“Arbeit Macht Frei.”
This Nazi proclamation, a promise wrought in iron letters across the gate of the camp, had been one of my first impressions of this place when I had been brought here by cattle car over ten months ago.
That, and the smell of death, which by now had so permeated my nose, lungs, and clothing that I no longer noticed it as it rotted all around me.
Arbeit Macht Frei. Work makes you free, indeed.
It had not been the backbreaking toil we were forced to suffer here, or the senseless inhumanity we suffered at the hands of our Kapos -- other prisoners who had been elevated to guards by the commandant -- that had liberated us. In the end, it had been the Americans.
They had seen those words, too, those iron sentinels upon the gate, after coming down the railroad tracks outside and witnessing the stalled boxcars filled with dozens of the dead, stacked like cordwood. As they drew closer, their voices began to roar with an intensity that no one on the inside could muster. Those who had not been gassed or worked to death had had their spirits broken, and rage and anger and fear had become but a shadow, a memory too strenuous to recall.
Arbeit Macht Frei.
I looked toward the gate, toward the road that marked our freedom, but my view was obscured by a Kapo, and behind him a guard. He barked an order above the din to keep us all from rushing the entrance, waving his machine gun to enforce his control until the end. To their left, another group of guards rallied to try to delay the inevitable.
Amidst the insanity, my eyes locked on those of my beloved, who stood near the barracks, gaunt in his tattered, gray inmate uniform, with the pink triangled patch sewn to the sleeve, like my own. He managed a smile as the American troops forced themselves through the gate and the SS guards grappled with the reality of defeat.
I smiled back, and with my right hand, made a move to scratch my ear lobe.
It was then that one of the guards looked at us and opened fire.
