Part 2

Elisha stood in numb shock in the middle of the seething mass of people. Heavily armed soldiers screamed orders at the crowd in a language half of them did not understand. He saw women and children being manhandled, the elderly being hit with the butts of rifles and the weak and sick being shoved along with such force they fell down.

People tried to carry the luggage they had brought with them, but the guards simply pulled their bags and suitcases out of their hands and threw them on the ground, pushing the people towards the lines they wanted them to form. Elisha wasn't sure what to do or where to go. There was so much noise he couldn't hear what was being shouted at them over the loudhailers. All of the other people were just as confused and moved around looking for family members and loved ones while the guards tried to round them up into smaller, more manageable groups.

Elisha raised himself up on his tiptoes and tried to see where most people were going. He craned his neck and looked along the platform into the distance. Most of the people who had been travelling with him were being told to go to the left side of the platform and form a line. Elisha moved off to join them. Standing in the middle of the crowd, he suddenly had the creepy feeling that signalled he was being watched. He looked up and saw that everybody was being watched; the guards that weren’t manhandling the new arrivals were standing along the raised area of the platform and eyeing the crowd. Some of them walked with guard dogs clenched on short leashes and their machine guns were slowly scanning the people as they watched and patrolled unhurriedly up and down. Elisha glanced uneasily from soldier to soldier, until his gaze stopped on the face that was staring directly back at him.

He couldn’t see much of the soldier’s face; the collar of his trench coat was pulled up high against the cold and his metal helmet was pulled down low over his brow. But his face was stern and his icy blue eyes held Elisha in a cold gaze as he watched his every move. Now that Elisha had seen the eyes he had felt boring into his back earlier, it left him with an even more ominous feeling. He looked away quickly and continued shuffling his way along with the crowd towards a line of transport trucks.

Elisha stood and waited with everybody else as they were pushed forward and searched. Their baggage had long ago been taken from them and anything of value they still had on them, or in their pockets, was taken now too.

Just as they started moving forward again, Elisha felt a sudden painful stabbing sensation as the steel barrel of an assault rifle jabbed him in the ribs.

“Halt!” The voice right next to him said so loudly it made him jump. Stop.

Elisha looked up and straight into the face of the guard who had been watching him. Elisha stared at him, frightened out of his mind.

Unable to keep up the eye contact with him, Elisha let his glance fall from the guard’s face and onto his chest. The collar of his trench coat was pulled up high but the first few buttons were undone and the coat gaped open as he stood pressing his rifle into Elisha’s chest, allowing Elisha to see his uniform from his throat to his sternum.

The uniform was charcoal grey like those of all the soldiers, smart and tailored to fit him perfectly. On the grey material of his uniform jacket he wore the insignia of his regiment and rank. All the emblems and insignia were stitched in silver thread; the effect was both striking and frightening.

On his right collar were embroidered what looked like two thick silver lightning bolts enclosed in a silver border. Elisha stared at the double “S” lightning bolts and recoiled at the instant recognition of the emblem of the dreaded Nazi “SS”.

On his left collar was the “Totenkopf” badge… the Death-head. Silver skull-and-crossbones, that was as ominous as it was morbidly beautiful. The face was angled slightly to the side, making it different from the playful Jolly Roger pirate flag of childhood games. The blank eye sockets of the skull stared out vacantly and its mouth was slightly open in an evil grimace. The cruel combination of the SS runes and the silver death-head made Elisha tremble. He barely noticed the man’s rank chevrons – two silver lines embroidered along the edge of his collar and his matching sleeve insignia; the two sliver V’s stitched along his cuff. Even if Elisha had noted them, he wouldn’t have known that they gave the man the rank of Lieutenant.

Under his coat, hidden from view was the embroidered silver Reich’s Eagle; its wings outstretched, a swastika encircled in a leafy wreath, clutched in its claws.

But Elisha didn’t see any of that; his eyes were drawn to the bright red armband wrapped around the soldier’s trench coat. It encircled his upper arm – blood red with a black stripe top and bottom, and in the middle on a white circular background was a large black swastika.

