Chelsea's Awakening

A present-day teenage girl who thinks she has it rough awakens near a stack of corpses in a cattle car headed to history's most heinous terminus.

The settings and scenes portrayed in the central portion of this story

are based on the testimonies of a fortunate few who lived to describe them.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not purely coincidental.

 

Chelsea Chisolm bristled when her high school world history teacher assigned a PowerPoint presentation on the Holocaust. I’ve heard enough about that already and my own life sucks, she muttered to herself. I’d like to do a PowerPoint on my crummy average day. Let’s see now, how would it go?

Chelsea put pen to paper and scribbled down the following list.

My Daily Grind (Not a Coffee)

1)      Get up early and hit the head before Mom and Chastity hog it

2)      Sit through one boring class after another (I don’t even like art anymore)

3)      Wait for Chastity after school and walk the brat home

4)      Clean the dump up when I get there

5)      Help Mom make dinner even though I’m happy with frozen or not hungry at all

6)      Do homework up the gazoo from teachers who think their subjects make the world spin

7)      Talk with Dad when he calls even though I’m pissed off at him

8)      Watch maybe an hour of TV if I’m lucky or talk on the phone a little

9)      Stumble into dark room I have to share with bratty sister so I don’t wake her up and drop dead into bed

Chelsea pished. What a rotten life ... and that’s not the half of it. I don’t have all the necessary things my girlfriends have. Do I have a smartphone like them? Ha. An iMac like they do? Yeah, right. The hip threads they have? Pssh. A nice home like theirs that I’m not embarrassed to invite them over to? Not anymore. Thanks Mom and Dad for splitting up. Because of you two I had to move from our decent “rented” home to a grungy apartment. I’d rather die than ask any of my friends over to that rathole. A peeved Chelsea shook her head. Yep, there’s no doubt about it. My life is the pits and I don’t have the bare necessities you need to get by in the world. Geez, all we have is a lousy landline ... and I only have five or six pathetic dresses to my name.

The next week as yet another classmate presented a PowerPoint on the Holocaust, Chelsea did what she pretty much had done since her world history teacher, Ms. Bridges, began a unit on the subject. She zoned out. She caught the gist of it that first day: how the Nazi regime persecuted and eventually murdered the bulk of European Jewry during World War II in an unfathomable genocide calculated to rid the world once and for all of the Jews they reviled as subhuman parasites and held responsible for its many ills. But after that she mostly spaced as Ms. Bridges spoke about how Hitler’s sick anti-Semitism led to laws barring Jews from hospitals, schools, buses, parks, restaurants, movie theaters and swimming pools; how they were then forced from their jobs, businesses and homes; how after they lost everything they were confined to ghastly ghettos; and finally how they were transported in cattle cars to extermination camps, where six million of their brethren were gassed on the spot, or spared only to die from exhaustion, starvation, torture, disease, exposure and outright execution in a diabolical scheme the Nazis termed the Final Solution. The bits and pieces she did pick up made her feel bad for the Jews, but for her what good did it do now to dwell on their unhappy fate. It was ancient history and there were far more interesting things going on in the world of today--like on that TV reality show she never missed in which unmarried teen moms had to raise their kids all by themselves and go to school at the same time. More importantly, Chelsea felt, she had her own problems to deal with in the here and now. I can’t worry about worry about people who are long dead and gone. Sorrrry.

Finally, save one student, everyone had presented a slide show on some aspect of the Shoah, the Nazi death cabal’s extermination of a staggering two out of every three of Europe’s then nine million Jews. “Okay, everyone’s good except for Chelsea,” Ms. Bridges said upon checking her class roster. “You’re up, kiddo.”

“I didn’t do it,” Chelsea grumbled.

“Any good reason why not? You’ve had ten days now.”

Chelsea shrugged and Ms. Bridges uttered the four words every student dreads: “See me after school.”

Chelsea dutifully reported after the last bell. “Please, take a seat,” Ms. Bridges said, her piercing blue eyes meeting Chelsea’s satiny green ones. Chelsea glanced away and sat down at the side of the teacher’s desk, where she fidgeted in what she considered to be the pathetic long brown granny dress and lame button-down yellow sweater with a stitched-on hood that her mother had picked up at a clearance sale. Although slender and pretty, she looked like a wallflower at a Sadie Hawkins dance.

“So, why didn’t you do your PowerPoint?” Ms. Bridges asked.

“I just didn’t,” Chelsea replied with another shrug.

“That’s it? ‘I just didn’t?’ You’re such a good student, Chelsea. It’s not like you to blow off an assignment, especially one as important as this one. Is something wrong?”

Feeling slightly remiss, Chelsea turned her eyes to her lap, where she absentmindedly twisted a tress of her glossy long dark hair between her thumb and first two fingers. It was what she always did when she was nervous.

“Well?” Ms. Bridges asked when Chelsea didn’t respond.

“No, everything’s peachy keen,” Chelsea said flatly.

“Then why didn’t you do the assignment?” Ms. Bridges pressed. Chelsea sensed the teacher’s laser-like blue eyes boring in on her and twisted her hair more vigorously.

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t feeling it, I guess,” Chelsea said shrugging once more.

Ms. Bridges’s face knotted. “I’m not following,” she said shaking her head.

Chelsea was feeling testy and snapped. “I have troubles of my own, alright?” she blurted looking up, her green eyes seeing red. Chelsea fumed. “I mean, I know the Jews’ lives was no bed of roses,” she said, “but mine sucks too.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Care to talk about it?”

“What good would it do,” Chelsea muttered. “All the talking in the world isn’t gonna change the fact that my life sucks.”

“How so?”

“How so? How so? I’ll tell you how so! My parents split up so we all had to move out of our home and I ended up in a measly apartment. It doesn’t even have a washer and dryer, and now my mom drags me to a lousy laundromat every Saturday to do the laundry. Can you imagine? I’m doing laundry while all my friends are hanging out at the mall buying nice clothes. Meanwhile, I’ve been wearing the same old stuff forever--and that’s not to mention the fact that I don’t have a smartphone and iMac like they all do. No, I’m stuck with a rinky-dink landline and a computer from the Stone Age.”

“Oh, I see. Sounds like you really have it rough, Chelsea,” Ms. Bridges said tongue in cheek.

Chelsea took her at her word and lowered her head in self-pity. “And then some,” she bemoaned. “I didn’t even mention that my dad had to sell his car and we have to bus it when we stay with him. You should ride in a city bus sometime--people are packed in like sardines and they smell like them too.”

“Hmm … I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to tell you that you have it so much better than so many others have had.”

Chelsea looked up. “Like the Jews, you mean? That all happened eons before I came along. It’s ancient history. All that matters is the present, and in the here and now I’m getting the royal shaft.”

Ms. Bridges looked into Chelsea’s petulant green eyes. “Even by your own standard, I rather doubt you’re that deprived. Right now there are hundreds of millions of young people around the world who would beg to differ. Kids who don’t have enough to eat or have to sleep on the street. They’re the ones who’ve been handed a bad break, don’t you think?”

“Not much worse than mine,” Chelsea said. “We can’t afford to go out to eat and you should see our place--it’s ghetto. I don’t even have my own bathroom anymore. I have to share one with my mom and little sister.”

Ms. Bridges looked skeptical. “Does the roof leak?”

“No.”

“Do you have a bed to sleep in?”

“Of course.”

“Is there enough food on the table?”

“Yeah, but it’s garbage--nowhere near as good as what’s at Whole Foods. All in all, my life stinks.”

Ms. Bridges pursed her lips before she responded. “It doesn’t sound so awful; in fact, it doesn’t sound awful at all. I hope you never have to experience real suffering, Chelsea. Then you’d see how good you really have it.”

“I doubt it,” Chelsea said dismissively.

“Well, I see we’re getting nowhere,” Ms. Bridges said ending the discussion. “Have a nice weekend, Chelsea.”

“Yeah, right. I’ll make sure to whoop it up at the laundromat,” Chelsea sassed. She bolted from her seat and stomped defiantly to the door. She was mad that Ms. Bridges dared dispute how miserable her life was as she left the classroom, and knowing that she had to go get her six-year-old sister Chastity and walk her home from school didn’t improve her mood. So wrapped up in her huff was Chelsea that she didn’t pay attention as she approached the abandoned railroad track along the shortcut she always took to her sister’s school, and tripped over the near railing. She fell forward as the sky thundered and her head slammed into the opposite rail with a clunk.

Chelsea was dead to the world.

***

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack ... the resounding clatter pierced the oblivion that enshrouded Chelsea and roused her from the void. She was lying face down when she regained consciousness and was instantly seized by a sharp throbbing pain smack-dab in the middle of her forehead. She brought her hand to the hammering spot and winced as she touched a scraped lump the size of a big marble.

