Now, I work and don’t get paid. I’m fed just enough to keep me alive, and the roof I sleep beneath is just another form of prison within a larger prison. Everything Tata tried to explain then finally makes sense now, and it’s too late. I may never get to experience anything more than entering names into a book.
The ten-hour workday mark strikes with shouting demands from the corridor outside the clerical room. We fold up our catalog books and funnel out the door and into a line where we’ll be escorted back through the main gates. The girl who spilled her ink earlier in the day is hunched forward in front of me. With blood stained across her uniform, and tears in the fabric gaping below her neck, a dark bruise of fingerprints tells the story of how she was grabbed earlier.
She’s limping and dragging her feet, trying to hold her uniform together over her chest. Throughout the walk towardthe main gate, I listen to her heavy breaths, struggling more than the others. She slows down, causing a gap to form in the line. She stumbles to the left and I lunge to grab hold of her, but catch the eyes of an SS officer standing at the gate, watching the scene unfold. The girl thankfully rights herself back to two feet, but again, stops walking. Her knees buckle and she falls face first into the dirt. For a brief second, I question if she will stand back up, but then a blitzing crack of a pistol fires past me, a bullet lodges straight into the back of her head.
She won’t be getting back up.
The lights in our barrack go out, marking the end of another dreary day I’ve managed to survive. My pulse races within my ears, my nerves fraught with impatience as I listen for another ghostly hint of Luka’s voice, knowing I shouldn’t want to hear it. I want him to live and find a way to survive, and he’s already been depleted of so much. The idea of hearing him in the first place makes no sense. I’m not sure who he or anyone would be singing for or where the singing would be coming from.
The longer I lie here in the darkness amid the thick air of bodily stenches and sounds of whimpering and moans, the more my mind races. My eyes fall shut, trying to block out the surroundings and the hunger pains growling from within my body.
Then it happens again…
A hum of music drifts by, but so quick and faint, I can’t convince myself it was a voice or a song. It’s easy to imagine, though. Too easy.
Another brief wave of notes tickles my ear, and I prop my head up on my folded arms, listening for more.
“Are you all right?” the woman next to me asks. I must have woken her up with my sudden movement.
“Yes, sorry for bothering you. I thought I heard some music.”
“Oh, yes, like last night? It was lovely, wasn’t it?” she asks, her voice croaking through her words. She heard it, too. More of the melody flickers through the air, the sound almost out of reach. “It’s harder to catch tonight.”
I slide forward and turn onto my back to pull myself out of the hole between the bunks. “It’s much harder to hear tonight,” I reply as I scale down the wooden ladder.
“Where are you going? You know we aren’t allowed to leave the barrack after the lights are out.”
“I know,” I whisper back. I don’t want to say much else, fearing her saying anything more.
“What are you doing?” someone else utters as I pad barefoot toward the door. “Using the latrines downstairs is forbidden at night.”
The warnings are clear. I know the rules. I’m aware of all the consequences for just breathing the wrong way in Auschwitz.
“A kapo could be guarding the corridors,” someone else shouts in a whisper. “You shouldn’t leave.” At this hour, the kapos are as exhausted as anyone else, and sleep while they can.
I drown the women’s voices out through my desperation to know where the singing is coming from. I open the door to the corridor and make my way down the one flight of stairs, gripping the handrail with all my might so I don’t stumble through my blindness of the night. As I make it to the bottom, more notes fill the air, and I follow them, finding the sound growing just slightly louder the farther left I walk.
An open door catches my attention. I don’t usually come down this way as the main entrance and exit is to the right of the stairwell. Sweat forms on my forehead as I glance behind me, finding nothing but more darkness.
I pass the open door, finding an administration-like office setup with boxes of paper stacked in dozens of columns. There’s a small window along the back wall and I creep into the room, cautiously peering around each column of boxes until I step up to the window, which sits just between two moving spotlights that don’t cross over one another.
There isn’t much to see of course, nothing but a barbed-wire fence. But the music is continuous now, just soft. I pull up the window, slow movements to avoid any squealing or crackling. The music grows louder, reeling my focus to the right, beyond the fence, where I’ve been told the Commandant’s villa stands.
Why would the music be coming from there of all places?
From now until tomorrow
The moonlight will?—
A crash echoes through the corridor, startling me into closing the window and scrambling for a place to hide. The front door, that’s what it was. Two sets of footsteps follow, and I realize there’s nowhere to run. Someone is coming down this way. The other is heading up the stairs.
Terrorizing heat boils through me, sweat dripping from every crevice of my body. My breaths are heavy and short, and my knees are shaking as I crouch behind one single column of boxes. A breath catches in my lungs as the footsteps grow louder. Whoever is here enters the room I’m in and walks toward the window, coming into my view. An SS guard.
I lift a foot to shift around the column, away from the swishing glows of nearby spotlights. My other foot sticks with sweat, making a soft squelch. I clamp my hands over my mouth.
The guard takes long, slow strides, the movement sounding as if they’re weaving around the columns, but I can’t tell where the sound of their footsteps is coming from now.
“Second floor is cleared.” The voice travels down the corridor.
