‘What was the best?’

The best? Could anything have been the best? When I got this question, I was confounded. Nothing was good, but there were moments when we could forget where we were and even laugh.

It felt good at night, when the day’s toil was over, when we could stretch our tired limbs out on the hard bunk. We had survived. I knew that the night would be very short, and it would not offer much rest, but in the moment it felt good.

Before bedtime, the group of friends sat huddled together on one of the beds, and held a ‘literary salon’. We recited poems, read stories, and shared memories, or ‘cooked’, exchanged recipes, talked about the delicious dishes we longed for.

I had a special experience in Auschwitz that offered some light in the blackness of our existence. One morning, an SS man entered the barracks and asked for two volunteers for some work. My friend Olga and I put ourselves forward. The soldier, who carried a rifle over his back, took us away. We passed by one area after another surrounded by barbed wire fence, until we came to one with smaller barracks. These were the soldiers’ barracks, and we were tasked with cleaning and scrubbing the floors.

As we approached the barracks, a lush, verdant birch tree caught my attention. It was like a mirage, to see such greenery after the greyness of Auschwitz. There was life outside, everything was not lost.

Olga and I just looked, first at the tree, then at each other, and without speaking we knew what the other was thinking. We would smuggle some leaves into the camp, so that everyone else could see it too. The soldier hurried us on, we were to enter the barracks and get to work. He gave us instructions, a bucket of cold water, and a rag.

It turned into a hard day’s work. In order to get the very dirty floors into a somewhat clean state, we needed to gather a few branches. Under the soldier’s goading insults, we toiled away with the branches, using our knuckles and nails to make the floor a little less grubby.

When the signal came for the end of the working day, we could breathe again. ‘Feierabend’, the soldier said when evening came, ‘Time to call it a day’. We were to return to the camp, where the counting of the prisoners awaited. I managed to tear off a few leaves, but on the way home I was very tense: would I be able to smuggle them inside, or would we be searched? Bringing in as much as a blade of grass was strictly prohibited. I hid a branch in the hem of my dress and put a leaf in my mouth. So did Olga. Trembling, we walked past the gatekeeper and — we made it.

Our legs shook as we waited for the counting to end. Later, when we entered the barracks and presented the leaves, there was much joy. A hope arose in all of our friends that a brighter future would be waiting outside, even for us.