The Wrong Boy (19 page)

My voice was hoarse. “Where are the guards? Have the Russians come?” They didn’t hear me. I stepped outside, dizzy with hunger, and followed them. They tramped through the snow to the far end of a field and swung the limp body between them, once then twice, before letting go. The body arced into the air then plummeted, its fall cushioned by another body. The women stepped away and others took their place, tossing their dead sisters onto the pile.

Prisoners wandered the camp searching for food. I slipped between the women’s barracks, searching for my mother. Most of the huts were empty, their roofs caved in, their walls blackened by fire. The few that still stood were peopled by women and girls too weak to rise from their bunks. They lay on the planks and waited for death.

I walked past a group of women huddled in a burned out barrack, hacking at a block of grey bread.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, my voice sharper than I’d intended. The women swung around, their eyes travelled down my face to my throat and the scarf looped around my neck. The skinniest of the three closed her fingers around the loaf.

“Tell me where you got that scarf and I’ll tell you where I got the bread.” She dropped the bread into her lap, pulled a knife from her pocket and chipped at the frozen crust.

“I haven’t eaten in two days.” I ignored her question. She sawed through the loaf and divided it among the group.

“So you’re hungry.” She gnawed on the stump of bread. “My neck is cold. Looks like we’re even.”

Gunfire erupted in the distance. Up ahead, a truck idled at the main gate, its engine spewing grey smoke onto the snow. A guard clutching a striped shirt to his chest ran past as I lurked in the shadows. He leaped into the waiting truck and pulled the door closed. The gate opened and the truck sped out. I stepped from behind the hut and watched the truck’s tail-lights recede into the fog. The gate closed.

“Where are you,
Anyu
?” I whispered into the gloom.

Behind me a knot of women were arguing beside a barbed wire fence.

“I’m going to find food. You want to join me, then shut up and follow. You want to stay here and starve, that’s up to you.” A girl stepped away from the group and bent down to survey the fence. She wrapped her hands around a breach in the wire and pulled at the weakened fibres until the hole was large enough to crawl through.

“Don’t be foolish, Klara,” the women hissed. “Wait till the Russians arrive. You don’t know who’s out there.”

I approached the girl.

“I’ll come.” I bent down and pulled the wire apart. She crawled through and I crawled after her, wincing as the barbed wire caught my headscarf. I let it slip from my head and left it shivering in the breeze.

“The guards have deserted.” She put a finger to her lips and crouched down. “But it only takes one … ” I crouched down and followed her.

“SS quarters,” she whispered, pointing to a stand of huts splayed along the fence.

We crept behind the first of the huts, rising onto tiptoes to peer through the window. The guards had left in a hurry. A chessboard sat on a table in the middle of the room, knights poised in battle. Two bowls of soup sat either side of the board, their spoons sticking out. We scrambled through the door, pitched the spoons from their bowls and slurped down the broth. The guards had fled before draining the tea from their mugs, so we emptied those too, sucking at the sugar that dribbled down the sides of the cup. Klara found an empty sack on the floor and we swept through the hut, filling the bag with whatever we could find – custard powder, lard, whisky, potatoes. She pulled an eiderdown from a bed and wrapped it around her body, securing it at the waist with a guard’s leather belt. I wrapped a white cotton pillowslip around my head.

We snuck back along the fence, dragging the sack between us, till we saw my silk scarf flapping in the wind. Klara squeezed through the hole first. I pushed the sack through after her and climbed back into camp.

She handed me a bruised potato. I took it and bit into its soft green flesh.

“My mother used to buy potatoes from the market but they weren’t as bitter as this.” I forced myself to take another bite. “She bought the baby potatoes, the ones with the white skin. She said they were the secret to her silky mash.” I pictured my mother leaning over a bowl of steaming potatoes, peeling each in turn, adding milk and butter and whisking the mash until it stood in peaks.

