Want a chance to write in a competition as you travel through time? Now you can. This unique competition will allow you to hone your skills as a writer as each task is from a different period of history. Your characters have been kidnapped and rippe...
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(This drawing is mine.)
Name: Shmuel (shoo-mull) Ableman
Age: 12, going on 13
Gender: male
Time they're from: born in A.D. 1928, and turned twelve in 1940. It is now 1941 for him.
Country/City: Krakow, Poland
Languages: his first language is Polish. He knows some Hebrew from studying the Torah, and is in the process of learning English.
Appearance: Shmuel has a bit of a dark skin tone from Hebrew heritage. His eyes are large and a deep, chocolate brown, his overall size relatively small since he has not yet had any sort of growth spurt yet. His hair is a dark brown, almost seeming black in dark enough light. He wears a hand-me-down, grey, fraying overcoat and soft, beige trousers, along with a normally white undershirt. On the shoulder of his overcoat lays a bright yellow Star of David, Hebrew writing on it labeling the child as a Jew.
Backstory: Shmuel was born to loving parents; his mother who emigrated from the land of Israel, and his Polish father, Filip, who has the profession of an interior painter. He was an only child for all of his life, and preferred reading books to roughhousing. Shmuel grew up in a Poland that had seen much better years, and was continuing to decline. In 1939, Poland was taken by Nazi forces. For about two years, his family suffered through the Nazi regime.
Personality: Shmuel is a quiet and, frankly, quite timid child. He liked to stay indoors and read, both from the Torah and from any book he could get his hands on. His family is Orthodox Jewish, so he also had learned to make Kosher food at a young age. His mother fondly likened him to Jacob, the youngest son of Isaac and Rebekah from the Book of Genesis. He dreads and fears that his father may be drafted into war, or worse, captured and taken by the Nazis to...wherever they take the people they capture. He doesn't know.
Weapons: possibly a worn kitchen knife from his mother's knife block, a small pistol, or an automatic rifle. He's only twelve, so probably the knife.
Friends and family: the closest relationships he has are with his mother and father. His mother is an immigrant from Israel named Sarah. She taught Shmuel how to cook a proper Seder meal with her aid for Passover, prepared him for his Bat Mitzvah, and healed up his scrapes and bruises. His father, Filip, taught his son all about painting and even some rudimentary woodworking skills. Shmuel loves his parents dearly, and wouldn't trade them for anything in the world.
Favorite hobbies: reading the Torah, exploring around the Polish countryside, cooking, reading in general, gathering flowers for his mother and making new paint for his father.
The Day: It was bleak and cold the day the small boy was taken from the side of the small creek flowing through the Polish woods. He had just been playing by himself, soaking up the coolness of the air and the soft crunch of the frozen leaves beneath his feet. When the agents came, however...he thought his life was going to end there. The poor boy froze up as the people came towards him. He couldn't run. He could barely move. He though they were some kind of special Nazi... He was wrong. "Please, don't take me!! I..I want to go home!! Let me go home!!" The boy had wailed in Polish as the people captured him, tears building in his big brown eyes.
