Because I’m like her.
I’m Jewish.
And I’m working for the Nazis.
Serving them. Feeding their children.
My stomach heaves, and my hand flies up to my mouth. I hold my breath and close my eyes, my body swaying back and forth. Back and forth.Why? Why did it have to be this way?
I fold the papers back up, as tightly as they were, following the original creases, and pull myself up onto the bed to slip the note back into the seam of the book. I shove the book back into the interior pocket of my suitcase and button the flap.
No one has ever searched for my mother’s name. Will Heinrich have access to papers that Julia didn’t? Could that happen?
“You look like a Jew.” His voice bounces around in my head, the memory of those words he spoke to me the day he found me along the edge of the woods.
I have to get out of here before they realize the truth.
Out of this house.
Out of this prison.
What if I can’t? What if it’s too late?
I scoop Flora into my arms, careful not to move her around much. She’s still very much asleep and I need to get her back to her crib while I figure out how I’m going to escape a life behind those tall iron bars of Auschwitz.
The beat in my chest is erratic, like fists pounding the head of a drum as I steady myself to amble down the stairs, then keeping my arms from shaking as I lower Flora into her crib. A cold chill snakes up my spine and I manage to return to my room without causing a stir. I’m still trying to picture my mother writing these words without a foggy hint as to what she looked like. Do I look like a horrible Jew hating person or do I look like a woman who would give up everything for a baby she never met?
What am I made up of?
What part of him is in me?
Is it the chill I’ve learned to use as battle armor?
Or the sharp use of tongue I sometimes can’t control.
What if I’ve been the one keeping him a part of me all this time? I don’t want it. I don’t want him to be a part of me.
Julia will know what to do. I have to get to her. They can’t keep me here. I am not their servant. I will never be their slave. They don’t own me.
I don’t think…
How can someone hate an unborn child? Where does that kind of hatred come from?
I thought I knew who I was.
Doesn’t everyone by this age?
Not me. I don’t know anything about myself.
I’m a stranger in my own body.
And I can’t think of a lonelier, worse feeling.
TWENTY-SEVEN
GAVRIEL
August 6, 1943
