All but My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissmann Klein

Author:Gerda Weissmann Klein [Klein, Gerda Weissmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Women, History, Holocaust
ISBN: 9780809024605
Google: -j-PtY_Kwz4C
Amazon: 0809015803
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1995-03-30T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

SEVERAL DAYS LATER ABEK WROTE. THE THING HE HAD HOPED would not happen–had happened. His parents and sisters were gone. The Jews of Sosnowitz had met the same fate as those in Bielitz and elsewhere. He had managed to get to Sosnowitz but by the time he arrived no one was left. Even the young people had been sent to Auschwitz and not to work camps. Abek described what he thought had happened, down to the last cruel, unthinkable detail. He told me that he had seen the large field where his family and thousands of others had stood before their last journey. He imagined how the place must have echoed with cries only the day before. He described the bodies still lying in the field, dead from cold, starvation, or suicide. There were many bodies of children, whose parents had given them poison or sleeping pills, so that they could be spared Auschwitz. I lived it all through Abek’s eyes until I felt that I could take no more. I forced myself to read all his letter.

“My life is a desert now,” he wrote. “I go on living only because I have you. Only you can make a future possible for me. When I hold you in my arms again, we will both cry our bitterness away. You will wipe away my tears and make me happy. You will teach me to smile again. Through you I might yet know some happiness … .”

When I put down the letter, I felt anew all the pain I had suffered at separation from Papa and Mama. I was afraid of the future. Abek’s parents were gone too, and I felt closer to them than to Abek. They were no more. I could hardly grasp it. With horror I remembered how I had battled with myself in the Dulag. Had I stayed in Sosnowitz and not been able to get back to Bielitz, I would have been sent to Auschwitz too.

I sat down at once and wrote to Abek. I wrote what he would want to hear: that I would be with him, that I would never leave him, that I would make him happy. I wrote slowly and deliberately, not in my usual swift, careless way. I was halfway finished when the lights in our quarters were turned off for the night. In the washroom, in the dim blue light there, I wrote the rest. I wrote without looking back, without correcting. I had to finish it without stopping.

Timidly I knocked on Frau Kügler’s door and asked her if my one weekly letter might be mailed ahead of time. To my surprise, she was not angry; she promised to send it off in the morning.

I returned to my bunk, undressed slowly, and neatly folded my things away, something that I had never done before. When I got into the bunk, I felt Ilse’s hand reaching for mine. The gesture annoyed me. I turned away and gazed into darkness. Only then did I start thinking of what I had written to Abek and realize that it was false.

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.