The officer shakes his head slowly and speaks in a low voice to the other officers in his truck.
‘How did you escape?’ he asks.
‘The march, we ran away from the march.’
‘Do you know why you were marching? Where you were going?’
Cibi didn’t know – so much made little or no sense: the violence, the torture, the killing machines. She had learned never to question orders. She shakes her head.
‘They were going to use you to bargain for their freedom,’ he tells her, adding, ‘and other reasons too: to carry on working for them, but also to stop you telling your stories to the Allies. Thank God you escaped.’
The girls shuffle awkwardly from foot to foot; none of them wants to imagine more camps, more work, more brutality.
Cibi tilts up her chin and stands straighter. ‘It’s behind us now,’ she says. ‘We want to look forward.’
The Russian officer smiles and nods. ‘I agree. Will you show me around the house?’ he asks.
Cibi nods and steps aside to let him into the room, where the girls’ crumpled bedding covers the floor. After a tour of the house, the officer returns to the living room. ‘You are all Jews?’ he asks. The girls fidget and grumble, reluctant to answer: how has being Jewish ever helped them?
‘We’re all Jewish,’ Cibi says firmly, with a defiant nod of her chin.
‘I promise you will come to no harm,’ the officer says. ‘Not from me or my men. You have my word. I am also a Jew.’
Cibi informs the officer of their routine: the cleaning and collecting of vegetables, and the rounding up of cows in exchange for milk, bread and cheese.
‘I need to talk to this farmer,’ he tells Cibi. ‘We Russians need meat!’
Cibi witnesses the transformation of one of the outbuildings into a slaughterhouse for pigs, and introduces a new chore into their roster. They will now help to prepare food for the soldiers.
‘I know it’s pork,’ Cibi tells the group. ‘But we don’t have to eat it.’
‘I’d eat it,’ says Livi, giggling. ‘If there was nothing else, but it does stink.’
All this work has taken a toll on their clothes, and now the pungent aroma of pork fat is embedded in their tatters.
‘Help me sew these into dresses?’ Cibi corners Magda on her way to the farm. She is holding up old curtains she found in a cupboard, and has also uncovered an ancient sewing machine.
Now, every night, Cibi and Magda cut cloth to the measurements of the girls and soon they have functional dresses made of blue and red cotton. Eva dances in her new clothes, delighted. Livi thinks she is turning back into the little girl she was before the camps, despite the haunted expression in her eyes.
*
Another couple of weeks pass in the happy company of the soldiers, after which Cibi decides it’s time to move on. They are stronger now and they have new clothes and food. They pack bread, cheese and salami into the capacious pockets of their new dresses and head to the farmer’s house to say goodbye.
‘The Allies have taken over Brandenburg,’ he informs them, scrawling out directions on a scrap of paper. He hands it to Cibi. ‘That’s where you should go.’
The sun is shining on the girls as they head away from the house, waving a warm goodbye to the Russian soldiers.
As the afternoon grows hotter and then cooler, Cibi is on the lookout for a place to sleep. They find a barn. The next night they sleep in a cowshed. Cibi is grateful to the locals who donate food as they march on.
As they near Brandenburg, the group is joined by hundreds of others heading in the same direction, towards safety.
‘We are all survivors,’ Cibi tells her sisters. ‘We have all been beaten, starved and tortured, but look at us, we’re still moving, still alive.’
Brandenburg city has been reduced to rubble and the girls navigate the destruction as they make for the huge army base set up to assist and repatriate the dispossessed. It is here the sisters say goodbye to the six girls who joined them on their freedom march. The Polish girls will stay together as they try to find their way back to Krakov, and Eliana and Aria are now firm friends, so no one is on their own. Eva, of course, will remain with the sisters. It isn’t a tearful farewell in the end; together these girls regained their humanity, and that can only be celebrated.
*
Cibi gazes up at the blond soldier talking to her in English, a language she has no knowledge of, but she understands he is there to help her. Around her, broken girls fall to their knees, kissing the hands of American soldiers.