A Never Ending Nightmare
A shining expanse of water reflecting thousands of millions rays of sunlight far in the horizon, I arrived at his house one cold autumn day after two hours of driving. The streets were covered in leaves, and the wind was moaning through the bare autumn trees. The door opened with a slight squeak, and I walked in. Henri put out one hand and welcomed us with gentleness. Now he was old, past his ninetieth birthday, but that wouldn’t change much about how he told stories. My grandmother has known Henri for more than forty years, but she never talked about him, not until this day. She believed the story to be so important that the most efficient way to hear it was him telling his story personally. And she therefore offered me a gift I could never be thankful enough of today.
I came to Henri’s house to hear a story, but never did I expect such tragedy in his words, such emotions. After he’d served us coffee, he sat down and remained silent for a few minutes. He struggled bringing out his first words, and I only then realized what courage it would take him to try sharing the past, his past.
He began speaking with broken fluency, “It all started the night … the night before my … my fourteenth birthday, when …” and he went off.
A young boy, aged of 14 years, faced the challenge of his life, when being the last concentration camp survivor out of all its relatives. It all started on the 10th of may 1940, the day before his birthday, when shouts and cries came from the outside. Henri and his family were eating dinner, when he felt a shade of doubt hidden behind the window and stood up to look out. He paused. Henri headed towards the open window, he glanced and turned over to his father. Eyes to eyes, he knew his doubt was the beginning of something bad, a nightmare.
Henri’s hands were shaking, small tears came out of his beautiful eyes. His voice was trembling. For a second, I felt guilty. I felt guilty for making him try to remember his worst memories of his adolescence he prayed to forget. Henri would have gathered all his scattered impulses into a passionate act of courage, but I was too taken by his words, his story, to talk. He continued speaking.
A nightmare? To Henri, childhood was more than just a nightmare. Even worse, a vast of uncountable days imprisoned, where humans turned the world into a planet of explosions. He knew a long path of desperation bended him from freedom and peace. Henri would have gone through years of hopes and cries, of deaths and desperates, changing everything in him. From his fourteenth to nineteenth birthday, he lived through times that many people would have not believed they existed. Today, the only memorial he kept was his prisoner’s pyjamas, striped in blue and white, and a tattoo marking his victim number, “A.177.189,” which also appeared on his small hood that every prisoner was forced to wear. Day-to-day crime became usual for victims, while suffering became you, and you became what’s left.
….
September 3rd 1942, the day where Henri and his family got arrested a second time, but quite differently than before. It was on a saturday morning and Bertha, his younger sister, had already been trapped by the evil German Soldiers. Nobody ever saw her again. Henri expected the same to happen to him, and indeed he was right. Until the end of his days, Henri would hear the echoing ound of boots on the stairs, which more and more approached their door.
“Open the door! Jews out!” The SS guards hit the door as brutally as they could. Henri was scared to death, but he knew there was no way out. After a moment of silence and hesitance, Henri grabbed the door handle. But the second he opened it, a man, dressed with a black mantel, grabbed Henri’s arm and shoved him forcefully to the wall.
“You! Where is the rest? Where are the others?”
Henri lacked the strength to speak, and began gasping out of pain and fear. Was it really worth not to betray your family? If they would still strangle you to death and search for the rest of your Jewish relatives, and in the end make them all suffer the same way?
“The boy is not worth asking. Check all the rooms and find the others!” Henri closed his eyes, and the second he reopened them, the guards had brought down his mother, father, and his cadet sister Nicha. They led them to a German truck, reading “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (WORK BRINGS FREEDOM) in which they were thrown like invasive species that should soon be executed from this world.
The truck later brought Henri and his family to a train station. Henri’s family boarded the train that was driving them somewhere they didn’t know. When arriving at the train’s destination, the soldiers were shouting and hitting people, saying “Faster! Get out of the train! Faster!” Barbed wires encircled them. There was nowhere to go, except to follow the path that guards forced them to follow, demonstrating cold and threatening aspects as always. Yes, there they were, Sakrau, the first camp where all the deadly horror began.
