The Seven Year Dress: A Novel Read online

  I looked at him. Our fear commingled. Too afraid to speak, my jaw locked. I grabbed his hand. Tightly. We heard a cacophony of noises outside: shouted commands, chaotic replies, and “yes, commandant,” over and over. And crackling sounds. Through a few open spaces on the side of the truck, waves of warm air and smoke seeped in. They had set the farmhouse on fire. Peels of laughter told me that they enjoyed watching our hiding place—our home for four years—burn. The wind was knocked out of me. I felt a sense of grief too deep for tears. For all of this to have happened, Max’s fears about being followed must have been real. And if those fears were true, Max was surely dead. Who would protect us now?

  I heard more rapid-fire commands that I didn’t want to understand. Then the doors to the truck popped open. Four of the SS entered. Giving us disgusted looks, they sat on the bench opposite to us. I heard Commander Goliath and another voice in the driver’s compartment when the vehicle’s engine sputtered and started. We had traveled several kilometers over bumpy terrain before any of them spoke.

  “Too bad they aren’t still using this to gas the pigs,” said the young SS, who earlier had dragged me to the truck. He continued, directing his civil-sounding comments to Ben, “This truck had been used for gassing…you know, extermination, but, now that it’s old with cracks and holes on the sides, it’s no longer effective for, well, you know.” He smiled. “So we use it to gather pigs.”

  One of the more mature SS, sternly said, “Quiet! Do you want to start a panic when they get to the train?” He turned to Ben and me, and, with a repugnant, serpentine smile, said, “My youthful friend here misspoke. There is some mistake. A rumor. We assure you this relocation is in your best interest.”

  Best interest! Again, I wanted to grab the rifle out of his hands and impale him with it. I would gladly watch the life flow out of his body and the body of every single Nazi who had tortured and murdered my family, my friends, and my people. An invisible vise-like restraint compressed my body. Something hindered me from taking action. I knew that if I did anything but sit still and silent, it would be the last thing I ever did on this earth. Stay alive, my Papa’s loving words came through to me. I held on to that. I was alive. Ben was alive. The memories of the warmth from my Papa, my Mamma, and my family were all I had to hold onto. And I held onto them for dear life.

  The ride from Brandenburg seemed long; I tried my best not to think about the horrors of the camps Max had shared with us. I forced my mind to focus on what my eyes were seeing and my ears were hearing, and I used my senses to keep each moment as calm as possible. When one of them lit a cigarette with a match, I noticed their shiny boots and the different positions of their feet. The older officer’s legs were rigid with no space in between. I assumed he was the second-in-command. I feared him the most. He had an eerie, disingenuous expression when he spoke that unnerved me. A dog we used to have, Greta, popped into my mind. When Greta sensed danger, her hackles stood up. Just like with my dog, the hair on the back of my neck painfully tingled around that officer. My instincts told me what I needed to know. For now, I knew that as long as we kept quiet and remained submissive, we wouldn’t be killed. Again, my father’s advice came to me, no sass. The wisdom of my body melded with the wisdom from my Papa that lived on in me.

  After a while, the bumpy road smoothed to what felt like a conventional highway. The noise of driving over forest terrain quieted. I overhead what one of the SS whispered to another. “That idiot had to buy her a dress.”

  I knew from that comment how we’d been discovered. The thought of Max’s selflessness and generosity made my legs feel numb. Someone must have seen him buying it and reported him for doing it. Purchasing a dress when he didn’t have a female companion must have roused suspicion. Max’s simple act of kindness to lift my spirits brought those demons to our location. And brought an end to his life. There would be no leniency for a traitor to the Führer, especially for one helping Jews. All the years he served their cause would not afford him a reprieve. He had betrayed Hitler. The only saving grace was that Max’s personal secret remained safe with me; it never came back to haunt him.

