––––––––
Nicolae was in shock, a low whine barely audible, that I could no nothing to quell, and I feared Elone would soon join him.
We clung together, lost innocents in this place of darkness and maleficence. Yet somehow, for all I had seen and heard, my mind could not embrace the truth.
For all I had witnessed... My father’s execution; the brutal murder on the platform in Bucharest; the mowing down of lines of Jews outside Plaszow; the screams that still echoed loudly in my mind... For all Henryk and Maxim had warned me, still I could not conceive of the enormity... Of the sheer scale of the extermination taking place here.
It was so unreal that I began telling myself it had not happened. That hunger and fatigue had produced some horrific collective hallucination between us. That I would shortly wake up in a warm bed at home and find the whole thing had been no more than an obscene nightmare.
I wanted to comfort the children, to deny what they had heard, to give them hope, but my brain had all but ceased to control my body. I found myself being drawn back to the edge of the hut despite myself, not wanting, but needing, to see. To assure myself it had not taken place, that I was somehow mistaken.
For a moment, perhaps minutes, perhaps an hour, it was as if nothing had happened. The concourse was deserted, the shower rooms silent. A cool autumn sun was breaking through the smog of ash that drifted incessantly from the furnace chimneys now just a short way distant. From afar I could hear the sounds of industry as the factories churned out their deadly munitions.
Closer still I heard voices, human voices, from within the shower barracks and I was craning myself forward, desperate to believe, willing those hundreds of naked Poles to walk back out into the cold day, cleansed and disinfected, ready to don clean clothes and take up their duties.
As the doors opened from within it was all I could do to contain my joy and rush out to greet them. To embrace them. To celebrate their very existence.
But the dream turned to macabre reality as the first labourer appeared in his striped prison uniform, dragging a cart behind him. If I knew what was on the cart even before it emerged into view, still I looked, unable to tear my eyes from this grisly scene.
I watched, unwillingly, unable to turn away, as cartloads of tangled bodies were drawn across the concourse before me, quietly borne to the furnaces in the distance.
And as I watched the true nature of these ovens became apparent. These four huge chimneys rising above the birch trees represented no industrial process but one. They were crematoria, designed and built for the sole purpose to dispose of the bodies of the innocent victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.