Surviving the Holocaust

Your name is Mora Elizer. You are a thirteen year old boy. You have brown eyes and dark hair. You were born in Germany and you speak German. But you are also a Jew. You are a Jew during the worst time to ever be a Jew the 1930-1940s, during the Holocaust. It is a time where the mass killing of Jews is on the rise. In a matter of moments, your life has just been changed. Your parents are being sent right and left and you are all alone in this scary place called Auschwitz which is a concentration camp, far from home and family. What do you do? I mean what can you do? How are you going to survive? If I was put in this situation the only way I could possibly survive is by following the directions, using my imagination and trying to stay in the best physical condition.

To begin with I’m alone , I’ve been separated from my family and I’m only thirteen . All my life I lived without a care in the world, I never really had to follow directions but that all changed when I got to the concentration camp. My father told me before we got separated to do whatever they asked you to do no matter what it is “ put your pride on the self” were his exact words I didn’t know what he meant until later. I remember reading the memoir Night and reading how Elie Wiesel survived. He had to follow directions in this one specific situation when the Russians were arriving and the Germans had to evacuate the camp. The Jews had to run for their lives they were yelled at by the Germans and told “Faster, you filthy dogs “! In the memoir Night by Ellie Wiesel (85). ”If one of us stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog (85).When they finally shot my foot off I finally understood what my father said follow the directions no matter what.

Imagination is something that people take for granted but for me it saved my life. In order to survive the Holocaust like I did you have to put yourself in a different type of reality. Seeing people die and being killed every day was a lot for me to take in at that age. I always tried to act like I didn’t see it or act like it wasn’t real but that didn’t last for long at all. Every night I would have dreams of those people calling out to me asking “Mora why didn’t you help me? Without my imagination I would’ve been driven utterly insane. I used my imagination to bring me back to the good ole days I acted like I was out working with my father in this store. That’s all I ever thought about. It wasn’t so much my imagination it was more like drifting on my memories of the past. Even to this day I still use that method of thinking because I lost so much during the Holocaust it really scared me, but I still have my memories which I kept