i apologise how short this chapter is. i just finished scriptfrenzy this year (hoorah! i finished two days before the end) and it's been driving my grades downhill, which i have to bring up now.
thank you for your patience!

Gregory Rosenberge, 77, Retired Administration Director - Sorbonne, Marseilles

I was one of them – one of those that kicked the Jewish kids in the shin, teased them, tormented them, bullied them. Even though they cracked, I kept going on.

It was almost like a high off a drug or drinking back then. God, it was almost more exciting than doing any of those things. Drinking and drugs made us think that we were adults; drinking and drugs and tormenting the Jewish kids who went to school with us made us think that we were the model for the next generation.

But God, I was just so…stupid. Stupid, foolish – just, utterly awful. I don’t blame anyone but myself for doing those actions.

John lived in an area with both Jewish and non-Jewish kids, like Annabelle, Nikkolai, Yvonne, and so many more.

And Magdalena.

John was infatuated with her. I couldn’t possibly see how such a hater would grow to fall in love with a girl who he opposed. She was Jewish and had the distinct looks that Hitler had told us to point out: dark brown hair, pale face, hazel eyes. She had come from Poland, but didn’t have a lick of an accent. But she was so quiet and so calm.

John protected her from everyone else, me included. He didn’t let a single one of us touch her, nevertheless even come in a ten meter radius of her. But Magdalena didn’t seem to notice this and never even seemed to notice John. Never caught her eye, never saw him wink at her, never blushed. She hardly ever said a word to him.

Then one day, she was gone. The day before, she had been laughing with Annabelle and their girlfriends, and the next, she was gone. The teacher told us that she was to take a temporary leave from school, and we had laughed and swore that we kicked her out of school.

That day, John did not show up to school as well. When I went to see him that afternoon, he was clutching a piece of folded paper tightly. He had been keeping it in his fist so tightly that his knuckles had turned pale white.

He followed me out of the room stonily and down the stairs and into the front steps. There, he ripped the paper, until he could rip it no more, and gathered the shreds into a pile. He pulled out a lighter and set them on fire, making not only me, but his mother shout our in surprise. He had set off down the street by the time I had stomped out the fire and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring him back.

Two years later, when we graduated, he enlisted in the war. Not in the French army, but into the Germany army of all things. Two days after enlisting, he had disappeared without a trace.

He had so many anger built up in him by the time he had enlisted, during those two years. Fire spitted out of his eyes, and he was more violent than I had ever seen him. When the Germans took over our town, he followed them and tortured the Jewish people. He’d come home with blood stained all over his boots and pants, a vicious, almost sinister, smile on his face.

I never saw him after he returned from the war. Annabelle told me through correspondence that she heard a rumor that he had fled to the United States.

I heard more stories as time went on about him: he had taken in an Italian lover during the War and was living with her, he had died on the front and they mistaken him for someone else, he was hiding with Dr. Mengele in South America.

I never guessed, but I knew he was there.

But I refused to search him out.

Because war change men and their minds and their hearts.

I knew he would be more violent than ever before.

And what a coward I had been.