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I Held My Breath

Bill Tope

We had been crowded into a low-ceilinged
room the size of a small church. Cement
walls and floor. The soldiers had confis-
cated all our clothes, our shoes, what jewel-
ry and personal effects that had remained
with us. Most of it had long ago been
bartered away for food or clean water or
other privileges scarce in the compound.

We were completely naked: the men, the
women, even the little children. Our heads
had been shaved. Rumor had it that the
Huns stuffed their pillows and mattresses
with our hair.

The room was entirely vacant but for the
human bodies; our pale white flesh was the
color of a fish’s belly, and we were stuffed
into the room like oysters into a turkey.

We had all been shipped to the death
camp—Todeslager—like cattle to the
slaughter, in box cars, with no food or
water. With scarcely enough room
to breathe. Once or twice a plane flying
overhead had strafed the train with
machinegunfire. Perhaps our own
brave pilots.

There were no youths or middle aged men
and women; they had all been absorbed into
the vast slave labor network the Huns oper-
ated. Only the crippled, the maimed, the
feeble and the old, like myself, were here,
save for the very young, who weren’t hardy
enough for slave labor.

We were in Treblinka. It was June, 1943
and the rumor was that the camp would
be closed soon. We had no room to lay or
sit or even turn around. We were like the
kippers that were packed in oil or mustard
and that the inmates in labor camps—the
Arbeitslager—got from the Red Cross. At
Treblinka we never received our kippers.
There were nothing but rumors flying
throughout the compound: I had heard it
said that the German women made lamp
shades with our skin.

Some of the old men stared up at an aperture
in the ceiling, about a foot and a half over our
heads. That, they said, was where the Ger-
mans would deposit the Zyklon B, the poison
they would gas us with. The Commandant,
addressing the prisoners some time ago, had
bragged that superior German industry had
created many wonderful things. This was per-
haps the example he had in mind when he
said that. He had seemed very proud.

One of the younger of the men had been a
helper, removing the bodies from the chamber
after the gas had dissipated. After everyone
was dead. He told us all about how it worked.
The poison—prussic acid—he said, worked fast.
There would be a rattling over our heads, in the
chute that the poison was fed into. Someone,
he said with a grotesque grin, always tried to
keep the pellet from descending. But fall it
always did. For his labors he had received
an extra crust of Brot.

We waited. And waited. Suddenly there was a
clattering overhead, in the chute. The pellet of
Zyklon B was descending. A tall man, as if act-
ing a part in a movie, attempted to prevent the
pellet from falling, where it would crack open and
then dissipate in a cloud of murderous vapor.
His hand slipped. Suddenly, a large white pellet
crashed to the floor, burst open and a deadly,
diaphanous cloud rose up. A woman cried out.
The lethal “showers” had begun. I held my
breath.

 

Previously published in Chantarelle’s Notebook.

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