How could I forget the great flames of the crematorium which devoured my childhood?
Despair gave way to emptiness. Inhuman fatigue took possession of me, and almost made me forget everything. A day, a week, a night, an eternity … all became a blur in my mind. I was alone, and I was nothing. Where did my tears come from? Were they still mine? What a strange sensation, to not belong to myself: reality, dream, and despair overlapped. How easy it would have been to give up, to be swept away by the lure of death.
Everything had been set up to create this life of despair. Fear, uncertainty, and lies were carefully cultivated around us and in us to push us into madness or death. I cannot forget several of my fellow prisoners who would help each other at night to hang themselves in the toilets at the end of the barracks, using scraps of their clothing as a noose. Our entire identity was stripped away from us: mementoes, clothes, even hair or teeth if they were crowned with gold. However, fraternity lived on in the hearts of some of us, and shone forth.
I can still hear the warm voice of a fellow prisoner, who had been in the camp for five years. She would say to us, “Trust in life. Let us chase away despair. Let us cultivate friendship among us. Let us gather our forces. Let us not lose courage; the weak do not live here. We need to survive. We need witnesses.”
These words came from an unknown sister. They took root in me and have long since helped me to get through moments of exhaustion.
If today, though aching all over, I am crossing the bridge of memory, I do so to keep alive the memory of those women and men whose lives were stolen but who, right until the end, wanted to give us the courage to live.