The Sweetest Revenge
Reading Comprehension Questions

Passage

“Then they were led to rickety barracks where rats skittered across dirty floors and fleas jumped on the men's ankles. Beds were nothing more than bare planks of wood.” (Paragraph 10)

Question

1. In the excerpt above, the word rickety means
 
 
 
 
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The Sweetest Revenge

Alan David

Preview

Having barely survived the Holocaust as a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp, Yossi Abrams has more reason than most to want revenge against those who harmed him. But his thirst for vengeance has given way to something surprising.

"Revenge can be a strange thing," Yossi Abrams says thoughtfully. "You have to wonder about paying someone back with the same kind of awful treatment that you hated. What kind of sense does that really make? What about the Golden Rule?" Yossi rubs his hand across a tattoo on his wrist and sighs heavily. "But there was this feeling that I had to do something. Those bastards couldn't just get away with it and not suffer too. That was the way I felt back then. A lot of us did."

Yossi picks up a very old picture. He points to a thin, young boy standing next to three siblings. The boy is wearing too-large glasses, looking awkward, and trying unsuccessfully to hide behind his sister. "That was me eighty years ago," he says with a grin. "I was the smallest kid at school. Kind of a target for the bullies. And there was one bully in particular, Gabe, who really seemed to have it in for me. He wasn't very big himself, but I was smaller, so..." Yossi talks about his school days in a small town in Lithuania and about how Gabe used to push him around. Gabe would often sneak up behind Yossi on the way to school, kick him to the ground, and steal his lunch from him. Other times, Gabe called him names or threw stones at him for no reason at all.

But then, quickly, that all changed. "I grew nearly a foot and gained a lot of weight one summer," Yossi says with a smile. "Suddenly, Gabe was smaller than I was, and when he saw me, I could tell he was worried. He began waiting to leave for school until after I had passed his house. When I caught his eye, he looked frightened." Yossi says he thought more than once about giving Gabe a taste of his own cruelty. After all, Yossi had been hurt and humiliated. Now the tables had turned, and it would have been easy to kick Gabe or throw a punch without worrying about Gabe getting the upper hand.

"But I was happy," Yossi explains with a shrug. "I had friends and a good life. I think that even in my young mind, I knew that was enough. They say that living well is the best revenge, and that's what I was doing. By my senior year in high school, I had everything-- even a girlfriend, Ana, who I secretly hoped to marry after we graduated."

But suddenly, Yossi's good life was crushed. The very next morning after Yossi's graduation from high school, he and his family heard tremendous blasts and gunfire growing closer. It was the German army beginning its invasion of Russia in World War II, and on their way, the Germans occupied the small town where Yossi lived. "Many of the people in our town were Jewish, including my family, most of my friends...and Ana," Yossi says, frowning. "The Nazis began beating and killing Jews right away. They dragged women out into the street and shamed them by making them take their shirts off and throwing mud on them. They did this to my mother and sister. The Nazis just stood there laughing at the women crying."

A few mornings after this humiliation, military trucks roared in to round up all the Jews and take them to concentration camps. The Abrams family, like many Jewish families, tried desperately to hide from the Nazis, but there were not enough hiding places to go around. The family was huddled together beneath a pile of hay in an old barn when three German soldiers stormed in and began blasting bullets into the hay. Yossi's 8-year-old brother, Micah, was hit in the leg. He threw his arms up and shrieked, revealing the hidden family. "They lined us up and pointed their guns at us," Yossi remembers. "Micah couldn't stand up, and he continued screaming. One of the Nazis shouted for him to be quiet, but he kept screaming. He was just a child. That didn't matter to the soldier. He shot Micah in the head. Twice." Yossi shakes his head and clenches his fists at the memory. "My mother collapsed, but my father quickly picked her up. The next thing I knew we were being shoved and kicked to trucks loaded with nearly everyone from our town. They just left my brother's body in that barn."

Yossi, his parents, and his two remaining siblings, both sisters, were taken to a train station and packed with hundreds of others into filthy cattle cars. For what seemed like days, the train rolled on as the prisoners sat in darkness. The heat and stench was overwhelming. Except for a few loaves of stale bread thrown into the cars and a spray of water from hoses at two train stations, there was no food or water. Several elderly and ill people died along the way, their bodies remaining in the cars until the journey ended. Many of the prisoners believed the "work camps," as the Germans called them, would be a welcome relief after such a nightmarish journey. "But the nightmare was just beginning," Yossi says.

Once inside the camp gates, men and women were immediately separated. They were not allowed to ask where they were going or to say goodbye to loved ones. Yossi would never see his mother or two sisters again. He was later informed by a fellow-prisoner that most of the women who were brought into that camp were sent in large groups to gas chambers shortly after arriving. Although some women were kept alive to serve the German soldiers, Yossi never found any trace of his mother or sisters after the war ended.

Yossi and his father stood in a long line, waiting to be inspected and questioned. Yossi noticed that weak, sickly, or older men and young boys were placed in one group while healthy young men were placed in another. Yossi's father, who was in his sixties and suffered from arthritis was separated from Yossi. "I had a very bad feeling about it," Yossi says. "My father looked at me and tried to smile. I knew he was terrified."

