The following 300-word short story was based on a prompt for Artoons Writer’s room.
The Alchemy of The Scar
Rivka Weiss strutted towards the centre of the museum, the staccato taps of her unsteady cane reverberating hauntingly through the exhibition hall. She halted, panting from the effort. At 95, things weren’t easy at all…
Scattered strategically throughout the hall, stood her sculptures, each of them a mute testimony to a time that shamed humanity.
Ausstellungen der Ewigen Stimmen (Exhibits of eternal voices) was held to mark the 79th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. She loved sharing titbits with young visitors. After all, the younger generations wouldn’t know what happened in that inferno decades ago, would they?
She sighed, looking at her shaking left forearm; the deep disfigured gash from aeons ago, was now a mere grotesque scar. Its jagged edges once firmly embedded in her delicate skin, were now a distorted map of veins and wrinkles. Her children had advised plastic surgery for years…
But how could she explain? This wasn’t just a physical scar but imprisoned in it was her tumulus past… her very soul. The scar stirred the emotions, never letting the embers of memory die.
The scar brought alive the nightmares of the concentration camp where she was among the ‘chosen ones’ for the deranged doctor Josef Megele’s* medical experiments. The deep gash happened when, at barely 15, she resisted his eccentric attempt to alter her genetic makeup…. without anaesthesia.
The Nazi camp didn’t know that her defiant blow to his head left him with hemiparesis for the rest of his life, and gave her the scar. Hemiparesis caused Megele’s ‘accidental drowning’ a few years later. Liberation came soon after and she was a hero in her circles. She became a renowned sculptor, each of her pieces telling the story of the testing times, forming a bridge between memory and history.
Rivka was scarred for life.
(word count: 300 excluding the title)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction based on what is reported to have happened in Auschwitz. This is completely a figment of the author’s imagination. The author doesn’t intend to demean anyone/anything or distort history.
Author notes: (source: Google)
- Josef Megele: Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death,” conducted horrific medical experiments on prisoners, particularly children and twins, under the guise of scientific research. He is known to have died of accidental drowning though there are various theories in regards to the same.
- Auschwitz is the name of a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp established in 1940 during World War II. It’s one of the most recognizable symbols of the Holocaust and genocide in the world
