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ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT

FREYA ROTHWELL-BODYCOMB

June 1943,
Paris, France
Photographed by Michael Berenbaum

I was eight and a half years old when I was taken from my father. It was late August when I died.

But I still don’t rest in peace. I still feel tension and hatred. I still feel for the soles that were lost in this tragedy. Some of it even silent. Half the soles that were lost aren’t remembered today.

We could have brought something special to this world. In a way, we did. We didn’t let them, let you, forget. You can’t. It wouldn’t be right. To just forget the past and still hear the screams of bodies being murdered before you. The innocence. The faith that had been lost in so many. We’re afraid to remember. But I’m not. I remember the slaughtering, the paranoia. I remember the day it all happened.

I was raised in Paris, France. We Jews thought it was outrageous. We hadn’t heard of such a thing. It wasn’t possible until it happened.

It started with the German police coming to our town. Watching us. They seemed like anyone else. But it had been taken to the next level. We weren’t allowed at parks.We weren’t allowed to communicate with the other children. We had to wear stars, representing that we were a part of the religion the Germans hated. I was a Jew. They were also Jews. And I got punished for it.

We had later been transported to Auschwitz were my father was taken away, and I never saw him again. I had been forced to work on my own grave. And then I was taken to the gas chamber. And I never woke up again.

I’m the little girl with dark hair on the second row and second to the right.

Freya is my school friend's granddaughter. She is fourteen years old. She gives me permission to publish her fine essay. For 'sole' read 'soul' and see http://www.umilta.net/soleheel.html. Hazel and I were school children together across the English Channel from where this was happening and later we were having Nevil Shute's Pied Piper about the Kindertransport read to us by nuns in the room called 'Utopia' that looked out onto France. Memories we'll never forget.

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