~ It Only Took One Mouth ~
My mother used to say that “care is the way to heaven”. I always thought she should say, “Knowing is the right and wrong way”, because it sounded more official and definitely sounded smarter, but whatever. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. She’s dead, and I have one mission, and one mission only. To deliver my journal to the Allies. I have to get those papers to them or else this war is never going to end. And on the way? Well, before she was taken, Mama made me promise one thing to her: that I would stay alive – even if no one else did – and find a husband, have a nice big family, and never drown in the past. Ever.
I suppose she never mentioned anything about preserving the Jewish legacy, but I can do that as an added bonus. Because my journal? It has every single moment of every single day of the war preserved perfectly in vivid detail. No bias. No decorations. Just the facts. And no names, no addresses, only time stamps and neat columns of words and colleagues of crisply printed photos – all developed secretly in our neighbor’s hidden dark room. And yet, after all that careful planning that we thought was going perfectly well, it’s still my fault my parents are dead. My fault my friends are dead. My fault our neighbors, teachers, and students are all dead, their cold, stiff bodies piled in a truck and dumped into an icy pit in the ground.
And how, you might ask? To put it quite bluntly, I told too many people. Our group was one person too big. After all, it only took one mouth to get us all killed.