Holocaust

William Roberts
Grade 12
The chill of a winter wind pierced through the
threadbare cloth covering a small boys famished and
atrophied body. Rather a man now, but left in the same body
of the boy who had entered this destructive and corrosive
place so many years ago. The abject conditions he was forced
to endure had taken their unremitting toll on his once
healthy and resplendent body. Ignoring the cold he had
become so accustomed to, he stood erect under the dark
blanket covering the world over his head; a blanket
incapable of warming his frail figure, yet so overwhelmingly
comforting as to warm his heart and mind. Staring up at the
glinting light scattered throughout the darkness, each speck
of light representing some world, some universe, some reality
not his own, he stood and let his imagination wander to these
worlds where children would laugh and play and humanity
lived in harmony, all in stark contrast to the reality of the
world around him that he saw whenever he averted his gaze
from the warm blanket above.
His captivation at these tiny specks of light gave him a
pleasure to await with anticipation. To most, the darkness of
the blanket stifled the imagination and suppressed all hope,
obscuring their view of future happiness with an
impenetrable blackness and rendering them incapable of
maintaining their nearly extinguished optimism. But the boy
did not focus on the darkness. He knew that the darkness
was not meant to extinguish the light, but rather to provide a
canvass for thousands of smaller lights, tiny hopes that when

joined together in the completed painting of the night sky

formed the portal to a world far better than the one it
enveloped in its indiscreet ubiquity.
It was to this world that the boy retreated each night.
He transported back to the home that presented itself so
vividly in his memory, with his parents and sister smiling as
he walked through the door, greeting him as if he had been
gone for years even though in this imaginary world he was
merely returning home from school. The home he would
sneak out of, absconding into the night in order to catch a
glimpse of the eternal light show above. In this world nobody
ever came and took him away from this home, he had never
been separated from his family, he never had to visit the
terrible place that existed only in the bleak reality of life. To
the boy it seemed a horrible testament to humanity that he
was forced to retreat into the blanket of the night for such a
place as the camp he found himself in now to be no longer
extant, almost as if he were once again a child crying scared
into the warm embrace of his mother.
This mother though, mother to all humanity, showed
herself even in the absence of the boys real mother.
Everywhere he went, even the despondent and macabre
setting he found himself in now, she comforted him with her
loving embrace of the world, her beautiful display of light
and affection glinting at him from each bright and shining
point hanging above. The stars, the stars, the stars! So bright
and so vivid were they that he could not help but succumb to
an overwhelming and enduring ecstasy at their presence,
underneath their watchful and caring eye. And so with each
setting sun came the emergence of new hope, and in each
heavenly glint came the vision of a new world, and so

continued the laborious and tragic life of the boy, until

finally the ultimate retreat into this wondrous world
occurred from whence there was no return to reality.