Six Digits

Victor sighs heavily at his clothes, which he quickly changes when he wakes up in the morning. He had slept well. Of course, it was unfortunate that his clothes were old and worn out. The boy didn’t worry too much, though, because he knew that the school would give him new clothes, from trousers to coats. Victor touched his friend’s bare heel that was sticking out from under the blanket. The girl yelled in sleep, but she didn’t wake up. The girl’s eyes opened wide in surprise when he touched her head. Vic smiled and said, “It’s time to get up.” “Breakfast will be late.” She jumped down and said, “Oh, just a moment!” However, she refused to release the blanket. The boy smiled and walked away, giving the girl time to quickly change her clothes. “All right, I’m ready!” After five minutes, she said. Victor complimented her, saying, “You dress quickly.” Lyra was wearing a light summer dress in a color that looked like waves. It surprisingly looked appealing on her. “Practice, » the girl said with a heavy sigh as she walked towards the door. “Shall we go?” Victor opened the door with a nod, and the two teens walked into the hallway. The young guys had only gone a dozen steps when the lights in the hallway went out. Suddenly, there was a sea of people pressing against them. They knew they were on a train because they could feel the movement and the sound of the wheels clattering in a dark cabin. The brakes were squeaking, so it was clear that the train was stopping. A lot of people were upset; some were screaming and crying. A strange waggon, seemingly incapable of moving, squished them all together. Despite her fear, Lyra didn’t have time to scream, “The train suddenly came to a halt!” Victor, unaware of the situation, was attempting to protect the girl from the painful shocks emanating from all directions. The girl recognized the doors by their squeaky opening. Inside the dark coach, there were barking sounds. “They were voices, » someone said. Along with loud barking dogs, Lyra saw a sea of people dressed in black and striped clothes. The girl didn’t know what was going on, but people pushing her from behind made her move forward so she wouldn’t fall. The crowd also engulfed Victor, who was standing right next to her. “Alle raus!” The people around them seemed to understand the yells. There was nothing for the two young men to do, so the crowd just dragged them outside. All of a sudden, it was very quiet and… scary. People were whispering instead of yelling, but Lyra was powerless to intervene as the very old-looking train pulled away from her. She’d seen other trains at the stop, but this one looked more like a goods train. At that very moment, a boy ran along the train. He was very young — maybe fourteen years old or a little older. “Halt!” Someone yelled. The man was clearly holding a gun, dressed in black. Lyra couldn’t remember what the man’s outfit made her think of after all the stress. The boy didn’t stop; he tried to run faster. First time she saw how to kill. The sound of the line pushed this almost-child forward and onto the stones of the railway slope. Lyra screamed when she saw the body fall. Victor first froze in shock and then ran to the boy, but a severe blow to the face stopped him. The young man placed his hands on the boy’s face and felt a substance trickle down his fingers. He realized it was blood. Victor, unable to stand, moved without looking, believing he couldn’t see anything. Someone shoved him and said something. After taking his hand off his face, he realized that he could see pretty well. The girl was gone, though. There were two rows: women and men. Lyra’s well-combed hair flashed for a moment, but Victor wasn’t sure if he was seeing things. But people in black clothes who didn’t care, who reminded him of something, wouldn’t let him stop. They made him stand in line, and if someone didn’t obey right away, they started beating him badly with long belts or something similar, while their faces showed no emotion at all. Victor didn’t get it, but he didn’t need to. Initially, they divided the women into two asymmetrical rows, revealing Lyra once more to Victor. He led the clearly confused girl, along with a few other girls and women, to the gate. As soon as Lyra turned around, feeling lost, she was struck by what appeared to be a belt and hurled forward. Vic wanted to lash out right away, but the other men held him back by shaking their heads in silence. It looks like it was impossible to say no here… Finally, their group moved forward. A man with wrinkles and what appeared to be a German outfit glanced at Victor and touched his hands. He then raised an eyebrow, nodded, and pointed to the left. Victor wasn’t sure what to do next, but the guys in striped clothes provided him with guidance by leaving signs that stated, “One must go where Lyra had gone.” He went with Victor. The young man tried to remember where he had seen this black outfit before but couldn’t. As soon as he passed the test, he forgot all about history. *** Lyra was yelling when she was stopped by something, which made her run back to where the queue was. She couldn’t see Victor and didn’t know what was going on. A woman grabbed her arm and tried to explain something, but Miss Vonson couldn’t understand what she was saying. Miss Vonson wanted to cry, run away, and dream, but the men in black uniform moved quickly, pushing everyone into a queue and hitting them hard to enforce their orders. Lyra had never experienced such physical abuse before. When she was a child, she had been hit for a grade, but they stopped to avoid leaving marks. However, that incident was more akin to a disturbance than the current situation. Strange men in black who had some signs on their lapels that looked a bit familiar were now hitting the people who were standing there with blank looks on their faces. The atmosphere was so eerie that Lyra was at a loss for comparisons. Just like Viktor, she had learnt history but lost it, so she didn’t know who the SS men were. They didn’t wear outfits or