My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

Author:Dana Fitzwater Cornell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2013-08-19T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

Over the span of five or six months, we spent six days a week building the crematorium regardless of the weather conditions. We marched off to work before the sun rose and didn’t return home until well after it set. My skin soon blistered from the constant sun exposure. For every brick we cemented in place, we were one brick closer to completing a monstrosity that would annihilate us. When we completed the smokestacks for the building, we were very much aware that some, if not all, of us might wind up exiting through them as miniscule particles of dust, floating out of them in ashy puffs of smoke as the crematorium exhaled after consuming its meal. Positioning the windows and doors into place—making the building look inviting rather than intimidating—we knew that we might look out of them one day, absorbing our last mental image of Mother Earth prior to being led into the basement and asphyxiated.

During this time, there was the usual roll call two or three times a day, breaks for our starvation rations of watery coffee, soup, and bread, and intermittent trips to the “barbers” to have our hair shaved and our bodies decontaminated and bathed. I cannot say that it was monotonous, for that would imply that it was mundane and we were bored yet comfortable with our situation; there was no adjusting to our twisted existence where at any moment we could be killed. We were led off to work by the musical notes of the orchestra and walked back to camp to the same upbeat marches. Dead or alive, all prisoners had to return to camp after the workday. When members of my labor group became sick or keeled over when they physically and mentally could no longer exert themselves, we were expected to carry them with us to the inlet of the camp at the end of the day.

I can’t tell you how many times I walked back to camp with a man slung over my shoulder, the same man who had taken bricks out of my hands only minutes prior. But I carried the weight of the dead more so in my heart than on my shoulders.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.