Chelsea rubbed the welt and then turned her head to her left. What she saw made her gasp: Mere inches away was the stubbled face of a soundly slumbering man. The sight of a strange man so close made Chelsea shriek and scramble to her feet. Her heart raced as she proceeded to look down at the unstirred stranger, whereupon out of the corner of a spooked eye she noticed a blurry shape on his other side. She squinted at the dim blur and made out a startled little boy cowering against the breast of a sitting woman, and realized that she scared the poor thing when she screeched and bolted up like a jack-in-the-box. She leaned over and started to apologize, but as she stooped she heard a cackle behind her and spun toward the hair-raising sound in a startle. What Chelsea saw took her breath away every bit as much as the strange man had.

Only the spectral flicker of a kerosene lamp swaying overhead lit the scene, but it was enough for Chelsea to make out several scores of nebulous people sprawled against one another. The huddled mass extended out before her, stuffed into the narrow confines of the kind of freight-train boxcar used to transport livestock. What are all these people doing in a cattle car? she thought, looking like she did when a geometry proof threw her for a loop. This is no dream so I must be hallucinating.

Chelsea shut her eyes and rubbed them, hoping that when she looked again she would find that she was just seeing things. But when she lifted her lids the throng was still there as real as could be, a forlorn assembly of children who looked like their dog had just died, teenagers who looked like their first love had just broken up with them, young adults who looked like old souls, middle-age men and women who looked like their doctor just told them they had only six months to live, and seniors who looked like they were ready to call it quits right then and there. Chelsea’s heart sank as her eyes now swept across the crush of sad people, but what really did her in was not their faces but their bodies. They were emaciated, skin and bones, and the tattered, torn and threadbare clothing that clad them looked sizes too big. Only cinched belts on trousers and clothespins attached to skirts kept those garments from falling, and the children were back in clothes they had outgrown years before. One gaunt little girl especially tugged at Chelsea’s heart, reminding her of the malnourished children she saw on TV in humane-group appeals for donations to feed the hungry. She held back a sob when she saw her.

One other sight shook Chelsea to the core. At first she thought she was looking at a stack of logs across the dimly lit car. But as she squinted she saw that it was not a pile of wood that she was looking upon but in fact a mound of corpses--six scantily clad bodies propped one atop another to save space. Chelsea had never seen a corpse, except for pretend in a movie or TV show, and she shuddered at the jarring sight of so many for real. She suddenly felt faint and sat down, her heart thundering. “Take deep breaths and calm down,” she whispered to herself. Gradually the beating of her heart returned to normal and she took stock of her situation.

Okay, so I’m in a cattle car with a ton of people who look half dead and some who are dead period. But how did I get here?

Chelsea rubbed the throbbing knob on her forehead. And how did I get this humdinger? Did I get bonked by a ball or something or did I fall and bang my head good? Whatever it was it knocked me for a loop and gave me a splitting headache. Ow.

Chelsea dug hard to remember what happened, but a retrograde amnesia prevented her from retrieving recent events. Frustrated, she gave up and her mind turned to a foul stench that had been grossing her out ever since she emerged from her blackness.

Ugh, it smells like a backed-up toilet in here, Chelsea thought raising the collar of her dress over her nose. But that meager measure did little to lessen the stink, which especially reeked immediately to her right. Although she didn’t want to look she did anyway, and gagged when she saw a puddle of urine mixed with diarrhea. She traced the course of the sickening mixture and found that it had seeped from a stained and smudged white terry-cloth bathrobe; following the robe upward she saw that it was worn by a woman staring into space. The seepage had come to a wobbly standstill within a few inches of Chelsea’s dress, and not wishing to take any chances she promptly scooted as far away as she could. Thisclose to vomiting, her brow furrowed as she pondered this latest wrinkle in her already inexplicable circumstances.

I wonder why she went in her robe. There has to be some kind of toilet in here ... doesn’t there?

Chelsea stood up and scanned the car. There was scarcely enough room for all the people crammed into it, much less a toilet. But in a corner beyond the corpses she espied a man standing with his backside bare to all, and heard the sound of urine striking a tin surface.

So there is a toilet in here … or should I say a pail or something. So why didn’t she use it?

Chelsea looked at the woman again and pondered. Maybe she’s sick and weak ... or maybe she just doesn’t care anymore. Whatever the reason, she felt sorry for the woman. She looked around and saw puddles next to others, and hoped she didn’t become so sick and weak or apathetic that she couldn’t make it to whatever waste receptacle was back there. The thought of being unable to get to it and having to go in her dress and then sit in it made her cringe. Not nearly as cringeworthy, but bad enough, was the thought of going into a filthy pail used by dozens of people--and with maybe a few dozen onlookers looking on. God, I hope I don’t have to go before this train gets to wherever its going, she thought. And God up in heaven, I promise I’ll never complain again about having to share a bathroom with Mom and Chastity if I ever get back home. You have my word!

After Chelsea made her solemn vow, her eyes latched onto a small vent above the space carved out for a “bathroom.” Looking around she observed that it and three similar vents in the other corners provided the only ventilation in the car, sealed as tight as a drum by caulked wooden planks. The slight ducts were no match for a fog of fetid fumes in what was in effect a big rolling casket, and Chelsea wished she were on the city bus where she could open a window if someone stinky sat nearby. The smell of sardines she said the buses’ passengers cast off she now considered practically a breath of fresh air.

The inadequate vents left the car not only smelly but stuffy. Brutally stuffy. It’s definitely more than a hundred degrees in here, Chelsea thought in the stifling heat. She wiggled out of her sweater and wished she had something to drink. But I didn’t see any water pails when I looked around so that’s not going to happen ... unless someone has a water bottle or something and is willing to give me a sip. Chelsea looked around again but her hope was dashed when she didn’t see anyone holding a bottle or canteen. She wondered if anyone had had anything to drink for a while, and looked around to see if people were licking their parched lips like she was. When she saw that they were or that their lips were crusty and cracked she had her answer. Not only were people going where they sat, but they hadn’t a drop to drink in god knew how long. And maybe a bite to eat, for that matter.

Starving people in a cattle car wearing clothes that look like they scavenged them out of a garbage dump, Chelsea thought. It’s like I’m in some poor faraway land and not the United States. But that’s impossible: I’ve never been out of the country.

And yet, Chelsea couldn’t say for sure that she hadn’t been. She wracked her brain again as she sat down but the most recent memory she dredged up was of being at the zoo with her dad and Chastity. But that was last winter and it’s definitely summer now. Who’s to say what happened in all that time? Maybe I am in some poor faraway land. It sure seems like it. I can’t imagine there’d be anything like this in the United States.

The train rolled on and her head pounded with every clickety-clack. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. But the rubbing just made her headache worse, and she lowered her hands to her lap. Just then the strange man beside her yawned and stretched an arm into her chest. “Hey!” Chelsea snapped as the man blearily opened his eyes. He seemed surprised to see her sitting next to him, and uttered what seemed to be a question and comment in a foreign language. Chelsea got the heebie-jeebies as he spoke, for he had an accent that reminded her of a Dracula she had seen in an old black-and-white horror movie.

“I don’t understand,” Chelsea said as the man awaited an answer. He didn’t understand in return and scratching his head he turned to the woman sitting next to the little boy she had scared. The man and woman began conversing softly in words Chelsea didn’t understand, and the thought that she was in a faraway land grew. But if I am, how on earth did I get to it? she wondered.

A demanding growl in Chelsea’s stomach drew her attention now and she wished she had something--anything--to eat. I’d go bonkers for even one of those little packs of crackers you get in a restaurant right now, she thought, licking her chapped lips. Chelsea ran a hand along the outside of one of her sweater pockets to see if she might have stuck a snack in it and felt a small, hard, log-shaped object that she instantly knew. It was a Jolly Rancher!

Chelsea beamed as she plucked the dandy candy from her pocket and stared at it like it was the Hope Diamond. She didn’t remember putting the blue-raspberry sweet there but who cared? All that mattered was that it would take away some of her hunger and taste great! Eagerly, she untwisted the candy’s cellophane wrapping and was just about to pop the delectable morsel into her mouth when she heard the little boy whimper like a drooling dog. She looked at him, saw him looking at her with sad hungry eyes, and could do only one thing.

“Here you go,” Chelsea murmured reaching over the strange man and handing the boy the Jolly Rancher. The boy thrust it in his mouth and was so famished he didn’t bother to suck on the hard candy, but instead wolfishly chomped into it and practically swallowed it whole. He smiled and whispered a word in the strange tongue of the strange man and woman afterward, which Chelsea figured was his word for thanks. She nodded with a faint smile and leaned back, happy to have done a good deed but with a still-growling stomach. Maybe if I go to sleep I won’t feel hungry, she thought. She closed her eyes. Several feet in front of her Chelsea heard a woman singing a lullaby. The woman had the same exotic accent as the man, which made her think she somehow really had been spirited to a foreign land.

