The Children’s Train

Thirty-six wooden bunk beds with triple tiers lined the walls and ran down the center. Six people slept on each wooden plank. They had meager covers, no pillows, and no mattresses.

Eva helped her mother into the bunk. “Did you see the railroad tracks? They ended here. There is no leaving this place.”

“There never is,” Helga answered.

Eva gave her mother her ration of bread, and watery soup, made with rotten vegetables and a trace of fatty meat. The one heating stove in the middle of the barracks went out.

Eva lay down in the bunk next to her mother. It would be the last night she was allowed to stay in the women’s barracks. The next day she would be transferred to the kinderlager, the children’s barracks, to help with the children in the overcrowded housing. That night, her first night in hell, she stared at the bottom of the bunk above her. Written in Yiddish graffiti was: “NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE.”