beloved forever, never alone.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Tell me the truth.”
Her anxiety reminds me of our first day at Auschwitz when she stood naked with her shaved head, gripping strands of her hair. Maybe she condenses the huge global fears about what will happen next into more specific and personal fears—the fear that she is not attractive enough to find a man, the fear that her lips are ugly. Or maybe her questions are tangled up in deeper uncertainty—about her essential worth.
“What’s wrong with your lips?” I ask.
“Mama hated them. Someone on the street complimented my eyes once and she said, ‘Yes, she’s got beautiful eyes, but look at her thick lips.’ ”
Survival is black and white, no “buts” can intrude when you are fighting for your life. Now the “buts” come rushing in. We have bread to eat. Yes, but we are penniless. You are gaining weight. Yes, but my heart is heavy. You are alive. Yes, but my mother is dead.
* * *
Lester and Imre decide to stay on in Vienna for a few days; they promise to look for us at home. Magda and I board another train that will carry us eight hours northwest to Prague. A man blocks the entrance to the train car. “Nasa lude,” he sneers. Our people. He is Slovak. The Jews must ride on top of the train car.
“The Nazis lost,” Magda mutters, “but it’s the same as before.”
There is no other way to get home. We climb to the top of the train car, joining ranks with the other displaced persons. We hold hands. Magda sits beside a young man named Laci Gladstein. He caresses Magda’s fingers with his own, his fingers barely more than bones. We do not ask one another where we have been. Our bodies and our haunted eyes say everything there is to know. Magda leans against Laci’s thin chest, searching for warmth. I am jealous of the solace they seem to find in each other, the attraction, the belonging. I am too committed to my love for Eric, to my hope that I will find him again, to seek a man’s arms to hold me now. Even if I didn’t carry Eric’s voice with me still, I think I would be too afraid to look for comfort, for intimacy. I am skin and bones. I am covered in bugs and sores. Who would want me? Better not to risk connection and be denied, better not to have my damage confirmed. And besides, who would provide the best shelter now? Someone who knows what I have endured, a fellow survivor? Or someone who doesn’t, who can help me forget? Someone who knew me before I went through hell, who can help me back to my former self? Or someone who can look at me now without always seeing what’s been destroyed? I’ll never forget your eyes, Eric told me. I’ll never forget your hands. For more than a year I have held on to these words like a map that could lead me to freedom. But what if Eric can’t face what I have become? What if we find each other and build a life, only to find that our children are the children of ghosts?
I huddle against Magda. She and Laci talk about the future.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” he says.
It’s noble, a young man who, like me, was little more than dead only a month or two ago. He has lived, he will heal, he will heal others. His ambition reassures me. And it startles. He has come out of the death camps with dreams. It seems an unnecessary risk. Even now that I have known starvation and atrocity, I remember the pain of lesser hurts, of a dream ruined by prejudice, of the way my coach spoke to me when she cut me from the Olympic training team. I remember my grandfather, how he retired from the Singer Sewing Machine Company and waited for his pension check. How he waited and waited, how he talked of little else. Finally he received his first check. A week later we were evacuated to the brick factory. A few weeks later, he was dead. I don’t want to dream the wrong thing.
“I have an uncle in America,” Laci continues. “In Texas. I’ll go there, work, save up for school.”
“Maybe we’ll go to America too,” Magda says. She must be thinking of Aunt Matilda, in the Bronx. All around us on the top of the train car there is talk of America, of Palestine. Why keep living in the ashes of our loss? Why keep scratching for survival in a place where we’re not wanted? Soon we will learn of the restrictive immigration limits in America and Palestine. There is no haven free of limitation, of prejudice. Wherever we go, life might always be like this. Trying to ignore the fear that any minute we’ll be bombed, shot, tossed in a ditch. Or at best forced to ride on top of the train. Holding hands against the wind.
* * *
In Prague we are to change trains again. We say goodbye to Laci. Magda gives him our old address, Kossuth Lajos Utca #6. He promises to keep in touch. There’s time before the next departure, time to stretch our legs, sit in the sun and the quiet to eat our bread. I want to find a park. I want to see green growth, flowers. I close my eyes every few steps and take in the smells of a city, the streets and sidewalks and civilian bustle. Bakeries, car exhaust, perfume. It’s hard to believe that all of this existed while we were in our hell. I gaze in shop windows. It doesn’t matter that I am penniless. It will matter, of course. In Košice food won’t be given out for free. But at this moment I feel completely full just seeing that there are dresses and stockings to buy, jewelry, pipes, stationery. Life and commerce go on. A woman fingers the weight of a summer dress. A man admires a necklace. Things aren’t important, but beauty is. Here is a city full of people who have not lost the capacity to imagine, make, and admire beautiful things. I will be a resident again—a resident of somewhere. I will run errands and buy gifts. I will stand in line at the post office. I will eat bread that I have baked. I will wear fine couture in honor of my father. I will go to the opera in honor of my mother, of how she would sit at the edge of her chair listening to Wagner, how she would weep. I will go to the symphony. And for Klara, I’ll seek out every performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. That longing and wistfulness. The urgency as the line climbs, and then the rippling cadenza, the crashing, rising chords. And then the more sinister theme in the strings, threatening the solo violin’s rising dreams. Standing on the sidewalk, I’ve closed my eyes so I can hear the echo of my sister’s violin. Magda startles me.
“Wake up, Dicu!”
And when I open my eyes, right here in the thick of the city, near the entrance to the park, there’s a concert poster advertising a performance with a solo violinist.
The picture on the poster is my sister’s.