Thoughts continue to scatter in my head until one rolls off my tongue. “Did you know about the girl in the cellar? I had been hearing noises, but I wondered if they had a cat or maybe there were mice.”
“She disappeared a couple weeks ago. No one knew what happened to her.”
I wonder why she hadn’t run away. If she made it as far as escaping from the lineup to return to Auschwitz at night, why hide in this cellar of all places? “She almost made it, I suppose.”
Gavriel shakes his head. “No one escapes Auschwitz, or the bordering ‘restricted zone’ within, and lives to talk about it. Trust me. She figured that out after it was too late, I’m sure.”
His stare becomes dark and a bit lost. “I’m tired of this—all of it,” he says, his voice rising with hostility. “The killing, the terror. The way they poison their own children—their minds filled with horrific sights they’ll never forget. Ada should have taken her children with her. She knew. She’s a coward.”
I can’t argue. He’s right. She left her children here to witness their father murdering a woman. But Gavriel’s words aren’t just an expression of frustration. It’s something different. The look on his face, the way his hands are clenched into fists by his side, all I see is someone who is prepared to do something about it—this life here. Someone like me…
“I better get back to work,” Gavriel says. “If you need anything—sorry, I know you have everything under control.”
“I should have just said thank you for trying to protect us from seeing what we did. And for standing up for me to the kapo when I first arrived. I’m not very good at this…”
“Good at what?” Gavriel asks.
“Trusting someone, then showing my gratitude. It’s something that’s missing inside of me, I guess.”
“We’re all missing something inside of us. You’re not in this alone.”
EIGHTEEN
GAVRIEL
Hours have passed since Bea was shot in front of an audience. The house has been eerily silent, though loud with grief. The grief is my own. Something inside of me is breaking, slowly crackling like splintering wood. He’s going to kill her, or me. Both of us. Adam and the others too. We’re on a list of numbers and names, and too many of the others have been crossed out. A one-sided armed war isn’t a war—this is a mutiny. They took everything from us then attacked. For years, I’ve been following rules, biting my tongue, sacrificing everything to be their living victim, rather than a dead one. And now, they have us—the Jews, and every other minority who doesn’t fit within their Aryan race, in a chokehold, helpless, and weak—some begging for death.
My pulse drums within my ears and my temples throb, but rather than take the right turn back upstairs, I continue down the hallway and head down the main stairwell. It’s time to stop feeling so helpless.
The house is still quiet. Not even the hiss of a stove or the stream of the faucet from Kasia in the kitchen. With a peek into each room on the main floor, confirming I’m alone, I slip into Officer Schäfer’s office and close the door behind me. I’ve never been here, not even seen past the bookshelf along the wall,visible at the doorway. The entire room is lined with walnut bookcases encircling a worn Persian rug with a matching walnut desk, a leather smoking chair tucked in, and a single lamp in the corner, hovering over a pen stand and bottle of ink.
The windows are trimmed with heavy burgundy linen, and framed maps, certificates, and awards accent every open space along the wood-paneled walls. Between the two large windows are a row of war medals and Nazi paraphernalia. My throat clenches as I take in a whiff of a potent liquor mixed with tobacco and wood polish. A small grandfather clock sits on a shelf facing his desk, each tick of the second hand, sounds like a tapped key on a typewriter.Tap, tap, tap, tap…
I don’t have long.
The drawers on either side of his smoking chair have brass handles, perfect canvases for fingerprints. With the bottom hem of my uniform top, I yank open the top drawer and shuffle the stack of papers from side to side. I work my way down the three drawers, finding what I was looking for in the deep bottom one.
I retrieve the pistol with a careful grip, as if it might detonate upon an unlawful touch. I’ve never used a gun—never had a reason to. Pa never liked hunting much and the pistol he kept for safety was locked away beneath his bed. He showed me how to use it if there was ever a real emergency, and how to check the chambers, but other than that one time, it was never seen by my brothers or me.
“Guns kill,” Pa told us. “There’s no reason for you to ever lay a finger on one unless you have intentions to kill—God forbid any of you ever should.” He didn’t know what the world would turn into, and we didn’t speak much about that gun after he was forced to turn it in per German law.
As a grown man now, I see his point was: don’t do as I’m doing. He had a gun in case anyone ever threatened his family. He’d kill if it meant protecting us.
My drawers won’t hold this up with the string I fight with every morning just to keep these heavy baggy pants around my waist.
I hold the pistol in my right hand, keeping a solid grasp around the grip. The hollow feel within the grip tells me there’s no magazine loaded into it. I hold the weapon out in front of me, like my Pa always said, and pull the upper slide backward. As the slide comes back, a round pops out and falls to the floor.Good thing I checked.With a glimpse into the barrel, finding no other rounds, I slowly let the slide return to its place. I scoop up the fallen ammo and close the drawer.
“I’m well, how are you this morning, Edith?” Frau Schäfer calls out. Someone must be walking by the house. Her voice is muffled but clear enough that she’s likely right outside the front door. But she’s home.
I close the drawer with a gentle nudge and head for the hallway.
“Of course. That sounds lovely,” she says, ending the impromptu conversation.
I make a run for the stairwell, unable to see her profile in either of the tempered glass windows either side of the front door. Skipping every other step, I clench my grip tighter around the pistol, my muscles and joints burn and ache—a reminder that my body has aged far beyond my twenty-three years. My brain can’t keep up. I should have the strength to do what I’ve always done, but I’m losing too much weight, eating so little and pushing myself through twelve hours of labor each day.
The front door opens just as I turn up the attic stairwell. I stop my trampling motion and soften my steps to avoid making a sound until I’m upstairs in the expansion.
“Girls, your mother is home,” Frau Schäfer calls out.
