Four Scraps of Bread Read Online Free

of death.
    Everything had been set up to create this life of despair. Fear, uncertainty, and lies were carefully cultivated around us and in us to push us into madness or death. I cannot forget several of my fellow prisoners who would help each other at night to hang themselves in the toilets at the end of the barracks, using scraps of their clothing as a noose. Our entire identity was stripped away from us: mementoes, clothes, even hair or teeth if they were crowned with gold. However, fraternity lived on in the hearts of some of us, and shone forth.
    I can still hear the warm voice of a fellow prisoner, who had been in the camp for five years. She would say to us, “Trust in life. Let us chase away despair. Let uscultivate friendship among us. Let us gather our forces. Let us not lose courage; the weak do not live here. We need to survive. We need witnesses.”
    These words came from an unknown sister. They took root in me and have long since helped me to get through moments of exhaustion.
    If today, though aching all over, I am crossing the bridge of memory, I do so to keep alive the memory of those women and men whose lives were stolen but who, right until the end, wanted to give us the courage to live.

C HRISTMAS 1944
    I will not forget Christmas 1944. Two days’ break from our work at the time as weavers. The first time in a year of deportations … Two days without working, far from that damned factory, where from morning to night I threaded bobbins!
    I had no gift for that job, and I did nothing to apply myself to it. I did display plenty of false enthusiasm, dazzling with innocence; for once my guards were taken in by it. I did not get hit one time in three months, which was quite a record.
    A great surprise awaited us on the evening of Christmas Day. The factory presented us with a banquet: a little block of margarine, two slices of dried sausage, and, to make our joy complete, two tablespoons of granulated sugar. What a lot of stars in a wooden spoon.
    We savored this feast slowly to make it last longer. It was good. It was a party for our palates, and a warm sense of well-being took hold in us. It took so little to encourage our taste for living, our survival instinct.
    We became poetic and talked about our favorite menus. We recited poems. The momentary sweetness of the present put us back in touch with our past. “Do you remember that friend? That place? The man who sold roasted sunflower seeds at the corner of the roadwhere the school is? That book I loved?” For a few minutes we became human beings again, with a story that went beyond these moments that we had snatched from both the past and our uncertain future.
    My friend saw me as someone; we had memories in common and thoughts to share. Not everything was dead in us. There was a past, even if rather brief. These were privileged moments, so fragile and so measured. We grabbed them and locked them away in our hearts like an extraordinary gift.

W AITING
    The wait is so long
    In the depth of winter,
    The sweltering heat of summer
    Full of the unknown, menacing
    For worn-out seconds
    Crushed minutes
    Endless hours
    We await
    Bread
    Gray soup
    Day
    Night
    We wait
    With eyes
    Which defy
    Plead
    Put up
    Die
    We wait in silence
    With hands ready to take in
    To stretch out
    To hold tight
    To give up
    We wait for the end
    Of an exhausting job
    With our legs swollen
    Tense
    Heavy
    Painful
    From forced marches
    From roll calls prolonged for the sake of it
    We wait
    Behind the barbed wire
    With our hearts ready to burst
    Breathless with impatience
    Beaten down with anger and impotence
    With hatred and anxiety
    We wait
    With a glimmer of hope

T HE F INAL M ARCHES
    The Allies were advancing.
    Behind us the sound of heavy gunfire was getting closer and closer.
    Where were we going?
    The exodus is long before liberation.
    How many tens or hundreds of miles?
    I measured the distance by the effort it took.
    I dragged my footsteps, each of which was an