Have you seen, in fields of snow,
frozen Jews, row on row? Blue marble
forms lying, not breathing, not dying...

-Avrom Sutzkever

A louse crawled from under Avraham's sleeve and dropped on to the snow. It wove a drunken path away from him and he watched it go and wondered idly if lice had lived in the Late Jurassic Period. He tried to imagine a scelidosaur trying to scratch itself, but only managed a faint image, and an equally faint smile. He dug his fingers into the snow, welcoming the cold pain, and closed his eyes against the faint sunlight, and against the black smoke that rose, continuously now, from the crematorium further away.

He remembered arriving at the camp. They were made to queue, the men to one side, the women on the other. A man in a striped uniform and with an armband that read Kapo stood nearby. He had asked him, in German, 'where are we?' and the man had said 'Auschwitz.'

'What's Auschwitz?' Avraham said, and the Kapo said, 'You've never heard of Auschwitz?' in a strange tone that was both mocking and afraid. And he had said 'No,' and the Kapo said, simply and with a certain weight, 'It can't be.'

He knew Auschwitz now. When he arrived the number on his arm was a high number, and the veterans, those who had arrived before and were selected, had lower numbers and treated him with what was part suspicion and part a tired reluctance.

Now, his number was one of the lowest, and he was himself a Musselman, a camp veteran, a skeletal machine. He opened his eyes and looked for the louse, but it had gone. He caught a sudden flash of speed then, as of something reptilian and large, but when he turned his head there was nothing there.

After they were selected they were assigned to barracks, five to a room that would hardly let them sit, let alone sleep. They would need, he had realised then, to shrink even further if they were to fit into their new habitat. And they had. They had shrunk, until they were little more than babies again, feeble children trapped in the witch's oven. Some soup arrived in the evening, but with nothing to eat it. Some people scooped it into their hands and it was running through their fingers. One of the men, Andrej, had worn, for some inexplicable reason, wooden shoes, and now, with an air of embarrassed determination, removed them, went to the bowl of soup and ladled it with the shoes. The men sitting open-legged against each other in the narrow room passed the soup to each other and ate in silence.

They were alone with their thoughts. That, at last, Avraham had come to realise, could not be taken away from you. And so he drank the soup, making himself eat it slowly despite the hunger, and thought about Sellosauruses. His father used to take him with him sometimes to the Neckar Valley in Baden-Wurttemburg, where they dug out giant bones and tried to guess how they fitted, what the creature they once supported may have looked like. He used to imagine the valley filled again with dinosaurs, the feel of their feet pounding earth as they moved.

He decided the search for the louse was fruitless. He rubbed snow into his face with his right hand and stood up slowly. He was thirty five once. Now he was just old. He turned away, when a dark shape in the snow halted him.

He peered at it in the pale winter light. Five feet from him was a footprint in the snow. It was the size of a man's head and had three giant toes. He looked at it for a long while, squinting against the light. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again the footprint had disappeared, replaced with grey, sludgy snow.

He felt sudden excitement stir in him, unfamiliar after its long absence, but Alex, the Kapo, was calling him already, and Avraham was scared of being lashed again by the kid; the scars on his back felt raw and reptilian, as if they were an alien entity on his back, pulsing with an ill-health that had nothing to do with the rest of his decaying body.

He wished the louse - he had never come up with a name for him, or her, and now never would - good luck and returned to the cabin. The men slept together like a joined heap of bones, trying to draw warmth from each other's body without success. Avraham's dreams were full of flying pterodactyles, who swooped high above the watchtowers of Auschwitz, crying into the night air.

He woke up sweating despite the cold, and thought he heard the beating of leathery wings outside, but of course there was nothing there when he looked out of the small window.

His imagination, which he thought was betraying him lately, was seemingly trying to over-compensate for its recent reticence. Then he was outside again, the wind lashing his body with icy determination, and he thought for a moment that his heart would stop. They were assembled, distributed into units, and marched out of the barracks and to work; an orchestra led by a white-gloved conductor played Beethoven.

At first his job was to sort through the artefacts that had once belonged to the dead people whose ashy remains were being buried in the giant communal graves and he guessed, then, that he was lucky.

It was even, he sometimes thought while handling a brown, leather shoe or a pair of round spectacles, that it was comforting. Sorting through the dead past perversely reminded him of the digs with his father, and he felt he was sifting history through his fingers. When he saw a name - Hanna Rubinstein on a delicate, gold necklace, less than an hour before; Samuel Kaplinski, inscribed on the back of a pocket watch, stopped on an afternoon hour - he would try and remember them, running them through his head like a rosary just as he did with dinosaur names, so that sometimes the two lists mixed with each other, and a megalosaurus followed a Gross.

