Free Auschwitz Violin by Maria Anglada Page A

of course, before the days and months in the ghetto. Now it was turnips and more turnips, turnip soup and more turnip soup.
    He felt a friendly hand on his shoulder. It was a fellow inmate, the former professor who was now a baker. The man secretly slipped Daniel a thick slice of bread that he had managed to steal from the bakery. It was dangerous to do so. He could have been killed or whipped, but he risked it sometimes and would offer the stolen morsels to his fellow inmates, following a strict order that was intended to keep others from being envious. Daniel had forgotten that it was his turn! These little conspiracies, in the midst of so much misery, were like flames that warmed the inmates. The professor was fortunate to work in the bakery, but he deserved it; he remembered his friends.
    Feeling more cheerful after the extra piece of rye bread, Daniel strode to the heavily guarded row of men who would be taken to the factory. Everyone realized that a truck had just arrived with a new “load of misfortune.” One of the inmates turned around to glance at it, but a heavy fist sent him staggering; the prisoner started walking faster, eager to avoid being struck again. Let’s hope he stays in line, Daniel thought, or they’ll kill him just like they did Dénes the other day.
    He felt as though he had been in the camp for an eternity, was rooted in it; yet his own arrival seemed like only yesterday. The stupor, the shouts of Raus! , the shoves, the humiliating rituals. The long hours of standing naked at attention in the freezing cold, waiting his turn for the miserable, perverse ceremonies: face and body shaved by common prisoners—criminals who wore the terrible green triangles—arms marked by indelible tattoos, hair sheared, bodies disinfected as if they were plants. The fear that the showers might be gas chambers rather than the freezing water that scarified their bodies but was finally inoffensive if the men weren’t under it too long. (Sometimes the guards amused themselves by forcing the prisoners to remain in the cold shower until they shook uncontrollably, their teeth chattering.) The thrashings if you didn’t immediately understand orders or walked too slowly. The screams and sobs from prisoners whose wives or children were wrenched from them, the defiant eyes of the gypsy who had switched lines and stood by his elderly father while his little boy headed for death.
    Daniel trudged along, never pausing in case he too would be struck, but his memory again unearthed the insults issued—at him and at all the newcomers—as he’d descended from the crowded truck, the gentlest being the oft-repeated bledehunde , “You stupid dog!” He thought, as he had that first day, that no response was possible for the terrible suffering, released with such fury against them all on what seemed like an interminable Yom Kippur—the day of abstinence and atonement.

    Daniel had thought about his violin for hours, wondered for days about the possibility of his survival. During the Spring Cleaning he had felt more concern for himself than pity for the condemned. But now suddenly, hearing in the distance the shouts directed at the newly arrived prisoners, he marveled that his heart had not completely died, that he could still feel for others, that compassion for other men could spring from him like a tiny blade of grass emerging not from some wasteland but from the rich earth. Despite the derision and his forced smile that morning, despite the months of cold, hunger, and threats, his body bruised by beatings, the tremendous effort to stifle the cries when he was whipped, learning not to long for anything, not to think of anything beyond the immediate, despite it all, his heart was alive. He recognized a similar feeling in the eyes of the boy standing in line next to him, a young political prisoner who had just been struck in the face. Daniel silently squeezed his hand, secretly sharing the modest pride of knowing that they had