‘I am so sorry we can’t provide you with your correct shoe size, madam. Perhaps you would care to come back another day,’ the kapo sneers.
Cibi grabs a pair of shoes with one hand, and Livi’s arm with the other, and drags her out of the building. Once outside, she stops and holds up the shoes.
‘Lift up your leg, Livi,’ she whispers.
Livi’s cheeks are red. She doesn’t respond.
‘Please, Livi, let’s just try and get these on.’
Livi is staring at Cibi’s mouth.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Cibi urges.
‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ Livi cries, shaking her head, trying to clear the ringing in her ears.
Cibi gets to her knees, attempting to push Livi’s feet into the shoes, but they are at least two sizes too small. She is grateful Livi can’t hear her as she quietly pleads with her mother for guidance. The shoes don’t fit and Livi will surely die if she has to walk to and from Auschwitz in bare feet. Above the wind, above the barking of the dogs and snarling SS, Cibi hears her mother’s reply. Put the shoes on your sister’s feet.
So she tries again. Livi, feet numb from cold, can’t sense her toes as they’re crushed into the too-small shoes.
But the uppers are made from canvas, which, after a couple of journeys to and from Auschwitz, gives, at least enough to make the shoes slightly more comfortable. They have ribbed wooden soles, which become packed with snow on the long treks. The girls joke that Livi is getting taller. Livi responds that she is now the big sister. She knocks off the snow from her soles, and returns to her usual size. This twice-daily ritual provides a small oasis of amusement for the sisters.
*
Despite Cibi’s initial reservations, she and Livi grow bolder in the sorting rooms, smuggling extra clothes back to their block, holding on to just enough to provide a little extra warmth in these cold months and giving away the rest. Cibi hides jewels and money in her pockets, makes trips to the toilet pit where she drops them: she would rather they disappeared for good than the Nazis get their hands on them. They are only searched at the end of the day when they leave the Kanada.
The weather is ruthless, however, providing enough of a motivation to cancel out whatever loyalty exists between the women, and often Cibi and Livi return to their bunks to find their own clothing missing. There are no confrontations: everyone is desperate.
New arrivals continue to create tension: fights break out and old allegiances dismantle. The new girls need clothes if they’re to survive and the old-timers won’t share. The SS step up the selections during rollcall, singling out the weak and the sick for extermination. To Cibi and Livi, it feels as though they’re taking place every day, as more and more girls disappear.
Christmas heralds a new outbreak of typhus, hitting their block hard, and Cibi is struck down. Within days she is delirious with fever, but every girl knows that if she remains in the block when the workers leave for work in the morning, she won’t be there when they return.
For the next two weeks, Cibi is half carried to and from Auschwitz. At night, Rita turns a blind eye to Cibi shivering and sweating beneath a pile of donated clothes, as fever wracks her emaciated body. Livi holds her sister’s hand all night, while Cibi thrashes around their bunk. Cibi’s thirst is barely quenched by the sips of water the girls smuggle in. Sometimes she sees Magda’s face, hovering above her own, willing her to get better. At other times it is Magda who feeds her crumbs from the broken biscuits the girls have ‘liberated’ from the sorting rooms.
With an enormous effort, she gathers her strength each time they pass through the gates of Auschwitz or Birkenau, and Livi urges her, just as Cibi had done, to walk unaided past the watchful eyes of the SS. The bad weather often plays in their favour too, as the SS guards have no desire to hang around in the snow.
Cibi’s recovery is slow, but steady. She holds the delirious mirage of Magda in her mind, and that helps, but she makes no mention of her dreams to Livi. If Magda is in her head, her heart, that’s enough.
On Christmas Day the girls are given the day off, but a Christian Christmas means nothing to them. They have missed Hanukkah, have had to work long hours when they should have been lighting the menorah candles in the windows of their homes, reciting the prayers with their families. But for the German guards, the SS and the kapos, Christmas is a day for feasting and drinking, not exterminating.
Christian festival or not, the girls are glad to receive a Christmas present of hot soup with noodles, vegetables and meat. It is an absolute feast, and for Cibi, it is also the first meal she has been able to eat unassisted. She hopes the food will give her the strength to get up the next morning and return to work unaided.