Today, however, he was transferred to another group. The smile Alex gave him then was predatory, and there was anticipation in his healthy, left blue eye. 'No,' he said, his finger pointing at Avraham and moving slowly up and down, as if he were admonishing a child. His protruding nail was blackened and grotesque and reminded Avraham of a talon. 'you're joining the sonderkommando today.'

They were marched away from the barracks and the orchestra played on.

To his surprise, Avraham found he was content. Something had changed in him over the night, when the faint groans of the others mixed somehow in his mind with the cries of pterodactyls, as if the ancient dinosaurs hadn't known that they were already dead.

They were led to a clearing in the forest beyond the camp. Avraham's shoes were shredded leather, strapped together by curses and prayer. He felt the cold stab him through the soles of his feet, an icy spike that penetrated into his abdomen and chest and punctured his brain with all the power and pain of a Polish winter. He tried to flex his fingers, but they wouldn't obey.

'Dig,' the SS officer said.

They dug. Were they digging for themselves? Avraham had wondered. Was this to be their own grave they were digging? He knew that the Germans periodically killed the sonderkommandos. They were dangerous witnesses, periodically eliminated and replaced. And after all, what was there that was left of them to be used?

Avraham felt himself focus, his consciousness narrowing. He worked in silence, digging the frozen ground, the touch of earth on his non-responsive fingers serving to transport him to a different time, a different place. His fingers closed on a heavy fragment of bone and he discarded it without looking.

There were many bones there, in the earth. He touched each one briefly, almost caressing them as a sense of expectation settled slowly over him, as the bones became larger the deeper they dug, both heavier and older.

The light was fainter here, filtered through the barren branches of the trees; and it seemed to weaken even further the deeper into the earth they dug, so that they moved in twilight amidst this makeshift cemetery.

SS guards, sonderkommandos , even, for a moment, Auschwitz, all receded slowly from Avraham's mind, and in their place he began to discern sudden changes in the unnatural twilight. The afterimages of faint, lumbering shapes imprinted themselves on his retina like flashes of searing light, and the hole itself seemed to be opening out into a wide and featureless plane.

The bones he found were mending themselves. Slowly, they were assembling into groups, knitting into patterns, absorbing substance from the darkness, from his mind.

'You see?' the words barely penetrated into his reverie. The voice of the SS officer in cultured German. 'This is how a Jew should work!'

they were forming into shapes, and he recognised them, and in the silence of his mind he called to them. A herd of long-necked sauropods ambled past him as if he were invisible, and stegosaurii with spiky tails raced each other along the savannah like unruly children. Pterodactyls cried overhead.

He realised then that the hole he was digging, the hole he had thought was opening out to a plane, only seemed to him so since he was at its centre, and that this wound in the icy earth was really a wide crater, formed by some unimaginable impact, some powerful, mindless, destructive event that could change worlds.

Something that could kill a dinosaur.

'Enough!' He heard the German's voice as if it was spoken through a thick liquid. In the distance, a sauropod called, its cry a melancholy melody that wrapped itself around the distant bars of Beethoven's sixth symphony. A baby stegosaurus passed close to Avraham and stopped to look at him with a look of benign curiosity on its face.

'Remain in the hole,' the German said, and to his men, said simply, 'open fire.'

He sank into primordial mud. It filled his nose and his mouth, suffocating him. through the ground, through his entire body, he could feel the herd of sauropods as it ran.

'We'll get another group tomorrow to cover them up.'

There was pain in his leg, in his shoulder. An immense weight pressed on his chest and face.

'Any still alive?'

momentary clarity as he rose from the mud and found himself buried under the weight of a man.

'All look dead to me.'

The earth was shuddering now, quaking in the wake of the sauropods flight.

The mud reclaimed him. it no longer suffocated him; he sunk into it and beyond, until he was once again standing in the crater. All about him were dinosaurs, whole families, whole species he had never imagined existed.

'Just... check.'

The air felt increasingly warm. The sun had nearly disappeared. A baby stegosaurus - the same one? a different one? He couldn't tell - approached until it towered above him, then leaned down and licked his face thoughtfully.

Avraham felt tears rise, their fading memory catching him by surprise. They had come for him, he knew that now. They attached themselves to him, the way ghosts are sometimes set to haunt a place; they haunted him.

He looked into the sky and breathed in thickening air. Something immense was falling down, growing until it filled the sky. Avraham looked at it, and looked away. Then he sat on a rock and watched dinosaurs.

He was content; and only dimly aware of the voices of the SS soldiers, far away under the mud, and of the rock that was falling from the skies.

'Got one! He's twitching.'

He knew it won't be long before it landed.

The End