Holocaust Short Stories

The Best Kind of Art

Ashley missed her paints. She missed her canvases and brushes and the smell of acrylic. She hadn't been able to bring them when she was brought to the concentration camp and separated from her family.

But now, leaning against the back of one of the barracks, she desperately wanted some colour. This place had none of it. It needed greens and yellows and oranges, and definitely reds. Red just happened to be Ashley's favorite colour. Most of her paintings consisted of it, depicting vivid flowers and sunsets on the horizon. Ashley cherished drawing nature, it was so pure and full of such a rugged beauty that could not be matched by any other thing.

There wasn't much nature to see at the camp. What little grass grew among the cement streets was brown and dead, and the land beyond the fence seemed to be little different.

Not to mention the colour of everything else. Faded blue and white clothes, brown buildings, grey pavement, brown dirt. It was all the same, and Ashley was sick of it all.

Sick of being separated from her family and being forced into heavy labor every waking hour of her life. She was sick tired of living in a world that had no substance or life to it. Didn't she have an obligation as an artist to fix that?

With a sudden skip in her heart, Ashley looked down at her small forearm. She didn't have paint, but she had something else. Glancing up at the wall she was leaning against, her face broke out in a smile. She knew just what she needed to paint.

With a quick, sharp movement, Ashley brought her forearm down as hard as she could on a large nail that stuck out on the side of the building. It stung horribly for a long time after that, but she knew she had to act fast before she ran out of time and pigment.

As carefully as she could, Ashley dipped her fingers into the red blood that was slowly seeping out of her arm and began to spread it over the wood. Faster and faster, picking up more blood, and ignoring the splinters that caught in her fingers. Her head began to feel light and dizzy, but she just shook it and continued on. The blood seeped into the wood making a permanent stain that would prove hard to wash off if left alone long enough.

When she finished, Ashley stepped backwards, pulling off a bit of her nasty clothing to wrap around her wound. The cut wasn't horrible, and the nail hadn't managed to cut that deep. Reassured that she would be okay, Ashley quickly ran away from what she believed was her best piece of artwork yet. It was simple, but it seemed to mean more than anything else she had ever made.

It took the Nazis almost a month to find Ashley's work spread out across the backside of a building. By that time, it would be almost impossible to get it off, so it was left there, much to their disdain.

But for many years afterwards, people spoke of the silent angel that fought for them. The angel who had painted a Jewish star in blood on the side of a Nazi building.