Free Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz

thought of it made my arms and legs ache.
The kapo took us out a different way, through a vast
chamber where every footstep echoed. One of the men
in front of me stumbled, and a piece of salt clattered
off the wooden boardwalk beneath us and splashed.
Water! There was an entire lake under here. It rippled and glimmered black in the light from the kapo ’s lamp.
Up more steps we went, and another elevator, until
we came to another huge chamber, this one lit with
electric light again. Here there was no lake, but something even more amazing: statues! Dozens of figures,
all carved out of salt. And the lights in the ceiling —
they were chandeliers. Chandeliers made out of salt.
After so many months and years of dirty streets and
peeling paint, of gray uniforms and spartan barracks,
it was astounding that there could still be beauty in
the world. Especially here, a mile underground.
“The workers, the miners— they did this,” whispered the man who’d told me the name of the mine
before. “Some of these statues are a thousand years old.”
There were trolls and serpents and gnomes. There
were Polish knights and kings and queens. I wished
they could somehow, magically, come to life and free
us — save us.
They stayed still though, frozen in salt. As trapped
and helpless as we were.
The last room was another monument left by former miners in Wieliczka’s happier past. It was a temple,
a chapel — no, an underground cathedral. There were
more statues, an altar, a rail. Everything a Catholic
needed to hold services. But praying hadn’t done the
miners any good either. The Nazis owned almost
all of Poland now, even three hundred meters
underground.
Night had fallen and the stars were out when we got
back topside. We were taken to our barracks, which
were no better than our last at Plaszów. Because we’d
missed dinner we were sent to bed without any food.
We knew better than to complain, and most of us went
to our beds as quickly as we could. Morning, as we all
knew, would be there before any of us were ready
for it.
But the two men who’d been looking strangely at
the man I thought was familiar cornered him once the kapo was gone.
“Your name is Holtzman, isn’t it?” one of them said.
“No,” the familiar-looking man said. “No, my
name is Finkelstein!”
“You were in Kraków, weren’t you?” the other man
said. “You were one of the Judenrat’s policemen.”
Of course! That’s why I remembered him! How
could I have forgotten that face? He was the man who
had brought the Nazis to my flat, the one who had
stolen everything else from us while the Nazi took my
mother’s ring. I remembered my mother’s eyes that
day, the emptiness that had never completely gone
away. I’d been so scared, so protective, that I hadn’t
even felt anger.
I did now.
“No!” the policeman said. There was panic in his
eyes. “My name is Finkelstein! From Zielonki!”
“Quiet in there!” a kapo ’s voice shouted from outside. The two men said nothing more to the policeman,
but they watched him all the way back to their bunks.
That night, I could hear the man crying softly in his
bed, until someone hissed at him to shut up.

—
    The morning was cold, with only lukewarm, coffeeflavored water to fight off the chill. It was colder still
underground, where it was always damp and the sun
never shone. The low ceiling made us all walk like old
crones, and I noticed that even when they could, some
of the old-timers never stood up straight anymore.
Their backs were permanently bent.
    I was given my own carbide light, my own pickax,
and my own place to work. It was heavy work, and
boring; there was nothing to it but swinging my pickax
again and again, breaking off big chunks of salt that
another prisoner shoveled into a donkey cart. I chipped
away, my arms already starting to ache from weakness
and malnutrition, when I heard someone cry out from
the chamber around the corner from