The following excerpt is taken from:
Open My Eyes, Open My Soul -- Celebrating Our Common Humanity
Created by Yolanda King and Elodia Tate

"SILENT NIGHT" as told to Beth Murphy

November came, and I had not seen daylight for months. Each day in the concentration camp was the same: down in the darkest places of the earth, breaking stones, building tunnels in the mountains to create an underground airplane factory, where enemy planes could not bomb.

By December the tunnels and the factory were complete. Still I spent long hours under artificial light, never seeing the sky, assembling and dismantling missiles for the German war effort. The dust was so thick that we often couldn’t see our hands working. We breathed dirt, and sweat.

A man next to me whispered that even God couldn’t find us. As Christmas approached, he whispered that Santa Claus could not find us, either.

But Santa Claus did.

This was a small camp – only six-hundred or so people – Germans and Austrians, French, Polish, Czechs, and a few Russians. The place had been an old salt mine and warehouses, all surrounded by electrified barbed wire. The cold gnawed at our bones; we lay down on damp planks and our garments were always sodden from our sweat and the cold.

We were so desperately focused on just getting through the day, on just getting the task at hand complete, that we learned nothing about the person next to us. More terrible: we did not know one another. We did not know each other’s names. We could recognize a face, and knew the face’s nationality, but there was nothing else left.

Above all else, I remember the hunger. They gave us barely enough to keep us going – the thought of food, the uncertainty of that next meal, made us work even harder: if we followed the rules, if we did what they said, they would feed us. Sometimes they fed us, sometimes they didn’t. Once I met a man who offered a crust of bread in exchange for a discarded cigarette butt: that dry crust – mold on one side – still, all these years later, seems savory and rich and extraordinary.

One day, as Christmas approached, our captors called us out to the common yard in front of the barracks. We dodged one another’s gaze.

A Staff Sergeant stood before us. His shoes glistened in the light. The pleat on his pants was sharp.

Usually the guards’ faces were blank: they were robots, just doing their duty. This man, though, seemed to really be looking at us, at me – he was really seeing me. With revulsion, perhaps, but pity, too; and compassion.

“It’s Christmas,” he told us.

We said nothing. What could we say? What did Christmas have to do with the dust and the hunger, and the cold? Christmas should be celebration, and joy, and warmth – Christmas should be filled with light, and we saw only dark.

“It’s Christmas,” he repeated. “We should celebrate. We should do something to celebrate.”

We prisoners glanced at each other, disbelieving.
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