You wouldn’t know. After days in a decrepit railway truck that pushes and pulls over 500 miles where you’re jammed in like so many cattle. Sharing a bucket of feces and piss that stinks worse than a public lavatory. You wouldn’t know as you were herded off and ordered to strip down to your underwear. Left standing vulnerable and chilled in the Polish air, wondering why you’re surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers that menace with pointy machine guns.

You would never know, but you might suspect. As you are led unto an underground chamber for ‘processing’ and are made to sit on bare concrete seats. Seats that make your already numb behind ache. Seats that make you shiver in distress while you embrace those members of your family that you can find. Your mind ruminates on what’s happened to the others, what might happen next among a song of distressed sobs and wails. As with all things in this terrible situation, you want to believe that this is just another deprivation you are being put through because of your beliefs.

You would never know as the hissing begins that a silent unseen demon was beginning to clutch at your insides and burst blood vessels and capillaries. The work of cyclon B, the wickedest invention of the regime. Doing their dirty work for them. Surrounded by gasps and moans you clutch your wind pipe and your eyes roll up inside the top of your skull. You suffocate and choke and are crushed by a weight you can’t explain. You would never know that such a small puff of gas could do so much damage, thousands and thousands of lives worth of damage. You would never know that gas could weigh so much.