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October 9, 2023 - January 5, 2025
Cibi wishes they’d been allowed to keep their suitcases – perhaps they’ll be reunited with them tomorrow.
Something bit me!’ and the reply: ‘It’s just fleas. You’ll get used to it.’
ARBEIT MACHT FREI. What rubbish, none of them are free. They are prisoners, treated like animals, their lives worth nothing. This ‘freedom’ means only death.
They watch the tattooist gently take Gita’s hand; he says something to her and Gita seems to relax a little. When it’s Cibi’s turn, the tattooist is still watching Gita walk away. He is a gentle man and when he’s done, he whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’
Walking to their new block Cibi and Livi see Cilka, the young Slovakian girl who has her own room in Block 25, where she oversees the women who are bound for death.
It must take a certain type of courage to wake up every morning and just carry on.’
One morning, on her break and lost in her thoughts, Cibi finds herself under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign. She looks up and wishes a bomb would drop on it right now,
‘I guess it’s nearly Christmas,’ Magda says. ‘Christmas in a death camp.’ Cibi sighs. ‘Nothing makes any sense anymore.’
‘She’s with us, Livi,’ Cibi says. ‘And Grandfather. They’re walking with us right now. We just can’t see them.’ ‘I can feel them,’ Magda whispers. ‘Mumma is next to you, Livi, and Grandfather is beside Cibi.’
After a long silence, Livi says, ‘I can feel Mumma and Grandfather with us now.’
‘I feel Chaya is with us,’ he says. ‘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.
how do you embrace the future with an open heart when that same heart has been broken over and over again, the shards of it hammered into dust?
‘We owe it to those who died to live our best lives, become our best selves, and here we can.’
That we shouldn’t look at each day as a series of tasks we have to get through, but to see each twenty-four hours as a gift from God and cherish individual moments.’ Cibi gulps.
‘Well, if he feels his experience wasn’t as bad as ours, then maybe somewhere, deep down, he believes it should have been – God knows there are some terrible stories out there. He probably thinks he got away with something he shouldn’t have.’
‘I’ll marry you on one condition, Ziggy Ravek,’ Livi tells him. ‘That we talk about what happened to us whenever the mood takes us, that we tell our children and grandchildren what happened, that we never stop talking about it. We can’t hide this stuff or pretend it’s in the past and try to forget about it.’
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 fulfil a promise. As
‘I have everything that matters,’ Livi tells him. ‘That’s what I love about you.’ ‘Is that all that you love about me?’ ‘I love everything about you.’
‘I’m fine where I am. And, this way, when I have had enough of you, I can wheel myself out of here.’ ‘If only I didn’t love you so much, I would push you down the stairs for that.’ ‘You keep on like that and I’ll push myself down the stairs.’
‘What? Your big sister doesn’t get a kiss?’ Cibi says, indignant. ‘I gave you a kiss in the street, or have you forgotten already?’ Magda snaps back.
‘Do you want my chair, Cibi?’ Ziggy asks. ‘No, I’m happy in my own chair – one I can run away in.’
The reports of Mala’s death vary in the official records. Livi confirms the report that she bled to death on the cart as she was taken to the crematoria. A musical (Mala, the Music of the Wind) and a film (The Last Stage) have been made about Mala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mala_Zimetbaum
The story of my mother, Cibi and Magda is testament to the power of love and devotion. Against all the odds, the three sisters survived the most heinous, systematic genocide that the world has ever known. And yet they went on to live and work in a new country, the country of my birth,
‘It is the same blue sky and sun that is over the death camp and the fields and forests beyond, on the other side of the fence.’
‘We are here. They are not.’
