rack and the guards, with blows, made us huddle in a heap. He became irritable, cursed our neighbors, then would hold his head in his hands in remorse. During our last night in the barrack, I woke up and heard him weeping, but said nothing, thinking it better for him to be alone with his trouble. In the morning, when the command to move was given and we rose and lined up, my father spread his coat on the ground and lay down on his back with his eyes closed. I ran over to him in a panic and begged him to stand up. Not opening his eyes, he told me to leave him. He couldn’t go on, he said, couldn’t take it. The soldiers noticed us, pushed me back. I joined my grandmother, who did not know what was happening, and the column continued on its way, walking around my father. Leading my grandmother by the hand, I looked back and saw guards gathered around my father, who still lay on the ground. I heard two shots, and then we were outside the camp. We were marched back to the railroad track, where a train was waiting. The day was hot, the cars like an oven from standing in the sun, the windows no longer strung with wire but boarded up. Our car was filled, but the guards kept loading in more people, until we were packed solid. The doors were shut. We thought we would all be suffocated, that this was indeed the end we had all feared from the guards’ threats and the whispers of our prophets of doom. Sweat poured from us. The children, again with us, cried for water. Feeling along the bottom of the car, someone came across buckets of lukewarm water. There was fighting, pushing, shouting. One of the women suggested that the children be given sleeping pills, which some had brought along. Each child was given half a tablet, and finally they grew quiet. The train did not move until the evening. It traveled all that night and the following day, and not once were the doors opened. Again the children cried, and the old people fell from exhaustion, making the already cramped space more cramped. There was some air in the car while the train moved, but people needed to relieve themselves. One of the buckets, which we had emptied, was used for that purpose. The car stank. Someone covered the bucket with a coat, but people were going to it all the time, until it became too full and excrement flooded the floor. We had no more water. Hardly any food. All I had left in my pocket were a few lumps of sugar and one small piece of bacon. My grandmother and I took turns chewing it, saying nothing. On the evening of the second day, the train stopped. The car door was opened, but our attempts to jump out were met by Hungarian policemen’s threats and bayonets. An officer told us that we had reached the frontier and would now be handed over to the Germans. “Up to now you’ve had it good, you dirty Yids, but that’s all over. So anyone who has anything of value, gold, rings, bracelets, anything you’ve hidden, cough it up. If the Germans find that someone’s held on to the smallest trinket, they’ll kill the whole carload without mercy.” He hurried off down the length of the train. There was urgent whispering. Although our bags were taken from us at Baja, we all had managed to hide a small thing of value, in case there was the possibility later of buying something with it. Some people thought it was dangerous to hand over anything, because that would be proof of our deception, but others said it was dangerous not to obey the order. Finally, we collected several articles of gold in an old man’s hat and gave that to the police. They seized the hat and, right there in front of the car, before our eyes, distributed the gold among them, then pulled the door shut on us. After perhaps an hour, the door scraped open again. Now German soldiers stood in front of our car with flashlights fastened to their chests. Two or three of us cried out in German, begging for water and to be allowed out of the car to go to the bathroom. “Shut your mouths!” was their answer. One of them announced that we would be searched, and if even one of us was found to have anything of value, everyone in the car would be shot. It was our last chance, he said, to surrender what we had hidden. Someone dared to reply that we had given all our remaining possessions to the Hungarians. At this, the Germans swore, but did not let up in their demands: “Collect what you have, scum, or we’ll search you one by one, and then you’re done for.” Again, reluctantly, several gold objects fell into a handkerchief, and I gave up the ring I had sewn into the hem of my grandmother’s dress. The door was shut; the train moved on. From weariness and hunger, our legs gave way, and we would have collapsed if we had not been held upright by other bodies pressed against us. The old and the sick fainted, raved, prayed, and the children whimpered with fatigue. We guessed that we had passed through Austria, though it no longer mattered. We would have exchanged our state for any other. On the third day, we stopped. The door of the car was opened, and we heard shouts of “Los! Los!” Outside, the daylight was blinding, the air sharp as we poured out of the car and, pushing or carrying the weak, fell on the ground. Dogs barked, German shepherds on leashes held by healthy young pink-faced German soldiers, and we, like refuse, crawled at their feet, gasping for air and rest. But we were ordered to stand up. “Los! Los!” And the men had to go to the left, the women and children to the right. There were farewells, weeping, my grandmother and I made our way with the women to the right. They