Brittney Cleans :
You’re woken before dawn by screams in a language you barely understand. Armed men burst in, shove your family into a cattle cart with so many people that you have to keep your arms raised above your head, until some of the passengers died then you can stack those dead bodies like fire wood in the corner giving the living passengers a tiny amount of standing space with each death. You don’t know where you’re going. You hear rumors, gas chambers, furnaces, but no one wants to believe it. You arrive at a camp surrounded by barbed wire, dogs, and towers. Your name is taken. Your belongings are taken. Your hair is shaved. You’re no longer a person, you’re a number tattooed on your arm, given a dead persons uniform that doesn’t fit.
The stench of death hangs in the air. Every day, you watch people collapse from hunger, disease, or exhaustion. The guards beat them for fun. Some are dragged away and never return. You are given a crust of bread and watered-down soup that smells like rot, not enough to nourish you, just enough to prolong your life to extend the suffering. You sleep on wooden planks in bunks, rats crawling over your legs with five other people how don’t have access to water and are wearing the same uniform from the time they arrive. You freeze in the winter, sweat through rags in the summer.
You don’t know what day it is. Time has stopped. You learn to walk past corpses without flinching. You stop asking questions. You stop hoping. You watch your brother wither to nothing. You hold your mother’s hand until it goes cold. You keep moving, because stopping means death.
You were taken for being born Jewish. Not for a crime. Not for entering a country illegally. Not for a choice. Just for existing. And if you survive long enough they will put you in a gas chamber and kill you. Unless you are selected for medical experiments, like how a body reacts to being frozen or being sown to your twin, or an amputation with no anesthesia.
That was the Holocaust. That was the death camp. Never forget. Never distort.
2025-07-05 17:48:16