….
Henri had lived through many dark times. In 1150 days imprisoned, Henri had experienced 11 concentration camps, from the first cries to the first moment of liberty after years. However, while times had become quieter, Henri was unaware of the unpredictable, that would change who he is. Since then, three years have passed, and only was it then that the worst came, in december 1944, …
….
I had only met him a couple of minutes ago, but I was able to imagine his reactions and his feelings in every single situation. I could feel anger in his words. But Henri, like all other Jewish prisoners, knew the consequences of protesting, and what wiles of innocence could sometimes bring to their families.
Henri considered every new day as another day of misery. Like every morning, he would dig graves and bury the victims who died the previous day, which all prisoners had to do. They would cram hundreds of dead bodies upon each other, while being surveyed all day, all night by the SS guards.
On the 1rst december 1944, at noon, he experienced the tragedy of his life. The sky was grey and cloudy. The camp had remained noiseless for hours now, and Henri was unsure about the situation. He waited, waited, and waited, for gleams of sunlight to appear, bewildered like ourselves. Nothing, not a single ray of sunlight would be able to reach the earth. His father was staring motionless at black points falling from the sky. Henri recognized American planes through the mist. He closed his eyes and grabbed his father’s hand, thinking about taking his last breath of life, and waited again for the incident to happen. No person knowing Henri’s story has the words to describe what he felt like at this moment, and neither do I.
Henri hid among with 20 other people in a small old wooden house. He had hope for his family, for his mother, his sisters, but mainly for his father. He revealed his only reason to stay alive was for his family, and had put himself in danger to save the life of his father. In exchange for his braveness, a miracle took place. The bombs had hit every single square meter of the Auschwitz camp, except the small wooden house. Henri and his father had survived.
The earth was still shaking and trembling. He wanted to scream for help, but the panic was so serious that none of the silent majority would speak. The bombs had still hit him like thousands claps of thunder and his body felt as if covered of a thousand knives all piercing his skin at once. The smoke invaded his body, and his lungs. The heat invaded the ground, burning the area. The camp had gone into flames and smoke.
The guards had disappeared. Their bodies had probably blown away through the bombardments. Hours had passed, the camp was quiet. It was a nightmare. The day passed, and the prisoners were separated into groups, likely did they separate families, father, mother, children. His tears were never as meaningful as before, but he knew this moment would come, either today or later. His thoughts would have escaped his mind, leaving him with another thousand mindless prisoners, all making their way to death. Everything had been taken away from him. His life would have just been a small part of it. He stared at his father, his father stared back at him. One moment he was there, the other he was gone. The train disappeared in the dark horizon, rolling away and refusing any last goodbyes. He took a breath and fell on his knees, and prayed, prayed for tomorrow, for the day after tomorrow, and for the rest of his life.
Henri fell asleep under the light of a thousand stars, all glowing in the black sky. Henri’s sleep and dreams were a treasure to him, he would consider them moments of freedom and liberty.
Henri woke up unconscious, in the position he fell asleep in the night before. Henri was weak, and too despaired to remember what had happened. His worries never left his mind. His eyes looked around, and he searched, but how would he be able to distinguish his father from another thousand prisoners, all wearing blue and white striped pyjamas? Then he remembered that his father had left him the previous day. He isolated himself, and cried, and never stopped telling himself under his breath “please, let me die, let me be free from this never ending nightmare.”
….
On january 1945, weeks after the destruction of Auschwitz, Henri confronted “The Walk of Death.” With only 25 kilos left and 386 km to walk, Henri didn’t how long he would be able to hold. The temperature was approximately twenty degrees below zero, the ground had turned into ice, and the snow reached over people’s knees. Painful, just painful.
But in spite of everything, he often surprised himself by humming a common German air to exalt himself:
“Everything passes by, after a month of December follows a month of May.”
