Thousands of people surged out of the rows and rows of barracks. The same SS guards I had seen at the kitchen lined us up for marching. “Anyone who doesn’t march quickly will be shot!” screamed a guard. He shot randomly into the crowd as a warning.
“Miriam, stay with me,” I whispered. We did not know where we were going. I held onto her hand very tightly. We worked our way into the middle of the group. It was safer than being in the front or the back where we might attract attention. If they started shooting, we would be surrounded by other people.
The crowd swept us along. Being pushed and jostled in that big crowd, it was a struggle to stay in the middle. The SS kept shooting randomly as they herded us. Around us as bodies fell to the ground, our fear increased. All of the children and the older people who had not been taken in the earlier marches were in this march. Later we learned that 8,200 people, including us, marched from Birkenau that night. In one hour, 1,200 were killed on the way. Only 7,000 people arrived at the barracks.
Forced by the wave of the crowd, we finally arrived back at the barracks in Auschwitz. It was still the middle of the night, but the brick buildings glowed in the klieg lights. Not knowing what would happen next, people started pushing hard, shoving to get inside the two-story building. Miriam and I also raced toward those barracks for shelter.
The SS guards inexplicably disappeared.
And somehow, I cannot remember how it happened, somehow in the shuffle I lost my twin sister.
“Miriam?” I called. “Miriam! Miriam! Where are you?”
I whirled around and around. She was not there, not anywhere!
As I began to panic, my heart clobbered in my chest, my breath rushed out of me in short bursts, my face burned hot despite the cold. My eyes, darting this way and that, filled with fearful tears.
“What if Miriam winds up in another barracks?” I thought.
“What if she gets transported somewhere?
“What if she gets hurt?
“What if she dies? Who would know to tell me?
“What if I never see her again!”
I left the two-story building and half walked, half ran from barracks to barracks, calling her name. “Miriam! MIRIAM! MI-RI-AM!”
I asked anyone and everyone whether they had seen a girl who looked just like me. “Her name is Miriam,” I told them, “Miriam Mozes. Please, please. Have you seen a girl named Miriam?”
Some kind people must have seen my desperation, my panic. They helped me by joining in, yelling her name: “Miriam Mozes! Miriam Mozes!” But no matter where I went, no matter where I looked, no matter how loudly I yelled, I could not find her.
After awhile, when Miriam did not answer, the people stopped helping me search. “Keep searching,” they urged me, pity in their eyes, their own exhaustion making their bodies limp. “She has to be here somewhere.”
“Miriam! Miriam!” I did not let thirty seconds go by without yelling her name.
While I saw pity and concern in some people’s eyes, other people did not care, could not be bothered. So many of them had had enough and did not have even an ounce of concern left for anyone else. “So you’re looking for your sister? Big deal! I don’t have anybody.”
I wanted to yell at them that Miriam was more than a sister. She was my other self. Our survival depended on each other! I could not stop to think about these hopeless souls. I had to find her. I had to.
I kept searching. “Miriam! Miriam!” I cried, my voice growing more hoarse, fainter. I was hungry and tired. But I did not allow myself to sit down to rest. I did not stop. Terrified, I went from one building to another, unable to give up my search. So many emaciated people, their thin prison garb clothing their pitiful bodies, were blocking my vision everywhere I looked. There seemed to be so many other people! They all looked the same to me because they were not Miriam. What could have happened to her? In one quick moment, dashing for safety, we had been separated! What had we done? I kept on.
My legs shuffling forward, my arms pumping to keep me moving, I did not let myself think of hunger, of the pains in my gut, of the dryness making my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. None of it mattered. “Miriam! Miriam Mozes! Miriam!”
Hours and hours, minutes and minutes, seconds and seconds—all piled on top of another in my panic. I had been searching for twenty-four hours. No Miriam! She could not have simply disappeared. I refused to accept that. Where was she?
I was stumbling about in a near-stupor of desperation and exhaustion when I went through yet another doorway.
“Miriam! Miriam Mozes! Miri—“
I bumped into someone about my height. “Sorry!” I was about to lurch past the person when it hit me: It was Miriam.
