The Sun at Midday by Gini Alhadeff

Author:Gini Alhadeff [Alhadeff, Gini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78999-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

“The days passed but we had no exact sense of time. We knew that the front was drawing nearer, as the alarm sirens were becoming more frequent, especially at night. During those alarms every light was turned off and the current in the fences was interrupted. Once, a prisoner took advantage of the pitch dark and managed to escape. He strayed in the countryside for twenty days, stealing clothes and provisions here and there. He was caught and led back to camp. A gallows was erected at the center of the camp and we were made to form ranks all around it. The prisoner, a young man about twenty-five years of age, climbed the few steps up to it with a firm gait; his face blank, he heard out the sentence that condemned him to capital punishment. He looked around at us for a time, then resolutely climbed onto a stool that had been placed before him. He allowed his hands to be tied behind his back, and the noose to be slipped around his neck. Then the executioner, a common prisoner, kicked the stool, and the man hung. A quiver ran through his body, his mouth twitched—that was all. Only the eyes, staring hideously, expressed horror. The body was left to sway late into the night, as a threat and a warning. But soon even this grim episode was forgotten—something much more interesting occupied us: through the German newspapers which entered the camp clandestinely, we surmised that something new was happening on the eastern front. There was talk of a Russian offensive in Krakow and a strange excitement had taken hold of the camp. There were conflicting opinions. We would all be either killed or evacuated; I was of the second opinion, because I believed that as long as the great Reich needed hands, our life would not be in danger. No one thought that they would leave such a sizable workforce to the Russians.

“Amid hope, illusion, doubt, we reached the morning of the eighteenth of January, 1945. At about eight, some of the German rear guard went by; at ten, an endless column of female prisoners began to march past us. They were all young, most of them Jewish, of all nationalities: they smiled and, though it was forbidden, called to us who watched from a distance, asking whether we had news of a loved one. Among them, many were fat, abnormally fat, the sort of awkward fat that is caused by a glandular dysfunction. I found out later that they had been experimentally ovariectomized: we had, before our eyes, human guinea pigs. After two hours, it seemed that the column was at last drawing to a close. The most enfeebled, the eldest, and the thinnest brought up the rear. An emaciated woman in her forties remains etched in my mind: she dragged herself along the icy road, wearing a rope shoe on her left foot and a rough wooden clog on the right one. The wooden clog

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