"By their fruits you will know them"

[Mercy]

"THE ARRIVAL"

We have arrived. We have arrived where? Where are we?

Young men in striped prison suits are rushing about, emptying the cattle cars. "Out! Out! Everybody out! FAST! Fast!"

The Germans were alwys in such a hurry. Death was always urgent with them--Jewish death. The earth had to be cleansed of Jews. We already knew that. We just didn't know that sharing the planet for another minute was more than this super-race could live with. The air for them was befouled by Jewish breath, and they must have fresh air.

The men in the prison suits were part of the Sonderkommandos, the people whose assignment was death, who filled the ovens with the bodies of human beings, Jews who were stripped naked, given soap, and led into the showers, showers of death, the gas chambers.

We are being rushed out of the cattle cars. Chicha and I are desperately searching for our cigarettes. We cannot find them.

"What are you looking for, pretty girls? Cigarettes? you won't need them. Tomorrow you will be sorry you were ever born."

What did he mean by that? Could there be something worse than the cattle-car ride? There can't be. No one can devise something even more foul. They're just scaring us. But we cannot have our cigarettes, and we have wasted precious moments. We have to push and run to catch up with the rest of the family. We have just spotted the back of my mother's head when Mengele, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, points to my sister and me and says, "Die swei." This trim, very good-looking German, with a flick of his thumb and a whistle, is selecting who is to live and who is to die.

Suddenly we are standing on the "life" side. Mengele has selected us to live. But I have to catch up with my mother.

Where are they going?

Mama! Turn around. I must see you before you go to wherever you are going. Mama, turn around. You've got to. We have to say good-bye. Mama! If you don't turn around I'll run after you. But they won't let me. I must stay on the "life" side.

Mama!



(Taken from the book "Fragments of Isabella--a Memoir of Auschwitz" written by Isabella Leitner)

[Mercy]

"Grave"

Life denied us the grace of a grave. Just a grave for my mother, my sister, my other sister. Just a grave to bring flowers to.

Is a Jew that low that a Jew cannot even have a grave? Even death is too good for a Jew?

I am not sentimental. I am not conventional. Yet I crave so a small piece of earth, a testimony that I too had a mother, that this planet is mine too, so the salt of my tears on that littie mound might make me part of the whole scheme of things.

The smoke [of the crematoriums] has vanished, and only I remember it. And nothing marks that noble mother but my heart.

You beast! Give me the body, that frail little body. I want to bury it.


(Taken from the same book, Pages 18-24.)

I write this from this book to let others know that even strangers have feelings--they love their families and their children, wives and husbands. Because we don't know them doesn't take these things away. To destroy innocent people, those who are loved dearly, is the worst of evilness. Just because you have the power to destroy lives does not make it right. There is nothing worse in this world than the abuse of power towards fellow human beings in such a way as to hurt them.