If I Should Die Before I Wake Blog 3

In If I Should Die Before I Wake it never says where they are specifically. It doesn't say what exact time period that it is. It doesn't even say the importance of this family. It is just another unheard family's story of the Holocaust. My main character’s name is Chana and she and her family are forced to live in a ghetto. Her father is publicly executed, her grandfather dies from undernourishment, and the whole family has lost hope. Even her little sister, who could not be more than 9 years old is digging through trash heaps of human waste to find enough food for her family. The death toll is slowly rising in this Nazi ghetto. More Jews die every day from starvation and disease, and some even commit suicide. You may ask, "Why did they allow themselves to be captured? Why did they just stay at home when they knew what was happening to Jews all over Europe?" The problem is that they didn't know. Nobody ever knew what happened to their neighbors who just suddenly vanished off the face of the earth. People simply decided that they had moved without saying so. It is quite astounding, though, how the Nazis kept the secret for so long. Word must have gotten out somehow. But no, Chana's family never sees the free light of day again, or gets word out otherwise.

Although this story is fiction, many children like Chana were living in the Lodz ghetto. Some Holocaust survivors spoke to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum on some of the horrors that actually happened to those people only 50 years ago. One person said that the majority of deaths occurred when people tried to run, not to get free, but just so the soldiers killed them. It’s really unbelievable to think that people would actually want others to kill them. That is how bad the Holocaust was in real life, not just in books.

The Holocaust is nothing like the stuff in books that you read about. The survivors’ stories are their own primary sources. The grandfathers of our generation were only children back then and didn’t know what was going on and only 10 maybe 20 years later did they understand. One woman even remembers asking her friend in the ghetto, “Why are we being separated from all the other people when we do not look nor think differently from anybody else.”