time. It's colorful and ornate, and confirms that there is a world beyond the electric fences and barbed wire that surround us. It is proof that somewhere someone cares whether we live or die.
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We tear open the brown paper, ripping open the boxes as if we are opening presents from family. There is a can of sardines, a package of crackers, and a sweet tea biscuit. Slowly we unscrew the top from the sardines. They are so salty. After not tasting anything with flavor in six months, they are a smorgasbord to our mouths. We stick our fingers into the oil and lick slowly, trying to make it last, but even if we could lick it all night it would never be enough. The crackers and biscuits we stick in our pockets to save until tomorrow.
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I feel stronger that day, savoring the crackers with our soup at lunch and saving the biscuit for dinner. The sweet cake serves as an actual dessert after our meager supper. It plunges our senses into another realm, melting in our mouths, leaving them yearning for more. We've craved sugar since the day we arrived in camp; it rushes through our bodies, but then it is gone. We are grateful for these three semi-meals, but the next day our stomachs yawn and ache for more and there is nothing left to eat except bread, tea, and soup.
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"Are you going to get the soup today?" I ask, hoping the care package will have encouraged Danka's appetite. She shakes her head. I treat her as gently as possible, but if she doesn't start eating more and getting her own soup again we will both turn into a muselmann, and from that there is no way back.
5
If we become emaciated we're goners. I try and try to get her to get her own bowl of soup, but her spirit is dwindling before my eyes. How do I get my sister to want to live? Without that desire there is no way we can survive, and I need her just as badly as she needs me.
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 | | 5.
Muselmann
is camp slang for those who have lost not only body weight from starvation but the will to live, becoming living skeletons.
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