Ethel and Agnes raced down the stairs to answer the door for their mother. They were twins, and the only children born to Johanna and Zachariah Rosenberg. They both had the same brown eyes, the same brown, curly hair, and the same smooth, plain facial features. They talked in the same manner, walked in the same manner, and thought in the same manner, too. They were so alike it was as if the two had been cut from one body and made into two separate persons. They reached the door at the same time and opened it together.
There was their father, broken and bleeding on the doorstep. He could barely keep his head up, and yet, he struggled to stand. “Papa!” Ethel yelled. “What has happened to you?” Agnes asked. Both girls leaned down and helped their father into the house with worried looks on their faces. They got him into the kitchen and sat him down on a chair. The girls called for their mother. Johanna rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen, stopping short in the doorway and gasping.
“My dear, darling, Zachariah! Oh, what happened to you? Oh, darling, you look awful!” said Johanna. She went up to her husband and began smothering him with kisses. Then she stopped and turned serious. “So what happened?” she asked him. The man moaned in pain, then croaked, “Water.” Ethel and Agnes sprang to fulfill their father’s request: Ethel retrieving the glass from the cupboard, and Agnes taking the glass pitcher from the refrigerator and filling the cup with ice-cold water. Ethel walked over to her father and handed the glass to the broken man and watched as he gulped it down.
Gasping, Zachariah thanked his daughters for the drink and kissed them on their heads. Then he moaned in pain again, and then began to sob. “Our shop,” he began. “I told everyone to hide when I heard the sounds of glass shattering and people screaming.” He choked back a wail and continued on. “I heard machine guns firing and Nazi officers shouting commands at the people. And when the Nazis came to our shop…” He broke off in the middle of his sentence, shaking. He motioned for more water, and his daughters refilled his cup in the same manner as before. After draining his cup dry again, he continued.
“They knew. Oh, they knew that we were hiding. They had dogs with them. Big, vicious German shepherds, they were; the kind that’ll rip your arm off in a heartbeat.” He shuddered at the thought. “They-” He broke off again and coughed, blood coming out of his mouth. “They found me and pulled me out of my hiding spot. They said that if I told them where the others hid—which was in the basement—they would spare me and my family.” He looked at his family, who looked back at him in sadness and in horror. “So I did what they asked, and-” his voice broke, and his daughters refilled his glass for him. This time, he did not touch the glass, but instead, carried on with what had happened. “And they called me a traitor and beat me, then left me on the floor to watch. And they brought them up, one by one, and slaughtered them before my eyes.” He began to sob uncontrollably, and could not stop. The girls held each other and wept. Their mother led them to their father and brought them in for a tight family hug. They all were crying for their lost companions, and a feeling of imminent doom swept over the twins.
Just then, there came a loud pounding at the door. “Open up! Juden!” called a booming, German voice. “Ve know that you are in here, Juden. If you do not come out before the count of
five, you will all be killed! Understand? Vundebar! Zhe counting starts… Now!” The father mouthed “I’m sorry,” to his family as they turned and stepped slowly out of the house and into the hands of the Nazis. They were taken by way of a German army truck. Everywhere, there was violence and screaming, as Nazi forces terrorized the local Jewish population. Now and then, the truck would stop, and more people would be tossed onto the truck.
When they finally arrived at the train station, they were all loaded into a boxcar, and the door shut with a bang. It was crowded and dark, and it reeked. The stench was of human waste, of death, and of fear. It was unbearably hot in the daytime, and had to huddle together to keep warm at night. People screamed, yelled, and wailed. Some tried to tear their way out of the boxcar. Other people were getting sick, and many were dying. . Some of the people in the car began to go insane. They were all starving, but they could not eat. They were all thirsty, but they could not drink. There were so many people in the boxcar that there was no room to sit, so they all had to stand. Ethel witnessed a child eating his own feces to stay alive; another gnawing on the flesh of her deceased mother. Agnes saw this, too, and held tight to her twin sister. Days into the trip, their own father, bruised and broken already, had fallen ill. It seemed like they would never make it out.
