Reflection
My Reflection
When we emerged, we were told to go and find a place in any of the barracks where there was room. We didn’t get tattooed as I later learned others had been. I don’t know if they didn’t have the time or they just figured there was no point in numbering and keeping track of us anymore. Why bother? We would all die soon.
About half a dozen young women around my age were walking together. We didn’t speak, but we all just walked out of there together and started looking for a barracks to park ourselves in as we had been ordered to do. We were in a grey place with no colour. Everything was drab beyond words. There was not one flower or bush, not one tree, not a blade of grass or leaf. As we were walking in the middle of this enormous camp, we passed a barracks on the left, number 15, which had one window at eye level. The sun was out and shining on the window. It was like a mirror, and as we came upon it, we all stopped and looked in the window. When I looked, I didn’t see myself. I saw strange, bald, skinny women. I didn’t know which one in the group was me. I couldn’t tell until I counted. One, two, three, four people in the window. One, two, three, four — looking at us. That fourth bald girl was me? I couldn’t believe it. Three days earlier, I had been removed from under an umbrella of love and care that I’d felt my entire life from my parents. Now I was someone else, someone unrecognizable to me.
Then we disbursed as one girl found a place here and another one found a place there. I found myself in one of the last barracks in the area where we were being held. This barracks had no windows, just huge doors, like barn doors, and wooden walls. There were no floors, just earth, the same as outside. Our good fortune was that it was summer and we weren’t in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the winter without any extra clothing or blankets, especially when we stood outdoors for Appell, roll call, for several hours, as we were forced to do twice daily.
There were women lying on the floor side by side in the barracks, and I saw an empty spot. Prisoners were coming into Birkenau so fast that, in some of the barracks, they hadn’t built the tiered bed structures that were in other barracks, and people just lay on the ground. No one complained; the women just lay there. I went to the space I had spotted and lay down. A few days later, it rained, and I realized why that space had not been taken. The roof above it was leaking, and the earth I was lying on became a puddle — a muddy, cold puddle. The voice in my head said, No, you can’t lie down there. It’s suicide. You’ll get sick. So, after roll call, I wandered out and walked around the barracks. I found three little pieces of scrap wood left over from the construction of the barracks, I assume. I had my solution. When I lay down, I put one little piece of wood under my knees, one under my hips and one under my shoulders, and I was raised up about half an inch above the puddle, just high enough to keep somewhat dry.
There was no chance of escape, no thoughts about it. Since we weren’t taken out of the camp to work, there was no place to go. There was a tower in the middle of the camp where a Nazi guard with a machine gun stood watch, and we were warned not to go near the electrified wire fences. If we did, we would be shot. But I did go near it. Someone must have told me that in the next camp there were people from Czechoslovakia, and I thought maybe my cousins from Bratislava would be there. So, I went to the fence sometimes and shouted their names. But no one answered, and I never found anyone.
Totally alone.
