Playing for Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

“They’ll pay for this, every one of them…”
    We stayed there, exhausted, for about two hours. Clara, squeezed against me, renewed her vow in a low voice: “We’ll never leave one another. We’ll share everything. For life.”
    The flat phrases echoed strangely in that icy amphitheatre. At regular intervals the searchlights on the watchtowers burst through the transoms, revealing snatches of the scene, wrenching details of hunched, shivering women from the shadows. From time to time, on the floor of the amphitheatre, the beam of a torch would range slowly, incomprehensibly, over the tiers. There was no sound from outside; inside, the occasional groan, a sob, a cry that was a prayer.
“Ruhe! Kein Wort mehr!”
barked an invisible woman guard and once again there was absolute, total silence, the silence of a graveyard, a graveyard peopled with the living.
    If I wanted to stay that way, I would have to put up some kind of resistance, but how? I would learn that later, day by day.
    A light went on. Below, on the floor, hefty creatures were coming in with a tub filled with soup, which was slopped out into our bowls. I had no spoon and felt sick at the thought of swallowing this viscous liquid in which nameless lumps were floating.
    “Eat it, you must, it’ll warm you up.” The little Russian girl was firm.
    Noisily, we lapped up this repellent stinking brew. Below, in the small yellow circle of light, the serving had finished and went unapplauded. The light went out again, the beam from the torch of one of our usherettes wandered over the tiers for a moment, then darkness and silence reigned. The show was over.
    The winter day broke through, bleak and grimy. The waiting continued. At last the door opened and a volley of orders rained down. We were driven out with whistle blasts and blows, gasping in the icy air. My bare feet shrank in my odd men’s shoes: one yellow, one black, one boot, one laceless oxford—size ten, and I took a size four. How could I march in line or keep in step with such things on my feet? A new terror seized me: to walk was to live; to fall behind, to fall down, was to die. I looked with loathing at the Auschwitz mud into which I was sinking, a clay soil which never dried out, even in the height of summer. Dark grey, deep red in places, it was like a flood of molten lava, it never stopped moving: rain, wind, and snow sent it sliding over its own base. It sucked me in treacherously. I was aware that my life depended on the length of this journey; luckily it was short. We stopped in front of an enormous light brick building, long and squat. “It’s the quarantine block,” the rumour ran. “You don’t come out of here alive.”
    The Sign of the Cross
    It was a huge, dark, low shed. A thousand women were crammed into the three-tiered wooden shelving, with no more room than one’s slot in the morgue. Indeed it was a sort of morgue; the smell of decay seized you by the throat.
    Clara and I, who were among the last, stayed for a few moments by the door. For some reason I thought of the mother and her little girls. Might I meet them again? Foolishly, I questioned the blockowa: “”Please, madame, where are the people who went off in the trucks with the red crosses?“”
    My temerity astounded her; she stared at me, weighing me up—was she going to clout me with her hefty club? Boldly, I repeated: “Where are the people who went off in the Red Cross trucks?”
    She gave a sort of gurgle of a laugh and, seizing my arm in a viselike hold, forced me to pivot towards the open door: “Look…” She pointed to a low building about fifty yards away, above which rose a stubby chimney. “You see that smoke coming out of that chimney over there? That’s your friends, cooking.”
    “All of them?”
    “All of them.”
    They had not even been given whatever chance the quarantine block offered. The Red Cross trucks had been a lure.
    The blockowa kept her grip on my arm; confidentially she thrust her