l
Prologue
     The camp and all its atrocities lay ahead of him through the iron gates crowned by the words ”ARBEIT MACHT FREI”-“WORK MAKES FREE”He marched with the other soldiers through the gates, under the sign and into the camp.  Were these remnants of humanity real or a figment of some terrible nightmare?  He looked round him in growing horror and drew himself back from the parchment hands which tried to touch him. It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno.  This could not be real it had to be part of some terrible dream - no-one could do this to other human beings.  His eyes filled with tears and looking up he noticed that the other soldiers were as unbelieving as he was -he sniffed hard to stop them falling as he tried to reconcile himself with what lay ahead.             
     “Cooper, you go into that hut and see if anyone’s in there”, the order pushed him into movement and he steeled himself against what he would find inside and the walk past the piles of corpses and the survivors of this atrocity with their vacant eyes.
     It was dark inside and the stench of urine, excrement, vomit and rotting flesh made him reel, as his eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the darkness.  The silence was deafening as he looked at the strangely peaceful scene in front of him.
     There was not much room to move.  Row upon row of bunks had been piled into this  space and eyes,  which had long ago given up hope followed him vacantly as he went from bunk to bunk  some of which appeared to be shared by four or five people-checking who had survived and who had not.  None of the emaciated bodies spoke  in this hell where the living and the dead lived in  harmony although some of the living  tried to smile  as it dawned on them that at last freedom  had arrived.
     The silence was broken by a whimper and he looked towards the sound.  A child’s eyes stared at him in terror, the little body clinging to the dead body that lay nest to it
and trying to press itself into the wall so they could become one and thus it  would be invisible.  He could not tell if it was a girl or a boy. But the elfin features and the huge dark eyes struck a cord:   “I won’t hurt you, you’re safe now.” 
     Gently he disentangled the child from the body and taking it up into his arms and  embracing it he went out of the darkness and into the sunlight.
He looked down at the tiny creature in his arms, at the shaved head and the lice which ran over it in gay abandon.  He saw the gaping wounds on the dry shriveled skin and for the first time since he was a child, Cooper cried.  The name Auschwitz would be etched into his heart forever.