Unravelled by Anna Scanlon Page A

SIX
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    We heard his name whispered through the barracks, in tones that sounded equally terrified and awestruck.  
    "Mengele."
    The word was like a light wind on an airy summer day. Mengele.
    We met him two days after arriving at Auschwitz. The barracks were lined on either side with what looked like oversized shelves meant for storing a vast collection of library books. Instead, the wooden shelves held people. But not just any people: girls and women of all ages, each with a double of herself. The smaller girls peered over the edge of their shelf turned bed, complete with straw, as if they were farm animals instead of little girls. Their eyes were wide as they gawked at the newcomers, following Hajna and my every move until we settled in a free shelf space together, the wood creaking and squeaking beneath our tiny bodies as we tried in vain to make ourselves comfortable.
    The first two days, we mostly slept, our eyelids heavy from the journey, our tiny bodies exhausted. We had been given a very cold shower, our clothes had been sprayed with some sort of chemical, and we were brought to a table where women, dressed in striped outfits resembling potato sacks and kerchiefs over their heads, ordered us to bare our arms so that they could etch a number into our skin. I wanted to shout, to scream that I didn't want one, that I wanted my father who would surely object to any kind of permanent marking of his children. Somewhere between my fear and the chill of my cold, wet hair on my back, I stopped and fell limp, letting the woman in front of me put the needle to my arm.  Pain shot all the way up my arm and through my back, originating at the fire of the numbers.
    Mengele, it was said, was very busy and wouldn't be able to see the new twins for a while. He had since "discovered" something and was working with a pair of twins named Judit and Edit, neither of whom had come back to the barrack for several days. Their existence was only a whisper on the tongues of those confined to the barracks.
    "You know what that means," an older girl shouted across the room to another. She put her finger to her throat and made a slitting of the neck motion, followed by a piercing noise with her mouth.
    "Don't scare them," a woman a bit older than the girl spoke. She was bent over a dress, mending it for one of the younger children. "They've only been here a couple of days. Let the new girls rest."
    "We're in Auschwitz," the older girl who had made the slitting motion mumbled, tossing a waist length blonde braid behind her shoulder. "They probably don't even know their parents were burned in the chimneys and-"
    "Stop it, Maria. Stop," the woman mending the dress shouted. She looked up at the girl, her face hollow, a hand over her left ear. Her blue eyes seemed distant, lost in the past, a time before Auschwitz or chimneys or barracks full of twins.
    "It's true," Maria shouted. "Let's face the truth. You new girls should know your parents are dead. And that smell, well, it's them. They're burning,"
    We stared at her blankly, my eyes so wide that I could feel a breeze blowing through them, making them dry and heavy. My jaw fell slack. Was that what that smell was? People? Could Germans really get away with burning people? I didn't even have to look at Hajna to know her face mirrored mine, the left corner of her mouth slightly more lax than her right, the opposite of mine.
    "Maria! I told you to stop!" the girl with the sewing needle continued, rubbing her face with her hand and then looking us in the eyes with the same distant expression she had given Maria. Neither of us spoke, our voices frozen in our throats.
    I drew a circle on the ground with my white shoe, my entire body weighed down with the possibility that my mother's ashes were floating above me, that she had been burned alive. I tried to hold myself up by clasping my hands onto the shelf-bed in front of me, but I fell to the floor, my eyes brimming with tears.
    "Don't cry."
    It was