Voices From Auschwitz (1/3)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 17:34:31 UTC
Wow. This took a lot longer to write than I expected; sorry folks. The ‘Roma’ in this story refers to the gypsies/Romany, not Ancient Rome. Warning: As this is holocaust fic, I will not warn.
*
The invasion itself is mostly a blur: seconds ticked off by tramping boot-clad footfalls, the brief scream-filled hours at once hectic and interminable, Germany’s hand on his wrist, squeezing squeezing squeezing until Poland is sure his bones are about to break, sure he can hear them grinding against each other over his own shrieks of pain, his priests are on their knees with no God in sight and falling, falling forward into holes like yawning black mouths and his teachers have stopped lecturing, all gone silent and he tastes blood as Germany forces his face into the soil of his own violated span of earth and pushes farther into him.
*
Now he is huddling silently in the frame of his own bruised shoulders, naked, clumps of his beautiful blond hair sticking on his cheeks and mixing with his tears.
The jumpsuit is too big for him, but it only takes a few minutes for him to appreciate meager warmth granted when he rolls the extra length of leg back up his shin and wraps the excess sleeve around his fingers. He avoids looking at the others, shaved and suited in identical ill-fitting clothes. He knew them all, only hours before, he knows he knew, but now they are unrecognizable, bereft and strange.
He sits at a rickety table, the metal slats of the chair digging into his thigh as strong alcohol is daubed on his arm with a dirty rag before the needle drills ink under his skin.
Poland stares at the snow coming down in fat, fluffy clumps, and thinks, but Oswiecim was such a nice little town.
*
Germany is shouting. Time for count. Poland fucking hates the fucking count.
He stands and stands and stands in neat, endless rows as Germany marches back and forth, the only blemish on his immaculate uniform the mud on his boots and the dull, dark smear of blood on his rifle butt. Poland’s legs shake inside from the strain, and he fights the urge to lock his knees. Faint and fall, fall and die.
One of Judah’s boys soils himself standing there.
Fuck, Poland thinks, as the kid topples over, blood pooling with the excrement, another bout of dysentery decimating the whole damn camp. Last thing we fucking need.
He keeps facing forward, knowing better than to move, but he can feel Judah’s glare against the fuzz at the back of his skull. He can’t really find the effort to care about how little he cares.
Someone was shot. Someone else. It’s another fucking day and if count ever ends, can they get breakfast already?
(God. He’s so hungry. He feels like he has a dog in his stomach, gnawing and gnawing on dry splinters of bare bone. Fuck, finish the count.)
Germany counts the prisoners, barracks by barracks, standing in rows like the leafless grey birch trees along the fence. Germany counts the corpses piled outside the barracks doors, dumped there in the morning after hunger and cold and exhaustion took their nightly toll.
Two of the Jehova’s Witnesses are missing.
Fucking bastards. Fucking lucky escaped bastards.
Germany picks out twenty other prisoners and hangs them in the center of the camp. Poland wonders how long he’ll leave them there, this time.
At least the cold will keep them from rotting too badly.
Breakfast. Finally. The bread is hard and the gruel is tasteless. Poland gulps it down fast. He takes one longing, loving sip of the coffee (it tastes like sawdust but it’s hot) before he pours the rest over his face and hands and scrubs. It doesn’t get him clean, not even close, but it’s better than all that wash water they totally don’t have.
Voices From Auschwitz (2/3)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 17:39:59 UTC
The rock he’s carrying slips in his grasp and he jerks wrong and then pain is shooting through him because he’s twisted his ankle.
I’m dead, he thinks, as soon as he realizes. I can’t work, so I’m dead. It feels half like relief, and half like all the rage that’s been building inside him ever since Germany tore at his clothes while Russia held him down.
He’s a stubborn goddamn Pollack, so the rage wins, before he shoves it down into the black abyss that is his stomach now and goes down on Germany in the travesty of a makeshift infirmary. He feels like slime afterward, like the lamest, sickest thing, and he can’t get the taste out of his mouth after a week of rotten rations, but he gets a different work detail out of it, repairing the striped uniforms between one set of walking dead men and the next. Most of the tears he mends are bullet holes, but it’s something he can do sitting down, working the pedal with his uninjured foot, and that’s the important thing.
