Cilka's Journey(14)
“You better go faster or you’ll find yourselves in trouble,” a woman says. “Watch me.”
The woman takes her empty bucket and uses it as a scoop, half filling it. Steadying it on the ground, she uses her cupped hands to fill it to the top. The women attempt to copy her with varying degrees of success. They all fill their buckets before attempting to pick them up. None of them can; they are too heavy.
“Empty some out and just put in as much as you can carry. You’ll toughen up the longer you do it,” they are advised.
Cilka and Josie can only manage half-filled buckets, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the guard standing at the cart. It was one thing to carry them, another trial to lift and empty them.
The guard monitoring them looks at the half-empty buckets.
“You lot don’t get a break. You have to make up for being such weak bitches, and get moving.”
At various points, Cilka sees Antonina writing in a little book, conferring with the guards, answering for her brigade’s productivity.
* * *
The work is so grueling that Cilka, Josie and Natalya are beginning to groan and huff out loud. They watch enviously when the others get ten minutes to down tools and take a break. There is a burning sensation across Cilka’s shoulders, neck and back. When the next clanging bell sounds several hours later, buckets, picks and other tools are dropped where they are. Men and women trudge over to the train tracks, sorting themselves out as they find the others from their brigade—those they share a hut with and those from the surrounding huts. They stand, waiting to be led by their brigadiers, waiting for the signal to walk.
Once they are allowed, they silently trudge back down the track, stopping again outside the compound gates. Antonina Karpovna hands her piece of paper to the administrative guard, who counts the women in. They follow Antonina back to their hut, shuffling and sore, where a few embers glow without giving off any heat. Natalya throws some coal into the stove to reignite it. Cilka is amazed she can find the strength to even look at the coal, let alone lift a scuttle of it. They all fall onto their beds, pulling blankets up over their heads. No one speaks.
What passes for their dinner does nothing to restore their energy. Returning to their hut, many retreat back to bed, but some hover around the stove.
“What are you looking at?”
Cilka, lying on her bed, recognizes the voice. Elena.
“Not your ugly face,” she hears Natalya reply.
Cilka pushes up on one elbow to see where the exchange of words will go.
“I’ll take you out, bitch, if you don’t keep out of my face.”
“Leave me alone, you bully. Leave all of us alone,” a defiant Natalya snaps back, standing up from her bed.
“Natalya, sit down. She’s not worth it,” Olga says.
Elena gives out a hiss.
Exhaustion has flattened Cilka. She understands the anger, the lashing out. When the rage can’t be targeted at your captors, for fear of death, it finds other ways out. She wonders how old Elena is, what has happened to her. Maybe it is that nothing has happened to her before. Like Cilka, before that horrible place. She’d had all the love, food, clothing, comfort she could possibly need. When it is all taken away overnight … Well, no one knows how they will react.
She must stop herself from thinking back. Tomorrow … Tomorrow will be a repeat of today, and the next day, and the next week, and for Cilka the next fifteen years.
Despair overwhelms her.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943
Wrapped in a warm, full-length coat, Cilka stands in the snow outside Block 25. As she had feared, her block contains women who are spending their last days on earth, often too sick to move, the life already gone from their eyes. This is Cilka’s world now, and she exists within it in order to stay alive. Similarly dressed kapos approach her with women and girls trailing behind—emaciated, wraith-like figures, many holding each other up. Each kapo tells the women they have escorted that Cilka is their block leader, they are to do as she says. They are instructed to wait outside in the cold for the SS officer who will do the roll call.
Cilka feels as inanimate as the snow. Her eyes blur over the bony, bowed bodies, but her feelings have been taken away. It started when Schwarzhuber placed her in that tiny room at the front of Block 25 and began his regular visits. She found she could become just a series of limbs, just bone, muscle and skin. She didn’t choose it. It just happened. She thinks it might be a bit like when she was a child and badly scraped her knee—though she saw the blood it took a long time to register the hurt.
Cilka stands there, saying nothing as she waits to be told that all the women coming into Block 25 that evening are present. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day if the Nazis decide they have something better to do, they will all be taken to the gas chamber that looks like a little white house. And they will be killed.
A senior SS officer approaches, along with the last group of ten women. His swagger stick strikes out, randomly hitting unsuspecting women. Something breaks through Cilka’s glazed state and she hurries over to meet them.
“Hurry up, you lazy good-for-nothing bitches!” she calls out. “I’ve got them,” she says to the SS officer, stepping in front of him as he is about to bring his stick down on the head of a nearby girl. Cilka gives her a hard shove, sending her sprawling face-first into the snow.
“Get up and join the others,” she screams at the girl.