It made him laugh. How would Germans call a month of ice, of dust, and freezing temperatures a month of May? Germans would never use irony in their talking, neither would they today.
They walked for several days, for several weeks. Henri had lost hope for everything, and waited for the moment to be left behind, like other thousands of dead bodies had been. His “shoes” would hurt his feet, every step was torture. Prisoners were forced to stay quiet, and whoever lost the strength to walk, whoever dared to complain, was directly murdered or beaten to death by the SS guards. The days seemed interminable, and because of the early nightfall, they marched endlessly in the dark, without halt, without knowing when and where they would finally arrive.
It was this Friday morning that the march of death would end. The march ended on this Friday at about four in the afternoon. On arrival, the guards made them board at a train station that would bring people to another train station, that would certainly bring them to another of those German death camps, and maybe then only half of the people would stay there, while the others would continue walking another thousand kilometers.
Henri had lay down in the straw for a moment. He was weak, and so skeletic there was only a slice of skin left covering his bones. Another man boarded the small wagon before departure. He did not have the strength to stand up either, and seemed to be even weaker than Henri. Instead he pushed himself up against the wall and raised his head carefully, not willing to admit the pain that shivered through his body as he moved. He wore partly broken glasses, with his prisoner pyjama and his small hood. This man must have lived in concentration camps as long as he had, Henri thought. And by chance, the man had taken his hood off, and appeared to be Henri’s father. And he was.
Henri cried, without speaking a word. He ran into his father’s arms.
“Father?”
“Oh, my son”
“Father, you are alive.”
The ride had been long. Henri was holding his father in his arms, who had fallen asleep by fatigue. The sun was rising up, and not a single cloud was to be seen in the clear blue sky. For once, it was actually a beautiful day.
The train had stopped, and the guards started shouting again. “Out of the train everybody! And fast!”
Henri tried to stand up, while his father was still asleep.
“Come on, father, we have to go,” he said, but nothing happened.
“Father? Please, we have to go.”
Still nothing.
“Father, if we don’t go now, we’ll get caught.”
Not a single move.
“Father?”
Henri began panicking. He sat down next him and took his father in his arms.
“Father please! Please! They’re coming.”
Nothing, he wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t wake up. Henri couldn’t feel any heartbeat either. The SS came in and forced Henri to get out.
He asked full of panic “Please sir, help me, help my father,” but the guards ignored and pushed him out of the wagon.
Henri’s father had died. Now, it was goodbye father, goodbye forever.
….
I cried. I could not withhold my tears. Neither could he. I cried for every tragedy he’d told me, for what he’d experienced. I could not hold it back. Since then, Henri’s story became part of my life, and I can still hear his voice when writing about him, right here. I thank Henri, for sharing a story not everyone would manage to share. Henri should not only be considered a hero because of he’s still alive today, but also for being the one of the only ones sharing and telling out of a few people that have lived the same experiences. Henri and his story are more than just a primary source about War, what he tells is him, what he tells reveals the past.
In dedication to Henri, I wrote a poem from my perspective, about my feelings towards what he experienced. His story changed my perspective on human cruelty during War, and I believe him and his story should never be forgotten. With his 90 years, Henri still travels from city to city, country to country to share the tragedies he lived in World War II. Henri doesn’t tell his story for people to have pity for him, but to transmit the horror in concentration camps, for people to avoid making the same mistakes again. I realized that the past can make men want to express proudness to be the last remains of what happened. But most importantly, I learned that “History with a capital H is transmitted more efficiently through Personal History.” -Michel Kichka; Son of Henri Kichka.
It was a day
It was a day,
where the sun went hence.
It was a day,
where pain was crying.
It was a day,
of end and mess.
He opened his eyes,
A blast of bodies,
A vast of red.
The world is crying,
And fears an end.
But this time,
It’s fear became us,
and we became its fear.
We tried,
And we lost,
No end was to be seen.
There is no mercy,
nor pity for our past,
and neither will there be for us.
Alexandra Michiels, English 9
