“They will be planted in God’s house
And bloom in the courtyard of our God.
In old age they will still be fruitful,
They will be robust and fresh.”
Psalm 92:13–14
Getting home is easier said than done. Theresienstadt is infected with typhus. The grounds are covered with sick people who are too weak to move. They lie in groups, moaning and shivering and then lying still. Russian women come in to clean the place up. I have never seen women clean up a mess as efficiently as they do.
The man who told us we are free comes down to our bunker the night after we are liberated.
“We are looking for volunteers,” he says.
“For what?” someone asks.
“We need girls to work.”
I do not wait for him to say what kind of work they need. I knew in Auschwitz that work would kill me. I know that here, work will keep me alive.
“I volunteer!” I say.
He assigns me to work in the nursing home.
“Why is there a nursing home here?” I ask as he walks me there the next morning. We walk over people lying on the ground, waiting for death. He shakes his head.
“Sick Nazi propaganda,” he says. “The Germans invited the Red Cross to come see this camp as if it were an example of all the camps. They even made films here. When the Red Cross came, they had an orchestra of Jews playing and people watching and enjoying it. When the Red Cross left, they killed every last Jew in the orchestra.”
“So, they kept an old age home just to show the Red Cross?” I ask.
“Yes, and some children too.”
I do not have anything else to say.
We reach the old age home, and he sends me inside.
“I am going to go recruit more volunteers,” he says. “We have so much to do.”
I walk into the nursing home by myself. There are rows of beds with ancient looking people lying on them. They look like they are waiting for death to come and claim them already.
“Who is here?” An old lady says from her bed. She sits up. Her skin is translucent.
“My name is Rosie Greenstein,” I say. “I have come to help.”
More people sit up in their beds.
I gulp nervously as they all watch me.
“Rosie, thank you for coming,” says another lady. “Step closer so we can see you.”
I spend the day talking to them, feeding them, washing them, and then I go back to the bunker to go to sleep.
I go to the old age home every day. The elderly people there love me. They direct me to the attic where there are suitcases of forgotten clothing. They tell me I can take what I want. I bring back a suitcase full of beautiful floral dresses to the bunker. Each of us picks out a pretty dress. When I get dressed the next morning to go to work, I start feeling better about myself already.
My cousin Faigy and I take walks every evening when I get back from the old age home. A boy from Faigy’s town joins us. His name is Pinchas Hershcovitz. It is clear to me that Faigy is falling in love with him. She looks up at him while he talks, her face in a rapture from his every word. But slowly I realize with a horrible guilt that he isn’t falling in love with Faigy, but rather, he is falling in love with me. I will not be the one to get in the way of my cousin. Anyway, it is time to find my mother.
When I get back to the bunker that night, I speak to Leah about going home.
She is starting to look better already, and wearing a green floral dress that is tied with a ribbon at her waist. Her hair has grown in short, and it almost looks stylish. The rice that they feed us here has added some shape to her cheeks. “We need to go home,” I say. “Mama and Yecheskel might be there already.”
Leah nods. “How are we going to get home?”
“There are trains of soldiers going toward Hungary. I heard the soldiers talking about them. We can get on board. There is one leaving tomorrow morning.”
“I met a boy,” Leah says. “Can he come with us?”
“A boy?” Here?” I try to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “We need to go to Mama.” Now is hardly the time for boyfriends.
Leah blushes. “His name is Avrumi Frankel. He saw me through a window and came down to meet me. He says he knew right away he wants to marry me.”
“Leah, this is not how we do things. We must go see Mama first. What will she say if we come home with a boy? She won’t be happy.”
Leah’s face falls. She knows I am right.
“I’ll tell him he can’t come home with us then.”
The next morning, we find a group of girls and boys going toward the train. Chanky, Leah, and I walk along with them.
“Leah!” a man’s voice says.
Leah blushes. A dark and handsome man comes toward us.
“This is Avrumi,” Leah says.
“You must be Leah’s sister and aunt,” he says. He looks at Leah like she is a movie star, not an emaciated girl.
“You cannot come home with us,” I say. “Our mother will not be happy.”
“I know,” he says. He smiles at Leah. “I will find you afterwards.”
We find the platform and wait in huddled groups as the train steams toward us. The train is full of soldiers, but the conductor is kind and lets us ride on top. The ride is exhilarating. We hold onto bars on the rooftop and feel the sweet wind on our faces as the train chugs closer to our mother and our home. The soldiers from the train start to come up to the top. One soldier takes my hand and spins me around. I am bewildered but he is so much stronger than me that I let him lead me as I twirl. He says something in Russian. He spins me around some more and we are dancing on top of the train, then he goes back down to his seat.
“He said he is going to marry you,” a girl says in a broken Romanian. She starts laughing. “He said he has a farm at home with a chicken and a hen and he will take you there and make you his wife.”
