CHAPTER ELEVEN
Amelia
Day 60 - March 1942
Only darkness surroundedme in the early hours each day. I never knew the true time, but I believed it had to be three or four in the morning. At the sound of heavy boots marching around outside and the loud screech of an alarm, I rolled off of my bunk and waited for my eyes to clear. Without electricity, it was easier for my vision to adjust from one level of opaqueness to the moonlit dirt courtyard where I would start my fifteen-hourday.
I pulled my dress down from a hook I had made from stolen paper clips and slipped it on over my undergarments. It was the only sense of normalcy I could offer myself before starting the workday. Small rituals such as those helped me continue to feelhuman.
The other women around me scurried to prepare for their jobs too, as they did every morning, which made things a bit chaotic in our small block. “Amelia,” one of them called out to me, but in a whisper of a voice I could barely hear. “Did you get that bandage forme?”
Alise, the woman around Mama’s age who slept on the bunk above me asked if I could sneak a bandage for her. She refused to go down to the sick bay in fear of being marked as injured. I couldn't blame her—I still don't. More frequently, we were seeing people’s identification numbers marked with a note, labeling them as sick or injured. Shortly after, they would be transported elsewhere. We were told they were being taken to a different location where they would receive better care, but we all had a difficult time believing anything the Nazis told us—for a good reason. It was hard to avoid the assumption that the next stop would have better conditions than what we wereexperiencing.
“I did,” I whispered back. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the bandage. “May I see the wound?” Not that I could see much in the dimly lit barrack, but the wound looked quite bad the day before when she asked me to help. With absolutely no prior medical training, I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for, but I had been watching the German nurses work, taking notes so I could help wherever and wheneverpossible.
The irony of my work there was that I had once planned to attend the university with hopes of becoming a nurse. At that point, however, I doubted I see a day where I’d be allowed to take such prestigious classes, so I focused on learning as much as I could by observing the nurses. When my eyes finally started adjusting to the darkness, I dropped my legs down off the side of the bed. My bones felt heavier than my muscles could handle in the mornings, especially after being on my feet with such little sustenance day in and day out. It was taking a toll on my body. It was hard to even imagine what it was doing to the olderwomen.
Alise carefully climbed down from her bed, and I helped her as much as I could until her feet touched the ground. I wrapped my hand around her wrist, noticing it was so thin I was able to close my grip around it a little more than once. It wasn't surprising that everyone was losing weight and starting to look more like skeletons than people. I pulled her arm toward me and gently rotated it to the side. I could immediately see that the wound looked worse than the previous day, and the area of inflammation had spread, but it was still hard to tell exactly how bad it was without much light. “Alise, I'm not sure this bandage will cover the wound entirely,” I toldher.
“You have to try,” she said with fear in her frail voice. “I’ll be working in the dirt again today, and I can’t let this get any worse. They’ll send me away if I becomeill.”
Each morning, Alise was taken outside the gates to the SS building so she could help with a pool the Nazis were building. She said they were using their hands to do most of the digging, and I could only imagine how awful that must have been. At the end of each day, she would come back covered in dirt from head to toe. Her fingertips were bloody, and she had bruises all over her hands andarms.
“I'm worried about this wound, Alise. I think it needs ointment at the very least, but antibiotics would probably be better. I wish we had some. It may already be infected,” I told her. Regardless, I placed the bandage over the area, then quickly hid the wrapper beneath mymattress.
“Do you think you can get some of that ointment or antibiotics today, too?” she asked, pleading as she leaned up against the bed to give her emaciated body somesupport.
Taking anything from the sick bay was not permitted, and I could be put into one of the prisoner cells for doing anything of that nature, but Glauken, the head German nurse, would often leave to take breaks. She would close me into the nurses’ quarters, and I would continue working on the paperwork. It offered me a few moments of freedom from time to time, and it would give me the opportunity to take what I needed to care for Alise or any of the other women in myblock.