As the train chugged along, Chelsea picked up the rhythmic sound of the wheels rolling along, and built upon it to compose a lullaby of her own that she thought would help her sleep, like counting sheep. “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, I hear a train on the railroad track,” she recited over and over, drifting more into sleep each time she did. Finally, she was about to nod off when a piece of her recent past came back and jolted her wide awake.

“Clickety ... clack ... clickety ... clack ... I ... hear ... a ... train ... on ... the ... railroad ...

“TRACK!” Chelsea blurted opening her eyes wide. That’s how I got the lump! I tripped at the railroad track and I must’ve hit my head and knocked myself out. That’s gotta be it!

Chelsea’s memory now came rushing back; she remembered that she’d been in a huff after talking with Ms. Bridges and on her way to get Chastity when she tripped. Hitting my head must’ve been what caused me to forget everything too. But knowing those things still didn’t explain how she woke up in the boxcar. She put her mind to it but the best she devised was that some creep had found her out cold on the tracks, and was now smuggling her to be a sex slave in some faraway land in a carload of apparent refugees. The very idea seemed ludicrous--someone snatched and smuggled her in a coma to Katmandu for all she knew and then plopped her in with a bunch of desperate or dead people? Right, she scoffed.

Chelsea searched for another explanation to how she came to be in the car, but the only thing that came to her was that she had somehow gone through one of those sci-fi wormholes that connected distant times and places. She didn’t dismiss the notion. Such time tunnels were within the realm of possibility, after all, according to a NOVA program she had seen in a science class. Who knows? Maybe I went through one, she thought with a shrug. I can’t think of anything else.

Baffled, Chelsea turned her attention to a man squeezing his way through a thicket of people toward the toilet in back, and noticed a crocheted blue-and-white yarmulke perched on the crown of his matted flaming-red hair. She recognized the small round skullcap because she had attended the bar mitzvah, a ceremony that marks the ascent of a boy to manhood, of one of her eighth-grade friends a few years earlier. She had learned then that Jewish men and boys (and increasingly women!) wore the cap while in synagogue as a sign of reverence for God. She further learned that more devout Jewish males wore a yarmulke as they went about their daily lives as well.

So Chelsea knew the man was Jewish, and under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But now that her recent memory was fully restored, the sight of the Jewish man triggered a sudden surge of terror to her heart. "Oh no, I might be in the Holocaust!” she gasped. “What if I really have gone into the past and I’m in it? Then I’m doomed!” Chelsea felt faint but there was still one other possibility to consider and she jumped on it.

“But maybe I haven’t gone back in time,” she sniffled. “Maybe I’m in the present and he and everyone else here is just a refugee. And if no one else here is wearing a yarmulke that could be it.” Chelsea looked around to see if anyone else was wearing a yarmulke and her heart spiked again. For not only did she notice a few other men wearing one, but a smattering of people with yellow Stars of David sewn onto their tattered apparel. That clinched it for Chelsea--her doom was as sealed as the boxcar she was in; she was condemned. “I’m on my way to one of those extermination camps and I’m gonna die,” she sobbed. She turned her wet eyes upward. Please God, I’m only fifteen--I don’t want to die! Take me back and I’ll do whatever you want me to for as long as I live.

But no celestial poof whisked Chelsea away and she looked out at the muddle of despairing people in front of her in her own despair. Everything fell into place for her now, by way of the bits and pieces she had picked up while Ms. Bridges and her classmates spoke about the Holocaust. The reason everyone was skin and bones was that the Nazis had been starving them to death in ghettos for months. The reason they were all stuffed in a cattle car was that was how the Nazis transported the Jews to the death camps ... or at least those who didn’t die along the way. And finally, the reason so many looked so sad was that they knew that the Nazis haters wanted to kill every last Jew on earth and that they were dead ducks. And so am I! Chelsea thought distraughtly.

On the verge of heatstroke, sickened by the stench, her stomach growling like a bear and scared witless, Chelsea wished she would fall back into a coma to escape her waking nightmare. She considered banging her head against the plank wall behind her to knock herself out, but thought she would just end up making her massive throbbing headache worse. If I could fall asleep that would be just as good, Chelsea thought rubbing her lump. She closed her eyes and this time nodded off.

Soon Chelsea was dreaming of her mother lighting a cinnamon-scented candle she always kept on the dining table. She saw herself sitting down on the cushioned chair she had always found so uncomfortable but felt absolutely plush now, and scooping up a big helping of macaroni and cheese she had always spurned as boring and gorging on it. Stuffed, she retreated to her plain single bed after dinner and got between its cool, crisp sheets. Chelsea smiled in her sleep. Oh, how wonderful it all was!

Her slumber had been so golden that Chelsea chafed when the screech of the train braking to a jarring halt crudely awoke her. Brief seconds later she heard the boxcar’s door slide open, and she sat up as a German officer climbed into the car. He looked frightening but elegant in a peaked hat emblazoned with a macabre death skull and a smart grey-green uniform bearing a silver swastika on the lapel, and the words he now spoke were as polished as the black jackboots he had on.

“Welcome to our work camp, ladies and gentlemen,” the officer projected in the strange tongue that Chelsea had heard whispered and muttered about. “I know your journey has been a difficult one, but all will be made better now as a cleansing shower and hot meal await you. Yes, they are in store for you, but to maintain civilities I ask that you join the proper line when you disembark. Men will join a line forming outside specifically for you, and you women will take your children and do the same. Your kind cooperation is appreciated, and once again I welcome you.”

The officer tipped his cap and left the car, and a bedraggled man wearing grimy black-and-white striped pajamas replaced him. He too made an announcement in the alien language, and Chelsea watched as the befuddled and stiff-limbed people of the car slowly started to rise. She got up too and was frantic as a stream of wobbly-legged men, women and children disembarked.

I’m dead if I go out there, she thought, twisting her hair. I have to hide and try to get away when the coast is clear! She looked around and realized there was only one place where she had any chance of concealing herself--behind the stack of corpses. So she stole her way to the macabre mound, only to discover that the bodies that formed it had been piled flush to the wall and there was no room for her to hide. Chelsea found herself at a literal dead end and morosely turned to follow the others. But just then a last-ditch idea seized her. Wait, I could pretend I’m dead. She lay down to one side of the bodies and played dead.

A few minutes later the car was empty of everyone but Chelsea. She lay still as a mouse but the man in the striped pajamas was on to her ruse and kicked her side. She cried out and the man yanked her up by the arm, then pulled her by it to the line of women and children where he deposited her with a shove.

Chelsea found herself toward the end of the long line, and on a long wooden platform between the train and a depot. A signboard hung from the awning of the station, and her blood turned as cold as the icy air that braced her as she looked at it. For although there was but a single word painted on the wooden shingle, it was one that spoke unspeakable volumes.

Auschwitz.

Chelsea shuddered. It was night as she stood alongside an elderly woman from her car, but blinding giant floodlights lit the platform as brightly as a sunny day would. Her eyes hurt from the onslaught of glaring light, and she wished she had the cheap sunglasses she had thrown into the garbage when her mother brought them home from a dollar discount store. She also wished she had a mask to block out a thick sickening stench that reminded her of the time she had been playing with matches and set her hair on fire. What could be making that awful smell? she wondered as her nostrils started to sting.

Chelsea raised the collar of her granny dress over her nose as teams of skeletal men also clad in striped pajamas now began to trot onto the platform. Each team hauled a rickety baggage cart, which the men rolled to the door openings of each of the 50 cattle cars in Chelsea’s transport. She watched the team at her car disappear into its bowels, then two of their number return to the door carrying one of the corpses from the stack by the arms and legs. She cringed as they proceeded to swing the limp body into the cart, where it landed helter-skelter with a sickening thud. She had seen enough and turned away as another pair appeared toting a second corpse. She plugged her ears as she turned to drown out the thud of another body landing akimbo.

The teams completed their grisly work in minutes, and then hauled their carts along the side of the train toward the front of the lines. The train began to chug away when the last cart passed it, and the body collectors who had loaded some 20 bodies on it trotted forward behind a caravan of 49 other similarly laden carts.

As the cart rolled off into the distance, the line of men and that of women and children began to move forward at a snail’s pace, and an hour later the elderly and weak in both lines began to drop in droves. A few yards ahead and to her side in the men’s line, Chelsea saw a man with a long white beard fall to the ground, which prompted the elderly woman beside her to break ranks and rush over and kneel beside him. A German guard armed with a billy club then descended upon the woman, and the next thing a gasping Chelsea knew he clubbed her on the head. The woman crumpled next to the man, and as the line behind them stalled and they didn’t get up the furious guard barked at them. The two still didn’t get up and Chelsea averted her eyes and covered her ears as the now livid guard began to bring down his club again. She didn’t look on again, but as if on cue she watched as four men in striped pajamas hauling yet another cart cut through the line in front of her. They swerved toward the couple as the guard strutted away, and Chelsea kept her ears covered as they swung the elderly couple into a tangle of corpses they had amassed in their cart.