pushed us forward, I held my grandmother around the waist, because she could hardly move her legs, until we reached a tall officer who was separating the women left and right with a thin stick. He lowered the stick between me and my grandmother, she slipped off to the side, to the ground. I bent to help her, but the officer’s stick pushed me to the other side, and the guards herded other women after me. That’s how I left my grandmother. I didn’t have time to look back, and I never saw her again. We were arranged into ranks of five, and I found myself with four strange women. Marching along a path lined with soldiers and dogs, we came to a high barbed-wire fence; behind it were hundreds of people the like of which I had never seen in my life — emaciated, gray, with huge, bulging eyes and hairless heads. Waving rags in their shrunken hands. “Madmen!” someone whispered, and for a moment we believed that. The guards opened the gate, and we entered among those apparitions, who now made incomprehensible signs or pointed with their thin, dirty fingers to their mouths. We passed them, and passed prisoners using the brief time they had after washing themselves to dry whatever clothing they had washed, too, surreptitiously, by walking back and forth, which we would do ourselves the following day. Then we were in front of a large brick building. Two well-dressed women in German military caps came out and ordered us to strip for a bath. We left our clothes in separate little piles and waited, naked, holding our shoes in our hands, until we were let into the building. After showers, which sprinkled us with only a few drops of lukewarm water, the German women pushed us into the next place, where we were received by men in striped prison clothes, watched over by a soldier. They shaved our heads and bodies, sprayed a stinging liquid between our legs, and pushed us on to the next place, where we were given clothing from a heap — oversized, bedraggled, torn, so that for a moment we looked like a band of revelers. They quickly lined us up and marched us to a barrack. There were three rows of double bunks, no blankets, only bare boards. We had to lie down five to a bed and could hardly move. In the evening, they took us out for roll call, counted us, recorded us, but gave us nothing to eat. We complained of hunger, but the trusty of our barrack, a young Slovak woman, told us that we would get no food tomorrow either, we were not on the provisions list until the day after. We lay down on our cramped beds, our stomachs aching, delirious from the desire for food. In the morning, we were awakened at two-thirty — it was to be the same every day — and given half an hour to relieve ourselves and wash, but since there were only two latrines for all the thirty-two barracks, and only one wash basin, people were still pushing and shoving when the order for roll call was given. We had to stand in place until late morning, when the Lagerälteste arrived to inspect us, a woman in uniform escorted by SS men and dogs. Before she came, some of the women fainted, and the trusty hit with a stick anyone who tried to help them. After the roll call, we all collapsed in exhaustion. We were not allowed back in the barrack, and so spent the day lying on the ground, twisted with hunger. In the evening, roll call again, until late into the night. Now there were dozens of women unconscious. We were ordered to drag them to the roll call and lay them out in rows of five. After the roll call we had to drag them back into the barrack. The next day, we got up in the dark again, again ran to the latrine and the wash basin, and went to roll call. Then our first breakfast, a soup of pine needles. We had no spoons, no dishes; we drank the sickeningly sweet but warm liquid from a single mess tin, passing it after each mouthful. In the afternoon, turnip soup and a piece of bread. In the evening, a little marmalade, a slice of brawn. The minute we swallowed the food, our hunger, unsatisfied, would gnaw at our stomachs worse than before, but then it would go away while we stood, half-asleep, half-unconscious, at roll call. We grew weak, we could hardly move. But we knew what awaited us if the last of our strength went; we saw what had happened to the camp inmates before us. One day, they herded several hundred women into the barrack next door, all skeletons who had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. In the evening, after roll call and after we had just got to sleep, we were awakened by shouting, barking, screaming. We went to the windows and saw closed black trucks in front of the other barrack and German soldiers forcing the skeleton women into them. The women resisted, they yelled at the top of their lungs that they didn’t want to go to the ovens, they were still strong, they could work, and their fear gave them new strength, they clutched convulsively at the door frames, the windows, at anything they could, and some even climbed on the roof of the barrack. But the searchlights from the guard towers located them, and the soldiers and dogs pulled them down and threw them into the trucks, which took them away. The following day, we began to be sorted for the ovens. Two SS men came into the barrack with a woman doctor in a white coat and the trusty. They set out narrow planks in the middle of the floor and, stripped naked, we had to run the length of them, from end to end. If anyone stumbled, lost her balance, touched the floor with her foot, the doctor made a tired movement with his hand, and the SS men grabbed