Prisoner B-1941

The Journey

Running towards mother to give her a hug, a Nazi soldier roughly grabs my wrist and shouts at me to pack a case. I run upstairs and squeeze as many things into my case as possible. Slowly, I quietly walk downstairs hearing my heart pounding in my head. When I get downstairs, everyone is already in the truck and so I decide to quickly bring the remains of the bread with me; stuffed into my pocket. In the truck, I am surprised to see nearly all of the Jewish people from Frankfurt in the truck as well, so I am rather squashed. Sitting on my case, I huddle next to Anne, my younger sister and my older brother Hiram. Facing me is my older sister Rebekka who looks so scared, but not as scared and worried as I am. Lastly I look at my youngest brother Tomas who at only four years old looks so confused that I can’t help but shed a tear for him as I know, whatever they will do to us, it will be the hardest on my little brother.

The truck ground to a halt. When we get out of the dark dusty truck we were dazzled by the brightness of the summer’s sun. Everyone pushes and shoves to get out to the fresh air, to then just be pushed onto an even more crowded train. We are so pushed together that it is like we are crammed in like sardines. I decided to take my piece of bread out without anyone seeing; I quickly ate a small bit and then passed it onto father who then shared it out with our family and our friends. I then saw an elderly man looking like he might die of starvation as we had been on the train for many hours now. Luckily I had a small piece of bread left, even though it wasn’t much, I knew it would help. He was very close to where I was standing so I could just hand it to him without anyone noticing. He looked up with surprise, then he smiled, but as soon as it spread across his face it was quickly replaced with a look of deep sadness and fear.