Hello, friends! Here another chapter of "The Labyrinth", translated into English by Bea Valkyrie. Again, thank you, dear, for your kindness. Please let me know what you think! Leave a comment! Thank you!

The cold really was chilling. It came from every pore, throbbing inside our bones. The Krakow ghetto was anything but warm. Even in the scorching summer days, the accommodation – sometimes with more than four families housed in only three rooms – were very cold, dark, and mouldy. At sixteen, I was old enough to understand that our situation was not temporary, as such, but also not permanent. It was more like being in limbo, I suppose, waiting for something, or waiting for nothing…

That oppressive room held nine people; my father, my mother, Anna, me, and a family made up of a couple and two small children of ten and four years. There was also somebody's twenty year old son, always quiet and serious, who never opened his mouth to speak but to thank us when we shared anything we could. We slept on the floor, on mats so thin that our whole bodies ached. By that time, we were already used to it, so we lay and slept for whole nights without dreams. We simply existed.

We arrived in the winter of 1940. The Krakow ghetto was formally established as such in March 1941, but the Hirsch family could already have been considered veterans there, because we had already lived there for more than three months, with several other grieving families in the same situation. Before that, we had, of course, experienced hardships in our own home; from the beginning of the war the treatment of the Jews had gone only from bad to worse. Before long, the space that had housed 3000 people had to accommodate 15,000 humans in only thirty streets and just over 3000 rooms. Many people weren't as lucky as us, if you could call it luck, and wandered the streets of the ghetto and begging for others to let them in. The air was heavy; foul and oppressive. We lived so tightly packed together and in such an unhealthy environment, that I don't even know how I did not manage to catch some kind of horrendous disease like tuberculosis, typhoid, scabies, or anything else which is prevalent in places with such large concentrations of people. In the end, we got accustomed to it. When I turned nineteen, in 1943, we were so confined, that I believed I would spend the rest of my existence in those thirty streets. But that was not what happened.

In March of 1943, specifically the quiet, cold night of the thirteenth day of the month, I was sleeping a dreamless sleep in our hovel of an apartment when I was awakened abruptly by my mother, shaking me violently.

- Daughter, wake up! Get dressed quickly, we must go down…

Still dazed from sleep, I tried to be as agile and quick as I could, tugging my clothes on over my nightdress. Anna, who at sixteen was faster than lightning when she needed to be, was ready and mocked my difficulty finding shoes in the dark because mother had asked us to keep the light off in our… bedroom. I went to the kitchen and found my father with Petr, the young man who lived with us, saying that we needed to go down to the courtyard, because the SS had appeared by surprise and were organizing queues. The other family had already gone down.

- What a time to make a call, they know everyone in this side of the ghetto is fit to work, so why we… Anna started.

- Shh! Silence, Anna. They told us to go, so we will go down to them, and perhaps it will take no longer than half an hour, - my father said, sharply.

We descended the stairs to the courtyard with all our clothes and our work permits, the Blauscheins, in our hands. Logically, Anna and I did not have any training, which would even enable us to have a permit, as neither of us had been able to continue our secondary education since the start of the war. But in the ghetto you could get hold of anything, trade was the currency we lived by. My father exchanged an old, but valuable, Swiss watch for our blauscheins. The black market flourished at that time. I stayed quiet, knowing our blauscheins would spare us any of the useless, most demeaning jobs available in the ghetto. But down the streets seeped evil, and I could tell something was different in the atmosphere of our cramped building. Some SS men quickly descended the stairs themselves, flinging doors open, kicking and screaming at us to go faster and form queues.

I ran as fast as I could, crowded in amongst however many others, trying not to lose sight of my family. However, my parents were put in a queue with older people, and me and my sister in another full of youths and adults who could still be considered strong. A strange tremor invaded my body and I felt so terribly cold. I felt that, from that point, I might never see my parents again, and it scared me. I shouted to them, and could hardly hear my father telling me to calm down, that everything would be over soon and we could go back home. As if those three icy rooms could ever be our home.

I carried on, determination in my eyes, with Anna at my side, hoping everything would be over quickly. Things quickly turned to a macabre tale, with pushing and shoving and screaming and the shots of guns fired randomly into the crowds. The queue my parents were in was quickly ushered out of one of the four entrances to the ghetto, and more people came to join our own queue. It was the first time in three years that I had seen my parents leave the ghetto, and I was terrified – I had never seen it happen before and perhaps now their departure would be more significant than our entry to that horrible place, distressing, as it had been. I tried to scream for my parents' attention, but a brutish SS man turned, and before I could react, slapped me squarely in the face, leaving me stunned and surprised. Nobody, not even my father, had ever beaten me before. My face burning with pain and anger, I kept quiet, my sister looking at me with amazement. Even in the face of everything that was happening, I was most often the calm one.

After the slap, everyone in the queue was pushed out of the ghetto too. I waited to catch a glimpse of my parents outside the ghetto, but I saw nothing except confusion. After we left, I began to hear more shots and stirring around us which only served to make me more terrified. Anna and I were pushed into a truck and taken to the train station in Krakow with thousands of other Jews, or so it seemed. We were put straight in freight trains, the kind used to transport cattle, and I became so thirsty that I may as well have been in the desert. Even through this torment, I never took my eyes off Anna, and she did not take her own from me. When they finally opened the door of the cart, after hours of waiting, despite the relatively short trip, I now realized that this was rather worse than our situation in the ghetto. We were taken to the labour camp, Plaszow Concentration Camp, on the outskirts of Krakow. I had heard a few comments whispered between gritted teeth about the new camp during our time in the ghetto, but I had never paid much attention because I had never thought it would come to that.

It was with horror that I realized there were very few older people there – everyone seemed strong and fit to work. I knew it was unlikely I'd see my mother or father, but the hope kept me alert, though I did not say anything to Anna – after all, we did not know what was happening. But when Anna was put in another line composed of younger people, teenagers like her, I began to protest violently. I tried to lie about my own age, but an SS guard examined my blauschein and didn't let me join Anna's queue. She went back onto the train with some others, and that was the last thing I remember before passing out.

- Helen, Helen, my love, wake up! Wake up! Are you having that nightmare again? - I heard it in the distance, Sammy's voice, and I opened my eyes to see him embrace me suddenly in the bed. As he always did when I woke from my usual nightmares, he looked at me lovingly, but with apprehension. - Did you dream about the liquidation of the ghetto again, love? - He asked.

- Yes, of course I had dreamed of it again, but I tried to disguise it, passing it off as tiredness.

- If you want, call Anna. There's a good time difference between New York and here, she'll be awake, I'm sure…

- No, I'm fine. Really, it's just tiredness.

- Are you sure? Shall I ask the front desk to bring up some tea?

- I'm fine, Sam. I'm going out to the balcony to get some air, okay?

- Sure. I won't come though, because I need to get up early for rehearsals tomorrow.

- Yes, stay in bed, please! I'm fine, I just need some air… - I said.

I opened the door to the balcony, stepping out and looking down at Vienna. The city was quiet, very quiet, as was normal at that hour of the night. I took deep breaths until my heart had calmed itself. But I was unsettled, it was as though being there was wrong, as if being in Vienna was a challenge to him, as if being there was not right, as though I was unworthy of walking the streets of Vienna, the his city. Remembering made me shiver, and I left the balcony.

Going back to the bed quickly, I hugged Sammy tightly, as if to make sure he was still there. He, Samuel Horowitz, was real, and so consequently I, Helen Hirsch Horowitz, was also real, and not some cartoon or imagined person as I was in Plaszow, beside him…