He’s still alive. He favors his good leg during the unbearable eternity of count and ignores the stains under his fingers when he stitches uniforms and waits for his ankle to heal and he. Is still alive.
*
He has a cough. For a terrifying moment, Germany glares at him during selektion, but Poland forces his burning lungs to keep still and stands as straight as he can, every line of him screaming, I’m strong, I’m still strong, I’m healthy enough to work, let me work one more day.
And Germany passes him by like plague, picking some to kill and some merely to pock and scar, impassive and inexplicable, and Poland goes to the showers.
It isn’t tuberculosis, and Poland would thank god for that if he could still pray without flying into questions and curses, each as pointless as the other. It isn’t a cold. He has no fever, at least according to Roma’s mothering hand on his forehead.
He just has a cough.
He thinks it’s all the smoke in the air.
*
Roma sits at the sewing machine next to him. She shows him how to steal needles, use them to prick his fingers and smear droplets of blood on his face before selektion to look ruddy-cheeked, healthier. He uses his spot by the door to serve as a lookout for her. He hums whenever the guard overseeing their work approaches, and they use the excuse of needing a warning signal to teach each other folk songs, simple tunes they used to dance to, pure melodies in soft voices, crooning to the rhythm of the pedals.
*
Russia is in the next barracks down, surrounded by his demoralized soldiers, disarmed and disheartened. Germany turned on him, of course, and whenever Poland sees him he has to fight down the urge to shout, serves you right for joining him you sadistic fucking bastard and how stupid are you not to see that coming, but Russia looks about as miserable as he feels, his bulky body withered and gaunt, his violet eyes dull, and Poland still can’t quite erase the rancid, bitter musk at the back of his throat, so Poland just meets Russia’s eyes, and nods, and keeps silent.
Voices From Auschwitz (3/3)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 17:45:00 UTC
It’s Sunday. It’s the day of the Lord, which means rest, except that rest means the officers make the prisoners jump for sport instead of work.
Poland doesn’t want to move. His stomach feels like it’s inside out, like it’s trying to suck the marrow out of his own ribs.
“Hey.” Germany nudges him with a boot. Poland waits as long as he thinks he can without getting hit before he opens his eyes.
Apple.
Germany is holding an apple.
Apple apple apple -
Germany tosses it down to him, and he surges and scrabbles for it, but he is too weak and it rolls into the mud.
Germany snorts and picks it up, swiping it clean on his -
Filthy striped jumpsuit. The red triangle on his arm confuses Poland’s eyes for a moment, because it’s been so long since he’s seen red from dye and not blood.
Germany pulls out a knife and sets the flat of it against the skin of Poland’s jawline, sliding slowly. Poland gasps softly, and Germany grins. He carves one small, thin slice of apple, and holds it to Poland’s lips. Poland snaps it up, and lets Germany worry about getting his fingers out of the way of Poland’s teeth. He forces himself to chew instead of gulping the chunk down whole, afraid of losing the unexpected sustenance if he eats too much too fast.
The skin is a little leathered and shriveled and the juice dribbling over his tongue is sweetest goddamn thing he has ever tasted. Germany cuts another morsel and another, and Poland nips his fingertips and gobbles them down. When he pares the small fruit down to nothing but the stem and seeds, Poland grabs Germany’s wrist and sucks the sticky drips of juice from his fingers. He tongues the line of his palm, tasting salt sweat and dirt with the apple, and he doesn’t care.
(Ashes settle like dust on his hair, like dandruff as they all age too-quickly.)
He licks the knife clean too, and all he can taste is sweet.
Poland laps at his lips, grinning. Germany ruffles the new white wisps of his hair and hands him a turnip, asking if he can manage now without being hand-fed half in amiable jest, half in malice. Poland answers in kind, calling him a coward, too scared to risk his fingers any further. He tucks the root inside his shirt, promising himself on the God he isn’t talking to that he’ll save half for Roma.
