I am old now, oh so very old. I feel my body weakening with every breath I take. I know my time is coming, the end to my story. But while I am still here, I may as well tell you some of the things I got up to when I was just eleven years old.
I was born in the year of our lord, 1928. In a time when there was much rivalry in Europe. Our country Germany: having just recovered from the last Great War. But the way things were going, some said we are on the road to another.
My mother was Nitzanah Asener, a Polish Jew brought to Germany when she was very young. Considered quite pretty; with her long wavy dark brown hair and eyes. A kind and gentle woman who wanted not even the slightest argument with the Nazi's, never mind a full scale world war. Jeremiah Alfandari was my father, a middle aged man, a German Jew who had lost both his father and grandfather in the first war. We had seen the huge Nazi parties, yet we hadn't even thought to consider what this would bring for our future.
I would say that my life was ordinary, not the best, but pleasant, we weren't rich, but not poor, we had enough money to survive but not to spend it lavishly. Up until I was around about ten years old I could live with no fear. That's when the Nazi Germans started to take proper action against us Jews. The name Jew became an insult, you would be mocked in school, shouted at in the streets, treated like we were vermin, and I suppose we were in their eyes. I understood some things better than most people my age, but what didn't get was the Nazi's infernal hate for Jewish people, and it was that hate that was going to shape the entire world in ways that no human being could imagine.
There was a man, a far from ordinary man, who refused to back down. He was a person who was most certainly not going to sit there whilst masses of people were murdered by a man named Adolf Hitler. He had the names of thousands of people, stacked up above him. Those whose lives he had claimed. The man in question claimed not to be a military man but had fought in so many wars. When you asked that man what he thought of Hitler, he would grin and say "Oh Hitler, I met that man once. Didn't like him. Locked him in a cupboard. Of all the things he could have done. He locked one of the most dangerous military men known to man, in a cupboard.
The man called himself a healer, and he influenced my life greatly. He led me on a journey. A journey which still haunts me even now, hundreds of years later.
I shall start I suppose, the night they came for me…
I have gone back and added more detail and stuff.