“Digging,” he said. “All we did, at first. Making pits deeper. The dirt so black. So soft. Like sticking your hands… inside an animal. All those trees leaning over us. Pines. Great white birches. Bark as smooth as baby skin. The Nazis gave us nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. But they paid us no attention, either. I sat next to the gypsy I had slept beside all through the war. On a single slab of rotted wood. We had shared body heat. Blood from each other’s cuts and wounds. Infections. Lice.
“I never… even knew his name. Four years six inches from each other… never knew it. Couldn’t understand each other. Never really tried. He’d saved-” A cough rattled my grandfather’s entire body, and his eyes got wilder, began to bulge, and I thought he wasn’t breathing and almost yelled for Lucy again, but he gathered himself and went on. “Buttons,” he said. “You understand? From somewhere. Rubbed their edges on rocks. Posts. Anything handy. Until they were... sharp. Not to kill. Not as a weapon.” More coughing. “As a tool. To whittle.”
“Whittle,” I said automatically, as though talking in my sleep.
“When he was starving. When he woke up screaming. When we had to watch children’s… bodies dangling from gallows… until the first crows came for their eyes. When it was snowing, and… we had to march… barefoot… or stand outside all night. The gypsy whittled.”
Again, my grandfather’s eyes ballooned in their sockets as though they would burst. Again came the cough, shaking him so hard that he almost fell from the chair. Again, he fought his body to stillness.
“Wait,” he gasped. “You will wait. You must.”
I waited. What else could I do?
A long while later, he said, “Two little girls.” I stared at him. His words wrapped me like strands of a cocoon. “What?”
“Listen. Two girls. The same ones, over and over. That’s what… the gypsy… whittled.”
Dimly, in the part of my brain that still felt alert, I wondered how anyone could tell if two figures carved in God knows what with the sharpened edge of a button were the same girls.
But my grandfather just nodded. “Even at the end. Even at Chelmno. In the woods. In the rare moments… when we weren’t digging, and the rest of us… sat. He went straight for the trees. Put his hands on them like they were warm. Wept. First time, all war. Despite everything we saw, everything we knew… no tears from him, until then. When he came back, he had… strips of pine bark in his hands. And while everyone else slept… or froze… or died… he worked. All night. Under the trees.
“Every few hours… shipments came. Of people, you understand? Jews. We heard trains. Then, later, we saw creatures… between tree trunks. Thin. Awful. Tike dead saplings walking. When the Nazis… began shooting… they fell with no sound. Pop-pop-pop from the guns. Then silence. Things lying in leaves. In the wet.
“The killing wasn’t… enough fun… for the Nazis, of course. They made us roll bodies… into the pits, with our hands. Then bury them. With our hands. Or our mouths. Sometimes our mouths. Dirt and blood. Bits of person in your teeth. A few of us lay down. Died on the ground. The Nazis didn’t have … to tell us. What to do with them. We just… pushed anything dead… into the nearest pit. No prayers. No last look to see who it was. It was no one. Do you see? No one. Burying. Or buried. No difference.
“And still, all night, the gypsy whittled.
“For the dawn… shipment… the Nazis tried… something new. Stripped the newcomers… then lined them up… on the lip of a pit… twenty, thirty at a time. Then they played… perforation games. Shoot up the body… down it… see if you could get it… to flap apart… before it fell. Open up, like a flower.
“All through the next day. All the next night. Digging. Waiting. Whittling. Killing. Burying. Over and over. Sometime… late second day, maybe… I got angry. Not at the Nazis. For what? Being angry at human beings… for killing… for cruelty… like being mad at ice, for freezing. It’s just… what to expect. So I got angry… at the trees. For standing there. For being green, and alive. For not falling when bullets hit them.
“I started… screaming. Trying to. In Hebrew. In Polish. The Nazis looked up, and I thought they would shoot me. They laughed instead. One began to clap. A rhythm. See?”
Somehow, my grandfather lifted his limp hands from the arms of the wheelchair and brought them together. They met with a sort of crackle, like dry twigs crunching.
“The gypsy… just watched. Still weeping. But also… after a while… nodding.”
All this time, my grandfather’s eyes had seemed to swell, as though there were too much air being pumped into his body. But now, the air went out of him in a rush, and the eyes went dark, and the lids came down. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep again, the way he had last night. But I still couldn’t move. Dimly, I realized that the sweat from my long day’s walking had cooled on my skin, and that I was freezing.
My grandfather’s lids opened, just a little. He seemed to be peering at me from inside a trunk, or a coffin.
“I don’t know how the gypsy knew… that it was ending. That it was time. Maybe just because… it had been hours… half a day… between shipments. The world had gone… quiet. Us. Nazis. Trees. Corpses. There had been worse places…1 thought… to stop living. Despite the smell.
“Probably, I was sleeping. I must have been, because the gypsy shook me…by the shoulder. Then held out… what he’d made. He had it… balanced… on a stick he’d bent. So the carving moved. Back and forth. Up and down.”
My mouth opened and then hung there. I was rock, sand, and the air moved through me and left me nothing.
“Life,’ the gypsy said to me, in Polish. Only Polish I ever heard him speak. ‘Life. You see?’
“I shook… my head. He said it again. ‘Life.’ And then… I don’t know how… but 1 did… see.
“I asked him… ‘Why not you?’ He took… from his pocket… one of his old carvings. The two girls. Holding hands. I hadn’t noticed… the hands before. And I understood.
“‘My girls,’ he said. ‘Smoke. No more. Five years ago.’ I understood that, too.
“I took the carving from him. We waited. We slept, side by side. One last time. Then the Nazis came.
“They made us stand. Hardly any of them, now. The rest gone. Fifteen of us. Maybe less. They said something. German. None of us knew German. But to me… at least… the word meant… run.
“The gypsy… just stood there. Died where he was. Under the trees. The rest… I don’t know. The Nazi who caught me… laughing… a boy. Not much… older than you. Laughing. Awkward with his gun. Too big for him. I looked at my hand. Holding… the carving. The wooden man. ‘Life,’ I found myself chanting… instead of Shma. ‘Life.’ Then the Nazi shot me in the head. Bang.”
And with that single word, my grandfather clicked off, as though a switch had been thrown. He slumped in his chair. My paralysis lasted a few more seconds, and then I started waving my hands in front of me, as if I could ward off what he’d told me, and I was so busy doing that that I didn’t notice, at first, the way my grandfather’s torso heaved and rattled. Whimpering, I lowered my hands, but by then, my grandfather wasn’t heaving anymore, and he’d slumped forward further, and nothing on him was moving.