Good luck homing pigeon

Chapter twenty five: no mans land (date unknown)

The place I'd called no mans land was a place I hated. Well-hated wasn't the exact word for it. You know how many people would hate something so passionately, just because they didn't understand it? Coming from me, it sounded hypocritical. But when you were stuck in a place, thinly placed between mortality and the afterlife, you couldn't help but hate it. You didn't know what was going to happen to you-you couldn't even assume it. It was a place of darkness, garbled voices and pure confusion. Some of it seemed real, but most was just plain impossible. People who shouldn't have been were there from time-to-time. Just talking to me, telling me to make up my mind soon. Small touches, soft mostly, around my face and neck. This was life-not the way I knew it to be. This was no mans land. Limbo.

The most I'd seen in no mans land was a stranger. I couldn't see her, couldn't smell her, could barely even hear her. But I knew her touch. It was gentle; like one of mama's haute couture dresses she sometimes brought home for her clients. I knew it was a woman's hand too-no man had hands that small, or fingers that slender and smooth. Sometimes I wondered if it was mama; dabbing me with a cold compress like she did when I was sick. Even if mama was in Belson, who could tell whether she was still there? She could've moved on, or worse. She could've ended up on the other side of no mans land-waiting for me to join her. Perhaps it was her, trying to convince me to come with her. Again, it made me frustrated. I didn't know for sure if it was mama, or just a plain figment of my imagination. There was no telling.

Figment or not though, the stranger was kind. First thing I felt was water-warm, clean, and something smooth running over my skin. I was being bathed, like an infant. I didn't know if it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I could've sworn I smelt just the slightest hint of...roses. Briana once wore perfume just like that-before the invasion, that was. She was sixteen-beautiful, spoilt, free. No mans land was no place for the likes of her. My long-gone sister-the girl destined for more than life in a camp.

Sometimes the stranger talked to me. As she pushed spoonful's of hot, salty liquid through my frozen lips, she told me to swallow. Other times, when she would just stroke my head, she would say she was sorry. Sorry that she wasn't there for me before. I felt like telling her that she didn't need to apologise-her prescience, however real it might've been, was the only thing that made me happy. I couldn't speak. I tried and tried to force a squeak, even the slightest of whispers from my mouth. I just couldn't. So many things I couldn't do, except think. It was both a way of maintaining my sanity, and a risk of losing it altogether.

I wasn't dead-not yet. But I certainly wasn't alive either. If the choice was mine, I'd have to make a decision soon. I am Kate Christoff. I was eighteen years old, I could sing like a bird, and I'd been a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly two years. The guards called me filth, the block leader called me kid, the flock called me homing pigeon, and the man I loved called me his sweet. Whether I got to pass these gates a free woman or not, I would always be Kate. Nothing would take that away from me; especially not now.