Continued - From Quest for Eternal Sunshine, Chapter 9—Liberation. Pages 39-42 

Jews weren’t allowed to leave the ghetto. When our family began to starve, Bronia had to become a smuggler again. She would sneak out of the ghetto to purchase a live chicken from a neighboring farmer, and then sneak back in, holding it under her shawl. It was a huge risk every time. One noise from the chicken would have alerted the German soldiers and given her away.

My family could never afford to eat the chickens. Instead, they sold them on the black market to get money to buy potatoes and bread, which stretched much farther.

In August of 1943, all the Jews in Sosnowiec were rounded up and packed into cattle cars that took them to Auschwitz. When the train doors opened, German guards with guns, clubs and fierce dogs began screaming, “Out! Out! Quickly! Leave everything behind. Move faster!”

Bronia, Rutka, and Macia were told to go to the line on the left that led directly to the gas chambers. Mila was sent to the line on the right that headed to the forced labor concentration camps. But instead of going where she was told, Bronia ran after Mila.

Immediately upon arrival, my sisters were stripped naked. Male inmates shaved their entire bodies until they were bald, and then their arms were tattooed with prisoner numbers.

Mila and Bronia worked long days on only one bowl of watery soup and a slice of bread made mostly from sawdust. In the barracks, they slept crowded together on wooden planks with just one thin blanket for many women to share, despite the freezing Polish winters. There was no way to get clean, and only one latrine for hundreds of people. Before long, Mila and Bronia became skeletons covered with lice and sores from scratching.

After a few months, Mila came down with typhus and could no longer do heavy labor. She was sent to the Revier, the barracks where sick people were housed in terrible conditions without any medical care. Bronia went with her.

Then a day came when all of the sick and dying prisoners were to be collected and sent to the gas chambers. Bozenka—the Jewish nurse in charge of the barracks who had been one of only three prisoners out of a thousand to survive her transport from Slovakia—risked her life to save Bronia. She pretended that Bronia was her sister so that she had a reason to keep her off the list of those being taken away.

Bozenka continued to care for Bronia when she became so sick with typhus that she went into a coma for a long time. Bronia was still terribly ill during the Death March in January 1945. Bozenka carried Bronia whenever she couldn’t keep up to prevent her from being shot. After liberation, certain that Bronia was an orphan with no family remaining, Bozenka brought her home to Slovakia and enrolled her in school there. She would have kept Bronia forever if our cousin hadn’t found her.

***

Bronia and I had suffered terribly and lost so much that neither of us could put our pain into words, not even to each other. We’d both witnessed unthinkable horrors that could never be erased. The memories of what we’d lost forever were both precious and torturous. Except for each other, everything we loved had been destroyed. Parts of us had been destroyed as well.

We had no idea how difficult it would be to live with what had happened. Bronia felt guilty for being alive. She couldn’t stop thinking about Mila or our two baby sisters dying alone in the gas chamber without her there to hold their hands.

Neither of us knew how to move on. We had nothing to look forward to, just anguish and devastation to run away from. Although we’d survived, living without a home or family in a world full of unfathomable cruelty did not feel at all like a triumph.