As I marched, I drank in a crisp morning breeze. After a long, frigid winter, the earth was reawakening. Instead of trekking through snow and ice on the way to the workshop, now I passed wildflowers along the road and orchards and fields in full bloom. Springtime reminded me of Warsaw, where friendly street vendors sold roses, geraniums, crocuses, and poppies, and Mama would fill every vase and pot until our apartment was as colorful and fragrant as a garden.

Like buds bursting from the earth in springtime, the residents of Oświęcim were reemerging from their homes. Sometimes I’d catch glimpses of them seeking little moments of normalcy, as if the SS soldiers had never occupied this area and life was as it had been before the war. Gray-haired couples took leisurely strolls, young people turned their faces toward the warm sunshine, and children laughed as they raced across open fields.

What struck me most were the girls my age, girls with long hair, flowing dresses—thin from strict rations, perhaps creases of worry across their brows, but finding whatever joys there were to be found in wartime. Girls who picked wildflowers with friends or darted behind trees to steal kisses with handsome young men. An existence so different from my own. Sometimes I felt as if those girls didn’t exist at all. They were just products of my imagination, the result of a fairy tale too idyllic to be true. They weren’t reality. Reality was hunger, labor, suffering, death.

Then they would avert their eyes when we walked by, and I remembered that their lives were real. And so was mine.

It was my second spring in Auschwitz. While the world around me teemed with new life, my own deteriorated. Springtime was when the ache for freedom became most acute.

At last we reached the main camp, and they ushered us into Block 26, the same block where I’d been registered. Inside, the massive room was already packed with inmates. I didn’t see Hania, so I supposed I’d lost her somewhere in the crowd. I fell into line, but I was too far away to determine what was happening.

After I’d been in line for a few minutes, a familiar whisper came from behind me. “Have you noticed recent transports have been given prisoner number tattoos?” Its owner extended her forearm to display the ink etched into her skin.

“That’s what they’re doing to us?” I whispered, staring at the bubbles of blood mingling with the ink. “How badly did it hurt?”

“Not as badly as this.”

At her words, I turned to look at Hania, wincing at the fresh gash on her forehead.

“Courtesy of the Beast,” she said as she rubbed excess dried blood from the wound. “Well, I should get back to my kommando, but before I go, what are we going to do with our day free from labor, shikse?”