“What about your tongue? Was it like that when you were born?” Curiosity swims through her troubling emerald eyes.
I watch as her tongue moves up and down, touching the inside of her teeth to form certain letters and sounds. I’ve been hopeful of re-teaching myself to speak properly, even if with a stutter, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to make any progress.
Shoes clapping against the floor outside of the sewing room distract me from answering. I turn and glance toward the door, seeing Elek. “Nora, Nora, Nora, what fancy pants are you preparing for me today?” he jokes.
I roll my eyes at his question and grin. “Are you having trouble with your machine again?” he asks Katia.
She sighs and stares up at Elek with a glint in her eyes. “No, not anymore, but thank you for asking,” she says in a sing-song tone.
I’m no stranger to the girls ogling Elek. He is quite charming and nice to look at. No one seems to be bothered by his missing arm, not even him. Everything about me seems to bother the others, though. I’m not sure what that says about me.
“Good. Did Nora fix it up for you?” he asks without missing a beat.
Katia presses her lips together and offers him a brief smile before spinning back around in her chair.
“There’s an art exhibition set up on the edge of town tonight. One of the houseparents is going to take a group of the older kids. I already signed both of us up because I’m sure you won’t turn down an exhibit?” Elek says to me.
We don’t get to go into town often, but the houseparents try to find some activities for the older group. Walking to the edge of town sounds like a night of others groaning and grumbling that I’m not keeping up with them.
“I’ll push your chair,” Elek says. “We’ll be fine.”
I take in a deep breath, prepared to say no. “You should go. I would if I was old enough,” Katia says.
Elek lifts his dark brows and waits for confirmation.
“O-o-okay,” I say.
“It’ll be fun.”
“Do you know what happened to her mouth?” Katia asks Elek, as if I’m not sitting right here in between them.
“Not every personal detail is public information, Katia. Sometimes it’s better to have secrets than to allow the world to know what they haven’t earned the right to know.”
My cheeks burn—not from embarrassment, but from the feeling I get when Elek stands up for me. He places his hands on my shoulders and squeezes. “I’ll see you at dinner. I can’t wait to try on my new fancy pants,” he says, brushing his fingertips across the soft dark fabric.
Just after he leaves the room, Katia sighs. “He’s so dreamy…even if he is missing an arm.” It’s times like this that I’m glad I prefer to stay silent. “I suppose you two are one of a kind.”
With a sharp inhale, I press my foot against the pedal and continue hemming. She has no clue how similar Elek and I are, nor what we have been through. I hate to think what would have happened to her if she had to live through the hellish nightmare we did.
Two Years Earlier
Auschwitz, Poland, May 1944
Arina and I squeeze each other’s hands so tightly, I’m not sure either of us has any feeling left in our fingertips. We’re following a guard in a different direction to everyone else, but the farther we walk, more is unearthed before us. Weak, tired, and starving people amble by in blue and white striped pajamas. The thought of how long they’ve been here, living like starving vagabonds, strikes the thought that Arina and I might look like them in two weeks from now—if we make it that long. Will we be just soulless bodies shuffling along? We don’t know where we’re going, but there are a few other sets of twins in front of us and behind us. One pair is a boy and a girl, maybe younger than us. The other two appear to be slightly older—one set of boys and one set of girls. We’ve never been around other twins, never mind three others at the same time.
“Just as everyone else here, we must scribe you into our registry and jot down some important notes. We will direct you on where to go once you step inside the hospital up ahead,” the guard says, twisting on his heels and giving us a once-over without any emotion on his face. The air is thick, making it hard to breathe, or maybe it’s the sweet pungent smell of rot must my lungs are fighting off.
“Why are we at the hospital?” Arina whispers. Her hand is clammy, and her fingernails are biting into my flesh. She knows I don’t have an answer, but she speaks her thoughts out loud more often than I do.
Ahead of us, there are quiet conversations between guards and I’m not sure I want to know what they’re saying, even if it was loud enough to hear. Without sudden or erratic movements, I take a pause in our steps to glance around more, wishing I could see where Mama and Papa might have gone. These grounds look like a ghetto, but bigger and more industrial or militaristic.
“Come along,” a fresh voice calls out. I peer ahead, finding a man in a saggy striped uniform—not one of the Nazi guards, telling us to follow him inside.
The building sprawls out before us with various shades of red bricks, three floors, seven windows, and a foreboding black wooden door centered at the top of five cement steps. I’ve never seen stairs leading up to the main door of a hospital. I can only wonder how difficult it would be to walk inside if a person’s legs didn’t work well.
Upon entering the main corridor, a masked odor toys with my mind, but whatever is being hidden alerts my stomach and kills the pains of hunger I’ve been fending away. Nothing about the inside of this building resembles the look or feel of a hospital. A scientific laboratory is all I see, or I imagine this is what one might look like. We aren’t standing in a waiting room and there isn’t a counter to approach with our name or other vital information. All I see are hallways branching off from the space where we’re standing.
Each corridor has the same appearance: long, dark, and endless, with door after door. After a moment of what seems to be confusion from the man leading us, we take a sharp right turn and enter the looming hallway. The farther in we walk, the more doors I see, and then I spot one room without a closed door. The lights flicker and buzz as if each one of our steps is disturbing the electrical wiring. Not one of us asks a question, yet we are all wondering what we’re about to face. A chilling sensation skates up the length of my arms—a warning of sorts. Some doors we pass have narrow windows, but each pane of glass leads to darkness.
A door to the right opens and a haggard middle-aged woman in a dark frock beneath a stained white apron slips out of the lit room and closes the door. With only a momentary glance inside the room, I must believe that what I think I just saw was a matter of my mind playing tricks on me. A wall with hundreds of small eggs adhered to a corkboard in perfect straight lines down and across. I can’t understand why someone would display so many eggs, and on a wall of all places. Surely, they could have a better purpose, seeing as most of the surrounding people look to be starving.
“One at a time, please,” the man at the front of the line says.
He stands to the side of the opening toward the end of the hallway. His hands hang by his sides and his gaze falls heavily to the wall he’s facing.