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I am back on the ramp, standing by the doors. A warm, sicken­ing smell gushes from inside. The mountain of people filling the car almost halfway up to the ceiling is motionless, horribly tangled, but still steaming.

“Ausladen!” comes the command. An SS man steps out from the darkness. Across his chest hangs a portable searchlight. He throws a stream of light inside.

“Why are you standing about like sheep? Start unloading!” His whip flies and falls across our backs. I seize a corpse by the hand, the fingers close tightly around mine. I pull back with a shriek and stag­ger away. My heart pounds, jumps up to my throat. I can no longer control the nausea. Hunched under the train I begin to vomit. Then, like a drunk, I weave over to the stack of rails.

I lie against the cool, kind metal and dream about returning to the camp, about my bunk, on which there is no mattress, about sleep among comrades who are not going to the gas tonight. Suddenly I see the camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others maybe dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work…

The lights on the ramp flicker with a spectral glow, the wave of people — feverish, agitated, stupefied people — flows on and on, endlessly. They think that now they will have to face a new life in the camp, and they prepare themselves emotionally for the hard struggle ahead. They do not know that in just a few moments they will die, that the gold, money, and diamonds which they have so prudently hidden in their clothing and on their bodies are now use­less to them. Experienced professionals will probe into every recess of their flesh, will pull the gold from under the tongue and the dia­monds from the uterus and the colon. They will rip out gold teeth. In tightly sealed crates they will ship them to Berlin.

The SS men’s black figures move about, dignified, businesslike. The gentleman with the notebook puts down his final marks, rounds out the figures: fifteen thousand.

Many, very many, trucks have been driven to the crematoria today.

It is almost over. The dead are being cleared off the ramp and piled into the last truck. The Canada men, weighed down under a load of bread, marmalade and sugar, and smelling of perfume and fresh linen, line up to go. For several days the entire camp will live off this transport. For several days the entire camp will talk about “Sosnowiec-Będzin. ” That was a good, rich transport.

The stars are already beginning to pale as we walk back to the camp. The sky grows translucent and opens high above our heads — it is getting light.

Great columns of smoke rise from the crematoria and merge up above into a huge black river which very slowly floats across the sky over Birkenau and disappears beyond the forests in the direction of Trzebinia. The “Sosnowiec-Będzin” transport is already burning.

We pass a heavily armed SS detachment on its way to change guard. The men march briskly, in step, shoulder to shoulder, one mass, one will.

“Und morgen die ganze Welt…” they sing at the top of their lungs.

“Rechts ran! To the right march!” snaps a command from up front. We move out of their way.