[The following is told from the perspective of Markus Reich, a seventeen-year-old Jewish Polish boy who grew up in Bochnia, Poland, and who spent much of the Second World War in or escaping from various prison and concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe.]
Six months after his return, Markus was walking down the street in Bochnia when once again he was grabbed by the Nazis and taken away. He was sent to another forced-labor camp, this time in Klay, just a few miles outside of town. The camp, built deep in the forest and hidden among tall pine trees, was an ammunition factory that had eight huge warehouses. An electrified barbed-wire fence and watchtowers with armed guards surrounded the camp. About 300 boxcars were loaded and unloaded every day with bombs and land mines. It was Markus’s job to carry 100-pound (45-kilogram) bombs to a special place in the forest and stack them up. As in his previous camp, Markus wasn’t allowed to communicate with his family. But he did learn tragic news: Those in the Bochnia ghetto, more than 3,000 Jews, had been either murdered or shipped off to a death camp. Markus held little hope that he would ever see his family again. He knew in his heart that he was now an orphan. But by then, there were only a few tears left in him, so he could barely cry.
Source:
Zullo, Allan, and Mara Bovsun. “So This is Where I’m Going to Die. Markus Reich’s Story.” Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust. Scholastic, 2004. 60-1. Print.
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