A week after finishing Daniel Siva’s A Death in Vienna, one passage remains with me,
a film loop, a film loop, a film loop.

Silva’s books follow the Israeli art restorer/’intelligence’ expert Gabriel Allon. In one section of A Death in Vienna, Allon accesses his mother’s recount of the Death March from Auschwitz* in January, 1945, while visiting Yad Vashem** (Hebrew: יָד וָשֵׁם, yād wā-šêm, a memorial and a name”) on Mount Herzl.

“Juden, rau, raus!” An SS man cracks a whip across my thigh.

The healthy will evacuate on foot. The sick will stay behind to meet their fate. At one o’clock in the morning, I pass through the gates of Hell for the last time. The shooting is as relentless as the snow. We dare not stumble. Those who stumble are shot on the spot and thrown into a ditch. 

“You there,” he calls.

I look up. The man on horseback is pointing directly at me.

I stand there. I am dead, I know it. Rachel knows it, too. 

“Remember me,” I whisper as I follow the man on horseback into the trees.

A few meters from the side of the road, he dismounts and tethers his horse. 

I look straight ahead. He removes his gloves then touches my face.

“if you’re able to survive the next few hours, you might someday have a child. What will you tell this child about what happened to you during the war? Answer me, Jew!”

“Birkenau is the truth.”

No my dear. Birkenau is a rumor. No one is going to believe such a thing. No one is going to believe it is possible to kill so many . . . to tell you the truth, I saw it with my own eyes, and even I cannot believe it.”

He pulls the trigger twice and her two friends are dead in the snow.

We walk that entire night, in neat rows of five. I shed tears of ice.

It has been twelve years. Not a day passes that I don’t see the faces of Rachel and Lene—and the face of the man who murdered them. 

No words.

*As Soviet troops approach, SS units begin the final evacuation of prisoners from Auschwitz, marching them on foot toward the interior of the German Reich, in mid-January 1945. SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from Auschwitz. Thousands had been killed in the camps in the days before these death marches began. Tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced to march west for 30-35 miles. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue. Prisoners suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure. Possibly as many as 15,000 prisoners died during the evacuation marches.

**Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered. Yad Vashem’s massive archive is comprised of some 500,000 photographs, more than 11,500 artworks, more than 32,000 artifacts, over 130,000 documented eyewitness accounts, and some 210 million pages.