[I've rated this 16+ just in case]
I wrote this for History h/w. Feel free to rip it to shreds, especially as I haven't given it in yet.
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Evil knows no limit. They will stop at nothing to cling on to their sacred power; what little it matters now, who would want to cling on to a shattered country? What kind of power is that?
They came for us with a backdrop of red and white. With a soft step and a heavy boot: the cowards way. Before even the neighbourhood had seen the first light their muffled steps thudded on our stairs. Black suits, white shirts and red papers filled the family room. Pack our bags we were instructed, in harsh guttural voices but in hushed tones.
My father was told to sign that dreaded red form. He refused. So they beat him. They hit him and they hit him, until in the end, as he was insensible, they grabbed his hand and scrawled a signature on the form. That red form now splattered with red blood – in so many ways. In one fell swoop they had efficiently and stealthily executed our lives as we knew them. We were on a dark and shuttered train carriage within the hour. I was six at the time.
Thus we were whisked away into the darkness. My mother was sitting in the corner of the dirty and empty carriage, tears stained her face. She was cradling my father who had lost consciousness from a particularly nasty blow to the head an office dealt him out of spite, for giving them trouble. I peaked out of a gap in the boarded window, splinters of dawn touching my face like a tender mother. I watched the town landscape transform into countryside as my home raced away behind us. I gazed out at the gloomy and barren fields as the Sun was starting to rise; rise as it so often did: hopeless and unable to help, as its radiant beams failed to penetrate the blanket of oppression that had befallen Nazi Germany.
The country landscape became bleaker and more foreboding as the Sun rose higher into the grey sky. Fields quickly turned into muddy bogs and wooden fences soon merged into mesh and barbed wire. Every so often a uniformed man would flash before my eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to our carriage. Just stood there, armed, and often idly smoking a cigarette.
Eventually the train started to slow, and a great iron fortress appeared before me. I stared at the gate, under the fierce gaze of the Eagle. I read the sign underneath. ‘Konzentrationslager Dachau’ it read. I didn’t know at the time what Hell I was about to embark into, but my father had crawled up behind me, and peaked out the crack. He made a little gag in his throat and murmured a prayer. My memory fails me somewhat, but I think it went something like: “Dear God, make me dumb,/ that I may not to Dachau come.”
The door to the train was opened and we were dragged out of the train. Swiftly pulled away by the scruff of our necks, that iron gate disappeared as we were pushed in a different direction; though I still felt very much, that I was still under that gaze of the all seeing Reich Eagle.
Passing guards with their dogs, we trudged trough the mud under that gloomy sky. My father dejectedly dragging his feet, accepting whatever fate may become him; my mother, weeping silently still and looking desperately at my father’s back; me, my feet hardly touching the ground as a guard roughly pulled me along by the scruff of my shirt. I looked about me curiously and with fear. We passed along through a corridor of barbed fencing, towards what looked like a city of hovels and sheds, a multitude of times larger than my home town.
We trudged through, passing many desolate huts. There were no windows, but, in the desolate states that they were in, I often thought I saw a multitude of listless eyes peering out at me from cracks in the wood. I wondered at them even being human eyes, in my innocent state of childhood, as they looked so despondent, and not an ounce of that hope that defines humanity was to be found there; in my ignorant state, I did not know then what inhuman cruelty there existed around me that could result in men, women and children being reduced to such a primitive state of mind devoid of both hope and fear. They looked merely shells of the creatures they once were.
We came to one of the hovels, and were shoved in. There was no-one in there, but it stank of human excrement and suffering. There was no furniture. There was nothing. No windows. Just a rancid hut with a hard wooden floor to sleep on. My father was taken away from us, pulled away by the guards. He didn’t protest, just went with them. I caught a glimpse of his eyes: they reminded me of the others. Eyes that were no longer full of hope and joy, but resigned to some predestined fate of suffering.
My mother wept as they took him, quietly in the middle of the hut, I had curled up into a corner. Then they came. Guard after guard. I did not know then in my innocence and ignorance what they were doing, and I could not see, for it was dark; all I heard was each guard coming in after the other, chuckling, accompanied by my mother’s whimpers.
I did not know back then what evil the world could manifest. What cruelty a man could do to another. Germany, 1938; Hell on Earth. Hitler’s reign was absolute: my father, a simple business man, had made a joke. An anti-Nazi joke. This brought about the utter destruction of my family, the death of my father and my mother. They left me, a broken shell of a child, to walk along the streets of Berlin, and chant “Long live my Führer!”
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