Free In the King's Arms by Sonia Taitz

off. She saw it floating down all around her, then briskly swept up and collected. She asked the perfunctory woman official where the enormous bags full of hair were taken. “They fill our mattresses and bedding,” said the woman. “You see how nothing is wasted.” Her voice was raised, declaiming to the antiseptic corners of the room.
    The girl toiled outdoors. Like most of the women, she was assigned to dig ditches in the frozen ground. Her naked head felt cold, and her thin shift fluttered carelessly in the wind. Each day, in the snowy dawn, a thousand bald scarecrow shapes emerged. They looked like neither women nor men. With no mirror, it took the girl a long time to understand that she looked just like any one of those scarecrows about her. But some were dying; some withered more quickly in the frost than others. At the harsh morning “Appel:” UUUUPPPPP!!!! Lily’s mother noticed the limp slugabeds that had struggled to their feet only the day before. If they were not yet dead, but only ill, these women were taken out and shot.
    Each day, the roll call consumed more and more time, for the
pauses between unclaimed names grew longer, and more names went unclaimed. The S.S. officers, livid, would swivel their eyes left and right as the unclaimed names echoed into silence in the air. Soon, too many names produced this mocking nothingness. A decision was made: the women would be given coats. The coats would be sewn from scraps of confiscated Jewish clothing. Sometimes, the girl imagined, a scrap may have come from a threadbare portion of a Nazi’s uniform.
    “You see, Lily? They slept cozy on my hair, but maybe I put their clothes on my back.” Here, Gretta would smile a pearly smile. “We were very near to each other all the time, Lily.”
    Lily had often pondered this concept. “Yes,” her mother persisted. “Close. We shared the same crazy world. We were their shadow, and they were ours. When we had winter, they had winter. Near us grew the Tannenbaums they chopped down for their Christmas. On the holiest night of their year I was crying: let them learn to be merciful to us, doesn’t their Jesus tell them to be merciful? And even that night, as women were dying, they slept cozy on our hair. They were always so near, Lily. I could feel their warm breath. I could smell their hands on my clothing. Very, very near.”
    The first time Lily had heard this, it had given her a strange, almost erotic shock, as though a murderer, asleep at her side, had let a senseless hand drift familiarly to her throat and lie there, weighing softly down.
    “We were not told about the coats beforehand. They were in a large shack and we stood outside, scared. No one could imagine that something good was waiting for us inside there. The doors had heavy padlocks that the Nazis freed up with great ceremony. Lily, when we saw what was there!
    “Some women, I don’t know how many, became a little crazy.
They began to throw themselves into the warm piles. Rolling in them. Some pulled at the coats, ripping the poorly sewn sleeves off. Buttons rolled on the floor. The fever spread until it seemed as though the women were dancing within a large bonfire: coats swirled like flames around their shoulders. It no longer mattered what a coat was for, what the practical use of such a garment was, that it was supposed to keep women like us alive to work a little longer in the cold. Time meant nothing anymore; it seemed like the last day in earth; nothing had a sensible purpose anymore. It was a crazy freedom.
    “If anyone had started screaming, Lily . . . . If anyone had started screaming in such a bonfire, I believe to this day you would still hear that scream. You would not be able to get it out of your ears.
    “Somehow, I felt very calm inside. I could see everything very clearly. I even noticed how some women stood apart from the mass, hesitating, wanting a coat, trying every now and then to get to the piles. But they couldn’t. The