The sign that Elisha had come to dread in every midnight raid they had endured over the past few months of forced living in the ghetto.

Elisha looked down past the muzzle of the gun that still poked painfully into his chest and noticed that he could see his face reflected back at him in the soldier’s shiny black boots.

“Zurück!” The man barked at him, shoving his gun harder into Elisha’s chest. Move back!

“Helfen sie mir,” Elisha said, trying to remember as much German as he could. Help me.

“Zurück!” The soldier hissed at him again. “Folgen sie ihm. Schnell!” Follow him. Quickly! He jabbed the barrel of his gun into Elisha’s body once more then pulled it away and waved it after the man he wanted Elisha to follow.

“Bitte,” Elisha begged. Please.

Expressionlessly, the soldier grabbed Elisha’s arm and turned him around, shoving him after a man who was heading in the opposite direction.

Elisha gulped back terrified tears and followed the man as he was told. They ended up at the back of yet another queue, with soldiers pushing and shoving people around, dogs growling and pulling on their chains, and terrified children screaming for their parents.

Just then, he noticed the first of the prisoners moving among them collecting up the abandoned luggage and carrying it to small carts to be taken away and sorted through. They were wearing dirty striped prison-camp pajama uniforms, some with cloth caps on their shaved heads, some with ill fitting wooden shoes on their feet and some with just rags tied around their feet. They all looked ill and starved.

“Hey.” Elisha grabbed the arm of one close to them. “Is this Auschwitz?” He asked.

The man stared blankly at him, as if he had long ago lost his mind. “I think you’ll find Hell is a better name for it,” he said at last in a dead voice.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Elisha asked.

“You’re going to die.” The man replied, then glanced at the line they were standing in. “But first you’re going to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“This side on the right is for the people who are going into forced labour. Those people on the left,” He said, pointing to the lines of people Elisha had just left and who were now climbing into the waiting trucks, “They’re going straight to the gas chambers. They’re the lucky ones.” The man sighed and moved away to his cart with the suitcase he was dragging behind him.

Elisha’s blood ran cold as he watched the doomed group he had been a part of. He looked up at the raised step and found the blond, blue-eyed guard who had turned him around and pushed him out of the line. The man was still staring at him, but as soon as Elisha looked at him, he turned away.

“Is that not a good thing, then?” Elisha asked, “we are all going into the camp instead of to the…” But he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

“Not necessarily,” another prisoner said. “There is still the medical selection to go through and then they split you up into the living and the dead again. Don’t be too hasty to celebrate,” the man told him.

By “medical selection”, the man had not meant what Elisha had thought. At the head of the line, as the people slowly shuffled along, was a man who would become infamous as the most hated physician in the world, The Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.

He cut a fine and handsome figure in his tailored uniform as he closely scrutinized the faces and bodies of the people who shuffled in front of him. The soldier standing at his side yelled out to the crowd, “zwillinge, zwillinge." Twins, twins.

From behind Elisha, a woman stepped forward clutching the hands of two little girls, they looked very alike but not identical.

“Are they twins?” Mengele asked her.

“Is it good if they are?” She questioned.

He looked them up and down, studying their faces before he nodded his head to say yes.

“Then yes, they are twins.” The girl’s mother said and the children’s hands were pulled from hers and they were pushed to the left while their mother was pushed to the right of the line. The little girls looked back at her and began to cry. “Hush,” she called out to them. “Go with the man and be good. I will see you inside,” the little girls nodded and bravely followed the soldier who took them to stand with another group of children – all of whom had an identical partner whose hand they clutched in fear.

The girls, Romanian twins, had arrived in Auschwitz in 1944. Their names are Eva and Miriam Mozes and both girls survived the war and the experiments performed on them – their mother, father, two older sisters, grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins did not. It’s not known what substance they were injected with during the “research” that was done on them, but both became very ill and were plagued with health problems all their lives. Miriam died of a rare cancer in 1993 at about 60 years of age, while Eva is in her early 70’s and lives with her American husband – also a camp survivor – in Indiana, where she founded a Holocaust Museum, CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) and gives lectures on the subject. Eva later publicly forgave the Nazis and in particular, Dr. Josef Mengele, contrary to Jewish Law. Her video, Auschwitz to Forgiveness, can be viewed here.

