Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
I hung my head because I knew that nothing would ever be normal again after that point.
“I was sixteen when the Nazis invaded Poland. They took our shop and forced us to move into what is now called the Warsaw Ghettos. I remember my mother holding my little brother so tightly, and I held on to my eldest sister. Her name was Abigail, and she had the voice of an angel, so she would hum at night to calm the rest of us down whenever we heard the screams or guns. There was so little food, and it was so cold. We gave what food we had to Igor because we knew that while we would starve, we at least wouldn’t die of sickness. But luckily, it wasn’t enough for him, and he caught a fever and went in the night.” She smiled though it wasn’t anything to smile about. “My mother wept over him. My father, in his grief, burned with the desire to fight back. But even then, I was glad Igor didn’t have to suffer anymore. After that, my two older sisters disappeared. They said they were sending them to work. A lot of people were being taken to work.”
“They just took them?”
She nodded. “SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, I’ll never forget his name, wanted more and more of us. And when people complained about not knowing where their family or friends were, they began burning down our homes. My father wanted to join the growing uprisings being planned, but my mother begged and begged to use our magic to escape instead. She’d heard of witches using their powers to get as many people out of Poland as possible. She convinced him this was our own uprising. And so, he agreed. No one was to talk about it. They didn’t even tell me. But I was nosey and also wanted to help. I had cast one of the only spells I was good at in order to eavesdrop. No one was to speak of it, and no one did—no one but me, stupid me, who had told my friend, a fellow young witch who was also Jewish, Nadia Kübler. They had already taken her brothers, and it was just her and her blind and deaf grandmother. What I didn’t know was that she had become what was known as a catcher. They gave her a salary of three hundred Reichsmark for every Jew she betrayed.”
“She betrayed you and your family, and you couldn’t fight?”
“And expose that we were witches, too? No.” She tilted her head. “A few managed to make a run for it, while others were gunned down. Running or fighting would have been worse, or so we thought. We thought we’d be thrown in a ghetto—after all, what could have been worse than that. I didn’t know. No one knew hell was just beginning and that the train would be the last time we ever saw each other. For once we got to Treblinka, they sent my father off to his death immediately and my mother and my sister two weeks later. I didn’t know why they didn’t take me. I’d never been alone in all of my life, and now I was alone in hell.”
Her eyes were glazed over with tears, and she gripped the cup so tightly it cracked. Atarah swallowed before she took a deep breath.
“Then one night, I had a feeling my time was coming, I knew I’d die young, but I was ready to go. I was tired, weak, and broken in every way possible. No one really slept at night, at least not well. So when the door opened, we all sat up, but no one was there when we looked toward the door. Instead, I heard a voice command, ‘Atarah Lenkowski, only you, come out.’ It had been so long since I had heard my name. It was odd. They never called us by our names, they didn’t know them, and they didn’t care. I had a number. Nevertheless, I was worried that if I didn’t listen, the other women and girls would get in trouble because of me. So I got up and stepped outside, and the door slammed and closed behind me before I was knocked out.”
“It was Arsiein.” With his gift, he could move without being seen. “He saved you.”
“He did. He knew my face and was trying to track me down, as Theseus did you. But Rhea rarely ever has a name with the face, nor did they have anything more to go off. Arsiein searched for me but could not find where I was. It was only when Sigbjørn saw me in the mind of one of the witches who had managed to escape the night we were betrayed that Arsiein knew where I was, and he came.”