"Where are you, Rebecca?"
She slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were dead, her mouth open. "Ruda's gone with the Snowman!"
"Where are you?"
She spoke in an almost drugged monotone as she described sitting in the dentist's chair in the glass booth with the dark green curtain. Rebecca seemed old now and wizened, yet she could have been no more than four.
She spoke of seeing what they had done to Ruda, how they had forced her to look at her sister through the glass window.
"Papa took out Ruda's insides. He said it was because I was naughty. He cut off Ruda's hair, and put something in her belly, he said it was a baby like me. Papa said I was a bad girl because I couldn't remember... I tried, I tried hard to remember! Tried to feed her..."
That night, after that session, Rebecca refused to take her sleeping pill. She rang the bell by her bedside with insistence. She didn't want Maja, she didn't want Louis, she wanted to see Franks. By the time he came over from his house she was hysterical. As he walked in, she attacked him.
"Why are you doing this to me? Why? Why are you making me remember these things. Why? You are killing me!"
"No, no I'm not. I am helping you. These things happened to you. You have to face them, go through them."
"Why?"
"So that you may heal, leave with your husband, and be with your children. These events are real. You have been denied the remembrance, and all I am doing now is allowing you to recall the past. If you wish, I can stop. It is up to you."
She became quiet and sat on the edge of the bed. "I want to tell you something... about Ruda."
Franks rested his chin on his hands, waiting. Rebecca tugged at her blanket as she explained how she had seen Ruda through the glass. Then she looked up. "It was a mirror. I didn't see Ruda, it was a mirror."
"I don't understand, what mirror?"
"He cheated me, he lied to me." She twisted the blanket around and around in her hands in a wringing motion. Franks quietly asked who had lied to her and she let it out.
"Papa lied! Don't you understand? It could not have been Ruda saw.
Rebecca became visibly more and more distraught, and Franks suggested that she rest. She dismissed the idea with her hands. "No, no, listen to me. I understand now. I mean it wasn't logical, how could her hair have grown overnight? He didn't show me Ruda. It was me, in a mirror."
She went to the window and gripped the white painted bars. "I saw myself in the mirror. Not Ruda, but me. They gave me cakes, sweets, milk — and I ate everything, I saved nothing for her."
Franks put his arms around her shoulders. "You were a baby then. You cannot blame yourself, there is no guilt."
"There is. She hates me. I ate and ate, and she went hungry."
"Nobody hates you, and you should rest. Try to get some sleep. Rebecca?"
She sighed and flopped down onto the bed. "Rest? You open my mind and expect me to sleep at night?"
She closed her eyes. "The memories plague me, even when I'm alone. It's as if I cannot stop the past..."
"No matter how painful, that's good. What are you remembering?"
"A soldier, the one who took me away from the camp. He took my hand and asked if I wanted some chocolate. I demanded a piece for Ruda also because she was inside me. She needed a piece of chocolate, but... please, please don't leave me alone."
Franks assured her he would stay. He watched as she stared at her reflection in a small mirror, repeating over and over, "It was a mirror..."
Throughout the session, which lasted the entire night, Franks was able to piece together what it was she was desperately trying to release.
Gradually, as the telepathy succeeded beyond his first expectations, Mengele did not want Rebecca to see that her twin had not been rewarded or fed as he had promised, so he tricked her by placing a mirror across the booth's window. Thus, Rebecca did not see Ruda in the white dress, but she saw herself. Only now did Rebecca recognize the deception. She became consumed by guilt because she had not understood the horror of it.
Franks watched Rebecca wrestle with her own conscience.
"How could I know? And Papa was very pleased with me, he kissed and cuddled me and one of the Schutzhaftlings took me over to the warehouse to choose a new dress. I wanted to show off my new dress. We passed a group of inmates designated to clean latrines and they spat at me! One woman hurled mud at me... I remember the way they shouted after me. The children hit and kicked me and I cried and cried. I shouted back that when Ruda came back she would make them cry, too. They told me she'd gone with the Snowman; that she would never come back for me."
Two days after Rebecca had been given the new dress, the camp was liberated. In the mayhem that followed Rebecca and a number of other children from her ward ran into the main hospital wing. She ran from bed to bed looking for Ruda.
Ruda was skin and bone. Lice crawled like black ants over her shaven head. Her skin was paper thin, a deathly bluish white, and tubes full of congealed blood protruded from her stomach. A filthy bandage partially covered a jagged wound in her distended belly. Rebecca saw the pitiful bundle of rags, and perhaps had even known it was her sister, but she was so horrified that she ran away screaming, right into the arms of the young soldier. He held her tightly, he too was crying. He carried her from the ward, not wanting her to see the corpses, the dying.
They went past the glass partition, and, unwittingly, past the mirror... and Rebecca saw Ruda again — this time she was with her, in the soldier's arms. It was at this moment that Rebecca began to believe totally and utterly that she and Ruda were one.
Aware that the adult Rebecca had emerged at last, Franks talked with her about the events that took place at the time of the liberation. When Mengele realized that the Russians were advancing he hastened to destroy all the evidence of his experiments. With manic energy he cleared the camp of the dying; only days before the liberation, thousands lost their lives in the gas chambers. Mengele himself escaped after burning all the documents along with the corpses.
Never brought to justice, never paying for his crimes against humanity, the "Dark Angel" haunted the survivors. The young, whose minds he had twisted, whose bodies he had tormented and crippled, were taken to hospitals and institutions. Many siblings were separated in a desperate bid to give them the medical care they needed so badly. Ruda and Rebecca were just two of these tragic children.
Rebecca was given many carefully chosen books from Franks's personal library to help her understand fully those nightmare years. She had become calm, and often discussed her reading with the doctor. Then late one afternoon, Maja called to Franks at home saying that he was needed urgently at the clinic. Rebecca had become destructive, abusive, and violent. In a rage she had systematically wrecked her room, though she hadn't hurt herself or any of the nurses. As Franks hurried along the corridor, he heard her hoarse screams, and a terrible banging and thudding of furniture being hurled against the walls. He looked through the peephole and asked Maja to bring him a chair. He sat outside the room until the banging and the shouting stopped. Then he entered the room.
Rebecca stood by the window, exhausted. She was utterly drained, her eyes red from weeping. He knew instantly that this was no longer Ruda's rage. At last this was Rebecca's own blazing fury at what had been done to her. Finally, she had embraced her anger, and she was cleansed.
After almost a year of treatment, Franks thought that Rebecca was ready to be told the truth about Ruda. Louis was not allowed to be present, but he was nearby, as he had been throughout the entire year.
Sasha had stayed with him at the hotel during her school holidays; no nanny, just father and daughter. In the time together, he had tried to explain her mother's illness in terms she could understand. When Sasha asked if her mother was well now, Louis had hesitated, knowing Rebecca was at a critical point. Franks had cautioned him that learning of Ruda's death might cause a major setback. Considering her delicate state, the impact of hearing that Ruda had been alive and had now died could send her over the edge — an edge on which she had balanced precariously for years. Louis told Sasha that they would know very soon.