I thanked Klara and walked back to the women’s camp, past the electrified fences that had separated me from my father for all these months. The gate was open. Papa! I ran through the gate, thinking of all the boys and men locked away from their sisters and mothers and lovers and wives, until today. Papa! My heart quickened.

An old man stood outside a dilapidated hut, his adam’s apple pushing through his thin skin.

“Esther.” He reached out a bony hand and grabbed my coat. “Esther, you’re alive!” He pulled me into his shuddering body. I didn’t pull away. I wrapped my arms around his brittle body and returned to him – if just for a moment – his long-lost daughter or sister or wife.

I slipped from the old man’s embrace and continued down the path to look for my father. There were no guards patrolling the grounds so I swung open doors and peered into storage sheds. I knocked on windows, crawled under bunks and yelled out Papa’s name. I must have called for him a thousand times, until my voice grew faint and I began to lose hope. There were so few men alive and so many dead. They lay collapsed into each other in the shadows of buildings, hidden behind the latrines and collected in carts. I wanted to look away, but what if Papa was among them and too weak to call out? I scanned their faces for my father’s grey eyes, for his dimpled chin and strong, square jaw. I didn’t see him.

An aeroplane screamed low over the camp and the sky filled with flames. I ran back to the barrack, panting. I swung the door open and dived under the bunk, and for the first time in a year, I prayed. I prayed that the angry aeroplanes that roared over Poland had red stars on them. And that Mama, Papa, Erika and Karl were somewhere in Poland waiting for the Germans to wave the white flag.

I lay facedown on the concrete floor under my bunk. My legs were cramping, my fingers were frozen. I was hungry and I needed the toilet. It reminded me of the cramped cattle train. Locked in the slatted box with nothing to eat and no way out, I’d thought that whatever our destination, it had to be better than that stinking carriage. I was wrong.

I fell into a dreamless sleep and woke to the sound of footsteps scurrying across the floor. I pulled myself out from under the bunk and edged towards the window where a group of women stood pointing excitedly to the main square. I pressed my face to the glass. The place was deserted. A woman in a grey sack-dress stood in the middle of the square under a cloudless sky. Others joined her – an old woman with a limp, a little girl wearing a striped shirt hanging down to her ankles, a group of boys looking for their mothers. The door swung open and a woman in a tattered shirt poked her head into the barrack.

“The last guards have fled their posts,” she shrieked, hopping from one bird-like leg to the other. “The watchtower’s empty, the sentry post has been abandoned. No more SS …” She ran to the next hut.

“No more food …” a voice whispered from one of the bunks. I looked up and saw a face poking from a blanket: a girl with grey teeth and eyes as big as saucers. She looked sick, her skin was a dangerous yellow. I reached up and took her hand.

“The Russians will come. They’ll bring food.”

She looked frightened.

“No more guards!” The girls at the window stared at each other. “No selections!” They shook their heads in disbelief. “No work!” Their eyes widened. “No rollcall!” They pulled the door open and stepped onto the snow.

I pulled my hand from the dying girl’s grip.

The path leading to the main gate was crawling with inmates. They appeared from behind barracks and under carts, from empty sheds and burned-out buildings, blinking at the sun, dragging themselves to the gate, half-naked and wrapped in blankets. They came alone and in pairs, young women grown old and old women, dying. They shuffled through the snow, laughing, cursing, praying, crying. Mostly they wandered the square in a daze. All of us were hungry and everyone was weak.

The girl next to me was the first to notice the four men on horseback.

“The Russians are here!” she yelled, running for the gate. “The Russians have come!”

Four soldiers, gigantic men with long green cloaks and fur hats leaped from their horses. They had guns slung over their shoulders but they didn’t point them at us, and when they stopped at the watchtower and stared into camp, at the burning barracks and the bodies sprawled on the ground, their mouths fell open.

A truck sped through the main gate.

“Friends,” the loudspeakers blared in German, Polish and Yiddish. “You are free. You have been liberated by the Allied Forces.”

