Our landlady was an old woman bent double. She had a pyramidlike nose, and washed-out blue eyes sunk deep into their sockets. Her face was streaked with dirty wrinkles. Behind her tight lips she hid her bad mood and her completely toothless mouth.
She welcomed us with a tight grimace. Here were five young girls upsetting her peace. She was living in the basement of her large two-story home with a colony of lazy, ugly cats.
She took us around the building. We were dazzled. A real interior, full of furniture. In the bedrooms there was a bed … Seeing these familiar objects, whose very existence I had forgotten, was an emotional experience. The wooden plank of yesterday was now a too-soft bed.
The group of huts in the camp had now transformed into a real house.
The strip of barbed wire was now a garden in bloom.
Could it all be real? Or was it, too, a trap?
I needed time to understand.
It took me several weeks to rediscover the joy of a soft bed.
We swallowed entire loaves with omelets made from powdered egg.
This dreamlike sensation of no longer being on rations was intoxicating and almost made us ill.
Little by little we realized that we were in possession of ourselves, to do as we wished, freely.
This freedom, once acknowledged, was heavy with promise and anxiety.
My body was satisfied, but the soul that dwelt within was aching and sick.
Where should I look? How could I find the cure for the sickness of living?
The sight of a copulating couple in Auschwitz, the discarded woman blue and trembling, kept me at a safe distance from the American soldiers at whom some of my fellow prisoners were throwing themselves.
The soldiers were quite plump. They sparkled with medals and carelessness.
They were plucking low-hanging fruit without asking questions.
No, for me, that was not freedom.