Guest Writer #2

Ellen’s short fiction has won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize, a Virginia Fiction Fellowship, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in First for Women, as well as literary magazines such as The Sonora Review and Fiction Weekly. She teaches creative writing at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Marymount U.

Krakow, 1947

by Ellen Herbert

The woman steps into the showers. I think I recognize her, but I do not trust my eyes in the cement room’s grainy gray light. I pinch myself. Perhaps I sleep standing, and this is a nightmare, for never did I expect to see her again. Maybe she is an imaginary enemy as once I had an imaginary friend, but she is real: Maria Mandel, the Oberaufseherin, mistress of life and death at Auschwitz, once so feared by us prisoners we could not look in her direction.

In the hollow at the base of my throat, my pulse begins to flutter.

Her eyes fix on me. Their dark kernels widen as she recognizes me.

I almost laugh. Oh Maria, once so lovely and smart, you are like me now, a prisoner. We are two naked women prisoners, waiting for the Bolsheviks to turn on the water.

Slowly she moves toward me. Does she think she can bully me here?

I glance at the wall behind me and notice a stone loose from the masonry. My fingers reach back and carefully take hold of it. I hide it behind my back. It is large enough, a killing stone.

Of course I knew Maria Mandel was here at Montelupich Prison. I saw her scrubbing the corridor floor the day they arrested me. She didn’t see me because she kept her head down as I did in the camp. And now we are both here, both prisoners of the Bolsheviks.

How circular life is. Nazis arrested Papa for his membership in Polish Workers, a Bolshevik group, and Stalin’s Bolsheviks arrest me at a Democracy and Independence meeting. My mother, Matka, used to tell my father politics is in your blood as if were a disease. Perhaps it is an inherited disease.

“It is the wrong time to be political,” Matka would say to him.

“It is the wrong time to be,” he would answer, smiling. “And yet here we are.”

Whenever Papa came home from one of his meetings, Matka was so angry with him she refused to speak. So he brought his face close to hers and cooed like the pigeons that surrounded our flower stall on the Rynek, the beautiful market square here in Krakow. Matka could not help herself: she laughed. We all three laughed, and in this way she forgave him. She always forgave him. I grew up a point in the triangle of their love.

One Saturday when I was working for Papa at our flower stall, he told me pigeons the Rynek were once knights of a foolish duke, who’d taken gold in exchange for transforming them into pigeons. Upon the duke’s coronation, they were to be changed back, but when the gold was lost, the coronation never took place, so the pigeons remained pigeons. “And now I am their duke,” Papa said, laughing. With that he scattered bread crumbs for them. “And they have sworn to protect us Rynek flower sellers.”

I was thirteen when he was executed with his comrades at Ulica Pomorska. How bitter my tears were. It was the wrong time to be political. It was the wrong time to be and yet here we are. Later at Auschwitz I came to see his death as better than the way Matka was turned to ash and blown by the wind.

Maria comes closer, she who had the power to turn people into air.

I face her, my back to the wall.

Perhaps she sees me as a witness against her and means to harm me. But Krakow is full of us witnesses. I see people from the camp everywhere, their bright eyes burning from pales faces in the window of a passing tram, in the green grocer’s line, returning from the communion rail at St. Adalbert’s. Going about the business of living, we look like everyone else, but we’re not. Yet we recognize each other as if the number tattooed on our arms shines through our clothing. We exchange a look in which joy and sorrow and guilt mingle, a look that says: we survived.

A rumble overhead and the water comes on. Cold. I flinch, all the while holding tight to my stone.

Standing beneath her own spray, she watches me.

Now the world knows what happened in the showers at Auschwitz. At first they gave people towels and chips of soap to keep them calm and orderly. Was that your idea, Maria? But they dispensed with the towels and soap as more and more poured from box cars. They had a schedule to keep.

Sunrise to sunset I breathed the ash of Jews, gypsies, Czechs, Poles, the detritus of Europe, the inferior, NA, as they classified us, non-Aryan. Their ashes thickened my soup, settled on my skin like a blanket at night, darkened the day as I worked head down, believing soon I too would be settling on someone’s skin. The others at the camp are part of me. I hear their hushed voices inside my head every night as I fall asleep, especially those women who cared for me after Matka died, Anya, Helenka, Leni, strangers who became little mothers, who shared their crusts of bread, their blankets, their stories. Because of them, I survived.

Maria is a meter away when I realize she is not taller than me. I raise my chin. Always I saw her from a distance astride a magnificent horse, emerging from the back of a car, a German officer giving her his hand. Always I kept my distance for those who got too close were burned by her sun.

I thrust out my breasts and stand tall. See how my body has returned to me. I was a child when I entered Auschwitz, sassy on my parents’ love, a silly girl with an imaginary friend named Gerta. I am a woman now, that time in between, my youth, I lost at Auschwitz. But like my beautiful Krakow, which appears untouched by war, I am blessed. My skin hides my scars. I am strong now, strong enough to kill.

She comes even closer. My grip on the stone tightens.

The water turns warm, a Bolshevik gift, not to be trusted. Poles say the Bolsheviks smile with steel teeth. To the Nazis, we Poles were subhuman, untermenchen, good only as slaves. Now the Bolsheviks want to reeducate me, turn me into a good worker, a willing slave. Unlike the Nazis, who ruled with brute force, these clever Bolsheviks try to convince us to turn on each other. Too many of us do. In Krakow, trust is as scarce as winter oranges.

The heat makes steam rise around us. I let my head drop back to enjoy the warmth.

Suddenly she moves out of the spray and kneels before me.

What is she doing?

Her head bows. Through her long curly hair, a patch of pale skin on the back of her neck appears like a rabbit in a thicket.

I lift the stone, ready to strike her in that white place, when she raises her face to me, her eyes shiny with tears. “Forgive me,” she says in German, her words barely audible over the sound of the water.

Stunned I step back and drop the stone, which skitters across the floor.

“Please forgive me,” she says in Polish and takes my hand.

Hearing my beloved language on her tongue astonishes me almost as much as her words. During the war, many of us Poles secretly studied a foreign language. Yet which language depended upon how we saw our world. Optimists studied English, pessimists German, and realists Russian. But Maria has learned Polish, the language of her slaves.

The water goes off, the steam remains. In the steam I feel all of them crowd around me, Papa, Matka, the people who poured from the box cars and were burned, those few who worked beside me and survived, and especially those kind women, those little mothers, their names like a prayer, Anya, Helenka, Leni. All of them here in the steam with me.

I hear myself say to Maria, “In the name of the prisoners, I forgive you.”

She looks up at me a long moment, the pink flush of happiness spreading across her face. “Thank you,” she says in Polish. Dziekuje.

She remains kneeling, kissing my hand, both of us shivering with cold, when the guard comes in and shouts at us.

By the end of the next year Maria is tried and found guilty of mass murder. Early in 1948 she is executed. By that time I am far far away from my beloved Krakow with its market square and pigeons and sunshine.

At my trial, the Bolsheviks tell me they wish to recruit my mind. They send me for reeducation to Siberia, believing—I suppose—that nothing helps one focus like bitter cold. It was the wrong time to be political. It was the wrong time to be and yet here we are.

In Siberia, summer is a green blink of the eye, while winters pile white and heavy over the windows, so that ice crystals can form around your heart if you let them. I won’t let them. During the cold nights ahead at my new camp I remember the shower room, Maria’s question to me, and my answer, and for that moment a burst of heat fills my body, and I am warm, so warm.