Can’t Go On

That meant…

Wheelbarrows. Sore muscles. Spitting curses into the Polish dirt. For that was the only place you could aim them. If one of the Nazi guards heard you muttering, even if it was an ‘I love you Marzena, why oh why did they take you? I miss you. I love you,’ you were dead or worse.

They moved rocks till sundown. They hauled pipe and fitted large rooms with cold white tile. The slow September breeze did nothing to soothe their aches and bleeding scrapes. And of course, there were the measly working rations: the crusts of bread, the rancid soup, the pitiful slab of margarine. Jack’s stomach groaned at the thought of more food. His ragged and thin dreams were full of sumptuous dinners, but when he reached for them, they turned to ash.

The Trawniki men received bottles of brandy and extra bullets, and those bullets ended up in the backs of Jewish necks. They did their killing in the surrounding woods. They said they were executing Polish partisans, but Jack knew the Trawniki men and police battalions slaughtered his neighbors and friends.

Jack himself wasn't Jewish, but he was linked in with them all the same. He had been on his way to a doctorate in Classical Studies when the Wehrmacht burned through Lublin. The bells stopped ringing, and the hated Einsatzgruppen raided homes, looking for Jewish conspirators and intelligentsia. Jack could distinctly remember the pounding of a rifle butt on his door, the nauseous flavor of fear rolling around in his dry mouth as he and his fiancée tore out the back. They heard shouting and gunshots in the streets.

They ran from the horrid sounds, past the broken window shops. And in her pregnant state, in her haste and confusion, Alina sprinted right towards Spokojna Street where the SS were stationed.

“Alina! Alina, no!” he had shouted, but it was no use. A group of Nazi soldiers cut in front of them from a perpendicular street. Before Jack knew it, she was tripping over her suitcase and falling to the cobblestones, moaning. Nightshirts and her mother’s silk dresses tumbled into the wet street. Evil trails of blood followed.

Jack hadn’t even heard the shot. But he saw the next one. A young Nazi soldier pulled his pistol and shot her in the head from thirty yards. Jack was on her in a second, kneeling and trying to piece her back together like it was only a matter of time. Like if he was quick about it, she would come back and everything could be undone. If only he had more time!

But the Germans were on him before he could beg for a miracle. He turned as their gray bodies and glinting black helmets descended. The roar of tanks was fuzzy in his ear. The rage and sorrow leapt in his soul. He prayed to a God he half-believed in: please just give me a pistol. Anything to kill them. Please just give me a way out of this pain. The young man who shot his fiancée knelt and began speaking softly in German, then another—

The lights kicked on and a bleating siren disrupted Jack’s memory. Time for work.

He tried to stretch and blink away the tears forming. He felt the comfortable pressure of his last cigarette pressed against his ankle blisters. Jack reached for it subconsciously, out of habit, but he would not smoke it. Not yet. Though the yearning pulled at him, it tugged at his coat like a small child begging for food. He wanted it all to end—to see his mother again, his little brothers, his fiancée with their future in her belly.

Everyone in the camp knew that if they saw a man smoking his last cigarette, he would be dead before sundown. It signified to every prisoner that he had given up all hope and was beyond the trivial act of living, the abstractions of pain. Jack was so far above human feeling that all he could taste now was death and the sweet release of mortality. The joining of his dear departed family somewhere in the heavens.

But heaven was a bitter taste in Jack’s mouth. All he craved now was blackness. A void to vent the misery. Cessation of brain activity. No thought.

Just like his Alina.

He pulled down his grimy sock and reached for the cigarette. Jack brought it to his lips as the smell of stale tobacco graced the rotten air. With a shaking hand, he reached for the solitary match under his mattress. He felt its thinness and the dreams of life all but disappeared in the waiting sulfur. He pulled it from under him and struck the match when a cry rang out.

Somewhere outside the hut, a man screamed. Then came a long-drawn-out gurgling. Shouts in German and then more yelling. Curses fell.

Jack sat up rigid as a bone. The hut door crashed open, and one of the kapos burst in from the darkness.

“They brought in a prisoner! He bit an SS guard and disappeared.”

All the men shot up in their bunks. Jack was out of bed in an instant. He had to see—before they started shooting—he had to glimpse a Nazi defeat, however small it was.

