Good luck homing pigeon

Chapter five 3rd August 1942

This chapter does contain some non-consensual material-if it makes any of you uncomfortable you don't have to read it.

This is the last time I could date the events of what has happened. Our time during Vélodrome d'Hiver and Drancy was difficult for us, but we still had access to the simplest of things. Like toilets, clean taps, and lack of constant, controlling supervision. I never kept a diary during that time, but my husband knew well enough, the dates of when we arrived and when we moved. It was after Drancy when, like me, he simply lost track of time. In fairness to us both, it was never a very pleasant prospect to count the days one had spent in hell. And so up to this point, I'm afraid that whoever is reading this will just have to bear with me as I stumble through the events thousands of others would've sold their souls to forget. Again, people might ask why I would write down a worlds worth of pain that followed me for years. It's still hard to justify it, but here I am now. Tears in my eyes, and a pen poised almost carefully in my scarred, crinkled hand.

We'd been at Drancy for two weeks now, and though it was a little better than Vélodrome d'Hiver, it wasn't by much at all. The first thing we encountered was something we couldn't believe ourselves! Men and women, who wore white armbands, with their hair grown out, and weight proportioned healthily on their bodies. They called themselves 'Fellow Jews', meant to make our time at Drancy fairly easier and-maybe even enjoyable. They took us all for fools! From the very beginning, it was easy to figure out what they were-Kapo's. Jewish police, controlled by the Nazi's as illusions to fool a bunch of 'stupid Jews'. Those 'friends' were the ones to guide us into the camp, and explain that things were never as bad as what people had said it was. It was them who told us that we would get fed, three times a day; all generous, hearty meals that really brought strangers together as a community. It was them who took us to the registration office to be signed up for work detail, them who stood aside as the people at the other end of the desks called us 'criminals', and them who led us to the mass complexes, telling us to get a good nights rest. We hated them from the start. With their smug smiles and their 'happy-go-lucky' take on this place, it was as if lived their lives in a Technicolor film.

During those two weeks though, I couldn't have thanked mama enough for her clever, brilliant, hard-working mind. For it was her who thought of packing up our entire pantry, and taking it with us. It was her who pushed ahead in the administration line to get us easier jobs, in kitchen duty. And every time we lined up to collection our rations for the day, it was her who made us hang back at the end of the line because the potato pieces in the soup tended to settle at the bottom, which was only served to the last participants. When the time came to be extremely resourceful in a place where survival was increasingly difficult, mama really lived up to the part when she took charge. We would've barely scraped through this place alive, if it weren't for my mother. That, I would thank her for in ways I'd never imagined.

In Drancy, we had to work. Work brought us food, and food kept us going. Mama, Briana, Antonia, Alina and me worked in the kitchens; mostly just cutting vegetables and slicing the bread rations. It was stiff, boring kind of work, but it was an easy job compared to the others. And Angelo, who was seen as 'too strong and able' for mere kitchen duty, had been assigned to mend boots in the back of a trading warehouse in the centre of the camp. It wasn't as tiring or as dangerous as the ammunitions factory was, but he did come back to the complex, later than the rest of us. More often than not he was pale and exhausted by the time he got a hold of his dinner. And when he collapsed into our bunk, he often said nothing at all as he huddled close to me and drew the bed sheet up to our ears. I wish I could've done more to ease his tiredness; but he wouldn't even talk to me. And after all that work he went at, just to get three, measly scraps of food a day, bothering him about his feelings wasn't going to help.