“Kill the Jews!” “Kill the Jews! ”Kill the Jews!”
The chants of hatred grew louder and louder with each passing moment, as if the raging men were troops preparing for an honorable battle instead of a genocidal massacre. The sounds of clanking pitchforks echoed into the cellar, the musical timing of their beats in disarray causing an even greater level of horror. The sound of cracking wood resonated throughout the shelter burning fear into Rose and her mother’s mind.
At first there were only three. They carried pitchforks and torches in one hand, and a bible in the other. As they walked towards Rose and her mother, their faces seemed to twist and spiral, as if all the world's evil had taken shelter in their unnatural faces.
For Rose and her mother, they soon realized that there was nowhere to hide within the cellar; There was nowhere to escape. As Roses mother grasped the situation that she had been placed in, she thought about her husband. That his death had occurred in a place so far from her--in a place where she could not protect. But now, standing feet from her terrified daughter, she knew that she had but one option: to protect her daughter. Without a second thought, Rose’s mother dove at the attackers.
As she ran towards the angry men, they fixed their hands upon her shoulders and threw her onto the hard dirt floor. Thier struggled on the ground, like an inchworm trapped in a thunderstorm. The men continued to hold her down, a monstrous smile creeping upon their faces as they began to unzip her pants.
“She’s too old for me, not my type,” one of the men said.
“She's just perfect–look at that nice tight pussy,” said another.
“We have a whole town here. Why waste ourselves on this ugly, old Jew?” said the final one.
“Stop! Someone help her!” Rose screamed.
“Oh look, it’s another one,” snickered the first man to speak. He walked over to her and jammed a hard coarse hand into her jawbone. He was a large man with pale white skin, long blonde hair, and a stomach that seemed to roll out across the room. “This one’s younger. Yes, much better. Let’s get this bitch instead.”
As they began to creep towards her, a male voice sounded from a shadow within the corner of the cell.
“Get off of her.”
“What are you? Another Jew?” laughed the first man.
“I said get the fuck off of her.” As the shadow man walked closer, his figure became slightly more perceivable in the dark cellar.
“And what are you going to do? Steal our gold? Eat our children?” another man said, the three men continued to laugh in harmony.
“Shoot you like the fat fucks that you are.”
The second the shots went off it was over. The three men fell flat on the ground, blood oozing from different locations within their chest and head.
Rose ran over to her mother, who had been knocked unconscious from great amounts of stress. She then viewed the shadow man standing in the corner of the cellar, the two guns that rested in his hands were fuming with smoke.
“Who are-” Rose began to question but was silenced by the shadow's voice.
“I told you that talking too much would get you killed.”
She let out a soft gasp.
“Wait, are you-”
The shadow man creeped out of the dark revealing himself to be the young man from the wedding.
“My name’s Ruben, Ruben Kaplovitch. Sorry for the late greeting.”
“Wait. Where did you learn that?” Rose pointed to the dead men.
“Russian military. They force all Jewish men to serve twenty-five years in the military starting at the age of 12. Once our years of service are over, they send us to our deaths on the front lines of some shitty battle–Cannon Fodder, they call it. Escaped on my 5th year. Got some good fucking training though.”
“How did you escape?”
He pointed at the two rifles he was holding in his hands. The chambers were still fuming with smoke as he stuffed bullets into their pores.
“Why did you do it?”
Ruben paused and stared at her.
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"Do what?"
"Why did you try to escape? It was dangerous right? Thier had to be something."
Ruben sighed.
“I had a wife when I was very young. Married at 15 and had twin sons at 16.”
“Did something happen?”
He took a deep breath and stared at the ground, “we lived in a small Jewish village near the edge of Lithuania and Russia. It was a farming village, with spread houses and fields of grass that went on for so long they seemed to touch the sky. I had saved enough money to purchase a small green patch and some lumber. I worked, with many members of the village, to build that house and we spent three months doing so.”
He laughed weakly, resting the pistols back into their holsters, “it may seem kind of stupid, but once we finished that building that shitty box, my wife and I believed that we were the richest people alive. To have friends, a house, a family, that's all we could have ever hoped for.
“I can still remember the day when I came back. After a year at war with the Ottoman, I walked into the village. It was abandoned and destroyed, with the houses that dotted the landscape torched and deteriorating, their final remains slowly falling onto the ground. I can remember running. Picking up speed with every step I took. I ran through the fields where my neighbors used to live. Through the dirt pathways my children used to play on. I ran until I reached my house.
