The man shrugs. “No one knows. The doctor is a mad man. Thinks he’s a great scientist. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. You’d be better off dead than letting him touch you. If I knew then…I’d have asked to be shot instead of—” He points to his eye. “Steal this.”
I turn my head back to stare up at the wooden beams along the ceiling.
A pinch against my arm. A distorted face and a smoker’s laugh. The image of Rosalie’s face…a blur I can see through, a delusion—a dream.
The world fades again—black, thick, and endless.
My eyes flash open and I gasp for air as if I’ve been holding my breath for too long. My limbs tingle. It’s something. A sensation. My toes sweep along the coarse fabric of a sheet. Then I twist my head to the right, searching for the man with the missing eye.
There’s no chair.
No man.
But the light shines the same, casting a subtle streak along the yellowing sheet. I’m in the same place as I was last time I woke up. I’m sure of it. The man said we were in an infirmary block within the main Auschwitz camp.
Someone must have moved that man, and his chair. Now there’s a cot beside me with a different thin, bony man sleeping, his mouth ajar, hands dangling over the sides. There are other cots lining the wall next to him and to the other side of me, matching ones across the row against the opposite wall—half of them filled with people who look like the man next to me.
I wiggle my fingers. Stiff, but they move.
A man walks in through the partitioned opening, limping, groaning, holding his stomach with a clenched fist. His striped pajamas hang loosely from his waist, and the bottom hems drag along the floor. He catches my stare and shakes his head.
“Don’t let them see you awake,” he utters.
“Why?” I whisper, feeling less pressure in my throat than the last time I tried to speak—to the man with a missing eye.
“The doctors will use you for anything you can give them. And those of us in this room are the only men in this infirmary block,” he says. “If they need men to experiment on, it’s only us amid all the women.”
Images of the man on the operating table in the infirmary block at Birkenau…the one someone opened the door to and left open for anyone to see. The castration. The blood.
“What did they do to you?” I ask, my voice scraping the air like sand and paper.
The man stares at me for a long minute before rolling onto the cot, groaning. “Not enough to kill me.”
Don’t let them see you awake.His words replay in my head. I shut my eyes, trying to avoid the thoughts of what they did to that man, or the other men on either side of me.
I don’t exactly know what’s been done to me. Or how long I’ve been under treatment. Every time I wake up, I question if I’ve been asleep for minutes or a year.
A thud from the floor above startles me. My eyelids are almost weightless as they open this time.
Don’t let them see you awake.The words rumble through my head again. I twist my head to look across the row, toward the cot with the man who came limping in.
He’s gone.
To my right, I search for the man whose mouth was ajar, hands dangling off the sides.
He’s gone.
We’re the only men in this barrack.
They must be getting rid of the men. Is that the way?
More commotion from the floor above jostles the beams. The hanging bulbs swing back and forth, casting spotlights on each wall, one at a time.
A bloody handprint on the wall to my left comes into view. The lightbulb’s glow draws a moving line to it.
I bend my knuckles, pressing against the ache in my joints. I swivel my feet. Another ache. Every bone in my body feels like ungreased hinges. But even old doors can open and close. I clench my jaw, trapping in any sound that might come out of my mouth and push through the pain, moving my legs one at a time to the side of the cot, letting gravity assist with the rest.
I claw my fingernails into the brick wall, feeling the tear in my flesh as I make my way to my feet. My feet drag as I shimmy behind the row of cots in this row, never releasing my death grip on the wall. My knees might give out on me, but I must make it to the corner wall first.
