They are then herded into another room.
‘Into the sauna with you all,’ another kapo shouts.
This room features large iron tanks filled with dirty water. Puddles of loose hair float on the surfaces of them all. Cibi climbs into the nearest one. This is not like any sauna she has heard of. Cibi’s mind begins to drift away from this place, back to her home, to Magda and Grandfather and everything she holds dear. If she can hold them in her mind maybe it won’t be so bad here.
‘The water is dirtier than we are,’ says a girl, clambering out of the bath. ‘And colder.’
The freezing water snaps Cibi out of her trance. Her body has grown numb from the cold, as numb as her head and heart.
Having climbed out, and dripping with water, Cibi takes the clothes thrust at her. Dressed in the same Russian prisoner-of-war uniform as the older inmates, Cibi finds the harsh fabric of the khaki shirt irritating to her tender skin. The matching breeches threaten to fall down with every step.
The rough clothes cling to her damp body, providing no warmth. The kapo thrusts a piece of paper into her hands. She reads the digits scrawled onto it: 4560.
Back in line once more with the other washed and shaved inmates, Cibi doesn’t resist when she’s called forward. Another man in blue-and-white stripes sits at a desk at the front of the room in which her hair was just shorn. He holds out his hand for the scrap of paper and tells her to sit down.
The numbers which stand in bold black letters against the grubby white are etched into the skin of her arm.
The pain is intense, shocking, but Cibi shows no reaction. She won’t give this man her agony.
Outside once more, Cibi joins hundreds of girls, who, like her, are desperately searching for a familiar face. But no one looks familiar any more. In identical clothes and shorn heads, there is nothing left to distinguish them.
And then Cibi hears her name. She doesn’t move as Livi runs to her, embracing her before pulling away and staring at her oldest sister. She runs her hand over Cibi’s naked head. ‘What have they done to you? Cibi, you’ve got no hair.’
Looking at her sister’s own naked head, Cibi doesn’t reply. Livi is clutching her arm and wincing, tears of pain streaking pink cheeks. The pain of Cibi’s tattoo is equally intense – she can feel the blood running into the creases of her elbow, and wonders about infection. Putting her arm around Livi’s shoulders, she steers her sister back to the building with the flea-infested mattresses. It is not until the sisters sit cuddled together that they look at their arms.
‘Your number is only one ahead of mine,’ Livi says. She wipes away the dried blood so Cibi can see the butchered number: 4559.
When all the girls from Vranov have returned to their room their kapo enters, accompanied by four emaciated men struggling to carry two cauldrons, a crate of small metal mugs and another containing bread.
‘Form two lines and come and get your food. You haven’t done anything today so you will only have half a cup of soup and one piece of bread. Anyone who pushes or complains will get nothing,’ the kapo roars.
Taking their mugs and bread back to their mattress, the girls compare the contents of their ‘soup’。
‘I have a piece of potato,’ Cibi says. ‘Do you?’
Livi stirs the weak, brown liquid, shaking her head. Cibi pulls the potato out of her mug, and takes a small bite. She plops the rest into Livi’s mug. They spend the remaining time before lights out picking the fleas from each other’s necks and ears. The old-timers return after dark. On their way to bed they smile at the new girls, and shake their heads in sympathy.
*
Another 4 a.m. wake-up call. ‘Raus! Raus!’ is screamed into the room, accompanied by the hammering of a baton on the walls. After a visit to the bathroom to wash away as many fleas and bedbugs as they can, Cibi and Livi receive their first breakfast in Auschwitz: a ration of bread the size of their palms, and a drink of lukewarm liquid they were told was coffee, but which bears no resemblance to any coffee they have tasted before.
‘Soup and bread for dinner, coffee and bread for breakfast,’ Livi mutters, forcing the coffee down her throat.
‘Remember what I said when we arrived – we will eat stones and nails, whatever we are given,’ Cibi replies.
‘We should have kept the linden tea,’ Livi tells Cibi, as if they had had a choice in the matter; as if they should have asked the guards to wait a moment until they had removed the precious leaves from their suitcases before leaving them behind in the cattle wagon.