“There was a small hole dug up in front of the house. The sun was shining on it as if it were a gift from God–how oblivious I was. They were there. Bloodied and disfigured. Red and white ropes of blood and bone protruded from holes in their body that should have never existed. The expressions on their faces were incomprehensible, a pile of guts and organs covering whatever they were thinking in their final moments.
“At that moment I no longer cared about anyone. I no longer cared about anything. I wanted revenge. I wanted to kill everyone and everything who had prevented me from protecting my family. I hated them. I hated them so much.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rose whispered in response.
“I can still remember her hair. When she would walk outside it would glow brighter than the Shamash of a menorah. I can still see my children. I can see them smiling, playing and laughing. Why does remembering them hurt so much? It feels like my heart is shattering into a million pieces. I don’t want to remember them. I just want them back.”
Ruben burst into tears, his strong and robust posture breaking down into his true and unfiltered self.
“I miss them so much. God–why couldn’t it be me. Then at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.”
Rose stared at him, bewildered by his sudden breakdown, “It’s not your fault,” she tried to say.
He turned to Rose, a look of piercing rage flowing through his veiny cornea, “Not my fault? Not my fault! I was her husband, their father. I was supposed to keep them safe. I was supposed to protect them. But instead, I was sent a thousand miles away and I couldn’t do shit.”
“My father died too!” Rose blurted out, “I was very young at the time, but I can still remember the day when we got the military letter. We never found out what happened to him. We never got to bury his body. It’s like one day he was there and the next…”
“They were gone,” Ruben stated, looking back off into the distance.
There was deafening silence for what seemed like hours. Rose searched for something, anything to change the conversation. But no matter how hard she thought, she kept imagining her father and Rubens' family: beaten and gored, tossed into a hole and left for dead.
If only there was a place where people like them were safe. Where children like Rubens and fathers like mine could enjoy life without having to worry about being massacred by those who hate us…
“We have been working you know," Ruben whispered.
"Working? We? What do you mean?" Rose questioned.
"Well, many of us have been working on a movement; We call it the Alliance of All Peoples. It's goal to create equality and peace between all groups of people no matter their identity. We are not the average human rights group though, no, we are far greater. From America to China, members of our movement have gained great power in nations across the world. We have also began mobilizing an army and the equipment needed to supply it. Within a few months we should be able to-"
Before he could finish his sentence a female voice screamed, “help! Someone help!” Rose and Ruben lifted Rose’s mother and quickly relocated her to her bed. They then ran outside towards the direction of the voice.
As they ran they noticed the condition of the village. The once lush and green grass was now browned and crisped, fire spreading throughout its capacity. Many houses that resided within the village were either burning or in ruins. A cloud of smoke rose into the sky and the sounds of the angry mob began to fade.
When Ruben and Rose reached the women, they gawked in horrid surprise. A man laid dead on the ground. The indents of pitchforks and torches marked him, displaying the immense amount of pain he had experienced in his final moments. It took them a moment to realize that the man was the groom at the wedding they had attended just the day before.
His wife continued to cry, her naked and violated body bruising against the harsh, sharp wind.
“Why him?” She cried. Tears poured onto his body as if her sorrow could bring him back from the afterlife.
“Why god?”
Rose and Ruben could only watch, any words they could say seemed pointless in the moment.
She continued to cry, “We were finally together–finally happy. But now he’s gone. Now everything is gone.
“I don’t want to live without him. He can’t die. Please help us. Someone help.”
Rose and Ruben continued to stare, letting the woman cry out her despair. They both knew that there was nothing they could do to help her because they were her. They still could remember the day when the ones they loved most were stripped from them. They could remember praying that it wasn’t real. That everything they were experiencing was just the plot of a horrifying nightmare that would go away when they woke up. They could remember the feeling of guilt that weighed them down greater than anything they had felt before. They could remember how much they wished that it was them that went. At least then they could have died knowing that the ones they loved were alive.
“I won’t be going to America anymore,” she said to them, trying to stop her crying but failing nonetheless. She pulled the two visas that she had received as a wedding gift from her pocket. “Take them for yourselves. Live a good life. A happy one. I don’t even know if you are both together but if you are, have lots of children. Raise a good family. But make sure you never forget about what happened today. Never forget about those who died. Never forget about what they did.
"One day you will fight them. And on that day, you must show them no mercy. Drag them to the ground. Take their heart and pound it until their is nothing left. Make them watch as their loved ones are beaten to death right before they're eyes. Do to them just as they did to us. For us. For all of us who have died in events like these.”
And even though she tried to stop crying–to stop wanting to commit the most revolting of actions against them, she could not; because everything she had ever dreamed of was robbed: her husband, her love, her life. And it all happened in a moment.