Free A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Buergenthal Page B

whole loaves. Complaints would invite a beating. In the evening, we would be served
     the day’s only other meal. It consisted, as a rule, of some tasteless, watery turnip soup. Since we got no bread in the evening,
     I would try to save a little piece of my morning bread for later in the day, hiding it very carefully so that it would not
     be stolen.
    That, more or less, was all we had to eat. On such a diet, some people gradually became
Muselmans,
the name given to inmates who had become totally emaciated, walked around in a stupor, stopped eating altogether, and in
     no time died quietly. I soon learned that if somebody became a
Muselman,
he would not live very long. That was the fate of a friend of my parents whom I had called “Uncle” for as long as I could
     remember. He and his wife had been with us in Katowice. He was Jewish; she was not. And while, as a German gentile, she could
     have left him and gone back to Germany, she refused to do so and helped him as best she could. In Kielce, she lived outside
     the ghetto and somehow managed to get food to him; she did the same in the labor camp. I still remember them talking over
     the fence in the ghetto. Access to Auschwitz or anywhere near the camp was closed to her, and he, a big man, simply could
     not live on the rations we received. When I saw him a few weeks after we had arrived in Auschwitz, he was the skinniest human
     being I had ever seen. He no longer recognized my father or me and kept mumbling to himself. After the war, my mother and
     I visited his wife, who had returned to her native Hamburg. Of course, she wanted to know when I had last seen her husband
     and whether I knew what had happened to him. I lied and told her that the last time I had seen him, he was his usual friendly
     self, although somewhat thinner. I simply could not bring myself to tell this woman, whom we all admired for her courage and
     loyalty to her husband, the truth about his last days. She had suffered enough.
    I do not remember how long my father and I remained in the barrack we occupied when we first arrived in the Gypsy camp. A
     Kapo who took part in the terrible beating of Spiegel was in charge of a barrack that served as a kind of warehouse, where
     the clothing taken from people on their arrival in Auschwitz was sorted and eventually shipped out. Where it went, I never
     knew. To help us, the Kapo had my father and me and a few of his other friends from Kielce assigned to his barrack. We slept
     there and worked there. In many ways, this was a lifesaving break for us. We were no longer subjected to the maltreatment
     dished out in the other barrack, we had a little more food, and we had a bunk bed with blankets and a straw mattress. Equally
     important, we could keep warm with some of the clothes stored in the barrack.
    In our new barrack, my father and I shared a bunk with my friend Walter and his stepfather. Walter had managed to avoid being
     murdered with the children of Kielce because he was a few years older than most of them and was rather tall. After we had
     moved into our new barrack, Walter got very sick. His father took him to the infirmary, where he was admitted after being
     diagnosed with diphtheria. The barracks serving as the infirmary of the Gypsy camp were located kitty-corner across from our
     barrack. Less than a week after Walter had entered the infirmary, we were awakened one night by terrible noises coming from
     across the street. SS trucks with their motors running were standing outside the infirmary, while SS guards herded screaming
     patients into the trucks. Of course, the patients knew that they were being taken to the gas chambers, and we knew that the
     SS was thinning out the population of the infirmary to make room for new patients. They would do that every few weeks; that
     is why it was so dangerous to go to the infirmary. In the morning, we learned that Walter was among those who had been taken
     away. His stepfather kept blaming