**Prices firm, but I take off $1.00 for every $10 spent*\*
**I accept PayPal, Venmo, & Cashapp*\*
**Codes are always split/dual portion where applicable, & have no DMI*\*
**Only redeem the portion you pay for!*\*
New additions
2000s 10-Film Bundle (The Departed 4K, I Am Legend 4K, Pan's Labyrinth 4K, The Hangover 4K, A History of Violence HD, Best in Show HD, A.I. Artificial Intelligence HD, Mystic River HD, Ocean's Eleven HD, Letters from Iwo Jima HD) HD/MA $30
24 Hours to Live HD/VU $3.5
355 HD/MA $4.5
48 Hrs HD/VU $6
65 HD/MA $4.5 or SD/MA $2.5
80 for Brady HD/VU $5
976-Evil HD/MA $5.5
A League of Their Own 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
A Most Violent Year HD/VU $4.5
A24 Horror 5-Film Collection (X, Green Room, It Comes at Night, Hereditary, Witch) HD/VU $13.5
Addams Family '19 4K/IT $4.5
Addams Family '91 4K/VU $5.5
Aeon Flux 4K/IT $5
Afflicted HD/MA $4
Aliens 4K/MA $6.5
Almost Famous 4K/VU $5
American Psycho 4K/VU $5.5
Angels & Demons 4K/MA $6
Anyone But You HD/MA $7.5
Armageddon Time HD/MA $4.5
As Good as it Gets 4K/MA $6
Asteroid City 4K/MA $6.5
Atlantis Milo's Return HD/MA $5 or HD/GP $4.5
Avatar The Way of Water HD/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $4
Avengers 4K/MA $5.5
Back to the Future Trilogy HD/MA $10
Bad Boys 4K/MA $5.5
Bad Guys HD/MA $4.5
Bad Times at the El Royale 4K/MA $6
Banshees of Inisherin HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Barbie HD/MA $6
Battle for Terra HD/VU $4.5
Beast HD/MA $4.5
Beekeeper 4K/VU $9.5
Beguiled HD/MA or IT $3
Beyond Re-Animator HD/VU $4
Big Chill 4K/MA $5.5
Big Eyes HD/VU $4
Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk HD/MA $4
Black Adam 4K/MA $5.5
Black Phone HD/MA $4
Blockers HD/MA $3.5
Blood Father HD/VU $3
Bloodshot HD/MA $4
Body Double 4K/MA $5.5
Book Club Next Chapter HD/MA $5
Book of Life HD/MA $3.5
Bram Stoker's Dracula 4K/MA $6
Broken Hearts Gallery HD/VU $4.5
Bros HD/MA $4.5
Bullet Train HD/MA $4
Burrowers HD/VU $4
Call Jane HD/VU $4.5
Cannibal Cabin 4K/VU $5
Cat's Meow HD/VU $4
Charlie's Angels '00 4K/MA $5.5
Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke HD/VU or IT $3.5
Christmas Classics 4-Film Set (Miracle on 34th Street '94, A Christmas Carol '84, Home Alone, Jingle all the Way) HD/MA $12
Cinderella '50 HD/MA $4.5
Cinderella 2 HD/MA $4.5
Cinderella 3 HD/MA $4.5
Cobweb 4K/VU $7.5
Cocaine Bear HD/MA $5
Colossal HD/VU or IT $4
Come to Daddy HD/VU $4.5
Contagion 4K/MA $6.5
Creature from the Black Lagoon '54 HD/MA $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 4K/MA $6
Counselor HD/MA $4
Da Vinci Code 4K/MA $6
Dagon HD/VU $4
Dark Skies HD/VU $3.5
Dear David 4K/VU $6
Dear White People HD/VU $3.5
Devil's Workshop 4K/VU $5.5
Devil's Workshop HD/VU $4.5
Devotion 4K/VU $6 or HD/VU $4.5
Diary of the Dead HD/VU $4
Dig 4K/VU $5.5
District 9 / Elysium Bundle HD/MA $7.5
Dragon Blade HD/VU $3.5
Dr. Strangelove 4K/MA $5
Dreamland HD/VU $4.5
Dream Scenario HD/VU $7
Dumb Money HD/MA $6
Easy Rider 4K/MA $6
Emperor HD/VU $3.5
Equalizer 3 HD/MA $5.5
Evil Dead '13 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Evil Dead Rise 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
Evil Under The Sun HD/VU $4
Exorcist (2-cuts) 4K/VU $7.5
Exorcist Believer 4K/MA $7 or HD/MA $5.5
Expendables 1-3 Set 4K/MA $10 or HD/VU $7
Expendables 1-4 Set 4K/VU $15 or HD/VU $11
F9 Fast Saga (Thea & Ext) HD/MA $4
Fall 4K/VU $6 or HD/VU $4.5
Fast & the Furious 10-film Set HD/MA $25
Fast X HD/MA $5
Feast (Unr) HD/VU $4
Fifth Element 4K/MA $5.5
Fifty Shades 6-Cut Set (Thea & Unr) HD/MA $12
First Purge HD/MA $3.5
Five Nights at Freddy's HD/MA $6
Fool's Paradise HD/VU $6
Force of Nature '20 HD/VU $3.5
Forger HD/VU $3
Freeheld HD/VU $4
Friendsgiving HD/VU $4
Front Runner HD/MA $4
Frozen '10 HD/VU $4
Funny Girl 4K/MA $5.5
Gandhi 4K/MA $5.5
Gate ‘87 HD/VU $4
Gateway 4K/VU $5.5
Gattaca 4K/MA $6
Ghostbusters 1 & 2 Set HD/MA $6.5
Ghostbusters Afterlife HD/MA $4
Ghoulies Go To College HD/VU $3.5
Glory 4K/MA $6
Godfather 3 Coda HD/VU $4
Good Boys HD/MA $3.5
Good House 4K/VU $5.5
Goodnight Mommy HD/VU $4
Goosebumps 2 HD/MA $3
Gran Turismo 4K/MA $7 or HD/MA $5.5
Grease Trilogy HD/VU $9 or 4K/IT $10.5
Green Knight 4K/VU $5
Green Room HD/VU $4
Groundhog Day 4K/MA $5.5
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 HD/MA $5.5
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 4K/MA $6
Hail, Caesar! HD/VU or IT $2.5
Hammett HD/VU $4
Halloween Ends HD/MA $4.5
Halloween Kills (Ext) HD/MA $4.5
Harriet 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
Hex 4K/VU $5.5
High Tension HD/VU $4.5
Hellbenders HD/VU $4
Hellraiser: Judgment HD/VU $4
Home Alone 1 & 2 Set HD/MA $6.5
Hook 4K/MA $6
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 HD/VU $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Hunger Games Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes HD/VU $6.5
Ice Age Continental Drift HD/MA $3
I, Frankenstein HD/VU or IT $3
I Saw the Light HD/MA $4
Identity Thief HD/IT $3.5
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade HD/VU $4 or 4K/IT $4.5
If Beale Street Could Talk HD/MA $4
Inhabitant HD/VU $4.5
Insidious The Last Key HD/MA $3.5
Insidious Red Door HD/MA $5
Jaws 2 4K/MA $5.5
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot HD/VU $3.5
Jerry Maguire 4K/MA $6
Jesus Revolution HD/VU $5
John Wick 4 4K/VU $6.5
John Wick 4-Film Collection HD/VU $13
Journey to Bethlehem HD/MA $5.5
Jumanji '95 4K/MA $6
Jungle Book '67 HD/MA $4
Jurassic World 6-film Set HD/MA $18
Kandahar HD/MA $5.5
Karate Kid '84 4K/MA $6
Kiss the Girls 4K/VU $6
Knights of the Zodiac HD/MA $5
Kramer vs Kramer 4K/MA $6
Last Action Hero 4K/MA $5.5
Last Christmas HD/MA $4.5
Last Night in Soho 4K/MA $5.5
Leprechaun 8-Film Set HD/VU $15
Lincoln Lawyer 4K/VU $6
Little Mermaid '23 HD/MA $5
Lost Boys 4K/MA $6
Love Again SD/MA $2.5
Lucky Number Slevin HD/VU $4.5
M3GAN (Thea & Unr) HD/MA $5
Ma '19 HD/MA $4
Madame Web 4K/MA $11 or HD/MA $9.5
Mamma Mia Here We Go Again HD/MA $3
Manodrome HD/VU $5.5
Marsh King's Daughter 4K/VU $5.5
Martyrs HD/VU $4.5
May HD/VU $4
Memories of Murder 4K/MA $6.5
Menu HD/GP $3.5
Meryl Streep 8-Film Set HD/MA $22
MIB International HD/MA $4
Midnight Meat Train (Unr) HD/VU $4
Migration HD/MA $6
Miller's Girl 4K/VU $9.5
Miracle on 34th Street HD/MA $4
Missing HD/MA $5
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Pt 1 HD/VU $6
Mist 4K/VU $6.5
Mitchells vs the Machines HD/MA $4.5
Monster High Electrified HD/MA or IT $2.5
Mortal Kombat Legends Cage Match HD/MA $5.5
Mr. Holmes HD/VU $3.5
Mulan '98 HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 HD/MA $5.5
My Girl 4K/MA $6
National Champions 4K/IT $5
New Mutants HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Next Goal Wins HD/MA $7.5
Night at the Museum Secret of the Tomb HD/MA $3
Night Swim HD/MA $8
Night Train to Lisbon HD/VU $4
No Good Deed HD/MA $3
No Hard Feelings HD/MA $5.5
Nope HD/MA $4.5
Nun 2 HD/MA $5.5
Ocean's Trilogy 4K/MA $16
Old 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood HD/MA $3.5
Oppenheimer HD/MA $6
Other Side of the Door HD/MA $4
Out Of The Blue HD/VU $4
Overlord 4K/VU or IT $4.5
Parental Guidance HD/MA $2.5
Parents HD/VU $4
Parasite HD/MA $4
Paw Patrol Mighty Movie HD/VU $6.5
Pet Sematary Bloodlines HD/VU $5.5
Peter Pan Return to Neverland HD/GP $4
Philadelphia 4K/MA $5.5
