I waited for my roommates to fall asleep. Softly, softly I slid open the window and eased myself out. It was a hot night, cloudy and thick with tomorrow’s rain. Under my shirt, the package shifted and crunched. It seemed to me a thunderous sound. I took a deep breath and then raced across the open fields and plunged into the corn. The sharp stalks sliced at me. My heart pounded. I did not once dare to look back, for fear of seeing someone behind me. The boulder bulged in the distance at the end of a bean field. I crouched as low as I could, ran, left the package, and took one look around me. I saw no one, no light in the farmhouse, no patch of clear sky to let a star shine through. I heard distant thunder. My hands were slick with sweat. I lowered my head and sprinted back to the workers’ hut.
Trude was sitting up on her bed, her eyes wide with terrorat my absence. I put one hand over her mouth, the other over mine.
The next day Franz pulled me behind his horse and plow.
“Where is the underwear?”
“I left it.”
“It wasn’t there.”
“I left it exactly where Liesel said.”
“ Merde! Someone else took it.”
I gasped. Maybe I had been seen! Maybe the authorities had opened and read Liesel’s letter! We would be arrested! I imagined the barracks at Dachau. All that day and the next and the next, I waited for the Gestapo to come.
They never did, though, and we never found out who had taken the underwear.
I was put into a new room. I slept under the window. In the night I awoke and discovered that my face was wet. It wasn’t tears. It was rain. I rolled away from the broken window and went back to sleep. So the bed got wet—so what?
A S THE TIME for my return to Vienna approached, I tried to tell the truth of my heart to Pepi. I told him how much I regretted that we had not left when we could, what a terrible mistake it was, how we had no one to blame but ourselves. “We cooked this soup,” I said, “and now we must eat it, you and I. I promise you that I will always be a good comrade, whatever may happen. Count the days which are still between you and me. Another fourteen days. Then I will be with you.”
Mina turned toward me in her bed and raised herself up on one arm. The moon lit her face. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how it will be.”
“I will come in at the Western Station,” I said. “I will step off the train and not see him right away. But then he will see me, and he will come to me without calling my name so that all of a sudden he will just be there, suddenly, like magic—that is how he always appears. He will have flowers for me, and his wicked smile. We will go home together through the Belvedere and over the Schwartzenbergerplatz. We will go to his room and make love for three days, and he will feed me oranges.”
She fell back on her mattress, groaning. She had never had a lover.
We packed our suitcases. Nine of our friends, among them Frau Grünwald and Frau Hachek, received tickets for home. They were transformed by delight and anticipation, as they put on their city clothes for the journey. We could not wait to be them.
When we returned from the beet fields, Frau Fleschner assembled those of us who were left in front of the hut. We eagerly awaited her announcement, sure that she would tell us the day, the time, the train.
“You are not going to Vienna,” she said. “You are going to Aschersleben to work in the paper factory there. Consider yourselves lucky. Remember that as long as you are working for the Reich, your families are safe.”
Mina began to cry. I put my arm around her.
“Please tell Mama,” I wrote to Pepi on October 12, 1941. “I can’t write to her. When will we see each other again? Life is so hard now. I don’t know anything about what is happening in Vienna! For today I can’t write anything more. I kiss you. Your desperate Edith.”
W E STOOD IN the center of the Arbeitslager —the work camp—at Aschersleben, wearing our
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