How I Got Here

    The house shuddered in the cold night of November. I clutched my bear tight and shut my eyes tight to block it all out. I pulled up the covers over my head to get rid of all the monsters floating in the air, looming over me and under my bed. The wind blew again and the shutters swung open, and the cold came running in. However, I didn’t get up to shut it for fear of touching the ground and exposing myself to the demons below. I whispered to myself that it was OK, and just the wind, but I still wouldn't move. The air filled the room in shape shifted to fit the volume, consuming all it touched in it's cold fingertips. I sunk deeper into my bed and curled into a ball. The window remained open all night.
My mother woke the next morning in a tizzy. She went into my room and slammed the window shut, waking me as she did. “How long has this been open?” She asked me impatiently. “I don't know, it blew open in the middle of the night, I think.” I replied. She put her hands on her hips and then straightened her hair out. “Well then. Let's get you ready for school.”
We walked to school as we normally did: dressed in petticoats and hats with matching mittens she sewed. In stride with each other, we’d embark on the five blocks it takes to get from our home to Malgorzata Pawelczak, where I attended the 3rd grade. But on this November morning, the air was different than it normally was: filled with the sweet smells of the pastries coming from the bakery down the street, run by my uncle. But that day, the sweet smells weren’t there, instead replaced by the smells of snow and mud of the November snowfalls. As we passed the police on Guliwera street, we waved as always, but he didn’t wave back that day, which I thought was odd, but Mom didn't say anything about it. She kissed me on my cheek like normal when we got to school and told me to have a good day and learn a lot, but that day in school I was having more trouble focusing on the fact that my favorite police officer didn't wave to me today than any math problem. I was also thinking about the fact that my uncle sweet pastries were not in the air like they normally were. That was also the day that we didn't get recess, only a few kids did. The rest of us had to sit inside and read, which I was not adverse to, but it was nothing like chasing other kids on the playground.
When I got home, mom was not there like she normally was. I went downstairs to check the store, because sometimes she and Papa work there when I got home. When I called out to them, they called back to me saying that they were in the back room. They looked worried, and I wonder what have could have upset the two strongest people in the world. “Hi, Elsie.” Mom said sternly. “Run along now and get your homework done like a good little girl.” As I was walking off I saw my father and my mother put their heads between their hands and breath in very deeply. I thought nothing of the matter and went along and did as they told me.
A few nights later, I woke in my bed to hear shrieks coming from the street. Fearing the monsters no more, I jumped up and ran to my window to see the commotion. I was soon joined by my brother and my mother who watched in horror as the street below us was set ablaze in the night. Angry men with uniform shouted and ran and threw  things into buildings that contain stores of the businesses of the people who went to my synagogue.  My father ran down to the store but it was too late; A brick had been sent through the window with a note attached to it, “get out Jew”.
My mother ushered me and my brother away from my window so we wouldn't see what was happening in the streets below. She didn't want us to see our father being arrested along with 30,000 other Jewish men that night. She didn't want us to see the hundred people being killed innocently. She didn't want us to be afraid of the new leader. But we were.
The eruptions of gunshots and shrieks and silence filled the rest of the night. I clenched my bear and cried into my pillow.  My mother didn't think I did, but I knew what was happening to my father. Other friends of mine at school had their fathers disappear as well, I knew I would never see him again.
The months that followed were filled with sadness in the cold empty areas of gray. The void left by all the shops was unfillable to the rest of the people of Krakow. We went to school, and then went home. We went to the few synagogues that were still there. The one we went to normally had been destroyed. When asked why, mom said it's because the men in uniforms thought that we did something wrong, but I didn't think that living your life was anything to be wrong about.
I woke to the fire alarm blaring, to see flames and smoke engulfing my room. I screamed out to my family, but heard no response. I dropped to my knees and try to navigate the black maze before me. The smoke had a grasp on my throat, and force me to choke on my own breath. The realization that time is key set in then. I tried to crawl into the hallway but was blocked, so I ran to the window and jumped into the fiery streets below.
I felt the arms of a strong man who pulled me off the ground. He was not gentle about it, but more forceful. I asked where he was taking me, but he did not respond, he just dragged me along the streets until we came upon 3 large trucks with people from my street being shoved in. I started crying, but the man did not acknowledge me. I heard screams from the people in the trucks but no one could get out, no one could persuade them, no one could bribe them. The man pick me up and threw me into one of the trucks, then forcefully closed the door as I was packed into a car so tightly it felt as if it were full of sardines. We traveled far outside Kraków.
The truck pulled into a small City with many buildings painted gray along the with the hopes of all inhabiting it.  People on the streets turned away in fear when we came in. Once we pulled into a side street, the truck stopped and the doors opened. Then the noise started. Talking in different languages, words like “ ghetto”  were thrown into the air and caught by my young ears. We were unloaded onto the street like cargo where we gave a man our names and he told us where to go. That was when I found my brother. He ran to me, looking dirty. His knee was scraped, and his hands and face were covered with dirt. He picked me up and ran. I called out, “no!” but a man in a uniform ran towards us. He asked for our names. At first Jakob was hesitant, but when the man demanded our names again, he spoke. The man directed us to our new living space. He muttered “Saukerl” under his breath.
We opened the door to see our mother waiting there with two more women,two men, and four children. She stood up with her arms outstretched and cried out to us. “Jakob! Elsie! You’re alive!” we ran to embrace her and a hug of tears.
The apartment was cramped quarters, always filled with the smells of disease. Benjamin, one of the men, ran a small store that operated down stairs. he treated me and Jakob like his own kids, feeding and comforting us. Sometimes in the night I awoke in fear of the trucks, and he was always the first one by my side. The day that they got him, I cried myself to sleep. The men in uniforms picked him off the streets one day, and took him away in a train. I heard the adults talking, but the words they said did not make sense to me, but they looked worried.
