Read I Am a Star for Free Online Page A

don’t cry.
Come close — let the blows fall on me,
There’ll be a day when again we’ll be free.
    Hold me tight,
Day has turned to night,
Soon we’ll see the light.
    Give all your belongings to them, quickly undress,
One day soon we will again have happiness.
Sleep my child — I have no more to give,
Oh, God, Oh, God — we are not going to live!
    Hold me tight,
Day has turned to night,
Hold me tight.
    My best friend Ruth and her parents, who had shared our bunks in a tiny room for two years, were in these last transports to the death camp. She was also an only child, just two months older than I. We were like sisters and shared our daydreams and secrets with each other. She had beautiful blond hair. Her greatest pleasure was to draw pictures on scraps of paper with colored pencils that she had smuggled into the camp. She had hopes of becoming an artist. Ruth and her parents came from Berlin. Her father walked with a limp caused by a World War I injury. We both found it strange to live with and see around us so many disabled men with missing arms, legs, and other war injuries. Ruth and I owned identical dolls. Before she embarked on her final journey, she entrusted me with all of her doll’s clothing, which her mother had carefully sewn from rags. Ruth’s father was half Christian and half Jewish, and Ruth was raised as a Christian.
    Ruth died because of her Jewish heritage, even though she never considered herself Jewish. She would never live to see her tenth birthday. In “Hold Me Tight,” my heart still cries out to her and so many other children as they marched with their mothers to the gas chambers in Auschwitz and the other extermination camps.

CHAPTER 7

    Liberation
     
     
    I learned an old Czech folk song in Terezin. It speaks of the hope and the changes that come with spring. Would we ever be allowed to leave the winter that was Terezin, see the smile of spring, and feel the touch of May again?

    The spring of 1945 was different from the other two I had spent in Terezin. Unknown to us, Hitler’s Third Reich was collapsing and the German armies were facing certain defeat. The Allied forces were closing in on Europe. Meanwhile the Nazis made their last attempts to kill all the remaining survivors in the death camps of the East.
    As the Allies advanced, the soldiers forced their prisoners on death marches to places still under complete Nazi rule. I remember when these miserable people arrived at Terezin. They were barefoot, or their feet were covered with rags or torn sandals. Some wore blue and white striped uniforms, others only rags. Their heads were shaved. Many were no more than walking skeletons suffering from typhus and other diseases. In vain I searched the long lines, hoping to find Grandma among them.
    During these last days of World War II, orders were given to build gas chambers at Terezin. The plan was to kill us either by poison gas or by drowning in a specially prepared area. Not one Jew in Europe was to stay alive. By the time we were freed, the gas chambers at Terezin were almost completed. It was only the rush of events that spared our lives.

    Liberation at Terezin, 1945.
    Guards fearing capture by the Allies began to burn the camp’s records. Bits of partially burned paper floated through the air. The evidence of death and suffering had to be destroyed. Then, at the beginning of May, most of the guards living outside the barricades ran away. They made some last efforts to slaughter us as they left, by shooting wildly and throwing hand grenades into the camp.
    We were finally liberated on the eve of May 8, 1945 by the Soviet army. The first thing we did was rip off the yellow star from our clothes. I had spent three years in this human hell. I can still see the boisterous Russian soldiers singing and dancing on their tanks. All of us felt joy, pain, and relief. Many questions remained. Who was left of our families? What would our future hold?
    After liberation, the barricades were