Since our trip is about to begin, I’m using this log to introduce my character.
My character is a thirteen-year-old German-Jewish girl named Sarah. She has just watched many officials come into her home and take her father away to a concentration camp. (We will later learn that he was taken to Sachsenhausen)
In school, I have learned a bit about Sachsenhausen and of its infamous slogan on the front entrance gates that roughly translates to “Work Makes (you) Free”. The slogan is rather cruel considering it is typically that the prisoners were “free” from the “work” once they died from exhaustion. Sachsenhausen was where you went to work to your death.
Note: The holocaust survivor I wrote about in another blog post was taken here first with his older brothers. It was Sachsenhausen where he was separated from his sisters and mother- whom he never saw again.)
Being thirteen, Sarah wasn’t around for the First World War and so she is not familiar with the hostile environment that is beginning to form around her. She only knows of what she has been taught in school and heard from neighbors. She and her little brother, Ethan, are definitely in for some life changing experiences.
