How far is it to those hazy blue mountains? How wide is the plain that stretches out in the radiant spring sunshine? It’s a day’s march for feet that are free. A single hour on horseback at full trot. For us it is farther, much farther, infinitely far. Those mountains are not of this world, not of our world. Because between us and those mountains is the wire.

Our yearning, the wild pounding of our hearts, the blood that rushes to our heads—they are all powerless. Because of that wire between us and the plain. Two parallel fences of high-voltage barbed wire with dim red lights that glow above them as a sign that death is lurking there, lying in wait for all of us imprisoned here in this rectangle enclosed by a tall white wall.

Always the same image, the same feeling. We stand at the windows of our blocks and look into the enticing distance while our chests heave with tension and impotence. We are eleven yards away from each other. I lean out of the window while longing for that faraway freedom. Friedel can’t even do that; her imprisonment is more complete. I can still move freely through the Lager. Friedel can’t even do that.

I live in Block 9, an ordinary hospital block. Friedel lives in Block 10. There are sick people there too, but not like in my block. Where I am, there are people who have fallen ill from cruelty, starvation, and overwork. Those are natural causes that lead to natural diseases that can be diagnosed.

Block 10 is the experimental block. The women who live there have been violated by sadists who call themselves professors, violated in a way that a woman has never been violated before, violated in the most beautiful thing they possess: their womanhood, their ability to become mothers.

A girl who is forced to submit to an uncontrolled brute’s savage lust suffers too, but the deed she endures springs from life itself, from life’s urges. In Block 10 the motive is not an eruption of desire—it is a political delusion, a financial interest.

All this we know as we look out over this plain in the south of Poland and long to run through the fields and marshes that separate us from the hazy blue Beskid Mountains on the horizon. But that is not all we know. We also know that for us there is only one end, only one way to be free from this barbed-wire hell: death.

We know that death can come to us here in different forms.

He can come as an honorable foe that a doctor can fight. Even if this death has base allies—hunger, cold, fleas, and lice—it remains a natural death that can be classified according to an official cause. But he won’t come to us like that. He will come to us just as he came to those millions who have preceded us here. When he comes, he will almost certainly be stealthy and invisible, almost odorless even.

We know that only subterfuge hides death from our view. We know that this death is uniformed because the gas tap is operated by a man in uniform: SS.

That is why we yearn so, looking out at those hazy blue mountains, which are just twenty-two miles away, but for us eternally unattainable.

That is why I lean so far out of the window toward Block 10, where she is standing.

That is why her hands grip the wire mesh on her window so tightly.

That is why she rests her head on the wood, because her longing for me must remain unquenched, along with our yearning for those tall, hazy blue mountains.