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A woman in front of me put up her hand.
    “
Gut
. You’ll interpret. Now tell these whores to undress.”
    Undress?
I froze.
In front of each other?
    Mother peeled off her stockings while the women around her fumbled with their buttons and slipped off their shoes. Erika stepped out of her dress and left it puddled on the floor. I closed my eyes.
When I open them this will all be a bad dream
.
    “Move it!” the interpreter yelled. I pulled my crumpled dress over my head, crossed my arms over my chest and hoped no one would notice I was still wearing my underwear. Ever since I’d gotten my period, I’d undressed behind locked doors. Mother hadn’t seen my changed body and I was still getting used to it – to the curve of my hips and my rounded breasts and the soft blond hair between my legs.
    A skinny girl wearing a sack-like dress and a yellow star walked between us, scooping up bras, stockings, underwear and dresses. She pointed a bony finger at my groin. “I’ll get in trouble if you’re wearing those. Take them off or I’ll call the guards.”
    “Don’t call them,” I begged. “I’ll take them off right now. See?” And pulling the C sharp from my waistband, I stepped out of my underpants and let them fall to the floor.
    We were herded into a hall. Five women with razors, soap brushes and scissors stormed into the room. Mother had to be held down by three of them, but when it was my turn, I didn’t struggle. I leaned forwards and closed my eyes and let them hack at my hair. And when my plaits hit the floor, I let them scrape at my scalp with a razor. They shaved my head, my legs and my underarms. Then they shaved off my pubic hair.
    “Don’t let them see you cry,” Erika blotted the tears from my face. “It’s only hair. It’ll grow back.”
    I didn’t need a mirror to see what I looked like. A hundred mirror images stood in the room with me: hairless, wild-eyed, dirty, and shivering. We were the bald prisoners in rags I’d seen at the station. And the lingering smog which smelled so foul? The bluish clouds that rose from the giant chimney? They weren’t cooking breakfast. They were burning hair.
    We marched, single file, from one hall to another, but the guards didn’t seem to notice our nakedness, or our tears. They looked through us – as if we were transparent – and somehow that was worse. We were in a cavernous room with showerheads in the ceiling. I balled my hand around my C sharp.
    “Your film will get wet,” I whispered to Erika.
    “I slipped it under a step when we walked in,” she whispered back and I remembered the step and her stumbling over it and the women behind us grumbling to pass.
    They were grumbling now and looking up at the showerheads. Some were crying. The Markovits twins huddled in a corner of the room holding hands. A woman with drooping breasts and veined legs sat naked on the concrete floor reciting Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
    “Aren’t they glad to get clean?” I asked, but Erika didn’t answer. When the water pelted down she turned her face up to the ceiling and scrubbed the dirt from her body. I watched the brown rivers of dirt trickle down her legs and disappear down the drain and wished I could disappear too. Mother stood quietly beside us, her eyes closed, her head tilted up to the water, massaging her hairless scalp with her fingertips, as if she were at home in her bathroom. I lifted my mouth to the showerhead. The water tasted like it came from a swamp but I didn’t spit it out.
    We were handed drab grey dresses with yellow triangles, worn underwear and a pair of hard, wooden clogs. We weren’t given a towel. I slipped the dress over my dripping body and slid my feet into the shoes.
    Erika’s clogs didn’t fit so she handed them to the guard and asked for another pair. The guard laughed and said
Try this on for size
. The rest happened so quickly – the guard’s raised arm, the tip of her whip sailing towards my sister’s face, Erika