Lies. Told to us by our oppressors to prevent a revolt; rationalized by us, their victims, who were unwilling to see the cruel reality of our situation. Hours earlier, the monsters wearing the red armbands had laid siege to our village, segregating “the Juden” from the rest. Our homes had been looted. Our women accosted. Laughing soldiers entertained themselves with random kills. I heard my mother scream. I saw my father’s skull spray her nightclothes red with brains and blood, his body left in the street with the others as we were marched in columns to the train station six miles away.

Through a child’s eyes, I waited for the rebellion. Our numbers were far greater than theirs, and yet there was no resistance. Worse—not a word of protest from our neighbors. Not when our people were dragged from our homes and shot in the street. Not even when we were squeezed by the hundreds into cattle cars. Terrified and isolated, we rendered ourselves sheep, fearful of upsetting the wolves that fully intended to eat us.

Desperate to breathe, I pushed and squeezed my way to the nearest rectangle of night, the window grated with steel, entwined in barbed wire. Pressing my face against the cold bars, I sucked in deep lungfuls of winter—and my probing fingers discovered a loose bolt! Using my fingernails and teeth, I managed to remove a screw, and after ten minutes of effort twisted the bar free.

Using my new tool, I pried off the barbed wire and stared at freedom rolling by at forty kilometers an hour.

“You—Boy, what do you think you are doing?” The gray-haired woman had been my third-grade history teacher; she looked at me now—her eyes crazed in madness.

“The bars are loose, we can escape.”

“Little fool! The SS counted us when we boarded, they will count us again when we disembark. Escape, and they will kill us all.”

“They will kill us all anyway.” I pushed my head and shoulders through the opening, but she thwarted my escape, grabbing my ankles and dragging me back inside.

A short time later the train slowed and the whistle blew and we arrived at the outer gates of hell.

*   *   *

“No!”

Disoriented, I opened my eyes, the nightmare lingering with my dark surroundings. Was it just a dream or something deeper—a disturbing remnant of a past life? Either way, my mind struggled to connect with the present.

It took me several minutes before I realized that the heaviness I felt was gravity pressing me to the flat top of a Hunter-Transport—one of more than fifty transhuman vessels lined up end to end like freight cars to form an orderly procession several miles long. Hovering above a mist-laden swampland, the vessels inched their way past juvenile redwood trunks, their part-human part-machine pilots silently waiting their turn to deliver their precious cargo.