I hadn't known what a Muslim was before the "Culling", but I soon learned that if any of us tried to pray that was the last time we saw them. Yet, when the guard weren't looking, men, women and children formed little groups. I learned about Allah and Muhammad and the history of America and Israel. I heard about the Holocaust, it was something evil that had happened to the Jews and I learned it was being repeated, but this time the numbers were greater and the victims were Muslims.
I was ignorant – I didn't even know what a Jew was until I was told, but it never made sense to me.
"But if Muslims, Jews and Christians are so similar why is this happening? Why punish everyone for the crimes of a few people? Why?"
Nobody had an answer.
Each day, at sunrise we were forced out of the bunk beds that we shared with rats and lice and led in long lines to a nearby factory where we worked folding cardboard boxes. There was no break and no food until we returned twelve hours later to the warehouse. Exhausted beyond human endurance, the stench would drive us to our knees.
Each day more died, each day more arrived, each day I learned more about who I was and each day I prepared to join the dead.
YOU ARE READING
M
Short Story13-year-old Idris Ahmed, an Arab-American, wakes up in a jail cell surrounded by a bunch of strangers. "Where's my family?" He asks. "Forget them," he is told. "You are never going to see them again." And then he finds out why... "M" tells the story...
