never have I seen anything comparable to this. I have seen despair and hopelessness, I have seen insanity at first onset, but I have never seen any face so devoid of life. Even the dead look more alive than these walking corpses.
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"They are experiment victims," the girl next to me whispers. Danka's face pales. My hands begin to shake with fright. "They torture them until they are dead, or vegetables." She turns another shovelful of dirt over. "After they are done experimenting with them, they go to the gas."
10
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Of all the horror we see daily, of all the shattered selves we witness on a regular basis, they are beyond any realm of imagination. They look as if the spirit God breathed into their souls has been utterly sucked out. They're no longer human beings, having long ago ceased to be girls or women. They are a child's nightmare.
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"Rena, I have scabies and terrible cuts from a beating I got." My cousin's wife begs, "Please, help me." I look at her without pity, without feeling. Still, I must help her. It is not in my heart to turn family away, despite how she treated me when Danka and I first arrived in Bardejov, when she invited me to her house and served me a cookie and cup of tea while still in her bathrobe and her hair in rollers. She kept fidgeting and acting like I was a nuisance, then abruptly told me she had errands to run, indicating it was time for me to leave. She didn't ask me about my parents, or how Danka and I were doing in her city. She was so well bred, so wealthy, I felt like the poor Polish cousin being swept under the carpet to avoid embarrassment.
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I was not fond of her because of this incident in Slovakia. Then I heard she had made trouble in camp. She was caught on her
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 | | 10. "April 30 [1943] . . . 242 female prisoners are earmarked for experimental purposes . . . housed in the experimental station of Professor Dr. Clauberg in Block 10 of the main camp" (Czech, 386). "By the time [Dr. Josef] Mengele arrived in May 1943, Auschwitz was packed with almost 140,000 prisoners and stretched for miles in all directions" (Posner and Ware, 20).
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