Holy Night: After Dinner Conversation, #59

By Veronica Leigh

Synopsis: Three Auschwitz prisoners find a contraband bible and have to decide if they are willing to risk their lives to keep it.

After Dinner Conversation believes humanity is improved by ethics and morals grounded in philosophical truth. Philosophical truth is discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate. In order to facilitate that process, we have created a growing series of short stories, audio and video podcast discussions, across genres, as accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas intended to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family.

Podcast discussion of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Aug 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393396116

Book preview

Holy Night

After Dinner Conversation Series

December 1943

Auschwitz-Birkenau

IDA KOWALSKA CRACKED open her right eye and quickly surveying the vicinity, she deduced they had a few minutes before the kapo and guards summoned them to morning roll call. Opening her other eye, she crawled out of the lower bunk that she shared with three other women and made laps down the aisles of the barrack, in search of anyone or anything that might be useful to her existence. The morning moonglow cast a whitish sheen through the cracked, dirt smudged window and that helped, but she had trained herself to be able to see with her fingers. Groping about, the second her fingertips came in contact with something, she could see what it was, even if her eyes couldn’t. A piece of cloth, a sock, a button, a crust of stale bread – any and all of those things could make a difference between life and death in Birkenau.

Her spirits soared when she found a motionless heap in the middle of the floor, at the rear of the building. Instantly, she knew it was another prisoner. A dead prisoner. Before her incarceration, she never would have rejoiced over another person’s demise. However, Birkenau changed everything. Her life was divided into two parts – before Birkenau, and after.

Ida crouched down beside the motionless body and rolling it over, she remained nonplussed at the horrified expression on the woman’s face. Death and life held hands in the camp and to make it through another day, she no longer allowed it to affect her.

She jerked the woman’s cap off her head and put it down on her own, pulling the knitted material down to her ears. Then she pulled off the clogs and sat on them, until she could find a good place to hide the shoes. She was in the middle of tugging the deceased’s sweater off when two other prisoners swooped in and began to claim what they could of the woman’s belongings. They had become like birds of prey – vultures, scavengers – their humanity faded days after their arrival in Auschwitz.

Ida glanced the other two prisoners. She didn’t know them by name, but one wore a black triangle on left breast of her prison garb, and the other woman wore two yellow triangles superimposed forming a star. A black triangle signified an asocial person, but the barrack’s kapo had harassed this woman in the past for liking women. And a yellow triangle signified a Jew,