Three Sisters

by Heather Morris

“It’s very simple, Magda.” Menachem smiles. There is nothing that gives him as much pleasure as talking to his girls. Something catches in his chest; he must remember this moment, this sunny day, the wide eyes of his three daughters. “I want you to make a promise to me and to each other that you will always take care of your sisters. That you will always be there for one another, no matter what. That you will not allow anything to take you away from each other. Do you understand?”

“Livi, is that Gita? Ahead of us?” Cibi points a finger. “Gita, Gita,” she calls out. A girl turns around, smiling when she sees Cibi and Livi. It is their school friend.

A tear splashes down the nurse’s cheek. She gazes around the empty room. “I would have saved more if I could.”

“One day, the gold asked the iron, Why do you shout when you are beaten? I get hit too, but I keep quiet. The iron replied, I cry because the hammer is made from iron—it is my brother and that hurts me. You are hit by a stranger.”

“Where are we?” Magda asks, catching the eye of one of the thin men. “Welcome to hell,” he says, his eyes darting back and forth between the prisoners. “Where is hell?” “Poland. You are in Birkenau.” And then he is gone.

“Which one is your block?” Cibi asks her sister urgently, taking her hand. But Magda doesn’t move for a moment. She is staring at Cibi as if she’s finally seeing her. She looks her up and down slowly, touches her short hair, her shoulders, arms. “What have they done to you, Cibi?” Magda is crying again, but Cibi can’t do this right now. She knows what she looks like, she knows her face is gaunt and her body fleshless. They need to keep moving.

“Magda!” shouts Yitzchak. “Is Magda with you?” “Yes! She’s here. She’s fine,” Cibi calls back. Cibi watches Yitzchak lift Chaya’s hand to his mouth and kiss her fingers. He is saying something to Chaya: his lips are moving but the sisters can’t hear him. The old man is smiling. Smiling and nodding.

Just as they are laying their produce on the table, a figure rounds the corner of the house and stands before them on the lawn. He is dressed in rough cotton trousers, a thick shirt. “Who are you?” he barks. At once the group gathers around Cibi, instantly on their guard. Livi closes her hand around her knife; he isn’t so big and there are ten of them. Cibi once more finds herself stepping forward, clearing her throat. “We were prisoners of Auschwitz,” she tells him, firmly. “And now we’ve escaped.” The man doesn’t speak for a long time. He looks at the girls, who are suddenly self-conscious in the rags hanging from their emaciated bodies. His voice breaks as he utters the words: “Help me round up my cows and it would be my honor to give you some warm milk and fresh cheese.”

“How did you escape?” he asks. “The march, we ran away from the march.” “Do you know why you were marching? Where you were going?” Cibi didn’t know—so much made little or no sense: the violence, the torture, the killing machines. She had learned never to question orders. She shakes her head. “They were going to use you to bargain for their freedom,” he tells her, adding, “and other reasons too: to carry on working for them, but also to stop you telling your stories to the Allies. Thank God you escaped.”

“Looking at these photos in this special light, we have remembered the past without grief. And if we can do that, we can also look ahead without fear.”

She wished every Jew could find something to celebrate on this day, to show this man and his army of murderers that hope flourishes in the darkest of places.

Hell had escaped its moorings and risen to earth in the shape of Auschwitz and Birkenau and all the other camps, and yet, and yet, she had found the knife, and the sisters had found Magda, and Magda had kept them alive on a march to their deaths. Even in hell, they found enough hope to help them fulfill a promise.

A small act of kindness and that’s what binds these sisters now: small acts of kindness, of consideration.

“Pam and I have been working on a glass sculpture for a long time now. It is currently on display in an exhibition called ‘WAR Light Within/After the Darkness’ at a gallery in Toronto. We called it The Miracle of Three Sisters.” “Have you got it here?” Magda asks. “No, Aunty, it’s too big to bring all the way over to Israel, and anyway, it’s still in the exhibition. But we do have a photo of it here, in the gallery catalog.” Odie hands the catalog to Livi. Cibi and Magda lean in to look at the photo. They gasp as one when they see etched into the base of the towering glass structure the numbers 4559.

The “Miracle of Three Sisters” glass sculpture featured in the epilogue was created by Pam and Oded Ravek. It is both a tribute and a memorial. It is a memorial to the 6,000,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis (expressed by fragmented scattered roses with thorns on the base) and to the memory of the 1,500,000 children under the age of thirteen (twelve nascent roses on the second tier without thorns). The intentionally rough-cast numbers on three facing sides are the actual numbers that were burned into the arms of the three sisters. The side with no number serves to illustrate that a number may be filled in by the viewer in his/her mind, and also honors those who perished in the Holocaust who were not inked.

But what I remember most of all are the hugs when Safta would whisper: “You are my victory. My family is my victory.”