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"Come on, Sabine! We can make it, just don't look back!" Lena shouted, her grip on Sabine's hand tightening as they ran through the thicket of the woods. The undergrowth tried to snag their bare feet but their fear and determination broke through it.

Sabine barely registered Lena's words. The only things she could hear were the hurried breaths escaping her lungs and the whiz of bullets nicking trees. Bark exploded off the tree to her left like wooden shrapnel and scratched her arm.

The pain further clarified the situation she was in and her legs pumped faster. She ignored the cuts on her feet, the whistle of wind that brushed her skin as a bullet missed its mark...she even ignored Lena's pleas to slow down.

An upturned root caught Lena's foot and sent her tumbling into the ground. Her hand was yanked from Sabine's as the undergrowth finally claimed her. Sabine could still feel the imprint of Lena's hand in hers even as she kept running.

"Sabine!" Lena called out for her as she laid broken in the brush, her ankle twisted at an unnatural angle.

Sabine heard her friend's cries but she didn't stop or even turn around to look. Fear was controlling her body now. Pumping through her veins, heaving in her chest, running down her face in the form of tears.

"Sabine, please! Help me!"

The sound of her name ringing through the air followed after Sabine even though Lena remained behind. It was like a haunting song playing on the wind; Sabine! Sabine! Sabine!

Bang!

The ricochet of a gunshot marked the end of Lena's cries but the melody continued on inside Sabine's head. Lena's fall occupied the Nazi soldiers for enough time that Sabine was able to secure her lead. When she was far enough ahead she took a sharp right and dove into a large patch of bramble.

Sabine held back screams as the thorns tore apart her skin. Her body was so scratched up that she couldn't discern whether the liquid dripping from the leaves was the juice of its red berries or her own blood.

Sabine covered her mouth with both of her hands to muffle her breathing. The clomping of boots crunching leaves echoed in her ears as the Nazis moved in closer. One soldier ventured so close that his jacket brushed against the leaves of her bramble bush.

She could feel her heartbeat pulsing through every inch of her body. Even though it emanated from within her, it thumped so loudly that she worried the soldiers might actually hear it. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, BA-BUM. Sabine tried to will it to slow down but the only thing that slowed down was time.

Deciding that she didn't want to know what happened next, Sabine shut her eyes while she waited for eternity to end. She retreated inside her mind with the hope that death wouldn't find her there. At first it was dark and empty. And then it was overwhelming.

Sabine stood in the crossfire of alternating memories, trying to dodge the atrocities she had endured. But once one struck her, she became a magnet for the rest. A pile of nightmares grew upon her chest and weighed her down until she could no longer breathe.

The Nazis capturing her family after the Germans invaded their tiny village in France...

Watching a Nazi soldier shoot her father in the head when he tried to fight back...

Being sent to the French concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, with her mother and two younger sisters...

Losing her sisters back-to-back from starvation and fatigue...

Learning that her mother had been raped and killed by a Nazi soldier...

Trying to escape with a group of kids into the woods only to be found and hunted down one-by-one...

Eventually she could no longer hear the stomping of boots or the coarse German commands and slowly opened one eye at a time. Light trickled in between the branches of the bush and in that quiet moment it was almost beautiful. It was almost hopeful. Almost.

Taking several deep breaths, Sabine parted the leaves and peeked out to ensure that she was truly alone. When she deemed that it was safe, Sabine scrambled out of the bush and onto her hands and knees. She drank the air to quench her thirsty lungs and tried to slow her racing mind enough to determine what to do next.

Shelter.

She needed to find shelter before the sun went down or face freezing to death in the unforgiving forest. Even though it was spring, the temperature still dropped to dangerous lows under the night sky and her tattered uniform was not enough to ward her from an icy death. Judging where the sun hung in the sky, she only had a few more hours left to find reprieve.

Sabine moved through the forest in the opposite direction of where the Nazis had gone, but she was still weary of any rustling of leaves or cracking of twigs. Once she threw herself behind a tree after hearing a particularly loud crack reverberate through the woods, but it only turned out to be a deer.

She had no idea where she was and no idea where she was going but she continued on in a straight line with hope as her leader. She would walk until she found shelter or until she died. She tried not to hazard a guess as to which would come first.

