Episode I : Called

I've heard that most girls get called when they're in their teens. They have watchers, and they train, and they go out and find vampires and slay them. That's what a slayer does.

I'm a slayer.

But that isn't how it worked for me.

I don't know if I was just some random anomaly, called to my duty because I happened to get in the way of the ancient slayer power, or maybe the Powers That Be chose me out of the line because there was just too much evil in my world. Maybe I got called early so that I could help balance the scale in my little corner of Hell, but it just made the world into a bigger, badder Hell. I didn't have to find the evil. It found me before I was ever a chosen one and it just got worse. I was given the power to stop it, the strength to fight, but I was still just me and everyone around me was dying, suffering. If I hadn't been a slayer maybe I could've just died too. But I had to fight, and fail, alone, every day.

I was born September 14 1930 to a Polish family in Poznan. I suppose fate had me down from the start : while my family celebrated their first child, the Nazi party celebrated election. Despite the political tension, Poznan was a very charming place to grow up, and we shared the city with our German friends and neighbors without a second thought. My mother made clothes for Germans and Poles alike, Jews and Christians discussed the weather with my father when they came into our shop. My brother ran in the street with the other boys, and the matrons of the town all clamored to bounce the new baby girl on their knee. I was just a little girl. Poznan was home. Berlin was just spouting threats. For all I knew.

September 1 1939. The Nazis start their brutal campaign towards Warsaw. My beautiful town stood in fear as they terrorized my country, and we tried to figt back. Our army held them off for five days at the River Bzura, but my father fell, my uncle fell, my cousin fell, and our army failed. September 13, our men were lost and the Nazis had won. My ninth birthday was the first day without hope. Three days later the Soviets invaded; Warsaw fell, my country was given away in bits to the invading beasts, and my mother and I found ourselves in the mouth of Hell : Ravensbruck.

Ravensbruck was full of dry faces. Women arrived every day to join the hundreds of near-dead, walking dead, and already dead. As we were unloaded from the train and filed through the gates like a shipment of rotting meat an empty horror sunk in. This can't be life, I thought, as I looked up to my mother for reassurance. All I saw was a dry face. She held my hand and my little brother's, I held my baby sister, she didn't look at us. She didn't move as they took my brother. She didn't even look at the baby, just handed it from me to them. I wanted her to hold onto me, to say no, you can't have this one, but I was taken away and sent with the rest of the children.

You work here, they said.

We make the Jews and the Poles and the Scum useful.

You are children, you are not useful.

You see the fire, there you are useful.

You make heat.

I watched as tiny bodies were tossed to the crematory. The heat grew, it burned around me, it burned strong through me and inside me. The fire was so destructive and so strong, but I knew then I was stronger.

I could fight back.