On one fateful afternoon, however, the train stopped. In a rush of sound and light, the doors opened, and everyone scrambled to get out. They were all lined up and sorted out: males in one line, females in another, and children in the third. Promises of food and water, and even a nice, hot shower were made by the Nazi officers that oversaw the whole thing. Children were taken from desperate mothers that tried to take them along. Men tried to escape, but were gunned down. Ethel and Agnes were torn from their mother by a particularly cruel-looking Nazi officer.
“How old?” He questioned the two. They both replied, “Fifteen.” They lied about their age; they were only twelve. The officer inspected them more closely, and asked, “Sisters?” They nodded. Shrill screams pierced the air, causing the girls to turn their heads toward the sound. A teenage mother was struggling to get her baby back from the officers, who shot the poor infant in the head. The girls shuddered at the gruesome sight, and turned back to the officer. He leaned in closer to the girls, and touched their cheeks, fingered their hair, and gazed into their eyes. His breath was rank and his face shaven. His beady eyes absorbed every detail of the girls’ profile. He then stood up and nodded. “Twins?” He asked. The girls confirmed his assumption, revealing that they had both been born on the same, muggy July day.
The officer laughed and pulled the girls away from the rest of the group, away from the screaming children and wailing mothers. They were being pulled away from their own mother, who reached her hand out to them, bawling. The girls looked back as they were dragged after the large man. They saw more people fighting against the Nazi troops, who also were beaten and some gunned down. They entwined their free hands and shut their eyes. They were afraid, but refused to scream. They wept silently.
They were led into a hospital room that was clean and sterile, with white walls and white tile floors. Yet, something was wrong. Screams, though muffled, could be heard from inside that small room. Panic spread through both girls’ systems as they noticed two gurneys in the middle of the room. Another man came into the room with them, and assisted the other in strapping one girl to each gurney. They looked at each other with twin looks of sheer terror in their eyes. “Agnes,” Ethel whispered. “Ethel,” Agnes whispered back. Their hearts pounded hard, suddenly the only sound in the room. Then, a doctor in scrubs walked into the room, wheeling a silver tray in front of him. He stopped it in between the girls, and got to work preparing wicked-looking surgical tools.
He took his mask off and turned to one girl, then the other. “I am Doctor Z,” he introduced himself. He had an evil grin on his face. The girls watched in terror as he sharpened scalpels and other sharp, silver objects. Then he sat everything down and reached into a bag strapped to the side of Agnes’s gurney. From the bag, he pulled out a vial of green fluid and a syringe. He attached a needle to its tip, and then filled the syringe with the fluid. The girls screamed as the needle came close to Agnes’s arm. The doctor administered the shot to Agnes, then to Ethel, and the girls’ world swirled, and then faded to black.
Ethel woke with a headache. She opened her eyes to the blinding light of the hospital room. Everything around her righted itself, and she looked around. To her right, there was nothing but a white brick wall a few feet away. To her left lay her sister, who was about two feet from her. But something was not right about Agnes. She slept peacefully, her chest rising and falling in time with her breath, but there was a spatter of red on her forehead. Her clothes were stained with that same red color. Ethel’s eyes traveled down past Agnes’s chest, and stopped dead on her abdomen. Ethel screamed. Agnes’s stomach had been cut open, and her entrails spilled out in a bloody mess over her body. She screamed and screamed, her shrill cries summoning the evil doctor. “Shh…” he said to Ethel, smoothing her hair. He then raised his bloody scalpel so that Ethel could see it. “Don’t worry,” he cooed. “It’ll be your turn very soon.” Ethel gaped at the doctor in horror, and screamed. The doctor cackled, and then administered the shot to Ethel once again. She cried out, then everything went dark forevermore.