“Miriam! MIRIAM!” I fell into her arms. She fell into mine. “Where were you? I’ve been looking, looking, looking! What happened?”
“I have been searching for you!” she insisted. “What happened to you?”
We hugged, we kissed. Gripping one another we both slid to the floor to rest, crying and hanging onto each other.
“Eva, where were you?” she asked me through her tears. “We made such a mistake by racing. I thought I would never see you again.”
“No. I could not think too much about that. I had to find you!” I insisted. Then I admitted the truth to her. “I was desperate.”
I sank into her arms, feeling like it was Hanukkah. It was a miracle!
I had the strongest feeling of relief and love that I have ever felt in my whole life. I pulled away to look at her scrawny face and then put my arms around her again, holding her tight. Those twenty-four hours of searching for her had felt like forever. The more I held on to her, the more I felt sure we would never be parted again. “I am so glad I found you,” I told her, filled with more emotion than I could express.
Miriam reached out her hand. “Look!” she said. There she held a piece of chocolate. “Someone gave me this when I was searching for you.”
My eyes opened wide. She offered it to me.
I broke it in half, and we savored it in this sweetest of moments.
“From now on, always hold my hand,” I said. “Never let go.”
Miriam agreed. “Yes, we must never be separated again.”
“This is our lucky barracks!” I said.
“Then let’s take a little nap here,” Miriam said, sinking lower against the wall. “I’m so tired.”
Our hands tightly entwined, our bodies close for comfort, we shut our weary eyes. No matter what happened next, we knew we had each other.
CHAPTER NINE
For the next nine days Miriam and I were on our own, looking out for ourselves like everyone else was doing. We stayed in our lucky barracks with other sets of twins and adult women. My daily task was to find food for Miriam and me. Miriam’s feet were frostbitten from that long roll call at the gypsy camp, so she protected our blankets and bowls while I went organizing with two other girls.
The girls and I broke into Nazi storage places and buildings where the SS had lived. Twice we went into Nazi headquarters, a nice house with nice furniture. Before that, I had not known such a place existed. Luxurious living right in the middle of a Nazi death camp.
We saw food on the table that looked awfully good. It looked freshly prepared, delectable! In fact, it looked too good. I wondered why the Nazis would leave such good food behind. Was something wrong with it? Out of hunger I snatched some up. But just before eating it, I stopped and put it back. Later I talked to people in the camp who said that the Nazis had purposely left poisoned food so that prisoners like me would eat it and die.
Another time, the girls and I found huge containers of sauerkraut. We ate the food, and since we had no water to drink and there was no snow on the ground to melt, we drank the sauerkraut juice. In the kitchen, we grabbed bread. For us it was a feast.
By this time we were skillful at scrounging for something to eat. I had organized a scarf, and it became our most valuable tool. In a basement we came upon a huge pile of flour. I straightened out my square scarf and filled it with flour. Back in the barracks we mixed the flour with some liquid and baked a cake on top of the stove. It was like the unleavened bread the Jews had eaten when, in the Bible, they had had to leave Egypt in a hurry, with no time to allow the bread to rise. It was concentration camp Passover matzoh.
We still had very little food. I remember looking at my sister and thinking, “She’s like a skeleton. Do I look like that, too?” Whenever we found something, we gobbled it up till it was gone. There was no such thing as leftovers. At that time, we did not know that stuffing ourselves in our starved condition was dangerous. Some of the girls became bloated, and one of my best organizing friends died from overeating.
One morning another set of twins and I set off for the Vistula River, which was not far from camp. Armed with a couple of bottles and containers, we planned to crack the ice, lower the bottles, and fill them with fresh water.
As I stood on the bank of the river, I saw a girl my age on the other side. She had braided hair and wore a nice clean dress and a coat. On her back she carried a school bag, so I knew she was going to school.
I froze. I could not believe there was still a world out there where people were clean and girls wore braids with ribbons and nice dresses and went to school! Once, I had been that girl in nice clothes with ribbons in my hair on my way to school. Until that moment, I had thought everyone was in a concentration camp like us. But I realized then that was not true.
