Curiosity ~ Lucidity ~ Humanity
The wind blows hard enough to rattle your bones, lifting dust from dried mud and lodging it in your throat until you cough up something thick and metallic. Ghosts drift past—bodies so wasted you can see the barracks through their hollow bellies. Their eyes are dark, empty basins as they shuffle from building to building, stepping over spirits who’ve stopped rising. No families survive here—only a crushed community bound by hate. Even the birds avoid this place. Death silences the sky.
The smell in the air was of unclean bodies and human waste mixed with the horrifying scent of cooked meat [RS2] while soft flakes of ash fell from the sky onto the ground, mimicking a winter wonderland with grey mush.
In the middle of it all, in the muck and human runoff, stood a boy holding a cheap, worn violin. His name was Johann. He had been there a year; he would not last another.
The skinny thirteen-year-old turned the wooden tuning pegs carefully, plucking a string to test the sound until the violin sounded right to him. (It was actually a little out of tune, but nobody there would notice. Or care.)
“What will you play for us today, abschaum?” asked a guard, spitting to the side after calling Johann scum. “Something jolly? Or another funeral march?”
The boy looked around at the phantoms in rags staggering under the weight of malnutrition and disease. He saw Stanko lying on the steps, the life nearly gone from his eyes. Johann remembered how much the man loved beekeeping.
“Flight of the Bumblebee.”
“You want a challenge today, ja?” said the guard.
Johann ignored the man, raised his bow, and began to play, walking towards Stanko, whose eyes lifted, a barely-there smile touching his mouth. The young violinist played his heart out, hearing the bee veering through the air and buzzing the human below. As the music came to its conclusion, Stanko gave him one last smile and breathed his last, a look of peace on his face—even in this godforsaken hellhole.
Johann bowed his head at the loss of another Papo, and he wondered, as he always did, what little piece of knowledge disappeared with the death of a man who just loved bees.
“Sehr gut, dreckiger Zigeuner,” the guard said and walked away. Johann didn’t notice being called a filthy gypsy anymore. Members of this hellish community picked up Stanko to take the dead man to the place of smoke and many in the yard bowed their heads at the passing of a man who should be at home tending to his garden.
Johann felt a little pull on his ragged sleeve and turned his head to see Marika, an eight-year-old girl who had been here for two months.
“Mami.”
One word, and yet, that’s all Johann needed to know he needed to play another song. He followed the girl into another barrack and braced himself for the smell of the half-dead forced to exist five to a bunk, three bunks high, with only two waste buckets for four hundred.
“Where is she, little Marika?”
She took his hand and led him to the middle of the barn-like structure which let in more cold air than it kept out. Many shaven heads poked out from their dark sleeping holes and then disappeared. They knew someone was about to die.
“Mami! Mami!” The little girl jumped onto the bunk next to her mother who barely opened her eyes, but managed to smile a greeting all the same. A relative mercifully grabbed Marika’s hand and offered to take her to the playground.
“What is your favorite song, Mami Lakatos?” Johann asked her, and he bent closer to hear.
“‘Opa Ela,’” she whispered. He smiled and began to play the lively tune. Her eyes came alight and Mami Lakatos even managed to hum along. At the end of the song, she smiled one last time, gave her thanks, and passed.
He walked quickly out of the women’s barrack; he wanted to run from the smell and sorrow, but he respected these women too much to embarrass them.
That day, Johann’s violin helped twenty-six people to their rest. A slow day.
A hand shook his shoulder, and Johann woke from his exhausted slumber.
“We have a job for you, Zigeuner,” said a guard, shining a flashlight into his eyes which teared up. They led him outside into the night. Guards were gathering, laughing, and joking, as if they were on a holiday instead of in a place of madness.
“Play something joyful, Johann!” said one of the kinder soldiers. “Do you know Night and Day?”
“Ja, Wachmann Hubert.” Putting the violin on his left shoulder, he lowered his head and began the opening chords.
He’d lost track of the number of times he played evening concerts to allay the soldiers’ boredom. At all hours of the night, sometimes twice.
“Night and day, you are the one,” sang the guards as they pulled men, women, and children from the barracks. “Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.”
If they found a corpse, which happened often, they were thrown to the side to be dealt with later. Horror filled Johann’s mind.
“Whether near to me or far, it’s no matter, darling, where you are.”
The soldiers continued to sing while methodically forcing the prisoners out of the dank buildings and lining them up. Dogs ran up and down the lines, nipping at children who strayed.
“You are lucky, dreckige Zigeuner,” yelled the Wachmann to the waiting masses. “You are being transferred!”
The soldiers joined in a sarcastic cheer.
“The trains are on their way, but first, you must shower so you do not take your filth with you.”
A few women cried out, sobbed, and begged only to be hit in the head with a rifle. The men immediately began to shove, fight, and run, but in their weakened state, resistance was futile. Shots rang out in the night, and more corpses were added to the pile by the doors.
Little kids clung to their mothers’ legs, sucking their dirty thumbs. The kids didn’t know their destination, but everyone over eleven knew their fate.
“Keep playing!” shouted a guard, cuffing him hard. Johann lifted his bow and played a descending legato phrase, tears falling in rhythm to the notes. He began playing Ederlezi, a song his father used to sing to him. Johann lifted his head and began to call his fellow Roma to him for the slaughter of the lambs.
“Sa o Roma, sa o Roma...”
People marched. Some collapsed on the way. The soldiers shot them in the head with their pistols.
“Play us one last song, Johann,” said a weak male voice next to him.
“Ja, Papo Baro,” Johann replied and played Loli Phabay, a traditional folk song of goodbye, and the group began to hum. Soon, they sang as loud as they could as they walked to their death with heads held high and their sight clear for the first time in months.
When it came time to die, they did so not with a whimper, but with a harmony so heartbreaking, even a couple of the guards wept.
This is what happens when no one fights back.
Bio-Fragment: When not wandering through old books and forgotten corners of history, Kimm Antell can usually be found arguing with the dead, who continue to provide excellent material.