her like a sack and tossed her, no matter how much she struggled, outside, where the black truck was waiting. I didn’t stumble, but something else happened. The SS sergeant, Handke — we tried to avoid him, because he enjoyed hitting us at roll call for no reason — was there, and when I ran across the planks, he beckoned me over with his finger. He looked me up and down, pinched my arm to see how quickly the flesh recovered, then repeated the test on my breasts and thighs. He told me to wait by the door. He did the same thing a little later with Klara, a girl from Užgorod. After the inspection was over and the black truck was on its way, the trusty took our numbers, gave us dresses, and Handke, with the other SS men, escorted us out of the barrack. He took us to be bathed and disinfected, just the two of us, then through the camp and to a fence that separated the camp from the administration building. The soldier at the gate stood at attention. We passed the Kommandantur, the workshops, and went as far as the hospital, on the other side. There, they handed us over to prisoner nurses. We were told to undress and were given clean hospital gowns. They took us into a room with a row of cubicles, put each of us in a separate one, and told us to lie down. A strong light was shining. Two nurses came in, told me to spread my legs wide, then gave me an injection there that hurt terribly. Soon I went numb. They came in again, helped me to my feet, and dragged me past the cubicles into the operating room. Klara was already on one of the tables. They strapped my legs to a metal frame, tied my hands to my body, and a doctor wearing a mask and rubber gloves came in. They all bent over me. I saw a long drill-like needle that ended in a corkscrew, then felt a burning between my legs and, despite the numbness, a sharp pain deep inside, in the womb, as if it were being pulled out. They withdrew the needle and untied me. I was bleeding heavily, and they packed cotton wool in me and carried me back to the cubicle on a stretcher. I asked what had been done to me. One of the nurses hissed through his teeth: “It’s so you won’t have a baby, stupid.” I was feverish. But in the evening they brought me food, a soup much thicker and tastier than anything I had had so far in the camp. The next day, while I was being bandaged, a nurse pulled the gown off my shoulder and tattooed something across my left breast. This time I didn’t even bother to ask what it was. I was half-delirious. Later, when I felt better, I read it. My convalescence lasted about a week. The bleeding stopped, and Handke came to fetch me. He brought a dress for me, which I had to put on right there in front of him. He motioned to me to follow him. We went out of the hospital and to a building nearby, which was called the “house of pleasure.” It was a long room with cubicles like those Klara and I had been in at the hospital, except that each cubicle was closed off by a white curtain. Each had a bed. Klara was not yet there, but there were women in the other cubicles. We were eighteen in all. We could sit or lie down, but were not allowed to leave the cubicle except three times a day and all together. The commandant of the house of pleasure, Gisela, was a German woman who had been found guilty of poisoning her sister. Her cubicle, the last, had a door instead of a curtain. She wore a uniform, boots, and had a whip attached to her right forearm. When the soldiers came, from either our camp or a nearby garrison, or from units passing through on their way to the front, Gisela would shout, “Everyone out!” We would stand, each in front of her curtain, and the soldiers would look us over and choose. The girl chosen was supposed to go into her cubicle, take off her clothes, and make herself available. Gisela warned us that we must be nice to our visitors, satisfy their every wish, and that any girl who did not would be beaten to death. One by one she called us into her cubicle, undressed us, and showed us, herself undressed, what we had to do with the soldiers, but at the same time it was her way of getting her own pleasure. We had more food than in the camp, almost enough food, we were cleanly dressed, we showered every day, our heads were no longer shaved. But we were terrified at every visit, because we knew that we would not be able to defend ourselves against any accusation that we had not satisfied. Klara and I, in fact, replaced two girls who had been punished — that was what my neighbor, a Czech Jewess, whispered to me across the cubicle partition. I myself witnessed one such punishment. The victims were two sisters, Leah and Tzinna, brought into the camp from a Polish ghetto, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen, still undeveloped, and always terrified. Perhaps they didn’t know what to do in bed to satisfy the soldiers, perhaps Gisela just decided that they were not suitable or not to her liking as women. One morning, we were ordered into the circle in front of the administration building, and from the other side of the camp they brought hundreds of inmates right up to the fence, all of them stumbling skeletons, just as we had been before we came to the house of pleasure. Then the Germans emerged from the administration building, from the storerooms and guard posts, their uniforms unbuttoned, without their weapons, to watch the spectacle. Handke carried out the punishment. Two wooden horses were brought out, like those used in gymnastics but without the padded top. Gisela led the two girls up to them. The girls w