Pick 1 (Black Christmas '18 4K, Dog's Purpose 4K, Sparks Brothers 4K, Raw, Agnes Bourne, Antz, Being Frank, Loving, Don't Let Go, Kicks, Final Account) HD/MA $4
Pitch Perfect 3 4K/MA $5
Pixels HD/MA $3
Plane 4K/VU $5.5
Poor Things HD/MA $7.5
Pope's Exorcist HD/MA $5
Prey for the Devil 4K/VU $5.5
Priscilla HD/VU $6
Punch-Drunk Love 4K/MA $6.5
Purge 4 Film Set HD/MA $11.5
Queen & Slim HD/MA $4
Quick & the Dead '95 4K/MA $6
Rambo First Blood HD/VU $4
Rambo First Blood Pt 2 HD/VU $4
Rango HD/VU $3
Real Genius 4K/MA $5.5
Red Rocket HD/VU $4
Red Sparrow HD/MA $3.5
Renfield HD/MA $5.5
Requin HD/VU $4.5
Resident Evil Welcome to Raccoon City HD/MA $4
Robin Hood '73 HD/MA $4
Rosemary's Baby 4K/VU $6.5
Rhythm Section HD/VU $3.5
Ruby Gilman Teenage Kraken HD/MA $5.5
Rudy (Dir Cut) 4K/MA $6.5
Run Lola Run 4K/MA $6.5
Saint Maud HD/VU $4
Samurai Jack Complete Series HD/VU $40
Saw 8-film Set (Unr except Jigsaw) HD/VU $20
Saw X 4K/VU $7
Secret Life of Walter Mitty HD/MA $3.5
Shaun of the Dead HD/MA $4 or 4K/IT $4.5
Shrek 6-Film Set (1-4, Musical, Puss in Boots) HD/MA $19
Skiptrace HD/VU $3.5
Scorpion King 4-Film Set (1, 3, 4, Book of Souls) HD/MA $12
Scream 3 4K/VU $5.5
Scream 5 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Scream 6 4K/VU $7 or HD/VU $5.5
Sharktopus HD/VU $3.5
Shazam 2-film Set HD/MA $8
Shazam Fury of the Gods 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
She Said HD/MA $4.5
She's the Man HD/VU $3.5
Silver Linings Playbook HD/VU $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Sisu 4K/VU $6
Sixteen Candles HD/MA $3.5 or HD/IT $3.5
Sleepless in Seattle 4K/MA $6
Smile HD/VU $4.5
Social Network 4K/MA $6
Sometimes They Come Back...Again HD/VU $4
Sometimes They Come Back...For More HD/VU $3.5
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 4K/VU $5.5
Sound of Freedom HD/VU $6
Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse 4K/MA $7 or HD/MA $5.5
Split HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Spoiler Alert HD/MA $5
Star Trek First Contact 4K/VU $5.5
Star Trek Generations 4K/VU $5.5
Star Trek Insurrection 4K/VU $5.5
Star Trek Nemesis 4K/VU $5.5
Star Wars A New Hope HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Starship Troopers 4K/MA $6
Step Brothers 4K/MA $6.5
Stillwater HD/MA $4
Studio 666 HD/MA $5
Sum of All Fears 4K/VU $5
Supercell HD/VU $4.5
Super Mario Bros Movie HD/MA $5
Super Troopers 2 HD/MA $3.5
Superfly HD/MA $4
Suspiria (2018) HD/VU $4
T2 Trainspotting 4K/MA $6
Taken HD/MA $4
Talk to Me 4K/VU $6
Talladega Nights 4K/MA $6.5
Taxi Driver 4K/MA $5.5
Thanksgiving 4K/MA $8 or HD/MA $6.5
The Batman 4K/MA $5.5
The Bay HD/VU $4
The Color Purple '23 4K/MA $8 or HD/MA $6.5
The Descent (Unr) HD/VU $4.5
The Flash HD/MA $5
The Marvels HD/MA $6.5
The Natural 4K/MA $6
The Other Guys 4K/MA $6
The Professional (Ext) 4K/MA $6
The Super '17 HD/VU $4
Ticket to Paradise HD/MA $4.5
Titanic 4K/VU or IT $6 or HD/VU $4.5
Top Gun Maverick HD/VU $4
Toy Story 3 HD/MA $4
Trading Places 4K/VU $6
Transformers 4K/VU $5.5
Transformers Rise of the Beasts 4K/MA $7 or HD/VU $5.5
Trolls 3-Film Collection HD/MA $12
Trolls Band Together HD/MA $6.5
Truth or Dare (Unr) HD/MA $3.5
Tusk HD/VU $4.5
Umma HD/MA $4.5
Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 4K/VU $5
Unhinged HD/VU $3.5
Universal Monsters 4-Film Set 4K/MA $17
V for Vendetta 4K/MA $6.5
Vanilla Sky HD/VU $5.5
Velvet Goldmine HD/VU $4.5
Venture Bros Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart HD/MA $5.5
Violent Night HD/MA $5
Walking Dead Season 9 HD/VU $7
Watchmen Ultimate Cut 4K/MA $7.5
Waxwork 2 HD/VU $3.5
We Summon the Darkness HD/VU $4.5
Welcome to Marwen HD/MA $4.5
Welcome to Monster High HD/MA or IT $3
Whiplash 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
Whitney Houston I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody HD/MA $4
Wicker Man 4K/VU $5.5
Wish HD/MA $7
Witch HD/VU $3.5
Woman King 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $4
Woman Walks Ahead HD/VU $4
You're Next HD/VU $3.5
X-Men 1-4 Set SD/MA $7.5
Zombieland Double Tap HD/MA $4
All other movies (A-Z)
10 Cloverfield Lane HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
101 Dalmatians '61 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
13 Hours HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
14 Blades HD/VU $3.5
1917 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
2 Guns 4K/MA $4 or HD/MA or IT $2.5
21 Jump Street HD/MA $3
22 Jump Street HD/MA $3.5
3 Extremes HD/VU $4
3 From Hell (Unr) 4K/VU $4 or HD/VU $2.5
3:10 to Yuma 4K/VU $5
31 HD/VU $2.5
47 Meters Down HD/IT $3.5
47 Meters Down Uncaged 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
47 Ronin HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
600 Miles HD/VU $3.5
71 HD/VU $3.5
A Christmas Story 4K/MA $6
A Dog's Purpose HD/IT $3
A Good Day to Die Hard (Ext) HD/VU $2.5
A Journal For Jordan HD/MA $4
A Quiet Place HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
A Walk Among the Tombstones HD/IT $3.5
A Wrinkle in Time HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
A.C.O.D. HD/VU or IT $3.5
Abominable 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
About Last Night HD/MA $3
Action Point HD/IT $2
Ad Astra HD/MA $4
Adaptation 4K/MA $6
Adrift HD/IT $3.5
Adverse 4K/VU $5
After Earth HD/MA $3
Aftermath HD/VU $3
Air Force One 4K/MA $6
Aladdin ‘19 HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Aladdin ‘92 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Alien HD/MA $4
Alien Covenant HD/MA $2.5
Alfred Hitchcock 4-Film Set Vol 1 4K/MA $18
Alfred Hitchcock 5-Film Set Vol 2 4K/MA $21
Alien 6-film Set HD/MA $16
Alita Battle Angel 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
All Eyez on Me HD/VU or IT $3
All is Lost HD/VU $3.5
All the Money in the World HD/MA $3.5
Allied HD/VU or IT $3.5
Almost Christmas HD/MA or IT $3
Amazing Spider-Man 2 HD/MA $3.5 or SD/MA $1.5
Amazing Spider-Man HD/MA $3.5 or SD/MA $1.5
American Assassin 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
American Hustle HD/MA $3.5
American Reunion HD/VU or IT $3
American Ultra HD/VU or IT $4
American Underdog 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Anatomy of a Murder 4K/MA $5
Anchorman 2 HD/VU or IT $2.5
Angel Has Fallen 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Angel Heart 4K/VU $5.5
Angel of Mine 4K/VU $5.5
Angry Birds Movie HD/MA $3.5
Anna Karenina HD/IT $3.5
Annie ‘14 HD/MA $3.5
Annihilation HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Antebellum 4K/VU $5
Antlers HD/GP $3
Ant-Man & the Wasp HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Ant-Man HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Apache Junction HD/VU $3.5
Apollo 13 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Arctic HD/MA $4
Arrival HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Art of Self-Defense HD/MA $4
Ash vs Evil Dead S.3 HD/VU $5
Assassination Nation HD/MA $3.5
Assassin's Creed HD/MA $3
Assignment HD/VU $4
Atomic Blonde 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
August Osage County HD/VU $3
Avengers Age of Ultron HD/GP $3
Avengers Endgame HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Avengers Infinity War 4K/MA $4 or HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Baby Driver HD/MA $4
Backdraft 4K/IT $5.5
Bad Grandpa HD/VU or IT $2.5
Bad Words HD/MA or IT $3
Bandslam HD/VU $4
Bank Job HD/VU $3.5
Barb & Star go to Vista Del Mar HD/VU $4
Barbie & Her Sisters in the Great Puppy Adventure HD/IT $3.5
