without being killed outright. When she went into labor, the SS tied
her legs together. I’ve never seen agony like hers. But it’s watching a
starving person eat a dead person’s Ęesh that makes the bile rise in me,
that makes my vision black. I cannot do it. And yet I must eat. I must
eat or I will die. Out of the trampled mud grows grass. I stare at the
blades, I see their different lengths and shades. I will eat grass. I will
choose this blade of grass over that one. I will occupy my mind with
the choice. is is what it means to choose. To eat or not eat. To eat
grass or to eat Ęesh. To eat this blade or that one. Mostly we sleep.
ere is nothing to drink. I lose all sense of time. I am oen asleep.
Even when I am awake I struggle to remain conscious.
Once I see Magda crawling back to me with a can in her hand, a
can that glints in the sun. A can of sardines. e Red Cross, in its
neutrality, has been allowed to deliver aid to prisoners, and Magda has
huddled in a line and been handed a can of sardines. But there’s no
way to open it. It’s just a new Ęavor of cruelty. Even a good intention,
a good deed, becomes futility. My sister is dying slowly of starvation;
my sister holds food in her hand. She clutches the tin the way she
clutched her hair once, trying to hold on to herself. An unopenable
can of ĕsh is the most human part of her now. We are the dead and
the near dead. I can’t tell which I am.
* * *I am aware at the corners of my consciousness of day trading places
with night. When I open my eyes, I don’t know if I have slept or
fainted, or for how long. I don’t have the capacity to ask, How long?
Sometimes I can feel that I am breathing. Sometimes I try to move my
head to look for Magda. Sometimes I can’t think of her name.
Cries break me out of a sleep that resembles death. e cries must
be death’s herald. I wait for the promised explosion, for the promised
heat. I keep my eyes closed and wait to burn. But there’s no explosion.