“I will try,” I told her as I placed my hands over the bony area where her shoulders and arms met, offering her some warmth—the same kind I craved. The sensation of bone covered by only a thin layer of frail skin was unlike anything I had touched before. I remember the worry I felt at that moment, thinking Alise was not going to make it much longer without real medical attention, but it also seemed clear that she might have already come to terms withthat.
I headed out of the barracks, watching for the soldiers who were continually marching up and down the dirt paths in between the buildings. I did what I could to avoid interacting with them, as it never led to anything good. Though I could no longer run, I was still able to move quickly through the courtyard toward the sick bay where a line was already beginning to form. It was truly endless there. Every day more Jews were brought in, and every day at least half of those were transported away from the camp to anotherlocation.
Once inside the sick bay, I prepared the area for Glauken and the other nurses. I organized the supplies and the previous day’s paperwork so it could be submitted to the SS officers. I typically finished the pre-day work just as the nurses arrived. They never greeted me or acknowledged my presence, but I tried my hardest to be cordial to them. As much as it killed me to be pleasant, I wanted to remind them that I was human. I also wanted to think I was making it harder for them to replace me. I'm not sure if that was the case or not, though. Had I known what that day was about to bring, being pleasant to the nurses would have been the least of myconcerns.
When only a couple hours had passed by, the line of people waiting for care had wrapped around the nearest barrack block. There had to be at least two hundred sick patients in line. Each day, it seemed as if the number of people in line doubled. After making it halfway through the line, I spotted a man draped in dirt-covered clothes like the rest of us, except his belt was tightened so much that the excess leather was hanging down by his thigh. The man’s stomach looked concave as his shirt billowed inward from a passing breeze. His face was blackened with soot, and his beard was covered in dirt. His eyes were sunken and hollow, almost as if there was nothing behind them. I studied him for a moment, trying to analyze the torment he must have gone through to make him look that way, but as I stared at his smudged features, I recognized the olive hue of his eyes and the natural auburn highlights strung through his hair in the glow of the risingsun.
My knees began to tremble, and I dropped the clipboard, creating a cloud of dirt at my feet. “Papa?” Iwhispered.
He was in a state of shock from seeing me—his mouth was agape, and his bottom lip trembled furiously. “Amelia,” he groaned with a scratchy rasp. He tried to lift his arms, but it was as if he had weights holding them by hisside.
“Papa, where have you been? What have they done to you?” I asked, trying to maintain my composure, though everything inside of me was falling apart all over again. Papa was the strongest man I knew. He worked with his hands, chopping wood for factories. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do, and he proved that by taking such good care of our family all those years before the war. At that moment, though, he wasn’t that man. He was broken, hungry, and by the looks of his sagging pale skin…dying.
I leaned down to retrieve the clipboard, scared of anyone spotting my mistake. “We’re in the other section—the ghetto,” he answered. His worn, scratchy voice came out in hardly a whisper. “I looked for you every day, but I was sure you had been transported. Even after we heard there were women and children over here, I had very little hope of ever finding you, my precious girl.” His voice was so torn up, I could hardly understandhim.
“I've been looking for you too,” I told him. “Where isJakob?”
Papa managed to lift a hand and draped it over his chest while using what looked to be all his strength to swallow whatever thickness was in his throat. “He was transported,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “They took him two weeks ago, but I don't knowwhere.”
With so many reasons the Nazis seemed to have for moving us around, I couldn’t begin to guess why they took Jakob. Surely, he had to have been working hard. He always had been a hard worker, just like Papa. “Why did they take him?” I placed my pencil down to my paper, making it appear as if I were takingnotes.
Papa looked down at the dirt and shook his head with disdain. “Oh Amelia, you know Jakob. He tried toescape.”
“Escape?” I questioned withdisbelief.
“Don't worry, Amelia,” Papa tried to tellme.
“Where was he escaping to?” I felt a pain working its way through my body, wondering what Jakob could have been thinking. “Why would he leaveyou?”
