“Left by a soldier,” she said. “A shrimp of a boy, and so ill — he is not coming back. Better for you to have these than some drunken lout!”
Though old, these crutches made me new. They made a version of me that could walk. Or at least, one that could do more than stumble. I could sidle a crutch forward and swing my feet before me, and even within a few steps, I saw the potential of what I might do. That I might remain broken, but I could be swift and broken, adaptable and broken, able and broken.
With these crutches at my sides, I could take better care of Miri.
As we left that place, Miri asked me where I’d summoned such a story, about plots and vengeance and dreaming this most impossible dream of Mengele’s death, and I told her that it was something imprinted within me, and while I couldn’t locate its origin, I knew it to be real, or half-real, or at least the warmth that ran through me — so intense that it cast a shadow I could pretend into family — felt realer than anything.
“Remember that,” she advised me. And so, it was officiaclass="underline" this became my first true memory of my sister, the twin that I’d once had.
On our final morning I woke to the sun peering through the cracks in the boarded windows, tossing its ribbons over the rows of sleeping children on the floor, all of us cocooned in blankets and rags. Sophia lay on my left, snoring mightily, her arms flung over my chest. My crutches were on my right, and seeing them, I remembered: I could go anywhere by myself, and take Miri with me.
But on that day, they would try to turn me over to the Red Cross.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw the preparations for our parting. Miri and Twins’ Father, they were huddled on the kitchen floor, a pile of our many shoes between them. Miri was stuffing the holes with paper, and Twins’ Father was binding them with twine. Shoe after shoe they mended in silence, and with hands that shook, both unsteadied by the nearing good-bye. I saw Miri glance at the packs stationed by the door, one for Peter, another for Twins’ Father. She studied them as if she was trying to gather courage to speak, and then she addressed Twins’ Father, her face downturned, her eyes still low.
“You never questioned my actions, Zvi. Why was this? The others — I would hear stories about myself, what I had done. And the stories, they follow me, even now.”
She sealed the shoe’s injury shut, tied the twine in a final knot.
“You were only ever good,” he said simply. He faced her as he spoke, seemingly hoping that she might welcome this truth, and when she did not, he bent to arrange the mended shoes in rows, as if this could put matters to rights. But when he turned his back, Miri took the opportunity to slip past him, to the door. Spying my wakefulness, she gestured for me to join her, but Twins’ Father was not willing to forgo the formality of a farewell. Looking up from the rows of shoes, he gave her the only one the ex-doctor might accept.
“Your children will miss you,” he said.
Miri’s eyes said that she believed him.
And as I hobbled out on my crutches, I saw Peter’s head rise from where he slept, at the crackle of the fireplace, saw the hair ruffled on the back of his scalp. He looked at me in the haze of a partial dream. I had tried to prepare for this good-bye. “When we see each other again,” I said, but I couldn’t complete the sentence the way I wanted to. I couldn’t say: It will be better, I will be walking, you will be well, all will be found, we won’t be imprisoned or without a country, we won’t be hunted or starving, we won’t be witnesses to pain.
I couldn’t finish that sentence, not then.
Twenty years later, I would have a chance to finish, but there was no need for it. We would be grown adults, waiting in a courtyard in Frankfurt. Peter would show me pictures of his wife, the one who understood why he bolted in the night following the ring of the telephone, why he kept boxes stacked beneath the bed filled with speculations as to the whereabouts of a criminal more slippery than most, a man whose initial escape from Auschwitz led to a transfer to Gross-Rosen, and then a flight into Rosenheim, where he found work as a farmhand, separating the good potatoes from the bad potatoes, putting them into neat little piles for the farmer’s inspection, before settling into the ease of his final hideout in Brazil, where he wrote his memoirs and listened to music and swam in the sea.
But this is not about that man, as much as he would have liked it to be.
This is about Peter. As Miri had predicted, he was good at many things, so many that he found himself a bit lost after the war. He ran away from his guardian’s custody and traveled; he roamed from country to country as if he would never shed the role of a messenger, a delivery boy, but his travels stopped when a woman loved him and married him, despite her family’s warnings that he was damaged beyond repair, that she should not be surprised when their children were stillborn or, worse, born with mutations issued by the doctor’s hands. But they had children. Two boys. They were healthy and beautiful; you could see their father in their faces. I could have studied that photograph all day, but we were in that courtyard with a greater purpose.
Her trial was over. We would be permitted to see Elma in her confines; we would be allowed to confront her with the facts of what she had done. Germany had given her a life sentence plus thirteen years. One of the more severe sentences handed down in the course of the country’s prosecution of the criminals of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it determined that Elma’s death would occur on the cold floor of her cell.
Peter went in first. What he said, I don’t know. When he returned, he simply nodded me forward, without a word. Somehow, he had never stopped knowing what I needed.
Elma’s cage was more spacious than the one I had lived in. And no one drove a needle into her spine, no one hobbled her at the ankles, no one broke into her body and sifted through its insides, seizing her ability to have children while still a child herself, before sealing her shut with a ragged stitch. Her hair was close-cropped, but she had not been shaved. Her fine clothes were gone, but she was not naked. She had been captured, but no one had taken her childhood, as she’d taken mine, and even from behind her bars, she tried to take more from me; she gave a little laugh at the sight of my cane, eager for me to know her defiance. But I knew that she would spend her days hearing nothing but the sound of her own thoughts. She had no Zayde or Mama to soothe her — she had not even the davening of a pigeon at her window. This seemed a rightful misery. I felt no pity for Elma, and yet — the sight of her troubled me. I could have given her a game or two, to help her preserve herself within her cage, but I doubted she would see the value of such things. Instead, I gave her something that was of value to me: my forgiveness. She spat in disgust. I forgave her that too.
Forgiving her did not restore my family; it did not remove my pain or blunt my nightmares. It was not a new beginning. It was not, in the slightest, an end. My forgiveness was a constant repetition, an acknowledgment of the fact that I still lived; it was proof that their experiments, their numbers, their samples, was all for naught — I remained, a tribute to their underestimations of what a girl can endure. In my forgiveness, their failure to obliterate me was made clear.
And after I was finished telling Elma that I forgave her, I reminded her of those who didn’t have the opportunity to do so. I said their names.