Life sucked for Zeliha VonSmitz, but at least she wasn't in the camps. The camps were awful. The screaming, death, disease, and starvation. There was a never-ending cycle of it. At least, that was before she escaped.
Now you're maybe wondering how she escaped at the tender age of ten. The answer was simple. She never went in as a Jew. She was sent to go to the camps but one of the guards took a liking to her.
Zeliha was instead separated from her family to go be a servant for friends of the guard. The Schmidts were nice enough people. They gave her a whole room, clothing, and food. They even had a three-story house.
There was a problem though, Zeliha wasn't the most hard-working person, she was often compared to the cat her family had. With a preference to laze about, and stare at the large domed ceiling all day the chores the Schmidts gave her were so much more.
Try as she might, the effort to do things was almost an insurmountable task. To be fair she was to make their house sparkle by the time Mr. Schmidt got home from his bar.
She kept it clean surprisingly on most days. Though struggling on some, on those days where the dust was found on the chandeliers or the clothes were not ironed out, she would get knocked about.
Not by Mr. Schmidt, no, it was by the Mrs'. She would beat Zeliha till she was blue in the face. Zeliha soon learned that the exhaustion from the cleaning was much more desirable to the aches and pains from the beating the night before.
So Zeliha cleaned the mansion each day, relishing in the days where she could cut corners and relax. She learned that what she wanted more than anything in the world was to be free and to relax in the nothingness of flight through clouds.
Nine more years would pass until something differed from the usual pattern. The year was now 1939 and the second World War was in full swing. Zeliha's masters had long since fled from their mansion of comfort. They would not take her with them of course. They used the excuse "If this house is not sparkling when we get back, you'll be shipped off to a concentration camp."
So in fear of the horrifying camps, she beheld so long ago, Zeliha stayed and slaved over the house. That was until the bombings started.
The first was more downtown than she was so she knew but did not worry. The second wave was closer and it unnerved her a bit. And wave by the wave of bombing they grew closer, and wave by wave Zeliha's fear grew.
Before she knew it the ariel attacks had reached her residence. She was cleaning under the grand piano when it fell. First was the noise, then the searing pain of lost limbs. She laid there, crushed by the weight of the piano with no hope of escape. Burning in the fires of what had been her home for nine long years. Zeliha thought to herself that at least through all the pain and suffering she could relax into deaths embrace.