A strangled cheer rose up from the crowd. The girl next to me started crying. The man to my left fell to the ground. Someone hugged me. Two officers had words with a group of Russian inmates and we fell into line again. This time it was to wait for biscuits, soap and chocolate. I stood in front of an officer with red hair and pink skin and held out my hand. He must’ve thought me a creature from another planet, because he stared at me for the longest time. I knew what he saw, though I hadn’t looked into a mirror for days: a sparrow wrapped in a blanket, a pillowslip on her head, a face caked in dirt, bare legs, dirty fingernails.

“What’s your name?” he asked, first in Russian, then German.

“Hanna,” I answered, “but they don’t use names here.” I pulled my sleeve back and showed him my tattoo. He pulled a chocolate bar from a box and handed it to me.

“How old are you?” The question seemed to make him sad.

“Sixteen,” I said, sucking at the square of cocoa.

More officers poured into the camp. They leaped from tanks, armoured cars and jeeps, lugging medical supplies, water and food after them. They set up tents and tables in front of the watchtower and a desk with papers and pens. They built a fire in the main square and set a pot to boil over it. They threw a pig into the pot with some potatoes and cabbage. A hungry mob swarmed around the pot.

“Give your stomach time to adjust.” The block leader pulled me from the line. “Start on bread and crackers. Stick to bland foods.” Out of habit I followed orders but it was hard reigning in my hunger when those around me gorged themselves on meat and cheese. Hard, too, to watch them hours later, clutch their stomachs and soil themselves before they reached the latrines. I’d imagined this moment of freedom so many times, but never like this, never without Erika. I should’ve been glad but I couldn’t celebrate. Not till I’d found out what had happened to my family. Not until I knew what had happened to Karl.

The Red Army captured their first SS officer that day. They tore off his blue and white disguise, tied his arms behind his back and threw him against a wall. A group of prisoners gathered around, hissing and cursing and spitting at his feet.

“Let us at him,” they begged. But the guards shook their heads and pushed the men back. The prisoners circled and shouted abuse. They scooped rocks from the ground and hurled them at the man’s head.

The guards marched him to a barrack. I snuck after them. The moon was hidden behind cloud so I couldn’t see the officer’s face until he was under the floodlights. He looked tired and pale. His hair stuck out at odd angles and he had a bruise on his cheek. The guards pushed him into the barrack and locked the door. Two Russian soldiers guarded the hut.

“Is he the only one in there?” I approached the soldiers. They looked at me strangely.

“Are there others?” I reached into my pocket and felt for my black C sharp. My hands were shaking. I closed my fingers around the wood.

“Don’t worry about the prisoners. Concentrate on going home.”

I didn’t want to go home. In the camp there was at least the possibility I might see my parents and Erika, that they might still be alive. If I went home, I’d find out. My father would be in our apartment on the couch reading the newspaper and my mother would be in the kitchen frying fish. Or not. I wasn’t ready to stop hoping. I wasn’t ready to go back.

I wandered back to the women’s camp. Two Polish men walked past dragging huge legs of meat. I followed them to the main square and warmed my hands by the fire that burned in the yard. The men fed the fire with wooden planks, and when they dragged a pot onto the flames, filled it with water and threw in the meat, I stepped into line and waited to be fed. A woman pushed past me carrying a baby. She stepped to the front of the queue and held out her child.

“May I have some?” she asked the man doling out the soup. She pulled the cloth from her child’s face. “It’s for my son, he’s hungry.”

The man looked down at the infant, at his blank eyes and black face and slack mouth.

“I’m sorry, but the child’s–”

“Thirsty, I know.” The woman pressed the shrouded body against the man’s chest. “Please just a little soup, then he’ll stop crying.”

The man shook his head, but the woman kept begging.

“If I could feed him I would, but my milk’s dried up.” The woman started to pull at her top, but the man stopped her. He held the ladle over the baby’s mouth and tipped the broth onto the child’s blue lips.