The soldiers marched through the streets of Berlin. And the people followed.

The little girl flipped her long, blonde braids around as she looked past her fellow orphans to catch a glimpse of the Führer as he paraded down the streets in glory. The crowd was shouting, and it moved like an ocean. One could tell when the ruler of Germany was coming close, for all citizens present raised their arms in a perfect salute, "Heil!"

The small girl once again tried to see the Führer and shoved her way to the front of the group before falling into the road and landing at his feet. She stood up and tentatively raised her arm at the man with the funny mustache who was now looking towards her. She stuttered when faced with the attempt of saluting him appropriately and stared at him with wide eyes while he crouched down to be closer to her level.

The first thing that he did was to place three of his fingers beneath her elbow and gently push her arm up to the correct angle. By appearance she could not have been older than nine years old which explained why she was not dressed in freshly pressed Hitler Youth uniform. One could just see the shadow of a smile on the man's face before he looked past the little girl's fair hair and saw her wide eyes. They were eyes that he hated. They were his eyes; only they were not. They were his eyes in his dreams, in his nightmares filled with failure, grievance, and disgust. They were dark eyes.

Any semblance of a smile that his face may have held moments earlier vanished. The little girl did not look away and he could hardly break the hold that her eyes had on him when he stood up and returned to his motorcade. The two kept their bond until a schoolteacher from the orphanage yanked the girl out of the street and back into the crowd of children. She was, in truth, twelve years old and appeared small because of her tiny stature and petite frame. She was not given enough to eat at the orphanage, but even her poor rations there were a feast compared to what some millions of men would be forced to survive off of while they labored in the Polish countryside in the time to come.

…

The Führer's sleep that night was troubled and filled with the wide, staring eyes of the little girl. They haunted him. Little did he know that he was to be haunted by so many more eyes, so many more souls, so many more deaths that he would take his own life.

He knew, however, what he was doing when he ordered that all of the children who did not perfectly exemplify the master race from the orphanage in Berlin should be sent to ghettoes or camps directly, his reasoning being that they were obviously the spawn of Jews who were abandoned out of disgrace. All from the orphanage were kept safe and unharmed, except for two brown haired boys and a girl with dark eyes.

…

The girl with the dark eyes was now 15 years old and she was riding in a cramped, airless railcar. She could not see anything from the confines of the railcar, and yet she saw everything. She saw the people, the showers…And the smoke. She knew enough by now to know what to expect when they arrived, and her imagination spared no detail. The man that a little girl had admired once on the streets of Berlin had betrayed her, but even these three years later he saw her eyes everyday and was bewitched by how they darkened with age and with fervent hatred.

She had lived in a ghetto, forcibly removed from the orphanage, and was now sent to a camp. She did not care to remember its name. She would never get the chance to tell someone of it; no, her only companions were contemplation and an unusual sense of ease. No one spoke, yet the air sounded as if everyone had shrieked their last. They communicated in thoughts, for they all knew what the rest had in their minds.

The train screeched to a stop and all of the passengers were forced to group by genders and were then sent off into different checkpoints. Some people cried out to family members that they were never to see again, dropping to their knees in desperation. The young girl looked on as possessions were taken away and complied with the orders given to her. She found herself standing in a line and being forced to remove her clothes. She hesitated and felt a blow from behind as she fell to the ground. A man, presumably an SS soldier or a Capo, ordered her to get up and do as she was told before threatening to beat her again. Rising, she followed her orders and put on a brave face for the small child next to her and the pregnant mother. She was ashamed as her long, blonde hair fell to the ground and she was removed of all of her body hair. Underfed and scrawny, her only form of identification was her deep, brown eyes.

The group of women and children huddled their naked bodies together for warmth. The girl walked just a few inches away from the rest and she noticed a soldier eyeing her on her right. She shuffled left. He did not avert his eyes.

He took her by the arm, pulling her away from everything, and planted his mouth on hers roughly in an attempt to have his way with her. She tried to escape, but she was so weak. He slapped her at her attempts to free herself from his grasp and continued to touch her, making her feel even more uncomfortable. With all of her remaining energy, she forced her knee into his groin and ran as he bent in pain. Soon she could see him coming after her, but it was all in vain, for she rejoined the group of women, even though she knew what the building she had just run into was used for. She looked out the doorway as the heavy door began to swing shut. The last thing that the soldier saw of her, the last that anyone saw of her, were her dark eyes, more mature and knowing than any others that would stare so deeply into the face of death.