slow about it, who stayed behind to pack some valuables or necessities, they died first. I had believed the worst rumors on the day before. I’d already packed a bag. There were rifle shots from every direction. They caused panic at first, but most of us hurried toward the trucks. We were like cattle. No one wanted to know what the shots meant. Mothers shouting to their children, children alone screaming. The men calling to each other, asking what they should do. What could they do? The SS had already shot the mayor and the police chief.
“From the bed of the truck we saw the worst of it. The children . . . the poor babies. On Praga Street the Germans were killing the babies outright. Smashing their heads with rifle butts, swinging them by the heels against walls. I myself saw an SS grab an infant from Hannah Karpik and dash its head against the street cobbles. Hannah went mad, tearing out her hair and beating her fists against the SS. After a few seconds he took out his pistol and shot her in the stomach, then left her for dead.” The woman shrugged. “That was the Germans in Damosc.”
“In Lodz, too,” echoed a woman from the outer edge of the Circle. “The same, but worse. While we stood in lines in the square, the SS backed a flat truck up to the hospital wall. We could not understand what they were doing. Someone opened a third floor window. Then small packages began flying out of the window. When the second package landed in the bed of the truck, we realized what it was. They were throwing the newborn babies down from the nursery. Three floors. They laughed while they did it.”
“Like barbarians from the Dark Ages,” said the first woman. “Our rabbi was crying out to God to deliver us, while a young man cursed God in a voice twice as loud. On that night I felt the boy was right. How could God watch that slaughter and not be moved to act?”
“It’s always the same,” said another woman, a voice much older and cracked with phlegm. “Why write them down? The same story told a hundred times. A thousand times. No one cares.”
“That is why we must write them all,” Frau Hagan said forcefully. “To show what the Hun is really doing. Good men sometimes do bad things in war. But with the SS it is the rule. It is
“Later,” scoffed a disembodied voice. “What is later? Who will be left to dig up our papers? Our stories. Who will be left to listen? Soon the Germans will own the world.”
“Cover your stupid mouth,” said Frau Hagan. “There is always a reckoning. The Red Army is coming to set us free. Stalin will crush Hitler into the ice of Russia, drown his tanks in the Pripet Marshes. We must be ready when the soldiers arrive. We must point out the butchers to them.”
“Stalin won’t come. Hitler almost took Moscow in ’forty-one. Anyway, Stalin hates Jews as much as Hitler. It doesn’t matter. The streets of Moscow will soon have German names.”
“Liar!” Frau Hagan snapped. “Empty-headed fool! Ask the Dutch girl. She came from Amsterdam. She had a radio. Ask her about Stalin. Ask her about the Red Army.”
All eyes turned to Rachel. “Tell them,” urged Frau Hagan.
“It’s true,” Rachel confirmed. “The Russians began a winter offensive in December. Only days before I was captured, I heard that they had advanced into Poland.”
“As I told you!” Frau Hagan said triumphantly.
“I heard also on the BBC that they were driving the Germans back across the Ukraine.”
Nearly fifty faces turned to Rachel and fired questions at her in a jumble of languages. What was happening in Estonia? In Warsaw? Italy? What about the Americans? The English?
“I’m afraid I don’t know much,” she apologized. “There are rumors of an invasion this year.”
“They say that every year,” said a disparaging voice. “They will not come. They don’t care about us.”
A long shriek suddenly pierced the night. The women in the Circle fell silent. Rachel had heard screaming earlier, like several women shouting for help, but it had come from farther away, from the direction of the SS barracks, and she had been unable to make Frau Hagan take notice of it. But when the second shriek sounded — this one obviously from close by — Frau Hagan’s face told Rachel she sensed real danger.
“I may have to speak to Frau Komorowski,” the Block Leader said.
“Don’t risk it,” said a woman. “Let them solve their own problems.”
Frau Hagan ruminated. “I’ll wait a few minutes. Finish the story, Brana.”
“Should I hide the papers?” asked the Scribe. “What if the screams make them search?”
“Finish the story.”
The woman called Brana resumed her narrative, telling of the open trucks driving through the winter blast to meet a prison train at an empty stretch of track. Of families loaded into unheated cattle cars, as Rachel’s had been, without food, water, or toilets. Rachel found herself unwillingly reliving her own nightmare journey from Westerbork when something raised the hairs on her upper arms.
Frau Hagan glared at her. “What is it, Dutch girl?”
“There is someone outside. Hide your papers.”
Frau Hagan looked skeptical. “Heinke is listening at the door. She has heard nothing.”
“Hide the papers, I tell you!”
Frau Hagan snatched the papers from the Scribe and stuffed them under her shift. Her eyes went to the woman called Heinke at the door. “Anything?”
The guard shook her head. Frau Hagan curled her upper lip at Rachel.
The hooded candle was instantly extinguished. A wild scramble ensued as the women found their allotted places in the tiered bunks. Rachel realized then that they had practiced this maneuver a thousand times. The only sounds she heard were the grunts and curses of the new women as they stubbed toes and barked shins in their inexperienced haste. She admired the old-timers. Walking quickly without sound was a skill she had mastered long ago, in Amsterdam, and not an easy one.
Holding her breath in her own bunk, she waited for the slamming door and pounding boots of an SS search team. Instead she heard a furtive knock. Then the door cracked open and a shadow slipped through.
“Hagan?” whispered the shadow.
“Irina? Is that you?”
“Everyone stay in your bunks,” ordered Frau Hagan.
Rachel heard the muted thud of the heavy Pole’s feet hitting the floor. Frau Hagan crossed the room in total darkness and held a whispered conversation with the kapo of the Christian Women’s Block. In less than a minute the door opened and closed again.
“Another child has gone missing,” Frau Hagan announced to the room. “A gypsy child.”
There was a heavy silence.
“A boy child?” asked a quiet voice.
“Yes. Eight years old.”
Rachel heard a whimper in the darkness.
“That was his mother we heard screaming. Frau Komorowski ordered her gagged and tied to her bunk. For her own protection. The gypsy had told them she was going to Doktor Brandt’s quarters to get her son back.”
“She named the right place,” said a voice.
“God help the boy,” said another. “It is unspeakable.”
“Was it the same as before?”
Frau Hagan answered wearily. “A Latvian political saw Ariel Weitz talking to this gypsy boy earlier today.”
Rachel heard spitting and cursing in the darkness, then voices that changed almost too rapidly to follow.
“Devil!” hissed one woman.
“One of the men should squash that worm.”
“We should kill him ourselves.”
“Don’t talk madness,” said Frau Hagan. “Kill Weitz and we all die. He serves Brandt, so Brandt protects him. Sturm protects him. Even Schorner protects Weitz, and Schorner despises him.”
“Schorner uses him too,” said a knowing voice. “Weitz informs for Schorner.”
“To think he was born a Jew,” mused another. “Weitz is worse than the SS. A thousand times worse.”
“The shoemaker is also a Jew,” observed Frau Hagan.
