Page 26

TWENTY-FIVE

LUKA

The officer stops short as we arrive in front of a set of narrow, red-brick buildings joining at a point in the shape of a V where a line of people are walking into the building.

A large, open central hall blurs before my tired eyes, filled with rows of desks and groups of people waiting in a line at each.

The farther I walk inside, the danker the air becomes, the smell of sweat and pungent chemical cleaner swirl together, forming a nauseating stench.

Everyone watches each other, trying to understand what’s happening, as I am.

Again, I search every face, desperate to spot Mother among them.

But I don’t see her.

“Here, stand in this line,” the officer says to me, shoving me into the woman I’m standing behind.

“I’m very so?—”

I trip backward, a hand grappling the back collar of my shirt.

“I didn’t tell you to speak,” the officer says, shoving me forward again.

With a breath scraping my throat, I scan the area without moving my head, searching for Mother, but there are so many people in here, dressed in drab, dark clothing with their heads covered, it’s impossible to pick anyone out of the crowd.

The line moves at a slow place, and I can’t hear what information the clerk is seeking up ahead.

“She said next, did you not hear her, fool!” another SS shouts from ahead, striking a man across the back with his baton.

As time passes, the light within the open area dims, the sun faintly glowing through the barred windows.

Eventually, lights hanging from the ceiling flicker on, adding a subtle orange glow.

I’m next, waiting to step up to the tattered wooden desk where a woman sits with an open logbook spread out in front of her.

A black scarf conceals her head, and she’s dressed in blue and white striped garb, a Star of David pinned to her chest.

“Next,” she calls out, her voice hardly audible.

I’ve seen what happens to others if they don’t jump fast enough in response, so I move quickly, stopping within reach of the desk’s edge.

The woman keeps her head down, staring at the open book as the guard who pulled me inside steps around the desk to watch over what she’s doing.

“Name?” she asks, pressing the tip of her pen into a jar of black ink.

For a moment, I consider lying but the papers in my pocket will speak the truth.

I’m not sure a name makes any difference anyhow.

“Luka Dulski,” I reply, a tremor obvious in my annunciation.

She writes out my name then slides her wrist to the left, placing the tip of her pen in the next column.

“Date and birthplace?”

The scratching of pen on paper, murmurs of others in line and distant shouts make it difficult to recall simple information about myself.

My vision blurs for a moment as I speak, “The second of February 1918 in Warsaw, Poland.”

“Nationality?” she continues.

“Polish.”

“Occupation?”

The SS officer reaches over the clerk’s shoulder and points to a different column.

I can’t read the headings from this angle.

“Entertainer, singer,” he tells her.

The girl looks up at me as if questioning the truth.

The only truth between us is the red vein webbing across the whites of her eyes, the dark circles beneath her lashes, and her sunken, raw, chapped cheeks.

I nod, assuming she’s seeking confirmation.

“Religion?” she asks, her question softer this time.

By the matching withering armbands on both our sleeves, she can see I’m the same as her.

“Jew,” I reply, the word cloaking me like a contagious disease.

She jots down a series of numbers in the last column then reaches beneath her desk, retrieving a thin, rectangular scrap of white canvas.

Then she lifts a stamp and arranges the pieces of rubber with metal dials and presses the rubber onto a pad of ink then directly onto the white scrap of canvas.

“You are no longer who you were before,” the SS officer spews, needling me with cold, dark eyes—the stare of a raven carrying warning.

“Now, you have no name. Your number is your name. This is how you will be addressed and identified. Your family and home no longer exist. If you forget this fact, you will face severe consequences. Here, you are to work and follow orders, nothing more. There will be no rights or privileges. Your survival depends on you and your ability to follow instructions.” The officer speaks so fast, I’m trying to process everything he just said but it’s clear this new number represents me as an object, and no longer a person.

I take the scrap of canvas from the girl’s raw hand and clutch it within my grip.

The officer moves along without direction, and I scramble to stay behind him and his casual pace between lines toward a connecting corridor.

He stops walking just after passing an open door.

“Inside,” he says, pointing into the almost bare room where another line of people wait.

The tripod mounted camera centered in the room offers a blink of relief, but also, time to consider why an officer is escorting me around alone.

Everyone else is in a line of some sort.

A middle-aged man in a prisoner uniform shoves each person onto a bench, then snaps photographs from three different angles.

