The Audacity

The Audacity

Auschwitz, 1942

The walls.

Black walls, dripping with a crimson liquid, were closing in on me. Then a face appeared.

Who was he? I had seen him before. Dark bushy eyebrows and purely wicked, beady eyes that had dense layers of malice behind them. They spoke of death. Raw and alive death.

Alive death?

Then I saw it. There in, the angel of death’s hand, was a syringe with a deep green liquid swishing from side to side.

“No!”, I screamed as realisation washed over me like acid.

Josef Mengele. 

I tried to run. My feet…they were frozen in place, yet my heart rate could have beat Jesse Owens at a race. Then he took a step forward, followed by another and anoth-

“Elsie?”, a voice startled me awake. “Elsie?”, my eyes eventually adjusted to the darkness and I could make out Danae’s silhouette. “Are you awake?”, she whispered again.

I shook my head, attempting to shake of the crawling feeling that had laid siege on my spine.

“Yes, yes. I am awake,” I said groggily.

“Elsie, they is making…they is making. Oh! How you say?”, she let out a frustrated sigh.

She and I were not native English speakers. Danae had a heavy Greek accent when speaking, and I had a heavy French one. But we could usually understand each other.

“What is it?”, I questioned. She stiffened next to me.

I heard her shift slightly and that’s when I felt it. I felt her fear. The immense fear that came out with every breath that she released.

“The Germans.” I knew, we both knew, that there was no other reason to feel so petrified. The Nazis.

“I heard many gun. I heard many, many thorivo!”, her voice cracked.

Thorivo? She had used the word before. What did it mean? Noise? Yes, that was it.

BANG!

The door crashed open and a bulky commander stood in the door frame, our Kapo shadowing him. He was massive, he had to bend his head when entering.

“Out!”, his deep voice barked.

I nudged Kristel with my foot to wake her up. The young German girl could sleep through a bombing!

“What’s wrong?”, she snarled, her German accent eating up her words. I had forgotten just how cranky she could get.

Silvia shot up from next to Kristel. “Mamma mia! Cosa fai, Danae?”, she looked at all of us. She had clearly forgotten that none of us spoke Italian. She huffed. “E…what are you doing? You pinch me?”

“Get up…Soldier is here,” Danae responded.

The four of us scrambled out of the bed as well as the other four women. Yes. Eight women sharing one bed, just like the Ritz, no?

The commander started pushing us out into the cold night air. Our breath mingled together as we were all lined up outside the block.

A girl in the front row raised her head as the commander walked past. “What are you going to do with us?”, she innocently squeaked.

CRACK. A bullet to the skull.

…

Auschwitz, 2010

Going into the camp had been hard enough.

The atmosphere being dense, and the air being cold almost put me off entirely.

But I couldn’t stop now.

I needed answers to my questions and the only way I could get them was by entering what used to be hell to so many people.

My grandmother’s words echoed through my head that she would speak to me in Greek.

“Πέθανα εκεί.

Κάθε πρωί και κάθε νύχτα μιλούσα με τον θάνατο.”

She died there, she said. Every morning and every night she talked with death.

I joined my tour group, heading towards one of the blocks. The other people were chatting up a storm as we walked through the street.

The clouds loomed over us. Over the whole camp. The walls of the blocks took on a haunted look. Then it struck me.

Those Blocks, those walls had seen more death than anyone staying in the camp ever had. They had watched all the cruelty and all the raw evil that defined the camp to this day.

The tour guide led us into one of the many Blocks. “This is where some of the female prisoners would sleep. This particular one housed predominately Jewish women from many different countries. You can look around, but don’t touch anything.” He then stepped out and waited in the doorway.

A wave of horror swept over me.

This. This is where they slept? In such poor conditions?

A laugh broke through the layer of sorrow that had settled above my head. I turned to see a teenage girl with blonde ringlets giggling as a boy gave her a tickle.

“I bet it must have been fun for all those young girls staying here!”, another girl laughed. “They had a sleepover that lasted for a good couple years! Well, at least some of them did! The others decided to leave early,” she laughed again.

“They left early to go and make buttons and lamp shades,” a boy said solemnly and then burst into laughter along with his companions.

Rage started to fill me, engulfing all common sense and composure. The audacity!

“Enough,” I ordered. “You children are seriously joking about such a macabre subject? You are standing in a room where people starved to death and others rotted away. Yet you flirt with each other and play around!”, I hissed.

“Chill out woman! It’s just the circle of life, you live, and you die,” a red headed boy said.

Immature. That’s what these children were.

“Your comments lead me to assume that none of you are familiar with what actually happened here, at least not fully. You probably don’t know about Josef Mengele and his experiments, or…or about the regular shootings. One that took place right outside this Block.”

“How would you know that?”, piped up the blonde-haired girl.

I looked at all of them.

They really didn’t know what this place had meant for so many people.

“Because I am the granddaughter of Danae Aaronovich…”

“The violinist?”, the girl asked, her mouth hanging open.

I nodded. “Yes. The Jewish-Greek violinist who survived this camp. She stayed in this room. In this building. And she witnessed the death of her three best friends.”

A silence stretched out.

One of the boys swallowed as he fidgeted with his collar. “How…how did they die?”

She had been told the answer to that question once, and she had never forgotten.

Kristel had been shot.

Silvia had been sent to the gas-chamber.

And Elsie?

Elsie had been subjected to Mengele’s experiments.