“I will not die
Yet I will live
And I will recount the works of God.”
Psalm 118:17
We stand outside yet again in Zeilappell. The weather is colder. I cannot believe it was spring when the soldiers came into our town. It feels like a million years ago. We stand pin straight in the cold and try not to let the wind shake us.
After we are counted an SS woman stands in front of us. “Everyone! You are going to take a shower. Take off your clothes, leave them here.”
Another SS walks around with her stick and starts slamming it down on girls’ bald heads. “Get undressed!” She orders. Her hair is in blond bottle curls at her neck. She wears black shiny shoes and a double-breasted suit.
The skeletal girls around me pull their dresses over their heads.
With a sinking feeling, I also pull up the thin, hole-ridden fabric dress and take it off over my head. The cold air nips at my chest.
“Schnell, schnell!” The SS woman spits at us. She looks at us and laughs.
“Oscar!” another SS woman calls out. “These are taking a shower today!”
The SS men from the other side of the field turn around. Their eyes widen with excitement when they see girls pull their clothing off.
“Thank you for the tipoff, Irma,” one of them says and they laugh.
They walk toward us as we undress. They smile to each other. Two of them slap each other’s hands. I look down at the ground as my entire body tingles with mortification along with the cold air.
The SS woman steps in front of us. She is dressed in a blue, wool suit. She has pantyhose on. “Come on!” She says with laughter in her voice. “Get into lines you animals!”
If only we had the dignity of animals. At least animals have fur on their bodies.
“March!” she shouts. We march after her to the showers. Lines and lines of girls. The SS laughter rings in my ears. The air is like sharp ice around me.
We walk into the building with the showers. There are SS men standing next to shower heads that come down from the ceiling. They have rubber sticks in their hands.
The SS woman who brought us here pushes us closer together in line. The first girl in the line looks at the water.
“Jetzt!1 Schnell,” the SS man says. She inches in and then, it is as if she is hit with either fire or ice, and she jumps back. The SS takes his stick and shoves it into her mouth. He holds her like that under the water. She screams and blood falls from her mouth and turns pink from the water. He holds her like that for a long time. She looks like the stick will choke her. Then he pushes her aside and she stumbles away.
The SS motions for the next girl to go under the stream of water. She hesitates. The soldier’s face becomes alive with fury.
“Hurry up!” he yells. “I do not have all day!” He slams his stick into her stomach and pushes her under the water. She shrieks from it, but he holds her there.
The next girl also hesitates, and the same thing happens to her.
Rosie, I tell myself. Listen very carefully. The water is probably ice cold. You have two choices. Either go in right away and do not get hit with the stick or be scared and wait and then be pushed in anyways and on top of that get hit with the stick.
The line inches up and my turn comes. Without a split second of hesitation, I step under the water. It hits me like shards of ice and fire together. It is so cold, it burns. My entire body feels under attack. I cannot breathe. But then it is over. The SS nudges me out with his stick, and I am free. I shake violently.
The little Jewish workers called Häftlings2 are giving out new uniforms at the other end of the room. I am excited to get something other than my little blue dress with the rip up the side. A Häftling hands out packages to everyone. I go to her to receive my package. It is a perfect brown paper cube. Inside there is a pair of rough wooden clogs and a blue dress which is folded perfectly. I open the dress and take a look. It is covered with small black dots. The dots are moving. It is infested with lice.
I look around. Everyone is getting dressed. I have no choice. I put on the infested dress. My newly clean skin is now covered with tiny crawling bugs.
The lice are everywhere. The barrack doesn’t smell nearly as bad as it did in the searing heat but now it is crawling with lice. It looks like the room is moving on its own. Sleep, our only precious escape is now broken every few minutes from the incessant inching of the lice. The shoes turn out to be nothing but another source of pain. They make walking even more difficult because everything sticks to the wood and we end up shlepping all kinds of debris around on our feet.
A few days after the showers, the SS men line us up in fives after roll call. There are two girls to the right of me and two girls to the left. We are rows and rows like this. Five, five, five, behind five. We walk for a while with no idea where we are going. We reach a line of even more girls lined up, waiting. The SS shoves us into line with them and we do not know what we are doing there. Finally, we inch up and I see what is going on. Up ahead, sitting at tables, are a few groups of the same skinny prisoner girls who shaved our heads. When a girl from our lines gets up to the table, one of the working prisoners grabs her arm and pokes at it with a wooden stick with a flash of metal at the tip. They seem to be writing something on each girl’s arm, but I can’t see what they are writing with. When I get closer, I gasp. They are holding needles in their hands. I rub my arm. They dip instruments that look like needles straight into a hot flame, burn the numbers into the skin, and then rub a green rag over it. I watch each girl flinch a little as the marks are burned into their flesh. I hold Leah’s hand.
“Why are they doing this?” she asks. “What are they writing?”
I squint to try and see. “I think they are writing numbers on each girl’s arm,” I say.
As we get closer, I examine the prisoners writing the numbers. The one at the head of our line grabs a girl’s wrist and pushes up her sleeve. She moves her hand up and down, barely moving her wrist. I look at the girl’s arm. She has big, uneven numbers lining her forearm.
I look over at the prisoner girl at the next table. She seems calmer. She does not look at the girl in line in the eye, but she gently pushes her sleeve up and slowly writes small and even numbers. Her arm looks much prettier than the other one. I am not having those big numbers on my arm. Without thinking, I run to the line next to me. An officer shouts but no one shoots.
It is my turn to get tattooed. I reach my hand out to the prisoner. She takes my arm without looking at my face and carefully jabs numbers into my arm. Tears spring to my eyes but I do not cry out. Then she dips her rag into green ink and rubs it over the holes in my arm. I look down at my arm. A-13488. They are small and perfect.
Leah steps off the line after she gets tattooed and stands next to me.
I see her numbers are like big scrawls on her arm.
“Why did you run out of line, Rosie?”
“I wanted neat numbers,” I show her my arm.
“Neat? Neater numbers? Is that what you are thinking of now? Who cares? You could have been killed for that!” Her voice is thick with anger and fear. “Was that worth it? Are you crazy, Rosie? Was that worth it??”
I look down at my arm and then look at the people around me. They walk dazed, as if they are already dead. No, I’m not crazy. I know now, I know deeper than the sinking souls of the ghosts around me, I know.
“Yes, it was worth it, Leah,” I say. “It was worth it because we are going home! We are going home from here! We are going home from here. It was worth it because we still care. Do you hear me? We still care, Leah!”
Eidy leads us back to the barracks. I itch from my new lice-infested uniform. The lice seem to jump off from the dress and embed themselves in my skin that is stretched thinly over my bones. Before I go to sleep, I lift my arm up to my eyes. The skin around the numbers is red but I see the small black numbers clearly, A-13488. They are pretty and neat. “You are going home from here,” they seem to say.
When we stand in Zeilappell the next morning, they call us by our numbers. It takes even longer now because they draw out saying each number. When they get to me, I sneak a glance at my number. A-13488. It is printed perfectly on my arm, and it gives me comfort to see it. Soon I know my number in my sleep. Sometimes we are asked to recite our numbers and the girls who do not say theirs fast enough are beaten. The SS actually laugh while they do this. I memorize my number and if they shake me from sleep and demand it, I will be able to say it. I will spit it out faster than they can ask me for it: A-13488.