transported.
Margarethe begins to sob.
‘I die a little more each day, not knowing what has
happened to my husband.’
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‘He was taken with you, wasn’t he?’ Olga asks, as though trying to solve the puzzle aloud.
‘We were taken together but sent to different prisons.
I never saw him again. I don’t know if he is alive, but my
heart tells me he is dead.’
‘What did he do?’ Anastasia asks, having not heard the
story yet.
‘He fell in love with me.’
‘That’s it? No, there has to be more.’
‘He’s from Prague; he is Czech. I call him my husband
but that is the problem. We dared to attempt to marry. I’m
from Moscow and we are not permitted to marry a foreign
citizen.’
Cilka’s heart has been racing throughout this whole
conversation. She has been here five years and the women
know she is Jewish and Slovakian, but nothing of her
arrest. Josie had gathered a bit of information from asking
Cilka questions, though Cilka never elaborated. She had
told her about her friends, like Gita and Lale, wondered
aloud with Josie about where they were, whether they
were safe. She had told Josie about her mother and sister
dying, but had not gone into the details. She is ashamed
that she had not told her everything. But if Josie had
turned away from her, it would have broken her all over
again.
The hut falls into silent contemplation.
‘It is time to take my advice again,’ Olga says to the
group. ‘A happy memory. Force it into your head and
your heart.’
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Bardejov, Czechoslovakia, 1939
‘Cilka, Magda, come here quickly,’ their mumma calls out.
Magda drops the book she is reading and hurries to the
kitchen.
‘Cilka, come on,’ she says.
‘In a minute, let me finish this chapter,’ Cilka growls
back.
‘It’s something wonderful, Cilka, come on,’ her mother
says.
‘Oh, all right, I’m coming.’
Holding the book open on the page she was reading,
Cilka stomps into the kitchen. Her mother is sitting at the table reading a letter. She waves the letter at the two girls.
‘What does it say?’ Magda squeals.
Cilka stays standing in the doorway, pretending to read,
waiting to hear the news.
‘Put the book down, Cilka,’ her mother says firmly. ‘Come and sit down.’
Cilka splays the book open on the table as she takes a
seat alongside Magda, facing their mother.
‘What?’ Cilka says.
‘Aunt Helena is getting married.’
‘Oh! That’s wonderful news, Mumma,’ Magda says. ‘I
love all your sisters but especially Aunt Helena, I’m so
happy for her.’
‘What’s it got to do with us?’ Cilka asks nonchalantly.
‘Well, my two beautiful girls, she wants you to be her
bridesmaids, to be part of her wedding, isn’t that lovely?’
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‘You mean we get to wear a beautiful dress and have flowers in our hair?’ an excited Magda asks.
‘Yes, you will both have the most beautiful dresses and
I’m sure Aunt Helena would love you to have flowers in
your hair. What do you think, Cilka? Do you want to be a
bridesmaid, have everyone looking at you and telling you
how beautiful you are?’
Cilka looks from her mother to her sister, trying to contain the excitement she feels. She fails. Jumping to her feet, knocking over her chair, she swirls around the kitchen,
trying to pull her straight dress out.
‘I’m going to be a princess with flowers in my hair. Can
my dress be red? I’d really like a red dress.’
‘That will be up to Aunt Helena, but you can always ask
her. She might say yes, but you will both have to wear the same colour.’
‘I’m going to tell Papa.’
Cilka rushes from the kitchen, looking for her father.
‘Papa, Papa, Aunt Helena’s getting married. She’s in love.’
One day, Cilka thinks, it will be my turn.
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CHAPTER 26
The winter of 1950–51 is particularly harsh. The hospital
is overwhelmed by severe cases of frostbite and other
weather-associated ailments. Amputations of lower limbs
become common, the survivors immediately shipped off
to places unknown, to free up the beds. Pneumonia claims
many; lungs weakened from constant inhalation of coal
dust no match for the infections that spread through the
camp. Cases of pellagra barely make it through the front
door – the near-corpses are taken with their peeling skin
and put on blankets on the floor near the entrance, ready
to be taken out to a truck when they expire.
Injuries increase alarmingly as frozen fingers lose grip
on tools; crush injuries rise as weakened prisoners are
slow to respond to the dangers of heavy equipment and
falling rocks.
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Any suspicion of self-harm is verified when doctors question the injured patients. They beg to be kept in the
hospital, or at the very least, released from outside work.
Some of these self-inflicted injuries are terrible mutilations
– among the worst Cilka has seen.