And -
And he is still alive.
*
Most of the material I used here came from the stories of survivors I heard in the “Voices Of Auschwitz” room in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Oswiecim was the Polish name of the town where Auschwitz was built; Auschwitz is merely the Germanized form of the name. The red triangle indicated a political prisoner. Germany, in the last section, rather than a guard, is a kapo: a prisoner, usually German, whom the guards gave (non-firearm) weapons and told to keep other prisoners in line. Some kapos (many of them, with green triangles, convicted rapists and murderers) were even more brutal than the S.S. guards, but some kapos helped ‘their’ prisoners to stay alive, including by getting them extra food.
I did include one historical inaccuracy: the mention of Birch trees lining the fence would indicate that the camp in question was Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau (Birkenau means Birch), which was the large extermination camp people think of when they think of Auschwitz. Most of the Polish prisoners and Soviet POWs, however, were assigned to the smaller Auschwitz I nearby. For the purposes of simplicity, emotional impact, and fulfilling the spirit of the prompt, I amalgamated the two a bit.
Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, anon, you've just added another month to the time I'm going to be poking at my WWII related fics in desperate attempts to make them have this evocative or the prose half as beautiful or the heartbreak half as....god.
I'm gonna read this a thousand times, and cry every one of them. WOW.
Kills me every time. It's this room with just benches and transcripts, and this one recording of several survivors telling their memories on a long, endless loop. I stay for the whole loop every time I'm in D.C. This fic would be shallow and hacky without that excellent museum, and the individuals who gratefully gave their strength and pain so that the rest of us could know their stories.
Re: Voices From Auschwitz (3/3)
anonymous
April 9 2009, 07:28:36 UTC
Hmm... very interesting. I take a procrastination break from my work on the Warsaw 1944 Uprising to... find this. It's either fate, or a reminder to get back to work.
Sorry, I'm too tired to say anything profound, but I think I like your fic. It's not very graphic, but I'd say that's probably a good thing. People tend to focus on the horrific and just read history like an action movie. So I'm glad you wrote it the way you did. Also for including other nations. Sometimes I find people focus on their own and would rather not mention the rest...and that probably includes me too.
Re: Voices From Auschwitz (3/3)
anonymous
April 9 2009, 08:31:55 UTC
Wow. I really like this fic. When I saw the title I was a little nervous of what would I see there. You handled the topic very well and your characterisation of Poland and Germany moved me. I was in Auschwitz last year so it was easy to imagine all these things happening. That place is really scary.
*
The invasion itself is mostly a blur: seconds ticked off by tramping boot-clad footfalls, the brief scream-filled hours at once hectic and interminable, Germany’s hand on his wrist, squeezing squeezing squeezing until Poland is sure his bones are about to break, sure he can hear them grinding against each other over his own shrieks of pain, his priests are on their knees with no God in sight and falling, falling forward into holes like yawning black mouths and his teachers have stopped lecturing, all gone silent and he tastes blood as Germany forces his face into the soil of his own violated span of earth and pushes farther into him.
*
Now he is huddling silently in the frame of his own bruised shoulders, naked, clumps of his beautiful blond hair sticking on his cheeks and mixing with his tears.
The jumpsuit is too big for him, but it only takes a few minutes for him to appreciate meager warmth granted when he rolls the extra length of leg back up his shin and wraps the excess sleeve around his fingers. He avoids looking at the others, shaved and suited in identical ill-fitting clothes. He knew them all, only hours before, he knows he knew, but now they are unrecognizable, bereft and strange.
He sits at a rickety table, the metal slats of the chair digging into his thigh as strong alcohol is daubed on his arm with a dirty rag before the needle drills ink under his skin.
Poland stares at the snow coming down in fat, fluffy clumps, and thinks, but Oswiecim was such a nice little town.
*
Germany is shouting. Time for count. Poland fucking hates the fucking count.
