You said you wanted to know

(spoken)

My first husband was named Lajos. I wish I had a picture to show you, but ..I will get to that later. Our parents were friends; it had been assumed since we were very young that we would be married, and it did not turn out so badly. He was very smart, very educated, and he was good friends with my brother. Stephen. You met Stephen once, you must have been nine or ten. It was 1955. He went to the spelling bee that you won, and you were in the newspaper for it. Stephen was very proud of you, that you beat that Hirsch boy. He killed himself soon afterwards, do you remember? But this your life, not mine. This is not what you wanted to know.

Lajos and I had a daughter. She was very beautiful, and very smart, like him. He would say that she looked like me and thought like him, that she was the best of each of us. She learned to talk so quickly, and she was the youngest in her class. She was just learning to read. Her name was Anna.

Before I begin, you know that this is not a story I enjoy telling. I never thought you would want, need, to know. I don't understand you, I never thought I would tell you. Many things have changed.. This is not a story my mother would have told me. So.

When the Germans came, we knew about it a day or two beforehand, by radio. Anna and I would stay with a friend, a butcher. Someone we thought the Germans would understand and trust. Lajos would go from place to place, in hiding and at night, and throw Molotov cocktails at the tanks. We heard about him for a while, that he had killed some soldiers, and that he had almost been caught once in a barn somewhere, that he met with some of the leaders, and then we stopped hearing things. In those days, of course, once you didn't hear anything, you knew what it meant, and you stopped asking, and after a while you stopped hoping.

Four times, the Germans came to the shop, and they didn't find us. We were through a panel in the freezer, so it was always cold - it was not a well insulated panel. And when they opened the door to the freezer, they did not see the panel or even come into the freezer until the fourth time, and I thought we would be killed. But the butcher was a good man, and spoke of how the Jews always stole his money, damn their stinking souls, and the Germans left.

It was only one room, back there. I think it was originally for storage, things that did not have to be frozen, but only cold. We had many blankets, old ones, and when they fell apart we would make new ones from the scraps of fabric and stuff them with pieces that were too small. Or I would. Anna would read, read everything. Newspapers full of lies that she did not understand and words that she had to have me say for her, novels that the butcher bought for her, anything. We did puzzles, things like the Eiffel Tower or a field in summer, with thousands of pieces sometimes. And we always kept the radio on, hoping.

The fifth time the Germans came to the shop, they found us, and they put us all on a train- the butcher, his wife, Anna, and me. Their son got away, he heard about it at school, but none of us had much hope for him. All of our hope was for us. What they would do to us and where we would go. The butcher and his wife were allowed to pack suitcases, but Anna and I were not. That is why I do not have a picture of Lajos to show you, or a picture of Anna. The train was full of people, it was hotter than we had ever thought of behind the freezer, and Anna got sick. I made her sit on my shoulders so she could breathe out the little windows at the top of the car, and look out. That helped, and she was not so sick. The butcher's wife was sick too, and she was pregnant. How she would bring a child into the world we were in then, I found out later, but it was so strange at that time. The train-car was filling up with waste, too, since people had nowhere to go, and it made her worse. We had nothing to eat, nothing to drink. We were only in the train for two days, other people I met were kept four, five. Still, though, she was too sick to even stand.

When we got to the camp, Janos and I - Janos was the butcher - Janos and I carried her out so that she could get air. The Germans had us all line up, shouting schnell, schnell. She leaned on my shoulder. Anna hid behind me. I hope she wasn't watching. One of the Germans saw that the butcher's wife was pregnant, and he made her walk out of the line and stand where we could all see her. She looked so sad and weak, and they made her take off her jacket and her dress, and there she was without any dignity. She was maybe six or seven months along, and the German shot her belly. Three men were holding Janos back, talking to him. She fell to her knees, and then over, on one side. With her body lying there and the blood running over the dirt, the Germans divided us into men and women. The children went with the women, but I heard that this was unusual. Other children had been taken from their mothers, so the women would sometimes be jealous of me, and would sometimes pity me. Anna started to cry.

When I am done, I want you to tell me why you want to know this. Does it make your life more complete to know mine? Do I answer your questions on what meaning life can have? Will you not feel unhappy for yourself any more, if you know there is always another bad thing that has not happened? Not now, tell me later. Now that I have started, I have to go on.

The Germans marched us to a long, low building, and we thought they were going to shoot us all, like they had Janos's wife. It might have been better for some of us if they had. They made us take off all our clothes, which I think were burned, and they handed us dark, sticky soap, which they said would get rid of lice. You see, I know you have heard the stories about the showers, but noone survived those, so this was a normal shower. It was like the fire showers they have in buildings, little things close to the ceiling that spray cold water everywhere. When we came out of the shower they handed us clothing without looking at the size. There was a pile of shirts, and a pile of skirts, and a pile of shoes, each pair with the laces tied together. It felt strange wearing dead people's clothing. They put the numbers on our arms, and this is my scar, here, where it was removed. It did not heal well, of course.

