This is my current entry for write-invite.com. The prompt was 'The secret is to keep breathing'.
The railway sleeper is made of pine, and only about 30 centimetres shorter than Vladislaw, my work-mate. Vladislaw's uniform is baggy. I have seen him naked dozens of times, mostly when we are being de-loused. His body looks as if it is made of white pipe-cleaners covered in dirt.
We have to lift the sleeper into position in the little trench that the pair before us have dug, and then two Kapos on punishment duty hammer it down with mallets. Only those who are on full rations can do this job, because it really takes it out of you, and requires the kind of intense burst of energy that we are no longer capable of, no matter how much we are beaten. I will not let myself think about whether I might ever be capable of that kind of feat of exertion again.
I have recast my mind into a series of what I mentally refer to as wooden channels. My train of thought is a shiny metal ball bearing, like those at the Krupp works where I used to be a technician in the test laboratory before the war. The ball bearing gets dropped, and I often have to stop it, and so I imagine a little block of wood being stuck into the channel to stop the thought from reaching the bottom. If it gets to the bottom too often, you stop being able to survive and I don't want to stop. I want to carry on. Why? That's another wooden stop: a little block of oak with dovetails on it and plenty of glue.
I have put a stop in with regard to the pile of pine railway sleepers that we have to get through before we next eat and before we can lie down. Exhaustion is worse than cold. Cold goes away in the summer, but exhaustion, like hunger, never goes away. We drop onto the wooden slats of the bunks into which we are packed and we never move. Human beings would roll over and kick each other and get their elbows in each other's eyes, but we just lie still. If one of us feels really reckless, he squanders a bit of energy on emitting a low groan, but otherwise we remain completely inert until it is time either to relieve oneself or to get up for more work.
I am worried about Vladislaw. I thought he was a survivor, like me. When I call myself a survivor, I don't mean necessarily that I am going to survive, but that I am not going to just sit down and die like so many of them do. Hunger, cold, exhaustion, call it what you will. They just die. The Germans don't even have to expend a beating or a bullet or any poison gas on some of them: they remember their orderly and dignified home, or their job, or their loved ones, or their pocket-watch or an old wallet that they bought in Bruges on a trip there once, and then they realise what is happening to them, and they die.
Vladislaw's stops aren't working any more. He keeps remembering things. He keeps thinking about things he should not think about. Like the number of railway sleepers in the pile over there. Like the amount of effort we will have to expend before we can lie down. Like the wateriness of the potato and cabbage soup we had this morning.
I think about the air, when I need a change from just stopping thoughts going down and down. There are millions and billions and trillions of molecules in every breath you take. Every breath you take contains at least a few molecules that were exhaled by Julius Caesar at the moment he died. That sounds ridiculous, but it is a statistical certainty.
I try to imagine the dazzling quantity of molecules in my nostrils and my lungs, and I wonder what Julius Caesar was thinking at the moment he exhaled all those molecules of which I am now partaking. And I remember that in those days there was no Nazi party, and no Hitler, and none of this camp, and no railway sleepers to lay. And I reflect that, even if the Nazis win this war, eventually sun, and wind, and water will blow over everything they have wrought, and sweep it away, and the world will be clean again.
I think I am going to make a supreme effort and kick Vladislaw. Maybe a sudden inward rush of breath will impart some of the guile and determination of Julius Caesar to him. Kicking him is the best way I have to show him that I love him, and will always love him, even if he gives. Even if he gives in and leaves me here on my own, I will forgive him, and will still love him.