When the women and children’s line had shuffled forward the length of a few city blocks, Chelsea cast her eyes upward as she began to mouth a prayer. She noticed a glow in the sky to her right as she looked up, and turning her eyes that way she saw two columns of orange flames belching high into the night. What could be burning? she wondered, and then it hit her. Oh no--it’s people! The Nazis burned people in ovens after they gassed them. Burning people are making the flames and I’m gonna be one of them!

Chelsea’s heart thumped like a kettle drum as she realized what would soon become of her, and she began to twist strands of her tangled hair. Just then one of the men in striped pajamas slipped to her side and whispered words in the strange tongue into her ear.

Chelsea turned to him. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” she said shaking her head. “Do you speak English by any chance?”

The man’s brow furrowed. “Yes, I speak little English but you no speak Hungarian? You no Hungarian?”

“No, I’m an American.”

 The man shook his head in bewilderment. “I no understand how you get here but no time to learn. Guard see me talking to you I get shot. You too if you tell Herr Doktor you American. He shake his head and have guard shoot you.”

The man looked around and then back at Chelsea. “I cut to chase: You too much thin for hard labor,” he said furtively. “I tell you what to tell Herr Doktor translator if Herr Doktor point right.”

Chelsea scrunched her face. She had mistaken Herr for another word that sounded exactly alike, the only meaning she knew of the homonym.

“Hair doctor? I don’t get it,” she murmured.

“No hair like this,” the man huffed tugging a wisp of hair on his balding head. “Herr! Is German word for mister.”

“Oh, I see. But what could I possibly say?”

“No ask questions, just do,” the exasperated man grumbled. “If Herr Doktor point right, you say Varrónay vagyok. It mean I seamstress.”

“But I’m not a ...”

“Quiet! Just do if you want to live!”

Chelsea nodded.

“Now say like I say. Var-ah-no vie-oak.”

Chelsea repeated the strange words as the man pronounced them and he nodded. He then bustled away with the other cart men to retrieve an old woman who had fainted behind her.

After nearly seven hours of standing, her stomach churning as billy clubs cracked the bones of the fallen and the hideous orange flames loomed ahead, Chelsea at last neared the front of her line. For the first time she saw a handsome, dark-haired man, dressed in a spotless white physician’s smock and wearing immaculate white gloves. He also had on polished black jackboots that Chelsea found strange for a doctor to be wearing. The slightly built man looked both kind and sinister and was, no doubt, the Herr Doctor the mysterious man in striped pajamas had mentioned.

Chelsea now watched intently as the doctor inspected and, by way of an interpreter, alternated interviewing every man and woman ahead of her, flicking a black riding crop he imperiously held to the right or to the left when he was done with each. She noticed the efficient doctor directed the vast majority of the 30 or so people who proceeded her to a moving line behind him and to his right, and only six to a stationary line that had formed behind him to his left. There was one other grouping, Chelsea observed, consisting of four sets of identical twins huddled near the doctor. The sight of them tickled something about them in the back of her mind but didn’t come to fore. What is it? she thought, searching her memory. But the tickle remained elusive, and she wondered why the twins didn’t continue on with their mothers after appearing before the doctor. All she knew was that a ton of people were gassed immediately upon their arrival at Auschwitz, and that these lucky children were spared for the moment.

Chelsea took the cart man at his word that telling the Herr Doctor she was a seamstress was essential to her survival, and chanted “Var-ah-no vie-oak” like a magic mantra to herself again and again as she moved forward in the line. Now, as she recited the mantra yet again, Chelsea suddenly remembered who Herr Doctor was. A picture of him on a slide Ms. Bridges had shown came back to her, and she recalled that she had said that he was known as the “Angel of Death.” The grim epithet had snared her imagination and was one of the few times she had tuned in, all ears as Ms. Bridges described the handsome “angel” as the most notorious of the officers in charge of deciding who would live and who would die among the Jews and others when they arrived at Auschwitz. Only the strongest and those with desired skills were selected to live, she had gone on, but only as slave laborers or skilled workers who died pretty soon anyway. But at least they got to live for a while, which was better than being killed right away like the vast majority of those who arrived with them, Ms. Bridges noted. For them it was a straight slog to a bunker where they thought they were going to take a shower, but were instead gassed to death with a lethal insecticide and then flung into a brick oven and cremated.

As Chelsea’s awaited her turn before the Angel of Death, she suddenly remembered the something about the identical twins that had eluded her. That doctor used them as guinea pigs in monstrous experiments he performed! What a heartless b*****d!

Finally it was Chelsea’s turn to face the angel and she stepped forward. But when she opened her mouth to say the magic words that she hoped would save her life, the ones she had been saying over and over for hours, she could not remember them for the life of her! Her heart pounded wildly against her chest and she felt sure all was lost as the doctor’s black eyes appraised her. She was young and healthy, yes, but she looked dainty. Oh god, there’s no way I look strong enough to do hard work, Chelsea despaired. I wish I had pigged out more instead of always wanting to look like a fashion model. Now I’m gonna pay for it with my life.

Herr Doktor now revealed his decision with a casual flick of his riding crop to the right.

“No!” Chelsea cried out as a guard shoved her toward the line of the damned. Just then the words she had groped for came to her. “Var-ah-no vie-oak!” she blurted out.

Herr Doktor blinked and ordered the guard to stop. His black eyes probed Chelsea’s frenzied green ones. “Varróno?” he asked with an arched eyebrow. Chelsea nodded. For a brief second that felt like an eternity to her the doctor weighed this revelation, and then regally flicked his riding crop to his left. Her face drenched with cold sweat, Chelsea heaved a heavy sigh of relief and scurried over to join the line of the saved before he changed his mind.

Thank God the man in PJs told me what to say or I would’ve been sent to the gas chambers. I’ll probably end up there anyway but at least I have hope!

Chelsea wiped beaded sweat from her brow and then turned to her left. There she saw the tail end of the line of those Herr Doktor flicked to the right, condemned children, women and men plodding unawares toward the orange flames. Her eyes singled out the little boy she had given the Jolly Rancher to as she looked, and her heart sank as he smiled and waved to her. “He’s just a little boy,” she whimpered ... “and all those poor people. What a cretin I was to write them off as ancient history.”

Minutes later the false angel’s selection was done. Of the 5,000 men, women and children who had set out on the appalling train journey, he had selected only some one-tenth of their number to survive. The remainder, not counting those who had died en route, now had already been gassed, were at that moment being gassed, or were on their way to be gassed in the extermination section of Auschwitz called Birkenau, within whose electrified barbwire fencing four gas chambers functioned as the final stops for as many as 24,000 innocent victims every day.

For those selected a different horrid fate awaited, most sinister the branding of the flesh on the left arm with a prisoner number that informed them that they were no better than cattle in the eyes of their Nazi taskmasters. But it was past midnight and a “charitable” Angel of Death announced to weary guards that they could oversee the processing and tattooing of the new prisoners another day, and that they were free to take the lot to their barracks immediately and then turn in for the night.

An attractive young female guard with shoulder-length blond hair, a smooth high forehead and rosy cheeks now strutted up to the line of the saved. She was cutely dressed in a sleeveless crewneck sweater and a pleated, short, checkered skirt, and with a megaphone she held she might have passed for a college cheerleader about to launch into a cheer if it weren’t for the storm-trooper jackboots she had on and Simon Legree bullwhip she bore. Indeed, the boots and whip marked the guard as the polar opposite of a cheerleader, and instead of kicking up her heels in a cheer she now bashed the heel of a jackboot into the foot of a woman who stood slightly astride the spared women’s line. A malignant smile formed on the guard’s face as the woman cried out in pain.

“Step out of line again, you filthy swine, and I’ll give you a taste of my whip,” the guard snapped at the woman in a halting Hungarian. The woman limped back to the line, and with her went everyone else who had strayed a foot or two away from it.

The guard waited until the line was straight as an arrow and then shouted “Attention, female pigs” into her megaphone. “You will move ten paces to the right and form a straight line!” Chelsea followed the lead of others among the roughly 150 women in her selection as they quickly sidled toward the guard, who stood amid a handful of other fearsome female guards at one side and a pack of barking German shepherds at the other. When the women stood aligned in their new position the guard with a bullwhip shouted another command, and the women did an about-face and ran back along the platform with the dogs nipping at their heels and the other guards striking stragglers who didn’t run fast enough. Like the male guards these female guards also used billy clubs to deliver their blows, which they rained down upon their helpless prey with as much zeal as their counterparts did.