Bart Got a Room HD/VU $4
Battle Royale HD/VU $4.5
Battleship 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Baywatch HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Beauty & the Beast ‘17 HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Beauty & the Beast ‘91 HD/GP $3
Bedknobs & Broomsticks HD/GP $3.5
Before I Fall HD/VU or IT $3.5
Begin Again HD/VU $3.5
Beiruit HD/MA $3.5
Belly 4K/VU $5.5
Ben-Hur ‘16 HD/VU $3.5
Between Worlds HD/VU $3.5
Big Hero 6 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Big Lebowski 4K/MA or IT $5.5
Big Short HD/VU $3.5
Big Wedding HD/VU or IT $3
Billy Elliot HD/MA or IT $4
Birdman HD/MA $4
Black & Blue HD/MA $4
Black Christmas '19 HD/MA $4.5
Black Panther 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $2.5
Black Panther Wakanda Forever HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
BlackKklansman HD/MA $4.5
Blacklight HD/MA $4
Black Widow HD/GP $3
Blackhat HD/IT $3.5
Blair Witch Project ‘99 HD/VU $4
Bleeding Steel HD/VU $3.5
Blindspotting 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Blood Money ‘17 HD/VU $3.5
Blood Ties HD/VU $3.5
Blue Jasmine HD/MA $3.5
Blue Ruin HD/VU $4
Blues Brothers HD/MA $4 or 4K/IT $4.5
Bob's Burgers Movie HD/GP $3
Body Cam HD/VU $4
Bohemian Rhapsody 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Bombshell 4K/VU $5
Book Club HD/VU or IT $2.5
Book of Life HD/MA $3.5
Boss Baby HD/MA $2.5
Bourne Identity 4K/IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Bourne Legacy HD/VU $2 or 4K/IT $2.5
Bourne Supremacy HD/MA $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Bourne Ultimatum 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Boy ‘16 HD/IT $3.5
Boy & the World HD/IT $3.5
Boyhood HD/VU or IT $2.5
Braven HD/VU $4
Breakfast Club HD/MA or IT $4
Breakthrough HD/MA $3
Brian Banks HD/MA $3
Bridge of Spies HD/GP $3.5
Brothers Bloom HD/VU $4.5
Bumblebee 4K/VU or IT $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Butler HD/VU $3
Cabin in the Woods HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Cake HD/MA $4
Call of Wild 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Calvary HD/MA $4
Candyman '20 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $4.5
Candyman 3 HD/VU $4
Captain America Civil War HD/GP $2.5
Captain America First Avenger HD/GP $3.5
Captain America Winter Soldier HD/GP $3.5
Captain Marvel 4K/MA $4 or HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Captain Phillips HD/MA $3.5
Captain Underpants First Epic Movie HD/MA $2.5
Carol HD/VU $4
Cars 3 HD/GP $2.5
Casablanca 4K/MA $5.5
Case for Christ HD/MA or IT $2.5
Casper HD/IT $4
Celebrating Mickey HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Chaos Walking 4K/VU $5
Chappaquiddick HD/VU $4
Chasing Mavericks HD/MA $3.5
Chicago HD/VU $4
Child 44 HD/VU $4
Children ‘08 HD/VU $4
Christopher Robin HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Chronicles of Riddick HD/IT $4
Clerks 3 4K/VU $4.5
Clifford the Big Red Dog HD/VU $4
Cloverfield 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Coco HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Cold Pursuit 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Collection HD/VU $3.5
Collide ‘17 HD/VU or IT $2.5
Colma The Musical HD/VU $4
Colombiana (Unr) HD/MA $4
Colony 4K/VU $5
Come & Find Me HD/VU $4
Commuter 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Company of Heroes HD/MA $4
Conan the Barbarian ‘11 4K/VU $5
Conspirator HD/VU $4
Contraband HD/IT $3
Contractor HD/VU $4.5
Cooler HD/VU $4
Cool Hand Luke 4K/MA $5.5
Cooties HD/VU $4
Cotton Club Encore 4K/VU $5.5
Countdown ‘16 HD/VU $3.5
Courier 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Craft Legacy HD/MA $4.5
Criminal HD/VU or IT $3
Croods HD/VU $3.5
Cruella HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Crypto 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Daddy's Home HD/IT $2.5
Daddy's Home 2 HD/VU or IT $3
Damsel HD/VU $4.5
Dangerous 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Danny Collins HD/IT $3.5
Dark Crimes HD/VU $4
Darkest Minds HD/MA $4
Dark Places HD/VU $4
Dark Tower HD/MA $3.5
Darkest Hour ‘17 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes HD/MA $3.5
Deadpool 2 (w/Super Duper Cut) HD/MA $4
Deadpool HD/MA $2.5
Death of Me HD/VU $4
Death on the Nile HD/GP $3
Death Wish '18 HD/VU $3
Deepwater Horizon HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Deliver Us From Evil HD/MA $3.5
Dentist 2-Film Set HD/VU $7
Despicable Me 2 HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Despicable Me 3 4K/MA or IT $4.5
Despicable Me 4K/MA or IT $4.5
Detroit HD/MA $3.5
Devil Inside HD/VU $3.5
Devil's Due HD/MA $3.5
Die Hard HD/MA $3.5
Die Hard 5-film Set HD/MA $18
Die in a Gunfight 4K/VU $5
Dilemma HD/VU $3.5
Dirty Dancing 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Disney Animated Short Films Set HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Disneynature Monkey Kingdom HD/MA $3
Django Unchained HD/VU $3
Doctor Strange HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness HD/GP $3
Dolittle HD/MA $3.5
Dom Hemingway HD/MA $3.5
Don Verdean HD/VU $4.5
Doorman HD/VU $3.5
Doors 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Downsizing HD/VU $2 or 4K/IT $2.5
Downton Abbey A New Era HD/MA $4
Downton Abbey The Movie HD/MA $3.5
Draft Day HD/IT $3.5
Dragged Across Concrete HD/VU $3.5
Dragonslayer 4K/VU $5.5
Dream a Little Dream HD/VU $4
Dreamkatcher HD/VU $4
Dreamworks 10-Film HD/MA $25
Dredd 4K/VU $4 or HD/VU $2.5
Dying of the Light HD/VU $2.5
E.T. Extra Terrestrial 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Early Man 4K/VU $5.5
Earth Girls are Easy HD/VU $4
Eddie the Eagle HD/MA $4
Edge of Seventeen HD/IT $3
Edward Scissorhands HD/MA $3.5
El Chicano HD/MA $4
Elysium HD/MA $3.5
Emoji Movie HD/MA $3
Empire of Light HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Empire State HD/VU $3
Encanto 4K/GP $3.5
Enough Said HD/MA $3.5
Enter the Dragon 4K/MA $6
Epic HD/MA $3
Equalizer HD/MA $3.5
Equalizer 2 HD/MA $3.5
Escape From Planet Earth HD/VU $3
Eternals HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Everest HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Everything Must Go HD/VU $4
Evil Dead 2 HD/VU $3.5
Ex Machina HD/VU $3
Exodus Gods & Kings HD/MA $3.5
Expired 4K/VU $4.5
Fair Game (Dir) HD/VU $4
Fantastic Four ‘15 HD/MA $4
Fast & Furious 4 4K/MA $5
Fast & the Furious 8-film Set HD/MA $17.5
Fast & the Furious 9-film Set HD/MA $20
Fast Color 4K/VU $5.5
Fatale ‘20 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Fatherhood HD/MA $4
Fault in Our Stars HD/MA $3.5
Fear of Rain 4K/VU $5.5
Fences HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Ferdinand HD/MA $3.5
Field of Dreams 4K/MA or IT $5.5
Fifty Shades Darker (Unr) HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Fifty Shades Freed HD/MA $4
Fifty Shades of Grey (Unr) 4K/MA or IT $4
Finding Dory HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Finding Nemo HD/GP $3.5
Finest Hours HD/GP $3
Firm 4K/VU $6
First Man HD/MA $4
Flashback ‘20 HD/VU $4
Flight HD/VU or IT $3
Florence Foster Jenkins HD/VU or IT $3
Footloose ‘11 HD/IT $3
Forbidden Kingdom HD/VU $4.5
Ford v Ferrari HD/MA $4
Forest HD/IT $3.5
Forever My Girl HD/IT $3
Fortress HD/VU $3.5
Fortress Sniper's Eye HD/VU $3.5
Fox & the Hound 2 HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Foxcatcher HD/MA $4
Frank & Lola HD/VU or IT $3
