Chatterbox: Inkwell

Here it is, my dear readers, the extremely sad story to commemorate and help people remember the terrible period in history called the holocaust- PART ONE Remembering The Sky     
Auschwitz II/Birkenau, 1943

“I am not a Aryan-I will never be.” Those were the words Father uttered when we first arrived at Auschwitz.  And they were quite true. The moment we climbed out of the disgusting, terribly hot  cattle cars, and had been enveloped by the stench of burning bodies, (I thought then it was burning rubber)  we were all glad that we were not the race that had committed this horrid thing. All around us, other Polish Jews scrambled out of the car,  confused voices calling out names.
“Daniel-Danny, where are you?... Peter!.... Josephine, I can't see you!” I clung on tight to  Father's hand as  we where marched through cruel iron gates, our luggage collected  by prisoners in striped shirts.
“Make two lines. Women over here! Men-there!” A tall, thin lipped Nazi  barked out the words. “I said, women over here, and men there!” I looked desperately up at Father, hoping we would not be separated. How wrong I was. This was not a cozy little place, where they would take pity on a  thirteen-year old Jewish girl with only a father. “Move it, idiots!” The Nazi was heading in our general direction. Father knelt down by me.
“Listen, Lisle. We have to part-for now-but we'll meet each other again. Tell  those men you are fifteen-here, I think, being older helps.”  I could feel tears welling up, but I resolved not to cry as I hurried into line. The two lines of women and men were marched into separate areas. As we parted, Father looked over at me. And he smiled. A sad, lingering smile, in which his eyes showed everything he wished to had to time to say with me. Then something peculiar happened. He started crying. I had never seen my father cry before...and here he shed his last tears...under the smoke-filled, silent sky. And that was the last time I ever saw him. For less than a week later, his body was consumed by the fires of Auschwitz, second only to those of hell.
Tears rolled down my face, running over my lips, a strange salty taste. But I did not have much time to mourn, for then even further sorting began. Our line continued onward towards a cruel-faced man and his comrades. In his white gloved hands he held a baton, pointing it to either of the sides were women and children huddled in frightened groups. I did not know it then, but this was Dr. Mengele, the notorious Angel of Death. As I reached him, he squinted at me, and asked my age, and I said  fifteen, obeying my father's last command. His eyes raked over my emaciated figure, starving and unhealthy from weeks in the cattle car, and I saw his baton waver slightly in the direction  of the more worse-off looking figures, but he paused, staring at me with cold cruelty, and finally gestured the other way. I hurried towards the group. The will of God had saved me. As I looked at the electrified barbed wire surrounding me, thrusting upward, like deadly sabers, I was reminded of the ghetto, where I had spent two long years. Trapped away in Lodz, Poland.

To be continued