An alpha shepherd led the racing women to a road that lay perpendicular to the platform. Taking her sweet time from far behind, the guard with a bullwhip blew two toots of a whistle as the alpha reached the intersection, and the well-trained dog zagged left onto the road and ran along the sides of floodlit prisoner barracks that extended a half mile on both sides. The women followed as the dog barreled toward another tooting female guard standing at the next to last barrack on the right, one of 38 allocated to more than 30,000 Hungarian Jewish females hardy enough to do heavy labor in factories or adept in secretarial, tailoring, musical or other skills deemed useful to the running of the camp. The second guard waited impatiently for them and steered the fastest of the women to her left as they approached, barking at the same time for them to stop and form a line at a door halfway down the barrack’s long front. Halfway back in the pack Chelsea followed those ahead into a muddy rectangular courtyard that was also floodlit, and she bent down and placed her hands on her knees as she drew up to the line. She was panting from the all-out run in the smoky air and her lungs stung with every hungry gulp of air she took.

Nipping dogs and billy clubbing guards drove the last of the women to the end of the line, and the guard with a bullwhip then strutted past everyone to the door and waved them into the barrack. “Find a bunk or else!” she screeched. A woman ahead of Chelsea stumbled on her way in, and as she regained her balance the guard lashed her on the back with her bullwhip. The woman howled and Chelsea made sure to stay steady on her feet as she crossed the door’s threshold and stepped into a narrow brick-walled entryway. By light coming through the door only she saw that the vestibule ended on a straw-strewn plank floor several feet ahead, and as she moved toward it she saw the women before her veering off to the left and right as they reached the barrack proper. She went to the right when she reached the main building, but had no idea what lay ahead for it was as dark as a movie theater when the lights go down. Chelsea hoped there might be beds as she inched forward. But from the straw and a smell of dung that hung heavy in the air, she thought it more likely that she and the others were going to be sleeping in stables with farm animals. I wouldn’t put it past those Nazi b******s, she fumed.

With others bumping into her, by slivers of light that seeped through cracks in the barrack’s plank walls, Chelsea’s eyes adjusted and she issued a small scream: From the feet of three bunk beds that jutted out from the wall on her right, 12 ghastly cadaverous faces stared emptily at her. She looked ahead and saw a line of three-tiered bunks tailing off into the dark, and turning to her left took in a dozen other zombie-like women in three bunks jutting from the wall and another long line of bunks that faded off into obscurity. Chelsea stood dazed as women from her selection jostled to squeeze into the bunks that lay farther on, and when she snapped out of it she sensed it was imperative for her to get into one too. But how? she thought with a pounding heart. I’m not strong enough to force my way into one of those bunks. Chelsea watched helplessly as the women in front of her all fought their way into a bunk, and when she turned she saw no one behind her. It is important that I find a spot, she thought in a panic.

Chelsea treaded into the far reaches of the dark, hoping to find a bunk with fewer eyes staring emptily at her. She started to cry when she saw the far wall of the barrack just ahead, but just then a kind-faced woman with sunken eyes in a lower bunk tugged at her dress with a bony arm. “Here child, come,” she wheezed in Hungarian. The woman turned to her side and opened up the slimmest of gaps.

“Thank you so much, ma’am,” Chelsea whimpered.

“Is that English I heard?” someone in the bunk above the woman called out.

“Yes,” Chelsea said looking up. “Do you speak it?”

A pair of legs in the same striped pajama bottoms the cart men wore appeared over the foot of the next bunk up, and a young woman with a graceful, alabaster face that glowed in the dark and hair chopped to a scraggly stubble leaned forward. “Yes. My family lived in England until I was eight years old, and I know it as well as I do Polish,” the woman said in an elegant voice with flawless diction. “Wait just a moment, won’t you, while I make room for you up here.”

Chelsea thanked the kind-faced woman for her kind offer, and turned her eyes upward in time to see a snoring stubbly head next to the young woman’s left leg loll sideways. The woman then leaned forward again. “Here, let me help you up,” she offered reaching down. Chelsea was taken aback by the hand the woman offered and paused before she took it. The hand was gnarled like that of an old witch, and she wondered how such a young and lovely woman could have the hand of a hag.

The woman helped Chelsea climb up as a guard sweeping a flashlight approached from behind. Chelsea twisted on the ledge when she got up and the two hunched forward at the plank-bottomed bunk’s foot, between the head of the snoring woman on one side of them and the head of another woman on the other.

“Welcome to the regal bedchamber of Magda, Basha and me, Sarah Blum,” the woman playfully introduced herself, pronouncing her last name as bloom. “And you are?”

“Chelsea Chisolm.”

“Curious.”

“What’s curious?”

“Well, you speak English and your name sounds English, but you don’t have an English accent. And even if you did, I’ve never heard of anyone coming here from England.”

“Oh.”

“So where are you from?

“The United States.”

“The United States! Goodness gracious. How on earth did you end up here in Auschwitz? Have the Nazis invaded America?”

“No, and the animals never will. We’re going to win the war.”

“I hope you’re right. But you haven’t answered my question. How on earth did you end up here?”

“You won’t believe me if I tell you,” Chelsea answered shaking her head.

“Try me.”

“Okay. But don’t think I’m a crackpot, okay?”

“Crackpot?”

“Crazy.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I somehow went through a wormhole. Do you know what that is?”

Sarah shook her head.

“It’s a time tunnel that you can go back and forth through space and time in. Astrophysicists in my time say it’s possible.”

“Oh,” Sarah said with a quizzical expression.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Well, it is rather hard to accept.”

“I know I sound totally crazy but I’m not making this up, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, there’s not much more to say. I fell and knocked myself out on a railroad track in America way in the future, and when I came to I was in a cattle car here in Poland. How else could that happen unless I went through a wormhole, right?”

Sarah kept a straight face. “Give me a minute to digest all that you’ve told me, okay?”

“Take all the time in the world. I’m not going anywhere ... unless I fall into another wormhole and get swept back home.”

Sarah pondered and at length summoned a weak smile.

“What?” Chelsea asked. “You’re looking at me like I’m a pitiful basket case.”

“Basket case?”

“Someone who’s lost her mind. Is that what you think of me?”

“Truth?”

“Truth.”

“Well, I think perhaps you suffered a terrible loss or ordeal, and came up with a different personality to escape the pain.”

“But that’s not what happened, I tell you,” Chelsea insisted. “I had to come through a wormhole. I truly am an American girl from the far-off future!”

“Okay, let’s say I believe you. Even so, you’re here now and must do all you can to survive.”

Chelsea sobbed and Sarah drew her close. “There, there,” she consoled patting Chelsea’s shoulder. Chelsea’s sob subsided and wiping away her tears she faced Sarah in the spectral light. “So, tell me about you,” Chelsea said with a last sniffle. “Were you in college? You look super smart.”

Sarah told Chelsea that she had been a freshman at a university called Jagielloński in Kraków, Poland, the same institution where her father taught psychiatry. But when the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 they shut down all the schools and colleges and her formal education came to a crashing halt. “That was bad enough but nothing compared to what happened to my father,” Sarah said and then stopped.

“What happened to him?” Chelsea prodded.

“Well, the Nazis regarded him and many other Polish intellectuals as provacatuers, and deported them all to a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen in Germany. We never heard from him again.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Chelsea said.

“Thank you. Oh, how I miss him. It’s been four long years now since he left, and my heart aches for him just as much now as it did then.” Sarah was silent.

Gosh, I’d be heartbroken too if my dad was taken away and probably dead. I hope I get to see him again. He’s always been there for me and a great dad most of the time. I guess I’ve been lucky to have him as a father.

Chelsea looked at Sarah. “What about your mother?” she asked.

“Ah, my mother. “She owned a popular bookstore in a shop around the corner from our home ... and could she play the cello: A cellist with the national philharmonic said she was good enough to play for them! Ah, my dear mother. She always wore a bright smile until my father went away, and our troubles only got worse from there.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the Nazi government ordered the Jews of Kraków to leave the city. My mother had to sell our home and possessions for peanuts, and move my sister Hester and me into a flat outside town. It wasn’t much, but it was the Ritz compared to where we lived next.

“Where was that?”

“In a cellar. In March 1941 the Nazis required all the Jews of the district to move to a ghetto; the penalty was death if you were found outside it. So there we went with barely more than the clothes on our backs. My mother had to bribe an official with her wedding ring to get the cellar; there weren’t nearly enough lodgings in the ghetto and people were living in the streets. And so we at least had a roof over our heads, but the cellar had no running water or electricity which was trying. But we made do with water from a pump like everybody else, even though we were limited to just a bucket a day. As for light, there was none after the sun went down.”