Free Guy HD/GP $3
French Dispatch HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Friday the 13th 4K/VU $5.5
From Here to Eternity 4K/MA $5.5
Frozen (Sing-Along) HD/MA $2 or HD/GP $1.5
Frozen HD/GP $2
Frozen 2 HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Frozen Ground ‘13 HD/VU $3.5
Fury HD/MA $3.5
Future World HD/VU $3.5
G.I. Joe Retaliation HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Gambit ‘12 HD/MA $4
Gambler HD/VU or IT $3
Gamer 4K/VU $5.5
Gemini Man 4K/VU or IT $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Get Out 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Ghost in the Shell ‘17 HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Ghost in the Shell ‘95 4K/VU $5
Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance HD/MA $4
Ghost Team One HD/VU or IT $3.5
Ghostbusters ‘84 HD/MA $3.5
Ghostbusters (Thea & Ext) ‘16 HD/MA $3
Ghostbusters 2 HD/MA $3.5
Gifted HD/MA $3
Girl in Spider's Web HD/MA $4
Girl on Train HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Girl w/ All Gifts HD/VU $4
Giver HD/VU $3.5
Glass Castle 4K/VU $5.5
Glass HD/MA $4
God Bless The Broken Road HD/VU $3.5
God's Not Dead 2 HD/MA or IT $2.5
God's Not Dead 3 HD/MA $3
Gods of Egypt HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Gold ‘16 HD/VU $2.5
Good Dinosaur HD/GP $2.5
Good Kill HD/VU or IT $3.5
Grease 2 HD/VU $4
Great Wall 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Greatest Showman HD/MA $3.5
Green Book HD/MA $4
Grey HD/VU or IT $3
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 1 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 HD/GP $2
Guilt Trip HD/VU or IT $3
Gunman HD/MA or IT $3
Guns of Navarone 4K/MA $5.5
Hacksaw Ridge 4K/VU or IT $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Halloween ‘18 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Hammer of the Gods HD/VU $2
Hannibal S.1 HD/VU $5
Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters (Unr) HD/VU or IT $3
Hard Luck Love Song 4K/VU $5.5
Hard Target 2 HD/IT $1.5
Hardcore Henry HD/VU or IT $3.5
Hate U Give HD/MA $4
Hateful Eight HD/VU $3.5
Heat (Director's Cut) ‘95 4K/MA $5.5
Heaven is for Real HD/MA $3.5
Hercules ‘14 HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Here Comes the Boom HD/MA $3.5
Hereditary HD/VU $3.5
Hidden Figures HD/MA $3
High Note HD/MA $4
Highlander 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Hitchcock '12 HD/MA $4
Hitman Agent 47 HD/MA $3
Hitman's Bodyguard HD/VU $3.5
Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard 4K/VU $5.5
Hocus Pocus HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Home HD/MA $3
Home Again HD/MA $3
Home Alone 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Homefront HD/MA or IT $3
Homesman HD/VU $3
Honey 2 HD/VU $3
Hostiles 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Hotel Transylvania 3 HD/MA $3.5
Hot Fuzz HD/VU $4
Hotel Mumbai HD/MA $4
Hours ‘13 HD/VU $4
House of 1000 Corpses HD/VU $4
House of Gucci 4K/IT $5.5
House w/ a Clock in Its Walls sHD/MA $4
How to Train Your Dragon 2 HD/MA $2.5
Hugo HD/VU $3
Hunt for Red October 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Huntsman Winter's War (Ext) HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
I Can Only Imagine HD/VU $3.5
I Feel Pretty HD/IT $2
Ides of March HD/MA $4
I Know What You Did Last Summer 4K/MA $5.5
Imitation Game HD/VU $3
In a Valley of Violence HD/MA or IT $3
In Secret ‘14 HD/VU $4.5
In the Blood HD/VU $4
Incredibles 2 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Independence Day ‘96 HD/MA $4
Independence Day Resurgence HD/MA $2.5
Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark 4K/VU or IT $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom 4K/VU or IT $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Indignation HD/VU $4
Indivisible HD/MA $3.5
Inferno HD/MA $3
Initiation 4K/VU $5
Initiation HD/VU $3.5
Internship HD/MA $3
Interstellar 4K/VU or IT $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Interview HD/MA $3.5
Into the Woods HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Invisible Man '20 HD/MA $3.5
Invisible Man ‘33 HD/MA $3.5
Iron Man 3 HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Iron Man & Hulk Heroes United HD/GP $3.5
Iron Mask ‘19 HD/VU $4.5
It Follows HD/VU $3.5
It's a Wonderful Life HD/VU $3
Jack & Jill HD/MA $3.5
Jack Reacher 4K/VU or IT $5
Jack Reacher Never Go Back HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit 4K/IT $4 or HD/VU $2.5
Jacob's Ladder HD/VU $4
Jane Got a Gun HD/VU $4
Jarhead 3 (Unr) HD/IT $2.5
Jason Bourne HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Jesus Music HD/VU $3.5
Jexi HD/VU $3.5
Jobs HD/MA or IT $3.5
Joe HD/VU $3.5
Joe Kidd HD/IT $4
John Wick 1 & 2 Bundle HD/VU $4
John Wick 3 Parabellum 4K/VU $4.5
John Wick Chapter 2 HD/VU $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
John Wick HD/VU $2 or 4K/IT $2.5
John Wick Trilogy (Parabellum 4K) HD/VU $9 or all HD/VU $8
Journey to the West Conquering the Demons HD/VU $3.5
Joy HD/MA $3
Judy 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Juliet, Naked 4K/VU $5.5
Jumanji Welcome To The Jungle HD/MA $2.5
Jungle Book ‘16 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $2.5
Jungle Cruise HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Jurassic Park 3 HD/VU $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Jurassic Park 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Jurassic World 5-film Set HD/MA $14
Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Jurassic World HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Justice ‘17 HD/VU or IT $3
Kama Sutra HD/VU $4
Kick-Ass 2 HD/MA $3.5
Kid ‘19 HD/VU $3.5
Kid Who Would Be King 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Kidnap HD/VU or IT $2.5
Kill Zone ‘05 HD/VU $4.5
Killer Elite HD/IT $3
Killing Gunther HD/VU $4
Kin ‘18 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
King Kong ‘05 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
King of Staten Island HD/MA $4
King's Man HD/GP $3.5
Kingsman The Golden Circle HD/MA $3
Kingsman The Secret Service HD/MA $3.5
Knives Out HD/VU $3.5
Knowing 4K/VU $5.5
La La Land HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Labor Day HD/VU or IT $3
Lady Macbeth HD/VU $4.5
Lady of the Manor 4K/VU $5
Lair of White Worm HD/VU $4.5
Lake Mungo HD/VU $4
Lara Croft Tomb Raider 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Last Dragon HD/MA $4.5
Last Duel HD/GP $3.5
Last Exorcism HD/VU $4
Last Knights HD/VU $3.5
Last Man ‘19 HD/VU $4
Last Stand HD/IT $2
Last Vegas HD/VU $3
Last Witch Hunter HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Lawrence of Arabia 4K/MA $5.5
Legend of Hercules 4K/IT $3
Legends of Oz Dorothy's Return HD/MA $3.5
Leprechaun 7-film Set HD/VU $12
Let's be Cops HD/MA $3.5
Let Him Go HD/MA $4
Let Me Explain HD/IT $2.5
Life ‘17 HD/MA $3.5
Life of Crime HD/VU $3.5
Life of Pi 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA or IT $3.5
Light of My Life HD/IT $3.5
Lightyear HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Like a Boss HD/VU $3.5
Lilo & Stitch 2 HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Lion HD/VU $4
Lion King ‘19 4K/MA $4 or HD/GP $2
Lion King ‘94 4K/MA $5 or HD/GP $3
Little HD/MA $3.5
Little Mermaid ‘89 HD/MA $4
Live Free or Die Hard HD/MA $4
Locked Down 4K/MA $5.5
Logan HD/MA $3
Logan Lucky HD/MA $3.5 or /IT $4
