Holocaust Journal

May 27th 1942
Her name was Beatrix. She was two years old when I sent her away with her father’s aunt. All of our other relations are dead. Her father is God knows where. He disappeared after her birth. She turned three, fourteen days ago, May 13th.
My name is Heiidi. I am nineteen years old and I am an industrialist. I have a notebook industry that is on the black market for Jewish people. When things start to get bad Jews will rarely have the chance to buy something to record their memoirs in. This gives them something, however little. The back business is secret for now and prices are cheap.
I am Jewish. I am blond, blue eyed, and “5,6”. I am alone. Beatrix is all the family I have left and she is gone. It is not safe for her here with me. I can not be a good mother at the time, not with the situation I am in. We’re Jews and I am illegally selling merchandise. I can not risk her being taken away. The only thing that brings me some small joy is a little music box. Beatrix’s music box…
It’s been passed down from mother to child since my great grandmother gave it to my grandmother. Among it are trinkets each generation adds to it( my first coke’s cap, a tiny flipbook my mother made when she was young, the first and last letter I ever received from Beatrix’s father, a map of the world with places marked that we wanted to travel one day, and a necklace with David’s star on it, the first in our generations). These are not much, but they are memories from a happier life. The only things that give my Solitaire a bit of joy.


June 27th 1942
Cuts. Scratches, or scrapes can go deep or can be minor. Some may leave scars and others may heal instantly. It doesn’t matter much to you because you know that your immune system will heal it. A couple weeks ago I was running away from a marketplace after having stolen a small book. I took a shortcut and had to jump fences, something I’d become rather good at. I didn’t notice the barbed wire at the top of one and got many cuts and bruises all over me. I now had a deep gash in my right hand. I paid $200 for some stitches and salve, along with medication. The cut will heal but the scar will last. It’s a memory of pain. Painful memories are something that the mind has difficulty blocking. So although it will heal and the scar will fade until it is a faint line in my hand, it is an emblem that cuts into your skin.


July 27th 1942
Since my childhood I have learned to steal if I want to have a meal. Since then I have grown. I have an industry. I make ten grand. I have evolved. I steal sometimes even now in hiding. I went from nothing to a success. Stealing offers something for me. It’s an adrenaline rush, my heart starts to pound and my blood is pumping so hard I can’t think straight. It reminds me of being free to do as I please, of being equal to others. Those days have passed but I still have the hope and memory of being O.K. I will stand up for what I believe in, even I have to steal or lie. That will never change.



August 27th 1942
In the hands of the enemy. I woke up today, disguised myself, not fully because I look like a German as I changed religions in childhood. I have “idyllic” features to Nazis. I needed to leave the Annexe to get medicine for my hand. The one mistake I made was to leave David’s star on, the symbol of my faith. They didn’t notice it for a while, the soldiers. It was my fault, when I’m nervous I fumble with my necklace.. I didn’t even realize it but the soldiers did.
I’m on my way to the “camp”. The ads and pictures make is seem O.K. sort of like a jail but once you’re caught they don’t even bother pretending. They don’t grant us this simple joy, why bother?, Right? You don’t know exactly what’s to come. But you know it’s worse than you think, you know that someone this low, this Evil and cruel, inhumane even will not have set up a room, with a bed, dinner, and some clothing for you. The looks in their beady little eyes makes the lies that read so on their faces contradict each other in such a way to form a grotesque mutation. I do not know how I will go on but the soldiers were talking loud enough so I could hear them throwing back ideas about putting me on one of the “advanced” and “revolutionizing” scientific experiments. I can’t help it, through all my life alone, a thief, a mother, my hard heart can still know the terror this instills me in… No denial can make me forget what I know, what has happened. And what will happen to me and all other Jews. There is nothing for them but the hope. But yet for me I still have fight left. The realization of our situation makes me all the stronger.


August 28th 1942
Beatrix.. I may never see you again. Not while this hell blazes on. I have always loved you. Although alone in the world I have never been truly lonely. The thought of you makes me like a Polaroid. I will never leave you. The fight I have in me can not burn out. Your strength pumps through my veins. The face of new life is a lie. The truth is the lies on any other human’s face. Your eyes speak the same truth as your face, something few people keep. ‘Why we are here, I know not; where we shall go, it is useless to enquire. In the midst of the myriads of both living and dead worlds, minds, stars, and infinity why should I be anxious of yet another German?


September 27th 1942
I open my eyes as I lay on the dampened earth. Pine, Oak, and maple trees surround us. We are in the Black Woods. The French Resistance snuck in to our ‘camp’ yesterday. Our ‘camp’ has low surveillance. They saved all of us from the “medical experiments” they were doing to us. We ran, we ran like crazy! We walked on and on for miles. Even now the sounds of the wailing sirens and the gashes and blood dripping from climbing the barbed wire, they do not stop. I can not make the sirens go away! They wail on and on until I myself start to scream with the capacity of it all. I am afraid for my sanity. The images crowd my head. The days and nights of pain and injury through the “experiments” they do not go away. I can still see their faces. The “doctors” and their “perfect faces”. I can not come to the realization as those of the government who have found out the truth can not believe that a human can do such to another. I did not endure the worst. I did not go to the extermination camps, I was not a worker. I was lucky. My luck brought me through here. I have escaped, I have made it through. For others they will not. For now we walk on. I do not know where, we just lay in the rescuers’ hands now. I do not know what has happened to Beatrix, or Leo, or his aunt… But for now I walk on in memory of those beady little, all telling eyes on those lying grotesque mutated faces. The nazi will not last. The end will come for them as it has for many others. The world and its mind at its best will never achieve peace. The day will come for all, and realization.


After the War
: In the eyes of a government official who just found out what was really happening at the concentration camps to the Jews

‘I am walking through something,… something crunchy and snapping under my feet. There is something wet and warm trickling along my body. It is dark, I can not see but for a single light. As I walk forward through the light it brightens my path. I see the bodies and skeletons of humans (Jews) all aligned in perfect rows set to die, waiting. The reason it is dark is because I’m underground. I am covered in blood; not mine. The more I walk the farther away the light goes, but if I walk any other way it does the same. Its like the maze at apple orchards except you cant’s get out and there is no escape route. Its all closing in on me now, the humans all staring at me with sunken eyes, just skin and bones, and I..I do not know what to do. I am helpless, in treason!’

I wake in a cold sweat. I can still hear the sirens and the gunshots echoing in my head. But now as I lie awake, there is silence. Dead silence. I can not believe that my fellow coworkers could have, would have been so cruel and unusual to do this to another human. It is not plausible. The photographs and videos I saw were nothing like what it really was. It looked like a prison camp nothing more. And I, I know but nothing at all, barely anything of what they did to the Jews. Ah the evils of humanity. A subject both interesting and terrifying. For all those Jews, all those people who because of Hitler, Germany, the government, its people and myself… “never saw another butterfly”.


Epilogue
We lived in one of my abandoned factories. There was a locked up basement that no one knew about. I had it added on during construction in case something should happen. Over the years I installed things, like a stove, an Ice Box, appliances, and plumbing. Now when the time should come I started moving things in if the need to go into hiding arises. As people started disappearing I shut down the factory due to “malfunction”. During those years I brought in a Baker and his children, a scientist who I ‘d never met but heard of her experiments, and an artist. We all had our separate rooms and it wasn’t a bad living. Sometimes we’d get het up with each other. Mary’s mysterious past, the baker’s constant nagging, the artist brooding and my inability to be social, to talk