Aleksander’s prayer by Paul Rivers

I don’t pray. I was never taught to by my mother. But that night, as I held my breath, shivering in cold with only a torn blanket over my little body, hiding in that burrow from the men in black uniform, I prayed. I didn’t know who or what I was praying to but I remember being weak and helpless. I know my mother can’t save me this time like she always does. I saw her lying with blood oozing out the hole from her forehead. I tried waking her up.

“Dead Aleksander. The rabbit can’t hear, see or feel anything. It’s going to be like that forever.” I remembered the time my mother taught me that word, pointing at the rabbit we reared. My mother laid motionless like the rabbit.

I heard a man yelling “Dass Hund hier sein muss! Finde ihn!”. I prayed for this to be history. I wanted to tell my grandchildren there was this thing called war. Men and women abandoning humanity, obsessed with differences they created, taking lives like they had the rights. I wanted to tell them of a time when children talked about which dumpster to scavenge food for the next day. I wanted to tell my grandchildren how lucky they were that the lived in an age where all these sufferings existed only in textbooks.

My prayer that day, seventy years ago were never answered. We still fight our brothers and sisters to uphold goddamn rotten ideologies, which achieves nothing but a failed society. Greed and money prevails above everything else. Amelia, seven, comes running from her room these days. “Grandpa! Why are they lying like this with blood all over them?” she asked with tears in her eyes as she showed me a video of a pile of kids in a war stricken zone. I knew how afraid those boys would have been in their last minutes, how they prayed to be saved, how they hoped to live one day to tell their kids about war.

“Dead honey. They can’t hear, see or feel anything. They are going to be like that forever.”