The clouds were a dark gray. But it wasn’t going to rain.

That would relieve them of one sorrow - thirst. Yet, mercy was not on the minds on any Nazis. If people were to look back, they would think the clouds represented the dead one’s souls. Motionless, yet were large, heavy, cold and bleak.

It was at the point where vengeance - vengeance for nothing they had done - was expected. Hope was nonexistent. Smiling was simply a memory. Laughing was a luxury not allowed. Triumph was unheard of amid such terror.

You would always remember the screams of terror, and no matter how hard you dug your fingers into your ears, hummed the lullabies taught to you by your grandmother, they would always haunt you. Their screams would be forever lost in your nightmares, and hidden in your dreams.

Fifty years later, survivors can look back, and remember the deathly silent nights. If you weren’t quiet, you were shot. All you could hear was the faint beat of two hearts, the same two hearts that resided in the two bodies of the two strangers, laying next to you in the barely one foot wide wooden slot, that the Nazis said were your beds. Sometimes, when the injured had stopped their moaning, and the diseased finally slept, or when the mothers ceased their tossing, you could hear the children blink. The silence only added emphasis on how real it was.

I remember those months of intensity. Within the first week, my entire family had perished. My father and younger brother, immediately among arrival, were sent to the crematorium. I, still, sometimes, find myself staring at the ashes left in the fireplace. Remembering, always remembering, the smell of burnt flesh, and the piercing screams of those burned alive. My mother was already sick, even before the trip to Auschwitz. Her body was thrown, unburied, among the hundreds of others the sixth day after my arrival.

I was lucky, compared to the rest. Two days after my own disembarkation off the boxcar, a classmate - Izela Harponz, appeared in my barrack. Her usual jovial face was blank of all emotions, leading me to believe her own parents had left us, and gone to the angels.

She was the only thing that kept me sane at my stay at Auschwitz, which is more than most can say.

After both of our parents left us, we had no more family. My brother was dead, and her sister was in Holland. I later found out her sister had been shot to death. Izela and I were never close friends when we where in school. Her two best friends were German, and her parents were one of the many wealthy Jews, where as my family was not.

Yet, amid the smells of death, smoke, and hate at Auschwitz, she became close. It’s funny, to look back, and remember how much she loved cats, how her favorite color was yellow, how she wished, above everything else that peace would come to Europe, and how she would look at the bread in distaste, day after day. I revive the memories, bring them to life before I sleep sometimes and seem to remember more and more each day. Doctors say that you lose your memory in old age, but it seems as though I’m getting mine back.

The one of the most vivid memories I have is when a woman in the bed directly diagonal to Izela and myself caught the common cold which the Nazis refused to treat. At first, it was a small, curable fever. As they days wore on, she began hacking and coughing. She woke up sputtering in the middle of the night once. I remember hearing her wheezing.

A week later, she didn’t return to our barracks at curfew. She was gone the next day, and we didn’t see her the day after that. We knew she had passed on, probably from her weakness; she fell during her labor work.

Maybe two days later, I felt the same fever on a small, unclean forehead. I heard the hacking, coughing and wheezing from the same mouth that would frown upon seeing the stagnant bread. Instead of her usual distaste toward the evening meal, she eyed it hungrily, devouring the stale bread in seconds. I look warily at her, knowing what would happen. Without hesitating, I handed my only piece of bread to the only important person in my life, who was currently hunched, and pale before me.

I remember her just staring at me for a while, before we heard the guards calling for line. She blinked once, and ate the bread quickly; devouring it as if it were as sapid as any food she'd had before this; this land, this place, this hate. When we stood, she slipped her hand into mine, and after the guards called role in the freezing weather, we were sent into our barracks once again.

This continued for about two weeks, I only ate soup and bite or two of bread, she finishing it, and I helped her labor hours, until the last of the coughing subsided. Her wheezing subdued, and her temperature returned to normal.

I thanked God everyday, because, I still don’t know what I would have done if she had left me that early. Gone mad, I imagine.

But not every story has a happy ending, and five months after her sickness subsided, another one arose. But this one was not of the body; this one was of the mind.

