Glass—it was glass that shred through her feet without forethought. It looked up at her, mocking and glimmering in its opalescent glory, the light of the passing moon scintillating over its surface. Still, she stumbled forward, fearing for what laid behind her as much as what lay before. Powdered and fine, she forced her legs through the glass, the warmth her body provided it quickly reducing it into water droplets that collected on her skin. She drew closer the few scraps of thread that have since replaced her prayer shawl, providing her with only the memory of warmth. She held them close to her heart with a tender fierceness that her Mama would always say would land her in trouble one day.
She emerged from around the corner of the building, huddled close to the red-brick walls. To avoid being in the line of sight of the watchtowers was to also avoid and soldiers and pistols in which resided in them. Shaking from cold, exhaustion, and grief, she let herself sink down onto the snowy, mud-covered field. The winters here were cold. Papa would always tell her that Polish winters were unforgiving—nothing to be compared to the winters of Germany. She knew now. The cold raked at her scalp, her bones, her lungs, and forced her to expel clouds of smoke. Her little clouds mimicked those that bloomed from the showers in which many of her bunkmates never came back from. She watched as her cloud rose and rose above her. It swirled and dissipated past her line of sight. Past the fence that cooked the flesh of those who desperately sought for an end. Past the stone wall that looked down and laughed at her meek stature—spitting on the freedom of range in which she once knew. She knew her cloud rejoiced and mingled with the stars that winked down at her—a family friend welcomed into a homely get-together.
The wrenching in her gut had shaken her from her sleep. It was so unlike the familiar gnaw of hunger she had consummated affairs with every night. She woke to find blood that stained the seat of her pants—the dilapidated planks on which she slept with seven others, the row of planks no longer than the bed she had left behind in Germany. The Kapo would kill her for it. She would whip her until she drew blood—the same blood that now stains those slats. Whip her until she drew the very same Jewish blood that ran through the Kapo’s very own veins. Once she cried for mercy then, and only then, would she be handed to the Schutzstaffel soldiers.
She could feel the ghosts of those hands that had dealt with her before—that had once wandered along the jutting edge of her clavicle—the skin between her breasts. They were so unlike to hers after the four months in which she had spent in Birkenau. The hands were gentle with her in the moments when she pleaded, as if they enjoyed lingering in and savoring her grief. They were not so when they took her by force, reveling in her tears and plundering what they pleased. Hands of many—clean, polished, and smooth—had left a film of grime on her skin that made mockery of the breaths she once shared and the bed she once warmed with the lover that once was.
They do not come for her any longer. Her face had once harked a status of beauty, but now her skin stretched thin and taut over her cheekbones. Her eyes once filled with light and a tenacity for adventure now cowered into her skull—spirit defeated. A husk of what she once was stands in her place. As does her child, small enough to nestle into the palms over her hands—starlight illuminating the slick, wet coat surrounding its undeveloped fingers and toes—a vessel that was denied the chance to be filled with life.
And she so wept looking down at her child to be. Wept and rejoiced in what this extinguished light had blessed her with. Her child, her future, her love, her hope, her warmth, her light... it would not be brought into a world that would soil and tarnish it so. She craned back her neck until the fuzz of her scalp kissed the cold bricks that pilfered her warmth. The stars—in her teary visage—gleamed and smiled and whispered lyrics of love and hope and welcome. The stars were Papa who loved his neighbors and smiled and pressed kisses to her brow with his rough beard. They were Mama who murmured wise words and lead with deft hands and smelled of home. They were her lover who brushed back her hair and swept her off her feet and held her close. They were the bunkmates she lost in the mud. They were the children who undressed and ran into stone bunkers. They were the gypsies, the Jews, the young, the crippled, the guilty, and the innocent. There were one-million—no two. Perhaps, even more. But they all smiled at her, as did she. Six million—at least six-million stars smiled down and wept with her holding her babe.