Title: Fragments Under Glass
ISBN: 978-1-62420-256-8
Author: C. Rebecca Siegel
Genre: Historical/Holocaust
Excerpt Heat Level: 1
Book Heat Level: 1
TAGLINE
Fragments Under Glass tells in a moving way the experiences of a young,
teenage
Girl—her
life before, during and after the Holocaust.
BLURB
Living among corpses…a death train destined
for the Elbe River…bodies covered with lice…the murder of almost all close
relatives…life in the Netherlands before, during, and after the Holocaust is
perceptively written by Rebecca Siegel. She not only describes her experiences,
but also delves into the effects of that period in time on children,
grandchildren and mainly herself. The book touches on her years in the
Montessori School in the same class with Anne Frank and her survival in the
same concentration camp where Anne died. Interspersed with the prose and at the
end of the book are Rebecca’s poems which she wrote not long after the war and
which are relative to her narrative. This book is highly recommended reading
for adults as well as teens, giving a deeper understanding of that horrendous
time period and its after-effects.
EXCERPT
Slowly, the evening was getting colder and
darker. During this part of the day, surroundings seemed alien,
losing the proper size and shape necessary for recognition, and faded into one,
ominous-looking shadow.
I concentrated on trying to get some sleep,
making myself as small as possible in an attempt to fit on the narrow, slatted
luggage shelf suspended over the seats of the passenger compartment. This ledge
had been my wooden perch for the past week. No, it had only been six days and
five nights of riding and standing still.
Ours was just one car within a train made up of
cattle and passenger cars, a long, slow-moving snake containing its wretched
load of about twenty-five hundred prisoners.
Time had lost all meaning. We had left the camp
on April 6, and now it was April 11, but my body felt as if it had always been
twisted in this strange position, contorted in an effort to fit the narrow
ledge. I attempted to stretch and look down. On the wooden bench below sat my
mother, quiet and unmoving, next to my brother. Eddie, just eighteen, was very ill and seemed to have a high fever. His weight had dwindled
down to about eighty pounds.
Many years later I would remember this moment
very clearly, standing out in my memory as the last part of a nightmare that had
finally, necessarily, given way to the relief of waking.
The very last car of the train was filled with
explosives, anti-aircraft artillery, and the German guards who had been with us
sine we left the Bergen-Belsen camp. They were no longer yelling and
cursing, and their relative silence was unusual, even though we could hear from
far away the faint noises of artillery fire. We realized we were caught between
two fronts: The Russians were coming from the east, while the Allies were
advancing from the west. Suddenly, the German army was desperately fighting on
both battle grounds but seemed unable to contain the advancing armies.
Looking out of the window, I strained to see the
vast, empty grassland at my right. At my left, at the bottom of a hill, was a
lake. We had been standing still here for at least two days, the last
forty-eight hours of a journey which had taken us through a devastated Germany.
The train was static during the day and traveled mainly during the darkness of
night. German pride did not allow us to observe their bombed-out railroad
stations and devastated cities in the stark light of day. As usual, the Germans
had an indisputable method to their madness.
This night, though, was different from the
previous ones. I remember the time as a night during which I was more petrified
than ever before in my fifteen years of life. Clearly, the train with its
pitiful human cargo had been doomed from the start. Our final destination was
to be the bottom of the Elbe River in East Germany. However, the Russian forces
had crossed the river and, with the Allies advancing from the west, we had been
brought to a standstill.
The German soldiers on guard had made desperate
attempts to destroy us at any cost. They had activated the explosives at the
back of the train, setting them to go off in the middle of the night, thereby
blowing up the train and passengers. Our night was filled with overpowering
fear. We were waiting and waiting and expecting every second to be our last.
Hours and minutes did not pass by, only one terrifying moment after another. We
prayed silently, thought about what might happen, and reached a point where a
kind of numbness set in. Then, we thought about nothing at all.
There's no more shadow I can see.
Only my thoughts I hear
The daylight slipped away from me
And suddenly there's fear.
I'm sure my life will stay this way
My reaching out in air;
No easing up, no carefree day,
No one with whom to share.
Why so much night to stumble through?
Praying, praying, relief will come;
I'm more than tired, nothing else to do
Where did the morning go?
Slowly the morning
dawned. I looked around at the skeletal forms of the somewhat healthy, the
sick, the dying, and the dead, and experienced a burst of euphoria at the
certain knowledge I was still alive and part of the community. No German guards
were to be seen any longer. They had fled, and somehow the explosives had been
deactivated.
At this point, we could have just walked away,
but nobody moved. Most of us were too weak to walk any distance. Besides, where
would we have gone in the middle of a country whose aim for the last decade had
been to wipe us off the earth? Who would help us? So, we waited while listening
to explosions in the distance.
We had no food, but after almost two years of
constant hunger pains, starvation had become part of our existence. Medicine
was not available to relieve the pain of the open, festering sores that
covered our emaciated bodies. We felt no shame. Whenever the train had stopped,
we (or at least those among us who could still walk) had used the outdoors to
relieve ourselves. The sick and the dying had been continually denied a gulp of
fresh air. They were still lying in their own excrement and did not realize
their condition.
Hours passed, and nothing meaningful happened.
To me, it seemed I had always lived this way: hungry, dirty, sick, and
degraded. Maybe if I had been an adult when the war broke out in 1940, if I had
been in possession of a mature value system, it would have been clear to me my
situation was abnormal, that these conditions were inhumane. However, I had
only been ten years old in 1940, a mere child, receptive to
the pervasive climate of slow, persistent degradation. Just looking at
myself, I felt so very inferior. Five years had passed, and I had not grown,
mentally or physically. Whatever feelings of self-worth I might have had were
gone. I had become wise beyond my years in the ways of cunning, cheating death,
and maintaining the ability to look into hell with a blank mind and soul.
Suddenly, in the early afternoon, we heard
sounds of nearby motors. In no time, we were surrounded by strange-looking
square automobiles driven by black- and white-helmeted soldiers. Those of us
who could, gingerly left the train to greet our American liberators. They had
stumbled upon our train by chance, and to them we must have been a pitiful
sight to behold. Mother and I talked to the first soldier close to us. Not
being able to vent our thankfulness any other way, we asked him for his
autograph. The only paper we had left was my father's photograph. The soldier
wrote "C. Meeuw, Pennsylvania." I still have this
photograph. Amazingly, I recently found out one of the American soldiers who
liberated us was the father of my daughter-in-law.
The Americans immediately went to work to
create some order out of the chaos they discovered. The ambulatory among us
were put on trucks and driven to a nearby village. Each person or family was
taken to a different German house. Mother, Eddie, and I wound up as
the unwanted guests of the village baker. He was ordered, and grudgingly
agreed, to put the largest bedroom at our disposal. That night, we slept
peacefully. Our painful bodies were supported by a soft mattress and covered by
eiderdown comforters. Even the omnipresent lice did not bother our sleep.
