The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

At the end of Grodezka Street we turned left into Janowska Street and we were brought to
a halt to let a string of crowded tramcars go past. People clung to the doors like bunches of
grapes, tired but happy people struggling to get home to their families, where they would
spend the evening together, playing cards, discussing politics, listening to the radio—
perhaps even listening to forbidden foreign transmissions. They all had one thing in
common: they had dreams and hopes. We, on the other hand, had to attend the evening roll
call and perform gymnastic exercises laid down according to the mood of the officer in
charge. Often doing interminable knee bends until the officer tired of his joke. Or there
awaited us the “vitamin B” exercise in which hour after hour we had to carry planks through
a lane of SS men. Evening work was dubbed “vitamins,” but unlike the real vitamins, these
killed not cured.
If a man was missing at roll call, they would count us over and over again, and then in
place of the missing man they would take any ten of his comrades out of the ranks and
execute them as a deterrent to the other would-be absentees.
And the same thing would happen tomorrow, and perhaps the day after tomorrow, until
we were all gone.
Thoughts of tomorrow…made me think of the dying SS man with his bandaged head.
Tomorrow or perhaps the day after tomorrow he would get his sunflower. For me, tomorrow
or the day after tomorrow, perhaps a mass grave waited. Indeed at any moment the order
might come to clear the hut in which I and my comrades slept—or I might be one of the ten to
be selected as a deterrent.
One day a rumor ran round the camp that fresh prisoners were arriving from the
provinces. If so, there would be no room in our existing huts, and if the camp authorities