Page 83 of The Lost Husband

More women funnel in from the same direction I came, adding to the end of the line by the dozens.

“Why haven’t we moved forward at all?” the young woman continues questioning her mother.

“Ruhe!” a German soldier shouts toward the line.

The mother presses her finger to her lips just as we’re all shoved forward into one another.

My gaze drifts toward a crooked signpost pierced into a pile of dirt. A skull and crossbones on top and on the bottom, the words:

HALT!

STÓJ!

The irony of having a sign telling people to stop for danger when no one wants to keep moving must be a tease. If we don’t stop before the sign, danger will follow. That’s what it wants us to know.

My body feels hollow like it knows what’s coming. My eyes are heavy, and my stomach cramps.

I’ve heard the whispers long before today. Despite the Drexels’ attempt to masquerade the ideal of Auschwitz, it didn’t erase what I had already heard. The rumors flew through Amsterdam like summer crowds—everywhere and impossible to escape. People would speak of trains packed so tightly people couldn’t breathe inside. No one could sit or move a limb.

The other nannies on Herr Drexel’s street spoke of the smoke that never stopped reaching for the sky, and families swallowed by these gates, never to be seen again. I wanted to believe the stories were mere exaggerations—something meant to scare people into obedience.

But standing here, my toes touching the heels of the mother in front of me, hot breath fogging the back of my neck from the woman behind me, beneath the glare of lights…the truth and reality settle into my stomach.

This isn’t a prison.

Not even a labor camp.

It’s the place where people go to die. And now I’m in line.

The line finally spills into the building. Plaster walls surround me—all of us inside. Wall-mounted lamps, tables set up in rows. The wind masked the odor of sweat and wet clothes, but inside, fear and exhaustion are pungent.

Ahead, a chair scrapes against the floor. A ledger slaps open on a desk. A woman clutches her arms around her body as if it’s cold rather than hot inside. The clerk doesn’t look at her before shooing her away.

I move up further, hearing a pen scratch against paper. The woman behind me coughs, her breath hitting the back of my neck.

One room leads to another, each worse than the last. The floor is covered in hair in this one, a single braid drapes over a small pile.

This is where I lose my hair.

Next, I trade my name for a number—one I’ll never be able to forget.

When I lose my clothes, forced to stand naked in the same line I’ve been in all night, I realize I’ll never see my suitcase again. No one will ever know my real name or fake one. Or what color my hair was.

We all look the same now…

THIRTY-FOUR

CURRENT DAY

Gliwice, Poland

Elias blows out the flame in the lantern as the sun spills over the horizon. I pull myself up from the ground and return to my daytime view. The glass window is cold under my palms, and the prisoners in the yard all look the same again. I close my eyes, thinking the world outside will change like a photograph on a film reel when I look again. The film is running out.

I scan the rows, slowly, from one side to the other, the way I’ve been doing for the last six days. Distressed German uniforms, hunched bodies, gaps from missing prisoners—executed prisoners. No one is looking around, or anywhere but toward the ground. No eye contact with guards or anyone who might be a spectator.

My chest aches. Not with questions, or fear of what I might see, but something worse. What I won’t see.

A heaviness in my lungs, a dull pain in my stomach, emptiness. I place my hand on my stomach. I know when something is coming to an end—when there’s nothing left to question. When the light has gone dark from within becausethere’s nothing left to see. I look in the same spot he was in three days ago from the side door. I see a man in a German uniform who looks like the others, but from up here, I can only see his dark hair falling forward as his head bows.