I did not get to watch the parachutists land — they floated down to a location beyond my eye’s reach — but three days later, I would see a reconfiguration of the white silks that had bloomed above them, their soft lengths having fallen into the hands of a seamstress. Now, a bride glided down the streets; she drifted across the cobblestones toward the chuppah in this ruched wartime splendor, the parachute silks draped into a filmy bodice, the train wisping behind her like mist. The two mothers joined her; they led her beneath the lace. If you put your head out the window, you could hear the celebration. The bride circling the groom. The seven blessings. A shatter of glass sang out.
“There are weddings still?” I said in awe.
Miri rose from her bed and came to the open window to watch with me, to cock her ear and listen. She put her arm around me.
“There are weddings still,” she said, a catch in her voice. “And I don’t know why I am so surprised.”
One ceremony, and then another.
In the abandoned house, when I had thought Miri was leaving the world, I’d felt as if I were in a different kind of cage. My hands didn’t work and my vision blurred. All became distant and impossible. I didn’t even consider my crutches as I stumbled out to the street in search of help. My voice moved far better than I could, and my cries drew the neighbors from their homes. Jakub, the giver of onions, our Krakow host, was among them. His was the only face I knew and trusted. I pointed to the open door and watched as he dashed inside.
I knew he would carry her out. But I didn’t want to see her state. I didn’t look. Not even as Jakub put Miri in an ambulance and placed me beside her. I did not open my eyes until we came to the hospital. I saw her look away from the nurses and the patients both — though they’d seen many with her affliction, she remained ashamed of it, and her shame did not lift as she was tended to and her vitals were taken and she was given a bed. She refused to lie in that bed; she just perched on the edge and studied the curtain that divided the room, and there she remained until a nurse showed Jakub inside.
His entrance was unusually formal; he gave a little bow at the door — it was as if he thought an extreme politesse might conceal his worry, though from my perspective, it only announced an attachment to the doctor. He looked about the room as if he’d never seen the inside of a hospital before, and then he asked me to give them some privacy. I did, in a way. I ducked behind the curtain that divided the room, and there, behind its cover, I still heard everything.
Jakub drew a chair next to the hospital bed and sat beside Miri’s hunched form. He did not sigh or speak; he didn’t even whisper. In his silence, there was a loss, a too-bright and borderless thing, a loss that understood: the survivor’s hour is different from any other; its every minute answers to a history that won’t be changed or restored or made bearable. Recognizing Jakub’s loss, Miri spoke of her own.
“My husband,” she murmured. “He didn’t survive three days in the ghetto. Shot in the street.”
I peered around the curtain’s edge. The room was dim, but Miri’s face was half bathed in lamplight.
“My sisters, both lost to me. Orli, dead, months after our arrival. Ibi, dispatched to the Puff. But before they were lost — he made me take their wombs myself.”
She looked to Jakub, as if awaiting a response. None came. Jakub bowed his head.
“Of course, mine was not spared either. But I could not mourn it. I was too busy mourning my children. My Noemi, my Daniel. How many times have I wished that they were closer in years so that I might have told Mengele they were twins? In my dreams, I close that gap of time between them, I make them passable as twins. But when I wake, I know this was impossible, and I console myself with this: at least my children will never know what their mother did in Auschwitz.” And here her voice began to slip away from her, as if it had become untethered from her thoughts.
Jakub tried to tell her that in a place where good wasn’t permitted to exist, she had nonetheless enabled it. In a place that asked her to be brutal, she brought only kindness, a comfort to the dying, a defiant hope that crept—
But she would not hear it. The mothers, she said — she’d tried to keep the mothers alive, that was the logic of her acts.
So many more would have died without you, Jakub insisted, but my guardian drew only bitterness from this, a bitterness that plunged her into the unspeakable.
“A pregnant Jewess,” she said. “Little offended him more. I told the mothers, ‘If you and your baby are discovered, you will not be shot; no, you will not go to the gas. Such ends are considered too gentle for you. If your pregnancy is known to Mengele, you will become research and entertainment both, he will take you to his table, and, with his instruments, he will dissect, bit by bit, he will push you toward death. And as he kills you, he will force you to watch your baby become his experiment. For Mengele, such savagery is a treasured opportunity — as soon as he learns of a pregnancy, he places bets with the guards about the gender of the child, and they plot its death accordingly. If it is a girl, they’ll say, we will throw her to the dogs. But if it is a boy, we will crush his skull beneath the wheels of a car. These are only some of the brutalities I can speak of. They are too innumerable and varied, so grotesque — I do not have the words. What I know for certain: the only true delivery he knows is that of misery. For every mother and child, he invents a new murder — in Auschwitz, one need not even be born to experience torture.’”
She closed her eyes as if to shroud the memory. But it would not be shrouded. Opening her eyes, she looked squarely at Jakub with the air of one who can only confess.
“So many times, to save a mother’s life — I had to act swiftly, on the floors of filthy barracks, with dull, rusty instruments, and nothing to ease her pain. Alone, I pulled the life from her — my hands bare, bloodied — and I told myself, through the mother’s screams, and my own, stifled tears, You are sparing this soul, this baby, the greatest of tortures. And when it was over — oh, it was never over! — but I would speak to the mother, I’d say, ‘Your child is dead, but look, you are strong, you still live, and now there will be a chance, someday, when the world welcomes us back into its wonder, you will have another.’ Each time I said this, it was not just for them — it was for me too. The grief was not mine, and yet all I knew was grief! So many little futures — I ended them before he could torment and end them, to enable other futures. And still, myself I cannot forgive.”
Miri’s hands fluttered to her face — she did not permit us to see her expression. But we knew she did not want her own future at all.
Jakub looked as if he had witnessed the events she’d described. His face grayed, as if struck by illness, and he struggled to compose himself. He tried to tell her that he knew what it could mean to save a life. That cost, he said, was unending, because in choosing who could be saved, he had also chosen who could not be saved. In failing these lives, he’d selected the color of these deaths, their scents, their violences. Every day, he murmured, he had to save his own life, even as he’d failed the most vibrant, dearest one, the one he’d wanted to save most.
And then he must have found himself unable to say anything at all, because he pulled the curtain back and led me to my guardian’s side. She would not look at me, but she drew me close, she held me tight, and as she wept, I wondered if anyone else, the whole world over, could boast a stronger embrace.
Out in the hall, I overheard the nurses approach Jakub. The cost, he repeated. I know it well. I am sure that you know others too, working as you do, I’m sure you see us, desperate to shake these matters from our minds, you see us try to live until we try to die, and when we can’t succeed at either, we try to coax ourselves toward death by trying to remember them, the ones we couldn’t save, and when we remember them too well, it is terrible, and when we remember them too little, it is worse—