Affinity Konar - Mischling

I couldn’t imagine what cause he might have to usher me into such destruction. The isolation of Auschwitz had not saved me from the knowledge that the place he spoke of would soon enter history as the most devastated city of all time.

“There is no greater ruin than Warsaw,” I said.

He crouched in the snow and took to stabbing it with his bread knife. One, two. One, two. The motion was resolute, a way to steady his argument.

“But the man we want dead is alive there,” he said. “I overheard him; he was speaking too freely in the final days. While I sat waiting on my bench at the infirmary, he was on the telephone discussing his future plans. He was going to flee to Warsaw. He was going to rendezvous with someone there. I think he was telling this to Verschuer. They have documents about us, valuable pieces. Research. Information, I believe. Or maybe bones, all that war material, those slides you keep talking about.”

I couldn’t understand why he was telling me this now. Why had he not been direct before? I joined him in stabbing the snow. Have you ever stabbed the snow to make sense of things? It is not something I recommend.

“Let’s say that I do believe you,” I ventured. “What else did you hear?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, as airily as if we were seated in a parlor putting sugar in our tea. “Something about the Warsaw Zoo.”

“It would be like him to want to go there,” I offered. I thought of all the cells in a zoo, joining, dividing, engaging in all the tricks of variation that so enraptured Mengele.

“It would, wouldn’t it?” He sounded oddly pleased, as if he’d had a hand in the sense-making of it all.

I will be honest — nothing in this wild story should have sounded correct to me, but I didn’t want to doubt. It felt good to believe in something for once. It made me feel real. In believing, I was less experiment, more girl.

And so it was decided, there, on the banks of the Vistula, with its cathedraled branches of trees and snow: We would take Mengele’s life in Warsaw. We would repossess his slides, his bones, his numbers, his samples. We would take and take from him until there remained only a single mustache hair as proof of his villainy.

He had tried to make monsters of us. But in the end, he was his own disfigurement. Future innocents, we swore, had to be protected, and then there was the matter of repayment for his misdeeds. In the name of Pearl, he would be our kill. I thought of his eyes, I thought of the terror that would color them when he spied my approach; I thought of his surrender, his arms flailing in that blasphemous white coat. He would cry out; he would beg. We would permit him to beg because we would enjoy the spectacle, but when his beggary ceased to amuse us we would put him down, and because our humanity had not left us entirely, we would be swift about it. Mengele’s expression — the shock on his face at discovering our survival and pursuit of justice — that would be trophy enough for our violent souls.

And I knew that the animals in the Warsaw Zoo, witnessing the triumph of Bear and Jackal, would rejoice; I knew that they would lift up their voices in shrieks and cackles and guffaws so loud that even Pearl, in her death, would hear that vengeance was ours.

There were things I knew still: There were doors that shut, there were shouts, there were scratches along the floor; there had been someone else, caged opposite me, who muttered poetry through the day and night, his voice melodious and familiar. I could not remember exactly when his recitation halted, I knew only that it had ceased, and then I wondered if I had ever heard a voice at all. Perhaps what I’d imagined to be a voice, one possessed by a lover of poetry, had merely been a leak in the ceiling. A meek drip-drop with a musical quality. This alone I could be certain of: I had tried to converse with the leak, I had begged for its help, but it did not help, it only stopped.

Rats squeaked their way near me where I lay and I remembered: species, genus, family, order. In the dim, I saw whiskers, snouts, tiny feet. I knew that these were not the same parts I had, that I was human, but still, I sniffed in mimicry and became reliant on my nose. I could smell rust, waste, the dried blood encircling my ankles, the stitches at my abdomen, a stagnant pool of water. I told the rats about what I smelled but they weren’t impressed. I tried to smell more, I tried to smell all that I could, but the only other scent I could detect was death.

The scent of death is not frantic. When you have been around it enough, it is oddly respectful; it keeps its distance, it tries to negotiate with your nostrils and appreciates the fact that at some point, one becomes so accustomed to it that it is hardly noticeable at all.

Despite its politeness, I hated that smell. I wanted to train myself to smell other smells. This was an activity that was available to me, it was something I could do to pass the time. The rats, though, they refused to mentor me in this art. The pigeon at my window — he had departed long ago.

It seemed that I would have to instruct myself — if I could retain this sense of smell, I thought, the world might want me still, if I was ever freed from my cage. I began my recollections with the owners of the voices. Mama smelled like violets. Zayde smelled like old boots. My papa — I could not remember what he smelled like, but I didn’t much care, because I found a different avenue of memory to traverse. Or my pain found it for me. Because when I became aware that both of my feet were clubbed and swollen, that the bones had been snapped at the ankle and my feet sat at the end of my legs like a pair of too-large lavender boots, I had a thought that he would fix everything: he would come and heal me if I only called.

Papa, I remembered, he was a doctor. I remembered that.

And this discovery was so great that it overshadowed that other, very different discovery — the realization that even if I were able to leap from my cage, I would not be able to walk.

On what I’d later learn was January 27, 1945, footsteps surged through the door. There were words that were close to the first language I heard in my head, but they were not my words. My words were Polish. These words were neighbors in sound and meaning— They are speaking Russian, I thought. The Russian chatter increased, and the stomp of boots rose beside them. A pair of red spots bobbed toward me, and then the spots became stars and I saw that they were worn on the caps of soldiers.

Someone trained a light to this corner and that, and then traced it up to the ceiling.

The boots and stars moved through the dimness. The lights multiplied. There was a stumble, a fall of materials — wire clanged to the concrete floor, there was a metallic clamor of instruments and trays — and the soldiers pounded fists into boxes and debated, as if on safari, who had seen the most interesting and grotesque of sights. What they spoke of — all the many horrors — made me grateful for a moment that my darkness had kept such sights at bay. I thought about contributing my own story to their conversation — they seemed interested in all the goings-on, after all — but when I opened my mouth to speak I found that I could only croak.

“You hear something?” a gruff soldier asked.

“Rats,” said another.

Their flashlights found the wall opposite me, glanced over the wall after that, and then settled on my cage.

“What a shame,” a voice said. There was a catch in it, a start. And the others agreed that it was a real pity — the child looked so young; it was too bad, what had happened to that little body.

Hearing this, I cried out. I wanted to speak to this child who was the focus of their concern. I wanted to say to this child, I wish I’d known you were here! I hope you didn’t think me rude. I didn’t mean to exclude you from my conversation with the leak in the ceiling!