  I was saddled with the facts about my dear friend when we arrived at the train station. The commander-in-charge put his face inches from mine. I was forced to smell his acrid breath and feel the slime as he spewed spittle when he said, “Oh yes, I forgot to mention that your friend, Mr. Müller, is dead.” Once again, he opened the lapel of my coat. He looked me up and down then grabbed the material covering my breasts. “The Jew lover died for this!” He released his grip on my dress and grabbed my left breast. A cold shudder rippled through me.

  Although I sensed that Max was dead, hearing it from this monster, who glowered at me as if I was his next victim, made me weak in the knees. The world became blurry. As the environment spun around me, this hateful, pathetic excuse for a human being commanded, “Hold her up!” SS hands on my arms made my skin crawl. As if this wasn’t enough, the repulsive loathsome commander wouldn’t simply leave me to my grief and fear. He had to add one parting insult to rape me with his words. “A shame to lose a good Aryan specimen on a filthy Jew shoat.” It was the last thing I heard before I passed out.

  When I came to, I was on the ground with Ben by my side. The abhorrent SS, who transported us, were gone. As he helped me to my feet, I saw what must have been hundreds of men, women, and children standing at the station. SS used their pointed guns to motion confused, terrified people into already filled cars without windows. I thought of farmers herding cattle; only farmers were more humane with their livestock. The moaning and pleading coming from the opened doors were unbearable. “Please,” a hand reached out to the SS standing there, “water.” The poor man was slammed back with the butt of a rifle. The nauseating stench of urine and feces greeted Ben and me as the SS shoved us into a crammed compartment that would take us to God knows where.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I had heard from one of the other prisoners who had been on the train a couple of days that the train we were in had low priority. It would proceed to the mainline only after all other transportation was concluded. That meant we remained in the freight car in the layover yard for hours, stalled, in a suffocating, living hell. Many people had already been in there for two to three days on what was supposed to be a four-day journey. Along with the herd of people, some on death’s door babbling inaudible pleas for help from their parched mouths, Ben and I huddled together in the middle of the car. We bounced off others as we tried to inch our way to a side wall for support. Ben managed to rest an elbow on one of the sides. His other sweat-drenched arm clung to mine as the train began to move slowly.

  Max had mentioned the trains to us, the ones taking prisoners to occupied Poland. He told us that the maximum capacity proposed by the SS regulations was supposed to be no more than 50 per car. I didn’t believe that 50 people would fit in a railway car. How could I be so right and so wrong at the same time? These cars couldn’t humanely accommodate 50 people; yet there I was packed in with probably at least 70 men, women, and children. The SS gave us nothing: no food or water. The only latrine was a bucket. One bucket. Only those people near to it could use it. The rest of us were crammed in so tightly that we could barely move from side to side, let alone navigate our way to an overflowing container of human waste. Splatters of feces, puddles of urine and sprays of vomit covered the floors and the walls. And when there was no food left to vomit, bile came from the weak and dehydrated. A tiny barred window allowed for inadequate ventilation.

  Witnessing the collective terror, panic, and agony was torturous enough to leave scars on my soul that never healed. Worse still was living among the dead and watching the dying. I will never forget the man who gasped for air from lack of oxygen or the woman who froze to death from the elements. How could anyone freeze to death while virtually blanketed with warm, albeit sickly and unfamiliar, bodies? It was just one more Nazi savagery to boggle my already muddled mind. I’m sure many succumbed because the
y gave up. The weather probably pushed them over the edge. I hated the sounds of wheezing lungs desperately trying to breathe through the overcrowding. We were all suffocating. I panicked when a man pressed into my chest, knocking the air out of me. Were it not for Ben shoving him away, I might have been another body rattling on the floor.

  The worst of it was the stench of rotted flesh permeating the car. A mother cried into a bundle in her arms—the five-month-old deceased daughter she couldn’t abandon. As people weakened, they moaned for water that never came. Men searched through their pockets for anything that might pry a door open to throw the decaying bodies out and offer freedom to those who dared to jump. They were not successful in releasing anyone from that living coffin.

