*
One morning, a week later, Livi doesn’t wake up when the SS guard runs his baton along the walls of their room. Cibi prods her, feels her sister’s forehead.
Livi is hot, flushed and sweating.
‘Livi, please, you have to get up,’ Cibi pleads.
‘I can’t,’ Livi croaks, without opening her eyes. ‘My head hurts. My legs. Everywhere hurts.’
The girl in the bed next to theirs leans over and also touches a hand to Livi’s head, and then she pushes a hand under her shirt.
‘She’s hot all over. I think she has typhus,’ she says quietly to Cibi.
‘What? How?’ Panic washes through Cibi.
‘Flea bite probably, maybe a rat. Hard to know which.’
‘But what can I do?’
‘See if they will let you take her to the hospital. It’s the only place she will survive. Look at her – there’s nothing of her, and she’s ill. She can’t work like this.’
‘Will you stay with her while I find Ingrid and ask if I can take her to the hospital?’
The girl nods.
Ingrid frowns and even seems a little concerned. She nods her consent and Cibi races back to Livi, heaving her onto her feet and supporting her as they cross the room. She remembers, just in time, to slip Livi’s knife into her own pocket before exiting the block.
The girls are lining up outside and Cibi pushes her way through, stumbling as she half carries her semi-conscious sister. She thinks of their father then and wonders what he would make of Cibi’s role of responsible older sister at that moment. Is it her fault Livi has typhus?
Cibi hands her sister over to a stern nurse who instructs her to leave immediately, despite her protestations. She has no choice. When Cibi rejoins her detail, Ingrid tells her that she will be joining the girls on the rooftops: her job will now involve hurling bricks and tiles down to the workers on the ground.
For three days Cibi goes to work with no news of Livi. But at least she’s in hospital, not sweating and suffering on a bed made of straw, all alone. Cibi loses herself in her new job and looks forward to the regular breaks this heavy work entails. Their only meal is lunch, when the cart will turn up with five cauldrons of soup and five servers. Cibi has heard the crazy stories of what goes into these ‘soups’， and then sees it with her own eyes: a toothbrush, a wooden bangle, rubber bands, floating amidst the onions and sardines. The detail shares a rare laugh the day a girl pulls a comb from her bowl of soup and loudly announces: ‘I have a comb, if only I had some hair.’
On the third day of Livi’s confinement, Cibi climbs down from the roof and studies the mass of girls waiting to be called forward for their soup. She has noticed something strange about this lunchtime routine: most of the girls are looking in the direction of the plump server with the two long brown braids. Her hair alone is odd as, to Cibi, she looks like she’s at least seventy years old. Cibi makes her way off the roof and joins the girls waiting for their food. Now she too looks at this braided cook. When Cibi catches her eye, she smiles. The cook does not return the smile – God knows no one has once smiled since they arrived here – but she does beckon Cibi forward. The ladle is dipped deep into the pot, spooning not only thin, tasteless liquid into Cibi’s bowl, but a big chunk of meat too. The woman gives Cibi a nod and casts her eyes back over the hungry girls to see who next she will favour with her largess.
Cibi sits alone and gulps down her soup, until the chunk of meat is revealed at the bottom of her bowl. Looking around to make sure no one is watching, she picks it up with her fingers, licking it dry before stuffing it into her pocket, beside Livi’s small knife. She will find a way to go to the hospital on her return and share it with her sister.
But when Cibi enters the block later that evening, she finds Livi waiting for her inside. Livi is almost better and some of the colour has returned to her cheeks. Cibi puts a finger to her lips and reaches into her pocket. She opens her hand to reveal the piece of meat. Livi’s eyes go wide. With the knife she cuts the meat into thin slivers. It is a feast of unknown origins, but the girls don’t care.
*
Over the next three months the number of prisoners increases dramatically. They arrive by train in their hundreds, filling all the buildings in Auschwitz, and replacing those who have died, either from illness or at the hands of the SS. Cibi and Livi hear rumours of a killing room, a bunker below ground a few streets away where men, women and children enter alive, and are carried out dead. The girls have seen male prisoners pulling carts loaded with bodies. It’s too awful for Cibi to process, so she decides instead to believe they died from disease.