3:40 am

November 10, 1938

To the reader:

My name is Adalia Sara Hoffmann – a Jew from Southwest Germany. I am no one in particular – only another Jew as a matter of fact, and if you so happen to be German, then I can only hope that you don’t immediately throw this out.

I suppose that if you’re reading this, you must find it rather odd that I have chosen to write on the back of an old flier and stuffed it within an empty beer bottle (once we arrive where ever we’re supposed to be, I plan to bury it). I have several reasons – the first being that it is at the moment the middle of the night and with what just happened, it’s almost impossible for me to sleep, and the second being that hopefully something of me will be left after this whole war is over.

Because to think that four hours ago, everything seemed almost completely normal! (Normal, as in, nothing was really entirely wrong.) Very few Germans had the mind not to hate us all – nothing that happened yesterday could have even hinted at what happened no less than two hours earlier.

The raid and the beatings and the breaking of all our windows… do you think that if we had known about what was to happen, we could have fled just in time? And that I wouldn’t be on this damned train to where ever the heck we’re going? Do you think that with some warning, our neighbours could have taken us in or something and hidden us from them? If we had known… it would have made some difference, I’m sure, even if we were still on our way to nowhere. Maybe I wouldn’t be on this stupid thing on my way there alone. Maybe by some miracle they would’ve let my mother live and be brought with me on our road to hell.

But then, I suppose, it’s better off this way. If she were here, then she would probably end up suffering as much anyway. It’s better for her now that it’s done and over with. As for me? Well, I’m only sixteen years-old. They’ll probably kill me anyway after a million different ways of torture, although I think making me watch them beat my own mother to death is enough torture for a life time.

I’m not crying anymore, see. I am tired and there are no more tears to cry, and I’ve been crying for nearly three hours. And that’s enough. I’ve had it. It’s all over and there’s no use crying because what’s that going to do to help?

Absolutely nothing. What’s done is done, and the only thing I can really do is live so that my mother would be proud. She raised me well enough to know that sitting here and crying is not at all the best way to go about a situation like this (who knows? I may even survive this stupid thing).

That’s the real reason I’m writing this letter, you know. I hope that whoever is reading this will let the world know what is going on in Germany, and that it needs to be stopped and that people can’t keep getting hurt for no apparent reason.

And I hope more than anything that the discrimination against our people will one day stop.

Reader, I may only be sixteen, and this letter may never even be found, but I’m asking for this to stop completely, not for my sake, but for everyone else’s. No one deserves to be treated how we are being treated, and no one deserves to be part of a nation that has been completely brainwashed to believe that people who are different are the enemy.

Perhaps one day if everyone realised what is happening now, they would realise the number of ways to kill and hurt each other we have already invented, and perhaps if they stopped and just had a day of no fighting, and no war, and no discrimination we’d have a day when no one in the world died.

Maybe one day it could happen and another night like tonight would never be thought of again.

Let’s hope so.

--Adalia