Jacob ..... Written by Vic Davey

 Jacob Manifestova hauled his emaciated body off his hard wooden bunk. He stood for a moment, swaying and shivering in his threadbare striped jacket and trousers. He shuffled across the floor of the hut, opened the door and stumbled out into the cold, grey light of dawn. 

SS Guard Hoffman, with rifle slung over his shoulder was waiting to escort him. They passed the large imposing metal gates to the compound and he looked up at the grim ironic message exblazoned across the top, "Arbeit Machts Frei".

They reached Crematoria 1 and he was shoved inside, passing another prisoner whose shift was just ending. He gazed along the line of ovens, which operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, now waiting insatiably to be fed

A trolley, piled high with naked corpses was wheeled in. The oven door was opened and he stepped back as a blast of intense heat hit him. A loud shout from behind him spurred him and another inmate into action. They slipped on face masks and, grasping an arm and an ankle each, the first was tossed unceremoniously into the inferno....then another... and another, one after the other until it could hold no more......A haze of deadly Zyklon gas, hung over the bodies...the door clanged shut and they moved across to the next incinerator.

Jacob no longer saw the broken corpses as people, of the human beings they had once been.... men, women and children. He never looked at their faces. The horror and compassion long since beaten out of him. 

He remembered the night he and his Jewish family had been taken from their home in Krakow. The hammering on the door, the invasion of soldiers, the screams of his mother and sister, clinging on to his brother until he too was snatched away and hustled out into the night, into the darkness and into the waiting truck....never to see each other again. 

Another trolley was wheeled in and the process repeated, door open, blast of heat, grasp arm and leg, toss....

Jacob worked until late afternoon until the last trolley of his shift was brought in, this one seriously overloaded as they were behind their quota for that day. As it ground to a halt, the corpse on top tumbled off, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, to land in a crumpled heap at his feet onto the concrete floor. He bent and turned it over and, for the first time, looked at the face, the face of Lukas, his brother......