My Oral Presentation

It’s a dream of György "Gyuri" Köves (George Koves), based on the chapter 5 of the book "Fatelessness" written by Imre Kertész.

Where am I? Maybe I’m in… no please no, I’m in Auschwitz, the place where all began. Oh, what’s that smell? It’s disgusting; it comes from that factory, oh no wait, that’s not a factory, it’s another crematorium! Oh what’s going on? This smell remembers me the soup and the bread that we always ate on Auschwitz, probably the worst food that I ate on my life, but it was important for us to eat it because, as someone said on the camp, “the first rule for a good soldier is to eat up everything that is put in front of one, because there’s no knowing what tomorrow will bring”. Also, I remember the Gypsies that we saw next to our camp, I never considered them criminals, but they were also in a “concentration camp”. Oh, this is really weird, because also I discovered that this type of camps, as Auschwitz, has being here “working” since at least 4 years, and no one in school talked about them ever, and the worst thing is that this was not a concentration camp, this was a “Vernichtungslager”, an extermination camp!

Wait, I’m not in Auschwitz, I remember that in the third day we were transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp, which was older than Auschwitz’s one. It lies on the crest of one of the elevations in a region of hills and dales, and the air was really clear, not as the one of Auschwitz. Everything in Buchenwald was great compared with the first camp: the bathhouse was warmer, the barbers were more careful, and the food was better. I also remember that they gave me a yellow triangle as well as a broad strip, and that in the middle of the triangle, was a big letter “U”, while on the strip was a printed number, “64921”. This was the number that identified me on Buchenwald, and it was important for me to pronounce it well in German. Oh, I remember that there was also a crematorium but only one, and even that wasn’t the purpose of the camp. It’s fair to say that I too soon came to like Buchenwald.

Oh, but wait, I was also transferred from Buchenwald to Zeitz in the trip in which I was separated from the boys because of the alphabetical order that the soldiers used to decide who goes to which camp! Zeitz was a tiny concentration camp compared with Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There was not a bathhouse or even a crematorium; those two were trappings only of the more important concentration camps. I also remember that guy called Bandi Citrom, the one who came from a labor camp, the one without teethes. He defended me from a Gypsy who punched me. The last thing that I remember is that I was on the block 5, which has a roll of two hundred…of two hundred…of two hundred and fifty men.