Twins were Dr. Mengele’s fascination and obsession, and the experiments he performed on them in the name of science would revolt people for decades to come.

Next it was Elisha’s turn at the head of the line and the Doctor looked him over, deciding if he was fit to live or not.

“Jew,” he sneered as soon as he noticed the yellow star Elisha wore on the front of his jacket. “Don’t worry; I will cure you of your affliction. Step to the right.”

Elisha did as he was told, silently grateful that he hadn’t been told to move left where all the older and weaker people seemed to be.

Slowly, the crowd snaked along the platform and through the gates they were being led through.

Elisha glanced up as they were herded through the gates and felt an iron fist of dread close around his heart as he walked under the words “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Work liberates, work will set you free. The irony of it hit him fully in the chest as he understood the only thing they would know here was work and hardship – and the freedom that liberated them would come from death alone.

Part 1

The stench was unbearable and Elisha thought he was going to be sick. Several people already had been and the stuffy, rotten air inside the boxcar was making him gag.

They had been travelling for hours, packed together like animals, shoved into the airless cattle-car of a transport train, speeding through the bleak war-torn countryside. There were no windows and no fresh air. The door had been bolted shut from the outside and the only toilet facility was a bucket in the corner of the carriage. But that had quickly become inadequate and was overflowing only an hour into their journey.

Elisha glanced at his watch and realised that it had been almost seven hours since they had been herded like cattle onto the train. Seven hours since he had been informed he was no longer a human being with the right to be treated with dignity. How many more hours would he have to endure, he wondered. How many more could he endure of this nightmare?

Elisha sat huddled on the floor near the corner of the boxcar, as far from the bucket as he could get. He sat squashed up next to a man who had a hacking cough, the sound of which Elisha had long ago learned to block out. The man sat to his left and Elisha’s right side was pressed up tightly against the rough wooden side of the train. His legs were pulled up tight against his chest and in front of him sat a woman whose back was jammed against his knees. On her lap was a little boy who had finally fallen asleep. The constant rocking and swaying of the train had made the child nauseous and he had thrown up along with a number of other people in the carriage. In her arms the same woman cradled a baby who had needed her diaper changed six hours ago. The baby had also finally fallen asleep, or maybe it was unconscious, Elisha had no idea which it was, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if the baby had finally succumbed to dehydration. It had cried constantly for four hours, unable to understand why her mother wasn’t giving her a bottle.

Despite being early winter it was so hot in the overcrowded carriage that those people who had enough room to do so, had taken off their coats and jackets. The rest of them, who were unable to move, had to keep their winter coats on and several people had already fainted from the heat and lack of oxygen.

He had watched in horror as one person after another had passed out from the heat, their fellow passengers had swooped down upon them, divesting them of their coats and shoes. A fight had broken out over the items; half the carriage were trying to grab a hold of the belongings of the poor souls who were unable to defend their items and the other half were attempting to stop them.

In the seven hours that they had been travelling, Elisha had watched supposedly civilised people turn into monsters he could hardly recognise.

At the beginning of the journey, people had been talking loudly and some had even been crying. But as the day wore on, silence had finally fallen and the only sound that could be heard now was the hypnotic clicking of the train wheels and the quiet sobbing of those desperate souls who did not know what else to do.

Elisha looked at the mass of humanity sharing this tiny space with him and wondered what they had all done to deserve being treated like this. He looked at their faces, some worried, some in shock, some crying silently, all of them unable to believe what was happening to them. He wondered what they had been before they were reduced to this state. At the station, before he had been pushed up the wooden ramps and onto the boxcar, he had heard some of them talking and he had managed to gather that amongst them were a doctor, a baker, a lawyer and a teacher like himself.

