Have you ever taken a bad fall? Well, I’ve fallen under the ground, and it wasn’t fun at all. I’ll tell you all about it.

My family traveled to Europe last summer which was very fun. We went to Estonia, Finland and Germany, and one of the places we visited was Berlin. It was a really cool city, and I had lots of fun there. We learned all about the wall and Ampelman, and it was really interesting. But the day when we went to the concentration camp museum was not fun at all.

It was fine in the beginning, though. We got there and the tour guide explained that it used to be a Nazi concentration camp. It was gray, pallid, and somber, and the sky was cloudy that day. We ambled around and saw the rooms that some of them had, and the beatings they used to get. It wasn’t enjoyable.

Then, we made our way to the memorial sculpture that they had placed there for all the people that had died. It had things under the statue and I acquired inspiration to pick some wildflowers for the memorial.

I was picking some little white and blue blossoms, but it just didn’t seem right, and there needed to be more color added to the bunch. I spotted this pretty purple flower behind a piece of cardboard, so I stepped on the cardboard patch and I fell. Badly.

My foot landed on something hard, and scared, I looked down and saw my foot on an iron bar. I was panicked and shocked.

It was a narrow eerie pit-type hole in the ground with a rusty ladder on the side. Pieces of dirt were falling down on me as I looked up in fright at the radiant light beaming down from the bottom of the ground, which was now about a foot higher than me. I tried to scream, but I was too scared to cause a ruckus with all those other people there. I yelled, somewhat softly, “Mom!” and I waved and tried to stand on my tippy-toes. But nobody came. I was becoming more and more apprehensive as the seconds went by.

I noticed spiders of all kinds were wreathing around the walls, so I slightly squealed and shivered, realizing that I inept to being helped by anyone but me. I lifted myself up and tried to find inspiration from those old Indiana Jones movies. I thought, Okay, I’m an action hero who is not afraid of spiders, but I didn’t have enough strength. So I took one last glance at the creepy spiders and found one big thrust of adrenaline to make me heave myself out.

I got to my feet, squirming and brushing off my body because I’m afraid of spiders and was then too. I shook myself off, and then noticed the stinging in my arms, legs, and belly. I became aware of the fact that I had grazed myself on the drop. I looked at my stomach and saw a long scrape there, and I noticed one on my arm and two on my legs.

Noticing my family not even realizing that I was gone, I was a little bit sad, but mostly sad about the fall. It also came to mind that not much time had elapsed since when I descended. I was spooked. I had no idea that I would plummet so badly, let alone plunge in the first place. So I walked over to my mother and told her what happened. I was teary, shaken up, and frightened. I showed the hole to her, and she was freaked. She said, “I saw you waving, but I thought you were just lying behind the grass,” she sort of laughed at herself for thinking that, and then saw the tears in my eyes and realized that this wasn’t amusing at all to me and didn’t make me laugh. So she said, seriously, “I’m sorry.”

When she saw the hole, she said she caught a glimpse of the hugest spider she had ever seen. This made me feel glad that I had gotten out of there. I was agitated that the people there had decided to camouflage the pit instead of filling it up or warning the visitors about it.

I was teary and walking over to my grandparents. My mom told them that I had fallen into “a well”, and my grandma said, “Poor baby!” This made me undergo the experience of being an infirm little girl, and my grandfather made me feel even worse. He made me ashamed about crying. He said, “Well, that’s nothing compared to the people at the concentration camps.” I knew this was true and felt like a dolt for weeping.

“Mom, I just want to go to the apartment,” I mumbled, tugging on her shirt uneasily. Later, she told me that she thought it was all that “negative energy” from the deaths of the Jews in the dated concentration camp that made me fall.

It is a day I will never forget, although I would like to. I’ll just have to remember that I am NOT afraid of spiders the next time something like that comes around. But until then, I’ll still be the girl who finds arachnids disgusting.