Mischling Read Free Page A

built to imprison us. Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere kilometers bridged their attached evils. What this zoo was designed for, I did not know—I could only swear that Pearl and I, we would never be caged.
      
    The barracks of the Zoo were once stables for horses, but now they were heaped with the likes of us: twins, triplets, quints. Hundreds upon hundreds of us, all packed into beds that weren’t beds but matchboxes, little slots to slip bodies into; we were piled from floor to ceiling, forced into these minute structures three or four bodies at a time so that a girl hardly knew where her body ended and another’s began.
    Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, toddler girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood’s girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly every pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.
    When Pearl and I sat on our own bunk, the mobile ones descended on us. They scrambled over the rickety corrals with their straw mattresses and appraised our similarities. Demands of our identities were made.
    We were from Lodz, we told them. First, a house. Then, a basement in the ghetto. We had a grandpapa, a mother. Once, there had been a father. And Zayde had an old spaniel that could play dead when you pointed a finger at him, but he was easily brought back to life. Did we mention that our father was a doctor who helped others so much that he disappeared one night, that he left us to tend to a sick child and never returned? Yes, we missed him so much we could not even divide the weight of our grief between us. There were other things we dreaded too: germs, unhappy endings, Mama weeping. And there were things we loved: pianos, Judy Garland, Mama weeping less. But who were we really, in the end? There wasn’t much to say beyond the fact that one of us was a good dancer, and the other one tried to be good but wasn’t really good at anything except being curious. That one was me.
    Satisfied by this information, the others offered their own in a clamor of sentence-finishing.
    “We get more food here,” began Rachel, a girl so pale that you could nearly see through her.
    “But it’s not kosher and it eats your insides,” her equally transparent half pointed out.
    “We keep our hair,” noted Sharon, pulling on her braid for show.
    “Until the lice come,” added her shorn sister.
    “We get to keep our clothes too,” contributed one of the Russians.
    “But they put crosses on our backs,” finished her double. She turned so I could see the cross that blared in red paint on her dress, but I needed no illustration. A red cross stood between my shoulder blades too.
    The children hushed abruptly, and the uninvited silence hung over us all—it was as if a new cloud had installed itself within the rafters of the Zoo. The many doubles looked at each other searchingly—there had to be something, their faces said, something more than food and hair and clothes. Then a voice piped up from the bunk below us. We craned to see the speaker, but she and her twin were curled up together, flush with the brick wall. We never came to know her face, but her words stayed with us always.
    “They keep our families safe for us,” said this unseen stranger.
    At this, all the girls nodded their approval, and Pearl and I were overwhelmed by a new rush of conversation as everyone congratulated one another on belonging to families who would remain intact, unlike so many.
    I didn’t want to ask the obvious. So I pinched Pearl to make her ask for us.
    “Why are we more important than the others?” Her voice shrank as it approached the end of the question.
    A flurry of answers rose, all having