But the acid stench did not stop at irritating her eyes. After hours of inhaling it, her lungs burned and she started coughing continually.
“It will get better,” the woman working next to her offered.
“How do you know?” Rachel asked before another violent coughing spell shook her body.
“Because I’ve been here for a long time.”
As much as Rachel had been positively surprised last night about the sleeping conditions, just as much she hated the work. And it wasn’t because she was a spoiled city brat either, since she’d worked hard all her life on the farm. Despite the slightly better food here, she wished herself back in Bergen-Belsen, where she hadn’t had to work twelve hours a day in addition to another hour walking to her workplace and back.
But as awful as it was to work in the ammunition factory, it did come with some perks as she found out during dinner time: every woman received a glass of milk together with her thin soup. It was the first time since her capture that she’d seen or tasted milk. Real milk. Fond memories of home flooded her brain and made her smile.
“Why do they give us milk, when they haven’t done so in any of the other camps before?” she asked one of the women who’d been there for quite a while.
“Not out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously,” the thin and bald woman said. “It works against the acid taste in our mouths and supposedly offsets the poisoning effects of the vapors we inhale all day.”
The days passed, and while the work didn’t get any easier, it was mindless work. Performing the same exercise over and over, for twelve hours each day, was boring and tedious, but Rachel became more or less accustomed to the grind and, as the other woman had promised, the coughing diminished.
9
It was so hot. Mindel’s tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, but of course nobody cared. She wouldn’t get a single drop of water before this horrible never-ending roll call was over, and God only knew how long that would take. Stupid SS!
She did not understand why it took that long to count the prisoners. The SS guards were adults, so why couldn’t they count the prisoners without having to start over and over again the way she had to do when counting beyond three? It didn’t make sense, and doubts about the SS’s intelligence crept into her mind.
Next time she saw Hanneli, she would ask the older girl about it. By now she knew Hanneli was fifteen. Grown-up enough to know about such things, but not yet too old to be untrustworthy.
The sun steadily rose higher into the sky, scorching everyone on the ground. Laszlo had said it was August. She remembered that back home August was when the entire village was out in the fields, harvesting the crops. But here in the camp, they were only standing around, waiting. And the horrid SS guards wouldn’t even let them wait in the shadow of the huts, which would have been so much more comfortable. The SS really had no idea about how life was supposed to be.
An old woman standing nearby collapsed and, despite the guard’s outrage, whipping and beating her, she wouldn’t get up. Mindel watched the spectacle with wide-open eyes, voicelessly murmuring, “Don’t be stupid, get up!”
But nothing happened. The woman lay motionless on the ground and after a while, the guard stopped beating her and moved on. Mindel shook her head. It wasn’t the first time she’d witnessed such an event. According to Hanneli, the people who stopped moving were dead.
Mother had always told Mindel that after a person’s death, the soul lived on and went to God’s side. So, she stood there watching closely what would happen next. She really wanted to see the soul and how it flew up into the sky. But nothing happened, and the corpse lay there like a stick. Nothing, not even a shadow, or a feather, rose up to the sky.
Mindel was disappointed. Somehow what her mother had taught her didn’t seem to happen in real life. Could her mother have been wrong, or had she lied to Mindel? The enormity of her suspicion caused her heart to tense painfully.
That was another topic she would have to ask Hanneli about. Once she’d tried to ask Laszlo about the souls flying to heaven, but he’d only groaned and told her that she was a baby if she still believed that.
It was a disappointment, indeed. If her soul didn’t fly up to the clouds after she died, then she wouldn’t be able to frolic with the unicorns and neither could she look down from above to find her sister.
Her thirst was getting worse and standing in the scorching sun, she began to feel light-headed, but since she wasn’t certain anymore about the whole flying in the skies thing, she decided it was better not to die and forced herself to stay standing upright.
The despicable roll call continued, another woman stumbled, falling into the person to her right and causing quite a ruckus. Mindel watched as the other woman tried to stand up straight again, but an SS guard was already by her side, hitting her with his truncheon.
She cried out and fell forward, and Mindel watched in horror as the guards released the snarling dogs. The scream was stuck in her throat, but for the life of her she couldn’t look away as the horrible spectacle unfolded in front of her.
She loved all animals, and dogs especially. Her parents had had a watchdog at the farm, good old Rex. He dutifully barked at strangers and
