The Dream

Recently in school we have been learning about the Holocaust and World War II. So my friend came up with an idea for each of us to write a story about it so we could read each others. I am going to make mine longer later on but for now here it is. I am sorry if it does not seem very good, but this sUddenly came to me and this is it with only a few revisions.

He was running through the dark night. Something or someone was chasing him but it was to dark to tell who or what it really was. Suddenly he tripped on the root of a tree and fell to the ground. He lay frozen petrified of what was to come. Whatever was chasing him loomed over him in a sinister shadow.

He realized that the shadow was a person. Slowly the person bent over towards him. He saw the face; it was his father. His mother and sister were right behind him but he hadn’t seen them chasing him. The trees spread apart and the sun came out shining. His family was smiling and laughing as they were sitting on a picnic blanket next to the crystal clear lake.

Isaac woke with a start, shivering in the cold. The dream was just what he wished for, what he longed for. He wanted to be home with his family laughing again. Why had God done this to him; brought him into this nightmare?

Life in Auschwitz was so brutal. They fed them hardly anything and made them work day and night. Everyone was a living skeleton barely strong enough to survive. Death was now a part of life, something Isaac watched everyday. He had even witnessed his best friend dragged away, doomed to the gas chambers. He knew he would never see most of his friends, and maybe his family, ever again. He knew that he would surely die in this place of hatred.

He longed to die. Isaac wanted to be taken away from this dreaded place. He knew there was a better place waiting for him. A place where there was no hatred or racism. He knew if he died he would go to heaven. That’s what Isaac was always waiting for, the day he would finally leave.

He had to walk by dead bodies everyday. Walking by them became part of life at the camp. Isaac became a heartless zombie getting by from day to day but never having any feelings. Once though, he passed by the corpses of his cousin and aunt. He looked away trying so hard not to cry. He watched his sister be taken to the hospital knowing that it was for one of Dr. Mengele’s cruel experiments. He knew she would surely die. If not from the experiment it would be later from the infection caused. He knew because he had seen his cousin die of infection from the experiment that they had done on him.

Day and night they all heard shrieks of pain. People cried seeing their friends and family tortured and dying, when they themselves were dying as well. No one thought they would ever get out of this living hell. They all figured they were condemned to live here forever until they died.

The guards never told the prisoners what was going on outside of the camp. No one had any clue that the Allies were getting closer. The closer they got the harsher the guards became. They beat the prisoners within an inch of their lives just for stumbling.

Isaac awoke the next morning to the furious screaming of a guard. They were all told to get outside in straight lines of five. Anyone that stayed behind would be shot.

He got in line in front of his father, whom he was ecstatic was alive. Next to him was his uncle and on his other side was another of his cousins. They all began to march. The guards were yelling at them to move faster. They were on a Death March.

At times they had to run, others they would hide in barns staying quiet. He always kept up but he could see that his father and uncle were getting weaker by day. The guards would tell no one why they were making them march this way.

He was running along with the rest of the prisoners when his father and uncle collapsed from exhaustion. Isaac was forced to watch both of them shot in the chest. He cried out in pain, for he had only his cousin left. The rest of his family had been killed. He had found out from the woman in front of him that his mother had died from being killed in the gas chamber. He and his cousin were both all alone in the world.

Three days later his cousin collapsed just as his father and uncle had. Again, he watched a member of his family, the only one left, killed. His cousin was shot just like his father and uncle. Now he was totally alone in the world.

The next day the Allies caught up with them and took over. They nursed all the prisoners slowly back to health. There was nothing that could be done for them emotionally though. They could not take back all that the prisoners had seen and been put through. Isaac would be permanently scarred for life and not just by the tattoo on his arm.

He had no clue what to do or where to go. He had no family. Everyone had been killed. The Allies were doing there best to help everyone find a place to live. Isaac knew a close friend of his father’s that had not been taken since he was not Jewish. He hoped that the friend would take him in. All he knew that he was totally sure of was that he was now free.