This is a short story, a very short story. Is it called an anecdote? 

Auschwitz, no date, because I don’t remember dates. But it must have happened in late summer or fall, potato harvesting season, I assume. The year? 1944? 

A miraculous day happened. They, the rulers of the universe—SS for short—let us stay in the barracks. I don’t know what day it is, but now somehow, it feels like Sunday. Not only are we allowed to stay in, but…we are also given a whole boiled potato. 

Even the Olympian Gods didn’t feast like we did this day. 

The potato’s skin has that fresh, earthy smell and taste to it. The flesh, the inside, is creamy, deliciously so, yet solid enough to the bite. We savor every minute, minuscule drop of it. We inhale the scent, an aroma which only imagination is made of. And it is hot! I don’t, I can’t recollect when I had something warm inside my body. The watery morning tea slash purple-grainy-liquidy cereal, which even for our empty bellies is quite disgusting, and the so-called soup are always cold, by the time they reach us. 

As we reverently, slowly consume our heavenly treat, the women start to talk. We are on the top bunk, my mom and I! A great spot, not as claustrophobic as the lower ones, a little more space and light above our heads. 

If I remember correctly, I think we are actually sitting. 

The chatter rises in whispers… 

Here in the dreariest, the most God-forsaken place on this beautiful earth, the chatter is about cooking. 

The women tell each other, give to each other—as if there is a world to come—recipes: Torts and cakes and beef stews, puddings, fruit tarts and what not? And my Mamusia (mom) tells of the goose she used to make using the black cast iron, white-porcelain-inside roasting pan, the goose roasted to golden perfection. She let us—my brother Oskar and me—dip a piece of the freshly baked Challah bread in the delicious gravy, the nectar straight out from the Garden of Eden. To this day I savor the taste, although my mom never had another chance to make it again. 

The scene melts into nothingness, speck embedded in my memory, like a pleasant dream from which one awakens with a smile! 

It’s a short story as I promised. Every moment, every split second in Auschwitz–Birkenau, can be told as a story, a story tattooed in our brain never to disappear.