But Livi’s tears are contagious, and soon the room is full of sniffing and gasping sobs.
Girls stumble to their feet, tripping over each other as they head for the door. Voices call out to them to stop, come back. ‘You’ll get us all into trouble!’ a voice yells – very obviously now, a girl’s.
‘Go back to bed. It’s worse out there than it is in here!’ shouts another.
Livi’s sobs slowly subside, and the room falls silent, until a cry of, ‘Something bit me!’ and the reply: ‘It’s just fleas. You’ll get used to it.’
*
It is still dark when the girls are woken at 4 a.m. by the kapos shouting at them to get moving.
It is bitterly cold. Cibi and Livi slept fitfully, and now they are chilled, hungry and thirsty. Rubbing sleep from their eyes, they follow the inmates who have learned the rhythm of the morning ritual, lining up to use the makeshift bathroom of long troughs with dripping taps and open toilets.
Cibi and Livi hold on to each other as they begin to file out of the room, but then Cibi lets out a cry and stumbles, falling to her knees.
‘Cibi, Cibi, what’s wrong?’ Livi says.
Cibi rips off her shoes and socks to reveal feet alive with jumping fleas. Cibi holds the socks she had just removed in one hand and stares, paralysed, at her feet. Around them the girls climb over the straw sacks to get outside.
‘Cibi, you’re scaring me. We need to keep moving!’ Livi cries, shaking her sister’s arm.
Cibi looks at the socks and flings them away.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK. We just need to wash your feet. I’ll help. Come on.’
But Cibi pulls away from Livi. This is her problem, and she must be strong for her sister.
A young, shaven-headed girl pushes her way back through the crowd and grabs Cibi’s discarded socks. ‘She’ll need them,’ she tells Livi. ‘I shook out all the fleas.’ Livi is stunned by the girl’s tone: robotic, utterly devoid of emotion. But it is an act of kindness all the same.
Livi takes the socks with a nod and shows them to Cibi. ‘The fleas are gone. Please put them back on.’
Cibi says nothing but doesn’t resist as Livi pulls the socks onto her feet, and then buckles her shoes.
Cibi and Livi join the others trudging out of the building. Outside they are separated from the old-timers and marched to another building. In daylight, the streets and buildings don’t look nearly as inviting. SS officers now line the pavements, rifles strung across their backs, handguns holstered on their hips. Prisoners spill out from buildings like the one Cibi and Livi have just spent the night in. They pass a group of men shuffling along beside them – a glance here and there, but no one makes eye contact.
Eventually, the girls are ordered into a windowless room, where they are instructed to undress. Cibi is grateful, for the moment, that they haven’t been warned of what’s to come, grateful that Livi has been spared, even for a few hours, the reality behind the blank stares of the hairless inmates.
When some resist, their male and female guards think nothing of slapping them. Cibi and Livi and every other girl try to hide their nudity with hands and arms. The sound of men’s laughter fills their ears as they shout obscenities at the naked girls.
‘Your jewellery – don’t forget those pretty diamonds you have in your ears, girls. We want it all,’ their kapo calls out, laughing. She is a tall woman with short, curly black hair, and a single missing incisor.
Cibi reaches a hand to one ear and then the other. The small gold earrings with their tiny red stones had been fixed to her lobes on the day she was born by her grandmother, who had just delivered her. This would be the first time they had ever been removed. Cibi struggles to find the clasp holding them in place. She watches with growing horror as the kapo rips earrings at random from girls’ ears. Blood pours from split lobes as hysterical crying fills the room. She hopes Livi, wherever she is in this hellish room, has managed to remove hers. As she pulls them free she finds the kapo is standing in front of her, hand outstretched to take the precious tokens of a grandmother’s love. She thinks briefly of Magda, and thanks God her sister is many miles away.
One by one the girls are called into the centre of the room, to be inspected by the Schutzstaffel, SS guards, who continue to leer at the young female bodies paraded before them. Cibi remembers her grandfather telling her again and again, Humour will save you. Laugh, and if you can’t laugh, put a smile on your face.
Raising her head to her examiners, she puts a brave smile on her lips. She feels the flutter of a hundred butterflies in her stomach. When she is called, she slowly makes her way forward to stand in front of a man dressed in striped trousers and shirt. He is the barber. He snips off lengths of her chestnut hair and she watches the waves fall onto the growing mound at his feet. He flicks on a crude shaving machine and runs it over her head, reducing her once proud head of hair to stubble. Not finished, and to her shame, he drops to a knee. Spreading her legs, he directs the machine to her crotch, where he removes her pubic hair. She tries not to think of little Livi enduring the same humiliation. Without meeting her eyes, he nods for her to move on.