Poland, 1944
The rain seeped through their clothes, their skin, their bones; it drenched their souls like none had ever done before. Hundreds of feet sank into the mud, fought to free themselves, then fell back hopelessly down again.
In a tower high above, a German guard watched them all march on, clutching his rifle tightly to his chest, chasing the chill from his body to his heart.
Somewhere in the throng a boy, little more than a child, was all but whipped through the torrential rain, and clawing mud toward a commanding building growing out the ground as if to strike the heavens themselves. He looked to his mother, hoping desperately for some sign of comfort, a smile of reassurance that soon they would wake from this hellish nightmare and return to their normal daily lives.
But all the young boy saw in her teary, fearful eyes was the same bottomless pit of despair and dread mirrored in his own. And so he turned away to watch the shackles of mud at his feet.
When he looked up, they had reached a tall, hostile fence threatening them with venomous barbs and topped with spikes that at any moment could begin gnashing like a wolf driven mad with hunger. The boy could tell that this fence was designed to keep the insiders in, rather than the outsiders out.
Then the boy found his parents drifting away from him in the tempest of rain, mud, smoke, and broken hearts. He called out to her, a bony claw closing its icy fingers around his heart and injecting him with a fear deeper than any he had ever known. Panic-driven beyond rational thought, he forgot everything besides reuniting with his mother and father, but even as he called out to them a hand from behind wrenched him away from the last blessing he knew in his life.
His father turned and the boy choked on the anguish-contorted features of his father's face. Turning and seeing her son being taken from her, his mother screamed, called for him, strained her arms out to him, but the creatures with guns were already dragging both of his parents through that ominous black gate that threatened all of their lives.
Another soldier came to help the first hold back the boy who, screaming with arms outstretched in one final, desperate attempt to run to the only solace left in his life, now watched with horror as the massive gates sung closed with a great roar of triumph.
But the boy refused to accept defeat. Several more soldiers took hold of him and struggled to contain him. Still, the clot of humans and guns and fear slid though the mud toward the enormous metal gate that had swallowed the last vestiges of his family. Even when the guards lifted the boy's feet off the ground did he keep reaching for the gate, frantically grasping at the air for his lost parents screaming their names and pleas that they would return.
Convulsing metal pealed through the air.
The gate began to twist, to contort, to mutilate itself into its own representation of the fear, hatred, depression already taking its hold on the boy's soul. He had stopped screaming. His mind detached itself from reality; the gate held his entire focus. He forgot about his parents and the men holding him, about the people cowering from the gate in a new kind of fear, about his own fear. Then a spasm passed through his body and his mind went black as he slipped into unconsciousness.
The man who had hit the young, no longer innocent boy's head with the butt of his rifle stared at the other men who had fallen to the ground when the boy blacked out. One by one their eyes all turned to the boy now lying motionless in the mud, at once both amazed and terrified at what they had witnessed, and ignorant about what they had just created, and what it would become.