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just fix herself up, I said over and over, maybe my father would come back. Instead, two years later there was the postcard from Dachau: I have seen Ruta!
    “I don’t know what your situation was during the war,” I said to the clerk, “but surely it’s a human desire to look your best. A human right—a God-given right.” I seemed to notice for the first time there was a tiny diamond ring winking on the third finger of her left hand. “My mother had her chance—but she said it was more important to live— to work: therefore to live —good looks would take care of themselves when there was time that belonged to us again.”
    “What happened, Eligia?”
    She’s so pretty , I thought. Whatever she may have suffered during the war, she’s attractive again. Desirable. She’s engaged. Happy . . .
    But could I really tell her? Tell her that Ludi and I stole three quarter-grain morphine tablets to be exchanged in “Canada” for a certain pair of real Parisian red high-heeled shoes to be worn on a special date in three days’ time? That the shoes were safely hidden and I was in a fever of excitement when I broke my tooth the morning of my birthday? Should I tell this kindly Red Cross clerk, whose life was apparently so tidy? Should I tell her . . .
    We—Ludi and I—were in the supply room, my confidence was shattered. I had one of the dental mirrors and I was trying to smile so that the broken tooth—the little dog tooth on the lower left—wouldn’t show. “Is it very bad? I’m so embarrassed. That lousy bread! If only I’d had a toothbrush or vitamin C tablets—it never would have happened!”
    “You can get it fixed later, Gia—the war is almost over. I’m going to dress you up to the nines tonight—lipstick and everything!”
    My head was swimming . A real date. One of Ludi’s dresses. High heels—from Paris!
    “Let’s take two more of the tablets—you have one, give the other to Frederic—he’ll think you’re a movie star and you’ll be feeling no pain—that’s a guarantee!”
    As I watched her, she shook out three tablets.
    “But, you said two —”
    There was a fierce rattling sound and the door was flung open.
    Standing there, with the angriest look on her face I’d ever seen was my mother.
    “What happened, Eligia?” Stella Johansson said again. “Why did we find you—like the female kapos and the SS guards who were forced by the Americans—carrying the dead and flinging them into the mass graves?”
    It was a punishment detail, I knew—the guards were made to understand what they’d done all during the war and then just before liberation. Running away, leaving thousands to starve, leaving the dead unburied . . . the Americans rounded them up and brought them back.
    “What happened? Do you remember?”
    But I could not tell her that I stayed mute when Ludi turned my mother in, told the doctor my mother (a nurse! a healer!) had been saving other mothers by stilling the lives of their newborn babies. I could not tell her that just two days before the camp was liberated, I saw my mother’s face there among the heaps of bodies no one had cleared from the gas chambers . . . .The frenzied attempt by the Nazis to disguise the horrors of what they’d done all those long years. A final solution. I could not tell her that I knew the war was essentially over, that we’d be free soon, but that I kept quiet to wear red heels and lipstick for my birthday date with the young German who would soon no longer be my enemy. I could not tell her that. I could not tell her I was afraid I’d be beaten—or worse—for speaking up. I could not tell her, that I’d realized—too late—that atonement never makes up for the guilt we suffer, for the sins we have committed. I couldn’t tell her that nothing is ever enough to make up for the sin of silence, but we have to try.
    Pretty as she was, I didn’t think she’d understand— really understand—what I felt when I looked at the mounds of