Happy birthday, my little snail! May you never forget who you are; may you always find your way home.
A is for Abek, the youngest Lederman, the spoiled son of Helena and Elie, and younger brother of Zofia, who is making you this magnificent present…
B is for Baba Rose, the grandmother whose fingers are nimble and whose mind is more nimble, who holds the family together with patience and love in the beautiful apartment where we all live. She is the best seamstress in the city, and also the most exacting one…
C is for Chomicki & Lederman, the company that will be yours one day, which makes the most beautiful clothing in Poland. It was founded by Zayde Lazer, and his best employee was a young man named Elie, whom he invited home for dinner one night. That’s the night when he first met—
It goes on. It goes on, all the way to Z. It’s my whole family story. More detailed than I remembered it. Everything about my family that a person would need to know. I forgot how small and pretty my handwriting could be, how much I managed to fit on that one piece of cloth.
I don’t know exactly how this fabric ended up under this mattress.
All I know is this: The morning before we left for the stadium, I took this fabric from the wall where it had been hanging, and I quickly sewed it into the lining of Abek’s jacket.
I sewed it into his jacket, and then a few hours later we left for the stadium and a few days after that, the Nazis made us remove all our clothes and put on new, shapeless ones that didn’t fit. And all our old clothes were placed in a pile, where they were checked for money or valuables and then sold or repurposed.
The point is that Abek would not have been in possession of this cloth. That’s why I don’t have any of my old clothes or photographs or mementos—because we weren’t allowed to keep anything at all after that day.
The point is that the most likely person to have discovered this letter is the prisoner with the job of sorting through the clothes, of ripping our lives apart at the seams, stitch by stitch.
I BROUGHT YOU SOME TEA.”
I gasp at the sound of knocking and, without thinking, ball the cloth into my fist. But it’s not Abek; it’s Josef standing at the door, knuckles still on the frame.
“I told you, you didn’t need to come with me,” I manage, bringing him into focus, his curly hair, his sharp eyes, his slender frame.
“And I promise I won’t make a habit of thinking I know better than you what you need,” he says. He sets his mug of tea on the nightstand. “But in this one instance, I really wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Am I… all right?” I cannot even begin to think of how to answer that question. A sound comes out of my mouth, something between a yelp and the emptiest laugh in the world.
“Zofia?” Now he senses something must really be wrong. He crosses the room and kneels beside me on the floor. I feel the heat of him, just inches away, and I’m glad he’s here. I want him here, the reality of another body.
“Hold me,” I say. I don’t mean it in a romantic way. I mean it like, Hold me together. I mean it like, Am I really real? Is any of this really happening? Josef doesn’t take it in a romantic way, either. When we climb onto the bed and he puts his arms around me, it’s with the urgency you would use to warm someone with hypothermia. Or someone who’d had a bad shock. The kind of holding you do when your goal is to keep them alive.
He wraps his arms around me tightly enough that it’s almost hard to breathe, and this discomfort is inexplicably comforting. It reminds me that I’m here, tethered to this earth. The labor of my breathing reminds me that I have a body at all.
“Something happened, something you’re not ready to talk about,” he says. Mutely, I nod. “I’ll stop talking. I’ll stay here with you until you want me to leave, but I’ll just remain silent.”
He wedges his chin over my head, firmly and deliberately. I feel as though he’s burrowing in for a storm with me, readying us both against the wind. I try to steady myself against the beat of Josef’s heart. I try to match my breaths to his. I try to feel grounded by this, the comforting pressure and weight.
I try to feel grounded, but the feeling of Josef’s arms right now is competing against six years of misery swirling around my head with nothing to drown them out since Josef has promised to remain silent.
Remain silent.
A is for Abek. B is for Baba Rose. They’ll be gone soon, Baba Rose said about the Nazis in their tanks, but then they weren’t, they weren’t, they stayed for years. Remain silent. My neighbor Mrs. Wójcik’s dogs barked in her apartment, and the Nazi dogs were barking at Birkenau. I unloaded the pellets of Zyklon B, and Bissel fell out the window, and I sewed Breine’s wedding dress, and I sewed the Nazi uniforms, and my arm was throbbing from the shuttle, and I worked every day because we all worked every day because we didn’t want to die, except some days I wanted to die. Some days I did.
I walked to the soccer stadium because we weren’t allowed cars. I walked from Neustadt to Gross-Rosen in a frozen, frozen winter, when I could not begin to fathom how one foot was continuing to go in front of the other. And my toes were amputated by a doctor in white, and my father ran to help the pharmacist in the mud. And the soldier used his hand to break my father’s windpipe. Remain silent. I ate a plum with Josef, and I plucked a plum-colored dress from the donation box, and I buried a turnip in the ground, except maybe I didn’t, maybe I didn’t do that at all.
I waited in lines. I waited in lines to be discharged from the hospital. I waited in line for moldy potato skins. I waited in line for bread. I waited in line to get on the train for Foehrenwald. I waited in lines with all the other Jews of Sosnowiec to learn our fate on the twelfth of August in 1942, and my father ran to help the pharmacist in the mud, and Josef punched Rudolf’s windpipe in the courtyard. And the soldier punched my father’s windpipe in the soccer stadium, except that neither of them were punches, they were slices at the throat with the meaty L of a hand. Remain silent.
I slip back into focus. The room slips back into focus. Josef slips back into focus, his arms still wrapped around me.
“Silent killing,” I whisper.
“What?” Josef asks. But his breath catches; I’m close enough to be able to tell.
My voice is unnaturally calm. “It’s what the German soldiers called their combat training. Silent killing.”
Stilles toten. The German Army had its own hand-to-hand fighting style. Just the basics, the dirtiest of basics: A knee to the groin. A jab in the eyeballs. Or, hand flat like a knife, a vicious stab to the throat, before your enemy was paying attention, before he even knew you were fighting. It’s what brought my father to his knees in the stadium. When he tried to help up the pharmacist, a soldier jabbed him in the neck, then they shot him.
I had never seen fighting to kill until the German Army arrived in Sosnowiec.
And I had never seen it anywhere else until I arrived in Foehrenwald and saw Josef do it to the man in the courtyard on the morning I arrived.
“You weren’t in a camp,” I whisper.
“Zofia.”
My skin begins to crawl. I slowly ease out of his arms. “That’s why you don’t like to talk about where you were during the war.”