The ambulances struggle to transport the sick and
injured, many arriving piled into the back of trucks, or
carried in by fellow prisoners.
With the bleak weather, and Josie’s departure,
combined with the lack of hope, Cilka descends into
darkness, again. She refuses her breaks from going out
in the ambulance – picking up, dropping off and imme-
diately going back out, endlessly caring for the sick, the
injured and dying. She is becoming a stranger on the
ward.
The mine supervisors praise her bravery in never
refusing to go into a dangerous situation. They say her
size and competence make her the best person to enter
the mine to look for casualties. That word ‘bravery’ again
– Cilka still thinks she is yet to earn it.
‘Ambulance going out.’
‘Coming.’
Kirill, Pavel and Cilka race to the mine.
‘Not asking what we’re facing today, Cilka?’ Kirill asks.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Having a bad day?’ Kirill fires back.
‘Drop it, Kirill.’ Pavel comes to Cilka’s defence.
‘All right. It’s an explosion, so there will be burns as
well as broken bones,’ Kirill says.
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Neither Pavel nor Cilka responds.
Kirill shrugs. ‘If that’s the way you’re going to play it.’
* * *
The chaos is evident as they approach the mine. There is
the usual gathering of onlooking prisoners, mov
ing from
foot to foot in an effort to keep warm.
Cilka is out of the ambulance before the engine is killed.
‘Cilka, over here.’
She joins a group of guards. A supervisor appears.
‘Cilka, good to see you. Got a nasty one for you. We
were taking explosives into the central drift so we can
advance and one of them went off unexpectedly. We’ve
got at least six prisoners in there and about the same
number of guards. We’ve also got our explosives expert
in there. He was going to be setting the dynamite. He’s
the top man around here. Shit, there will be trouble if
he’s not all right.’
Cilka starts walking towards the entrance to the mine.
‘Pavel,’ she calls out, ‘bring the box. Come on, hurry
up.’
The supervisor runs after her, ‘Cilka, you can’t go in
yet. They haven’t declared it safe.’
She’s heard it all before.
‘And who’s going to declare it safe, standing up here?’
With no answer, Cilka turns to Pavel. ‘I can’t make you
come with me, but I’d like you to.’
‘Cilka, you heard the man – the walls could collapse
around us.’
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‘And get killed ourselves? I don’t think so.’
‘Fine, I’ll go in by myself. Hand me the box.’
Pavel holds out the box, hesitates, then pulls it back
towards himself. ‘I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?’
‘Probably,’ she says with a small smile.
‘Definitely,’ says the supervisor. ‘Look, I can’t stop you,
but I can advise against it.’
‘Come, Pavel, let’s go.’
‘Here, take the big lamp,’ the supervisor says.
As Cilka and Pavel descend in the lift, the lamp barely
penetrates the dust rising and swirling around them. They
step out into the darkness and inch forward for several
minutes before beginning to call out.
‘Can anybody hear me?’ Cilka shouts. ‘Call out if you
hear me so we can find you. Is there anybody here?’
Nothing. They walk deeper, getting closer to the blast
site as the ground underfoot becomes an obstacle course,
littered with rocks and boulders. The path narrows.
Pavel stumbles, slipping on a jagged rock and screams
as much from the fright of falling as from being hurt.
‘Are you all right?’
His string of expletives bounces off the walls. As the
echo dies down, they hear a cry.
‘Over here, we’re over here.’
‘Keep talking, we’re coming,’ Pavel calls out as he and
Cilka hurry in the direction of the voice.
Their combined lights illuminate several men waving
and calling to them. As they arrive, Pavel asks who is in
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charge. A guard sitting beside an unconscious man identifies himself.
‘Tell me who we have here and what you know of the
others,’ Cilka says.
There are six of them – three guards, two prisoners and
the explosives expert who is unconscious. Their helmets
were knocked off in the explosion, the lights went out at
the same time and they can’t see to tell how badly injured
they all are.
Cilka asks if any of them can stand and walk out them-
selves. Two say they think they can even though they are
badly hurt. One reports he has a broken arm as bone has
pierced his shirt and coat.
Using the lamp, Cilka and Pavel do a quick examination
of the men. The explosives expert’s breathing is ragged,
and he has a head wound. She asks Pavel to check on
another unconscious man. It only takes him a moment to
report that he is dead. He was one of the guards.
Cilka concentrates on the explosives expert. Besides the
head wound, he seems to have been hit in the chest by
something; a depression tells her he has several broken
ribs. Cilka has the able-bodied men help her lie him
straight. She administers a drip into his arm, and roughly
bandages his head.
