((Domanevka concentration camp, Transnistria, Early 1946. Transnistria was home to some of the worst ghettos and camps in the Holocaust, and the killing grounds for most of Eastern Europe's Jews. Annexed by Romania after a failed annexation of a region of hungry, Romanian forces were not equipped to build housing for so many people, and barracks were flimsy, there was no running water, and no latrines. Most deaths were caused by massacres of a hundred thousand at a time or diseases like typhus.
I have symbolized this in my head as Romania having to take on another child she doesn't have the money or the patience for, so he is neglected. But since this is for historical events, I wrote this. Do not except any replies, just had to get it down before I move on to communism /: hurggg, this was difficult for me. :I))
"You are going to do what?!" A hushed whisper where there needn't have been one, but too much needed whispering there.
"You aren't that old yet, you heard what I said." Cosim rolled his ratty, layered sleeves up so they wouldn't drag into his soup that looked like a hundred dirty sleeves had swum in it. To him it was delicious, it was the first food he'd had all week. It was Friday. "You said you wanted your radio, I'll get you your radio."
From the time the old man had been dropped there, he had acted like a sort of paternal figure to Cosim, who had never had any. It made him happy, as happy as one could be in a place where the days were full of gunfire and nights were for weeping and wheezing. The 14 year old was racked with typhus, his rags hiding the many sores but not masking at all the hacking cough he had received from it. Even visible under his thin pants were knobby knees even by emaciation standards that forboded the growth into a leviathan, if he ever made it there. At the moment, he wasn't predicting so.
The man looked at the boy, angered but too tired to be adequately worried. "You'll die. They'll shoot you."
"In here or out there, I have no preference."
"It's too dangerous in your condition."
"Kibitz, kibitz."
A boy as young as he was should not have treated death so lightly. But when one already felt like a ghost, what was the difference? Even starved and sick, the Transnistrian boy was still restless. He was going to climb over the fence (really he would not have escaped of he wanted to. Axis Romania to the left, to the right Ukraine, sometimes more terrible to Jews than even Nazis.) and steal the radio belonging to two frequently absent Romanian guards.
"I don't care about the radio anymore, I don't care...!"
"I would like to hear some music before I die, don't you think?" He replied jokingly, but his face was nothing other than sorrow.
"Cosim--"
The boy stood up and handed the man his empty bowl with a cough. "Here-- get the ones from the people who died, we can have alot more tomorrow." And with that, he trudged off and back out into the open air, the only difference being that there was snow on the ground that hadn't fallen from a hole in the roof. He apprached the fence as his face grew blank in preparation for another firing squad. He had learned to block out the bullets in his mind. He didn't know the people, they were in a different universe. But all of this felt too real.
The soldiers were gone for the moment-- he had timed it right. Ascending the fence with purple and black hands, cracked like glass, he cut them considerably on barbed wire before reaching the other side. The radio was on-- they would be back soon. But at the moment it wasn't that, but the words that struck his ears. And only one phrase entered his conscious.
The Red Army is on the March to Romania.
He did not even see the soldiers approaching until the very last moment. They raised their guns. He raised his hands to the unforgiving metal of the fence and barbs as fast as he was able and bolted back to his barrack with the old man, grinning in front of bullets too slow and lazy to find him.
"Alta Kocker!! Alta Kocker!!" He tripped into the barracks on a sheet of slush. "Alta--"
There was no answer. All dark rimmed eyes in the barrack turned to him as of they were all telling him the same truth. The old man had died. His bed sported a new inhabitant, and all his clothes and food met the same fate.
He should have cried. He should have been in anguish. But for so long it was expected, and anticipated so much in worry that small disappointment had come with every day the man had woken up alive. The barrack had started to stir again as people got over the death just as quickly. As he turned the corner to leave and go somewhere-- he did not even know where-- in the smallest voice heard round the camp, he said, "The reds are coming."
And the barrack was as silent as the old man. Because they were finally at peace, too.
Home 