Chelsea felt like a heel as Sarah was quiet again. The three of them lived in a cellar with no water or electricity, she thought, and I’m pissed off having to live in a two-bedroom apartment where I can take long showers and watch TV all night if I want. Gosh, I had it good.

Chelsea turned her face to Sarah again. “What did you do for food?” she asked.

“That was another challenge,” Sarah answered. “We scrounged for scraps of food night and day to feed ourselves, and my mother especially lost weight; she insisted on giving most of her scraps to Hester and me. But her generosity ended one night when she slipped past the ghetto perimeter to get food on the black market. A Nazi patrol found her and shot her on the spot for the crimes of leaving the quarter and smuggling potatoes.”

Chelsea sat dumbfounded as Sarah went on to share how she managed to sustain Hester and herself for a year after their mother’s death, until March of 1943 when the Nazis herded the last Jews left in the ghetto onto a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Her mother had made her pledge a solemn promise that if anything happened to her she would always take care of Hester and not let anything bad happen to her sister. But alas, when they arrived at the selection point she was unable to honor her mother’s wish. For while the camp commandant who decided the fates of the incoming Jews that day spared her life because she was a healthy young woman, Hester had not yet reached puberty and thus wasn’t a candidate for the hard slave labor the Nazis demanded in order to be granted a respite from death.

“So the b*****d, who was every bit as evil as Mengele,” Sarah remarked, reminding Chelsea of Herr Doctor’s name, “sent her to his right and that was that. Less than a half hour later Hester was dead,” she sobbed, “gone up a crematorium chimney in a waft of black smoke.”

Sarah wiped her eyes and continued. “It’s been nine months now and I still miss her like the dickens. She was a royal pain in the behind, but, oh, how I did love her,” she sighed. “I used to despise that I had to watch her until my parents got home; I wanted to go out with my friends, bless their hearts, they’re all dead now. “Anyway, what I wouldn’t give to have Hester back. I’d watch her for a million years and love every single minute of it.”

At that moment, doubting she would ever see her again, Chelsea felt the same about Chastity. She regretted all the times she complained about having to walk her home from school and take care of her until their mother came home from work.

Sarah snapped out of a lingering reverie that had brought an incongruous smile to her mouth, yet tears to her eyes. “Well, we best get some sleep, Chelsea from America,” she said looking tenderly into the eyes of her new American friend. “The alarm sounds at five a.m. sharp and we are going to need all of the strength we can muster for the day ahead. Come, let’s scoot to the wall so we don’t have to listen to Magda snoring in our ears all night. Watch your head.”

Chelsea ducked and the two scooted back. “That’s far enough,” Sarah said when they had gone a few feet. “You can lean back now.”

The two rested their heads flush to the barrack wall. “Lean up a bit, will you?” Sarah said. “I want to do something.”

“What?” Chelsea asked.

“You’ll see.”

Chelsea leaned up and Sarah began to untie Chelsea’s sweater from around her waist.

“What are you doing?” Chelsea said shifting away.

Sarah laughed. “Silly goose. I’m just going to bunch your sweater into a pillow for you. You’ll get a better night’s rest ... what little of it there is left to be had.”

Sarah folded and doubled the sweater in her lap. “There,” she said placing it behind Chelsea. “You can lean back now, silly goose.”

Chelsea looked at the makeshift pillow. “Thanks, but it doesn’t seem right. I’m new here and you’ve been here for nine months. You take it.”

“I won’t hear of it. Now listen to your camp counselor and lean back.”

Chelsea did as she was told.

“Better?” Sarah inquired.

“Yes. I thought this sweater was junk but now I think it’s exquisite. It feels like heaven. Can I do anything for you?”

“Just remember me in your prayers. Sleep well, my American friend.”

“You too,” Chelsea said. She looked at the ceiling barely a foot above her head and said a silent prayer for Sarah, then closed her eyes and conked out in an instant.

A buzzing blare that sounded like a fire-drill test startled Chelsea from a dead sleep at five in the morning and she sprung up like a jack-in-the-box. “I’d wish you a good morning, my American friend, but there is no such thing in this Dante’s inferno,” Chelsea heard a gentle voice say behind her. She swiveled around and saw Sarah, writing with a stub pencil onto a weathered sheet of typing paper. A nearby bulb dangling from the ceiling that had switched on with the alarm enabled both to see.

“What are you doing?” Chelsea asked, her head feeling like a sledgehammer had pummeled it. Even though Sarah was malnourished, worked to the bone and practically bald, Chelsea thought she looked exquisitely beautiful.

“Documenting more of the atrocities I’ve witnessed here,” Sarah responded. She folded the paper into a compact square and carefully inserted it and the pencil into a slot between a bunk brace and the wall. “I have to write very small because pencil and paper are priceless here, and as you see I don’t have much of either luxury.”

Chelsea felt like a spoiled child for complaining about being stuck with a clunky old computer instead of an iMac at home to write papers when a simple pencil and paper were worth a king’s ransom to Sarah. Oh, what a fool I’ve been.

“We must get going,” Sarah urged. “If a guard finds us in the bunk it will not be pretty, and I must attend to some unpleasant tasks. When I finish I will go with you to the latrine, and then we will eat some gruel. Stay with me so I can protect you. If we are separated, however, do not be late for roll call in front of the barrack in a half hour. You must be on time for that or the Beautiful Beast will have her pound of flesh.”

“The Beautiful Beast?”

“Yes, but there’s no time to go into that monster from hell now and you will see for yourself anyway. For now, just stay with me.”

Sarah lowered herself to the floor and Chelsea followed. She wasn’t prepared for what she saw when she turned around and gasped. Magda and Basha were grasping the limbs of the kindly faced woman who had offered Chelsea refuge and were carrying the dead Samaritan toward a cart. Sarah rushed to help them and the three raised her limp body to the top of a side railing, where they rested it for a moment before giving it a gentle push. The paper-thin skin and brittle bones that remained of the woman fell into a jumble of other half skeletons, the remains of once-vibrant women who had perished overnight at the cruel hands of Nazis who literally worked them to death. Chelsea sniffled as the three proceeded to remove two more bodies from nearby bunks and load them too, then push in some of the dead at the cart’s sides to make room for four sloshing waste buckets they had collected. They and another women then pushed and pulled the cart out to the courtyard. It was daybreak at Auschwitz where the sun rises before five in the summer months, and instead of floodlights the muted light of a cloud-covered day lit the camp.

The four women stepped aside in the courtyard and four other women took over the cart. Sarah wiped her brow as they began to haul it away, and then turned back to the barrack door. “I just saw her last night,” Chelsea sniffled just outside it. “She was going to let me squeeze in.” Sarah took Chelsea’s hand. “Come, we must use the latrine and eat before time runs out.”

The pair hurried past the barrack and turned right onto the road that Chelsea had raced the night before. At the end there was a long barn that bordered it, and upon entering it she saw hundreds of women sitting or waiting to sit on circular holes cut into three concrete “toilet blocks” that extended the length of the barn. She hadn’t gone since she awoke on the train and her feet moved up and down like pistons as she awaited her turn, which came soon enough as the women before her did their business quickly. Roll call was looming and besides that the women were humiliated having to go in front of five or six others. “It’s part and parcel of the Nazi scheme to dehumanize us,” Sarah said as she relieved herself next to Chelsea. “They hate us so much that they want to strip us of all human dignity and make us feel like scum.”

Chelsea and Sarah quickly took their turns in the reeking latrine and then darted outside to the front of the barn, where they joined one of four lines formed by women holding bowls, cans, mugs and even pots. Plump German cooks were ladling gruel from kettles at the front of the queues, and the ravenous women gulped the thin porridge almost as quickly as it took to dole out. Sarah reached into a bulging pouch sewn into the side of her pajama bottom and removed two bowls as they lined up.

“Here,” she said handing Chelsea a chipped bowl. “I was fortunate to find this in the bunk of one of the women who passed away during the night. Keep it with you at all times. Bowls and the like are difficult to come by, you see, and if you lose it you may be left with cupped hands to receive your meals, such as they are.”

Chelsea was famished and she downed her serving of gruel in two hungry gulps. “Come,” Sarah said taking Chelsea’s free hand, the other clutching the bowl. “We must report to our yard. Roll call for our barrack is at hand.”

Chelsea returned with Sarah to the courtyard. Twenty rows of women were forming there, and Chelsea took a place beside Sarah in one for the first and last time.

“The count goes up and down every morning depending on the transports and the dead,” Sarah said. “But on an average day there are eight hundred from our barrack lined up here.”

Chelsea looked astounded. “There are eight hundred in our barrack?” she uttered. “The place is big, but not that big. It seems impossible!”