He stands and stands and stands in neat, endless rows as Germany marches back and forth, the only blemish on his immaculate uniform the mud on his boots and the dull, dark smear of blood on his rifle butt. Poland’s legs shake inside from the strain, and he fights the urge to lock his knees. Faint and fall, fall and die.
One of Judah’s boys soils himself standing there.
Fuck, Poland thinks, as the kid topples over, blood pooling with the excrement, another bout of dysentery decimating the whole damn camp. Last thing we fucking need.
He keeps facing forward, knowing better than to move, but he can feel Judah’s glare against the fuzz at the back of his skull. He can’t really find the effort to care about how little he cares.
Someone was shot. Someone else. It’s another fucking day and if count ever ends, can they get breakfast already?
(God. He’s so hungry. He feels like he has a dog in his stomach, gnawing and gnawing on dry splinters of bare bone. Fuck, finish the count.)
Germany counts the prisoners, barracks by barracks, standing in rows like the leafless grey birch trees along the fence. Germany counts the corpses piled outside the barracks doors, dumped there in the morning after hunger and cold and exhaustion took their nightly toll.
Two of the Jehova’s Witnesses are missing.
Fucking bastards. Fucking lucky escaped bastards.
Germany picks out twenty other prisoners and hangs them in the center of the camp. Poland wonders how long he’ll leave them there, this time.
At least the cold will keep them from rotting too badly.
Breakfast. Finally. The bread is hard and the gruel is tasteless. Poland gulps it down fast. He takes one longing, loving sip of the coffee (it tastes like sawdust but it’s hot) before he pours the rest over his face and hands and scrubs. It doesn’t get him clean, not even close, but it’s better than all that wash water they totally don’t have.
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I’m dead, he thinks, as soon as he realizes. I can’t work, so I’m dead. It feels half like relief, and half like all the rage that’s been building inside him ever since Germany tore at his clothes while Russia held him down.
He’s a stubborn goddamn Pollack, so the rage wins, before he shoves it down into the black abyss that is his stomach now and goes down on Germany in the travesty of a makeshift infirmary. He feels like slime afterward, like the lamest, sickest thing, and he can’t get the taste out of his mouth after a week of rotten rations, but he gets a different work detail out of it, repairing the striped uniforms between one set of walking dead men and the next. Most of the tears he mends are bullet holes, but it’s something he can do sitting down, working the pedal with his uninjured foot, and that’s the important thing.
He’s still alive. He favors his good leg during the unbearable eternity of count and ignores the stains under his fingers when he stitches uniforms and waits for his ankle to heal and he. Is still alive.
*
He has a cough. For a terrifying moment, Germany glares at him during selektion, but Poland forces his burning lungs to keep still and stands as straight as he can, every line of him screaming, I’m strong, I’m still strong, I’m healthy enough to work, let me work one more day.
And Germany passes him by like plague, picking some to kill and some merely to pock and scar, impassive and inexplicable, and Poland goes to the showers.
It isn’t tuberculosis, and Poland would thank god for that if he could still pray without flying into questions and curses, each as pointless as the other. It isn’t a cold. He has no fever, at least according to Roma’s mothering hand on his forehead.
He just has a cough.
He thinks it’s all the smoke in the air.
*
Roma sits at the sewing machine next to him. She shows him how to steal needles, use them to prick his fingers and smear droplets of blood on his face before selektion to look ruddy-cheeked, healthier. He uses his spot by the door to serve as a lookout for her. He hums whenever the guard overseeing their work approaches, and they use the excuse of needing a warning signal to teach each other folk songs, simple tunes they used to dance to, pure melodies in soft voices, crooning to the rhythm of the pedals.
*
Russia is in the next barracks down, surrounded by his demoralized soldiers, disarmed and disheartened. Germany turned on him, of course, and whenever Poland sees him he has to fight down the urge to shout, serves you right for joining him you sadistic fucking bastard and how stupid are you not to see that coming, but Russia looks about as miserable as he feels, his bulky body withered and gaunt, his violet eyes dull, and Poland still can’t quite erase the rancid, bitter musk at the back of his throat, so Poland just meets Russia’s eyes, and nods, and keeps silent.
