They never tell us where we are going. We’re sent from one place to another - and the train isn’t like it used to be when I was small. If we travelled from Kraków to the country before, the carriages were panelled and there were seats covered in leather. There aren’t any seats now. It’s cold and overcrowded, a hundred people to one wagon. We get nothing for the journey, no bread, no water. The first time we were sent somewhere they said our luggage was to be brought afterwards. We were given sticks of chalk and the station platform was covered in suitcases, all with names on. Our four bags were stacked together, labelled in capital letters. My books were inside, my clothes. I had packed the teddy bear that I have kept safe ever since I was very little. We have not seen any of the bags again.

People die on the transports, mostly old people or ill people. They cannot survive the terrible conditions. I don’t know what happens to them when we get to the new camps. I suppose they are buried, far away from their homes and families. The last place we were in was the worst yet. We were building new huts and the work went on from dawn till dusk, always the same, no change in what you were doing. The guards shouted and beat you if you stopped. Several people were executed in front of us. A few days ago they selected some of the prisoners to move on. I was one of them, and among the others were my mother, father, and one of my two remaining brothers. Granny and Grandpa died when the Lódz ghetto was liquidated. I last saw them in May 1939, just after Czechoslovakia had been taken. A lady in a camp told us that she had known them and been near when they died. I cried for hours, because I have seen how people are killed in an Aktion. It is terrible, they are hunted out like animals and shot on the spot.

We’re all getting desperate. Nobody knows if we are going to a better place or a worse place. Nobody knows if we are to live or if we are to die. It is beginning to feel like God has finally left us, along with the rest of the world. We don’t know who is winning the war but every soul amongst us hopes that the Reich is falling. Nobody has said anything; nobody dares.

The people near the window say we are arriving at another camp. The railway runs through a gateway. Searchlights are swinging round and round, reaching in through the slats and making all of us blink. Wire fences, crowned with barbs, are surrounding the perimeter. The gateway is flanked by a long building on either side. Now they are seeing people, SS guards with guns and dogs. I feel the train slowing ...

It’s cold here. The snow is falling, soft white flakes that never seem to end. Several vast chimneys which reach up to the clouds are belching black smoke into the air. When we had been herded off the wagons, we were sorted into two lines. It was done by a bending of the finger from one of the SS officers - right, left, right, left. My mother and I were sent to the left, my father and my brother to the right. In my queue are all the children, the old, the sick, and the pregnant women. Our line is moving now, towards a bunker near the chimneys. They look like the crematoria chimneys that I have seen near hospitals in some towns. In the other line, my father is crying. I do not know why. I don’t want to leave him. His face is heartbroken, and he looked away when he caught my eye. My self-assured father, always so calm and so cool, crying. I don’t want to leave him. Oh, my daddy!

I’m colder now than I was before. They have stripped us of our clothes, our hair, our dignity. The young SS guards are standing looking at us. They are jeering. We are moving again, all in a clump. Even now, modesty and warmth are still important - maybe more important than in the life before the war. There is a room in front of us. ‘Baths and Disinfectant’ the sign on the door says. We go in, and it’s pitch dark. My eyes are adjusting to the light, and I can see rows of shower nozzles. The door is shut. The room is silent apart from some people praying. And it’s black, black, black ...

I can see down on the camp. It’s huge, enormous. Another train is coming to a halt. I know that most of its passengers will come to the same fate that I did. I want to tell them to resist, stand up for themselves, and not go like lambs to their deaths. And maybe some will - but there’s nothing I can do. In the eyes of the Nazis my people are untermenschen, sub-human, and should be eliminated. I know now why my father was crying. In the space of five minutes he lost his daughter and his wife. He knew our fate, and I feel he should know that I may be better off than he. For I was spared the horror of working slowly to death - although I too was part of the terror of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was just another person to enter, and never return to the outside world.

© Joanne Harris 2002