After being given a painful tattoo of their prisoner numbers on their arms and wrists, the men filed into the camp. They were not allowed to take any of their belongings with them. They were dressed in crude prisoners' uniforms and given a metal bowl for their meals. Then they were led to rickety barracks where rats skittered across dirty floors and fleas jumped on the men's ankles. Beds were nothing more than bare planks of wood. More than half of the men in this young men's barracks would die in the next two years from starvation, beatings, murder, bizarre medical experimentation, or illness.

It would be worse for the older men. Only two days after arriving, Yossi saw the older men being marched into the woods and out of sight early in the morning. Many of them were carrying shovels. Yossi called out to his father, but the guards had their guns trained on the old men. Yossi's father didn't dare turn around. Yossi asked one of the prisoners who had been in the camp for six months where the old men were going. The other prisoner just shook his head and said, "You won't see any of them again."

Frantic with fear and worry, Yossi rushed up to one of the Nazi guards and asked where his father was going. In reply, the guard smashed the butt of his rifle into Yossi's head, knocking him out. While Yossi was unconscious, the guard kicked him in the stomach and broke several of Yossi's ribs. When Yossi came to, he was still on the ground. As he lay there, he heard volley after volley of gunfire coming from the woods. "They sent all those men into the woods to dig a pit. Then the guards lined them up and shot them and buried them in the grave they had dug," Yossi says in a low voice.

For the next two years, Yossi witnessed unimaginable horrors in the concentration camp. Men were forced to labor 15-18 hours a day breaking rocks or doing other equally backbreaking types work. They were fed nothing more than moldy bread and a thin soup with an occasional piece of rotten vegetable floating in it. Men who passed out or collapsed while working were beaten or shot. When the bitter winter came, some of the guards amused themselves by tying naked men to trees and watching them go into convulsions and freeze.

Bits and pieces of news from the war trickled in with new prisoners, but it was rarely good. The Nazi army was apparently systematically killing thousands of Jews and non-Germans as it attempted to take control of a large part of Europe. Most of the men at the concentration camp feared that they would not make it out of this war alive. Then, finally, some news arrived that gave Yossi a spark of energy in his starving, beaten body and soul. "A new prisoner whispered about revenge squads," Yossi recalls. "Revenge! These were groups of Jewish men who had avoided capture were getting back at the Nazis in any way they could. I couldn't believe it. It seemed like a dream come true."

From that point on, Yossi burned with a desire to somehow survive the concentration camp and join a revenge squad. The squads tore up the railways that brought supplies to German soldiers. They blew up ammunition storehouses and set fire to officers' quarters. Some members of the squads even disguised themselves as German soldiers and shot and killed Nazis. The thoughts of revenge slowly consumed Yossi. At night he dreamed of blowing up Nazi supply trains and throwing grenades in the faces of German soldiers. During the day, as he used a pick-ax to break rocks, he envisioned using the pick-ax on the guard who had broken his ribs. Yossi willed himself to live another year through illness, starvation, and the sick abuse of the Nazi guards. He refused to die. "I was obsessed with revenge," Yossi admits. "It's what kept me alive."

Finally, Germany was defeated, and the war in Europe came to an end. Russian and American armies freed the remaining concentration camp prisoners who had miraculously lived through a hell on earth. Many of the prisoners, including Yossi, were not much more than walking skeletons by the war's end. Even when freed and given food and medical attention, thousands of prisoners were too far gone to ever regain their health again. But Yossi was lucky. He was still young and strong enough to get his health and weight back fairly quickly.

Although the war was over, the revenge squads still roamed the German countryside. Many Nazi officers and guards who had committed these terrible war crimes and acts against humanity were now imprisoned in some of the same camps where Jews had been imprisoned. Two members of a revenge squad who knew Yossi was interested in joining, approached him to let him know they'd be glad to have him on their squad. There was a plan, they told Yossi quietly, to poison the water supply in several large German cities with deadly chemicals. The aim was to kill innocent Germans on the same scale that innocent Jews had been killed. Millions of them. "But something had shifted in me the very moment I was freed," Yossi says. "When the gates to the concentration camp opened, and I walked out alive...It was all I had ever wanted! I was overjoyed, ecstatic. Alive! Just like that, my desire for revenge evaporated. Suddenly, the thought of doing to others what the Nazis had done to us made me feel kind of sick inside. How could any human do such things? I wanted nothing to do with that kind of revenge."

Much as he had felt years earlier, Yossi now sensed that there were other, far better, kinds of revenge. Today, at nearly 91 years old, Yossi still lives a full, rewarding life. He has been married to the same woman for over 70 years. "When I came back to our village to try and find friends, I found very few remaining. But the third night I was there, I found Ana looking for her parents," Yossi recalls with a twinkle in his eyes. "I never let her out of my sight again."

Like their own parents, Yossi and Ana had four children. Now Yossi leafs through a thick photo album of his family. Suddenly he stops and looks at a picture for a long moment. Then his face lights up with a smile. "You know, the Nazis were determined to kill every last Jew on earth," he says, shaking his head. "The thing that seemed to upset them more than anything else, always, was the thought of Jews living and thriving. But look at this..." In the picture are 42 smiling faces closely surrounding Yossi and Ana. From the four children had come twelve grandchildren. And from the grandchildren, there are now twenty-four great-grandchildren. Yossi counts the numbers on his fingers to make his point.

"I learned at a young age so many years ago that living well is good revenge," Yossi finally says. "But for me, the best revenge was just living. And through that living, look at how many more lives have been created! My living may have been the best revenge, but this is surely the sweetest."

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