Cibi picks up the note it came with and her face falls. ‘Stop! Stop!’ she says. ‘Don’t touch it.’
The girls turn their puzzled frowns on Cibi. ‘Listen,’ she says, holding up the note. ‘“If you eat the contents of this package, you will die,” it says. Put it back in its box,’ Cibi instructs Magda. ‘And no more food is to be eaten from packages.’
*
The mood in the camp is tense as the new year approaches. The girls are ordered to remain inside after the Christmas celebrations. The bombing they hear throughout the day and night is getting closer. Planes fly over the camps, and missiles are dropped. On occasion, the girls huddle together, their hands over their ears as the shelling outside grows louder. And once, even the officers joined them, charging into the block and slamming shut the door, hunkering down in an opposite corner with the same terrified expressions on their faces as the girls.
On 3rd January, the girls venture outside for the first time that year. The sun is shining and the sisters turn their faces to the sky, when a loud banging suddenly breaks out nearby. They follow the sounds to a courtyard, the same courtyard where Cibi and Livi were lined up when they first arrived at Auschwitz. A figure is staring up at the structure being erected. It is Volkenrath.
‘We’re making our last stand,’ she cheerfully tells the sisters.
‘What is it?’ asks Cibi.
‘Don’t you recognise them? They’re gallows.’
Cibi steps back, and then Magda and Livi do the same. The banging gets louder as planks of wood are added to the construction.
‘You’re going to hang us?’ she gasps.
‘They’re not for you. They’re for the four girls who smuggled in explosives to blow up Crematoria Two. Tomorrow they will pay for their crimes. And you will get to watch.’
Cibi and her sisters look at the gallows, but specifically at the four hooks from which the nooses will be strung.
That evening, the girls are warned that they are not to look away when the ‘criminals’ are hanged. They are to watch every second of it, or they too will die.
Sleep does not come easily that night, and equally, breakfast is hard to swallow the next morning.
The blocks stand together in long rows in front of the now completed gallows. They don’t have to wait long before the girls, their faces scarred and bruised, are marched up the wooden steps.
For several minutes an SS officer berates those watching. He repeats the threat that any girl who looks away will be the next to be hanged. Cibi notes the strong presence of SS officers, their eyes trained not on the gallows but on the girls.
Cibi stands between Magda and Livi, holding their hands. They have been told that the four girls smuggled the powder explosives in under their fingernails, and in the hems of their dresses, from the ammunition factory where they worked. The explosives had been received by those in the men’s camp who planned to carry out the detonation, with the aim of the destruction of one of the Nazis’ killing factories. Cibi wonders what happened to the men, but only for a moment, because now they have to focus on these young women, whose courage and acts of resistance have cost them their lives.
‘Think of Mumma,’ whispers Magda, as the four girls are instructed to climb onto the chairs beneath the hovering nooses. ‘Do you both remember when we took the linden tree leaves home in the sheet? How thrilled she was?’
Both Cibi and Livi nod slowly, their eyes trained on the ropes being secured around the girls’ necks.
‘Fill your minds with her face. Her beautiful face.’ Magda’s voice catches.
‘She made us tea with the fresh flowers, didn’t she?’ says Cibi. The chairs are kicked away and Cibi gasps but she doesn’t look away.
‘It was bitter,’ says Livi. ‘The flowers should be dried first. But I remember the cake.’
‘It was a fruit cake .?.?.’ Magda begins, as the girls begin to twitch.
It is only after the girls have stopped twisting in the frigid air, and the senior SS officers have left, that the girls are allowed to return to their blocks. No one speaks. There is nothing to say.
For the next four days, the bodies of the dead girls swing from the gallows.
*
Cibi notes the new year: 1945. She wonders where they will be in January 1946 – surely not in this place. Maybe they will be dead. But, a couple of weeks later, the sisters and everyone else in their block are told they will be leaving.
‘Where?’ a voice calls, speaking out loud the question on everyone’s mind.