Zyklon B was a pesticide. It came in pellets that dissolved into gas. I heard it was originally designed to kill rodents. In Birkenau, I unloaded these canisters, and then guards would take them to the buildings they called the showers. There they would pack hundreds of people inside and use the Zyklon B, and it worked on people, too.
I’VE LOST ALL SENSE OF TIME AS MRS. YOST LEADS ME OUT OF HER office. It’s hard for Foehrenwald to feel real, for any of this to feel real. I half expect that if I blink, I’ll wake up back in my family’s apartment, still sleeping next to Dima, or back in the hospital, still in the ward of broken girls. But I’m not; I’m hundreds of kilometers from home. The doctors said I wasn’t well enough to even leave the hospital on my own, but I’ve managed to get all the way here by myself. My devastation over Abek’s not being here is colored by a small bit of pride.
The sun is low in the sky as we step out the back door. It opens onto a dusty courtyard of sorts, between the administration buildings. A few wooden benches line the perimeter, and behind them are the green sprigs of an herb garden, the smell of dill and parsley. Behind those, through an open set of double doors, I can see round tables in a building that must be the cafeteria. Michigan Street, the road I walked in on, is now filling with people, presumably coming from the fields I passed. Not just the dozen or so I saw tilling the land, but many, carrying hoes and shovels, gathering around the courtyard while talking and laughing. Other groups, not in farming clothes, are approaching from different streets.
“Mrs. Yost?” As soon as we exit the building, a man in a checked shirt appears, picking his way across the dusty courtyard and extending his hand. “I’m from Feldafing.”
“Of course you are.” Mrs. Yost turns to me. “Zofia. My apologies. I’ll find someone else to show you to your bungalow.”
She scans the crowd. “Mr. Mueller,” she calls, gesturing toward a lone figure sitting on one of the benches.
The man who looks up is lean and angled. Suspenders hold up pants that hang low on his hips; a cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth. He’s working with something in his hands, using a sharp metal tool to bore holes into a leather strap. A horse’s bridle, I think. He sets it down when Mrs. Yost beckons him. “Could you come and carry Miss Lederman’s bag to Breine and Esther’s cottage?” she asks.
From a distance, I’d thought Mr. Mueller was much older, but as he approaches, I can see he’s actually just a few years older than me: dark curly hair, gray eyes, a lean sinew to his body. He takes one last drag on his cigarette before flicking it to the side.
The way his full lips curl around the cigarette paper, the way his hips swivel as he grinds the butt into the dust, the way he rubs a crick out of his neck using one long-fingered hand—I feel myself blush, followed immediately by the surprise of realizing I still know how to blush. There’s a quick, urgent pull low in my stomach, and this, too, is a sensation I thought had disappeared. There wasn’t enough left of my body, I thought, to manufacture the feeling.
Mr. Mueller raises his eyebrows in a brief greeting when he reaches me. “Hello,” I manage, and then I am immediately certain that the blush is in my voice, too, and that everyone around me can hear it.
He’s just leaned over to take the handle of my valise when I see his neck stiffen. “What did you say?” he asks quietly, in German.
“I—I didn’t—” I stammer.
But he’s not talking to me; he’s talking to another man whom he passed in the courtyard, barrel-chested with nice white teeth. “What did you say?” Mr. Mueller repeats, this time turning to the man.
Mr. Mueller drops my valise and walks back toward the larger, barrel-chested man. His messy curls stick to the back of his neck; his collar is damp with perspiration. I can’t hear what the two men in the middle of the courtyard are saying, only that the man with white teeth looks angry and dismissive, while Mr. Mueller is unreadable. Around me, other people have noticed the conversation, and a few yards away, Mrs. Yost, who had started off with the representative from the other camp, pauses, trying to decide whether to intervene.
The bigger man makes a rude gesture. Mr. Mueller returns it but then begins to step away. It looks like the conversation is over, and I unclench fists I didn’t know I’d tightened. But then, without warning—with something barely perceptible traveling across his face—Mr. Mueller whirls back again. It happens too fast for me to register the full motion; all I know is that I see a blur, and then blood pours out of the bigger man’s nose.
The bigger man lunges forward with both arms outstretched and hits Mr. Mueller with his full body weight. Mr. Mueller stays upright, but barely. He ducks the first punch, but the other man’s second one lands just below his eyebrow. He takes a third to the rib cage. He’s not an intuitive fighter, even I can tell that, and the other man outmatches him by at least ten centimeters.
Around the perimeter of the courtyard, doors and windows open as people lean out to see the source of the commotion. Now they’re on the ground, the big man on top of Mr. Mueller, straddling his chest and pinning his arms to his sides. The bigger man’s hand grinds the side of Mr. Mueller’s face into the ground, and Mr. Mueller’s legs scramble helplessly, wildly scuffing in the dirt.
Get up, I think.
I don’t know why he threw the first punch, I don’t know why he started this fight, I don’t know why he doesn’t give up and beg for mercy.
“Gentlemen!” Mrs. Yost yells, and then to someone I can’t see, “Go get a policeman.” But it will be too late. By the time an officer gets back, Mr. Mueller will have run out of oxygen, will be dead.
I should help him, but I can’t move. Close your eyes, I instruct myself, but my eyelids don’t work. Cover your eyes, I try. Pick up your hands and physically cover them. Do it now.
I should help him, but I can’t move, because if I could have moved, I would have helped him, and I didn’t help him, so that must mean I couldn’t move, and all I can do is stare and stare, like the fight is far away, like it’s happening in the movies.
I’m fading, I’m falling into myself, I’m unable to get my brain to stop, and then, just when I think I’m going to witness something horrible, Mr. Mueller frees one of his arms. He draws it back and, his thumb and index finger making the shape of an L, slams his hand into the bigger man’s windpipe.
The big man’s hands fly to his neck; his face turns purple-red, and his breath comes in pig squeals as he tries to find air. Mr. Mueller scrambles out from under him. Chest heaving, he staggers to the bench, to the sharp, leather-boring tool he was using before. He doesn’t pick it up but leaves his hands on the handle, a warning that he’ll use it if he needs to.
Watching him, something pushes in on my brain. A thought, a memory, trying to break through my spiraling, to bring me back to myself. Mr. Mueller. Sosnowiec in the summer. Heat, the hottest days, standing in lines. My father.
Do I know this man? Surely I don’t—I couldn’t—but something I’ve just seen him do reminds me of—what? Sosnowiec in summer, standing. The images are too vague for me to grab onto; I’m not even sure if they’re real.
I replay everything that just happened, every moment since I first saw Mr. Mueller get up to take my valise, to this moment, now, as he dabs his bloody eyebrow with the hem of his shirt while warily eyeing the courtyard. But it’s lost. Whatever I thought seemed familiar about him has disappeared again, if it ever existed at all.