After trekking for the better part of two hours, Sabine found a beacon of hope: an abandoned shelter dug under the roots of an old oak tree. It was so well-hidden that she almost walked past it but was stopped when she accidentally stepped in the ashy remains of an extinguished fire. The entrance to the burrow was small, but thankfully her languished 14-year old body was able to fit.

Sabine never considered herself to be lucky, especially after the previous events that had unfolded in her life, but fortune was on her side. Inside the den she found a ratty blanket, two cans of beans, and the most significant discovery of all: a box of matches. Warmth, nourishment, and hope.

With only faint light in the burrow, Sabine could barely make out the curly inscription on the matchbox: Matchs de Deuxième Chance. Second Chance Matches. Sabine furrowed her brows as she tried to decipher its meaning but eventually shrugged away the curious title and instead focused on her current predicament.

Surrounded by the items, Sabine began to ponder why they were left behind. The shelter was clearly created by another concentration camp escapee, but why would they leave such important objects behind? Had they been driven out of the shelter without notice or did the shelter still belong to them and they were just away foraging? If the latter, would they take kindly to a little French-African Jewish girl occupying their space?

While Sabine was scared of what may find her in the shelter, she was more scared of what might find her in the woods. Sabine scooted back farther into the shelter until her back was pressed against the dirt wall and remained there as the sun went down. Her only hope was that it was dark enough in the burrow that she'd be invisible to any visitors and that she could get the jump on them first.

Every crack and crunch sent Sabine's nerves on edge and her heart racing. Until another sound overtook her senses: Lena's screams. During this long and painful wait, Sabine's mind had plenty of time to revisit earlier events and it had tapped into the memory she had most wanted to forget.

"Sabine, please! Help me!"

Sabine could still feel the ghost of Lena's warm, clammy hand in her own and she tried to rub away the feeling on her leg but no matter how hard she rubbed it wouldn't go away. A stray breeze picked up outside the burrow and Sabine could have sworn that she heard her name whispered on the wind, as if Lena had followed her all the way there.

The feeling in Sabine's hand and the shouts in her head intensified until her whole body felt like it was on fire. She broke down in the burrow, heavy sobs wracking her tiny frame as she tried to gulp in breaths. She could have saved her friend, but she didn't. She was a coward.

Stuck in her own hellish nightmare, Sabine became paralyzed as she watched the rays peeking through the burrow entrance slowly diminish until she was enveloped in darkness. While the pitch black would have normally added to her fears, this time it made her hopeful. If somebody was still living in the burrow they would have been back by now.

When Sabine could no longer stand the cold settling into her bones, she grabbed the blanket, the beans, and the box of matches and crawled out of the burrow. She fumbled around in the darkness for twigs and branches to burn until she had constructed a large enough pile to keep her warm for a while.

Sabine assembled the twigs and branches into a slapdash monument on top of the old ashes. When she was confident it wouldn't collapse, she reached for the box of matches and struck one. It took a few tries, but eventually the little match erupted into a tiny ball of heat and light.

Sabine was about to throw the match into the stack of wood when something caught her eye. Something was moving in the flame...and it wasn't the wind...Sabine brought the match closer to investigate and was astonished at what she found.

Tiny golden figures flickered in the flame, running to and fro across an invisible plain. Smaller flames exploded beside the figures, absorbing some of them and then disappearing. As Sabine listened closer, she noticed that the crackling of the blaze sounded eerily similar to gunfire.

Sabine was so lost in the scene that she forgot her entire body was shaking from the cold. She tossed the match into the middle of the pyre and watched as the sticks became engulfed in a bizarre blaze. The fire glowed an overwhelming red and its tendrils bled into the sky as it danced higher and higher.

Sabine jumped back as the fire continued to grow past its wooden perimeter until it was nearly licking the trees. It expanded until it was twice the size of Sabine and as bright as the stars flickering above. With no water to douse it, Sabine became worried that it would swallow her and the forest whole.

Within the blink of an eye the strange fire collapsed in on itself like a dying star, emitting a clap that echoed for miles. The bright ball of red blaze disappeared, leaving behind a neat pile of ashes in its place...and an imprint in the dirt where Sabine had been sitting.

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