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the menfolk of Lodz who had heard word of this dreadful act of depravity and kidnap. Kolzac was taken by his hands and feet, he was beaten and whipped, and then he was hung from a tree in the nearby woods, his body left for the birds and the wolves.
    Elena Kruszwica was returned to Lodz, insane with rage and grief, and in the care of the town’s doctor she was retired until the birth of her son in August. She was seventeen, and once her strength had returned she took her son and fled from Lodz into the Carpathians, the home of her child’s father. Her parents searched for her in vain, searched until the Germans invaded in September of 1939, and when the Russians came less than a month later, once again to rape and assault their country, Elena’s family understood that they had lost her, that they would never see her again. Her mother took her own life as the Russians stormed into Lodz, and her father – a strong and stubborn man – ran from the house screaming and was cut down in a hail of communist gunfire that left his bodydecimated and bloody, lying there in the snow much as the body of his only grandson’s father had done in Lublin.
    Elena, finding only solitude and poverty in the mountains, returned to seek work and shelter in Krakow. It was here, towards the summer of 1941, that she was seized and questioned by Nazi troops. Proclaimed a Jew, a belief and faith that had dissolved in the moment of her lover’s death, she and her four-year-old son, Haim, were transported by cattle truck to a town in Upper Bavaria, just twenty kilometres north-west of Munich.
    Here they found their home for the next four years: a place called Dachau.
    To describe the horrors, to feel the suffering, to understand the pain … These things happened, and yet later there were those who tried to convince the world that such things had never taken place at Dachau.
    Those summer months – July, August, on into September – became the birthing ground of true revelation for Elena and her four-year-old son. A ranking officer, Wilhelm Kiel, a man indoctrinated with the Nietzschian concept of Man and Superman and the birth of the true Aryan Race, took this twenty-one-year-old Polish Jewess to his quarters, a wooden barrack room separated from the junior officers by a gravel walkway. Here, she was subjected to barbaric acts of sexual depravity, subjugated and overwhelmed, forced to the limits of sanity as he vented his sadistic fervor. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired, a Gestapo prodigy, and sexually insatiable. He would return from his duties to find her cowering beneath the bed, her son clutched in her arms, past tears, past screaming, and he would stripe her back with heated wires, tie her down and sodomise her, beat her across the back, the shoulders and the breasts with the flat of his hand, burn her with cigarettes and a crude brand fashioned from a length of metal into the word
JUDE
. Laughing, spitting, shouting, holding her by her hair as he bent her backwards over the table, raping her time and time again as her son crouched in the corner and watched, wide-eyed and confused.
    She fell pregnant, he beat her into a miscarriage; she became infected with lice and swellings upon the skin that burst and seeped, and Kiel threw handfuls of salt over her; he cut her hair to the scalp, branded the back of her head, and as he thrust himself into her he would shout ‘Jude! Jude! Jude!’
    Such things as these, daily, week after week, running into months, years it seemed, and beneath this torture and abuse her memory of Poland, of Jozef Kolzac, of Lodz and Tomaszow, of everything she had been and possessed and believed before KZ Dachau, faded into a distant blur. She became a nonperson, feeding her son with scraps of blackened filthy bread, sucking moisture from the threadbare carpet into which rain had leaked through the bare wooden floor, nursing her wounds, her shame, her debasement. She ceased to consider herself a human being, and