“Much better.” Mindel beamed at the prospect that her toes wouldn’t hurt so much anymore. She walked around, still unsteady in her oversized shoes. When she walked back, Mother Brinkmann was holding her old shoes in her hand, a furrow across her forehead.
“Timmy, come here,” she called and a small, meager boy of four years obeyed. Mindel looked at him. Timmy was so much smaller than she was, how come he was the same age?
Mother Brinkmann gave Timmy Mindel’s shoes, and then she gave Timmy’s shoes to a girl of two who’d just learned to walk in her stockinged feet and for lack of shoes hadn’t been allowed to leave the hut when winter had set in.
“Can I have new shoes, too? My toes always feel bruised,” Laszlo said.
Mother Brinkmann asked him to remove his shoes and socks and then frowned when she saw his toes. “Laszlo, why didn’t you say something sooner? These are going to get infected if you’re not careful. You can’t continue to walk around in these shoes, and I don’t know when Herr Brinkmann will be able to trade for a pair of shoes big enough for you. The bigger, the more in-demand they are.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to cut a hole in the toe of each shoe. That would give your toes some room to move about.”
Laszlo grinned. “Let’s do that.”
“But you’ll have to make sure and wiggle your toes when standing in the food queue. If you don’t they’ll freeze up and fall off.”
“No, they won’t,” he said with a cheeky grin.
“Yes, they will. Now, promise me you’ll keep moving your toes and I’ll make a hole in your shoes.”
“I promise.”
Mother Brinkmann went to work and when she was finished, he walked around the barracks, modeling his open-roofed shoes for everyone. The other children giggled with delight.
One of the girls who always pretended to be grown-up looked at Laszlo and rolled her eyes. “He’s going to be freezing all of the time now and his shoes will be full of snow and mud.”
“Well, he won’t have to worry about getting an infection that requires him to lose his entire foot,” Mother Brinkmann said, effectively ending that discussion.
Several children begged Mother Brinkmann to cut the caps off of their shoes as well. She refused, explaining she wasn’t going to disfigure perfectly good shoes. The children accepted her ruling and immediately set their minds to making up a rhyme about Laszlo’s toes falling off. A few of them, including Mindel, started to walk around on their heels, pretending they had no toes at all. Giggling hilariously, they bumped into each other, and played at being angry about the clumsy toe-less people milling about.
22
Utter desperation had conquered Rachel. Two interminable weeks earlier, she’d found her sister and missed meeting her by a whisker, when the rotten Nazis had selected her to work in the salt mines.
With exhaustion tugging at every fiber in her body, she trudged the short march from her new camp to the mine. Everything here was deplorable: the living conditions, the food, the work…and above all the salt. She swore that she’d never again eat a single morsel of salt should she make it out of there alive.
From morning to night, the women had to toil in the underground mines, never once seeing the light of the day. The rations were so meager, she never noticed the difference between before a meal and after, and regularly forgot whether she’d already eaten or not.
Armed with a pickaxe she hacked at the rock, breaking out the salt. Where the work at the ammunition factory had been tedious and perilous, here it was back-breaking physical labor, apt to wear down a strong and healthy man.
The emaciated women first had to break out the salty rock and then grind it to tiny pieces that were later used to refine the pure salt. Every day they climbed into the shaft, where the salt was deposited between layers of rock deep inside the ground.
There was no respite from the salt and it took only a few days until Rachel’s skin was raw from exposure. The slightest sweating or rubbing irritated her skin to the point that she believed it was catching fire. The worst, though, were her hands. Littered with blisters from the pickaxe there seemed to be no patch of intact skin left on the raw flesh and every time she came into contact with the vicious salt – always – it literally was like rubbing salt into her wounds.
Rachel was in so much agony at all times that she had forgotten how it felt to be pain-free. The only good thing about working in the shaft was that the SS rarely bothered them down there. Even the comparatively mild temperatures in the mine turned out more of a curse than a blessing, because every time she walked outside the harsh cold bit into her bones and numbed her limbs. At least then, she didn’t feel the pain anymore.
Every day Rachel collapsed deeper into a state of depression, until she no longer found a reason to stay alive. Let the Nazis win. She was ready to give them the satisfaction of dying right then and there. Rachel wasn’t the only one pushed to the edge of sanity, since most of the women had lost the will to survive and simple subsisted in a state of complete apathy.
In camp jargon, people like her who suffered from the hunger disease, a combination of starvation and exhaustion, were called Muselmänner – former human beings who’d become apathetic to anything including their own fate and were unresponsive to even the most barbaric treatment by the Nazis. It was as if she had already ceased to exist and by some divine mistake, her dried-up shell continued to walk the earth without an actual being inside.
Those women who still had a clear thought in their minds
