Chapter 29 Stefan
TWENTY-NINE
STEFAN
BIRKENAU (AUSCHWITZ II)
Injection. Black out. Blur.
Screams and cries. Whimpers and moans.
Repeat.
Until now. Something is different—my mind is clearer or remaining open for more than a few seconds. This time, I’m awake.
My memories might be illusions or delusions. Or not real at all. I’m not sure. It’s as if I’m starting over each time I force open my eyes. My most recent memories are hazy—so unclear I’m not sure what I might be starting over from. Dark surroundings, and loneliness, is what I can remember.
There’s a source of light now. Maybe it’s daytime. There could be a nearby window. Or perhaps just a hanging ceiling light.
My heavy head falls to one side, facing a man resting in a chair instead of lying on a cot. There’s discolored bandaging crisscrossed over his face.
It’s his eye. It’s hurt. That’s where the bandage is thickest, protruding.
He peers at me from the corner of his good eye, maybe wondering why I’m staring at him. It’s all I’ve seen in—I don’t know how long.
“Wh—where?” My throat is too dry to speak. The air in my lungs barely makes up a word.
“Auschwitz,” the man says. “Main camp.”
That’s not the answer I was looking for, but I didn’t know I had been moved again either. I was in Birkenau, the second addition to Auschwitz.
“Where in the main camp?” I’m not making sense to myself. And there’s still no sound.
“H?ftlingskrankenbau—the infirmary. Where we wait to die.”
His words don’t startle me. I don’t know how I’m alive. I’ve considered I might already be dead and this is hell, if such a place existed in the Jewish faith. If not hell, where?
My vision clears more, allowing me to see past the man in the chair. More beds, more people, pale skin, bones, bloody sheets. Nothing but horror, and yet, I haven’t looked down toward the rest of my body.
I swallow against my dry throat. The sting and soreness of dehydration merely distracts me as I dare look at what’s happened to me.
Dark, old blood stains the yellowing bed sheet draping the plateau of my body.
I try to wiggle my toes, watching the highest peak beneath the sheet.
The signal isn’t crossing between my brain and body.
I strain against the muscles in my neck, twisting my head upright, then dropping it to the other side. More beds. More people. Then a wall.
An acrid smell of something burning…a body, flesh…
Something metal and mechanical buzzes, and the smell that follows burns my stomach.
Where is she? Rosalie.
I clench my eyes shut, imagining my toes, then legs, moving, the sensation of the tired trembling muscles, and sweat streaking behind my kneecaps.
What did they do to me?
I need to get up. I need to get out of here.
A woman in a black dress, her face thin and narrow like a crow, passes by. “Help,” I say. My throat locks tight like sheets of fly paper.
She stops, even though I don’t think she could have heard the air come from my throat. With a brief glance, she continues walking, right out of the enclosed space.
“Don’t bother. No one will pay you any attention. They aren’t real nurses,” the man with the bandaged eye says.
“What do—” There’s no purpose in even trying to talk.
“People just die.”
“No,” I utter through a breath. “I can’t.”
“If not, they’ll steal a limb or an eyeball. That’s what they do.”
“What?”
“They collect them. Dissect them. Hang them on walls. Give them to other people.”
My stomach gurgles with pain. “Why?”
The man shrugs. “No one knows. The doctor is a mad man. Thinks he’s a great scientist. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. You’d be better off dead than letting him touch you. If I knew then…I’d have asked to be shot instead of—” He points to his eye. “Steal this.”
I turn my head back to stare up at the wooden beams along the ceiling.
A pinch against my arm. A distorted face and a smoker’s laugh. The image of Rosalie’s face…a blur I can see through, a delusion—a dream.
The world fades again—black, thick, and endless.
My eyes flash open and I gasp for air as if I’ve been holding my breath for too long. My limbs tingle. It’s something. A sensation. My toes sweep along the coarse fabric of a sheet. Then I twist my head to the right, searching for the man with the missing eye.
There’s no chair.
No man.
But the light shines the same, casting a subtle streak along the yellowing sheet. I’m in the same place as I was last time I woke up. I’m sure of it. The man said we were in an infirmary block within the main Auschwitz camp.
Someone must have moved that man, and his chair.
Now there’s a cot beside me with a different thin, bony man sleeping, his mouth ajar, hands dangling over the sides.
There are other cots lining the wall next to him and to the other side of me, matching ones across the row against the opposite wall—half of them filled with people who look like the man next to me.
I wiggle my fingers. Stiff, but they move.
A man walks in through the partitioned opening, limping, groaning, holding his stomach with a clenched fist. His striped pajamas hang loosely from his waist, and the bottom hems drag along the floor. He catches my stare and shakes his head.
“Don’t let them see you awake,” he utters.
“Why?” I whisper, feeling less pressure in my throat than the last time I tried to speak—to the man with a missing eye.
“The doctors will use you for anything you can give them. And those of us in this room are the only men in this infirmary block,” he says. “If they need men to experiment on, it’s only us amid all the women.”
Images of the man on the operating table in the infirmary block at Birkenau…the one someone opened the door to and left open for anyone to see. The castration. The blood.
“What did they do to you?” I ask, my voice scraping the air like sand and paper.
The man stares at me for a long minute before rolling onto the cot, groaning. “Not enough to kill me.”
Don’t let them see you awake. His words replay in my head. I shut my eyes, trying to avoid the thoughts of what they did to that man, or the other men on either side of me.
I don’t exactly know what’s been done to me. Or how long I’ve been under treatment. Every time I wake up, I question if I’ve been asleep for minutes or a year.
A thud from the floor above startles me. My eyelids are almost weightless as they open this time.
Don’t let them see you awake. The words rumble through my head again. I twist my head to look across the row, toward the cot with the man who came limping in.
He’s gone.
To my right, I search for the man whose mouth was ajar, hands dangling off the sides.
He’s gone.
We’re the only men in this barrack.
They must be getting rid of the men. Is that the way?
More commotion from the floor above jostles the beams. The hanging bulbs swing back and forth, casting spotlights on each wall, one at a time.
A bloody handprint on the wall to my left comes into view. The lightbulb’s glow draws a moving line to it.
I bend my knuckles, pressing against the ache in my joints.
I swivel my feet. Another ache. Every bone in my body feels like ungreased hinges.
But even old doors can open and close. I clench my jaw, trapping in any sound that might come out of my mouth and push through the pain, moving my legs one at a time to the side of the cot, letting gravity assist with the rest.
I claw my fingernails into the brick wall, feeling the tear in my flesh as I make my way to my feet. My feet drag as I shimmy behind the row of cots in this row, never releasing my death grip on the wall. My knees might give out on me, but I must make it to the corner wall first.
A zing of currents zap through my left arm, warning of an incoming tremor.
I hold on to the brick even tighter, coming within reach of the separating wall.
I shift my balance and grab a hold of the metal frame of the nearest cot and pull my hand away from the brick.
Blood drips from my fingertips. My muscles spasm, then rest. I breathe through a mild tremor and force my hand to steady enough to write.
Blood is all the ink I need.
I press my index finger to the partition and trace out the words in smears of blood:
TIME WILL FIND US
If she ever comes through this barrack—if she is ever assigned to this space, she’ll see the words. She’ll know. She’ll know I’m alive. At least for the moment. Still holding out hope that I’ll find her before it’s too late.
Or she may never see these words. She may never know that I’m fighting to stay alive. For her.
These men have all disappeared except one or two who might already be dead in their cots. If I don’t wake again, at least these words will remain.
Our words found each other in the darkness once before. I can only pray for a second chance.