Short Story Excerpt, The B

Here's an excerpt from a short story I'm working on entitled "The B."  This and other stories will be appearing in my new book sometime in the future.

We called it The B.  We never referred to it by its full name.  None of us could do it every day if we had used its full name.  We just said, “hand me a can of The B,” and did our jobs.

I heard that it was used as a pesticide.  I didn’t know anything about pests.  All I know is that it killed humans real good.  Two minutes, tops.

Before the war, I was a miner.  I had hauled coal for the better part of my thirty seven years.  The heavy labor had given me a muscular build.  I guess that’s why they selected me for the job.  The only other reason I can think of is because I was a Jew.  Juden.

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I arrived at Birkenau on February 1^st, 1942.  I was on one of the first passenger trains to enter this new camp.  I call it a passenger train, but it wasn’t.  It was a cattle car.  And from the day I was abducted from my home in Konigsberg, seven days prior, I had been standing.  We were hoarded into the car by Germans shouting at us in a language we didn’t understand.  They pointed machine guns in our faces and stabbed at us with the butts.  They locked us into the cars with padlocks. 

My friend, Gregor Kuznitisin, who I had known since the day I was born, attempted to jump off the train.  They shot him four times in the chest.  After he fell, the man in charge walked over to Gregor, pulled out his Luger, and shot him in the head.  That was the last time I ever saw anyone try to escape.

For seven days and six nights, we traveled through Poland to get to Birkenau.  There were 77 people in my car when we left Konigsberg.  When we arrived at Birkenau, only 40 were left alive.  The others died from despair.

On the seventh night, we arrived.  The train pulled directly into an encampment, passing under the German words, “arbeit macht frei.”  We were told that this meant “work will set you free.”  This was another of the kraut’s lies.  No one was ever freed.  In the 757 days that I spent at Birkenau, I never saw anyone go free.

The padlocks were cut and we were thrown onto the platform, much the same way we had been loaded onto the train in the first place.  We were separated by sex, men to the left, women to the right.  That was the last time I ever saw my neighbors alive, Mr. and Mrs. Nikolai Rozentov.  I saw them two days later when I saw their bodies lying on a pile of hundreds.