Without a word of exchange, he then grabs each person by the elbow and shoves them to the side to leave until it’s my turn.

I go through the same form of humiliation, and for what purpose?

It isn’t long before I’m following the officer again through another corridor to an exit where we briefly step outside to cross the grass-matted dirt into another building labeled: Sauna.

The new cement room holds dozens of naked men waiting to be sprayed down by metal shower heads protruding from the ceiling.

“Strip. Leave your clothes in the metal bins. Nothing shall remain on your body. All belongings should be left behind,” someone shouts.

The spray isn’t water.

It’s cold, burns, and carries an acidic stench.

Now naked, my scrap of canvas which was taken from me before being sprayed down, is handed back as I’m shoved into the next room where hair is flying around the room like falling snow.

Again, I wait, already coming to terms with what’s next.

A rough shave and all hair buzzed from my body.

Blood drips from several nicks down my neck and my face.

Another line forms toward the next door in sight and I follow it into another open space filled with rows of tables.

It takes a moment to understand what I’m looking at.

When it’s my turn, I sit on a wooden stool and reach my bare left arm out onto the table as the man across from me avoids eye contact while dipping a needle into a jar of ink before the first sharp sting and the grasp of rough hands squeezes at my wrist. The process of being poked over and over by hundreds of small dots of ink brings beads of sweat to the nape of my neck, the anger hurting me more than the sharp needle.

The coppery and acidic scent from ink and blood floats through the air and I refuse to look down at my arm.

Others around me grunt or utter a quiet groan through the pain.

I bite my tongue to bear the pain, until a metallic taste sloshes through my mouth.

Nothing masks the burn writhing up my arm.

Still naked, bare to the bone except for my identifying number etched into my raw skin, I’m escorted outside and through a set of iron gates with the words Arbeit macht frei arched over the top.

Barefoot, I walk in a line with others down a long row parting brick barrack blocks.

The roads are all rock and gravel, slicing my feet as we continue to parade through this compound, bearing our pale, limp bodies as we cover our privates for a sense of modesty in front of whoever is watching us.

By the time we stop in front of one of the identical buildings within the endless row, the sun is scraping along the horizon, a warning of impending darkness.

A man in a striped uniform pulls up to our side with a wagon full of roped bundles and proceeds to hand one to each of us.

I stare down at the load dropped within my arms, finding a striped uniform, a pair of clogs, a blanket, and eating utensils.

I then enter the open door into the building, finding a large, crowded space with rows of bunk beds, four rows high.

The first open space I spot is just a few columns down on the right and up on the third tier.

I place my bundled belongings down and retrieve the uniform and clogs, wasting no time in slipping them on and covering up.

The shirt loosely fits over my shoulders, and I futz with the waistband of the pants to try and roll it over, so they’ll stay above my hips.

This uniform is meant for someone twice my size—odd, seeing as all the Jews have been starved over the last two years.

I turn my attention back to the space I’ve claimed within the bunks, finding a middle-aged man lying on his belly to the side of my spot.

His arms are folded beneath his chin, and he stares at me with a scowl, but shifts a smidge to the side to make more room.

I climb up, careful not to jostle the first two tiers of beds.

I start on my back, realizing there are only two ways to find comfort here—on my back or on my belly like the man next to me.

My hips certainly wouldn’t thank me for putting my weight on them here.

My shoulder scrapes against the bunk above as I shift to my front.

I grab the blanket I received, and a matching striped cap falls out of the pile.

I slide it, along with the utensils and bowl, to the small amount of space next to my waist. I keep the blanket folded and pull it over my arms to rest my head, finding the first moment of rest since Mother and I were taken from Warsaw.

The voices around me grow louder through my stillness.

Whispers in Polish, Yiddish, and German slur into one indecipherable conversation.

Though, I hear snippets of statements of survival tips, work assignments, and warnings to stay away from the buildings where thick smoke rises into the air.

“First night is the worst,” the middle-aged man mumbles.

His eyes are half open, but my head is facing in his direction.

I was trying to look elsewhere to be respectful of his space, but I suppose that’s impossible here.

“Don’t ask questions. Do what they tell you. And pray none of them have a reason to talk to you.”

I let his words sink in and I nod against my rolled-up blanket.

“Thank you.”

My stare lingers on the wooden beams holding up the bunks across the row, the spots of dry blood painting a picture I can imagine far too easily.