While they are sipping from mugs of fragrant linden tea and staring at the mess around them, the Hlinka arrive.
They are to report to the train station tomorrow morning.
The time has come.
CHAPTER 19
Auschwitz-Birkenau
March–September 1944
C
ibi and the other girls working in the post office receive new orders. Handed dozens of postcards, they are instructed to write to the relatives of the family camp’s residents informing them that the prisoners are alive and well, and ask that they send food.
Cibi knows these prisoners are almost certainly dead.
‘Why are we doing this?’ Cibi asks the post office supervisor, a severe woman with little interest in answering questions.
‘You know better than to query your orders. Just get on with it.’
That night, Cibi tells Livi of the strange task she has been assigned. She fears that the numbers being sent to the gas chambers are increasing, and wants to know if Livi has heard rumours, or read any of the messages she delivers. Livi considers Cibi’s agitation. By now she knows that Cibi’s work is very different to her own. While Livi just delivers messages around the camp, her sister is confronted on a daily basis by the reality of the death all around them. Hundreds, thousands of letters and parcels, are being delivered for the ghosts of the dead.
Livi explains that she is careful never to so much as glance at the messages she delivers, not even those without envelopes. It is far safer to remain ignorant, however often she might be tempted to look.
‘Keep your eyes open, little sister. I have a bad feeling,’ Cibi tells her.
*
The next day Livi watches the transfer of prisoners, with their possessions, from the family camp to the recently cleared quarantine camp which sits next door.
Livi tells Cibi this dark news. And there’s more. She also saw a doctor enter the camp and leave with several small children.
‘A doctor?’ A nondescript man in a white coat who is often seen around the camp, trailing groups of very young children, springs to Cibi’s mind. Surely not him.
‘I think it was him, Cibi,’ Livi whispers. Neither of them wants to think about Josef Mengele or the terrible rumours that follow him all over Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Twenty-four hours later, all of the family camp prisoners are dead. The sisters do not speak of it again. They cannot. They hold each other close at night, and each day pray that they will be together again that evening.
*
Spring eases into the summer and the sisters’ routine doesn’t falter. They work, eat what they can and sleep. It is as though they have lived there for ever. But while the warmer weather makes their lives easier, it does nothing to diminish their awareness of the crematoria chimneys spewing their ash every morning, as they line up for rollcall. There is much about the camp they take for granted: the meagre food rations, the stealing, the random beatings – but they will never get used to the smell of the smoke. Part of their routine, an unspoken part, is to ask themselves, every day, Is today our last day on this earth? The answer comes at bedtime, as they cuddle together for comfort. We survived another day.
The trains continue to arrive several times a day, hauling their human cargo into Birkenau. Livi, from her position at the gates, witnesses families from Hungary disembark, only to be marched straight to the gas chambers and crematoria. The trucks trundle their possessions to the Kanada.
Cibi’s new supervisor at the post office, SS officer Elisabeth Volkenrath, treats the girls well, often allowing them to share amongst themselves the food parcels destined for the dead. Volkenrath is young and very pretty: her long, strawberry-blonde hair hangs in a single thick plait down her back, and she has blue eyes and full red lips. Cibi notices the other officers staring at her, but she only has eyes for her husband, SS officer Heinz Volkenrath.
One morning, Cibi catches him entering her office and, shortly afterwards, she hears Volkenrath giggling. When Heinz opens the door to leave, he is adjusting his clothes.
‘We are just married,’ Elisabeth Volkenrath whispers to Cibi, after he has left.
Cibi is wary of her apparent openness. This officer has as much blood on her hands as any in Birkenau or Auschwitz. But now she winks at Cibi whenever Heinz visits. He isn’t so keen on Cibi, however, glaring at her whenever he comes calling. And Cibi despises him back. One day, she chucks the newspaper he had casually dropped on her desk before entering Volkenrath’s office into the small stove in the corner of the room.
‘Has anyone seen my paper?’ he asks, pulling on his jacket after another ‘session’ with his wife. Volkenrath hovers, smiling stupidly at his shoulder. ‘I put it down here.’ He points at Cibi’s desk.