A Murder in Auschwitz by J.C. Stephenson Page B

headstone. It was quicker, easier, and more efficient to dispose of your body by cremating it along with hundreds more. And then you were ash. Scattered to the wind through the huge chimneys.
    “How long has the camp been open?” Meyer asked Geller.
    “Hey! No talking!” came an order from a guard.
    Meyer looked up from his bent stance. He felt sick as he saw an SS guard pointing straight at him and quickly returned to picking up the sticks and taking them to the piles in the centre of the clearing.
    The forest carried the same strange, loud silence that the camp suffered from. There was very little talking. The guards chatted in between shouts at the prisoners. The prisoners were only allowed to converse when it was required for their work.
    The guards permitted occasional stretches by those picking the wood from the clearing floor as they attempted to ease their backs, but anything more than that was met with a shout and sometimes a pointed rifle. There were no breaks or rests allowed, and Meyer wondered how long they could expect anyone to work like this without a respite from the constant bending and carrying.
    It was mid-morning when Meyer first heard the distant sound of metal clanging. A shout came from one of the officers that work should stop and all but two of the guards made their way to the dirt track which led to the clearing. From between the branches of the trees, Meyer could see a horse, which was pulling an old wooden cart with an old cast-iron water tank on board, and being led by a soldier. As the horse came to a standstill, the cups and ladles which hung from the tank stopped their mechanical song.
    Geller made his way over to Meyer, put his hand on his shoulder and, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, said, “Sit down Manfred. Take this chance to rest while you can.”
    Meyer and Geller sat on the same cut log and watched as the guards drank from the cups, which had heralded the arrival of the water cart.
    “You know, we used to call them ‘dead soldiers’ when I was in the army,” said Geller, before qualifying his statement. “The water tank. On the western front we called them ‘dead soldiers’ for some reason.”
    “Do we get to drink?” asked Meyer.
    “Yes, but only once they have quenched their thirsts. Then it will be our turn. They sometimes bring bread too, but don’t get your hopes up. The SS feel that one meal a day for Jews is enough.”
    Meyer was thirsty but he had no appetite at all. He felt that his metabolism had slowed right down. He hadn’t really felt hunger since he had arrived, and he certainly had not needed to pass a stool. But he was thirsty and could not keep his eyes off of the soldiers drinking deeply from the tin cups.
    He wondered about Klara and the girls. Where were they at that moment? Geller had explained that they would be barracked in the women’s camp near the crematoria in what was known as Birkenau. The men rarely saw the women, except occasionally, when they passed while being marched to their work details.
    “I had been here for only a couple of weeks,” Geller had told him. “As we were walking back from digging drainage ditches along the road outside the town, there was a column from the women’s camp being taken in the opposite direction. Well, one of the men saw his wife and broke from our party to try to embrace her. You can imagine how the SS dealt with that. It was tragic. He never got to even hold her before they shot him. And then they shot her, too.”
    Meyer winced as he remembered Geller’s story and wondered if he could stop himself from suffering the same fate if he saw his wife or children. Would he be able to stop himself from running to them?
    “What work do the women do?” he asked Geller.
    “The same as us,” he replied, “they don’t make any allowances for sex or age.”
    “I was wondering what my wife was doing just now.”
    “I often wonder where my wife, Magda is,” said Geller, “and my boy Franz.