31/07/2025
“The Twin Photograph” — Prague, 1942
They were born minutes apart on a snow-dusted morning in 1930—Hana and Eliška Weiss, identical right down to their lashes. Their father, a soft-spoken tailor with careful hands, used to say the only way he could tell them apart was by their dimples: Hana’s dipped left, Eliška’s curved right. That—and the way Hana chased the world without hesitation, while Eliška paused to study it first.
In the photograph, they’re seven.
Wearing matching navy pinafores, sewn stitch by stitch by their father. Standing in front of the family tailor shop, hands clasped, socks mismatched—Hana’s slipping down, Eliška’s pulled perfectly high. Both smiling. Both fearless. Children with cherry cake dreams and circus parade hearts.
But by 1942, the world outside the frame had turned.
The shop stood empty. Their mother’s lullabies faded into murmurs. A yellow star was stitched over their chests, right above the rhythm of their small, steady hearts.
That autumn, the Weiss family was deported to Theresienstadt. Hunger came. Then the transfer to Auschwitz.
On the ramp, Dr. Josef Mengele spotted them.
“Twins?” he asked, eyes sharp with something cold.
Their mother clutched them tight.
Soldiers tore the girls from her arms.
She screamed—a sound Eliška would never forget.
Not a word, but a breaking. A ripping. The sound of a mother being pulled in two.
Inside the lab, the girls were separated.
Measurements. Needles. Blood.
Strange questions. Cold hands.
Each day, they searched for each other. Each night, they whispered through the dark.
Then one day, Hana didn’t return.
Eliška waited.
She asked. Then begged.
But the silence never gave her back.
Months passed.
The gates of Auschwitz opened.
Eliška walked out alone.
Years later, in a quiet apartment in Brno, Eliška would sit by the window, sewing in silence.
In her old sewing kit—smuggled from the camp—was a single photograph, edges worn smooth with time.
Two girls. Holding hands. Bathed in sunlight.
She kept it close. Always.
“They took everything,” she would whisper. “But not this. Not her smile. Not her left dimple.”
And sometimes, when no one was watching, Eliška would press her fingers to the image, her lips curling faintly.
Her right dimple showing—just in case Hana was still looking.