  As the train moved on, insanity beset a few who, like us, had lost everything. Among a couple of the incoherent prisoners was a loud and unruly man who went into an angry, babbling rampage on the man beside him. The victim fell unconscious after hitting his head on the side of the car. He died a day later. After two days of enduring this perdition, I went numb and fell into an abyss. I stared into the dead space below the ceiling of the car or into the other blank eyes that mirrored my soul.

  When one kindhearted man suggested we sing, a group of others yelled for him to stay quiet. This moving inferno on wheels was driving us all to madness. How much can the human spirit endure? How much worse could it get?

  I would know soon.

  The train stopped several days later. I was weak from the exhaustion of standing the entire time while leaning on Ben and trying to keep my thoughts off our destination: a death camp. Due to the cold, the lack of any rest, our unending fright, and the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions on that transport, Ben’s bronchitis returned. He didn’t have a fever yet, but if he didn’t get the proper care, I knew he wasn’t strong enough to survive whatever the Nazis had in store for us.

  The doors of the car finally opened, blinding us with light even though the day was gloomy. Officers barked orders for us to get out, which was no easy task. We were a feeble, shaky, drained, brittle lot. Our path out of the car wasn’t clear, either. We stumbled over corpses in various stages of decay on our way out of the car.

  Ben and I were scarcely able to move our feet forward once upon solid ground. Guards used their rifles to push us into different lines. When the lines were formed to their satisfaction, the guards ordered us to march. We stayed in formation, but our pace was sluggish—not the brisk, enthusiastic stride of Nazis on the hunt. We were the hunted. Captured, our bodies were hunched over from agony, fatigue, sorrow and fear. Wanting to be invisible but ever the curious girl, I looked up briefly. Ahead I saw a gate. The gate to hell. Over the entrance were the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI (work sets you free). Max had mentioned that this was part of the false public relations campaign—the deceitful way of promoting fictitious hope that hard work would result in our liberation. Would a real work camp offering freedom have needed such a high, perilous barbed-wire fence surrounding it? The disgusting truth was that the internees were damned to slave labor or death. I quickly lowered my heavy, tired head. I knew in my soul I’d do what I needed to stay alive.

  I was fairly certain we were in Poland, but I wasn’t sure which living cemetery of a camp we were entering. Someone whispered, “Auschwitz.” Max’s words wrapped around my brain, the main camps doing the gas experiments, and when prisoners arrived there they were assigned a camp serial number. I later found out that it was strategically located at the crossroads of many Polish cities; so relocating Jews from German-occupied Europe as well as Germany was quite convenient. The Nazis designed the concentration camp to maximize efficiency in their efforts to transport and exterminate millions of Jews.

  Looking at the fearful faces, the grief-stricken mothers holding onto their children, and father’s pleading for mercy for their families, I wondered how much these people knew. They didn’t have someone like Max, who kept us informed of the atrocities. And because of the geography, in a large isolated area, the news from the death camps would be kept from the outside world. It was the Nazis concerted effort to hide what they were doing. Given the magnitude of these facilities, these sadists would have to locate them in remote areas. Max had said Auschwitz was large—at least 40 square kilometers on the inside and five kilometers surrounding the perimeter. Dear old Max, he was right about everything. I noticed some two-story buildings, which I assumed were for the SS. Other buildings looked like austere brick barracks.

  Prisoners moved to where the SS officers divided people. We were still several people back, but we were able to witness a mother clinging to her young child. As they pulled the small boy from her grip, he screamed, “Mamma!” The unthinkable happened when, in hysterics, she ran to her son. They were both shot and dragged away like sacks of potatoes. Tired, weak men and women gasped and cried as children clung to them. One man ran to the SS yelling, “Monsters!” The guards made him an example of what kind of behavior they wouldn’t tolerate. He was clubbed until his head burst open and gray substance oozed from his nose. The last few people ahead of us moved to the front of the line. When a father was separated from his teenage daughter, he spat on one of the officers. Both the man and his daughter were shot in the face as the rest of us stood there in shocked disbelief.

