Gretchen shuddered as the train edged noisily away; tried and failed to forget where it had come from, where it was going. Hard-hitting snowflakes assailed her hair and cap, dotting her form with bits of frost that refused to melt, that clung tightly to her as if content to wait for spring to come.
She trudged painfully through the deep snow covering the sidewalk, shivering in spite of the long woolen coat, the thick-knit gloves, the fleece-lined boots in which her feet were comfortably entrenched. She could not have imagined how terrible, how terrifying this winter would be.
The caretaker was waiting at the house when she arrived, rubbing the gnarled hands she recalled from her youth over a warm, cheerful fire. Hands now aged, blotched with spots; hands that had faithfully spent the last forty years in her mother’s service.
“She kept up the garden real nice,” he assured her kindly. “Right until the end.”
Well she remembered her mother’s garden. The loving care with which she’d tended it, tilling the soil before the frost had truly gone, coaxing flowers up out of the dirt before the sun had barely begun to shine through the winter clouds.
“Did she suffer?” she asked abruptly. “At the end?”
“No,” he answered slowly. “No, I don’t believe she suffered much.”
Gretchen bowed her head and gazed out the wide, wintry window, at a world cloaked in white, punctuated only by the bare brown branches of naked trees poking up through the snow, ice crystallizing each limb from tip to stem.
“No one blames you,” the caretaker said softly. “For leaving her. All other things aside, she was…” He swallowed in the sudden silence. “A very cold woman.”
Yes, a cold woman, she thought, bidding him farewell in the bitter chill that froze her breath and numbed her fingers, the cold to which she thought she could never again become accustomed. The cold she had left behind.
She couldn’t help but remember, as she sat now by the hot, glowing fire, how her mother had so earnestly described it, that one night four decades before, when Gretchen herself had been scarcely more than a child. How she’d breathed deeply and relayed the entire story at once, as if she’d been holding it carefully in reserve, waiting for her daughter to be old enough to hear it. The trains arriving one after another, crammed to their icicle-laden rafters. The passengers disembarking, standing shivering in the winter snow. The orders being given to undress, to run naked on frostbitten feet before the selection staff. The frozen barracks, their bunks jammed tight, ever tighter with women, ever more sick prisoners, more starving inmates. The cracks of the whip and the sadism of the guards wielding it; the insistence of the block-leaders on wielding it while its victim stood bare-backed in the chill wind that blew here, through Oswiecim, through Auschwitz.
The block-leaders, she thought, her stomach sickening at the recollection as she stared about her mother’s warm, welcoming house with its quaint, outmoded furniture, its thick, heavy drapes, its bright, cheerful windows opening onto the garden, where in spring she had liked to watch the flowers growing up out of the frost.
She heard a thump from somewhere outside, as of a bottle of milk, a newspaper being delivered to their doorstep, a peaceful sound out of her childhood days, before she’d heard her mother’s story. Before a thump brought to mind the evil images, of men in uniforms come to drag the innocents away, men and women and young girls, just like her, just like she had been.
She tiptoed to the front door; opened it guardedly against the wind and snow that swirled even harder in the descending nightfall, against the cold that penetrated her defenseless skin. In the darkling dusk she discerned two trails of ragged footprints penetrating the snow, leading to and from the porch in hapless, unsteady array, as if made by a man uncertain of his errand, unsure of his way. The source of the sound lay at her feet, a small pot containing a cluster of tiny white flowers. Galanthus nivalis, she thought, automatically recalling the scientific nomenclature for the flower that bloomed first in the spring, that survived even the late snows. How proud her mother had been to refer to it that way; how she’d scorned the native term.
She bent to retrieve it and descried a note tied to the slender stalk, a scrap of snow-dampened paper fluttering in the icy air, a coarse handful of block-letters etched upon it in quivering ink. She retreated inside and closed the door behind her, shutting out the terrible, terrifying cold.
“For the funeral,” she read.
Perhaps some had learned to look past it, to see her mother only as the mild old lady gently tending her garden, caressing the fragile petals and stems of her beloved plants with delicate fingers, as if fearful of doing them harm. Perhaps some could forget, could feel sorrow over an elderly woman’s passing, compassion for the long-lost daughter who would suffer and mourn at her death. Or perhaps there were no longer any remaining, of those who had known her before.
She turned to gaze at it, her mother’s most prized possession, the treasured photograph, still standing proudly on the polished end-table by the sofa where she had liked to sit. Her mother, young and pretty in her SS uniform, smiling brightly at the camera as if untroubled by either cares or conscience. And meticulously arranged in a vase beside her, her mother’s favorite: snowdrops, the flower that disdains the cold, and survives the frost.
Tomorrow, after the funeral, she would return. Take the flowers and leave them there, in remembrance of the thousands, the tens and hundreds of thousands who had stood waiting with their feet buried in snow to learn whether they would live or die. Those who had waited in vain among the snowdrops for the spring to come.
Lori Schafer is a part-time tax practitioner and part-time writer residing in Northern California. Her short stories, flash fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online publications, and she is currently at work on her second novel. You can find more of her work at http://lorilschafer.blogspot.com/.
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