Sentence The Fivehundredandeightysecond

 

Gretl Cohen (nee Bloom) hadn't yet known, when she arrived in the aftermath of the War, as a British Representative with the International Red Cross, at the former Death Camp at Auschwitz, that she

and her husband, Max, back in Glasgow where he practised as a solicitor, had both lost their entire families there; her medical training had done nothing to prepare her for what she saw, and even that did nothing to prepare her for what she was to learn had gone on at Auschwitz; she was so numbed that she could not even cry or wail or roar, so she simply worked and worked – ensuring the best

disposition of medical and food aid among the living, her heart breaking whenever the choice was between giving medicine or food to someone who could not be saved and would probably, definitely, die through the night, or to another, who might live another day, and perhaps another after that, and perhaps enough successive days to become a survivor; the piteous cries of those denied even the last shred of hope that they might see another morning, though it be their last, having survived years of brutality and inhuman treatment, only to fade at the very point of being saved, was more than Gretl could bear, yet bear it she did, for she knew that this truth must be told: by the survivors themselves

and for those who did not survive, by people like herself and the Allied Servicemen who had witnessed the end; when she returned to genteel Bearsden, she felt like a ghost – she had no interest in the complaints about their affluenza from her oysshteler neighbours in Number 17, the

Greenfinches, with their sights set on a Milngavie villa, and no time to waste on the boasting of Mr Mendelsohn the gonif schlockmeister at Number 5 whose goods if you bought them would probably never work yet in the face of any complaints he would stick his fingers in his ears and repeat, parrot-fashion, "caveat emptor, caveat emptor," but in the crepuscular light of that dying November day when her son Bernie came home, wan and aged, after talking a client out of the most serious of charges, she just took one look at him and said, from the depths of her soul: "my son, he has had a Shock, such a Shock, I only ever saw this before in one place, and that was in Auschwitz!"