Imagine.
Close your eyes and think backwards. Not to your first kiss, your last birthday, or to the day you met your best friend. Further. Imagine if you were born during the start of World War II as a Jewish child. Forced to bare the star of your religion everywhere you went. Forced to get in a train with too many people, and barely enough room to fit. Forced to stand there endlessly, starving, scared. Not knowing what the hell was going on, not that’d you’d know the definition of that world until you got to the heart of Germany.

The cart slows to a stop, and those who are still alive are there barely, the world getting darker every second. You’ve made it, but many of your family does not have life in their eyes. You have no choice but to leave them, continuing to rot away in that filthy cattle car.

You go into a room and are stripped away of everything. You put on the dirty, gray and white clothes, filled with holes, and more times than others the wrong size. You get in the line to get your head shaved. They sit you down, and it falls, curling onto the floor, along with your hope. You sit, biting your tongue as they tattooed the numbers--your new name-- on the inside of your wrist.

You get assigned a job of strenuous labor; the lucky ones got the jobs in the kitchen. They washed dishes and scrapped pots, and if really lucky, found a dry, crusty potato on the bottom of the pots.

This was the life of a Jew in the Holocaust. Only the word Hell is able to describe the camps, and only someone who has experienced it understands the true meaning of the word.

No one deserved such a fate; how were the debts of WWI their fault? But they were still tortured, treated like dirt, shoved into the rooms and beds that reeked of death and despair.

And no one stopped it before so many helpless people died, generations disappearing, hopes for escape fading out of the reach of their poor lifeless hands. Not even the Americans acted until that had to, for fear of intervening, while innocent victims of Nazi’s died, not deserving anything close to this torture.

After everything, I can only ask why? People stood, watching, seeing the carts filled with them go by. Nations that could save them, simply staring at their beckons and cries for help. How could they have felt when they saw the people along the sides of the road, just waiting for them to die in the gas chambers that would suck the life out of children, babies, elderly victims who had done nothing to get this pain, this ending to their life.

There were so many chances to stop it. So why? Why didn’t they?