Gilah Berkowitz

Gilah Berkowitz’s life is shaped by hunger, concealment, and imprisonment: first as a child in the Ukrainian SSR, then as a young prisoner caught in the machinery of the Nacht und Nebel directive. The remembered taste of her father’s chicken survives across the years, while her sense of a continuous past does not.

Identity and Background

Gilah’s childhood unfolds amid extreme famine. Her father has eaten a pigeon and tells stories to his daughter, who has had only grass to eat; a boy in another house is so weak that he falls when he tries to walk. The children’s hunger is not exceptional but part of a world where even the dead are treated as food because little else remains. Gilah knows that going outside is dangerous: her father alone is permitted to leave, while her mother, brothers, and Gilah stay inside as bodies lie in the street.

Her father turns deprivation into a story about a golden boat with silver oars. In it, little Gilah asks for the boat so she can fish and bring food home to her family; each evening, her mother calls her back from the river. The imagined routine gives the child a role as provider, but the tale sits beside the hard fact of her hunger. When her mother says she is going to die, Gilah watches her father take his hat and coat and leave despite the heat. She later tastes chicken for the first time, having been told that her father stole it. The last piece tastes best because there will be no more, and its flavor becomes a memory she carries forward.

Capture and Imprisonment

Two years before the journey through Germany, Gilah had arrived at Lemberg in western Ukraine. She was thirteen, though her body looked like that of a twenty-year-old man. After stealing a suitcase from a German military bus, she was caught by the Gestapo and swept into the system of Nacht und Nebel detainees sent to extermination camps. On arrival, no one examined her: she was given a card and work clothes, and her apparent health and strength were taken for granted. That omission left a crucial aspect of her body concealed from the camp authorities and, as the later journey shows, without access to appropriate care.

Forced labor initially seemed to confirm the value of the strength that had helped her survive. Gilah liked digging ditches and assembling machine parts; she watched other prisoners weaken and took satisfaction in outlasting adult men. The camp’s brutality is registered not as a single ordeal but as a steady bodily attrition: boils, infected wounds, chronic diarrhoea, and prisoners dying or nearing death. Gilah herself was gravely ill, with four large carbuncles on her neck, a badly affected stomach, an infection in her crotch, and ruptured veins on her inner thighs. Because her genitals differed from those of the other prisoners, she could not obtain treatment on the bus. She kept this difference secret, believing the one person who knew might not survive the war.

Twelve years after the famine, Gilah is transported through a collapsing Germany in a white bus marked with red crosses. The markings offer no reliable protection: British aircraft control the skies, international rules have broken down, and the convoy’s safe passage at German roadblocks depends on its Gestapo escort. Forty-five people, including Gilah, had left Dachau; at least four were already dead, and several others were close to death. The dwindling group makes the journey a continuation of the camp’s violence, not a passage securely out of it.

Her body remains stronger than most of her fellow prisoners, and she is among the few still conscious, but strength no longer means safety. The stench and anguish recall Dachau. Trying to imagine freedom, she cannot locate it in time: there seems to have been no life before the camp and no life after it. The memories remain, yet feel as though they belong to someone else. Against that broken sense of continuity, one sensation persists: she can still taste the yellow flavor of her father’s chicken.

Historical Frame and Narrative Function

The two historical proclamations surrounding Gilah’s memories expose the violence hidden inside official language. A 1933 Soviet proclamation in the Ukrainian SSR calls eating one’s own children a barbarian act, while the famine scene shows a world in which the dead are treated as food because little else is available. The contrast does not soften the horror by turning it into an abstract symbol: it places an accusation of barbarity beside the conditions that make survival itself morally unbearable.

The later German proclamation makes threat and punishment sound procedural. Under the Nacht und Nebel directive, civilians deemed a danger to the Third Reich could be sentenced to death, while those who broke its regulations or withheld information about enemy activity could be arrested. Set against Gilah’s journey, this language offers no account of individual bodies or suffering; it converts people into cases to be detained. The chapter’s movement between proclamations and intimate memory therefore makes the gap between state power and lived experience part of Gilah’s story: the rules name offenses and impose consequences, while hunger, illness, secrecy, and the remembered taste of chicken persist beyond their official categories.

An Unresolved Passage

The account leaves Gilah in transit rather than carrying her to a destination or a confirmed release. The convoy’s depleted numbers and her own serious illness make survival uncertain, while the memory of the chicken remains sharply present amid the journey’s physical misery. This suspended ending denies the passage a clean escape arc: the reader is shown movement through a collapsing Germany, but not what awaits Gilah when the bus stops.