The girl stared at me. I looked down at myself wearing ragged clothes swarming with lice and a coat and shoes many sizes too big for me. I was hungry and scavenging for food and water. I do not know what she thought, but as I looked up again at her I could feel the fire of anger rising in me. I felt betrayed. Miriam and I had done nothing wrong! We were just little girls like her. Why were we in this situation while she was over there looking so pretty and clean and living a perfectly normal life? It was so wrong, so inconceivable to me. But there she was. And there I was.
After what seemed like a long time, she hitched up her book bag and walked away.
I stared after her, watching her leave, then watching the empty space where she had stood. I did not understand it. I could not understand it.
Then I felt a grumble in my stomach, reminding me of my hunger and thirst. I found a thick stick and jabbed it angrily against the surface of the icy river, cracking it until the hole was big enough. I lowered my bottle into the frozen river, turned it slightly sideways, and watched the bubbles of air escaping as it filled with clear river water. The image of the girl stayed in my mind—as did all my questions about the outside world.
When we had collected as much water as our bottles would hold, the twins and I returned to the camp. Once there, we made a small fire and boiled the water to kill any germs. Although we made the trip to the river a couple more times, I never saw the girl again.
We could not leave the camp because battles raged all around us. It was dangerous to wander outside. Guns fired indiscriminately and hit anyone in the way. We were in the middle of a battlefield. In the noise and confusion outside, we learned to dodge the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire. If we heard a certain whining sound, we had to run for cover because a bombshell was coming in our direction. Bursts of gunfire flashed and crackled from the bunkers where the SS had gone to hide after dropping us off at the barracks.
During those days, rumors spread that the whole camp was going to be blown up—the barracks, gas chambers, and crematorium—to cover up evidence of Nazi crimes. The SS forced sixty thousand prisoners to leave on a death march. Miriam and I and many of the twins stayed huddled in our lucky barracks. Thousands of other prisoners, too old and sick to march, also remained.
Later I learned from an eyewitness account that on the night of January 18, 1945, Dr. Mengele had paid one last call to the lab where we twins had been measured, injected, cut into, and bloodlet so many times. He took two boxes of papers containing records of the approximately three thousand twins he had experimented on at Auschwitz, stashed them in a waiting car, and drove off to join a group of fleeing Nazi soldiers.
For about nine days we heard continuous shooting and bombing. The boom-boom-boom of artillery fire rattled the windows in our barracks. There was talk in the barracks among the adults that we were soon going to be set free. Liberation. Miriam and I did not know what that meant. We hid inside and waited.
On the morning of January 27th, the noise stopped. For the first time in weeks, it was completely silent. We hoped this was liberation, but we had no idea what liberation would be like. Everyone in the barracks crowded at the windows.
It was snowing heavily. Until this day I only remember the camp being gray—the buildings, streets, clothes, people—everything dirty and gray. In my mind, a constant smoky pall hung over the camp.
On this day, sometime late in the afternoon, maybe about 3:00 or 4:00 P.M., a woman ran to the front of the barracks and started yelling, “We are free! We are free! We are free!”
Free? What did she mean?
Everyone ran to the doorway. I stood on the top step, huge flakes of snow falling on me. I could not see anything beyond a few feet in front of me. The snow had fallen all day, and the dirty gray of Auschwitz was now covered in a white blanket of snow.
“Don’t you see something coming?” asked an older girl.
I kept peering through the swirling snow. “No . . .” I squinted.
Then I saw them.
About twenty feet away, we saw Soviet soldiers emerging through the snow, approaching us in snow-covered capes and suits. They did not speak as they crunched through the snow.
As they came closer, they looked to us like they were smiling. Were those smirks or smiles? I peered closely. Yes, they were smiles. Real smiles. Joy and hope welled up inside of us. We were safe. We were free!
Crying and laughing, we ran up to the soldiers, crowding them.
A shout rose from the crowd: “We are free! We are free!” There was laughter and wails of relief all mixed together in a jumble of celebratory sounds.
Laughing themselves, some of them with tears in their smiling eyes, the Soviet soldiers hugged us back. They handed us cookies and chocolate—delicious!
It was our first taste of freedom. And I realized that my silent pledge the first night in the latrine to survive and walk out of the camp alive with Miriam by my side had become a reality.