I shouldn’t be complaining about the width of his shoulders when I’ve likely woken him up several nights with my nocturnal tremors.
“My apologies for bothering you,” I offer.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks, still trying to find a position on his side that’s comfortable. It’s impossible.
“Hunger. Dehydration. Exhaustion. Isn’t that what’s wrong with us all?” I wish I could say all of us Jewish men in this barrack are on a united front, but when we’re each fighting for our individual lives, we need to protect ourselves.
“It’s something more than that,” he grumbles, shoving his fist into a makeshift pillow, fabric wrapped around a bundle of straw.
“What does it matter?” I utter, pressing my palms against a pain in my ribs. “I’m still here when I shouldn’t be.”
The man emits a quiet, humorless snort. “You think that prisoner pulled you up off the ground because he wanted to save you?”
I shift my weight forward, my shoulder scraping against the splintering wood. “Why else would he help me?” My throat tightens hearing my question out loud.
“Food,” he says, simply. “A kapo gets a few extra breadcrumbs for every poor bastard he turns in—the ones who limp, who fall, and especially those hiding a disability. I’ve heard from others that the camp doctor wants them. He must want you too.”
My stomach snarls and cramps as I realize why the man who helped me up has since avoided me.
I close my eyes, wanting to escape this conversation. Everything might be a rumor. Half of what we hear is true, half a lie. But I’ll still be seen as sick and useless.
“Stefan, epilepsy isn’t an illness, my darling,” Mama would say, dabbing my forehead with a damp compress following aseizure. “It’s just lightning in your veins. Lightning makes the earth bloom after storms. It does the same in you—it leaves your heart open, helping you feel deeper and love harder.”
I’ve been staring into the darkness of this barrack for God knows how many minutes or hours before the lights flicker with fizzling snaps. My eyes burn from the sharp contrast, stealing a breath from the unexpected action. There are no clocks. No measures of time.
“Listen up!” a kapo—a privileged prisoner, a privileged quarantined prisoner—shouts. “If I call your number, line up out front. I will only call your numberonce.”
Life or death. One line, one chance.
My pulse never tires of reacting. Though it’s been two weeks and suddenly I might wish to remain in quarantine rather than face selections. I figured if we survived without contracting typhus, it meant we would be sent back to labor.
I strain to stare at the back side of my left forearm, the blue-tinted ink carved into my arm by a needle the length of a pen. The characters “170501—” blur into “R0S0l.” The freckles along my skin enhance the ink to a perfect design of “ROSALIE.” The Reich wanted to brand me with a serial number but all I see is her name, right where I would want it.
With my eyes crossing, the echo of my number bounces between ceiling beams. My heart plummets into the gully of my empty stomach. The kapo has only called a handful of numbers. My body becomes rubbery as I scale down to the ground from the second tier of bunks and drag my tired feet down the center row toward the kapo. Every man who has shared this God-awful space with me for the last two weeks stares, watches, wide-eyed, not knowing whether to be envious or grateful they aren’t me.
I can’t fool myself into thinking I’m one of the lucky ones now.
The air is as imagined, cool and crisp, cleaner than the air inside those walls even with the low riding fog. The line of others is painted in black silhouettes against the glare of a flood light. The closer I come to the dark figures, the harder I try to focus on more details, wondering if I recognize them—if there are clues that might be common between us. Anyone who became ill during quarantine is gone.
I take my place at the end of the line, finding two officers in front of us, one with a white lab coat, the other with a clipboard, both confiding in each other silently.
“Too old,” the officer in the lab coat says, peering toward the line then back at the clipboard. A few more men add to the end of the line while the man in white knocks out three others from the line-up. “The truck is just outside the gate.”
A truck. Why?
Never ask why here. But it means I’m leaving. It means there’s no chance I’ll see Rosalie in this compound. It means there’s a chance I won’t see anyone ever again.
We pile into the truck. The rumble of the engine hums beneath me as the uneven road tosses us from side to side. No one speaks. After a few minutes, the brakes screech and we jerk forward. The tarp lifts and hands drag us out by our wrists.
“No, no,” a man cries out. “The showers. They’re bringing us to the showers!”
A boot slams into his ribs and a dog snarls over his face, silencing him. Panic still spreads among us. We all know what the showers mean.
We’re shoved forward in a single mass. Wooden barracks blur past, identical blocks behind barbed-wire fences—pens for animals. Even the streak of the rising sun looks sick against the mud.
“You’ll wait here for further instruction,” an officer barks.
Time runs like a broken faucet. Minutes pass, maybe longer. There’s no way to know. Then the doctor in a white lab coat reappears, smiling like a Cheshire cat.
