Silver Threads

The dusty gray morning sky was the same shade as the tip of one of Sarah’s fingers. Her eyes drifted open from a night of restless and painful sleep, and the color and numbness in her right ring finger caused her eyebrows to furrow. Dusty is better than black, but until this point the cold of the nights at Auschwitz hadn’t caused this particular color change. She woke most mornings to red and white, but never this hue. It could be worse. Most women in the barracks had lost at least a toe by this point in the harsh winter. Sarah had all twenty digits, last she checked.

As she started the process of rubbing her hands to warm them, she looked to the women on her right and left for signs of life. Chests rose and fell as their hosts slept restlessly–twitching and tossing from the nightmares that tormented them all. Those fortunate enough (or unfortunate) to have family with them at least had a hand to hold in the long night–Sarah kept her hands tucked by her side or across her chest as she drifted in and out of sleep.

The quiet of the early morning ended with the gong. Women rose all around Sarah, rubbing numb and discolored hands together, massaging tight and sore backs and arms, looking for dead around them. The lines were formed–first to one of the small wooden basins that served as a bath, and next to the pot of steeped garbage that was meant to pass for coffee. Sarah took a sip of hers only because the barely-above-freezing liquid helped to drive the chill from her chest and hands.

The second gong sounded calling the women to roll call, and at its completion the women were divided and herded off to their assigned work stations. As the daughter of a tailor, Sarah had been selected early for mending duties, and when her every stitch and knot was observed to be perfekt by the German officers’ wives, she was moved to work with the dressmakers, sewing garments for Nazi wives and the German elite. Three months Sarah had spent there in the upper room as the women called it, poking and prodding her fingers raw with the long and unrelenting work each day. 

That cold and bleak morning Sarah walked into the upper room, collapsed into her assigned stool, and took up her work left from the previous day. The gold and green threads were being crafted into a pattern that she had learned from her mother a long time ago.

***

Sarah Edelson sat at her working table in the corner of the shop, her father standing nearby fitting a customer near the welcoming glow of the fire. A skirt of delicate blue silk was laid out on her table as she finished the embroidery for the hem with a motif of roses and ivy that her mother had taught to her, pleased with the way the intricate botanicals were taking shape. It was a masterpiece in the making, if it was not too prideful for Sarah to say, and she knew that Frau Gosman would be pleased with the skirt for her daughter’s wedding in the spring. 

As the last light of day in 1937 faded into night, Sarah’s brother, Caleb, slipped through the door into the shop to sit beside her. Two years older than her, Sarah and Caleb had both been removed from public school that spring with the passing of more anti-Semitic laws. The disdain for their people was spreading like a flame of red thread throughout Germany, and sitting at the eve of 1938, the Edelson family was uncertain what hurtles lay before them. 

Caleb gave an approving nod to Sarah’s work and winked as his finger started to tap against her knee.

Party starts soon, he tapped out with a grimace. Sarah smiled at his frown and knew he was picturing the wet kisses and pinched cheeks he was going to have to endure from the aunts.

Run and hide, he tapped on when she didn’t respond with more than a chuckle.

One hour, she responded with a gentle smile, then hide. Their relatives would notice right away if the Edelson’s two children were missing from the New Year’s Eve festivities, but after an hour and a few glasses of Germany’s finest kosher wine, their disappearance might go unnoticed.

One hour, Caleb agreed. He smiled at his sister, his best and oldest friend and fellow trouble maker. 

Sarah smiled, nodded, and threw a few more gold and green stitches into an ivy leaf.

***

New Year’s Eve of 1940 was over and gone as Sarah sat on her cold stool that morning in January. She ran her fingers over the gold and green threads she was working with, her cold and numb fingers feeling their way instinctively across the pattern for errors, of which she found none. She had been working on this dress for several days now, sewing in the all too familiar motif of roses and ivy. The knots, loops, and ties marked the notes of a language that she had learned to speak fluently before she could correctly spell her family name.

It had been Caleb’s idea for the two of them to learn their own language, to better occupy themselves and laugh at their boisterous aunts and uncles at dinners and pass the time with jokes they didn’t want uttered out loud. 

Caleb. Sarah hadn’t seen him or their father in nearly six months. When the Gestapo came for them all, they came quickly, giving them not even a minute to weep over the fabric that was their family being ripped into shreds. The men had been taken to a separate prison than the women right from the start. Then mother didn't last long–pneumonia had caught her quickly that first winter at Auschwitz, and she died asking God to deliver them as he had delivered their people out of Egypt.

A tear threatened to undo her as Sarah thought of her mother and wondered at the fate of Caleb and their father. She continued sewing, stitch, loop, stitch, knot. Roses and ivy, round and round. And none the wiser, the dresses were sent off to the elite German women, botanicals bordered by a repeating delicate pattern of short dots and longer dashes, embroidered perfectly in shimmering silver threads, beautiful and innocent. Or so they seemed.

Gott wird uns gerechtigkeit geben

God will give us justice