What the Night Sings Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Vesper Stamper

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” by Vic Mizzy and Manny Curtis, reprinted with permission from Next Decade Entertainment, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stamper, Vesper, author.

  Title: What the night sings / Vesper Stamper.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2018] | Summary: Liberated from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, sixteen-year-old Gerta tries to make a new life for herself, aided by Lev, a fellow survivor, and Michah, who helps Jews reach Palestine.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020646 (print) | LCCN 2017037126 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-0038-6 (trade) | ISBN 978-1-5247-0039-3 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-1-5247-0040-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Refugees—Fiction. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Fiction. | Jews—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Germany—History—1945–1955—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S732 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.S732 Wh 2018 (print) | DDC

  [Fic]—dc23

  The illustrations in this book were rendered in ink wash, white gouache, and graphite, toned digitally.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.2

  a

  Remember

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: Liberation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  II: Women’s Music

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  III: Fast Friends

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  IV: Displaced

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  V: Oasis

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  A Song of Ascents

  Authors Note

  Glossary

  Europe and the British Mandate of Palestine 1935-1947

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I am lying next to Rivkah in the bunk when the announcement comes. She is burning; she is freezing. I hold her, and I sing to her:

  Az ir vet, kinderlekh, elter vern, vet ir aleyn farshteyn—

  When, dear children, you grow older, you will understand for yourselves—

  I learned this Yiddish song from another musician on my transport here. I only spoke German before, though I sang in many other languages. When they came for me, I was rehearsing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but even in German I understood nothing except the language of music. But now what do I care? I may as well die singing. Typhus is sweeping everyone away anyway. Die this way, die that way; pass out at hard labor, or get shot shuffling from one mysterious mound to the next—what’s the difference?

  So I hold Rivkah, and I mutter the song.

  I am nearly sixteen years old. At least I think so.

  Rivkah is my fourth bunkmate in Bergen-Belsen. Somehow I’ve survived four these last few wretched months. The first was a sick old woman from one of the death marches. She had diabetes and died from a seizure. We were packed so tightly that she shook against me for twenty minutes. I felt my brain shake in my skull; I felt my stomach shake behind my ribs. We pushed her body to the floor and folded her arms. Someone muttered a prayer over her and we fell back to sleep. It was the most dignity we could give her.

  There was no time to learn her name.

  The next two girls were pretty, even younger than me. This was obviously their first camp—hard to believe after so much war. It was a crowded week of transports, and the three of us shared one blanket. They kept to themselves and had managed to smuggle in a tube of lipstick. The girls were always whispering and putting on the lipstick, pinching their cheeks and ringing my ears with their acidic giggling. I didn’t understand their language, but I understood the tone: a stupid survival plot, as if they actually had a say in their fate. They starved a little more slowly than the rest of us, but one day they disappeared, one in the morning, the other that night.

  Rivkah came two days later from the Buna factory. She is also from Köln, the city where I was born, and she knew my parents. She’s a laboratory scientist, the mother of two boys, Michah and Chaim, fond of boxing. She said she usually scolded them for fighting, but she was secretly proud of her strong sons. They’d buy her little trinkets with the winnings from their after-school fights—flowers, chocolates—and kiss and flatter her to keep her from fussing too much. Big, sweet boys. She lost them to a transport last year but believes with her whole heart that they will all be reunited. Meanwhile, I’m a temporary substitute, a foster child. Somehow she is always smiling, even in fever. I think she’s in shock—or maybe she’s the kind of person who smiles so much, her face is fixed with a permanent grin, in her eyes as much as on her lips.

  Rivkah had met my parents a few times at the club in Köln. My mother died in the raid on the club, I told her. She was sorry, she said. Her voice got raspy and she used her little, growing cough as an excuse not to finish her thought. A couple of weeks after Rivkah came here to Bergen-Belsen, the typhus took root. Now she is dying in my arms.

  * * *

  —

  The soldiers burst into the barracks, and I keep singing. I’m dazed. I am catching fever and I don’t recognize their uniforms.

  Soldiers are soldiers. Guns are guns. Language is language.

  They shout to us in English, with British accents, I think, muffled through the rags they hold over their noses and mouths. I’m so used to the smell of filth and death that only when I see those handkerchiefs am I reawakened to the true state of things. I’m inexplicably ashamed. I have nothing left to be ashamed about—but I pull my uniform shirt lower over my bare thighs anyway.

  The soldiers begin removing the dead. There are so many. How could I not have noticed them lying right next to me?

