counted. The sun rises. Get counted. Get in line behind Emma. March out to the fields. Work until they say ''Halt!" Get soup. Sit down for a moment. Get up. Get in line behind Emma. March back to the fields. Work until they say "Halt!" March in neat rows of five back toward . . .
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Wait! We've turned. We are moving away from Auschwitz.
7
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Voices murmur through our ranks. We march. This is a change to our routine. The unknown is dangerous. Eyes vigilant, senses alert, we march away from Auschwitz, away from the walls and watchtowers. The sun sets. There are fences and more barbed wire towering before us. We march under a different gate with the same sign,
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
. We are not fooled. We stand in neat rows of five. Get counted. Emma and Erika and the other kapos go to their new blocks. They have moved with us to this new camp. We stand in the dark getting counted. We are assigned to Block Twenty, or is it Twenty-Two? It is dark when we step inside.
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The floor is dirt. There are no bunk beds here; there are shelves, wood planks, three tiers high. We are supposed to sleep here? Where are the mattresses? Our beds look like horse stalls. There is a sour smell of human odor. There are rags for blankets. We stand, squeezing our bread in our hands, unable to cope, unable to move. A girl begins to cry. Like fire in a stable her fear grabs us, and like dried straw we burn inside. Tears cannot quench these flames of disaster. We are lost. This is Birkenau.
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 | | 7. "August 510 [1942] . . . The women's section at Auschwitz I is moved to Section B-Ia in Birkenau" (Rittner and Roth, 29). "Birkenau was a swamp fenced off by electrified wire. No roads whatsoever, no paths in between the blocks . . . March to mid-August 1942 . . . about 17,000 women prisoners, most of them Jews, arrived at Auschwitz. A large number of them (probably about 5,000) perished before the transfer of women to the camp at Birkenau" (Strzelecka, 401, 394).
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