Chapter 2- Lungs

The air was knocked from my lungs. My ribs ached, and all I could do was lay lifeless in the snow, I couldn't even bring myself to writhe in pain, or scream, or even regret jumping. I was out of there, but felt even more broken physically than before. It was completely dark, clouds enveloped the sky and everything surrounding me was shrouded in black. I pulled my knees up to my chest and traced the threads in my tattered clothes, too afraid to close my eyes in fear I wouldn't reopen them. 

I thought about my family. My father, my mother, and my two brothers. My father, Sal, was a man that could never be duplicated. His intelligence made our conversations riveting. I got my sense of reality from him, his witty mindset rubbed off  on me as well. He taught me everything a father should teach their daughter, like how to tie their shoes and pick themselves up when they fall and scrape their knees. He always smelled lightly of cigarettes mixed with leather, a smell that I wished could flood my nose one last time. He was taken from us when the Nazis raided the shoe factory he worked at in Saxony. My last words to him were "Have a good day".

My brothers, Hanz and Klaus, were both older than myself. Unlike me, they both had sandy, blonde hair that lay straight along the crowns of their heads. Klaus' nose was slightly pushed to the left due to a biking accident as a child, and Hanz had a subtle scar on his upper lip from where he'd burnt himself playing with one of Papa's cigarettes. They both gave me hell when I was younger, which is a natural science for older brothers. Klaus and Hanz were both  away at school when the war started, and soon their letters stopped coming and we all found the most comforting thing to do was just hope for the best. 

My mother was beautiful. Too beautiful to be a godforsaken Jew. Too beautiful to die in a cellar.  Her name was Viheke, and she loved the three of us more than life itself. She wasn't smart like my father, but she had her own way about her that made her intriguing. The day she found out my father was taken from the factory, she wasted no time. I came home from school and she tossed a cloak around my shoulders, not pausing to take a breath. She shaved my head, and tossed  my auburn locks into the furnace before we left our home. We took refuge under a bakery where the owners snuck us loaves of old bread that couldn't  be sold, we stayed there for a month, but one day the loaves stopped coming. We were in that cellar for two weeks before my mother finally died from undernourishment, and I wasn't far behind. We were discovered three days later, and I watched them take her lifeless body and throw it mindlessly onto a wagon with all the other mothers and daughters and sons and fathers that were severed from  their loved ones.

I was numbed by the snow, but the feelings of heartbreak I felt for my family were like shards of glass slicing me all over. My lip was bleeding, and clots of coppery   blood tinted my frozen lips. My anorexic body twitched feverishly, and soon, I watched the sun begin to  come up. Like a ball of paint dripping over the horizon, the rich yellows and oranges leaked over the barriers of night, spilling into day. I don't know how, but I stood. I had to feel the sun on my face, and it felt damn good. My little, broken body  soaked up those rays of sunshine like a sponge in water, and for the first time in a month, I thought things were going to be alright. 

Author's Note

(Chapter 3 coming soon)