Spark of Life Read Free Page A

anything to come up in him again. He had crushed and buried all hope and it had cost much pain to bury. He let his arms slide to the ground and laid his face on his hands. The town had nothing to do with him. He did not want it to have anything to do with him. He wanted unconcerned as before to let the sun shine on the dirty parchment that was stretched as skin over his skull, he wanted to breathe, to kill lice and not to think—as he had been doing for a long time.
    He couldn’t do it. The trembling in him wouldn’t stop. He rolled round on his back and stretched out flat. Above him nowwas the sky with the little clouds of flak shot. They dissolved quickly and drifted along before the wind. Thus he lay a while; then this too he couldn’t stand any more. The sky became a blue and white abyss into which he seemed to fly. He turned round and sat up. He no longer looked at the town. He looked at the camp, and he looked at it as if for the first time he expected help from there.
    The barracks dozed as before in the sun. On the dance ground the four men were still hanging on the crosses. The squad leader Breuer had disappeared, but the smoke from the crematorium continued to rise; it had only become thinner. Either they were just burning children or orders had been given to cease work.
    509 forced himself to observe everything carefully. This was his world. No bomb had hit it. There it lay as pitiless as ever. It alone ruled him, and all that out there on the other side of the barbed wire didn’t concern him.
    At that moment the flak stopped. It hit him as if a belt of noise, closed tight round him, had cracked. For a second he thought that he had only been dreaming and had just waked up. With a start he turned round.
    He had not been dreaming. There lay the town, burning. There were fumes and destruction and it had something to do with him after all. He could no longer recognize what had been hit, he saw only the smoke and the fire, everything else had grown blurred, but it didn’t make any difference. The town burned, the town, which had seemed unchangeable, as unchangeable and indestructible as the camp.
    He started. He felt suddenly as though behind him from every tower all the camp’s machine guns were turned on him. Quickly he glanced round. Nothing had happened. The towers were as empty as before. In the streets, too, no one could be seen. But it didn’t help; a wild fear had suddenly seized him like a fist in the neck andshook him. He didn’t want to die! Not now! Not any longer! Hastily he grabbed his clothes and crawled back. He got entangled with Lebenthal’s coat and moaned and cursed and pulled it away from under his knees and crawled on towards the barracks, hastily, deeply excited and confused, as if he were fleeing from something other than death alone.

Chapter Two

    BARRACK 22 HAD two wings, each of which was commanded by two room seniors. In the second section of the second wing lived the Veterans. It was the narrowest and the dampest part, but that worried them little; important to them was only that they were together. This gave each of them more power of resistance. Dying was just as contagious as typhus, and singly one easily succumbed in the general croaking, whether one wanted to or not. Several together could defend themselves better. When one man felt like giving up, his comrades helped him to hold out. The Veterans in the Small camp didn’t live longer because they had more to eat; they lived because they had preserved a desperate remnant of resistance.
    In the Veterans’ corner at this time lay a hundred and thirty-four skeletons. There was room enough for only forty. The bunks consisted of boards, four above one another. They were bare or covered with old rotting straw. There were only a few dirty blankets over which, each time the owners died, there was a bitter fight. On each bunk lay at least three or four men. That was too close even for skeletons; for shoulder and pelvic bones didn’t