“It’s the numbers,” Hannah explained in a whisper. “They are ashamed of the
tattoo.”
In one stall, three Latvian girls, rounder and hairier than anyone else, soaped each other’s backs, laughing and groaning with pleasure. “Good, good, good,” they said, rolling the Hebrew word around in their mouths. They washed between their legs without embarrassment, pointing and joking with each other in a way that made Tedi blush.
She handed out the towels, confused and dizzy. Surely she had been in this same loud room with a group of girls like these, just weeks ago. Someone must have asked for her papers and put a stethoscope to her heart. She must have sneezed at the DDT powder and showered in one of these stalls. Someone had given her the dress she was wearing. Yet she remembered none of it.
What little Tedi could recall of the past two years took the form of snapshots, black-and-white and a bit out of focus, like the pictures in her family’s leather-bound album. She remembered the magnificent head of hair on the Greek boy who took care of her on the boat to Palestine. She remembered the way the barbwire had sliced into the eyebrows of the woman who committed suicide at the Dutch transit camp.
Tedi had just arrived at Westerbork, betrayed to the Nazis after two years in hiding.
They had told her she was going to Bergen-Belsen the next morning. Had that happened, she might have been like the others who were terrified by the steam machines and showers of Atlit. More likely, she would have been killed there.
But they never called her name for that train, and she languished in Westerbork for a week, or maybe it had been only a few days; the cold and fear warped all of her senses. She could not recall eating anything there or lying down to sleep.
Finally, she was shoved into a boxcar with seventy-five other starved and frozen souls headed for Auschwitz. No one spoke as the train gained speed. Already as good as dead, they did not even try to comfort one another. But in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, the engine stalled. A boy with a knife pried through the rotten floorboards and Tedi had been the second to squeeze through.
“Come on,” Hannah said, taking Tedi’s hand again and pulling her back into the noisy present. “Let’s help them get dressed.”
In the room beyond the shower stalls, damp piles from the steamers were heaped on a low table. A dozen dripping women rushed over to claim their clothes.
“You lied to me,” wailed the girl who had not wanted to surrender her sister’s dress. “Look at this,” she said, holding up a shrunken, faded remnant.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Sometimes the machines are too hot. But we have many clothes for you to choose from. The Jews of Palestine have given clothing from their own closets. You will have everything you need, better than what you brought.”
Just then, the nurse ran in looking for Hannah, who, after a brief, urgent conversation, held up her hand and announced, “My friend, I have to go with Nurse Gilad, but my comrade, Tedi, will take care of you.”
Twenty-two faces turned toward her. They were more curious than frightened now, and Tedi decided to pretend that she knew what she was doing. She led them through a door at the back of the building into a makeshift tent made out of old parachutes. Long wooden planks set on sawhorses were piled with stacks of underwear, dresses, blouses, skirts, shorts, and trousers.
The women rushed forward and began trying on clothes and offering each other advice. “Look at this,” someone shouted, waving a pair of bloomers from a hundred years ago. They all laughed except for one girl who was pregnant and could find nothing to fit over the firm drum of her stomach. Tedi suspected that Hannah would have walked into the men’s tent next door and grabbed a shirt and a pair of pants. She lacked that kind of nerve but felt responsible for the poor girl, who was on the verge of tears and seemed to have no friends in the group.
Tedi rummaged through the pile of clothes again with no better luck. But when a flap of yellow-gray parachute silk hanging from the side of the tent caught her eye, she grinned. “I’ll be right back,” she told the distraught girl and ran into Delousing, now deserted and so quiet that the sound of her sandals on the floor echoed behind her as she ran.
As she reached the front door, she stopped the young soldier who had shown such kindness earlier.
“Can you help me, sir?” she panted, first in Dutch and then in garbled Hebrew.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Tedi grabbed his sleeve, made scissors with her fingers and pretended to cut. Then she pointed to the back of the building, and put her hands together as though in prayer.
“Ah.” He smiled, pulled a tiny pocketknife from his pocket, and put his finger to his lips to make it a secret between them.
Tedi answered with a thumbs-up, took the knife, and dashed away.
She cut a swath of silk from the parachute and folded it so cleverly that the skirt she created looked pleated. One of the other women surrendered a blue scarf to use as a belt, to fasten it around the girl’s belly. Tedi’s efforts were met with praise and pats on the back.
“She looks like a bride,” said one of the girls.
“A little late,” someone else said, slyly, but as the comment was translated, it turned into a joke that made everyone laugh—including the “bride.”
Tedi did her best imitation of Hannah and announced, “Come along, friends. Follow me.” As they filed past her, one girl stopped and kissed her cheek, leaving behind a trace of fresh lavender. The smell of hope.
Zorah
Zorah tried to focus on the footsteps of the sentry making his midnight rounds, but the screams of the woman who had broken down at the gate still echoed in her head.
It was so quiet in the barrack, Zorah could hear the soldier clear his throat and the wind in the cypress trees outside. It was a sound, she supposed, that others might find beautiful and soothing but to her, it was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand.