Journal Entry: Nazi Concentration Camp

Dear Diary,

Ever since the first day I have been having this undeniable feeling that the end is near. On the train packed in so tight you could not sit down the end seemed to echo through the bodies, alive and dead. We didn't know where we were going, and honestly most of us did not care to know. When the train stopped and we were sorted by gender, I knew I would never see my father again, nor my brother who was two years younger than myself. It seems so long ago, when mother and I were taken in to a room with other women, and our heads were shaved.
Since then it has been the same routine in this place I now know is called Auschwitz-Birkenau. We wake up every morning at dawn, and by the end of breakfast two less people from our bunks are here, and the smell of the gas chambers makes it hard to breathe. From there we are taken to our jobs, where Mother and I plant crops until sundown, with one small break. If we stop to sit or rest we are yelled at or punished, and ever since the first day when I saw someone executed by a guard's gun I have yet to even pause. By the afternoon the stench of burning flesh fills the grounds that I am sure it will never leave my skin. At sundown we are taken back to our camps to be fed if we have been good, and to die if we have been seen as "unproductive".
All of us are grouped by marks on our clothes. Mother and I wear yellow stars, while I have seen others with pink and black triangles – those I have yet to figure out the meaning. Mother coughs all the time now, though, and she has gotten so skinny that her shirt hangs from her as if it was hanging on a tree, and the Star of David seems to swallow her whole. I am wondering if we will ever make it out alive.
Lately there have been rumors running through the camp that the war is over, yet if caught speculating over the subject you are immediately taken to the chambers, or shot on site. Fear has become a stench here, something that I know will permeate me for years to come – yet now I fear the end truly is near.
I must go now, before I am caught.