Then we went to the building we would sleep in. Anna and I shared a bed with a woman named Eva. She had been there for five weeks and had made what could be called friends with the woman who handed out soup every day for lunch. It was very weak soup, with only potatoes and some celery, so most people got only water. Eva, as a friend, got a lump of potato, and after Anna and I were introduced, we also got lumps. I tried to give my soup to Anna, but she did not like it and would not eat. We also got stale bread that the Germans considered themselves too good for. That was what Anna ate.

We were set to digging graves. If one of us got lazy, the Germans would beat us and shoot at us. If we stepped on the grass, the Germans would shoot to kill. They were building a new oven, so that they could later make us do more things for their war machine instead of digging graves, but it was only being built up from the ground, with a few rows of brick outlining the rooms. The men were building it, not the women.

The third day I was there, a German officer saw me and made me come to his quarters. Eva would look after my daughter, she said, and I went, and he had sex with me, and then he made me go back to my building. Eva guessed, of course. She said that I should make him give me things, blankets or cigarettes, but what could I do? As a woman, as a Jew in Dachau, I was more powerless than anyone in history. I could not make him do anything, and so, this went on for some time. I was glad Lajos would not know about it. Eva would watch Anna while I was in the officer's quarters. His name was Carl, but that is not important.

He did not beat me often, and I think he kept me from being beaten by the other Germans. Eva often had bruises, and they liked to kick Anna because she would whimper like a puppy. The Kapo in charge of my building often beat me, and the other women would cheer. A Kapo was a prisoner who was in charge of other prisoners. They called me a traitor, and a whore. If I had not gone the German officer would have had me shot. He knew my number, and at any point he could have put me among those called every morning to be killed. The other women could not have me shot, so I let them beat me. It was the least of two evils, like many things were then.

Anna grew out of the shoes she had been given, and had to work barefoot. She was made to dig graves, like the rest of us. They did not worry about health hazards, and she cut her foot on a broken glass. It got infected and she went to the infirmary, but they did not treat her for it. She laid on a bed for four days, and did not say anything because there was milk to drink and rice to eat in the infirmary, and there was no milk or rice anywhere else, and milk and rice and pain was better than no milk or rice or pain. Then a nurse looked at her foot and put yellow, stinging ointment on it, and a white powder. She came back when the wound had healed over but was still swollen and purple. The next day she had a fever and was sweating. Two mornings later she was dead. Even if antibiotics had been there for her, they would not have given any to a Jew.

Then, Eva did not have to look after her any more when I went to the German officer's quarters.

I saw Janos once, through a fence, while I was walking back from the German officer's quarters. He looked like bones with paper stretched over them, and I thought that I must look the same. I had stopped menstruating long before, of course, because I was too thin. We all were. Imagine, a camp full of women menstruating! But it was not something we had to think about. I had seen him fat and healthy, teaching his son soccer, before the war, and he was bones and his wife was dead and his son was probably in another camp by now, or in a ditch, with maggots.

I am trying not to give you all the details. You have seen the pictures, I know you have, because they were in Time magazine and they won awards. A few were already in your eighth grade World History textbook. You have heard other people's stories. We went to the museum in Washington, and you went inside and saw the photos and the models. You know what happened. Why do you want to hear it from me? You cannot enjoy hearing this. I am not done yet, but soon I will be, and then I want you to tell me why you want to know.

The German officer started to trust me, in a way. He gave me food, cheese, vegetables. Real chocolate, once. I did not tell Eva about it because the women would have been jealous, and beaten me. I think he felt bad that the Kapo and the women beat me, and it was his fault, but I could not say that, then. Once he was kind, and asked if there were enough blankets for Eva and me to keep warm. When I told him there were not, he gave me five of his own, rough grey wool, and I gave four of them to the Kapo. Then she stopped beating me.

The food, though, I did not share. I ate everything he gave me right away, I ate the vitamin pills he could not swallow. The way they made us work, every day I could have eaten a whole cow. But of course the German officer did not have a whole cow. He might have shared it with me, if he had. He was kinder than you might think of a German, and that is important.

I was not as well fed as the German officer, but I was much better off than the other Jews. He celebrated christmas, of course, so without thinking he gave me a hair brush and a mirror for christmas in 1944. I had not seen my face since we had been found in 1941, over three years. I remembered Janos, how papery he had been, and I was not so papery. I was not so papery at all. The food, and the vitamin pills ...The German officer may have saved my life. I want you to know that, because that is important in what I am going to tell you.

In April 1945, we were liberated. Most of the Germans left in the days before. The German officer left five days before. He touched my face when he said goodbye in a way that made the other Germans call him a traitor as well as me. Eva and I could not go home, we had no home, so we made ourselves look pretty with my mirror and hairbrush. They invented a name for us: Displaced Persons, making us sound like too much water in a bucket. We found soldiers who felt sorry for us and married them, quickly. Hers was an English pilot in a hospital. Mine was an American officer, the man who for the fifty-four years of your life you have called your father, and the man who for the rest of both your lives you must, must continue calling your father. He knows, of course, but he has treated you as his child, and he has loved you as his child, even though we spoke of you as 'early' to his family.

Is that what you wanted to know? You must continue calling him your father, for his sake. It has been too long, it would kill him for things to change, now. He is very proud of you, he considers you his own child. You do not have to think of him as your father, if you would rather have the German officer. They are both good men, kind men.

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