In February of 1945, I was so weak I could no longer scratch the lice bites. They won. I was being eaten alive, my translucent skin stretched tightly over my bones. So transparent was this covering of flesh that I could actually see my bones. I was in a state of despair. One must be in communication with others to become oneself. There had been no friendly conversations, no human gestures, no words of kindness between myself and other inmates during the previous ten months. Against a backdrop of terror, wariness, and brutality it was impossible to have affiliations with others. A transport arrived and I was to participate in my last selection. I was a walking skeleton without the strength to lift my feet completely off the ground. With a flick of the hand I was a Muselmann--my fate was clear. I don't know if a part of me died then or if I was irrevocably changed. I know only that there is no way of describing this unless you have been there.

We, the Muselmanner, were escorted to a holding barrack, where our numbers were recorded. I was asked by a man in a prisoner's uniform, "Deine Nummer?"

I replied, "Acht, drei, eins, funf, null"

"Deine Nummer?" he repeated to the next in line. The sound of his voice was familiar."Moishe Avrum?"

"Warum kennst du meinen Namen?" "Du bist mein Bruder!"

My brother, whom I had not seen in five years, was a Schreiber, a prisoner who worked as a clerical worker. In this nightmare, the Nazis brought two brothers face to face--one processing the other to his death. When recounting this I am distraught, as it is intrinsic to human nature to try and bestow a meaning or a significance to the past. I know that there is no meaning, nothing on which to base understanding and no means to communicate the evil. l fear that if we understood we would be one step closer to the evil. Truth is always on the way. It is not fixed to a time and never becomes final. Survivors are fixed in a time unknown to others. We cannot fly back to these truths and perhaps they are better left hidden in our memory. Within limits, we may have knowledge of these events, which we can hope will improve us. Reason and logic will not guide the thinker undisturbed on this path. Sometimes thought cannot be expressed in language.

It has been said thought is the talk that one's soul has with oneself. Because thought involves visual and not just reflective elements, this particular time is even more difficult to translate into words. Because thought also involves a kind of dwelling place for the mind in which man can live, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue living in this world without conveying those thoughts that pertain to this past horror. l find myself in the curious predicament of having to explain the impossible.

     That which is fundamental to understanding the fate of those during the Shoah is also that which is most obscure. The voices of 6 million Jews and millions of others who perished are trapped forever in silence. Chance and luck intervened in fate's path. Only the living can recount how this intervention occurred to save them. The dead cannot speak of the equally unlikely interventions that thwarted their resistance and will to survive. No one was willingly murdered at the hands of the Nazis. It behooves all of us who survived to attest to the strength of the human spirit, which fought under the most atrocious conditions, and to the struggle of those who perished or continued even in the face of death.

     My chance encounter with my brother, just as I was to be deported to certain death, is what saved me. My brother's luck was the Nazis' discovery that he spoke six languages, which resulted in his labour as a Schreiber. One of his responsibilities was to record the numbers of the Muselmanner.

From 1941 to 1944, Bumi worked in the Hungarian labour brigade in Kosice, Khust, Lotassa, and in copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia. In Bor, he escaped a massacre of approximately 3,000 Jews in the labour battalion. He was captured by the Germans in October 1944, in Beograd, and sent to Flossenburg in January 1945.

     I remained in the Muselmann barrack for the next three to four weeks. Every day my brother brought me bread, potatoes, and whatever he could find to nurture me back to life. My number never surfaced on the list of those who were sent from the barracks to the killing centres. I don't know how Bumi intervened or what he did for me to avoid this final step in the killing process.

     In the orb of the Nazis, one's survival almost always caused another's death. This was most certainly true in my case, for quotas had to be kept and the Nazi bureaucracy kept meticulous records. In the Muselmann barrack one number or one life could be substituted for another. There is example after example of this--we were often warned that if prisoners dared to escape a random selection would be made from among those who remained and these men would be shot. Do we praise those few who risked their lives in defiance of the Nazis, knowing that it was almost impossible to survive even if they managed to escape the confines of their killing centre? Do we applaud these courageous acts as testimony to the battle of the human spirit for survival by men and women who chose to resist and, in doing so, in all likelihood would not succeed? Is this death with dignity or do we hold them responsible for the slaughter of their fellow inmates? There is no triumph; moral confusion is all that can be ascertained by these questions.

Because I was emaciated and unable to keep down food, the camp doctor, Karl Schreider, who was a privileged inmate, reduced my food ration.

After regaining weight, I went to work in the kitchen and did general cleaning of the Appelplatz, barracks, and Nazi offices. The Germans were horrified about the possibility of contracting typhus. They had been subject to years of propaganda in which the world was polarized into two camps: the vermin and victims of vermin. Lice and other forms of vermin, which to many included Jews, were horrible and feared by the common man. This fear translated itself into the most literal of actions. Keeping the barracks and latrines clean was one of their highest priorities.

Many textures of fear surfaced in the different circumstances in which I found myself. Twenty-four hours a day in the Muselmann barrack, I lived in terror of being discovered. I always anticipated the pain of the next blow while I worked in the quarries and on the railroad. The torment that my mind would never rise from the embers of its near-destruction was always with me. Indeed, l questioned whether I could even refer to myself as having a mind as I once knew it.

From the beginning of April 1945, the sound of aircraft became more frequent during the day. On 15 April 1945, the day before the inmates of the camp were sent on a death march, my brother brought me to the typhus ward and told me to keep my body covered. He knew that the hospital would not be evacuated. Two days later, about 3,000 of the 15,000 inmates that were evacuated from the camp returned from the march. We left the infirmary and joined them. Because the SS men and Wehrmacht were in a chaotic frenzy, Bumi and I returned to the hospital fearing that there may be another evacuation.