Lone Ranger HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Lone Survivor HD/VU $2.5
Longest Ride HD/MA $3
Longest Week HD/VU $3.5
Looper HD/MA $3.5
Lorax HD/MA or IT $3
Lord of War 4K/VU $5.5
Lords of Salem HD/VU $4
Lost World Jurassic Park HD/MA $3.5
Love & Mercy HD/VU $3.5
Love & Monsters 4K/VU $5.5
Love the Coopers HD/VU or IT $4
Love, Simon HD/MA $3.5
Loving HD/VU or IT $3.5
Luca HD/GP $3
Lucy 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile HD/MA $4.5 or SD/MA $2
Madagascar 3 HD/MA $3
Maggie HD/VU $2.5
Magic Mike's Last Dance HD/MA $4.5
Magnificent Seven ‘16 HD/VU $3
Maleficent HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Maleficent Mistress of Evil HD/GP $2.5
Man Who Fell To Earth ‘76 4K/VU $5
Man Who Shot Liberty Vance 4K/VU $5.5
Marauders HD/VU $3.5
Marksman HD/MA $4
Martian HD/MA $3.5
Mary Poppins ‘64 HD/MA $3.5 or ‘64 HD/GP $3
Mary Poppins Returns 4K/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $2.5
Mask of Zorro 4K/MA $6
Mauritanian 4K/IT $5
Max Steel HD/IT $3
Maze Runner HD/MA $3.5
McKenna Shoots for the Stars HD/IT $2
Meatballs HD/VU $4
Megan Leavey HD/VU or IT $3
Memory HD/MA $3.5
Men HD/VU $4
Men in Black 3 HD/MA $3
Men in Black 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
MI-5 Spooks '15 HD/VU $4
Mickey & Minnie 10 Classic Shorts HD/GP $4.5
Mid-Century 4K/VU $5
Midnight in the Switchgrass 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Midnight Sun HD/MA $3.5
Midsommar (CANADA) 4K/IT $3
Midway 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Mile 22 HD/IT $3
Million Dollar Arm HD/GP $2.5
MindGamers HD/MA or IT $3.5
Minions 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Miracles from Heaven HD/MA $3.5
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children HD/MA $3
Mission Impossible 3 4K/VU $5
Mission Impossible 6-film Set HD/VU $17
Mommy HD/VU $4
Moneyball HD/MA $3
Monster High Electrified HD/IT $2.5
Monster Hunter HD/MA $3.5
Money Monster HD/MA $3.5
Monster Trucks HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Monsters University HD/GP $3
Monuments Men HD/MA $3.5
Moon 4K/MA $5.5
Morbius HD/MA $4
Morgan HD/MA $4
Mortal Engines 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Mortal HD/VU $4
Mortal Instruments City of Bones HD/MA $3
Mortdecai HD/VU $3.5
Mother! HD/VU $2.5
Mountain Between Us HD/MA $2.5
Mr. Peabody & Sherman HD/MA $3
Mud HD/VU $2.5
Mulan 2 HD/GP $3
Mulan ‘20 4K/MA $4.5 or ‘20 HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Mummy ‘17 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Mummy ‘99 HD/MA $3.5
Mummy 4-Film Set (Mummy 1-3, Scorpion King) HD/MA $12
Mummy Trilogy 4K/MA or IT $14 or HD/MA $9 4K/IT
Muppets Most Wanted HD/GP $3
Murder on the Orient Express HD/MA $3.5
My All American HD/MA or IT $3.5
My Best Friend is a Vampire HD/VU $4
National Lampoon's Vacation 4K/MA $5.5
Nebraska HD/VU $3
Need for Speed HD/GP $3.5
Needle in a Timestack 4K/VU $5.5
Nerve HD/VU $3.5
News of the World HD/MA $4
Night at the Museum Trilogy HD/MA $11
Night House HD/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $4
Nightmare Alley HD/GP $3.5
Nightmare Before Christmas 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
No Time to Die 4K/IT $4.5
Noah HD/VU or IT $2.5
Nobody's Fool HD/IT $2.5
Non-Stop HD/VU or IT $3
Norm of the North HD/VU $2.5
Nostalgia ‘18 HD/MA $3.5
Now You See Me 2 4K/IT $4
Now You See Me HD/VU or IT $2.5 or SD/VU $1
Nut Job 2 HD/IT $2.5
Nut Job HD/IT $2.5
Nutcracker & Four Realms HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Oblivion 4K/MA or IT $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Occupation ‘18 HD/VU $3.5
Occupation Rainfall HD/VU $4
Office Christmas Party 4K/IT $3.5
Olaf's Frozen Adventure HD/GP $3
Oliver! 4K/MA $5
On Chesil Beach HD/MA $4.5
One Ranger HD/VU $4.5
Onward HD/GP $2.5
Open Water 2 Adrift HD/VU $4
Open Water HD/VU $4
Operation Avalanche HD/VU $4
Other Woman HD/MA $3
Ouija HD/MA or IT $3.5
Our Kind of Traitor HD/MA $4
Outlander S.1 Vol 1 HD/VU $5
Overboard ‘18 HD/VU $3.5
Oz the Great & Powerful HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Pacific Rim Uprising HD/MA $4
Paddington HD/VU $3.5
Pain & Gain HD/VU or IT $3.5
Paper Towns HD/MA $3
Paradise Highway 4K/VU $5
Paranormal Activity 3 (Ext) HD/VU or IT $3
Paranormal Activity 4 (Unr) HD/VU or IT $2.5
Paranormal Activity Ghost Dimension (Unr) HD/VU or IT $3.5
Paranormal Activity HD/VU $4
Paranormal Activity The Marked Ones HD/VU or IT $3.5
Passengers HD/MA $3.5
Patriot Games 4K/VU $5
Patriot's Day HD/VU $3
Paul Apostle of Christ HD/MA $3
Peanuts Movie HD/MA $3
Penelope HD/VU $4.5
Peppermint HD/IT $3.5
Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters HD/MA $3
Perfect Guy HD/MA $2.5
Perks of Being a Wallflower HD/VU or IT $3 or SD/VU or IT $1
Pet Sematary ‘19 HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Pet Sematary ‘89 HD/VU $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Peter Rabbit HD/MA $3.5
Pete's Dragon ‘16 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Phantom Thread HD/MA $4
Philomena HD/VU $2.5
Pirates of the Caribbean 5 HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Pirates! Band of Misfits HD/MA $3.5
Pitch Perfect 2 4K/MA $4 or HD/MA $2.5
Pitch Perfect HD/MA $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Pixar Short Films Set Vol. 3 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Planes Fire & Rescue HD/GP $3
Planes HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Planes, Trains & Automobiles 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Playing w/ Fire HD/VU or IT $2.5
Poltergeist ‘82 4K/MA $5.5
Poltergeist (Ext) ‘15 HD/MA $4
Pompeii HD/MA $3.5
Power Rangers ‘17 HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Predator ‘18 HD/MA $3
Predator ‘87 HD/MA $4
Pride & Prejudice & Zombies HD/MA $3.5
Primal HD/VU $3.5
Promise HD/MA or IT $3.5
Protege HD/VU $4
Proud Mary HD/MA $3.5
Psycho 4K/MA $5
Pulp Fiction 4K/VU $5.5 or HD/VU $4
Punisher War Zone 4K/VU $5.5
Purge Anarchy HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Purge Election Year HD/MA $3.5
Purge 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3 or
Push 4K/VU $6
Quantum of Solace HD/VU $4.5
Quarry 4K/VU $5
Quartet HD/VU $4
Queen of Katwe HD/GP $2.5
Quiet Ones HD/VU $3.5
Rambo ‘08 HD/VU $4
Rambo 5-film Set HD/VU $18
Rambo Last Blood 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Ran ‘85 4K/VU $5.5
Raya & the Last Dragon HD/MA $3.5
Rear Window 4K/IT $3.5
Rebel Without a Cause 4K/MA $5.5
Reclaim HD/VU $3.5
RED 2 HD/VU $2
Red Dawn ‘12 HD/IT $3
Redline ‘10 HD/VU $4.5
Reign of Assassins HD/VU $4.5
Replicant ‘01 HD/VU $3.5
Replicas HD/VU $3.5
Rescuers Down Under HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Rescuers HD/MA $4.5 or HD/GP $4
Reservoir Dogs HD/VU $4
Resident Evil Retribution 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Resurrection of Gavin Stone HD/VU or IT $2.5
Retaliation ‘17 HD/VU $4
Revenant 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Ricki & the Flash HD/MA $3
Riddick (Unr) HD/VU or IT $3
Ride Like a Girl HD/VU $4
Right At Your Door HD/VU $4
Right One 4K/VU $5.5
Rings HD/VU or IT $2.5
Rio 2 (Sing-Along) HD/MA $3
Riot HD/VU or IT $3
RIPD HD/IT $2.5
Risen HD/MA $3
Rob Zombie Trilogy (3 From Hell, House of 1000 Corpses, Devil's Rejects) HD/VU $8
Robin Hood ‘18 HD/VU $3
Robocop ‘14 HD/VU $2.5
Rocketman ‘19 HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Rocky Horror Picture Show HD/MA $4