He studied the clothing of the people he could see. One or two were dressed smartly but most were working class people wearing working class clothes. The only thing that bound them together besides their very ordinariness was the cloth badges they wore stitched to the outside of their clothing. The majority of them, like him, wore yellow stars on their chests. The Star of David – which to them was the blessed symbol of their faith that had singled them out as hated Jews since the start of the war. Over towards the opposite side of the carriage Elisha had seen a family with purple triangles stitched to their clothing – Jehovah’s Witnesses is what the symbol marked them as. At the station, the political prisoners with their red triangles stitched on, and those common criminals with green triangles, had been separated from everybody else and pushed into their own cattle-car towards the back of the train. Elisha had seen four men wearing black triangles on their chests and asked the woman next to him what it meant.

“Gypsies.” She spat the words at him. “They’re almost as disgusting as them.”

With her chin, she had indicated the little cluster of men clumped together in a corner with the unmistakable pink triangles stitched to their clothing – the triangles that marked them as homosexuals. Next to them, another group of people with blue triangles sewn on their clothes spoke a language Elisha was unfamiliar with – immigrants.

The train lurched again and sent the sea of human bodies sitting on the floor of the boxcar colliding into each other. Elisha sat with his sleeve pressed up against his mouth and nose trying hard to filter out the stink in the air as he struggled to breathe. There was less and less oxygen in the boxcar and breathing was becoming difficult. The headache he had developed was threatening to turn into a migraine and he was feeling tired and dizzy, but he tried hard to stay awake.

There was just no air coming in. The only air they had to breathe was fetid and stale and carried the smell of sickness, fear and death.

Every time Elisha thought he had become used to the bone-jarring jolting of the train, it would lurch and shake in a way that banged his already aching back against the hard wooden side. He grimaced in pain and wondered just how bruised his back would be when they finally got off. If they ever got off. He was beginning to wonder if they would simply keep going until everybody on board either died of suffocation or starved to death.

The train began to slow and he thought perhaps they had at last arrived at wherever they were being taken to. But just as he relaxed, the train turned along the sharp bend it had slowed for and Elisha's back slammed into the hard wooden planks behind him. He heard a crack; the sound of splintering wood and looked up to see if anybody else had noticed it too, but they hadn't. Slowly he turned his head and saw that the seam between two planks had split and the brittle wood had opened a little. It wasn't much of a crack; it only gave him a sliver of space to look through, but by the best of miracles, it also allowed a stream of ice-cold fresh air to blow on his face. For a few moments, Elisha closed his eyes and simply relished the feel of the cold air on his cheeks. He breathed deeply, pulling the fresh oxygen into his choking lungs.

When he opened his eyes again, Elisha looked through the split in the wooden planks and noticed the countryside they were travelling through was bleak and barren. What looked like farms had been stripped bare and torched. The few houses they passed were abandoned and broken. He had no idea where they were – they could have been anywhere on earth.

An hour later, with his face feeling numb from the constant blast of icy air, Elisha was still sitting with his head twisted sideways looking through the crack in the panels. He had seen a few signposts but they had flown by too fast for him to be able to read them. But as he watched the countryside whiz by, he noticed that there were more and more houses dotted along the side of the tracks and he realised they were approaching a town.

It was more of a sleepy village than a town and they clattered through it without slowing or stopping but Elisha was able to see the signs and read them. Or in fact, not read them. They were in a foreign language; not English or German or French, not one he recognised at all. It wasn't until they left the village that Elisha saw a sign with the village's name on it.

Jedlina he read. And his mouth dropped open in shock and surprise. Poland. They were in Poland. Elisha knew the name of that town from a Polish student in his art class who came from here. He couldn't imagine what they were doing in Poland unless they were travelling through on their way to somewhere else. Elisha closed his eyes and tried to picture a map of Europe in his head. He tried to think what was beyond Poland's borders.

