[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.]
Markus was part of a group that was taken by open boxcar to Dachau, in southern Germany, which was another terrible camp, but they weren’t let in because it was too full. So the train chugged on in the dreary, cold winter weather to Czechoslovakia. The prisoners, packed so tightly they couldn’t even sit, were licking snow off one another because they had no food or water. As the train went under overpasses, kindhearted Czechoslovakians would throw bread into the open boxcars. Whenever Markus caught bread, he would break it up and share with others around him. One time, he waved at a woman who had tossed several loaves into the boxcar. As she waved back, smiling, she was shot by a guard.
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. 65-6. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...