I had left her post at the labor factor, as I was usually working beside her. As a guard had called me over to him, and he had new instructions for me, only a few meters away. I was barely gone four minutes, when I heard it.

It was a loud, echoing thud. Something hard and thick, coming in contact with human flesh. Then I heard a whimper, the same whimper I heard every night for two weeks, five months previously.

I swear I heard a loud, heart-wrenching scream, but many said it was I who screamed, not the one who needed to - Izela.

A loud, angry male voice yelled words of rage in German. The words your father would beat you for, if they came out of your mouth. I remember cringing at the sound of them, so harsh and uncaring. Towards the end of the Nazis rant, his voice became raspy, quiet, and almost deadly.

Izela, still lying as a small heap on the floor, tried to get up. Her shoulder’s where shaking from the exertion of the movement, a trick of blood coming from the side of one lip. A large wooden pole was still held in the guard’s hand, and he brought it down, hard, again, on her back, this time. She fell once again, and this time, I ran to her side. The guard looked at me in distaste, spit on my face and said in an angry whisper, “Filthy Jew.”

He looked from Izela to myself, with malice gleaming in his eyes, and I automatically knew something bad was to come.

The guard once again brought down the wooden block on Izela’s head. I remained in my crouched position, holding Izela tight, feeling her tremble, and then nothing.

At first, I thought she was dead. I thought my world had fallen from the little grace it had left.

I was wrong, because, once again, mercy was not on the mind of the Nazis.

The guard grabbed her by her once long, glossy black hair, into a standing position. His previous assaults making her too weak and dizzy to stand. He heard her let out the faint whisper, a prayer. He looked at her with such loathing in his eyes; I recoiled from my position on the ground.

That was when he pulled out the pistol. Trauma supposedly stops time - but I know from experience that isnt true. It was just as quick as everything else in life. There was a gleam of metal, and a devastating sound. "Boom" doesnt describe it. It was after it, that time slowed. I remember how her head went back, her raven hair flowing back. How her mouth formed a small "O" shape, and even her usual paleness couldnt describe the lack of color. So, I did the other thing I could do. I stood up just in time for her to fall into my arms.

The guard was no longer a guard, but simply a murderer now. He looked at me, the same look of hate, and told me to take her, fallen in my arms, all the way to the grave site, which being a concentration camp there where many. But, he meant the original one, nearly one mile from the labor factory. I gave him a faint smile, and heaved her bridal style into my arms and began my walk.

For one mile, I walked. One mile of pure torture. I was tired, but I walked quick and didn’t stop once, but more importantly, I never looked down. I never saw her face. I never saw the blood oozing out of what was left of her head. I never saw what would make my world spin.

That mile, that long, horrible mile will always be ingrained in my head. The blank, gray stones; the dirt; the lack of color; the everything.

When I arrived, I laid her among the other bodies, my eyes diverted, looking everywhere but at the small girl in my hands and walked back to the labor factor. This walk wasnt as nearly as long. Nerves, emotions... things like that seemed to stop. Just like Izela had stopped.

In the labor factory, everything was as usual. The murderer was still standing there, just gazing down longingly at the puddle of blood, Izela’s blood. He looked up as I resumed my post, and threw me the same, terrifying look over his shoulder as he walked out.

I still remember that look. It’s the look I get when I hear the name “Hitler”, or “Auschwitz”.

I never saw that officer again, not once, in my three more months of captivity, before Auschwitz was liberated. When I asked about it though, I was told he was killed on the way to prison. Nor, did I ever mention Izela to anyone. You might say it was my secret, or the murderer’s. The thing is, every time I sit down; finally ready to tell my story… I remember the murderer. I remember his look of rage, disgust, of hate.

It’s almost like he is taunting me, as if I tell, he has won. As if he had power over me, as if I was a coward, and I caved.

But, that's just it. It's only "as ifs". He didn’t, and won’t ever, because he was the one shot on the way to the jail cell, and I’m the one throwing hateful glances over my shoulder at his ghost.