Episode II : Connected

When you become a slayer, who you are changes. I didn't become less Polish, or less Jewish, or less myself, I became more. The Slayer line is about being connected. And disconnected. Suddenly I was part of this great ancient power, with new knowledge of girls before me who had been great warriors. I felt an amazing connection to these people whose names I didn't even know. Being in the camp was the same. We didn't even have names to know there, but we were all connected. Across Poland, the Poles were being persecuted and tortured together. Across the Europe, the Jewish community was strengthening our resolve to believe in our hearts. Across the world, the enemies of Evil were uniting.

But I was disconnected.

This evil, the evil the British were fighting, the evil that marched and fired guns and gassed naked men, this was just human. I was finding new evil every day, awake and in dreams, and the evil that terrorized me by day was nothing compared to the Evil I knew at night. This was a world that only I knew, and everyone around me spent their days in fear, yes, but also ignorance. There is too much bad in the world to take it all in, I don't even think they want to know what the're ignorant of. Do you?

I'll tell you what you don't want to know.

I was watching them burn the body of my baby sister. She had such fat legs, they sizzled. As the fire consumed her body, another fire consumed my heart. I ran forward screaming, every muscle in my body thrashing out to kick, hit, bite whatever it could reach. At the mouth of the oven a large arm reached out and a hand wrapped around my neck, lifted me off the floor. I felt the swing as the arm moved to hurl me in with the rest of the meat. I wouldn't be the one to crush my sister's disintegrating skull. My legs shot out for the wall as the hand released and I pushed back, leaping off the wall directly into the two massive bodies, two stoic faces, two vulnerable necks, two dead men. I killed them. With my hands. Twigs never snapped so easy.

Here's the thing about Nazis. There are always more Nazis. Two dead SS lay at my feet, three more came, then a surge behind them. And me? I ran. I ran and hid while they burned the rest of the children. I didn't know what it was like to kill men until then, and it turns out its not that easy. Even as they killed my people, my brother and sister and took away my mother I hated myself for killing just two evil men. That night I couldn't move, I just found a place to hide from those monsters and curled up and cried and slept. But there were more monsters.

A young girl, maybe 15, Chinese. Everyone outside is running and yelling. There is fire, lots of fire. And beautiful silk. I can see this girl is different. No, I know it, I feel it. I remember what she was thinking. She was scared, but not because her city was burning, or because her family was dying. She was afraid of a man in her house. He was pale and gaunt and confident because he knew she would die. She fought with a stick; I felt its power as she held it, but it was just wood and he had...a weapon...teeth...The girl was strong and knew how to kill. I knew how to kill. But he was made to kill, and he grabbed her, and held her close to his body and I smelled the blood as he drank her power. I watched from the door as he walked past me and her body burned in her own house.

I know her. Because she is why I'm here.

The girl died that night in China, and there was another like us, and another, on and on. All of these girls fought and died because there are monsters in the world. And here I was, Ravensbruck, living under monsters, hiding from them. These were different monsters. The monsters I knew weren't pale and gaunt. That was us, the Jews, the Poles. They had real weapons. All I had was a stick. But every girl who fought a monster knew the power in their hands, and all it took was a sharp piece of wood.

We know how to kill.