  Ben’s cough turned into dry heaves.

  The violent mental and emotional strain was too much for me to process. I shut down as human beings were divided into two lines: the old, the young, and the infirmed in one, and the able-bodied in the other. Feeling numb, I watched as a tall, sinister SS officer pointed a rifle at my brother and said, “You!”

  My very weak, dehydrated, ill brother tried to straighten his slumped body to look at the man. “Yes, sir,” his voice cracked.

  “To the left,” he ordered.

  Ben’s eyes pleaded when his mouth mumbled, “Please sir, may I stay with my sister?”

  For asking a simple question, my brother, my beloved Ben, was shot. His blood splattered on my dress. My dress: the reason we ended up in this hellhole. Frozen in shock, I stood silently, shaking, too dehydrated for tears, while my brother’s death squad stood laughing and making jokes.

  My brother’s executioner turned to me. I mouthed, “I sew.”

  “Speak up!”

  I tried to moisten my cracked lips with my parched tongue. I repeated, “I sew clothes.”

  “To the right,” he pointed. I received the tattoo on my left forearm. My life was spared for now. But for what? My father’s words no longer held meaning because my life was now unbearable.

  Would I live to feel differently?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After being branded, I was stripped naked. A wave of sharp indignation knotted my stomach as my feminine modesty and virtue were robbed from me. I averted my eyes off the horrible sight of women marching naked in front of laughing, jeering SS. With Nazis watching on as if Auschwitz was a brothel, we lined up at the next station in our slaughterhouse. It was where our heads were shaved.

  I wanted to grab the razor out of the dispassionate hands that butchered my head—the hands that stole the last of my femininity—and treated me worse than a sheep being sheared. Stroke upon stroke, I listened to that awful buzzing sound. I felt my identity fall away with each pass of the razor. Any objection from me would result in a beating or death, so I stood there and let them obliterate…me. Would there be anything left of me worth saving after this?

  Patches of my beautiful, brown, curly hair still clung to my body as I was marched to the shower. I grabbed hold of a lock and held on to the strands tightly as the ice-cold water ran over my body. I wept as the last wisps of my hair washed from my hand and circled the drain.

  After the shower, I was given an ugly sack to wear as a dress and wooden shoes. No undergarments. I no longer felt like a woman in the bleak, dull, beige dress I had to put on. It was the first time in my life that I hated a dress—if it could even be called a dress. With its circular slit for my head, flaps
for sleeves and piece of material to wrap around my waist, this garment truly was a sack. I despised how that ugly prison uniform looked and what it represented: Nazi criminal indecency and injustice. I wanted to burn that symbol of hatred and persecution. I wanted to grab back the dress Max had given me, but it coexisted somewhere in a pile of prisoners’ clothes the Nazis had confiscated.

  The next stop was a line where prisoners received water. A scrawny man gave me a half-filled tin cup.

  Grabbing it with both hands, I gulped down all of it. Nausea from dehydration forced it back up. I felt a hand on my back. I jumped.

  “Sips. Take sips.” Her voice was gentle.

  I lifted my head and saw a kind, soft face with worn wrinkles and bloodshot eyes. She stood by my side and told the man to please refill my mug. “Try again, but slower, my dear.”

  This time, it stayed down.

  Exhausted and traumatized, I cried, but no tears fell from my dried-out eyes. I tried to mutter, “Thank you.” A sigh was all I could manage.

  The woman smiled. “I understand,” she said. “My name is Ester.”

  I grabbed her hand, and, with the little energy left in mine, gave it a squeeze. Still holding my hand, she led me to a brick building that looked as if it was constructed hastily and with few resources. There was no insulation, heating, or sanitary facility. A bucket was used for elimination. My feet sunk into the marshy ground as she walked me to a hard, wooden-framed bunk bed. Atop it was a filthy straw mattress stained with urine and feces. My knees buckled. Ester grabbed hold of my arm and steadied me.