Affinity Konar - Mischling

“Your children — how long have they been missing?” I asked.

The woman didn’t have a ready answer. I asked again. But she appeared to be a little deaf in addition to being nearly blind. I was not beyond sympathizing with her conditions and so I did not press the issue but simply watched as she busied herself with cutting a loaf of bread. It was then that the starkness of the house came to my full attention. I found it odd that there were no pictures of these lost children. Or any sign, really, that they — or anyone — had ever lived here. Not a book appeared on the shelves. There was no piano, no cat sleeping in a cat basket. Before my family’s time in the ghetto, we had lived in a realm of objects, and sometimes I’d lie awake at night wherever Feliks and I happened to be sheltering ourselves and practice the memories of those things. I’d recite the details of Mama’s dishware, the color of Zayde’s telescope. I felt so sorry for the lost children because wherever they were, they had little to cling to in the way of reminiscences — this was a place where the candle had naught to flicker over. And then I saw the wishbone on the mantel followed by a procession of tiny ceramic angels. The sight of these objects comforted me — if I were a missing child of such origins, I would surely carry these tokens in my heart.

I asked the woman for her children’s names, their faces. Instead of answering these simple questions, she poked me in the ribs, in the manner of one titillated by malnourishment, and insisted that I eat.

Feliks ate merrily, but I couldn’t consume a thing. Eating bread required a talent that I no longer possessed. Raw rabbit — of that I was more deserving, as a jackal. But the civilized loaf of my past? Every piece of me had something to say about the fact that I did not deserve this bread if my sister no longer lived. What I am saying is this — I had no choice but to vomit on the table.

“What is wrong with you?” the woman cried, her voice entertaining a temperament quite different than the one we’d been introduced to. She raised her arm in the air. I could not tell if she was reaching for the hatchet on the wall or if she was settling for giving me a more standard beating, but I dove beneath the table and pulled Feliks down with me. “Vermin,” she muttered, nabbing a broom from its corner. Thus equipped, she stalked across the floor and bent toward our hiding place. With the handle of her weapon, she issued blow after blow, striking us at our shoulders, our backs. We fled, overturning the table in our wake, and parted to different corners of the cottage. The woman closed in on Feliks’s corner. Her broom handle flew about it in a chaotic fury, inflicting pain wherever it could on his body, and in a most disorganized fashion. Feliks shook, overcome by the reasonable fear of the mortal. But he did not cry out, not even when the broom handle landed on his spine with an audible crack. This crack made it clear: Now was the time to fulfill my vow of protection. My hand took up my hidden bread knife, and I crept behind the woman — she was so occupied with her abuse that my step escaped her notice.

But a knock at the door, merry and crisp, interrupted my quest.

The woman paused in her viciousness and her white eyes shifted; she crossed the room to the door and put an eye to the peephole. The sight it contained cheered her, and we understood why when we saw her company: a young man and a young woman in gray uniforms, thunderbolts riding their chests. The man introduced himself and the woman as heads of operations at the extermination camp of Chelmno. He was Heinrich and she was Fritzi.

“May you be blessed!” declared the woman, a nervousness riding the edge of her voice.

The man explained that Chelmno had been overtaken by the Russians. The camp officers had made a valiant effort to do away with the prisoners; to the very end, they’d risked themselves, even while fleeing, trying to leave no Jew alive. Unfortunately, the Jews, they were scattered all over the countryside. But Heinrich and Fritzi and those who had been with the cause from the beginning were not going to let them scamper into hiding.

“I have two finds that will thrill you, then, I am sure,” the woman said, ushering both of them inside. She gave us a nasty glance as we clung together, pressed into a single corner, shaking in our coats. She fluttered about, pouring tea and proudly displaying us to her guests.

“These two, they will not leave here alive. My husband and I killed Jews together for years. It was a holy obligation. You see that hatchet on the wall there? A good weapon against their skulls. I used to merely collect children for him, and he did the work, but now — he is gone.”

The heads of Chelmno offered their condolences on her loss.

“Yes, he was a good man, so dedicated to the cause. Of course, finding Jews became more difficult over the years, due to the führer’s efficiency! Once, we discovered a hiding place full of them in the woods, and from time to time, they even gave themselves directly to our hands, begging for food at the door. Collecting them is a much harder process without him. Now, if I am lucky enough to stumble upon them, I have to make them trust me. So I fill their bellies and then kill them while they sleep. You must understand my intentions — how else could I put these two at ease but with food?”

“A good plan,” Heinrich said. “But such a terrible waste of bread!”

“I know,” the woman lamented. “But I have no other way to gain their trust. I can’t read, and we have no toys. I suppose I should have sung to them?” This last bit — it was tinged with sarcasm. I could tell that she was displeased by their reaction. She’d expected praise and thanks, an outsize appreciation of her cruelty. Strangely, this had not been offered.

Heinrich stalked over to our corner and squinted at us. I am not sure how much of me there was to see because I had so thoroughly curled myself into Feliks’s side. We were just bear fur on jackal fur, trembling. The old woman joined Heinrich in looking at us.

“Maybe you will do the honors?” she said. “Or you could hold them down for me?” Her hand, mapped with green veins, clawed at the collar of my coat. I wondered why I was not running. Feliks tried to bolt, but in his fright, he tripped over his own feet and collapsed. Fritzi chuckled at his clumsiness, but somehow, her laughter did not strike me as wholly cruel. And then, oddly, the attentions of the heads of Chelmno turned to our hostess.

“You sing, you say?” Heinrich asked breezily.

“Yes,” the woman said, her forehead crumpled at the detour of this question, and she rose up and smoothed her hands over her apron. “I was trained as a girl, in another life. What would you like to hear?”

“‘Zog Nit Keyn Mol’” was the ready answer.

“This is a Yiddish song?” the woman wondered.

“You do not know it?” Fritzi asked, and, drawing her pistol and pointing it at the woman, she added, “It has become very popular in the camps and the ghettos.”

Together, the two soldiers sang a song Feliks and I knew well, the partisan’s song, the song of the Jewish resistance:

Never say that you have reached the very end

When leaden skies a bitter future may portend;

For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive

And our marching steps will thunder: we survive.

And when they came to that last line, the old woman opened her mouth and began to squeak. Maybe it was an effort to appease them by joining them; we had no idea. We didn’t hear a glimmer of her singing voice. The woman might have had a fine voice, one for the ages, one that would have pleased Hitler and Mengele both. Perhaps she was owed a far different life on the back of her musicality. I would never know. We never had a chance to hear her, because as soon as she opened her mouth a bullet buzzed into it, like a bee returning to a hive, and traveled through the back of her gray head. Upon its exit, the bullet performed a little jig into the wall and there it stayed, very still and quiet, as if it were aware that its work was done. The avengers coolly stepped over the old woman and loped around the scene they’d created, taking in the wishbone and the angels, their faces shiny with youth and excitement.