Stolen by Night by Steve Watkins

Author:Steve Watkins [Watkins, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2023-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Soon too many prisoners are turning up too feeble to work in the quarries and at the other workstations in the camp. The food is rotten, the water tainted, there’s not enough of either, and we all grow weaker. The kapos are ordered to increase rations. Productivity is everything to the Nazis. Arbeit macht frei.

When prisoners first begin working in the quarries, they look much as they did back home, before arrest and torture. But quickly, because of the grinding work, the accidents, the strained muscles, the starvation, the illness, the beatings, they fade. Many die there. Those who survive, but who have stopped being useful, end up working in the Weberei or a handful of other jobs in the camp. But they are usually so broken by then that it’s only a matter of time before they, too, end up in the stack of bodies in the cellar of the disinfestation building.

I can see Henri growing weaker. He has protected me, but I know he is ill, that he cannot hold on for much longer. When Denis has tried to talk to me back at the barracks, I have done all I can to avoid him. He has retained too much of the flesh on his cheeks, too much of his color. Anyone who is like this, I have learned not to trust. The healthy ones. That’s how I think of them, though of course even those such as Denis, who I suspect have been receiving extra rations, are slowly but surely losing their inner light.

When the stench of sickness gets too bad, the kapos flood the barracks with light, force all the prisoners out of their bunks, force us to strip and bundle our soiled trousers and jackets and carry them down the mountain to the disinfestation building, where all the clothes are dumped into boiling cauldrons and all the naked prisoners are inspected and shaved again and then herded once more back into the scalding showers. Afterward, wet clothes are retrieved, are wrung out and pulled on despite the damp and the bitter cold of winter night in the Vosges. I cover myself through it all with the wet uniform, but I, too, have become emaciated like the others, can feel the bones starting to protrude—my hips, my ribs, my spine. My hands seem translucent. Perhaps I’m becoming truly invisible.

We are forced back up the mountain, shivering through the deepening snows under the threat of the kapos’ clubs while the SS guards watch and laugh in their towers and the attack dogs bite at our heels to hurry us along through the middle of the night. Exhaustion will be compounded by the interrupted sleep and the misery of the cold uniforms.

A wave of nausea sweeps over me just as I am starting to fall asleep. I clutch my stomach and curl into a ball on the hard bunk, fighting the urge to vomit—out of fear of losing what little food I’ve eaten that is supposed

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