Roman J. Israel Esq HD/MA $3
Ron's Gone Wrong HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Room '15 HD/VU $3.5
Rough Night 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Run The Race HD/MA $3
Runner Runner HD/MA $3.5
Rush HD/IT $3
Safe HD/VU or IT $2.5
Same Kind of Different As Me HD/VU or IT $3
Samson HD/MA $3.5
Santa Clause HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Santa Clause 2 HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Santa Clause 3 HD/GP $2.5
Sapphires HD/VU $4
Sausage Party HD/MA $3.5
Saving Mr. Banks HD/GP $3
Saw (Unr) 4K/VU $4.5
Saw 7-film Set (Unr) HD/VU $16
Saw HD/VU $3
Scarface HD/MA $4 or 4K/IT $4.5
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 4K/VU $4.5
Schindler's List 4K/MA or IT $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Scream '96 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Scream Trilogy HD/VU $11
Secret Garden ‘20 4K/VU or IT $5.5
Secret in Their Eyes HD/VU or IT $3
Secret Life of Pets 4K/MA or IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
See No Evil 2 HD/VU $3.5
Selma HD/VU or IT $2.5
Serenity ‘05 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Seriously Red HD/VU $4
Sex Tape HD/MA $3.5
Shack HD/VU or IT $2.5
Shallows HD/MA $3.5
Shang-Chi Legend of the Ten Rings HD/GP $3
Shape of Water HD/MA $3.5
Sherlock Gnomes HD/VU or IT $2.5
Shivers HD/VU $4
Show Dogs HD/MA $3.5
Sicario HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Sicario Day of the Soldado HD/MA $4
Sicario, Wind River, Hell or High Water HD/VU $7.5
Side Effects HD/IT $3.5
Silencing HD/VU $4
Silent Night, Deadly Night 3-Film Set (3-5 HD/VU $7.5
Silk Road 4K/VU $5
Sing ‘16 HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Sing Street HD/VU $4
Sinister HD/VU $3
Sisters (Unr) HD/IT $2.5
Skeleton Twins HD/VU $4
Skyfall HD/VU $2.5
Skyscraper 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5
Sleeping Beauty ‘59 HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Sleepless HD/IT $2
Sleepy Hollow 4K/VU $6.5
Slender Man HD/MA $4
Smokey & the Bandit HD/MA $3.5
Smokin' Aces 4K/MA $5.5
Smurfs The Lost Village HD/MA or IT $3
Snake Eyes G.I. Joe Origins HD/VU $4
Snitch 4K/IT $3 or HD/VU $2.5 or SD/VU or IT $1
Snow White & the Huntsman (Ext) 4K/VU or IT $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs ‘37 4K/MA $6 or HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Snowden HD/MA or IT $3.5
Snowpiercer HD/VU $4.5
Solo A Star Wars Story HD/GP $3
Son of God HD/MA $3
Sonic the Hedgehog 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Soul HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5
Source Code 4K/VU $5.5
Southpaw HD/VU $3
Spartacus HD/MA $3.5
Spectre HD/VU $3.5
Spider-Man 2 (Thea & Ext) HD/MA $4.5
Spider-Man 3 HD/MA $3.5
Spider-Man 4-Cut Set (Spider-Man 2 w/ Thea & Ext) HD/MA $11.5
Spider-Man Far From Home HD/MA $3
Spider-Man Homecoming HD/MA $2.5
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse HD/MA $4.5
Spider-Man No Way Home HD/MA $4 or SD/MA $2
Spies in Disguise HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Spinning Man HD/VU $4
Spiral 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Spongebob Sponge out of Water HD/IT $2.5
Spontaneous HD/VU $4.5
Spy Who Dumped Me 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
St. Vincent HD/VU $3
Stand Up Guys HD/VU $3.5
Star Trek 3 Search for Spock 4K/VU $5
Star Trek 4 Voyage Home 4K/VU $5
Star Trek Beyond HD/VU $3
Star Trek Into Darkness HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Star Trek The Motion Picture ‘79 4K/VU $5
Steel Dawn HD/VU $3.5
Still Alice HD/MA $4
Straight Outta Compton (Unr) HD/MA $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Strange World HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Suburbicon HD/VU $3 or /IT $3.5
Sundown The Vampire in Retreat HD/VU $3.5
Super 8 4K/VU or IT $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Sword in the Stone HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Taken 2 HD/MA $3.5
Taken 3 (Unr) HD/MA $3.5
Tangled HD/GP $3.5
Ted (Unr) HD/MA or IT $2.5
Teen Spirit ‘19 HD/MA $4
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ‘14 4K/VU or IT $4.5 or HD/VU $2.5
Terminator 2 Judgment Day (Special) HD/VU $4.5
Terminator 2 Judgment Day 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Terminator Dark Fate HD/VU $3.5 or 4K/IT $4
Terminator Genisys HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
Texas Chainsaw ‘13 HD/VU $3.5
Thanks for Sharing HD/VU $4
The Heat HD/MA $3
The Impossible HD/VU $3.5
The Sting 4K/MA $5.5
Think Like a Dog 4K/VU $5
This is the End HD/MA $3.5
Thor Dark World HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Thor HD/GP $3.5
Thor Love & Thunder HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
Thor Ragnarok HD/MA $2.5 or HD/GP $2
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri HD/MA $3.5
To Kill a Mockingbird HD/MA $3.5
Toll HD/VU $4.5
Tomorrowland HD/GP $3
Top Five HD/IT $3
Top Gun ‘86 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Total Recall ‘90 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Touched w/ Fire HD/VU $4.5
Toy Story HD/GP $3.5
Toy Story 4 HD/GP $2
Training Day 4K/MA $5.5
Transformers Age of Extinction HD/VU $2.5 or 4K/IT $3
Transformers Dark of the Moon 4K/VU $4.5 or HD/VU $3
Transformers The Last Knight 4K/VU or IT $4 or HD/VU $2.5
Trolls HD/MA $2.5
Trust ‘16 HD/VU $4
Tucker The Man & His Dream 4K/VU $5
Tulip Fever HD/VU $4
Tumbledown HD/VU $4
Turbo HD/MA or IT $3
Turning HD/MA $4
Ugly Dolls 4K/VU or IT $5.5
Unbreakable HD/GP $3.5
Unbroken HD/VU or IT $3
Uncharted 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Uncle Drew HD/VU $3.5
Underworld Awakening HD/MA $3
Underworld Blood Wars HD/MA $3
Untouchables 4K/VU $5.5
Us ‘19 4K/MA $5.5 or HD/MA $4
Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets HD/VU $3.5
Vampire Academy HD/VU $3.5
Vanishing ‘18 HD/VU $4
Venom HD/MA $3.5
Victoria & Abdul HD/MA $4
Virtuoso 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU $3.5
Vivo HD/MA $4.5
Voices ‘14 HD/VU $4
Voyagers 4K/VU $5
Walk HD/MA $3.5
Walking w/ Dinosaurs HD/MA $3
Wall '17 HD/VU $4
War for the Planet of the Apes HD/MA $3
War of the Worlds ‘53 4K/VU $5.5
War on Everyone HD/VU $4
Warcraft 4K/IT $4.5 or HD/MA $3
Warhunt 4K/VU $4.5
Warm Bodies HD/VU $3 or SD/VU $1.5
Warning HD/VU $4
Watch HD/MA or IT $3.5
Wayne's World HD/VU $4.5
We Die Young HD/VU $3.5
Weekend HD/VU $4
Werewolf The Beast Among Us (Unr) HD/MA or IT $3.5
West Side Story 4K/MA $5 or HD/MA $3.5 or HD/GP $3
What Men Want HD/VU $3 or 4K/IT $3.5
What We Did on our Holiday HD/VU $4
When the Game Stands Tall HD/MA $3
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot HD/VU or IT $3
Why Him? HD/MA $3
Widows HD/MA $3.5
Wild Card HD/VU $3
Willow HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Wilson HD/MA $3.5
Winchester HD/VU $3.5
Winnie the Pooh Springtime w/ Roo HD/MA $4 or HD/GP $3.5
Wolf Hound 4K/VU $4.5
Wolf Man ‘41 4K/MA $5.5
Wolf of Wall Street 4K/VU $5 or HD/VU or IT $3.5
Wolverine (Unr) (w/Thea) HD/MA $3.5
Woman in Gold HD/VU $3.5
Won't Back Down HD/MA $3.5
Woodlawn HD/MA or IT $3.5
World War Z HD/VU or IT $2.5
Wraith HD/VU $4
X-Men Apocalypse HD/MA $3
X-Men Days of Future Past HD/MA $3
XXX Return of Xander Cage HD/VU $2 or 4K/IT $2.5
Z for Zachariah HD/VU $4
Zero Dark Thirty HD/MA $3.5
Zeros & Ones HD/VU $4
Zootopia HD/MA $3 or HD/GP $2.5

