Prisoner B-3087 by [email protected]

Author:[email protected]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

the traIn arrIved at bIrkenau at nIGht. The cars clanked and groaned as the train came to a stop half a kilometer outside the gates. It was a cloudy night, and should have been dark, but the sky was lit up red like a bonfire. Black chimneys stood up in silhouette against the glowing sky, shooting flames from their tops, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air. I gagged.

I waited for the train to move again, to take us into that awful factory, but we didn’t move. We sat for what must have been hours, all of us who could see out watching the flames, knowing that was where we were going. Why were they holding us here? Was this one last torture, one last joke? Did they want to drive us to panic? To madness? If they did, it was working. The longer we waited, the more anxious I got. What was going on? Why weren’t we moving?

“What are they waiting for?” I said at last, my voice hoarse from thirst and fear.

“Don’t you see the fires in the chimneys?” a man next to me said. “They have to finish off the last trainload before they have room for us.”

So that was it. We were just another raw material, waiting to be processed. Shovel us in, shovel us out.

I dozed again. Every time I woke, I was still in the cold train car, a dead man leaning against me. At last, the train jolted and began to move, and I woke for good to a pale yellow sun rising above the trees in the distance. They were taking us inside to the furnaces. They were taking us inside to die.

The train-car door opened. For a few steps the dead body next to me came with us, held up between the living as we pushed for the door. But soon there was more space, and he fell, slumping to the floor with the others who had died on the trip. There were dozens of them, rag and bone skeletons who had perished of hunger, or thirst, or the cold, or suffocation, or overwork. We climbed over them, gulping in the fresh air outside before the kapos and soldiers whipped us and shouted at us to line up.

We assembled in a field just beyond the train cars, those of us who survived, looking more dead than alive. After another roll call to see which of us were still alive, the Nazis marched us toward one of the big brick buildings with chimneys.

So this was it. The reality began to sink in, and I slumped under its weight. They really were going to kill us. I had come so far, endured so much agony and suffering.

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Walked the streets of occupied Kraków. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be

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