Prisoner B-3087

My father reached up to hold my mother’s hand. “We must not lose faith, Moshe.”

“See how easy it is to keep your faith when the Nazis take it away along with everything else,” Moshe told him.

My father smiled. “Let them take everything. They cannot take who we are.”

“Yanek speaks with the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah,” he said softly, then quoted, “‘Come, my people…and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.’” He cleared his throat and looked around. “Mina and I are staying too.”

One by one, the others agreed, until even Uncle Moshe sat down and was quiet.

“Yanek, we haven’t much time,” he whispered. “Listen closely. Here at Plaszów, you must do nothing to stand out. From now on, you have no name, no personality, no family, no friends. Do you understand? Nothing to identify you, nothing to care about. Not if you want to survive. You must be anonymous to these monsters. Give your name to no one. Keep it secret, in here,” Uncle Moshe said, tapping his heart with his fist.

But no matter how he was standing, you always knew a Muselmann from his eyes. There wasn’t anything left there. Muselmanners had given up, and there was no life in their expression, no spark of a soul. They were zombies, worked and starved into a living death by our captors. If the man below me wasn’t dead when they came for us tomorrow, the morning roll call would kill him.

We were going to survive, the two of us. We were going to survive—the last two men in the Gruener family written on the pages of the world.

Now there was only me. Yanek. I was fourteen years old, and I was alone in the world again. This time for good.

I don’t know why I showed them. Not when you survived by looking out for yourself and only yourself. Maybe it was because I’d wanted someone to help me when I had needed it. Maybe it was just that I would be lonely in there all day. But maybe it was that I just couldn’t keep the secret from someone else who could use help too. I’d done that with the black-market food Moshe had bought for us, and I’d felt guilty.

There was no rhyme or reason to whether we lived or died. One day it might be the man next to you at roll call who is torn apart by dogs. The next day it might be you who is shot through the head. You could play the game perfectly and still lose, so why bother playing at all?

“We are alive,” I told him. “We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.”

I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.

“Where are you from?” Fred asked me while we worked.

I hesitated, remembering Uncle Moshe’s warnings. But Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.

I remembered the food on the table in my old apartment in Podgórze, and all my family sitting around me. Mother and Father. Uncle Moshe and Aunt Gizela, and little cousin Zytka. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela. […]

I thought too of my friend Fred, and the boy who had been hanged for trying to escape, and the man who had fought back, and all the other people I had watched die. They filled my table and the tables all around me, taking the places of all the real people in the room.