A picture I drew when I was four.

Set in WW2 period, probably about 1943.

Word count: 2,132



I looked out of the window. The streets were full of people carrying their possessions with them. Some people had carts to pull furniture with, some were carrying chairs on their heads, it looked quite funny.

I didn’t know why they were doing it or where they were taking it to, all I knew was it was because that’s what they’d been told to do. I wasn’t even sure who actually told them to do it.

“Will you hurry up! Stop daydreaming and get a move on!”

That was my sister. She has brown hair and dark eyes and she is five years, three months and fifteen days older than me. She is normally very nice to me, but today she was cross. I think she was cross because we had to move out of our house.

I grabbed my little suitcase and the pictures off my wall. They were drawings I did. They were not very good and they had got a bit crumpled because I did them when I was only four. They were for a project at school; we had to draw a picture of something very special to us. I did two. One was of my little plastic doll that was called Eliza, my friend said I should draw it because she had exactly the same doll and we always played with them together and she said she was going to draw her doll too. I didn’t even like that doll. I only draw it because I didn’t have any other friends. My other drawing was of our family; me, my sister and my mother. I drew my father in that picture too, even though he is dead. That made my mum cry, so I didn’t take it into school. I kept it though because there is nothing else to do with my father at home, so I used to talk to him in that picture. I don’t do it anymore though. That’s silly.

“Come on! What are you doing up there? We have to go. Now!”

I looked around my little bedroom for the last time and ran down the stairs where mum was waiting in the hall way. She bundled me out into the street and her and my sister started walking in the strange way that they always did. Head down staring at the floor and walking as fast as they possibly could. I held on to my mum’s hand trying not to drag behind. Looking around me I could see crowds of people all heading in the same direction as we were, but I didn’t know where we were going. Not even when we got there.

We walked through a huge gate into the old part of the town; it was all closed off from the rest of the city where my house was, and my school. A man showed us into a small house down lots of little roads and around six sharp corners. He led us up a small staircase and showed us into a little room with two small windows. There was no carpet or curtains and barely any furniture, just two beds. On one of them sat a man and a lady with a little baby, all cuddling up to each other. The man told us that this was going to be our apartment and we were going to be sharing with the other people. The man left and we sat down on the other bed and stared at the family on the other bed, they stared back.

After a little while my mother started talking to the other people in the room. I didn’t listen to what they were saying because I’d been told that was rude. I was use to the grown-ups talking quietly about things I wasn’t supposed to hear so I started daydreaming. That’s what I spent most of my childhood doing, real people all had their own problems, but the people I talked to, that I imagined, they didn’t have any problems. They were happy and they smiled and laughed, like the real people used to. I talked to father to, well to my picture of him. But I only did that when I didn’t think anyone was looking.

We lived in the little room for a very long time. It was freezing cold in the winter, boiling hot in the summer, there was no food and the baby cried all the time. She wailed and screamed at night so you couldn’t sleep. When she eventually stopped in the early hours of the morning, I used to still hear sobbing. I didn’t know where it came from, but I heard it. It seemed that everybody was crying and I didn’t know why.

I didn’t leave the little room very much. I played in there by myself, kept myself occupied. But when I did go outside it was very strange. Everybody walked around so slowly, nobody seemed to be going anywhere, they were just walking. It was really quiet, nobody talked to anyone they didn’t know and people just minded their own business. It was very boring.

Then one day we had to leave. The men were outside with megaphones. And guns. They was shouting and running around dragging people out of their apartments. I left the little room with my mother, my sister and the other two people and their baby. We took our little suitcases but I folded up my pictures and stuffed them in my pocket.

I was holding my mother’s hand and we followed everyone out of the gates. I didn’t know where we were going, this time I don’t think mother did either. We just followed the masses of people, not speaking and our eyes not leaving the ground. I was out of breath from running to keep up with mother’s speed walking and I was breathing heavily.

We were taken to the train station with all the other people. The men split us into groups and we were herded into big wooden boxes, like train carriages but with a big sliding door and no windows. The box was not big, but there were a lot of us in there. Me and my mother and my sister were separated from the other people and their baby and pushed right into the corner of the big box. When as many people as possible had been crammed in, the door was pushed closed.