“Impossible but true,” Sarah said. “It was built to quarter half that many. However, the Nazis are quite greedy when it comes to free labor and they crowd in as many as they can.”

Chelsea shook her head and then jumped as loudspeakers suddenly screeched on. She heard a needle touch a record and then an accordion and banging drum blare. Chelsea’s face puckered up and she looked like she had just bitten into lemon.

“I agree,” Sarah said loudly. “It’s wretched, isn’t it. It’s a polka the barbarians play every morning called Das Esellied, or The Donkey Song in English. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to hear a Chopin polonaise on the radio once more.”

Chelsea had a stereo clock radio at home that she loathed, finding it primitive compared to the iPod she had begged her mother to get for her. Sarah would be in seventh heaven if she could just have a radio, and I had to have an iPod, she thought. She’d think I was a silly goose if I told her that.

Chelsea kept mum and looked up as a plane sputtered overhead. She saw a black Nazi dive bomber emblazoned with red swastikas, and as it swooned she wished it would crash into the gas chambers and destroy them. Just then a lightning bolt streaked practically into the courtyard and a deafening crack of thunder rumbled the ground like an earthquake. A microsecond later a hard rain came pouring down, and Chelsea looked on as the now assembled women eagerly turned open mouths toward the cloudburst or frantically scrubbed their scalps.

“I’m reminded of another reason to hold onto your bowl,” Sarah said. “We are only allowed a scoopful of water twice during the day, and you will only have whatever doesn’t drip from your cupped hands if you lose it. That will be far from enough for you to survive, as you can tell from the women with gourds. Two scoopfuls a day are hardly enough even for them.”

Chelsea pursed her lips. “What about the women scrubbing their heads?”

“Ah, they’re washing away lice. The little buggers are the only pets we are allowed to have with us here.”

Chelsea shuddered. Just then she noticed something in front of her and cried out “Oh my god.”

“What is it?”

“That woman there--she’s not wearing any shoes!”

“And she’s not the only one. Look around you, dear. There are many in their bare feet, and many more with shoes coming apart at the seams. Which reminds me, I neglected to tell before we slept that you must always hold onto your shoes tightly before you sleep. To keep them on your feet is to invite someone desperate to steal them as you slumber. I’m glad nimble hands didn’t finesse them off you last night. I would have been beside myself!”

The loudspeaker cut off and with it went the insufferable donkey song. Seconds later the commandant of the women’s block strutted into the courtyard brandishing a bullwhip in one hand and a pistol in the other. Two German shepherds accompanied her, each of the beefy dogs clenching a fat mutton chop between its slobbering teeth.

“That’s the guard who made us run here last night,” Chelsea exclaimed. “She lashed this poor woman in front of me with her whip.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sarah said. “That’s Irma Grese, the women’s camp commandant, or the Beautiful Beast as we call her. The woman got off lucky. I’ve seen the savage do much worse.”

The Beautiful Beast stopped at the center of the courtyard and told the dogs to sit. They obeyed with their eyes glued to her, waiting for a signal. A second later she gave it to them, a nod that was the go-ahead for them to have at their chops, which they wasted no time chomping into. The Beautiful Beast had a good laugh and then looked at a contingent of ten female guards who awaited her command to begin the roll call. She nodded again and the guards trotted to their assigned rows to conduct their counts.

The cloudburst stopped as suddenly as it began, and as a scorching sun broke through Chelsea got a sample of how the Beautiful Beast earned her damning epithet. The commandant looked exasperated as her minions took their daily census and began pacing. Eventually she strutted up to a woman in the first row and pointed her pistol into the woman’s face. “Take the meat from one of the dogs over there,” she said in her coarse Hungarian, jerking her head toward the chomping shepherds. “The bigger one closer to here, actually.”

The woman looked over to the dog and cowered.

“Do it or I’ll blow your brains out!” the Beautiful Beast bellowed.

The trembling woman slowly started off.

“Run!”

The woman bustled over to the dog but held back from leaning down.

“Take it!” the Beautiful Beast howled.

The woman grabbed the mutton but the dog wasn’t about to let her have it and sunk its canines into her hand. The woman screamed and the Beautiful Beast shot her in the head anyway. Chelsea stifled a scream. Now I know the meaning of hell on earth, she thought as the Beautiful Beast turned to the rows of neatly aligned Hungarian women and bellowed even louder in their native tongue.

“Does anyone else care to steal from a hungry dog?”

The Beautiful Beast pointed her pistol at the head of another woman. “You, perhaps?”

The woman shook her head and sobbed. The Beautiful Beast laughed and addressed the barrack inmates again.

“I think you pigs have begun to grow brazen. So that you will remember you are nothing, less than dirt, you will not report to your workshops or factories today. Instead, you will stand at attention in the muck and heat for the rest of the day ... and there will be no water for you too!”

And so it was that the women stood like sentries for hour after hour in the scorching summer sun, not a one making a peep for fear of a guard bashing her with a billy club or siccing a ferocious shepherd on her. Meanwhile, the guards raised a ruckus as they strode up and down the women’s solemn ranks, hurling insults and laughing giddily as they drank from glasses of iced lemonades the plump cooks brought to them on silver trays. Their biggest hoot came when one of the woman pulled down her pajama bottoms and defecated, and one of their cohorts smushed the woman’s face into the skimpy excrement with her boot and made her eat it. Chelsea wanted to throw up but held back when she considered a guard might see her and make her lick it up.

Chelsea choked back sobs as one after another of the heat-stricken, water-deprived, exhausted, sick and starving women in the courtyard collapsed and died throughout the day. Once she wanted to sink to her knees and give up. But the thought of Sarah, who had endured so much more, bearing up next to her gave her strength. If she can hold out after all she’s been through, then I can surely make it through just one day, she determined. But after twelve hours Chelsea’s reason for staying up came crashing down when Sarah succumbed to sunstroke too. Despite the dangers she risked, Chelsea knelt down to her fallen tower of strength and raised her gnarled hand with both of hers. Sarah’s sleeve slid back as she did, revealing an ugly black letter and number tattooed on her inner forearm.

“Please Sarah, get up,” Chelsea pleaded, clasping her hand. “A guard will shoot you if you don’t.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t make any difference anymore, my American friend,” Sarah wheezed with a tender smile.

“Don’t say that.”

Sarah grimaced. “Time is short: I must request a favor of you before I die.”

“Anything!” Chelsea said, fat tears rolling down her sunburned cheeks.

“Get my pencil and paper and continue my testimony. The civilized world must know what happened here.”

“Yes, oh yes!” Chelsea vowed.

Summoning a smile with her last ounce of energy, Sarah softly exhaled her last remaining breath. Chelsea felt the sunbaked ground beneath her drop away. She had known Sarah for less than a day, but felt as though she had known her forever. That’s the way it is sometimes: You can know someone for years and not really know her, and know someone for a day and feel like you’ve known her for ages. The latter was the way it was for Chelsea. She had lost a friend for the ages and didn’t know if she wanted to go on living--certainly not at Auschwitz at least. What was the use in such an unspeakably evil, God-forsaken place?

A guard now shouted at Chelsea and yanked her up by the strands of her hair. Chelsea took one last look at Sarah, taking in the tattoo on her forearm as indelibly as the indelible black ink used to imprint it: A126978. The guard left her body where it lay, but Chelsea did not look upon it again. She didn’t think she could bear seeing the body of her forever friend lying in the dust.

The Beautiful Beast returned to the scene of her crime as the sun set three hours later and chided those still standing. “Don’t you Jews have enough sense to get out of the sun on a hot day?” she jeered in her coarse Hungarian. “Even pigs know better.” The guards laughed at her warped gibes. “Now I’m going to have to come up with a new name for you because I’ve been too kind in calling you swine--see what you put me through! Hmm, now what shall it be? I’ve got it--asses I shall call you! They’re the dumbest of all creatures and on a par with you. Do you all know that?”

The women who hadn’t fallen nodded.

“Good. Now get out of my sight, you stupid pigs ... er asses, or I shall shoot every last one of you!”

The living scrambled into the newly floodlit night, desperate to be among the first in one of the food lines or find a seat at one of the toilet blocks. A forlorn Chelsea got swept away in the mad rush and opted for the latrine, where she waited anxiously to relieve herself of the sickening gruel she had held in for hours. She then trudged to the back of a food line, only to receive a thin mixture of soup in her bowl and a crust of moldy bread in her hand when she reached the plump cooks a half hour later. She was parched and guzzled the soup, but she had no appetite and gave her bread to Magda and Basha. They thanked Chelsea profusely and she plodded toward the barrack. She had never felt so sad and she felt even sadder as she beheld a sniffling little girl coming toward her. The girl was holding hands with her adorable identical twin, and while she too should have looked darling she was covered with sores and blisters that made her look mangy, unlike her sister who looked fit as a fiddle. Chelsea thought the spotted little girl was suffering from a terrible case of the measles, and didn’t have any ointment or medicine to help her. That the girl had no salve to apply or medication to take was true, for the Nazis at Birkenau would not spare so much as an aspirin for a prisoner in pain. But that she had the measles was off the mark, for what afflicted her was a severe allergic reaction to a chemical the sinister “Angel of Death” Mengele had injected into her but not her sister. Thus explained why one girl was beset with lesions while the other looked the picture of health. But such evil was far from anything Chelsea could imagine as she passed the loving twins and proceeded with a heavy heart to the barrack.

