Prisoner B-3087: Chapters 18–23

I don’t know where the name started, but Mexico always sounded exotic to me.

The soup was tepid, and you were lucky if there was a limp potato floating in it.

I blinked, disoriented and scared, but I managed to tumble off of my shelf.

The SS officer of the watch sneered at us.

We were skin and bones, with shaved heads and shuffling gaits and red skin on our arms where they’d tattooed us.

Our eyes were sunk into our heads, our ears stuck out like donkey ears, and we must have smelled wretched, though of course we’d all been long accustomed to our stench.

Our eyes were sunk into our heads, our ears stuck out like donkey ears, and we must have smelled wretched, though of course we’d all been long accustomed to our stench.

Little flecks of gray fluttered down all around us, collecting on puddles of water in the yard.

They all looked the same: a big muddy field surrounded by barbed-wire fence, with a bullet-ridden brick wall especially for executions.

One of them shambled up the line, whispering urgent advice.

They recoiled when they saw me, monster that I was.

“What? But that’s preposterous. He’s nine. He’s just a boy,” the woman said.

He looked immaculate, with a shining black cap, polished medals, and neat white gloves like a traffic policeman.

He held a baton in his right hand, and with a flick of it to the left or right he was separating the line.

“Are you healthy?”
“As an ox,” I lied again. It was all I could do not to waver as I stood.

Beside the new prisoners, the older prisoners like me looked pathetically weak and incapable of any kind of real labor.

“You will be happy to know too that your stay here in the camp will cost you nothing. All the valuables you brought with you are at this moment being distributed among the camps, where they will be used exclusively for the benefit of the Jews.”

At Birkenau, we had seen the stockpiles of riches in “Canada,” the camp storehouse.

“...If you work hard, if you perform your duties faithfully, you may be attached to the Wehrmacht as service personnel. From there, you may even earn positions of authority within the new Jewish state.”

I listened to their song, distant and plaintive.

Overhead, we heard the drone of airplanes, and we all looked up.

The Allies were getting closer. They were pushing back! Any day now we might be liberated.

That is what we began to call it, as our numbers dwindled.

The older men had the beginnings of beards on their gray skin, and we all walked like zombies, stumbling more than striding, trying always to stay just one step ahead of the Nazis and their guns.

“Bejvavalo dobre, bejvavalo dobre,” he sang, his voice weak but insistent.

Then a Pole beside me began to sing, and I recognized the refrain: “Hey, hey, hey falcons, pass the mountains, forests, pits. Ring, ring, ring my little bell, in the steppe, ring, ring, ring. Sorry, sorry for the girl, for the green Ukraine. Sorry, sorry your heart is weeping. I’ll never see you again.”

Then a Pole beside me began to sing, and I recognized the refrain: “Hey, hey, hey falcons, pass the mountains, forests, pits. Ring, ring, ring my little bell, in the steppe, ring, ring, ring. Sorry, sorry for the girl, for the green Ukraine. Sorry, sorry your heart is weeping. I’ll never see you again.”

He was an old man with sunken, bloodshot eyes, deep cracks in his face, and a grizzled beard.

It was still a struggle to carry the boy, but with someone else to help I was rejuvenated.

I quickly moved behind the boy and nestled in close, so we could keep each other warm in the night.

Faced with two evils—stealing from a living boy, or wishing him dead to take his food guilt-free—I realized I could more easily have the sin of stealing on my conscience.

His body sparked and thrashed in the wires and bled as the barbs cut him.

At lunch, a half dozen other young men and I were pulled away from our scant meals of watery soup and hard bread.

Were they going to feed us? In the soldiers’ canteen?
No. It was a trick, of course. All part of the Nazis’ game. And in Sachsenhausen, they played the game with relish.

For an hour we were their choir, our weak, raspy voices serenading them as they laughed and talked and ate—and the food they ate!