It was really dark and horribly stuffy inside the big box. I sat down and lent my head against the corner of the box and I think I fell asleep. When I awoke I was still inside the dark box but there was a horrible smell and there was hardly any air. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I looked around, all the people were sitting still and silent. Their heads only moved slightly with the monotonous movement of the train, or maybe they were swaying from lack of oxygen.

My mother was sitting next to me, still like everybody else wanted to ask her where we were going but it didn’t feel right, everybody else was silent. Instead I put my hand in my pocket and talked to father. But in my head. He talked back to me and he said that where we were going was going to be great, like a holiday. He said that I needed to not worry and not be sad and that everything was going to be all better again. But it was just in my head.

I think I must have fallen asleep again, or maybe I was unconscious because I couldn’t breathe, but I woke up to a gush of air and a blinding light. There were more men like there had been at the train station shouting and telling us to get out and hurry up. I watched mother stand up and steady herself on the wooden wall, then she helped me get up and stand on my legs which seemed to have forgotten how to work. We were hurried out of the box and told to stand in a line. Me and my mother and my sister stood at the back behind lots of other people. At the front there were a few more of the men with guns and what seemed to be doctors examining people. I watched as the people at the front of the queue were looked at by the doctor and then told to go either to the left or right and join a group of others. I watched as mothers and children were separated from each other. Women were screaming and children were crying and the men were shouting. They were shouting really loud. I looked around me at the look of shock and bewilderment on the faces of everyone and started to panic. This was not a good place, and we were nearly at the front of the queue. I grabbed my mother’s hand and squeezed it as hard as I could.

And then I did something I hadn’t done before. Not when we were kicked out of our house or shoved into a little wooden box, I had to do it now. I looked my mother in the eyes and asked her,

“Why?”

She looked back at me, unable to speak,

“Why are they doing this to us mother?” My voice seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a whisper. I watched my mother swallow and take a deep breath. Tears started to roll down her face,

“I don’t know. I don’t know why they are doing this to us.” She started to sob, “It is because we are Jews.”

I looked back at her. I didn’t understand. I was confused and frustrated and so horribly scared. I didn’t know what she meant, my mind was all full up with questions and I couldn’t think properly. My stomach was full of butterflies, except they weren’t butterflies; it was more like an angry swarm of wasps romping around my insides. I started to cry too.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said to her, “Why are we Jews?” I saw my mother smile through her tears.

“It’s a religion, just a religion. Your grandparents were religious, do you remember? We were never religious, I didn’t believe in it, and your father wasn’t from a religious background at all.” My stomach lurched. I felt like I’d just been slapped full on in the face. This was the first time my mother had mentioned father since he died.

What was happening to us?

We got to the front of the queue, I looked at my mother and my sister as they were sent to the other right and then I got told to go to the left by a very tall man. I did not know what left was and so confused and frightened I followed after my mother.

Unbelievably there was no shouting and nobody had noticed me go the wrong way. My mother made me stand behind her legs and she sobbed quietly.

I stood there quivering behind my mother for a very long time. We were then taken inside what I know was a concentration camp. Hell on Earth. We lived there for a while, but my mother didn’t last long. She died in her sleep from illness and starvation. I was separated from my sister too when she was taken away from me on a train to go somewhere else.

I understand now. I understand that we were technically a Jewish family living in the holocaust. The holocaust when the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews because they were subhuman.

But I was just a child; I didn’t even know that we were Jewish. I was just a frightened child that had everything taken away from her. I lived alone in that camp for a year, never talking to anyone. I don’t know how or why I survived, it was a cruel twist of fate. And I still don’t understand why. It will be a question that never gets answered. Nobody will ever be able to give me an answer that explains why it had to happen.

I had everything taken away from me before I’d even had it long enough to fully appreciate it. I was so young and naive that I don’t even remember my family. I feel like crying when I think that the only memory I have of my childhood is talking to myself and I can’t even remember what my mother looked like. All I have now is the only thing I have that survived that horrible time. It means that I can talk to them all, but now to me, my family will always be a picture I drew when I was four.