have any symbols on their shirts. The woman behind the girl tried to explain in French, “I need to feed the baby.” “After desinfection” was the uninterested answer. Lyra knew she had to speak French now. As the column went forward, it split in half. The girl moved with the others, but she seemed to be in a strange trance. Finally, she saw a man in the same black outfit as the men who had been beating people. He looked at her with fear in his eyes. She saw symbols on his lapel that made no sense and terrified her. Lyra didn’t understand why that outfit scared her so much. However, she was quickly grabbed in the chest, which hurt and felt in a way that didn’t seem to bother her, before she had time to think about it. A man in black nodded and said something about Canada. Since he didn’t speak French, Lyra could only understand that one word. Examining Lyra, the man said squeamishly, “Wir sollten sie dem Arzt zeigen, sie sieht nicht jüdisch aus.” “Jawohl, Herr Hauptscharführer!” replied one of the men watching the line. He poked Lyra in the back with something that hurt, causing him to walk faster. She walked slowly and looked around in shock, but then she heard a yell and felt another blow, which made her jump forward. They led her and a few other women into a building that housed only long tables. The girl looked around when she heard loud screams, but she didn’t understand anything until she saw the other women start to take off their clothes. “Why are they there? Why?” Lyra wondered as she looked around in her outfit. For a brief moment, Lyra resisted the urge to cry out in pain due to her reluctance to remove her clothes. The strange men in black were hitting her so hard that the girl couldn’t even close her eyes. Finally, they moved away from her, clearly waiting for a chance to keep doing the exorcism. A man’s voice yelled, “Ausziehen!” Lyra noticed that someone was telling her to take off her clothes. It was like the girl’s tears were coming out on their own, and she started taking off her dress buttons with shaking hands. Lyra had to remove all her clothes to prevent further pain, so she followed instructions and remained as naked as the other women for some time. The many books and descriptions Miss Wonson had read in school gave her ideas about what could be done to her. But the truth was scarier and harder to understand. Some of them had their private parts shaved, as well as their heads. All the women wept due to the rough and painful treatment, and as a reward, they received a punch to the face. Then, a black object was placed against the left hand, and it was bit very hard. After biting into the confusing black object, red streaks appeared on the skin surrounding the fingers. The girl observed that a significant injury had occurred. After that, they dragged everyone naked down the street to a new shower-equipped location. Later, Lyra realized she was lucky to be in the bathroom and not the “red house.” The girl was terrified at this point that she didn’t even think about fighting back. One of the girls tried to hide, but they hit her instead. They only left her alone when she was bleeding and stopped screaming so loudly. Lyra gained a clear understanding of the consequences if she did not promptly comply with the instructions. Miss Wonson failed at her attempt to transform into a warm person and ended up in the shower room, where boiling water poured from the ceiling and burned her. She then screamed and jumped out of the shower as ice-cold water hit her. When Lyra was given a rough, torn dress and something that looked like a cap, she discovered that she was entitled to wooden shoes called “stugas” or something similar. “What is it? Where am I?” she asked. She spoke in French, a language she had learned from the column. One of the women spoke French, which was lucky because the others spoke a different language. She said, “It’s Auschwitz, » and then she just stood there. Even though the girl knew awfully little about “that war, » she did know what “Auschwitz” meant. Lyra finally knew why she couldn’t do the transformation. The next question, “What day is it?” caught her throat. Lyra asked in a strained voice, and when she heard the answer, she almost passed out. Before her birth, a long time ago, she was destined for certain death. They killed people in this camp. This was something the future girl, who had been sent to a death camp without reason, remembered well. Lyra didn’t recall the chase into the barracks or the instruction to unleash their leashed dogs on the women and girls. She only came to her senses on the wooden bunks. As Miss Wonson looked around in shock, she realised she must be crazy or dreaming because Auschwitz was too real to be true! What was around her couldn’t have been this unbelievable place. The woman sitting next to her wanted to cry, but she told Lyra, 16, in a quiet French voice: “You can’t cry, or they’ll beat you, » said Maria, the woman who spoke. “If the SS is around, you have to show them your number and teach them how it sounds in German. It’s your name now.” “I am Wonson, though!” The girl tried to say no, but she didn’t really know what “death camp” meant yet. “Now you are this six-digit number, » she said. “You have no name left, and you won’t have long to live, because we’re all going to die here.” “They’ll kill…” Lyra’s eyes turned black, but a powerful slap woke her up right away. Maria told her, “Don’t even think about it.” “They’ll burn you in the boiler!” The girl tried to remember everything she had learnt about this time period for her history test, but sadly, she couldn’t. In reality, Lyra believed she had learned very little. The girl only knew that the SS was “Jerry, » which is what the British called the Germans during that war, and that they had won the war with their “cousins.” That was all. The fact that I didn’t know much was challenging for me to accept. The notion that those individuals might face burning, humiliation, and mistreatment also weighed heavily on me. She was now a six-digit number, too.