officer is just ahead. Everyone is being sent in the same direction. is
isn’t a selection line. It’s an ushering. It really is the end. ey’ve
waited until morning to send us all to death. Should we make a
promise to each other? An apology? What is there that must be said?
Five girls ahead of us now. What should I say to my sister? Two girls.
And then the line stops. We’re led toward a crowd of SS guards by
a gate.
“If you try to run, you’ll be shot!” they shout at us. “If you fall
behind, you’ll be shot.”
We have been saved again. Inexplicably.
We march.
* * *is is the Death March, from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. It is the
shortest distance we have been forced to walk, but we are so
weakened by then that only one hundred out of the two thousand of
us will survive. Magda and I cling to each other, determined to stay
together, to stay upright. Each hour, hundreds of girls fall into the
ditches on either side of the road. Too weak or too ill to keep moving,
they’re killed on the spot. We are like the head of a dandelion gone to
seed and blown by the wind, only a few white tus remaining. Hunger
is my only name.
Every part of me is in pain; every part of me is numb. I can’t walk
another step. I ache so badly I can’t feel myself move. I am just a
circuitry of pain, a signal that feeds back on itself. I don’t know that I
have stumbled until I feel the arms of Magda and the other girls liing
me. They have laced their fingers together to form a human chair.
“You shared your bread,” one of them says.
e words don’t mean anything to me. When have I ever tasted
bread? But then a memory rises up. Our ĕrst night at Auschwitz.
Mengele ordering the music and Mengele ordering me to dance. is