Playing for Time by Fania Fénelon Page B

absurdity annoyed me; there would have been no point in answering that the SS didn’t necessarily look like what they were, that one might find them good-looking without selling one’s soul to them. I turned my back and climbed up to the top of my
coja.
I would close my eyes and forget about them and sleep.
    This was the worst moment, the time when it was difficult not to give up. Despite all the wise lectures I gave myself, having entertained that SS woman after a selection filled me with the utmost disgust.
    In the morning my mouth tasted bitter. Making my bed with the required absurd neatness, I remarked: “I don’t know what I’d give for a toothbrush and some toothpaste.”
    “There are some girls who share one between five, they might take you on as a sixth!”
    “The best thing for her would be to ”organize‘ one,“ Florette piped up.
    “How does one go about it?”
    “In our camp, there are two ”Canadas‘,“ the small one near us and the big one, a bit farther away. In the small one you’ll find toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, scent, things like that; in the big one, nightdresses, slips, shoes, clothes, tins of jam… In fact, everything winds up there!”
    What was she saying? Shops, here?
    “What is this ”Canada,“ and why is it called that?”
    “No one knows. Perhaps because Canada is a rich country, a promised land. In fact, it’s a general store.” Florette continued, “To come here, we brought all our best things, the warmest and newest. The rich arrive with luggage containing fortunes: furs, jewels, diamonds, gold; groaning wallets, cases crammed with banknotes. Don’t think I’m exaggerating. These thousands of cases arriving every week for years represent a fabulous fortune. Everything that isn’t perishable is sorted, labelled, counted, packed up, and sent regularly back to Berlin. But what I find even more disgusting is that they filch our parcels.”
    I was stupefied. “Parcels—you get parcels? So our families know where we are? Do you mean to say that we can write?”
    Florette laughed. Jenny positively hooted. “She’s going to send her family coloured postcards wishing they were here!”
    Ewa interrupted the flow of sarcasm: “It does sometimes happen that our families are informed of our presence in a work camp and that the sending of parcels is authorized. Of course, they never reach us; it’s probably just another way of getting more for themselves.”
    “Yes, parcels arrive every day from every corner of Europe,” Florette took over angrily. “Some Germans and Polacks get some of theirs, but we Jews never do. First, of course, you have to have a family left to send you any—they can’t post them from the great beyond. And supposing parcels did arrive, the foodstuffs would be distributed at the SS canteen to privileged internees, black triangles, whores, thieves, criminals, the cream, in short! And the vilest thing of all is that the families are never informed of our disappearance, they go on depriving themselves so that the dead won’t go short—a little butter bought on the black market, a small pot of jam made by grandmother with her sugar ration, a sausage, a rabbit pate (how pleased she’ll be!), and some rusks so that little so and so can carry on her diet. The parents send and send… and the Germans are half sick with delight.”
    She shook with angry sobs. Little Irene put her hand on her shoulder. “Calm down or you’ll be in trouble again.”
    Anny sought a diversion by telling us that on the evening we arrived she’d just received a parcel, the first since July “43. Even then it was an amazing stroke of luck that they’d left her anything, because they naturally helped themselves first.
    “The whole thing doesn’t proceed with the speed of light, though,” Jenny snickered. “Don’t imagine the postman gallops breathlessly across Europe to deliver you your parcel. So all the grub that isn’t tinned has legs of its own by the time it