‘What of the others?’ she asks the guard. ‘We were told
there were about twelve of you down here.’
The guard tells her to shine her light further ahead.
When she does, she sees that the path is mostly blocked
by rock from the explosions.
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‘They will be on the other side of that,’ he explains.
‘Have you tried calling out to see if any of them
respond?’
‘It will be a waste of time. They were about a hundred
metres in front of us, going ahead with the dynamite when
it went off. They would have taken the full force of the
first explosion, then there were two more. They didn’t
stand a chance.’
‘OK, I’ll let you report that when we get out. For now,
let’s see who is capable of helping other men walk out
of here. I need at least one to help Pavel carry our expert
here.’
‘I can help,’ the guard says.
‘I can help,’ one of the prisoners croaks, coughing.
‘Thanks.’ Turning to the other prisoner: ‘Can you keep
an eye on him?’ she says, nodding towards the injured
man. ‘He’s got a badly broken arm.’
‘I’ve got him,’ the prisoner answers.
Cilka holds the lamp up towards the way out and the
shuffling, wincing men start to follow it. Pavel, behind
her, eases his arms under the unconscious man’s shoulders,
taking a firm grip around his chest. Cilka picks up the
medication box, places the intravenous bottle of fluid on
top, and follows the workers along the long, claustrophobic
corridor and eventually into the open door of the lift cage.
She looks back. Through the sooty swirl of the lamplight
she can see that Pavel is struggling with the weight of the
man. She hears rumbling. No. Dislodged rocks break away spewing out clouds of dust. She hears Pavel scream.
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Cilka hears yelling, and the lever of the lift clicking up, the cage door slamming. She coughs and coughs, ears
ringing. She collapses, her head hitting the hard caging of
the lift wall, her body vibrating as it starts its slow ascent.
* * *
‘Cilka, Cilka, squeeze my hand.’ Yelena’s soothing voice
drifts into Cilka’s semi-consciousness.
Hand, feel hand, squeeze, she tells herself. The small
effort of obeying this command sends shock waves of
pain through her body and she lapses back into uncon-
sciousness.
* * *
The sound of someone crying out stirs Cilka awake.
Without opening her eyes, she listens to the familiar sounds
of doctors and nurses going about their work, of patients
calling out for comfort, calling out in pain. She wants to
call out for both.
‘Are you with us, Cilka?’ she hears R
aisa whispering.
She feels Raisa’s breath on her cheek; she must be leaning
over her.
‘It’s time to wake up. Come on, open your eyes.’
Slowly, Cilka opens her eyes. The world is a blur.
‘I can’t see,’ she whispers.
‘You may have blurred vision, so don’t panic, Cilka.
You’re going to be all right. Can you see my hand?’
Something flashes in front of Cilka, a movement. It
could be a hand. Cilka blinks several times, and each time
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she does so her vision clears a little until she can identify fingers; yes, it is a hand.
‘I see it, I see your hand,’ she mumbles weakly.
‘Good girl. Now just listen while I tell you how you
are, then you can tell me how you feel. All right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have had a nasty blow to the back of the head
requiring twenty stitches. I can’t believe you made it out
of there, when the whole tunnel was collapsing. What are
you made of?’
‘Stronger stuff than you thought.’
‘We had to cut some of your hair away, I’m afraid, but
it will grow back. Now, you are bound to have a headache
and we don’t want you talking, feeling like you have to
do anything.’
Cilka opens her mouth to speak. Pavel. She is remem-
bering the last moments in the mine. She gurgles his name,
in distress.
‘It’s all right, Cilka,’ Raisa says.
‘Pavel . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Cilka. He didn’t make it.’
And it is my fault, she thinks. I made him go in.
She closes her eyes.
I am cursed. Everyone around me dies or is taken away.
It is not safe to be near me.
‘Cilka, you have grazes and bruises on your upper back
where the rock landed, you must have been bent over when
it happened. They are nothing serious and are healing nicely.’
She tries to breathe. It doesn’t matter about her.
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‘How are the other men?’
‘Oh, Cilka. Only you would ask about others before
yourself. Thanks to you, the workers who came out before
you are mostly fine.’
Cilka is relieved they are not all dead. But, Pavel. She
should have been more careful.
‘Now,’ Raisa says. ‘Here is how you are going to be
treated, and I want your promise that you will do as we
tell you. I want none of your interfering, even if you do
think you know more than all of us put together.’