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

As always, #1 slot does not mean that they're my winner pick, just that they're the most likely nominee. Reddit has a character limit and I go kinda crazy with these so I'll include a link to my elongated list at the bottom.

Picture

1. Dune: Part Two, Warner Bros. Pictures
2. Blitz, Apple Studios
3. Conclave, Focus Features
4. A Real Pain, Searchlight Pictures
5. Hedda, Amazon MGM Studios
6. Sing Sing, A24
7. Pedro Páramo, Netflix
8. Bird, TBD
9. Dìdi, Focus Features
10. The Fire Inside, Amazon MGM Studios
11. The Room Next Door, Sony Pictures Classics
12. Civil War, A24
13. Maria, TBD
14. His Three Daughters, Netflix
15. Gladiator II, Paramount Pictures
16. The Piano Lesson, Netflix
17. Parthenope, A24
18. Joker: Folie à Deux, Warner Bros. Pictures
19. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Warner Bros. Pictures
20. Hard Truths, Bleeker Street

Director

1. Steve McQueen, Blitz
2. Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
3. Edward Berger, Conclave
4. Andrea Arnold, Bird
5. Nia DaCosta, Hedda
6. Pablo Almodóvar, The Room Next Door
7. Paolo Sorrentino, Parthenope
8. Rodrigo Prieto, Pedro Parámo
9. Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez
10. Pablo Larraín, Maria

Actor

1. Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
2. Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
3. Barry Keoghan, Bird
4. Tenoch Huerta, Pedro Páramo
5. John David Washington, The Piano Lesson
6. Daniel Craig, Queer
7. Wagner Moura, Civil War
8. Sebastian Stan, A Different Man
9. Gael García Bernal; Holland, Michigan
10. Paul Mescal, Gladiator II

Actress

1. Tessa Thompson, Hedda
2. Angelina Jolie, Maria
3. Carrie Coon, His Three Daughters
4. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
5. Amy Adams, Nightbitch
6. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tuesday
7. Tilda Swinton, The Room Next Door
8. Kirsten Dunst, Civil War
9. Lady Gaga, Joker: Folie à Deux
10. Nicole Kidman; Holland, Michigan

Supporting Actor

1. Samuel L. Jackson, The Piano Lesson
2. Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
3. Stanley Tucci, Conclave
4. Franz Rogowski, Bird
5. John Lithgow, Conclave
6. Harris Dickinson, Blitz
7. Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing
8. Denzel Washington, Gladiator II
9. Callum Turner, Hedda
10. Stephen Graham, Blitz

Supporting Actress

1. Saorise Ronan, Blitz
2. Joan Chen, Dìdi
3. Nina Hoss, Hedda
4. Natasha Lyonne, His Three Daughters
5. Giovanna Zacarías, Pedro Páramo
6. Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson
7. Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
8. Eve Hewson, Hedda
9. Elizabeth Olsen, His Three Daughters
10. Kathy Burke, Blitz

Adapted Screenplay

1. Peter Straughan, Conclave
2. Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing
3. Nia DaCosta, Hedda
4. Barry Jenkins, The Fire Inside
5. Mateo Gil, Pedro Páramo
6. Denis Villenueve and Jon Spaihts, Dune: Part Two
7. Marielle Heller, Nightbitch
8. Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington, The Piano Lesson
9. Justin Kuritzkes, Queer
10. Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis, Here

Original Screenplay

1. Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain
2. Andrea Arnold, Bird
3. Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door
4. Sean Wang, Dìdi
5. Steve McQueen, Blitz
6. David Lowery, Mother Mary
7. Steven Knight, Maria
8. Alex Garland, Civil War
9. Umberto Contarello and Paolo Sorrentino, Parthenope
10. Daina O. Pusić, Tuesday

Animated Feature

1. Spellbound, Apple Studios
2. The Wild Robot, Universal Pictures
3. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, Warner Bros. Pictures
4. Inside Out 2, Walt Disney Pictures
5. The Glassworker, TBD
6. The Most Precious of Cargoes, TBD
7. Mufasa: The Lion King, Walt Disney Pictures
8. Sauvages!, TBD
9. Memoir of a Snail, TBD
10. Flow, TBD

Documentary

Shortlist Slots: 15

1. Daughters, Netflix
2. Sugarcane, National Geographic
3. The Beauty of Gaza, TBD
4. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Netflix
5. Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Netflix
6. Dahomey, MUBI
7. Power, Netflix
8. Learn/Apprende, TBD
9. No Other Land, TBD

International Feature

Eligibility Window: 1 November 2023 - 30 September 2024
Shortlist Slots: 15

1. Evil Does Not Exist, Japan (Japanese)
2. Pedro Páramo, Mexico (Spanish)
3. Parthenope, Italy (Italian/Neapolitan)
4. Emilia Perez, France (Spanish)
5. Kill the Jockey, Argentina (Spanish)
6. Kneecap, Ireland (Irish Gaelic)
7. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Norway (Norwegian/Danish)
8. All We Imagine as Light, India (Malayalam/Hindi)
9. Grand Tour, Portugal (Portuguese)
10. Dahomey, Senegal (French)
11. Dying, Germany (German)
12. The Girl with the Needle, Denmark (Danish)
13. Last Shadow at First Light, Singapore (Japanese/Mandarin)
14. Motel Destino, Brazil (Portuguese)
15. The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, Iran (Persian)

Cinematography

1. Greig Fraser, Dune: Part Two
2. Edward Lachman, Maria
3. Rina Yang, The Fire Inside
4. Nico Aguilar, Pedro Páramo
5. Yorick Le Saux, Blitz
6. Rob Hardy, Civil War
7. Stéphane Fontaine, Conclave
8. Lawrence Sher, Joker: Folie à Deux
9. Sean Bobbitt, Hedda
10. Robbie Ryan, Bird

Costume Design

1. Jacqueline West, Dune: Part Two
2. Jacqueline Durran, Blitz
3. Paul Tazewell, Wicked: Part One
4. David Crossman and Janty Yates, Gladiator II
5. Massimo Cantini Parrini, Maria
6. Lisy Christl, Conclave
7. Arianne Phillips, Joker: Folie à Deux
8. Shirley Kurata, Opus
9. Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, The Piano Lesson
10. Jenny Beaven, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Editing

1. Joe Walker, Dune: Part Two
2. Peter Sciberras, Blitz
3. Nick Emerson, Conclave
4. Harry Yoon, The Fire Inside
5. Jake Roberts, Civil War
6. Jeff Groth, Joker: Folie à Deux
7. Sam Restivo and Claire Simpson, Gladiator II
8. Marco Costa, Challengers
9. Joe Bini, Bird
10. Margaret Sixel and Eliot Knapman, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Hair and Make-Up

