Page 10 of The Lost Husband

“Never mind.” With a soft groan, she trudges on ahead.

We’ve fallen behind the other prisoners as the railroad curves and the road narrows between tall trees. We need to catch up.

Roaring shouts echo ahead, the wind distorting the sound and masking their origin.

My head fills with pressure, each step felt behind my sore eyes. Avi squeezes my arm and spins in a slow circle, searching. “You hear that?”

I blink and a cold rush of air snakes down the collar of my smock…

The sound storms within me. Women screaming as they’re shoved into our barrack. Numbers echoing over our heads as if intrusions to those already occupying the bunks. A kapo strikes the ground with a rubber truncheon repeatedly until all other sound dissolves into static. The silence always comes too late.

“Celina…” Avi’s hiss jolts me out of my brain fog. “This way.” She moves off the railroad and onto the snow and rubble running parallel to the tracks. I stumble after her, past a brass casing and a blue-tinged hand poking out from a snow drift.

She tugs me behind a long mound of warped metal and splintered wood. She crouches, her knees bending smoothly as mine creak as I waddle awkwardly to keep my head below our cover. When we reach the edge, Avi jerks backward, colliding into me. I lose my footing and fall onto the frozen ground with a muted thud.

“Soviets,” she mouths, the word barely audible. “With SS guards.”

I shift to my left, past a corpse half buried in pink-brown slush. Beyond our barrier, I see seven—no, eight—Soviet soldiers in fur-lined caps with rifles pointing at three German uniformed men with hands raised above their heads. This isn’t the same group that was detained and put into the Soviet truck. These German uniforms are different—different ranks and insignia.

It’s just as the SS did to us.Except it was a yard and mud instead of snow along the railroad.

Innocent women stand side-by-side, eyes fixed ahead, unblinking, because looking away is a punishable crime. I know—we know—one of us will be next. The gallows waitas guards pull her from the line. She’s young, no older than twenty. Her clogs slip in the mud. No one catches her or helps her to her feet. She struggles to stand, struggles to bear her weight while walking to her death. Whispers about her stealing food move up and down the rows.

The rope creaks when the guard pulls it tight.

Time drags. Long enough for the girl to think there’s hope, and long enough to convince myself this is a threat rather than a punishment.

The sound proves me wrong.

Not the snap or screaming from women beside me—the silence that follows as we keep staring at a young woman, now hanging by her neck, already dead.

My stomach knots, and a sourness burns my throat.

This isn’t just a punishment to her. It’s a scarring memory seared into my mind.

Avi waves her hand in my face, “If we stay along this road,” she whispers, “and weave through the trees, we can get back to the railroad and try to catch up with the other prisoners.”

“That’s a good plan. We want to stay in a group rather than on our own,” I say, already fixating on the route. If the Soviets are moving German prisoners toward working railways for transport, I’m sure they’ll stay close to the tracks. If we go the same route, we might find them again.

I need to see that man again. Just once more to know if I imagined him.

“Wait, wait…one minute,” I whisper.

A man, bloody and bruised, shoved into a cluster of others. A torn German coat hangs off his shoulder. Dark brown hair.

This isn’t the same group I saw when we left Auschwitz.

It can’t be him.

My breath sticks in my throat anyway, and I wrap my fingers around my neck. Plenty of men have brown hair, but his walk—the slight dip in his right shoulder—Noah stood the same when he was tired.

The man twists his head over his shoulder, his glance cutting in our direction. I let my knees give out again. I don’t have the strength.

“We need to go,” Avi scolds me.

She’s right.

She stays crouched, grabbing a hold of large pieces of debris to pull her back in the direction we came. I struggle behind, slower and less steady, commanding myself not to peek over at the standoff again.