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Poland doesn’t want to move. His stomach feels like it’s inside out, like it’s trying to suck the marrow out of his own ribs.
“Hey.” Germany nudges him with a boot. Poland waits as long as he thinks he can without getting hit before he opens his eyes.
Apple.
Germany is holding an apple.
Apple apple apple -
Germany tosses it down to him, and he surges and scrabbles for it, but he is too weak and it rolls into the mud.
Germany snorts and picks it up, swiping it clean on his -
Filthy striped jumpsuit. The red triangle on his arm confuses Poland’s eyes for a moment, because it’s been so long since he’s seen red from dye and not blood.
Germany pulls out a knife and sets the flat of it against the skin of Poland’s jawline, sliding slowly. Poland gasps softly, and Germany grins. He carves one small, thin slice of apple, and holds it to Poland’s lips. Poland snaps it up, and lets Germany worry about getting his fingers out of the way of Poland’s teeth. He forces himself to chew instead of gulping the chunk down whole, afraid of losing the unexpected sustenance if he eats too much too fast.
The skin is a little leathered and shriveled and the juice dribbling over his tongue is sweetest goddamn thing he has ever tasted. Germany cuts another morsel and another, and Poland nips his fingertips and gobbles them down. When he pares the small fruit down to nothing but the stem and seeds, Poland grabs Germany’s wrist and sucks the sticky drips of juice from his fingers. He tongues the line of his palm, tasting salt sweat and dirt with the apple, and he doesn’t care.
(Ashes settle like dust on his hair, like dandruff as they all age too-quickly.)
He licks the knife clean too, and all he can taste is sweet.
Poland laps at his lips, grinning. Germany ruffles the new white wisps of his hair and hands him a turnip, asking if he can manage now without being hand-fed half in amiable jest, half in malice. Poland answers in kind, calling him a coward, too scared to risk his fingers any further. He tucks the root inside his shirt, promising himself on the God he isn’t talking to that he’ll save half for Roma.
And -
And he is still alive.
*
Most of the material I used here came from the stories of survivors I heard in the “Voices Of Auschwitz” room in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Oswiecim was the Polish name of the town where Auschwitz was built; Auschwitz is merely the Germanized form of the name. The red triangle indicated a political prisoner. Germany, in the last section, rather than a guard, is a kapo: a prisoner, usually German, whom the guards gave (non-firearm) weapons and told to keep other prisoners in line. Some kapos (many of them, with green triangles, convicted rapists and murderers) were even more brutal than the S.S. guards, but some kapos helped ‘their’ prisoners to stay alive, including by getting them extra food.
I did include one historical inaccuracy: the mention of Birch trees lining the fence would indicate that the camp in question was Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau (Birkenau means Birch), which was the large extermination camp people think of when they think of Auschwitz. Most of the Polish prisoners and Soviet POWs, however, were assigned to the smaller Auschwitz I nearby. For the purposes of simplicity, emotional impact, and fulfilling the spirit of the prompt, I amalgamated the two a bit.
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I'm gonna read this a thousand times, and cry every one of them. WOW.
Reply
The Voices of Auschwitz room?
Kills me every time. It's this room with just benches and transcripts, and this one recording of several survivors telling their memories on a long, endless loop. I stay for the whole loop every time I'm in D.C. This fic would be shallow and hacky without that excellent museum, and the individuals who gratefully gave their strength and pain so that the rest of us could know their stories.
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*facepalm*
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I take a procrastination break from my work on the Warsaw 1944 Uprising to... find this. It's either fate, or a reminder to get back to work.
Sorry, I'm too tired to say anything profound, but I think I like your fic. It's not very graphic, but I'd say that's probably a good thing. People tend to focus on the horrific and just read history like an action movie. So I'm glad you wrote it the way you did. Also for including other nations. Sometimes I find people focus on their own and would rather not mention the rest...and that probably includes me too.
Polish!anon gives you her approval.
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I was in Auschwitz last year so it was easy to imagine all these things happening. That place is really scary.
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