My Shadow Beside Me

Prose After Auschwitz

In spring 1943, a few weeks before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a teenaged girl named Irka left the ghetto.  Most of the Jews of the city, including her parents, had been deported to Treblinka and murdered.  Irka had no family left and nothing of her own, aside from the clothes she was wearing and an extra sweater. 

She did have a friend.  A few thousand…