The Light in My Dark

By Chelsey Clifford

My name is Ava Wagner. I am Jewish, and this is the story of how I survived The Holocaust.

I lived with my mother and two brothers, Stefan who is two years older than me and Leon who is two years younger than me. My Mother Emma, she was kind and beautiful and always had a smile on her face. Though after my father died, she was never the same. None of us were.

My father was a kind man, but when he spoke, he was always serious.

My brothers and I were born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany. I have always been close with my brothers; we all understood each other and got along.

It was a normal day in 1944 when everything changed. My brothers and I went to school as we did most days, but we came home and everything was different.

My mother told us that we were going into hiding because the German soldiers who had invaded our town were not good people, and they were going to send us to a place that will have us dead by the end of the year.

This news did not sit well with us; this was all happening so fast.

We moved our things to an abandoned house that had a bunker. We were hiding for two months, but it seemed like forever. Big soldiers were going around town searching for anyone that could be Jewish or even looked it. I never understood why our ethnicity or looks mattered.

These soldiers found my family and I after we had fallen asleep. They came i to the house and raided it in the middle of the night. It was the scariest day of my life.

They dragged us out of our sleeping space and pushed us outside into the open air. They told us to crawl into a big, truck and locked us up in chains, as if we were criminals. We were taken to a concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen in North Germany.

When we got there, I soon realized this was not going to be all fun and games; this was going to be the end for all of us. There were so many people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

Soon, I forgot what day it was or even to keep time, but I knew it had been awhile.

When we first got to the camp, the soldiers spilt my brothers and I away from my mother. Before she was dragged off, she told us that in these dark times, she always found light in us, that we were going to be okay.

We were scared, and we did not know what was going to happen. The longer we stayed, the more we understood that it was going to be the same thing every day–no food, no water, and work all day long.

My younger brother Leon started to get sick and Stephen and I worried he was not going to make it much longer. We had not seen our mother since we first got here.

Day after day we worked. We tried to keep Leon’s spirit up, but it was hard when there were millions of people no different from our family dying all around us every day.

We woke up to the sound of people talking, people that did not look like German soldiers. It was April of 1945. I was now 17, but I didn’t know it.

The people had come to save us. They were shutting down the camp and we could leave.

They told us our mother did not make it. We cried, but found solace in the fact that she was in a better place, and she died knowing her children were all together. We took Leon to a doctor so he could get better.

We were at Bergen-Belsen for five months and we lived to tell our story. It’s hard to make sense of it all. I still do not understand why my people were killed for their beliefs, ethnicity or color.