Playing for Time Read Online Free PDF

coarse fat face towards me. “That’s where you’ll end up.”
    How could one doubt it?
    “
Herunter
!” Down! yelled the blockowa.
    “We’re going to shit, and high time too,” growled Adele the redhead, leaping down from her bunk.
    In line, paddling through the icy mud, shivering in our cotton dresses, we crossed a stretch of camp.
    Who could have dreamed up such a place as the latrine hut? It was an enormous hole dug out of the earth, about forty feet deep, surrounded by an irregular border of large stones, plank walls, and a roof. This enormous, funnel-shaped sewer was ringed with wooden bars. No sooner was the door open than, breaking ranks, the girls rushed forward
to
sit on these bars, buttocks exposed. Some, with dysentery, didn’t make it and relieved themselves where they stood, under the blows and insults of the latrine blockowa.
    I stared open-mouthed; I had to remember everything of this stinking horror. Perched in this roost about fifty girls were packed together like sick old hens, skeletal, shivering, clinging to their dung-stained bars. Those with long legs could touch the ground with the tips of their toes, but the others, the smaller ones like me, their legs dangling, had to grip the slippery round bar with both hands with all their might. To fall into the pit must have been a most terrible death.
    The women from the opposite
coja
looked at Clara and me coldly. We meant nothing to that row of skulls in their various states of filth, coloured by varying degrees of fuzz. Their bony hands, like
birds’ feet,
gripped the wooden frame of the
coja;
in their hollow sockets, their
eyes
shone like candle flames lit inside skulls for some diabolical sabbath. I stared back and anguish rose within me: they became mirrors, they reflected my image. How many days would it take for me to become like them? I’d learned so many things in a few hours, so many illusions had collapsed. Incredibly, with an adroit flick of the wrist, someone would swipe your soup, that vile concoction. Smaller prisoners like myself were at the mercy of the larger; the strong preyed on the weak; they pushed you towards death with utter indifference. Work parties left and were not seen again, the sick were sent to an infirmary known as Revier from which they never returned, without anyone’s being remotely concerned about it. A dead person would spend the night among the living without arousing the slightest interest.
    Once again I felt my fear of being swallowed up and digested by this crowd. How could one escape it? Lying on my stomach at the top of the
coja,
with Clara cutting me off from the others, I wanted to close
my
eyes, bury my face in my arms, and no longer see or hear. But it was not possible. We had to keep our heads well away from the soiled, stinking straw mattress which served as common bedding.
    Clara had begun to cry. Her sobs redoubled, which was disastrous. I knew I had to talk to her, and I threw out the first words that came into my head: “I’m going to tell you a fairy story.”
    It was so bizarre, so unexpected, that Clara gazed at me un-comprehendingly. Quickly I uttered the magic words: “Once upon a time…”
    It was a real jumble, and very long: jewels, junketings, romance. The perfumes of Arabia burned at the corners of luxurious divans; rose petals fell as thick as snowflakes, spotless doves flew about in peerless skies. The burning kisses of princes charming would have awakened the mummies in the pyramids. Triumphantly, I concluded: “And they lived happily ever after.”
    I looked around me and burst out laughing.
    And now I was being taken off to sing Madame Butterfly. It was impossible, it couldn’t be happening; and yet I stumbled out after the monstrous Pole who strode ahead of me. The vicious cold bit at my ears. My feet shrank in my men’s shoes and I sank into the icy snow where the mud sucked at my shoes and held them firm. The Polish woman wasn’t cold, with her warm coat, boots, and head