BEGINNINGS

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A baby is born inside a war. From one unfriendly womb to another she goes. It’s like living in a fishbowl. The view is panoramic, but the glass won’t give. It’s she who must. 

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1942 

It happened in winter, this birth, this unlikely, uncelebrated event. A winter that so efficiently branded her with its cold, she was never not cold again. So cold that of all the things she might have wished to do over, chief among them was to have been born in summer. 

     It happened in Auschwitz, this birth. Auschwitz. Winter. Impossible for a grown-up to wake, work, sleep, and wake again. For a newborn, miraculous. The cramped barracks, the sparse water—not enough to touch an inmate’s thirst let alone fill a pot for boiling, and even if anyone could have afforded anything so dear as a pot, there would’ve been no fire for it to boil on, nothing to warm an infant. Forget the mother. Which she did. The mother, the face, the roughened hands she fell into, the random tits she suckled until they gave out or she was cut off. 

     But in March, the women of Auschwitz were twice blessed as the waning of winter brought with it a midnight move to Birkenau. Their own little suburb built of wood. As promised, work had set them free. Free as birds. A thousand in a cage built for hundreds. A month, two months old, they brought the child along. What else to bring? And though they were all well-defended against miracles, one stepped forward and volunteered the last corner of the slice of bread she’d stood so long in line for, chewing before spitting it into her hand and putting the pasty wad into the tiny mouth puckered like her own because it, too, wanted more. Tough luck. The woman was good but no saint. It cost her nothing, though, to stick a pinkie into the baby’s mouth, so she did, and then miraculously, when that first nurturing soul disappeared, another stepped in. And because in night’s meat locker a baby took up little room and gave off much heat, soon there was a queue of women. 

     That the guards never learned of this baby’s existence was only one of the miracles at play. There was that she survived the winter of ’42 to see another and another and another. That there were women enough who pooled their paltry resources and bartered rag and needle for thread and buttons, a bit of wire, a pair of shoes, and stood for a while in a cement-block room, holding her, rocking under a sprinkle as ephemeral as spring rain, pretending the water ran hot and clear instead of cold and murky, a chant, loo la loo-loo-loo, rising from them, these women stripped down to their mourning-dove gray. Normal babies don’t see the world in Technicolor for five months. For this one, it would be years.