The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz by Ellie Midwood

Author:Ellie Midwood [Ellie Midwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800194977
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2021-03-08T18:30:00+00:00

The soft, velvet darkness descended upon the camp. The SS office staff, including Mandl, had left for the night; only the lone guard was strolling leisurely around the building. Every ten minutes, Mala saw his boots pass by her window in the camp administration office cellar, the snow crunching softly under his unhurried steps.

She loved her private quarters—an unheard-of privilege granted only to the so-called camp elite. The room was small, and mice visited it more often than not, but Mala didn’t mind such company. She had even befriended the most curious one of the group—the one with the missing ear—and left breadcrumbs by the hole in the wall, just by the radiator, from which her little pet appeared every night without fail.

At first, the mouse would grab the crumbs and disappear into the hole at once, but with time, it had grown accustomed to the young woman and began to eat in front of Mala, still on guard, still keeping its black, beady eyes trained firmly on the human. In Mala’s eyes, that was already progress. She hoped that eventually the mouse would learn to trust her enough to eat out of her open palm. Ridiculous as it sounded, that was her private dream of sorts—to have a pet in Birkenau, even such an unorthodox one. There was so much death around, Mala wanted to return to her room, after witnessing yet another mass murder, and simply sit on the floor and hold something warm and still breathing, feeling the horrors of the day fade away as she stroked the soft, gray fur with the tip of her finger.

Another ten minutes must have passed—the guard had made another circle. But Mala was on the lookout for another pair of boots. A few days earlier, she had instructed Edek how to get to her quarters undetected and which window to knock on so that she would let him in. A risky enterprise, and that was putting it mildly, but the patrolling guard was far too lazy and predictable and, unlike many of his compatriots, didn’t have the habit of shooting first and asking questions later. Even if Edek got caught, she’d explain his presence near the office building easily enough: the pipe in the cellar was leaking and could only be changed at night so that by the morning the camp office’s SS personnel would return to the warmth of their offices. Fortunately for Mala, the guard wasn’t overly enthusiastic and made it a point of honor to never do more work than he was being paid for. Both she and Zippy had smuggled guests into their rooms before, and the SS fellow had not once made the slightest attempt to investigate anything.

The familiar scratching by the radiator caught Mala’s attention. Sliding from the top of her bed to the floor, with a smile she watched a little nose appear out of the hole, its whiskers twitching slightly. A tiny pink paw followed, the other one held apprehensively in the air.

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