We would be black-and-white pictures in textbooks. We would be clavicles and cheekbones and bald heads to learn from. We could smell the bodies of our own kind. We were sitting on lice-infested beds when the British soldiers came. The liberators. The heroes that shuttled us through hastily assembled outdoor showers. They hung sheets on the barbed wire to give us privacy, but modesty was something we’d lost. We walked slowly to and from the showers in striped bathrobes, a pattern none of us could look at later in life without pause, without bile rising. Without fear. They made swings for the children and pushed them into the sky. They deloused us with DDT, spraying it into our hair and underneath our skirts. We sat next to each other on the floor, covered in sores. Some of us were dying of typhus. Some of us were just dying. Some of us drank water and picked through tin cans of food, though we couldn’t eat as much as we wanted. Our bodies couldn’t take it. We vomited. We sorted through discarded clothes and disintegrating shoes.