  And suddenly—Rivkah, too, is gone.

  I feel her final br
eath wisp across my lips. They pull her from me, but I can’t let her go. She is my last connection to the living world. I clutch her arm, her hand, her fingers. I sing the lullaby after her, my foster mother. I know no one else in all of Bergen-Belsen, either from Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. Everyone has come and gone, piles of shells pulled in and out of waves, and I’m still here, a skeleton of a sea creature, dropped in this tide pool, living, watching, still living.

  Two soldiers extract me from the bunk like a splinter. I’m still mumbling the song as one of them wraps me in a dirty blanket and the other picks me up like a sick baby. He carries me out of the barracks into the blinding sunshine. Every thirty seconds, I fade into blackness and reemerge. I don’t feel the soldier’s arms under me or the roughness of his uniform lapel on my cheek. Through a tunnel of washy sounds, I hover just above his arms, floating on a current above this chaos.

  Strange I hadn’t noticed it before, the bodies strewn in the courtyard. An old man who sat down to die against a wall. A woman stroking the hair of the lifeless friend in her lap. The nearly dead call out for help, reaching up to soldiers rushing by, and die with their hands in the air. People are running in zigzags. Several fall under the feet of frenzied crowds. Children wander blindly through piles of limbs and breasts that might have been mothers, open eyes, gaping mouths—I’m looking into a mirror at myself, my eyes half-lidded, my spirit exiting, entering through my mouth, making no commitment.

  I’m suddenly afraid that I’m being put into another selection, and I wonder, Who have I offended now, just by being? Until I was captured, I had no idea I was even Jewish. I held the Ahnenpass, the certificate of racial purity. It stated I was Gerta Richter, four grandparents deep in Aryan blood.

  * * *

  —

  The soldier lays me down on the ground inside a green tent, looks at me—looks away. His forehead is wrinkled. The rag tied around his nose and mouth is damp from sweat and tears. I see why: I am contagion. I am a threat to his life even as he saves mine. And he will handle hundreds of us today, carry us to the tent, touch our skin and clothes, breathe our miasma.

  Under the olive-green sunlight I lie here. I feel the dirt; I caress the dirt; I pack the dirt under my nails, as deep as it will go. I sing—“…vet ir aleyn farshteyn—” but a flutter, barely perceptible, arises in my throat, and suddenly, silence. My dry lips hang open; my voice has finally given out.

  * * *

  —

  There is a boy—a man?—lying on the ground next to me. I’ve been in women’s barracks for so long, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be near one. He is another skeleton, but even in their dark hollows, his eyes are bright, hazel like my father’s. He looks like a marionette, with glass eyes and a smile painted over his skin-wrapped skull. He apparently isn’t sick, just starved. He has the beginnings of a shock of red hair. He speaks.

  “We are free.”

  I turn to look at him, this madman. I must be delirious; he is speaking nonsense.

  “I can see you don’t believe me. But it’s true. The British. They’re rounding up the SS. We are free.” This stranger inches his hand over to mine and grasps it.

  I am staring at him, and his face morphs into abstract shapes, and I think, This is reality; everything is made of shapes; no one is human; language is shapes. I fade in and out again and find I’ve scratched the dirt with my free hand until my papery fingertips are raw and bleeding. This is the moment I understand.

  I have survived.

  * * *

  —

  The boy next to me stays only three days. With a little food in him, he is strong enough to get up and help the soldiers. He seems to have taken an interest in me and comes back to visit, to spoon soup into my mouth and wipe it from my chin. There is something familiar in his eyes, but I can’t name it. It might be…kindness.

  “Guten Morgen!” he greets me. “How about some soup?”

  I can’t speak, but he tells me in his rough, rushed German what is going on outside in the stabbing sunshine. “You’ve never seen a thing like it,” he says, lifting the spoon to my lips. “When they opened the camp, it’s like the SS knew they were coming. They just exchanged commanders: yesterday, SS—today, British. The guards even tried to blend in with us, in camp uniforms. But they couldn’t get away with that. And everyone is dying, dying…and there are too many to bury. So today they rounded up the guards and made them dig huge new pits. And in one of those pits, do you know what they did?” Here he catches a potato and maneuvers it into my mouth. “The soldiers made the guards lie with their faces in the dirt, like corpses. They had to lie there with guns at the back of their necks for the longest time. And when they were allowed to climb out, they had to carry each body from the piles by hand and bury it and say, ‘Rest in peace’!”