He snuck around a few prisoners huddled by the door, afraid to peer out.

“What is it, Jack?” little Itzhak said in a hush.

Jack stuck his neck out into the 4 a.m. dark and saw spotlights trained on the railway entrance to the camp. Nazi guards and kapos rushed toward the enormous shower and delousing chambers, the ones prisoners had spent months constructing.

Jack crept out of the block with his heart in his throat. Two German Shepherds rushed past, barking and growling. They disappeared behind the showers. Jack followed them as more sirens screamed. One of the dog’s barking got clipped into an unmistakable whine. Other workers had left their huts in the commotion and milled about in front.

“Geh wieder rein! Geh wieder rein! Get inside,” one of the SS guards yelled. He pulled his Luger and shot at the crowds of weary men. One went down with a bullet in his gut. The fear took them and they raced back inside, but Jack was beyond them in every sense of the word. He didn’t much care whether Nazis mangled his body with bullets.

He felt a new tugging, a new gnawing at his spirit. Something was pulling him behind the shower chambers. Something intangible. Something like fear that had undergone cell division into a new emotion. Like the time he had fallen out of bed when he was six and saw the presence of a shadow kneeling between his toys. The shadow had being, had Dasein, it observed. Jack knew there was a curtain to reality, and he had peered beyond it. That same buzzing electrical fear coursed through him now.

He cut back around his hut, crouching low as he passed the roll call grounds and hallows. The watchtower was directly behind him. They could fire at any time, but adrenaline pushed him on. Crawling on all fours like a beast, he made it to the shower station. Low growling came from behind the wall. He stood and rounded the corner, the taste of bile in his throat.

A dark figure was draped over a twitching SS guard. The Nazi’s black boots shook and scuffed up the ashen ground in erratic lines. Was he being choked? Jack couldn’t make out the man doing the killing, but he knew he had pierced the veil now. Then the figure raised his head, and Jack recoiled. Blood dribbled down his chin in trails. It was a man, about six feet with sunken gray eyes and three-day stubble. He wore a thin, holey jacket with a yellow star that marked him as a Jew. This man had been feeding on the guard. He was paler than fine porcelain, paler than a winter sky.

The bodies of the two dogs lay about arm’s length from the guard, their steaming blood leaking into the earth. The man pointed at him with a trembling hand. Jack knew why he was shaking. He could recognize that fight anywhere, that fight to hold back sobs. The energy it took to literally swallow grief racked the body, making it convulse.

“My daughter. They grabbed her by her little arms, patted her head and then sho—” He choked up. “I can’t go on, I can’t.”

The pale, blood-drenched man staggered toward Jack, but Jack tripped over his feet with the same fuzzy sound in his ears. The fear had taken hold of him now.

“Please,” Jack cried, his hands clenching the cold camp dirt.

The pale prisoner lunged at him and bit him in the neck. Stinging pain rippled through Jack’s body. He tried to pry the man off him, but the exhaustion of his deprived muscles and the strength of the man’s hand on his forehead made it impossible. Then the pale man lifted his head and bit down into his own wrist as if it were ripe fruit. Dark blood gushed out. He drank from the open wound, gargled, and then spit the blood into Jack’s screaming mouth.

As soon as he tasted the gamey tang of hemoglobin, his body convulsed worse than ever. Worse than holding back dying-family-sobs, worse than after Alina and the first night of German captivity. Pain rolled through every part. It was too much. He was on the verge of blacking out. The man shh’d him, stroked his burning forehead like a parent, and pulled a small wooden box from the inside of his prisoner’s coat.

“Guard this with what’s left of your life. The pyx came to me; now it comes to you. I cannot go on.” Ferocious hands dug into the ground. So fast! That dark spray of Polish dirt. Like Jack was being flecked with his own grave’s soil. Then the man gently placed the small relic in the hole he had dug. Covered it. Scattered it with loose earth.

“Come back for it and kill them for me. Don’t be afraid,” the man whispered as he stripped off his coat.

He rose and backed away, arms outstretched. Through the haze of searing pain, Jack saw tears roll down his cheeks. “And stay out of the sun.”

He turned and ran into the gunfire of the Nazi guards.