Three Sisters (The Tattooist of Auschwitz #3)(15)

Cibi says nothing but doesn’t resist as Livi pulls the socks onto her feet, and then buckles her shoes.

Cibi and Livi join the others trudging out of the building. Outside they are separated from the old-timers and marched to another building. In daylight, the streets and buildings don’t look nearly as inviting. SS officers now line the pavements, rifles strung across their backs, handguns holstered on their hips. Prisoners spill out from buildings like the one Cibi and Livi have just spent the night in. They pass a group of men shuffling along beside them – a glance here and there, but no one makes eye contact.

Eventually, the girls are ordered into a windowless room, where they are instructed to undress. Cibi is grateful, for the moment, that they haven’t been warned of what’s to come, grateful that Livi has been spared, even for a few hours, the reality behind the blank stares of the hairless inmates.

When some resist, their male and female guards think nothing of slapping them. Cibi and Livi and every other girl try to hide their nudity with hands and arms. The sound of men’s laughter fills their ears as they shout obscenities at the naked girls.

‘Your jewellery – don’t forget those pretty diamonds you have in your ears, girls. We want it all,’ their kapo calls out, laughing. She is a tall woman with short, curly black hair, and a single missing incisor.

Cibi reaches a hand to one ear and then the other. The small gold earrings with their tiny red stones had been fixed to her lobes on the day she was born by her grandmother, who had just delivered her. This would be the first time they had ever been removed. Cibi struggles to find the clasp holding them in place. She watches with growing horror as the kapo rips earrings at random from girls’ ears. Blood pours from split lobes as hysterical crying fills the room. She hopes Livi, wherever she is in this hellish room, has managed to remove hers. As she pulls them free she finds the kapo is standing in front of her, hand outstretched to take the precious tokens of a grandmother’s love. She thinks briefly of Magda, and thanks God her sister is many miles away.

One by one the girls are called into the centre of the room, to be inspected by the Schutzstaffel, SS guards, who continue to leer at the young female bodies paraded before them. Cibi remembers her grandfather telling her again and again, Humour will save you. Laugh, and if you can’t laugh, put a smile on your face.

Raising her head to her examiners, she puts a brave smile on her lips. She feels the flutter of a hundred butterflies in her stomach. When she is called, she slowly makes her way forward to stand in front of a man dressed in striped trousers and shirt. He is the barber. He snips off lengths of her chestnut hair and she watches the waves fall onto the growing mound at his feet. He flicks on a crude shaving machine and runs it over her head, reducing her once proud head of hair to stubble. Not finished, and to her shame, he drops to a knee. Spreading her legs, he directs the machine to her crotch, where he removes her pubic hair. She tries not to think of little Livi enduring the same humiliation. Without meeting her eyes, he nods for her to move on.

They are then herded into another room.

‘Into the sauna with you all,’ another kapo shouts.

This room features large iron tanks filled with dirty water. Puddles of loose hair float on the surfaces of them all. Cibi climbs into the nearest one. This is not like any sauna she has heard of. Cibi’s mind begins to drift away from this place, back to her home, to Magda and Grandfather and everything she holds dear. If she can hold them in her mind maybe it won’t be so bad here.

‘The water is dirtier than we are,’ says a girl, clambering out of the bath. ‘And colder.’

The freezing water snaps Cibi out of her trance. Her body has grown numb from the cold, as numb as her head and heart.

Having climbed out, and dripping with water, Cibi takes the clothes thrust at her. Dressed in the same Russian prisoner-of-war uniform as the older inmates, Cibi finds the harsh fabric of the khaki shirt irritating to her tender skin. The matching breeches threaten to fall down with every step.

The rough clothes cling to her damp body, providing no warmth. The kapo thrusts a piece of paper into her hands. She reads the digits scrawled onto it: 4560.

Back in line once more with the other washed and shaved inmates, Cibi doesn’t resist when she’s called forward. Another man in blue-and-white stripes sits at a desk at the front of the room in which her hair was just shorn. He holds out his hand for the scrap of paper and tells her to sit down.

The numbers which stand in bold black letters against the grubby white are etched into the skin of her arm.

The pain is intense, shocking, but Cibi shows no reaction. She won’t give this man her agony.

Outside once more, Cibi joins hundreds of girls, who, like her, are desperately searching for a familiar face. But no one looks familiar any more. In identical clothes and shorn heads, there is nothing left to distinguish them.

And then Cibi hears her name. She doesn’t move as Livi runs to her, embracing her before pulling away and staring at her oldest sister. She runs her hand over Cibi’s naked head. ‘What have they done to you? Cibi, you’ve got no hair.’

Looking at her sister’s own naked head, Cibi doesn’t reply. Livi is clutching her arm and wincing, tears of pain streaking pink cheeks. The pain of Cibi’s tattoo is equally intense – she can feel the blood running into the creases of her elbow, and wonders about infection. Putting her arm around Livi’s shoulders, she steers her sister back to the building with the flea-infested mattresses. It is not until the sisters sit cuddled together that they look at their arms.