Soon after, their worries became realities when the men in uniform started going into people's houses at night to put them on the trains. That was how they got my family and me.  They rushed us out of our apartment in the middle of a cold night, giving us no time to pack anything, without telling us where we were going or what they were doing. The men ushered us into the streets, and pushed my brother and me into separate lines. My mother ran for us, but she was kicked to the ground, and ordered away. I cried for her, but a man pushed us into a truck. As soon as the door shut, I was in a different world. I was in a world where death was my closest friend, and I was living there alone.
The days passed slowly, full of death and confusion. I had made friends with an old woman who let me sit near the one window we had. I drifted in and out of sleep. The men did not give us any food or water, and for days I could only feel the pit in my stomach. I spent most of the time pulling on my locket in one hand, and the other in the hand of the elderly woman sitting beside me. The picture in my locket kept me hopeful. It was cold against my chest, in the truck taking us out of our city. I opened the lock is feverishly, and looked at the picture again. I never stopped to look at this closely at it. It was a picture of my mother and her sister when they were young. They were outside in the garden near a window that my aunt was picking out of. My mother's hair was beautiful, tumbling down her shoulders. She looked relaxed, at home and oblivious and what was about to come.
The screeching tires probably back to the cold truck, and far away from my mother’s serenity. The doors opened in the back, with sunlight flooding into every space it could fill of the dark chamber of our hearts. But the darkness returned when we saw the uniformed men. People stood up in the car and tried to run, and I was pushed to the back by all the bigger people. They climbed over me and the woman next to me. I tried to shake the week, but she wouldn't budge. Soon I heard loud noises and felt all the people tense up. Murmurs flooded the air and were pooling with words I understood like “death” and “guns,” but also words I didn't know like “Nazi” and “concentration camp.”
The people were pushed out of the truck in front of me. When I reach the front, the man who picked me up in the street picked me up again and dropped me forcefully to the rocky soil below. I picked myself up this time, and dusted off rocks from my newly punctured skin. I dabbed at the blood with my hands. I looked up and saw it. The words AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU on a metal gate blocking the exit from a place that looked like an old mine. There were large buildings with tall chimneys rising from them. The smell of the smoke was awful. I covered my nose and winced.
“Come on!” a man yelled. “Keep it moving!” A woman put her arm around me and led me towards the voice. I looked up at her and let her move me. It had been a while since someone had done this for me, and I missed it. I rubbed my locket again and thought of my mother. A line was forming, and the woman and I joined it. Babies wailed and mothers cried as their children were ripped away from them. I held on to the woman and prayed to not be let go of. The men were asking for names and then assigning numbers. I heard yelling and crying in front of me, and I was getting closer to the scene. When it was the woman’s turn, she guided me behind her, and went before I did. “Elizabet Schnider.” She said. The men grabbed her and pushed her to a table where a man with a needle sat. He had a stone cold look on his face as he pressed it into her skin. She cried out but covered her mouth with her free hand. “Name?” one said to me. “Elsie Muller.” The men did the same to me as the woman. She looked at me as the number “D-134-72” was called to the man with a needle holding me down. He gripped my skin tight and pushed the needle into it, turning it on as he did. I screamed out. It was the most excruciating pain I’d ever felt, like being constantly stung by thousands of bees all at once. The woman looked at me full of sorrow as she bled from her own arm. I looked down at my arm to see a mangled mess of my once clean flesh, covered in black ink and blood. The man finished and threw me to the side, receiving the next victim of the needle. I tried to reach out the woman, but another man grabbed me and pushed me to another with a moving razor. He shoved me onto a chair in front of him and then began to dig at my head. A buzzing noise filled my ears as my golden locks fell to the dirt below. Once it had all been done, I pulled my hands up to my head and felt nothing. I cried, for my heads were red when I pulled them back down.
The uniformed men had made us into sections with the ink on our arms. They looked at us and pointed us to a certain direction. I walked behind more children like me. We did not speak at all, for fear of the men. I held onto my locket.
We entered a large building where we entered a giant room, where we were ordered to remove our clothes. I removed all except my locket, for that wasn’t going anywhere I wasn’t. The men then told us to go to a large room with many showers in it, but they stopped me when they saw my necklace. One yelled at me in a foreign language, and the other ripped the locket off of my neck and stomped on it, crushing it and all of my hope into thousands of pieces. I wouldn’t cry. The men pushed me into the room, and told me to “Rinse off.”  I thought that it was strange how they would give us a shower when they had already shaved our heads. I remember the older children saying that they read about this. Some of them tried to hold the smaller ones’ hands. A boy a few years older than me whispered to me that God loved me, and that it was okay. I nodded and squeezed his hand tight. A few minutes later, our shivering bodies were all huddled into the center of the room. That was when the showers turned on. However what came out was not water, but steam. I was delighted, a warm steamy shower was just what I needed, for I was freezing. But when the steam didn’t smell like water vapor, I knew that I would not be getting a shower. The boy that held my hand said to me, “My name is Joshua.” I nodded and replied, “I’m Elsie. Thank you.” He nodded back. The room was turning into a dizzy haze. My heart started to beat fast, and my lungs screamed for air. I felt my throat burning, and I gagged for oxygen, but there was none. My eyes slowly stopped opening after they would blink, and I felt myself fall to the ground.
A few minutes later, our bodies were no more than corpses of Jewish children without names, only numbers. I saw my body below me as I watched from above. Joshua’s hand was still in mine.

That’s why I’m here now. How did you get to Heaven?