Thankyou for all of your comments. All will be explained, Sugar, though Lesley has put it in a nutshell. I'm sorry this is such a dark piece of writing.
- X -
Naturally I can’t stop for more than a few seconds at a time without drawing attention to myself, but it is one of those odd coincidences of life that as I walk back to the tiny wooden hut I laughingly call home now I can see the sunset. It’s often the best part of the day for me, the snatched few seconds of that glorious act of nature which combines to send joy and dread down my spine at the same time.
My own sun must set soon, I know that. Everybody in here can only live so long, and my time will come. When you first arrive they promise they will take everything from you, and for a long time I believed them. As they stripped me, first of the fancy things I never needed, and then of basic things like dignity, and trust in humankind, I began to think they would truly leave me with nothing but life. But I’ve learnt that even in the most depraved of situations hope still exists, and they will never take that from me.
Now it’s been chipped down to a simple hope that my end will be quick, and soon. I’ve concluded that whatever waits for me on the other side of life, it couldn’t possibly be as bad as this. They’ve brought Hell to Earth and made it worse, and they’ve subjected the most innocent to it. The Devil now holds the world in his hands, and he will soon destroy all of humankind. I only hope that I never live to see it happen.
My eyes fix rigidly on the dying rays of the sun, turning the normally dull grey sky a beautiful combination of reds and golds. Occasionally the thought will come that it reminds me of my time in the Alps, in school, but it is one I quickly push away. To remember even that, relatively speaking, happy period is to admit that there was a time before this, and that is something I cannot do. But it is still a better thought than the conscious admittance of what my senses refuse to acknowledge.
They take everything they possibly can from you in here. They take normality, worship, even good health from you. They leave you wretched, broken, a living image of everything they supposed you to be in the first place. And they keep taking. Even in death they cannot leave you alone, but they subject your body to the most horrific of conditions. Now they’ve dug – or, rather, made poor souls like us dig – huge pits, which they fill with dead bodies to be burnt. Even in release, and freedom, they can still take your final dignity from you.
This body I inhabit, which causes me so much pain, and brings them new ways to torture me, will end up in that stinking pit soon. I discreetly cross myself as I pass; I can’t be too overt, I will get another beating if they think I’m doing something so obviously religious, but they cannot stop my silent prayers. I pray for all those who have suffered and will suffer in here – old or young, rich or poor, Christian or otherwise, I pray for them and for their souls. I know that He cannot make them suffer any more, I have faith in Him.
Only a few guards patrol us as we walk back, we are trusted to be good now. One of them is a man I know better than anybody else here, a man called Hermann. He watched me from the very beginning, and did everything he could to make my life a misery – he was always the first to beat me, to degrade and humiliate me. I think he knows that in another time he would have been trying to win my hand in marriage, I see a look of frustration in his eyes sometimes and I know. I sense. I’ve got good at that in here.
He’s got a new sport, ever since a few months back. My body tenses as we reach a certain point of the palisade. I’ve been counting the boards, and we’ve reached the thirty-fourth. It is always here, every night, ritualistically. A tap on my shoulder. I stand out of line, refusing to tremble, looking straight ahead, not acknowledging what must come. If I don’t ever think about it, it never happens. Of course, this never happens; men and women are kept strictly segregated, only they’re running out of bodies now. So they’ve given us some of the male guards – Nazi prisoners themselves, but better prisoners than ourselves, allowed a certain amount of power. Hermann is one of them.
I used to find it interesting to see the power being played out between them, this odd gamble of how far you could go. I can feel no sympathy for them, they are betraying us as surely as everybody else who sits by and does nothing, doesn’t try to stop our suffering. They are just as bad as those who actively make it happen, and I hate them all. But recently I’ve been able to focus my hate on Hermann in particular, which, in its own ironic way, makes it rather a fair exchange. He gets my body, I get to keep my emotions.
One of the games they thought up was to experiment on us, to see how far they could corrupt nature, until it was as warped as themselves. Women, of course, were the best target, because we hold the key to their perfect Aryan race. If a woman isn’t pure, how can her children be? And nobody in this forsaken place is pure. I wasn’t spared – youthful, fit, I was the ideal candidate. I never think about what happened, but Hermann likes to remind me that I’ll never pass on my Jewish scum to some devil who’ll suckle off me. Before they took me, he could never have done what he does now. Technically he shouldn’t, no guard should. It would mean being physically intimate with the undesirable, the sub-human, something which would revolt any good Nazi follower. The men in here are admired, thought heroes, just for getting this close to us.
Hermann knows he is safe, though. There are a line of bruises across my back which match exactly the pattern of the wooden boards making up the wall of the hut he leads me behind. I’m not the only one, nor the last, there are other women lead out of the line as we walk home, but we all turn away. They’ve even turned me into the very thing I despise most. Nobody else will see anything, this will never have happened.
Every night I refuse to shut my eyes, to turn my head away, to give him any indication that he has mastered me through fear and disgust. I simply stare into the middle distance and make myself go numb inside.
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