Beauty and the Beast

Part Three: A Glimmer Of Hope

The next day, Anna came to my room to get me. She told me that a squad of Gestapo men were coming in ten minutes to take me to my mother's house for a half hour visit. My reaction? A shrug and a nod, followed by a halfhearted attempt at a smile.
You see, I no longer had the strength to care about anything else anymore. A good day for me was when I was able to comb my hair and brush my teeth without having to be cajoled into doing it.

Even so, a small part of me told me that I ought to smile, to be excited and try to recall how to be happy. If I had been through hell and back, I wondered how my mother was faring. They always say that a mother knows when her child is suffering--how must it feel, I thought as I hauled myself out of bed, to know that your child is in pain and be powerless to do anything?

I mechanically brushed my teeth, and, at Anna's urging, showered. Ever the guardian angel, she had saved the dress I had come to the castle with, handing it to me to wear instead of the faded dirndl dresses that were once your wife's. She said she didn't think it would be proper at all to present myself before my mother in the clothes of a "filthy German bitch."

I should have said thank you. I should have smiled, should have shown that I was grateful for her magnanimous gesture, grateful for her hatred of Lina Heydrich.  But for some reason, I couldn't. The moment the silky fabric made contact with my hands, something inside of me that until now had only been held up by a few strands, completely snapped. I folded in on myself, hugging the dress to my chest, my shoulders heaving with ragged sobs. Anna sat on the bed next to me, wrapping her arms around me and drawing me to her chest.

The dress symbolized the girl I no longer was. It stood for days that would never come back, an age that was now nothing but a distant memory. It stood for Sophie Gabcik, not this bag of skin and bones that had now taken her place. Sophie Gabcik had two friends, Libena Fafek and Maria Svoboda, had a loving mother and the best brother a girl could ask for. She was madly in love with a boy a few houses down named Ata Moravec, and dreamed of being an actress or a singer one day.

I didn't know who this girl was, with stringy blond hair and dull blue eyes surrounded with bluish-black circles large enough for her to pass as a raccoon. This girl was the complete antithesis of Sophie Gabcik in each and every way. This girl was the personal whore to the very man indirectly responsible for the enslavement and death of millions of Czechs and Slavs. She allowed herself to feel pity for him and sympathize with him, even after he apathetically killed her unborn child.

My sobs eventually died down to pathetic whimpering. My head spun and I felt dizzy and lightheaded. It was all I could do to dry my eyes and sit there, a sack of self-pity clutching a dress that belonged to somebody else. I say that because if there was one thing that I was certain of, it was that the sunny, cheerful girl that this dress had once belonged to was definitely not me. I was a woman completely degraded and scorned, someone who not too long ago had just had the life of her unborn child snuffed out in a storage closet.

I blacked out halfway through the beating you gave me that night in that cold, dark room. I think of it now as a blessing--the pain each blow brought was excruciating to say the least. When I woke up, I was lying in a pool of blood with you standing over me, your face twisted in disgust, satisfaction, and rage. The air reeked of blood, salty and coppery, and everywhere I looked there was garnet liquid. It was everywhere--on my hands, my arms, on the floor, on the toes of your boots. All I could think was, all that came from me?before I blacked out again.

I came to in my room, in a bathtub filled with scalding water. Both Axelina and Anna knelt at the edge of the tub, their chins resting on the rim, their eyes bottomless pools of pity and concern. They started as I opened my eyes and looked straight at them with a blank stare. They looked like severed heads, I thought to myself. Like my child's head, now a pile of crushed, coagulated cells on a concrete floor. I lowered my head onto my knees and started crying.