Spark of Life Read Free

when it was necessary to make room quickly for new transports by mass liquidations. Even the starving to death of those incapable of work was pursued not too brutally in Mellern; in the Small camp there was always still something to eat and with it veterans like 509 had managed to create records in staying alive.
    The bombardment suddenly ceased. Only the flak still raged. 509 raised the coat a little higher so that he could see the nearest machine-gun tower. The post was empty. He looked further to the right and then to the left. There, too, the towers were without guards. The SS squads had everywhere climbed down and made for safety; they had good air-raid shelters next to the barracks. 509 threw off the coat altogether and crept nearer to the barbedwire. He supported himself on his elbows and stared down into the valley.
    Now the town burned everywhere. What had formerly looked playful had meanwhile changed into what it really was: fire and destruction. Yellow and black like a gigantic mollusk of annihilation, the smoke hovered in the streets and devoured the houses. Flames flared up everywhere. From the railroad station an immense sheaf of sparks shot up. The broken tower of St. Catherine’s church began to blaze and along it tongues of fire licked like pale flashes of lightning. But unperturbed, as though nothing had happened, the sun stood in golden glory behind it all; and there seemed something almost ghostlike in the appearance of the blue and white sky, looking just as gay as before and the forests and mountain chains all around lying calm and unaffected in the gentle light—as if only the town had been condemned by an unknown, sinister judgment.
    509 stared down. He forgot all caution and stared down He knew the town only through the barbed wire and he had never been in it; but during the ten years he had spent in the camp it had become for him more than just a town.
    At first it had been the almost unbearable image of lost freedom. Day after day he had stared down at it—he had seen it with its carefree life when, after a special treatment by the camp leader Weber, he had hardly been able to crawl any more; he had seen it with its towers and houses as he hung on the cross with dislocated arms; he had seen it with the white barges on its river and its automobiles driving into the springtime while he urinated blood from his crushed kidneys; his eyes had burned whenever he had seen it and it had been a torture, a torture that had been added to all the others of the camp.
    Then he had begun to hate it. The time had passed and nothing had changed in the town, no matter what happened up here. Thesmoke from its cook stoves had gone on rising every day, uncontaminated by the fumes from the crematorium; its sports grounds and parks had been full of crowds while at the same time hundreds of hunted creatures had perished on the dance ground of the camp. Flocks of holiday-happy people had wandered out every summer into the woods while columns of prisoners dragged their dead and murdered back from the quarries. He had hated it because he had thought that he and the other prisoners had been forgotten forever.
    Finally the hatred, too, had died down. The fight for a crust of bread had become more important than anything else, and almost equally so the knowledge that hatred and memories could destroy an endangered self as easily as pain. 509 had learned to shut himself up, to forget and no longer to worry about anything but naked existence from one hour to another. He had grown indifferent to the town, and its unchanged aspect was from now on only a sad symbol of the fact that his fate too would not change any more.
    Now it was burning. He felt his arms trembling. He tried to suppress it but he couldn’t; it only became stronger. Everything in him was suddenly loose and without connection. His head ached as though it were hollow and someone were drumming inside it.
    He closed his eyes. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want