"Speaking of the devil!" My friend exclaimed when a rat dashed over his feet.
There was a strange tone to his voice – as if some sympathy.
I wondered, feeling already my exertions were as hopeless as all of my national situation.
How could I guess his enigmatic thoughts if I had not been able to tell his age? As I had studied him for the first time, in the dim lighting of the last candle, I could have sworn he was younger than myself. Yet, after a few days, when there was nothing left to light up our slow and fearful existence with, I would have said he was an old man. Old – and wise.
Regardless, he asked me to consider him my mate. Preferring humans to rats – although the difference of the specimen is sometimes arbitrary – I agreed. I picked one man out of a range of one. What a choice that was! As a result, I dare to say, the underground seemed whatsoever less unbearable.
Nonetheless, we quarreled frequently and lively – as if we were not starving and dying. I was not accustomed to the kind of manners he possessed, and he expected me to, ignoring his status of the strangest stranger.
Whether he loved rats, adored them, pitied or associated with – I did never finally decide. But feeding them with these poor remains of his poorer meals was his must, which I had never spotted him neglecting.
Whatever this relationship was, the rats clearly enjoyed it, and hence they kept returning to our future chamber of death.
"You will be solemnly regretting that," I stated with contrasting hatred; for as much as I started respecting and loving my fellow, I despised the dirty creatures. "When hunger kills you."
"Do you not think they are similar to us?" he asked instead of confronting my prophecy.
"I think I am not..." I started, but he suddenly touched my knee as if to alarm me.
As a typical survivor of the Holocaust, I broke off at once. Maybe there was something wild about me after all - as I was listening to noises around, trying to foreshadow where the heavy steps of the Gestapo could be coming from. Like a scared animal indeed.
Everything was silent.
"Let me speak now." He was looking at me. I could say he was, despite the darkness, such attentive eyes he had. "If we are not rats, why are we sitting here? What are we for the German?"
