The Note Between Barbed Wires – Auschwitz

Amid the rot of splintered souls, Where frost gnawed at an earth too bitter for burial, She stood—a flicker of sinew and shadow, A flute cradled between chapped fingers.

No stage, no warmth, only mud and iron, And a melody torn from the marrow of memory. Her breath coaxed song from cold metal— A tune yearning for places beyond these wires.

He lurched past, skin pulled taut over bone, Eyes pinned wide by unspeakable terror, Yet the thin thread of sound grazed his cheek, A filament glinting through fog and filth.

He paused. She searched. And in that hush, the air thinned— A single chord of light bridging numb despair.

Her gaze found his, unwavering, Offering neither plea nor promise, Only a quiet refusal to be invisible, Even here, especially here.

Her lips curled—barely, A curve that defied barbed wire and watchtowers, A smile with no rightful place in this world, Yet it remained, stark as bone.

His chest tightened— Not from hunger or cold, But from the weight of her defiance, The cost of feeling alive.

She played on, fingers trembling, Fear and creation warring against the freeze, Each note a defiance, each breath reclaimed From the lungs of a camp built to strangle.

He moved; the spell broke. Feet sank again into swallowing mud. But he carried her with him— That smile, that note, that impossible second.

Later, he would wake to screams and ice-bitten dawns, To a sun that offered no warmth. Yet he would remember: In a place built for forgetting, she made music. She saw him. She smiled.