I lost count of the time; it could have been an hour, a year, a day for all I knew. I just lost sense of time. It may sound strange, but I did. Time no longer mattered. In a sense, nothing mattered. I was confused and scared, that was all that seemed to matter. The people seemed to know when the journey was going to end, they would all move closer, no one wanting to be near the door. Then suddenly the crowd surged forward, scrambling towards the doors. At first I thought this meant freedom, but then realised they were scared. I pushed forward with them, not wanting to be left behind when the train moved off. I lost my mother in this struggle. I searched as hard as I could for her after that, but to no avail.
I never saw her again.
No matter how vividly I describe this to you, you will never quite understand just how bad life there was. The conditions were terrible. hundreds of people shoved into areas that probably weren't even fit to hold half of us. Every day some of the stronger ones were taken out to do work on the trains, but what i can say is that not all of them came back, not ever. And you could tell by the looks on the survivors faces that they hadn't been let loose.
The first problem I suppose was lice. They were everywhere. They crawled all over you, in your hair, on your skin, on the wood of the bunks, in the horrible, stiff striped uniforms we were made to wear. They even crawled over the small scraps of food we were given.
Bodies.
Never as long as I would come to live, which would be a very long time, would the sight of a dead body leave me. I had never anticipated seeing one, to be honest, I had never anticipated any of this would happen. Yet still it did. Out of everything I would come to see, all the races, even those who were said to be the worst, it was the humans who won the prize for the most lethal, most bloodthirsty, the most terrible. In my eyes, you couldn't get anything worse than a human, they never improved, and I know that better than anyone.
I would limp around the border, following the huge barbed wire fences that kept us enclosed. I would gaze up at the tall watch towers, and at the Nazi guards that were watching over us. They would stare down at me suspiciously, almost as if they were daring me to strike back, but I never did anything but continue my walk. It became almost a routine. Something that kept me sane.
During the day I would just do the tasks that were required of me, like; working in the small factory, just left of the place. I would stagger back to the bunk I sometimes occupied, hands bleeding, arms aching. Then walk, or sit. But night-time was the worst; because it was that the terror called imagination that was let loose. creating nightmares of the horrible thing they would do to me. In a way, I was more scared of my dreams than anything. More scared of the demons roaming in my head, than the uniformed ones watching over our every move.
It was, I suppose, almost as if the world had become black and white to me. Not literally, but I saw people as just another empty shell that may have once been something. Not as something whose individual qualities stood out to me. No. I saw not the humour or kindness of those imprisoned with me. I saw just saw a body that would soon be lying stiffly on the ground, riddled with holes from the hungry attackers of lice. i had really one emotion, now I was here, and it wasn't pain.
Indifference.
