Three Sisters (The Tattooist of Auschwitz #3)(61)

‘Mumma and Grandfather, Uncle .?.?.’ Cibi begins. Livi is already crying, her face buried in Magda’s shoulder. Ivan seems to visibly deflate before their eyes. He leans against the fencing, his fingers gripping hold of the wire.

‘Tell me,’ he says, his voice thick.

But Cibi doesn’t know how to say the words. Should she tell him of Grandfather’s smile? Of Mumma’s parting entreaty, of the look on her mother’s beautiful face, stoic and prepared to meet her terrible fate? In the end, she needs only two words. ‘They’re gone.’

Their fingers push through the holes, entwine, and the family weeps.





CHAPTER 22

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Winter 1944

I

t is winter when the rumours start circulating. The girls from the administration block are privy to the talk amongst the officers, and they share everything they hear. They are adamant the Germans are losing the war, the Russians are on their doorstep. And why shouldn’t they believe these rumours, when the sound of shelling, night after night, keeps the girls awake? Aerial battles are fought overhead. The SS is now destroying the records of all the Jews, all the other prisoners, gypsies and Russian POWs they have killed.

This is why the murders have stopped.

In a frenzy of activity, the prisoners, men and women, find themselves allocated to new work details. Both Livi and Cibi are informed that they are being moved back to Auschwitz to work and to live, but Magda is to remain in Birkenau. Rita, despite their pleas, cannot help them – no one can. Once again the sisters will be separated.

‘It won’t be for long,’ Cibi reassures Magda. ‘We’ll find a way to get back to you.’

But Magda is despondent. She doesn’t understand this place and without Cibi and Livi to guide her she worries she will put a foot wrong and end up dead. On the morning her sisters depart for Auschwitz she refuses to wave them goodbye and instead remains in the block. She is angry with them; she can’t help feeling abandoned, and soon she falls into the all-too familiar despair for her mother – if they had only been allowed to stay together, she could have entered the gas chamber by her side. Maybe this would have been better, she doesn’t know anymore.

On the day of their departure from Birkenau, Cibi and Livi dress in every item of clothing they own, and after rollcall hundreds of girls begin the march back to Auschwitz, back to the place where this nightmare began.

Now, just like the other girls in the block, Magda doesn’t have a job to go to. The days unravel, and she spends more and more time curled up in the bunk she once shared with her sisters. There is no comfort in having all this space.

*

Only a few officers are out in the snow, ordering the girls through the gates, telling them to move faster, calling them lazy, work-shy, filthy Jews. But it’s not the soldiers that Livi is afraid of: she has seen Isaac. He is wrapped up warm against the cold, sharing a joke with the officers when he sees Livi. He raises a hand in greeting, Livi stares at her boots. She is afraid she is going to wet herself.

‘I see you, girlie,’ is all he says, as she joins the long line of girls walking away from Birkenau.

She doesn’t speak a single word the entire length of the journey, but then neither does Cibi. Each girl is wrapped up in her thoughts, but they are broadly similar thoughts. Will they die before they reach Auschwitz? Despite their layers, it is freezing. Why can’t Magda join them? Will she be safe at Birkenau? And finally, if they are to die, why can’t they do it together? Livi is shaken by her encounter with Isaac, but takes some comfort in the fact that she no longer has to worry about seeing him around the camp.

Now they pass through the gates Cibi had hoped to never lay eyes on again. Livi had almost stopped believing Auschwitz had ever existed, but here they are, cut off from Magda, only two miles up the road, but a universe away.

Livi and Cibi are put to work in the Auschwitz post office together, sorting letters and parcels as they arrive, in much the same way Cibi did in Birkenau. They are sent from families throughout Europe and beyond. No effort is made to locate the addressees, no journal consulted to see where the prisoner might be, whether they’re dead or alive. Cibi continues to open the parcels and separate the contents into edible and inedible, and burn the letters. The girls work to the sound of planes flying overhead, bombs dropping. Everyone wants to stay inside these days, fearful of attack, but not Cibi. She wants to be outside to see their saviours before they arrive, and welcome them.

One morning, on her break and lost in her thoughts, Cibi finds herself under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign. She looks up and wishes a bomb would drop on it right now, even though she stands directly beneath the evil signage. She doesn’t really register the black car which has just driven through the gates until it pulls up beside her.

The window rolls down to reveal a pretty officer with strawberry-blonde hair. ‘What are you doing here?’ Volkenrath asks. She seems genuinely pleased to see Cibi.

‘They moved us back here,’ Cibi says, and then adds, desperately, ‘We’ve been separated from Magda.’

‘And who is Magda?’

‘My sister. There are three of us, but she only just arrived a few weeks ago. She is still in Birkenau. Can you help me?’

Cibi’s pleas seem to fall on deaf ears, because Volkenrath doesn’t respond. Instead, she rolls up her window and the car moves off.