Flesh and fat were luxuries of childhood, in that window before starvation was understood.
My loose, thickened skin — coloured the same as my mama’s, who I’d never see again — held my cracked bones in as they rattled up the road, away, away from there.
My hair — the same colour as my sister’s with the auburn tinge, whose hair I’d never braid again — was still short from the soldier’s forced shaving but it was growing; growing slowly, but growing.
My scalp — still burning from the bites of bugs sucking my starved blood, burrowing into my skin — was covered in sores with an incessant itch and a ceaseless sting.
My knees knocked as they rattled up the road, building the bulging bruises that coloured my limp limbs. My determined hands, which had white-knuckled their way this far, domed to shelter the bluest bulge — reminiscent of my brother’s treasured bouncing ball — on my left knee.
My flesh — alive but not fresh — was weeping waterish whiteness that pooled and glistened beside the dry blood that sealed scab to skin.
Amidst mountains and valleys of emaciated corpses with familiar faces, my sores from unsanitary incarceration had erupted into volcanoes: boiling blood ruptured, releasing the gas and burnt hair that had been inhaled and trapped within.
My weeping wounds revealed what my grit concealed.
My back straightened through spasms as I spat on a scab and brushed it with my rag of a dress. My tongue pressed again and again into my palette, muscles moving and saliva springing — mechanically, magically.
My scant spit smeared away some of their dirt, their mud; my hurt, my blood.
My cries were contained by recalling stories of heroes from history that hid in my head — their examples hauling me upward, forward and onward, to be sitting here where my bones rattled, my wounds wept, and my heart hoped that my mother, sisters and brothers waited somewhere ahead. To survive the threshold of a hell previously unimagined, to walk upright through the gates of an inferno and be sitting in this truck, my imagination had to lie and lure me on with the promise of the warm windows of my old home, improbably glowing.
Now, with a moment to sit, no longer on the run, I could begin to look into the pit where my body had been flung — I’d postponed the pain and perhaps fully would until old age when mind’s threads come undone…
Two of ten toes were broken. Three of ten toes were missing nails. Four of ten toes balanced nails, now dead. My eyes stared fixedly at the three nails still growing.
My new clothes came from the soldiers who’d liberated the camp. The ones who’d led us to food. They told me I was a hero; I wished they’d paid me no heed. For they’d seen the secret of how dirty, dirty, dirty Auschwitz was.
Food was finally in my belly but disease now lived there too. My body was working, I was alive, but my belly hurt and hunger morphed into malnourished agony as my body rejected mouthfuls too large following meals of just occasional snails and stale trails of crumbs.
It was too much after not enough: I needed a toilet — quickly! I needed my dignity. I could wait no longer.
Waiting for the war to end, waiting for reunions, waiting for warmth, waiting for death, waiting for life, waiting for the truck to stop; waiting for the toilet.
The wait was over. I found a toilet. There was no paper — but I needed my dignity.
I saw a copy of Mein Kamf sitting on the shelf above the basin.
I needed the paper; I took the book.
I needed my dignity. I began to cleanse.
Siân Darling is an acclaimed video director, arts curator, album producer and creative strategist in the social impact sector. She is an artist manager with One Louder Entertainment working with statesmen songwriters Uncle Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly and the shining talent, Jess Hitchcock. Siân is the proud co-Chair of human rights media organisation, Right Now and Ambassador for climate action group, Groundswell. In 2020, Siân produced the Kev Carmody tribute album, ‘Cannot Buy My Soul 2020 Edition’, a charting album of Aboriginal truth-telling in 42 songs sung by some of Australia’s greatest talents. A regular contributor to Art Guide producing intimate portraits of visual artists, Siân also does ongoing work with Kimberley legend, Uncle Sam Lovell, developing and curating the Sam Lovell Collection at the State Library of WA. In 2020, Siân founded the Museum of Inherited Memories and continues as Senior Curator.