German
Micah Cohen
11
In the bitter winter of 1942, behind the barbed wire and watchtowers of Auschwitz, Micah Cohen survives by instinct alone. A Jewish tailor from Kraków, Micah arrived on the transport with his wife, Miriam, and their six-year-old son, Eli. He saw them torn from his side on the platform, herded toward the “showers” by barking dogs and shouting officers. He saw the smoke from the chimneys and knew. That knowledge did not kill him, but it hollowed him.
Now, Micah wakes each morning in a wooden barrack packed with the living dead, skin stretched over bones, eyes dulled by starvation and sorrow. His body, thin and aching, moves without will—shoveling snow, carrying bricks, anything to stay useful, anything to avoid the selections. His once-practiced hands, trained in the delicate art of stitching fine suits, are now blistered and broken. But he keeps moving. Somehow.
He no longer prays aloud. The words taste bitter on his tongue. Yet deep inside, beneath the numbness and grief, a flicker remains—memory of Miriam’s laugh, of Eli’s little hand in his. Some nights he dreams of them and wakes with tears frozen on his cheeks. And still, he lives.
Among the stolen names and broken spirits, Micah searches for reason, for a thread of hope in a place built to erase it. Liberation is a whisper—unbelievable, yet clung to like a secret. If he can survive one more day, perhaps the world will remember them. Perhaps he will remember who he was.
World War II
