Eleven and twelve,

that’s how old we are.

I can’t imagine

being as old as

Mother and Father,

but I also can’t imagine

not becoming as old as them.

Yes, I am eleven-and-three-quarters years old.

I used to worry about my grades

and having to eat stuffed cabbage.

I used to wonder about being invited to parties.

But now I wonder,

what will become of us?

What will become of me?

I hear my parents

and their friends

speaking of news

from Berlin and Frankfurt,

and other German cities,

where things are worse

than here in Hamburg.

In those places,

Jews are arrested

in the middle of the night,

taken from their soft beds

to the police station.

In the dark of a movie theater—

a movie theater,

one of my favorite places!—

suddenly on come the lights,

and all Jews are rounded up.

At a café, over dinner,

on a lovely summer night,

in crash the police,

and out go the Jews.

They are sent to Buchenwald,

another of the Nazis’ concentration camps,

which, I have learned,

are not camps at all,

but prisons for people

who have committed no crimes.

The news comes

from shortwave radios

that my parents and their friends

listen to every day.

Broadcasts from other countries,

with foreign reporters telling

what is happening to Jews here.

Listening to these reports

is against Nazi law.

German radio stations

don’t have bad news about Nazis,

only news about how bad

Jews are.

In bed at night,

with my sister, Ruthie,

breathing lightly

across the room,

I close my eyes

and see the Gestapo

the Nazi secret police—

bursting into our home

to take us all to Buchenwald.

But when we get there,

and the Gestapo realize

that my parents really have committed a crime,

the crime of listening to shortwave radio,

they get very angry

and send us to an even worse place.

Then I open my eyes,

because I have reached the limit

of my imagination.

I can’t imagine what might happen.

I can’t imagine what will become of us.

I can’t imagine being as old as Mother and Father.

I can’t imagine not becoming as old as them.