If I Should Die Before I Wake, by Han Nolan is about a girl named Hilary who gets into a motorcycle accident and is put in the hospital. She dreams that her name is Chana and she is a jew. Her whole time is at the hospital as she drifts in and out of consiousnous she lives in another world.
She is sent to a concentration camp and stripped down to nothing. (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144) People today can still remember this moment in their life like Henny Fletcher Aronson who was one of the many victims of the Nazi concentration camps.
"As we came to Stutthof, they told the women to get out, and they said we will meet, we'll meet up with your, uh, husbands and fathers later on. So my sister-in-law, the two of us got off the train, and, uh, I think, you know, I'm not sure if they had transportation. Yes, they had, I think, open, open trucks where we were, uh, piled in, and we were brought to Stutthof. And then we were told, of course, right away my coat was taken away, and whatever else I had, which was very little, I suppose, because, uh, I didn't have a chance to take anything with me. And I held on to my mother, and then they told us to disrobe. Uh, you know, they had always tables and young Germans sitting behind it. And they said to us, "Okay, go in in this large area and disrobe." I mean by disrobe take everything off. So here I am next to my mother, hundreds of women, and we had to be totally naked coming in in front of a desk with a bunch of young hoodlums. So what do you think in a case like that? They are creatures from some other planet. There was no planet then, but creatures from hell. Why should I bother worrying about them, what they look at me. Because how demeaning can you even feel with standing your mother and relatives and friends, I mean I didn't have relatives, my, my sister-in-law. And here you are standing totally naked, and they look at you, it's like.... So, uh, I just stood there, and they just looked at us, and then they told us to go in the back to take showers, and they gave us the uniforms, the striped uniforms, and this is how our ordeal started. And this is concentration camp."
After being hosed down, shaved and given raggy clothes to wear Chana was sent out into the freezing winter air along with the others. Days passed and everyone is starving. The prisoners are continually pushed to their limits, some people drop dead right where they are working and are just left there. Chana stays strong knowing her grandmother is their to support her. Day after day the jobs get harder and less food is given out. Many jews were beat and some were burnt alive. They were treated like wild animals and not like human beings. One women remembers that time in her life all too well.
"I have seen a lot of dead people around, all over, and I guess when you see so many, it doesn't really make that much of an impression. One of the times in Ostrowiec Lager [camp] I was in the, uh, outhouse, in the bathroom, which was on the corner of the, uh, uh, area where like it was a big area in the center of the camp, and then all the barracks were around it, mostly actually on two sides, and the outhouse was at the corner. And I happened to have gone into the outhouse and, uh, all at once there is a commotion and everybody is rushed into their barracks, because that's where they were supposed to go, and, uh, I got stuck in the bathroom. Well, I got up on the seat and I looked out of the little window on the top, and what had happened is some people tried to escape, and they were caught. And I guess they were wounded, and there was some shooting going on, and they got about, I think, four people to dig graves just outside of the wire of the fence of the camp. And they brought these, uh, people that tried to escape, that were, uh, shot already, but they were not dead. And they made the other Jews bury these people that were not really dead yet, and they were begging not to be buried, that they're still alive, that they should do something to kill them. But they didn't do anything, they just buried them alive. And these people had to do it, or else, these poor people who that were been picked to do it, because otherwise they themselves would have would up in--dead. That was a very, very traumatic experience. I can still hear them screaming."- Ruth Webber.
Eventually Hilary fully recovered and stopped living in Chana's life. She did not come out of it unchanged. She changed her views and opinions on many things completely.
