Affinity Konar - Mischling

“I hope you understand,” I said in the direction of the window, “that I’m not myself without Pearl anymore.”

The loud noises swelled and increased. My bad eye saw only a blur, but the untouched eye helped me see the smoke that crept toward the building.

I hoped that smoke would take me till there was nothing left.

This thought must have disturbed Zayde and Mama more than anything. The windowpane began to rattle. Another rebuke. A spark, a flash of smoke. I knew the meaning of all of it. But I didn’t know that I was weeping till I felt a hand wipe my cheek.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Dr. Miri as she offered me her handkerchief.

Her face was oddly still, and then it began to crack along its every seam, and laughs and sobs began to pour from her.

“What are you sorry for?” she said between the fits of this display.

“All of this.” I motioned to the flash of smoke passing by the bank of windows.

“This is not your doing,” she said.

I assured her that it was, and just as I was about to confess—

“It is hard to believe, I know,” she said, one trembling hand at my shoulder. “But the camp, it may be ending. We’ve been told the Russians have been approaching for weeks. It seems impossible, but all of this”—she gestured toward the knock-knocking on the panes by thick threads of smoke; the rattles; the hums—“it could give us hope if we chose it.”

Even as she attempted brightness for my sake, her tone indicated that this was not a particularly large or impressive hope, but a hope that was a bit tattered and that introduced a new set of unknowns and troubles into our lives.

Three of the cloud-people rose from their beds and clambered over to the window for a look. They were told to lie down, to rest — I could see that the staff was worried; it seemed not entirely certain that the planes overhead were friendly. The cloud-people themselves demonstrated a division in this line of thought. It would soon be over, all over, some said. It will never be over, others said. I did not know whom to believe but looked to Dr. Miri’s face for guidance. Her eyes were lit, active with optimism, but her mouth remained set in a grim line.

For three days we waited, with fingers in our ears, with eyes wide open, with our shoes at the ready in case we had to run. We waited while the bombs whistled a pretty tune, waited without knowing where they might fall. We waited while the snow mixed with smoke and the camp went gray with wondering.

I waited knowing that if freedom truly came, another wait would begin for me. I lay in my bunk and began another letter to my sister; I scratched it into the wall that stretched beside me, but I was able to execute only the salutation. Dear Pearl, I wrote, believing that someday, if only for a moment, she might leave the site of her capture — be it death, be it Mengele — and see this greeting and know that we were people, still, in spite of what we’d been told.

Auschwitz, its work was done, said the grim faces of the guards as they pursued the shambling of it. The place that had once welcomed their every evil impulse now threatened to be their undoing. We were accustomed to that burning-chicken-feather smell, that red sky, the ash always hunting us down, but this — now the flames leaped with tongues whose vocabularies were devoted to the destruction of Auschwitz. The SS set fire to the little white farmhouse where they’d gassed us; they had pyres of documents, they destroyed all they had built, but they were not systematic about this destruction the way they had been with ours. No, this was a blazing assault on the kingdom over which they had ruled, and the random nature of its dismantling placed us at still greater risk. The prisoners walked with bowed heads — meeting a guard’s eye could only encourage his ruthlessness. While these guards had once answered to superiors, they now answered only to their desperations. There were rumors of what they might do, and no two rumors were alike — it was said that they would relocate us to another prison camp, that they would send the whole of Auschwitz up in flames to destroy evidence of their crimes, and that this was the beginning of surrender.

The last seemed most unlikely to me. I couldn’t imagine that one would embark on surrender by enacting these particular violences, this tossing of children in the air to make them more challenging targets, this cornering of women to cut their throats, this mowing down of men with vehicles. Watching this chaos from the window of the infirmary, I wondered if a bullet or a scream could better pierce the sky.

On January 20, 1945, the movements of the SS festered into flights. We saw them load themselves onto the same trucks they had piled our loved ones on, and they fled. They scampered into cars and hurtled through fences, leaving twisted wire in their wake. Those who didn’t flee were roaming about, extracting whatever power they could find. Along the rows of us, Miri was issuing strict instructions: “Stay inside,” she said, “wait, wait, the Soviets are not yet here, but they are coming, and only then, perhaps not even then, will it be safe to venture out.”

Being deathless, I slipped past her form. There was no keeping me within those walls. Not when I could see Bruna waving to me from the window, her arms full of supplies, her charcoaled hair thrown back, and her face drawn in anticipation of a good-bye. After I bolted down the steps she was there, around the corner, waiting with Feliks. She clapped a fur coat on my back.

“Jackal,” she said, stroking the fur in benediction. I had never played a jackal in the Classification of Living Things, but it suited me. The coat shone with the determination of a clever animal whose reputation had been much maligned but who chose to endure.

Feliks was wearing a bear’s pelt. It was luxurious, full of gloss and menace. In these additions to our own hides, we ran past the menace of uniforms, the goods that Bruna had given us bouncing in our sacks. We ran past the block where the orchestra had played, and the flames, they were eating all the instruments, they were gnashing with all the violent flicker entrusted to their kind. We heard the skins of drums burst, heard the oboes whimper as their reeds died. Thunder rose from the remains of the piano. But Pearl’s piano key — it stayed by my side.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Bruna asked, taking in the clumsy flight of the SS.

We agreed that it was and stated our delight in viewing such a show. We swore that we would stand by Bruna and help her contribute to these destructions. She did not care for this plan; she pushed us bodily away from her.

“You must go back to the barracks without me!” she insisted. “I have promises to take care of here.”

Later, we would learn that Bruna’s promises were to Dr. Miri. The two had developed an evacuation plan for the weakest in the infirmary if an event such as this came to pass, and the SS began to pick off the ill as they lay in their beds. Bruna had better things to do than deal with us. Of course, she would never have put it that way — our Bruna dealt only in benevolent insults.

“Go away, you babies, and hide in your bunks,” she hissed. “There, you worms have a chance. Your chances here— pfft —in this place you will live only by playing dead.”

“We will do that, then,” I argued, pulling on the lapels of my jackal fur coat. Already, I felt it sharpening my instincts. But Bruna did not share my faith.

“I doubt your ability to play dead well enough. You are too animated, Stasha. No, it is better for you to go to the barracks and wait. Wait for me to fetch you. If you don’t go back and save yourselves”—Bruna paused—“I’ll do awful things to you.”

“Like what?” Feliks challenged. “Your worst is the best in all the world. I wouldn’t have anything but the worst. All the other girls—”