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.
“Häftlingskrankenbau—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?”