Shortlist Slots: 15

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Civil War
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
4. Monkey Man
5. A Different Man
6. Hit Man
7. The Apprentice
8. Joker: Folie à Deux
9. Wicked: Part One
10. The Fire Inside
11. Gladiator II
12. Borderlands
13. Maria
14. Nosferatu
15. Challengers

Production Design

1. Zsuzsanna Sipos, Patrice Vermette, and Shane Vieau; Dune: Part Two
2. Arthur Max, Elli Griff, and Jille Azis; Gladiator II
3. Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock, Blitz
4. Suzie Davies and Cynthia Sleiter, Conclave
5. Nathan Crowley, Wicked: Part One
6. Eugenio Caballero and Carlos Y. Jacques, Pedro Páramo
7. Caty Maxey and Lizbeth Ayala, Civil War
8. Mark Friedberg, Joker: Folie à Deux
9. Guy Hendrix Dyas and Sandro Piccarozzi, Maria
10. Colin Gibson and Katie Sharrock, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Score

Shortlist Slots: 20

1. Volker Bertelmann, Conclave
2. Hans Zimmer, Dune: Part Two
3. Alan Menken, Spellbound
4. Gustavo Santaolalla, Pedro Páramo
5. Tamar-kali, The Fire Inside
6. Harry Gregson-Williams, Gladiator II
7. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hedda
8. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Challengers
9. Anna Meredith, Tuesday
10. Nicholas Britell, Mufasa: The Lion King
11. Bryce Dessner, Sing Sing
12. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Joker: Folie à Deux
13. Kris Bowers, The Wild Robot
14. Thomas Newman, Kinds of Kindness
15. Siddhartha Khosla, The Idea of You

Song

Shortlist Slots: 15, (max 2 per film)

1. TBD from Diane Warren: Relentless
2. TBD from Kneecap
3. TBD from Spellbound
4. "Not My Fault" from Mean Girls
5. TBD from Joker: Folie à Deux
6. TBD from Wicked: Part One
7. TBD from The Idea of You

Sound

Shortlist Slots: 10

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Civil War
3. Twisters
4. Challengers
5. A Quiet Place: Day One
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
7. Blitz
8. Gladiator II
9. The Fire Inside
10. Joker: Folie à Deux

Visual Effects

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Blitz
3. Twisters
4. Civil War
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
6. The Fall Guy
7. Wicked: Part One
8. Mufasa: The Lion King
9. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
10. Here

BAFTA Casting

1. Blitz
2. Dìdi
3. Conclave
4. Bird
5. Monkey Man
6. The Nickel Boys
7. Wicked: Part One
8. Sing Sing
9. Pedro Páramo
10. The Apprentice

SAG Ensemble

1. Sing Sing, A24
2. Dune: Part Two, Warner Bros. Pictures
3. Blitz, Apple Studios
4. Conclave, Focus Features
5. Hedda, Amazon MGM Studios
6. Civil War, A24
7. Wicked: Part One, Universal Pictures

Stunts

1. Dune: Part Two, Warner Bros. Pictures
2. The Fall Guy, Universal Pictures
3. Monkey Man, Universal Pictures
4. Joker: Folie à Deux, Warner Bros. Pictures
5. Civil War, A24
6. Blitz, Apple Studios
7. Wicked: Part One, Universal Pictures

DGA First Feature

1. Rachel Morrison, The Fire Inside
2. Sean Wang, Dìdi
3. Agathe Riedinger, Wild Diamond
4. Dev Patel, Monkey Man
5. Ellen Kuras, Lee

My long prediction
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGARiueyOM/_uGZO8OTqKkXOiRdmCmG_g/edit?utm_content=DAGARiueyOM&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

This is Jill. She has been with me since early October of last year. When I got her, she had a couple leaves still on so I decided to keep her in the house throughout the winter season where I kept her out of dormancy. She grew a few more leaves over winter and stayed pretty active and green. Now that we are in spring time, she has dropped all of her leaves, leaving her naked as I transition her outside with my other plummies.
My question is, now that she is without leaves, should I still water her as I would for spring time weather, heat, and sun exposure? I was told to not water her as generously without leaves. Her soil is still within range of moisture below the surface…..but it’s drying up quicker now that it’s warmer outside. I’m not sure what to do.

For non-spoilers, Iris Wilson, the child prodigy in the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, would be in her 60s when Manfred Von Karma, the nigh-undefeated prosecutor was born.
​
For Ace Attorney Investigations 2 Spoilers, (Specifically the 4th case), Because Karin had to wear Jill Crane's clothes to disguise herself as her during the auction, all Jill had on was her underwear. If you look at Lotta's photo, the case intro cutscene, and any other image of the person in the red raincoat (excluding the person walking towards Kay, which is revealed to be a seperate person), you will not be able to see her pants, let alone legs. Because the auction went on AFTER the box was bought by Karin, this means that Blaise put an unconcious Kay Faraday inside a locked box with a practically naked corpse. That's... really messed up, and it never occurs to you unless you REALLY think about it, which I did, because I love that case and it's my favorite :D.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street,
"I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror? O look in your distress, Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

Sorry about the formatting
Some of these are series as well and some are documentaries. I couldn’t be bothered to filter out the series’s or docs because most of these are films
Top Gun: Maverick The Banshees of Inisherin Nomadland Amsterdam Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri The Client You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah The Big Lebowski The Big Short GoodFellas Casino The Godfather The Godfather: Part II The Silence of the Lambs Hannibal Dolemite Is My Name The Wolf of Wall Street Joker Supersonic The Covenant The Lie Painkiller Filth White House Farm Inside Man Ready or Not Parasite Twin Peaks: The Return Breaking Bad Band of Brothers Chernobyl The Riot Club La Haine City of God Tapping the Wire The Dark Knight There Will Be Blood Whiplash Miss Sloane The Little Things Dark Money Locked Down 99 Homes The Founder Edge of Tomorrow The People Under the Stairs 28 Days Later 28 Weeks Later What Lies Beneath The Hills Have Eyes Signs Detroit The Holiday Deceit Adult Material The Serpent We Need to Talk About Kevin The Devil All the Time Who Is Erin Carter? The Cry Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Life of Pi Avatar Deadpool Hell or High Water Network The Social Network Thirteen Donnie Darko Gone Girl Ricky Gervais: SuperNature Ricky Gervais: Humanity Profile Creep Take Care of Maya The Secret Calibre Air American Sniper Sound of Metal The Business Disturbia Flight Patriots Day The Imitation Game Crank Crank: High Voltage The Bank Job Throw Momma from the Train 127 Hours Gangs of New York David Brent: Life on the Road Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa Alan Partridge - Stratagem Alan Partridge's Scissored Isle Swarm American Made Uncut Gems The Dropout The Patient Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case Who Killed Jill Dando? A Hidden Life Inventing Anna Pieces of a Woman Come to Daddy Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Nobody Alias Grace Unbelievable Seven Seconds Nowhere When They See Us Fair Play Blue Ruin Those Who Wish Me Dead He Never Died Gerald's Game Cam The Forever Purge Hubie Halloween The Boogeyman Nightmare Alley Barbarian The Burial Hereditary The Conference Maxine Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Gold Wrath of Man The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Old Dads Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul Fresh Suspiria The Girl Next Door Midsommar Knives Out The Wailing Prisoners Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood The Killer Tales from the Lodge A Murder at the End of the World Don't Breathe Super 8 Insomnia Loving Pablo Tucker and Dale vs. Evil Ronnie O'Sullivan: The Edge of Everything The Gunman Blade Runner 2049 Room JFK Traffic Bad Lieutenant Boss Level Leave the World Behind Da 5 Bloods The Revenant Saltburn Withnail & I Everything Everywhere All at Once Society of the Snow King Richard The Disaster Artist The Lobster Alone The Hunt 21 Bridges The Vast of Night Manchester by the Sea Ricky Gervais: Armageddon Honey Boy The Whale Blow the Man Down American Nightmare The Tender Bar Widows The Hunt for Red October Zola Winter's Bone Single White Female House of Sand and Fog The Impossible Paris, Texas Nil by Mouth Muscle Beast God's Creatures 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi The 12th Man Trunk - Locked In Deadwater Fell It's a Sin The Road Green Book All My Friends Hate Me Snowtown One Day Naked The Beasts Munich The Ballad of Buster Scruggs The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar Army of Darkness Run Medusa Griselda Dead Set Killers of the Flower Moon Hijack Black Bird Femme Dune: Part Two Rise of the Planet of the Apes Dawn of the Planet of the Apes American Fiction Scoop

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.