What if my lie is what could keep us safe? Nora must know what I’m thinking, as she shakes her head furiously at me. A lie could also get me killed. There’s no use in denying what we know. “Mama said lying was okay if it might determine our well-being,” I remind her.
“It w-w-won’t,” Nora says. “I’ll tr-tr-try to hide it.”
We both know she can’t, no matter how hard she tries. After she didn’t grow out of the speech impediment, our doctor explained that her situation was likely because the muscles and nerves in her brain were not communicating properly with one another.
“Roll call is in ten minutes,” the room elder says while flipping the light switch three times. She’s one of a set of twins, but they took her sister away and she didn’t return, so now she just meanders around with lifeless, lost eyes, keeping track of who is coming and going from this barrack room and delivers announcements when necessary, much like a manufacturing machine. “Dr. Mengele will visit with each set of twins in our barrack today straight after your morning bread.”
All of us who live in this barrack with one small, foggy window have done nothing but sit complacently on our beds since we returned from collecting our breakfast. I sometimes wonder if the aides and Dr. Mengele make us wait like lab rats inside of a shoebox I know he has eyes on us, watching every drop of sweat form, every tear fall, and every shiver run through our bodies.
Nora is staring across the room at the plaster wall between two beds. It looks like nothing but a blank canvas to me, but as I stare harder, I notice a crack webbing like a vein from the ceiling to halfway down the wall. She loves blemishes and imperfections. She refers to them as art, which I don’t understand, but when her gaze freezes and her mind seems lost somewhere, I always know what she’s thinking about. Nora would love nothing more than to pull out a sketch pad and pencil to draw the oddly shaped line with random jagged branches. We have used crumpled paper swiped from the trash bins in the exam rooms. We hide it beneath our mattresses, but we won’t dare touch it unless the lights are out.
Five of the fifteen sets of twins have been called out of the room, one by one. Each has returned, which offers me hope that Dr. Mengele didn’t look too hard to find an appealing difference between any of them.
The door opens again, and an aide appears. She calls Nora’s name. My heart skips a beat, and my lungs threaten to fall flat. I feel like I’m suffocating. Nora forces a small smile before touching her fingertip to her mouth, then my cheek as she passes by. My heart feels like a heavy stone falling from a tall building, seconds before it will likely shatter.
When the door closes, I stare at the same crack on the wall she was focusing on, wishing it would do something for me like it must have been doing for her. All it gives me is more unwanted thoughts, jitters, and pains in my stomach.
A few minutes pass before the door opens again. This time, it’s my name that’s called—unlike the other sets of twins where one got sent back before the other was called. I follow the aide down the hallway, turning into an exam room where I find Nora sitting on a table. She doesn’t look at me as I walk in but holds her stare against Dr. Mengele’s white laboratory coat.
“Where were you born? Please state the city and country,” he says, turning to face me.
“De-De-Debrecen,” I begin, mindlessly going against Nora’s plea to speak as I normally do. Regret is instantaneous as I watch Dr. Mengele’s eye twitch in response to my words. My stomach cramps and I’m restraining myself from folding in half from the self-inflicted pain. “Hun—”
“Again,” Dr. Mengele says without allowing me to complete the answer.
“D-D-Debrecen, Hun—”
“Again,” he says.
“Deb-re-cen, Hun-gary,” I say in its entirety this time.
“Just as I thought. Why would you want to have a speech hindrance like your sister? Can’t you see she suffers from it?” Nora glances at me from the corner of her eye and I know how disappointed she must be with me right now. “Take the one without the stutter to another room,” Dr. Mengele tells his aid. The man hasn’t shifted his gaze from the clipboard he’s holding.
After all the years of listening to my sister, I couldn’t replicate her stutter well enough to fool a stranger. I should be ashamed. I wish Nora would look at me as I’m led out of the exam room, but she doesn’t move her face, not even a hair.
I follow the aide as he clogs down the long hallway. We stop a few doors down and he opens the door to wave me inside. “Have a seat,” he says.
I walk past the man but stop before going too far inside and turn to face him. “Would you mind telling me what I should expect from Dr. Mengele?”
The man lifts his head for the first time and stares directly at me, allowing me to see an angry red patch of skin where his right eye should be. “You and your sister are different, and he would like to know why.”
“We’re no different,” I argue.
“He won’t agree. When you’re different, you can’t be together.”
I want to run back to the exam room, and I consider what the consequence might be if I was to try, but when I poke my head out the door, I spot Dr. Mengele making his way down toward me, and I’m trapped.
“Did you send my sister back to our barrack room?” I ask, trying my best to remain calm.
“We are going to help your sister. I assume you want this, yes?”
“I want to be with my sister,” I cry out.
“But you have forgotten how to speak like her, I see.” I take a few steps backward into the room until I reach the exam table. “My job here is to help. You must believe me,” he says with a smile curling.
“How? And why is this man’s eye missing? Is this how you plan to help?” The words spew out of me, and I regret opening my mouth.
Dr. Mengele gives the man a once over before returning his vicious glare back to me. “Didn’t your parents ever teach you to hold your tongue?”
I close my mouth and stare down at the freckled tiles below my feet, wondering what the marks might be from. The distraction isn’t enough. I’m crawling out of my skin, desperate to run between the two men and escape the jaws threatening to swallow me whole. “Please don’t hurt her.”
“We don’t hurt. We help,” he says, each word with a snap.
TEN
NORA
BOUGIVAL, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1946
With school in session, the days feel shorter, but each minute seems longer. I watch the clock in the classroom, wishing the hours to pass. I used to love school, learning, and challenging myself. Now, I’m not sure I see the point. I won’t finish grade school this year like I would have if it weren’t for the war. I’ll still have another year to go if I ever want to attend a university. Papa often said that the world is changing rapidly, and it won’t be long before women are on the rise in the workforce. He said this before the war, though. Before women were obtaining jobs to cover for the men who were sent to fight. Now that’s over, it’s hard not to wonder if women will go back to the way they once were—suppressed. Papa had high hopes for me making something of myself, but I’m not sure he would categorize the work of an artist as success. “Few make it as an artist,” he would say.