5.04: Holocaust Assignment

My name is Asa or at least it used to be before they tattooed the numbers ‘20324’ on my arm. That’s my new name now. Ever since the men in uniforms found out my family read the Tanakh, they’ve been after us now. My father was the first to go. He hid us and all of our things when the first man came banging at our door. My older sister told me that this was all because a man named Adolf Hitler wanted to make the Aryan race and that we were standing in his way of that. We tried to hide away with my father's friend but after his store was burned down, he decided to leave the country without telling us, leaving us alone again.

Eventually we were found by the men in uniforms again when we tried to go shopping for food. They put us in a train cart that was so full of people that we could hardly move. We were in that train car for so long that people started using the bathroom on themselves. We arrived at a large camp and I was separated from my mother and sister and I was tattooed and put to work. I found my father and hoped he had found a way out but he seemed like a walking corpse. Not long after our reunion, he and a bunch of other men disappeared from the camp. An older man told me that they had been set to gas chambers and that my father was dead. I already knew that other countries didn’t understand the severity of the situation until the United States entered the war but it didn’t stop me from wondering why they weren’t helping us, why they were letting us be killed.

I always thought that after we’d been freed that everything would return to normal as if this whole event was just one big nightmare. It hadn’t gone back to normal. I was under constant post-traumatic stress and I was almost buried alive when the U.S soldiers couldn’t tell me apart from the actual dead victims. I was a prisoner again when we weren’t allowed to go to Palestine or the United States. They took care of us but it felt like I had been put in a camp once again. I never found my mother and...