Page 25 of The Lost Husband

Most of the faces in front of me aren’t helpless—but full of anger. The Soviets shout at them in Russian just like those officers shouted at us in German.

I hadn’t realized I’m holding a sap branch until it snaps in my hand. The crack has several pairs of German eyes turning to find me spying. Blood drains from my face.

“Jude!” a German prisoner shouts.

Avi pulls me down from the mound edging the trench, and I fall back and on top of her. She groans and coughs from the blow and Elias pulls me up, separating us and yanking us up to our feet.

“We need to run. Go!” he demands.

We hurry to the right, toward a cluster of trees, but not fast enough when someone makes it known they’re coming after us. And not just someone.Multiplepeople.

Elias swoops in behind and shoves us between a cluster of trees with gnarly branches that weave the individual birches into one. “Don’t speak,” he hushes.

The four of us scramble quietly between a set of boulders, then lower ourselves behind them. I don’t know if anyone saw where we went or if we might have disappeared from their line of sight fast enough.

I only know that we’re hiding because of my decision. I’m the one they’d noticed. The ditch smells like moldy moss and mildew. Wet snow bleeds through my wool socks, now sagging at my ankles as I curl into a ball. If only I could disappear entirely.

For a moment, I thought the soldiers might have given up on us, but the voices continue. Russian, and—there’s German mixed in. I dig my fingers deeper into the snow, reaching the mud as my nails bend. My throat tightens as if I’m being strangled by air itself. Not one of us can make a sound. Not even a whisper of a breath.

Avi slips, her body crunching lower into the ground as snow gives out beneath. Her eyes widen, as do Gerda’s and Elias’s. She stares at me, our eyes locking. Still strangers, yet I can read every thought on her face. Every ounce of fear.

More crackling, crunching, grinding snow, ice, and frozen dirt. “Celina,” Avi whispers, the words a warning. She grabs mywrist and squeezes, her nails biting into my flesh. A distraction. “Stop.” She swallows hard. “You’re shaking.”

I’m the one making the noise. Again.

Boots crunch closer. Someone stifles a laugh. A rifle clacks against a hip. “Just a hungry Jew,” one says in a mix of Yiddish and Russian. “You won’t find anything here. Gey avek!” Their message to go away is loud and clear. “No time for this, comrade. We must head back to the tracks and continue en route.”

Elias lifts his finger to his mouth, like we don’t already know. Avi squeezes my wrist tighter. Gerda closes her eyes and mouths a prayer. Back to the tracks.

The voices pass, then drift into the wind. I stretch my neck to peek over the ledge of the ditch, searching for trails of shadows, finding the tail end of two.

We wait in stillness, minutes longer, until Elias climbs out of the ditch first and makes his way to a clearing deeper into the woods. Gerda and Avi follow, but my body struggles to unfold and straighten. My knees are frozen. It doesn’t matter. I have to move.

I claw my way out, stumbling to my feet, then landing against a tree. The bark scrapes my calf. Avi reaches her arm out for me to take. We follow Elias blindly like he has a compass, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s following the direction of the wind, but to where, is anyone’s guess. We don’t stop until the faint shouts from the barbed-wire imprisonment are quiet.

Elias leans his back against a tree, heaving breaths through puffed red cheeks. “All we had to do was wait a few minutes until they leave. They were talking about rounding up the prisoners. I heard it myself.”

I wasn’t trying to get caught, or sending a warning signal that we wanted to steal their food.

“You don’t steal food and supplies by showing your face first!” Avi adds.

“I wasn’t trying to—” I begin, my whisper sticky in my throat. Even with effort, sound doesn’t form. “I was trying to see if I could spot food, or supplies, something we could use…”

“We can’t move until they’re gone,” Elias interrupts me. “That’s the point.” I stop myself, remembering the reaction in the infirmary when I asked if anyone had seen who carried me back inside.

“No, you weren’t just investigating, and you weren’t in some sort of shock,” Avi says, tightening her coat around her chest, her wet hair sticking to her cheeks. “You were looking at their faces—the faces of all those murderers. What were you looking for? An apology?”

Gerda’s head tilts to the side and her brows furrow. Elias gives me a shrewd, untrusting glance. It makes me wonder if he looks at everyone that way—if that’s what his time at Auschwitz caused.

I’m not sure how many hours we’ve been on this trek together, but I know very little about any one of them. They know just as little about me. Survival is greedy, lonely, and trust doesn’t come easily. Regardless, Avi has been kinder to me than I might be to me in her situation—able-bodied, eager to find a way out.

I bend forward, pressing my hands into my thighs for support, trying to catch a full breath. “My husband. Noah. I thought I saw him,” I finally answer, the words burning my throat.

No one says a word but I’m sure I know what they’re all thinking… Why would I be looking for my husband among a group of German soldiers?

“He was a prisoner too?” Avi asks, surprise settling into her dark eyes. I told her I was looking for someone before we left Auschwitz. Then I said he might be with the group of prisonerswe followed. Then I told her he wasn’t there. I can only imagine what she’s thinking now.

I shake my head and search for words but speak the wrong ones. “I—I’m not —He’s dead. Or I thought he was dead. I thought I watched him get killed. But then the day before we were liberated, someone saved me from the crematorium explosion, and the man—he looked uncannily like my husband. I could almost swear it was him.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to find the right words. “But that man was in a German uniform. The next day, I was sure I saw him being taken away by the Soviets.” My voice falters into fragments of air. “I know it sounds mad, but I can’t shake the thought from my head.” I press my hand to my throat as if to will my voice to keep working. “I—just need to see whether it’s him or not.”