  I realize I’m smiling at the thought. My jaw feels a little looser as I chew. The boy pats my shoulder, strokes my forehead and pulls the blanket back over me.

  I’ve been in this tent ten days, and I make no decision to walk out; my brain just lifts me, and I leave. A British nurse grabs my arm and I feel the sickening lack of muscle, the bare nerve rolling between my skin and bone.

  “Your name?” she asks. I have to think a moment.

  My name?

  “I’m glad you’re able to get up,” she says, “and you’re free to leave the medical tent, but I need your name so I can write that you’ve gone.”

  I pull up the sleeve on my left arm and show her the tattoo of my number: A28865. She begins writing it on a card.

  “All right, that’s helpful, too, but, my dear, I really do need to know your name. Oh, and your place of residence before the war.”

  I blink halfway, swallow, moisten my lips. “Rausch,” I say, the first word since I lost my voice on the day of liberation. “Gerta…Rausch. Würzburg.” I walk away into the afternoon sun.

  “Wait, Gerta Rausch!” She is frantic, calling after me. “They are moving everyone out of the barracks! You’ll need to get a new bed assignment!”

  But I’m almost across the courtyard now. There are still mounds of bodies waiting to be buried, like cordwood or piles of matchsticks. Men with religion emerge to say Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, as the dirt is packed over and patted down. I never learned any prayers, so I wander away into the fields, beyond the gates and watchtowers, as far from the barracks and bodies as my atrophied muscles will carry me. My legs begin to feel their strength, and I break into what I think is a run but must be more like the shuffle of an elderly woman.

  I am midway across a vast meadow, tall grass cutting my legs, before I realize I have nowhere to go.

  Barbed wire edges this barren, infinite wilderness, just a line of stitching along a gray tea towel. How did such flimsy boundaries hold us here?

  And if I am free, how do I get home?

  And where is home?

  * * *

  —

  I walk back through the gates, exhausted.

  Nurses, new soldiers, relief workers ask questions among themselves in English, thinking we can’t understand—

  “Why did they not rise up?”

  “Didn’t they know?”

  “Couldn’t someone have armed them?”

  —as though these hypotheses could be tested. As though we could have fathomed the intricacies of the Nazi web: the reinvention of language, the animalization of human souls.

  As I round the corner back to the main camp road, I pass a group walking by in street clothes. For almost two years, I’ve seen nothing but uniforms of either captives or captors. But here now are pretty flowered spring dresses, tweed coats and trousers, crocheted sweaters on fat babies. It’s so alien to my eyes, I think I must have walked into the wrong place, into some kind of Easter parade.

  The British have brought our neighbors here for a visit.

  Families from Winsen, Buchholz, Osterheide. I think about the transports from camp to camp, how I screamed inside as we passed village after village: Do you kn
ow there are human beings on this train? Do you care? But long before, it had been codified into law, digested in the guts of children along with their biscuits and milk: we weren’t humans, but infectious vermin. We were simply animals in these…appropriate vehicles.

  So now the soldiers round up the old village ladies, young mothers with their hair curled and pinned, wounded and decommissioned German soldiers. They bring them on a little excursion through the corpse-woods, past the stinking mass graves, into the storage rooms where luggage molders unclaimed and shorn hair piles up in a corner, destined to be stuffed into mattresses and woven into cloth for SS uniforms. Such things are merely the by-products of their animal neighbors. Shoes, thousands upon thousands, fill another warehouse: white kid-leather baby booties, red high-heeled dancing shoes. A closet holds the half-skeletal remains of discarded women.

  Some of the visitors vomit on themselves. Hardened veterans faint. Women holding their pretty children become furious and spit their demand to leave. The soldiers won’t relent. One woman is shouting so loud, a sergeant grabs her red cheeks until his fingers press them white. He yanks her head and forces her to stare into the room.

  “You will look at this! You will take it in with your blind eyes until they truly see! You, you let this happen—to your own neighbors, in your own country, your own streets. These are humans! Human beings!” His mouth foams; he shakes her with all his own shock and indignation. She slaps his hand away. Her cheeks have begun to bruise.

  “No,” she says, her eyes wide but her voice calm. “No. They are not. They never were. This never happened.”

  It’s been a month since the British came. We’ve been moved into the SS quarters across the woods. There are still many living in the old barracks, but less crowding means at least everyone gets her own mat and blanket. We no longer have to line up outside for a supper of cloudy dishwater. Now we can sit in shifts in the dining hall and eat a whole potato; now and then we get a little margarine.