The Empty Room

The Empty Room

 The taxi driver helped Hannah out of the car. He lifted his head towards the darkening sky.

“The snow will be heavy.”

         Hannah glanced around. Even through the falling snow, she recognised the outline of the cattle cars.

         She nodded, handed him the fare, and held up a fifty-zloty note. “Come back. Two hours. Tak?”

         He went to take the note. “Two hours.” She returned it to her purse.

         Aaron, her grandson, jumped out and turned up his coat collar.

         “Will he return Booba?”

         She smiled. “He wants the money.”

         A flurry of snow drifted on the ice-cold wind as two figures stood near a desolate concrete platform. Twenty cattle cars stood empty, their doors wide open, a reminder. She remembered jumping from the train and her old suitcase breaking open, spilling what few possessions she had onto the ground. Those around her never stopped to let her retrieve them.

Hannah, her shoulders stooped, looked at ten-year-old Aaron.

         “Come. There will be more snow.”

         The boy held her arm. As they progressed, their footprints disturbed the fresh white covering.

         “Why are we here, Booba?”

         “When I was younger than you are today, I came here with my family to work. I need you to see this place and remember it exists before I die.”

         “Booba, you’re not dying, are you?”

         “One day, Aaron, but not today.”

         Arm in arm, the two walked beside the aged, rusted railway track. The track ended, and the path rutted. Aaron held his grandmother to steady her. The ice-cold wind wrapped around them, sapping their body warmth as they trudged deeper into the camp.

         They passed a row of crumbling brick barracks. Most were roofless now. Snow lay where bunks once stood, drifting through broken windows and doorways.

         Booba stopped and stared.

         “Did you sleep there?” Aaron asked.

         She nodded.

         “We shared the space with over a hundred. In winter, we huddled together for warmth. Some mornings our thin blankets were frozen stiff.”

         Aaron peered through an empty window.

         “What did you do here?”

         “Worked.”

         “What sort of work?”

         “Whatever they ordered us to do. We sorted clothes, carried bricks, cleaned buildings. It didn’t matter if you were tired or ill.”

         Aaron frowned.

         “Weren’t there teachers?”

         For the first time, she smiled.

         “Not here.”

         “No school?”

         “There were no babies or young children. Teenagers learned different lessons in this place.” She glanced towards the distant wire fence.

         “They learned not to cry when they were hungry. Not to complain when they were frightened. Not to ask where people had gone because sometimes there was no answer.”

         The smile vanished from her face.

         “Young people should never have to learn those things.”

         A gust of wind swept fine snow across the yard.

         For a moment, Booba thought she heard voices carried on the gale. The laughter of children. Mothers calling names. Then it was gone, leaving only a crow’s mournful cry.

         “Come,” she said quietly. “There are places you must see.”

         Dozens of crows perched on the sagging wire fence. Every so often, one swooped and tore at the corpse of a small animal trapped in the barbed mesh. Others followed and fought for scraps.

         The wooden door to an outbuilding swung in the wind, banging against its frame.

         “Over there, Aaron,” she said, pointing. “That’s where we registered. Those who were selected for work received a number.”

         “Why, Booba?”

         “Those with a number received some food and worked.”

         A sign giving disinfection directions remained screwed to a brick wall. They turned right and navigated an ice-covered slope toward two iron doors, their black paint flaking after decades of exposure. The sign above the doors read, TO THE SHOWERS.

         Her hand tightened on Aaron’s as they drew close. For a moment, she felt a chill of doubt, then dread, as she pulled open one door. Her mind flashed back seventy years; the changing room was as she remembered. The walls glowed white, and scrubbed wooden benches were fixed to the concrete floor. Some broken coat hooks hung at regular intervals around the four walls.

         Aaron’s grip tightened on her arm. “There’s no one there. I do not like this place.”

         She stared. “We must move on to the next room.”

         “I’m freezing, Booba. Can we go back to the hotel?”

         “I have to show you this place of misery, and then we’ll leave.”

Aaron walked ahead and opened a heavy metal door. Its hinges groaned when it swung open, revealing a yawning darkness. He stood back to let his Booba enter. To her surprise, an automatic sensor activated, flooding the room in white light.

         “It’s like our shower room at school, Booba, but bigger.”

         “Hush, child.” 

         For many minutes, she stared at the bare, whitewashed walls, which reflected the horrors they conjured in her mind. Here, the nightmare began, and for those in here, it ended.

         The wind rattled the rooftop ventilators; the screech of metal on metal as they turned made the room feel unsettling.

Hannah leaned so hard on Aaron that he had to lean against the wall to keep from falling.

         In the intense silence that followed, he turned to her and saw that her face was as white as the walls.

         For a moment, the room seemed to resent this intrusion. The room felt crowded, though they were alone. Faces she hadn’t seen in seventy years drifted at the edge of memory. Someone seemed to be behind her, but when she turned, the blank walls stared back.

         She remembered the people crying, screaming and hammering and then the silence of the dead. The hum of electric fans before the doors opened. Strange, but in that moment the room held a macabre warmth, not the cold it had now.

         Her whole body shook with rage. She grabbed Aaron and rushed through another door and into the open air. She breathed, filling her lungs as if expelling the air of death.

         The snow flurry had turned into a blizzard. She staggered to a pile of logs for shelter from the storm, next to a brick wall and watched Aaron make snowballs.

         He stopped, kicked the snow, and went to her. “Booba, why did we come here?”

         “Aaron, I had to. Your Zada and I worked here, but when he was ill, they took him into that room. I helped carry him out.”

         “Did you take him to the hospital?”

         She shuddered and pointed to a group of trees. “No, we buried him somewhere over there.”

         “Can I place a stone on his grave?”

         “Please. No more questions, Aaron. It is time we went and found our taxi.”

         As they trudged through the deepening snow, she looked back once.

         Aaron stopped and pointed. “Booba, you said there were no children here.”

         She looked at him, her face red with cold. “Why do you ask?”

         “When we entered that white room, I could hear children crying.”

         She trembled. “In that room, I know what I saw. One day, when you’re old enough, I’ll tell you.”