Spark of Life Read Online Free PDF

added to his name. They were only a shabby irony.
    The square made by the sun glided slowly on. Chaim, Ruben and Moische Wolf, whom it had only touched with one corner, disappeared again in darkness. Instead, two new inscriptions moved into the light. The one consisted of only two letters: F.M. He who had scratched it in with a nail had no longer thought as much of himself as had Lieutenant Meyer. Even his name had been almost a matter of indifference to him; nevertheless he had notwanted to succumb without leaving a sign. But under it a full name appeared again. There stood, written in pencil: Tevje Liebesch and family. And next to it, more hastily, the beginning of the Jewish Kaddish prayer:
Yis gadal—
    509 knew that in a few minutes the light would reach another blurred inscription: W RITE TO L EAH S AND —N EW Y ORK —The street was no longer legible, then came: F ATH —and after a piece of rotten wood: DEAD . S EARCH FOR L EO . Leo seemed to have escaped; but the inscription had been made in vain. None of the many inmates of the barrack had ever been able to notify Leah Sanders in New York. No one had gotten out alive.
    509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more—Russian, Polish, Yiddish—which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed. The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.
    509 turned away; he didn’t want to see all that now. He felt suddenly alone—as if in some peculiar way the others had become estranged from him and they no longer understood one another. He still waited awhile; then he couldn’t bear it any more. He groped his way to the door and crawled out again.
    He was wearing now only his own rags and felt cold at once. Outside he rose to his feet, leaned against the barrack wall and looked down at the town. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he no longer wanted to be on all fours; he wanted to stand. The guards on the watchtowers had not yet returned. The control on this side was never very strict; those who could hardly walk could not escape.
    509 stood at the right-hand corner of the barrack. The camp was laid out in a curve which followed the range of the hills, and from here he could see not only the town but also the quarters of the SS troops. They lay outside the barbed wire behind a row of trees which were still bare. A number of SS-men were running to and fro in front of them. Others stood together in excited groups and gazed down at the town. A large gray automobile came fast up the mountain. It stopped in front of the Commandant’s house which lay a short distance from the SS quarters. Neubauer already stood outside; he immediately got in and the car dashed off. From his days in the labor camp 509 knew that the Commandant owned a house in town where his family lived. His eyes followed the car so attentively that he did not see someone coming quietly along the path between the barracks. It was Handke, the block senior from Barrack 22, a squat man who always sneaked about in rubber soles. He wore the green triangular badge of the criminals and was in the camp for manslaughter. Most of the time he was harmless, but when he got his fits he had sometimes beaten