A World of Decay

I'm Renate Straub (Straub is a surname which means "to escape"). I'm 22 years old born July 22nd, 1911 and I live in Deutschland (Germany). I look like Katniss Everdeen with dark green eyes fused with a little orange. By the time you read this, I probably won't be alive... I know, I'm only 22, but if you only understood. The world was once so schön (beautiful). To think it was a blessing having a good feeling about waking up tomorrow and being alive. If you thought no day was guaranteed then, you would definitely think that now.

My family comes from a small town called Schwäebisch Hall, Deutschland. This is the place everything went downhill in the year of 1927, when I was only 16 years old. It started like any normal day, but of course that's how they always are. I came home from schule (school) and saw my house starting to go down in flames. Those orange, red, and yellow colors were the scariest colors at that moment. How could heat take lives snaps, just like that? It was despicable. I assumed the fire just started out so I ran into the house and tried to find anyone I could. I had a Mutter (mother), Schwester (sister), Zwei Bruder (two brothers), und eine Oma (and a grandma). I went in there and the smell, the smell, it was death. Even if they were alive, that smell alone could've killed them. No one was alive; I started to get trapped and had tears in my eyes, not able to see clearly, it was hard to find an exit. I had to run through flames, the crazy part is my left arm is the only part of me that got permanent scars from those deadly flames. I felt the flames spread over my left arm like locusts to a fresh crop eating away.

I still remember the days Meine Schwester (my sister) and I would listen to "Auf Uns" ("To Us") on the radio. Meine Schwester and I were very , very close. We've been through everything together and I'm thankful for every impact she's had on my life. I would teach her as much English as I could when I would came home from schule. Of course, in return she would help me with my mathematics. I had trouble in that subject. My family was really close with each other, except my Vater (father), he was often distant. He would want you to know him and act like he knows you, but couldn't possibly remember your favorite color, even if you told him 1 million times (which was blau / blue by the way). Other than that, Meine Mutter played both roles. She was a mother AND a father, she's simply amazing. So life without my family is hard. It's like walking over ice with just tennis shoes. You just keep falling only to try to keep getting back up. I'm not able to forget the memories and the life long lessons everyone has taught me, but life goes on.

This is just the beginning, what you just learned about me, I believe it prepared me for what's going to happen next. Now here's what happened in the year 1933. It was the year of destruction to my country, the year of destruction to Germany. That was the year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor to Germany. For the German people he was amazing, Hitler was maybe somebody we needed. He created autobahns which helped transportation of things. We had law and order (few locked their doors), we had propaganda to give us hope, and we had everything else we could possibly want. The thing we didn't realize is our freedoms were slowly drifting away. For instance, movie stars had to be a part of the Nazi party, all music had to be German, and books had to be by approved authors. That's not even the big picture; he was after the untermensch (Subhuman or "Germs of Destruction", people who he thought was below him, like jews), not us Germans (who didn't oppose him). Well, I forgot to mention that I had a few Jewish friends with whom I was very close with. When everything got so bad; if they were on the run, I was too. One night we were running trying to find some shelter and happen to find ourselves creeping around corners of buildings. While we were doing that we had to stop and hold on to the wall to help us not fall past our cover. My friends Johann, Ingrid, and I were pushed up against each other. We were trying to hush our breath from running 5 million miles that night. We could hear German soldiers right around the corner yelling at people warning them to stop and comply. Those poor people were screaming at the top of their lungs, so desperately. When the soldiers shot them we saw the flash from the barrel on the wall across the street from another building.