“Oh no, he won’t!” I say.
“See if you can stop him,” the girl laughs.
More soldiers come up, but these ones do not talk of marriage like the other soldiers did. They start assaulting girls before my eyes. The girls whimper and cry like pitiful baby birds as the soldiers do whatever they want to them. The soldiers act like the girls are objects that they are entitled to. I avert my eyes. It reminds me of War and Peace, and I feel like I read that book a million years ago, rather than just a few. Suddenly, a soldier comes toward Chanky and starts touching her. She whimpers. I do not cry like a baby bird. I screech like a wild animal.
“Stop it! Let go of her!” I scream.
The soldier ignores me and carries on. Another soldier starts walking toward me.
God, I whisper to myself. You let me come home from Auschwitz and no one touched me. Let me go home the way I came here. We need our dignity. Now God, take care again of me because they are not going to touch me or Chanky.
The soldier comes even closer.
“Ahhhhhhh!” I scream like a wild animal. I let all my anger power my scream. I will still have some control over my life. Everyone must stop doing whatever they want to us like we are not people. I scream so loud, my own ears hurt.
In a second the train stops, and the conductor comes flying up to the top. The soldier backs away from Chanky. The one that was on his way toward me takes an abrupt turn.
“Who is screaming like that?” the conductor asks.
Someone points to me.
“These soldiers are bothering us,” I say.
The conductor sees the look of despair in my eyes. His face turns to rage. He bellows at the soldiers. “Get down! Get down now or I will kick all of you off the train! I don’t care what you say. Not a single soldier will remain on my train if you continue this behavior!”
The soldiers don’t look at us as they follow the conductor down. They do not come up again.
We get off the train in Budapest and there are Russian soldiers everywhere. I do not want to have the same problem as we had on the train, so I put my arm around the first poor boy I see walking. He looks at me bewildered.
“What are you doing with your hand around me, Miss?” he asks.
“Shhh. You are my husband. If the soldiers see I am with a man, they won’t bother me.”
“Okay,” he agrees. And he walks us all the way to the train station on the other side of town.
On the next train we meet Avrumi again. Leah’s face lights up. We climb up on top of the train together.
“You cannot come home with us,” I remind him.
“I know,” he says. “I am going to my hometown, Dej, it is very near to Crasna.”
Leah and Avrumi spend the whole train ride talking.
Suddenly there is a Russian soldier next to us. “Come with me,” he says to Leah. Leah shrugs him away. The soldier walks away and then turns around and comes back. He walks up to Leah and starts to pull open her blouse.
“Get off of her!” Avrumi says.
The soldier ignores him and sticks his hand up Leah’s shirt. I am about to scream but Avrumi is fast. He pulls the soldier back and in the blink of an eye, Avrumi lifts him by the back of his shirt and hauls him over the side. We are going through a tunnel and the soldier disappears down into the darkness. The other soldiers look at Avrumi in shock. I let him travel with us for as long as he wants.
Chanky is depressed. She keeps crying about Duvid and her baby.
“They are OK, Chanky,” I say as I try to reassure her.
“You do not understand,” Chanky says. “You are just a girl. You do not have a husband; you do not have a child. This is agony for me.”
Someone finds Chanky the next day on the train.
“Duvid is alive!! I saw Duvid! He is on the way to Satu Mare.”
Chanky shrieks. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!” the man says. “Go to Satu Mare. He is looking for you! He talks about nothing but you!”
Chanky is ecstatic. “I am going to Satu Mare! Duvid is alive! Come with me!”
“We need to go home, Chanky,” I say. “Our mother is waiting for us.”
Chanky hugs us and gets off the train to transfer to Satu Mare.
Avrumi gets off by Dej and promises to find Leah as soon as he locates his family.
We finally reach Crasna. I hold Leah’s hand as we get off the train. It has only been 13 months since we were last here but as I look at my town, it feels like I have been gone for a million years. We walk slowly to our one-room apartment. I stand next to Leah as we look up at our small building. Maybe our mother is already there, preparing a meal for us. Suddenly someone comes to the window. It is the window where I used to look out at the stream every day and listen to it sing. This was my home. A lady opens the window and sticks her head out, out of my window.
“Oh, look who showed up,” she says with a laugh that makes the blood in my body stop cold. “You little girls came home, did you?” Her ugly face contorts. She speaks to us like one speaks to a child, but worse, in a mocking voice. “Oh, you little girls came home?”
There is a big rock on the ground next to the building and I pick it up in my hand. I am ready to hurl it at her and smash her into pieces.
“Put down that rock,” Leah says through her teeth. “Do you want to get put into to jail after all we have been through?” She nudges the rock from my hand, and I let it go.
I see the reflection of the stream through the window. The birds do not sing. The trees do not whisper. The stream does not trickle along the colorful rocks.
“Get out of here!” the lady says. “This is not your house anymore.”