Chelsea went inside and turned to the right past the entryway, then found her way to the bunk where the kindly faced woman with sunken eyes had tugged at her dress the previous night before passing away sometime between then and that very morning. She climbed up to the bunk that Sarah would never use again, and not caring to bunch her sweater she laid her swirling head back and fell into a dreamless sleep. But not, however, before she remembered Sarah in a prayer.

At five o’clock sharp the next morning the sole barrack bulb switched on, and Chelsea pried Sarah’s prized paper from its slot. She looked at the words Sarah had set down in an elegant cursive hand, the written counterpart to her cultivated voice. Sarah’s firsthand accounts of the Beautiful Beast’s and guards’ savagery were in English, and Chelsea became so caught up in reading of the horrific crimes they related that she didn’t heed an approaching fall of jackboots until a floorboard near her bunk creaked. Quickly she folded the paper but there was no time to squeeze the sheet back into its slot, for just then a billy club came into view. Chelsea had but a second now to hide the damning chronicle and she stashed it into a pocket at the side of her sweater. A stout woman guard now stepped into the picture. She barked at Chelsea and brusquely swung her arm for her to come down, and when she did the guard swung the billy club into her forehead.

Chelsea was dead to the world.

***

Chelsea awakened with her forehead pressed to the railroad railing, and the mother of all headaches. She rubbed a huge knob smack-dab in the middle of her forehead, raised her aching head, and paused to get her bearings. She saw she was on a rain-slicked railroad track and wondered how she got there. The mystery lasted only until she got to her feet, when she remembered tripping on the railing on her way to fetch Chastity. Chastity! Oh gosh, I still have to get her. I wonder how long I’ve been out?

Chelsea rushed to Chastity’s elementary school just in case she was late, but her sister was just then skipping to their meeting spot. I guess I wasn’t in la-la land for long, Chelsea thought.

“Where did you get that big bump on your forehead?” Chastity asked skipping up.

“At the railroad. I tripped and banged my head on a rail.”

“You should be more careful.”

“Yeah, I should.”

Out of nowhere an overwhelming urge to hug her sister came over Chelsea, and she leaned over and gave her a fierce bear hug.

“You’re squeezing the living daylights out of me,” Chastity cried. “What’s with you anyway? You always storm off when I get here.”

“I don’t know,” Chelsea said shaking her head. “I guess I’m just happy to see you.”

“Oh geez. Give me a break,” Chastity muttered pulling away.

Chelsea beamed lovingly at the sister she had always found so annoying and wondered what had come over her. She felt something had happened while she was out cold ... something extraordinary. She wracked her mind to come up with what it was but drew a blank--a fantastic just-out-of-reach something that gnawed at her. But then in her geometry class the next day her teacher tossed her a Jolly Rancher for answering a question, and Chelsea suddenly remembered giving the hungry little boy her Jolly Rancher on the cattle car. Oh my god, she thought stunned. I went back in time!

A flurry of images now flickered in her mind’s eye as it all came back: waking up next to the strange man in the cattle car, the cart men flinging corpses onto the baggage cart, Herr Doctor flicking his riding crop, a German shepherd nipping at her heels on the run to the barrack, beautiful Sarah inviting her up ...

Sarah!

A pang of anguish struck Chelsea and hot tears welled in her eyes as she remembered her all-to-brief time with her forever friend. But she couldn’t have been … none of what she recalled could have. It was all just a bad nightmare--the worst ever. Just as she thought that, however, two words popped into her mind that changed that perception.

Var-ah-no vie-oak. Whoa--I’ve never ever read or heard those words and couldn’t have made them up in a million years! And the same goes for the university where Sarah went, called Ya-gi-lone-ski, I think it was ... plus Sash-sen-something, the concentration camp where her father the psychiatry professor was sent ... and how about the wretched Das Eza-lee, The Donkey Song? Those places and song are beyond my wildest imagination! But I better make sure they’re real.

Chelsea rushed to the library during lunch and found the Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Das Esellied, plus their correct spellings, on the Internet. “There’s no way around it,” she exclaimed. “Somehow, I went into the past!”

Chelsea wanted to share her incredible travel back in time with her friends, but decided against it. They’ll just laugh and say I’ve gone off the deep end, she predicted. And I can’t say I’d blame them. All I have to prove I’m not nuts are some words I could’ve read somewhere--even though I know I never have! But they’re not gonna believe me. I have to come up with something better to convince them. I need hard proof.

Chelsea thought of a way she might get it in Mr. Bridges’s class. Maybe the Nazis kept lists of all the prisoners at Auschwitz, and if I could find Sarah’s name on it that would prove I went back in time. How else would I know she was there? It’s not like there was ever a book written about her--the Nazis killed her entire family and all her friends.

Chelsea hoped there was a list with a Sarah Bloom on it, thinking that her last name was spelled with two o’s instead of a u. But there’s probably a lot of Sarah Blooms if they kept lists, she thought. It’s a pretty ordinary name after all. Heck, I even met one. No, that’s not gonna work. I need something definite.

 Chelsea began twisting her hair and then it hit her. “A126978!” she shouted. Her outburst prompted Ms. Bridges to throw a stern look at her.

“Sorry,” Chelsea apologized. She returned to her train of thought. If Sarah’s name is on a list with that number it would prove I went back beyond a shadow of a doubt; there’s no way in the world I would know that number was on a list and that she had it. Oh, I hope the Nazi b******s kept lists.

Chelsea raced up to Ms. Bridges after class. “Did the Nazis at Auschwitz keep lists of the slaves there?” she blurted.

“They did but they destroyed most of their registration logs at the end of the war,” Ms. Bridges replied. “They didn’t want to leave behind evidence of all the people they murdered.”

“Shucks,” Chelsea sighed.

“Why do you ask?”

“I was hoping to find the name and number of a prisoner.”

“Well, some logs did survive. Do you want me to write you a late pass and we’ll look them up? I can see you’re disappointed and my prep hour is now.”

“That would be great!”

Ms. Bridges proceeded to conduct a search in a Holocaust survivor and victim database. She found no Sarah Blooms, or Sarah Blums as she suggested.

“Thanks anyway, Ms. Bridges, a frowning Chelsea said. “And by the way, if it’s not too late I’d like to do that PowerPoint on the Holocaust.” Chelsea had been thinking about her sacred promise to Sarah to continue her testimony, and the slide show would be a first step. She would dedicate her presentation to her forever friend, one of six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

As a disheartened Chelsea walked Chastity home after school, an image flashed in her mind that made her heart race, one that would prove for sure that she had traveled back in time--plus make her the happiest girl in the world. “I’ll race you home, Chas,” she blurted, hoping to bait her kid sister to run so she could get to the apartment as quickly as possible.

Chelsea dashed to their room when they arrived and slung open a sliding closet door. Her hooded sweater hung from a hanger before her, and reaching into the right front pocket her heart skipped a beat as she touched something inside. Her hand trembled as she pulled the object out and beheld it.

It was only a folded sheet of paper. But to Chelsea, it was worth more than all the smartphones, iMacs, cool clothes and nice homes in the world.

 

Author’s notes

Following the war, Dr. Joseph “the Angel of Death” Mengele made his way via a Nazi-run escape route called the ratline from Germany to Argentina, where he found sanctuary for 15 years until an international manhunt hot on his trail forced him to relocate to Brazil in 1960. There he lived in peace for another 19 years until he suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned in 1979. His body was not buried but instead turned over to The University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil, where today students in the school’s forensic medicine program manipulate it as a tool in their studies.

 

A British military tribunal found Irma “the Beautiful Beast” Grese guilty of crimes against humanity and murder following the war. The bench sentenced her to be executed, and on December 13, 1945, her sentence was carried out when she was led to a gallows and, as ordered, “hanged from the neck until dead.”

 

A nationwide survey of 11,000 U.S. millennials and Gen Zers conducted in 2020 found that 63 percent of the 18- to 39-year-olds in those cohorts were unaware that six million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust, and 56 percent had no knowledge of Auschwitz. As of 2022, more than half of the 50 states do not require schools to educate students about the Holocaust.

 

This story was written to supplement the instruction of those that do.

 

And to provide perspective.

Author's Note

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