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I Am a Survivor

Imagine a fiery plane crash, the collapse of an enormous building in a immense earthquake, or the sinking of a ship on a savage sea, each of them claiming the lives of everyone involved except one. Astonishingly, from time to time, someone faces such perils and somehow manages to survive while everyone else simply perishes. Is it a miracle? I don't know, but to believe in miracles, first you must believe. The plane, building and ship survivors certainly cannot be faulted for believing, but someone who has survived the unbridled and calculated inhumanity of the men of Nazi Germany can never do so. I am one such survivor: my name is Isaac Edelstein and this is my story.

My early childhood was carefree and happy. My mother was a kind, loving, and gentle woman who cared for my sister and me without question or compromise. My father, a pharmacist, was hard working and dedicated to both his work and his family. When we were younger, they'd take turns reading us the classics, where virtue and justice always prevailed; we had no way knowing then that virtue and justice lived only on those pages. Yes, I was a happy boy, yet so nave and so innocent. Fortunately, I possessed one other quality: I was fast. At school, there was not another boy who could keep up with me. As it turned out, little could have been more important than this.

I was just a boy of 14 when I noticed things beginning to change. The adults seemed to always be speaking with such urgency, although when my sister or I were around, they mostly whispered, trying to shield us from the reality of the Nazi monster. It was right around this time that we all started to work feverishly on building a secret cellar in my uncle's house. He was an engineer, and the cellar was so superbly crafted that it was almost impossible to tell even where the trap door in the floor boards was located. I should have known why we were building it. I certainly could have figured it out, but the last vestiges of the innocence of my carefree childhood must have stood in the way. When it was completed we all went down into the cellar to test our handiwork, but we quickly discovered we had overlooked something very important: air. My uncle's hasty fix of simply placing a tube from the cellar up to the garden above made me realize there wouldn't be much more time before we'd be using this cellar for more than just storage.

My entire family stayed at my uncle's after that, and one morning I was awoken by shouts,

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