The map wouldn’t form in his exhausted mind and he opened his eyes again and stared blankly at the scenery as they rattled and rolled their way through the Polish countryside. Elisha was still trying to think where they were headed. Away from the front and the advancing Allies was all he could think of. He was thinking so hard about it that he almost missed the sign that gave him the answer. He glanced at it, read the words and saw the direction the arrow was pointed, but it took a moment for the full impact of those words to register in his brain. Elisha's face registered shock as he pressed his eye right up to the crack and read the sign again as the train sped past it.

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The words rattled around in his mind as his head emptied of every other thought. He must have read it wrong. He shook his head, closed his eyes and tried to picture the sign again. Deep down inside he knew he hadn't made a mistake. Opening his eyes again, Elisha stretched his stiff neck and eased his head forward. Looking at the crumpled mass of people herded like animals into the boxcar with him, their sullen faces reflected the badges on their chests –  the yellow stars, the purple triangles, the black triangles. Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses and gypsies.

He thought of the homosexuals, political prisoners and criminals in the boxcars behind. And he knew he hadn't made a mistake. His blood ran cold and he began to tremble. Nausea rose in his throat and he forced himself to swallow hard. He looked again at his fellow travellers. They were the living dead. All dead, they just didn't know it yet. There was only one entrance into Auschwitz but there were many ways out like the gas chambers, the firing squads, exhaustion from forced hard labour and death from disease. Your life expectancy once you entered its massive imposing gates was three months.

Elisha felt chilled. Three months. He would be dead by Christmas; if he even lasted that long.

The baby, that the woman in front of him was holding, began to cry and it suddenly dawned on Elisha how many other children and infants were on that train. How long would they last? Three days? Three weeks? His head pounded as he realised he already knew the answer.

Probably not more than three hours.

Before the long journey even began, he remembered the very young, the very old, the sick and disabled weren’t even processed. After they were picked out by the German Officers, they left the train and boarded trucks that went to the infamous “showers” where tears flowed more freely than water. The only thing that would be coming out of the pipes above their heads was cyanide gas.

After being evacuated from the ghetto, they were told that they were going to a refugee camp. But he now understood that the word “evacuate” was nothing more than a pleasant euphemism for the word “exterminate”.

As his sense of dread grew, so did his sense of hopelessness. By the time the train had slowed enough for Elisha to clearly see the barbed wire and electric fences of their destination, he had almost lost his will to stay alive. He saw the guard towers and the soldiers who manned them. They stood watching the slowing train, machine guns were slung over their shoulders. They looked neat, grey and emotionless.

Elisha watched the huge, looming structure of the entrance as the train curved along its tracks towards it. He saw the long wings of the building that spanned either side of the railway tracks and the clock tower that sat over them. He felt the blood drain away from his face as the train swayed heavily through the arch under the tower. As it slowly ground to a halt with a screech of steel brakes and a hissing release of steam.

The people around him became aware that they had stopped and their faces brightened as they thought they could finally get out of the cramped boxcar and into the refugee camp they had been promised. They believed this would be their home until the end of the war.

If you only knew where we are, you would never leave this train, Elisha thought as the people around him struggled to their feet as soon as they heard the bolts on the outside of the door scraping open.

As much as Elisha needed to get out of the cramped space, he couldn't face the crush of humanity trying to squeeze its way through the door all at the same time, so he hung back and waited until all of them had disembarked. He stood up carefully and stretched his legs as he grimaced at the pain in his cramped muscles that had been forced into an uncomfortable position for so long. He noticed another person left in the train too. An elderly man was lying on his side on the opposite end of the carriage. Slowly, Elisha moved over to him and tried to shake him awake.

"Sir, wake up. We can get off the train now," Elisha said softly.

The man's body rolled over stiffly as his vacant, unseeing eyes stared back at Elisha. From the blue tinge in his open lips and the unsightly way his tongue was protruding from his mouth, it was clear he had been dead for a long time. Weak, old and unable to breathe in the stifling heat, he had been crushed to death not long after he boarded that fateful train.

"Oh God!" Elisha cried out and jumped back so fast he almost lost his balance. He spun around and jumped onto the long platform and into a throng of shouting, pushing and frightened people.