ACX Audio Audition for the Book "Before Berlin"

I have a voiceover profile on ACX which is the Amazon platform for audiobooks. You can buy audiobooks there. You can sell them and you can narrate them. I narrate them.

As a voiceover artist I audition by uploading audio I’ve created based on the script the author has provided.

All of the books that are open to auditions are already on Amazon as ebooks.

Sometimes the author decides they do not want to move forward with creating an audiobook. So they take the audition down.

The tough part is I’ve already spent the time and energy to do my best on the audition.

Sooooo…..

I refuse to waste my time and energy. All the ACX auditions I perform will be going up on my site here.

Below was a well written and challenging script entitled Before Berlin. It looks like it was up on Kindle but it’s been taken down.

Although the audio audition is still up on ACX, the actual book – Before Berlin – is not on Amazon right now.

However…

You can find one of Leah Moyes’s other books in the series – entitled ENSNARE here…

@seekingnexus

CHAPTER ONE 19 August 1941

“Vorwärts! Kinn hoch! Arme nach oben!” The sharp demands in a thick German accent came swiftly.

Step forward. Chin out. Arms up. I hardly had time to turn to my left to see Renia, my best friend of ten years, performing the same ridiculous movements with an equally sour- faced woman in front of her.

The long horizontal line of students extended the length of our stone courtyard, chunks of concrete still littered the ground even now, nearly two years after the explosions rocked our school. Another dozen or so girls clustered near the outer gate, awaiting their turn.

“Open your mouth.”

The timeworn taskmistress inched closer to me, but even in youth, I towered over her by a head at the very least. She stretched her neck and leaned forward. The sulfurous scent of mustard reeked from her lips as they curved into an ardent scowl.

When she spoke, her jowls wiggled loosely above her crisp, clean uniform collar, but it was the brown mole near her chin with the solitary hair protruding that captured my full attention.

“Do you have all of your teeth?” She inspected my mouth thoroughly. I nodded.

She tugged on the end of my braid that hung freely down the right side of my chest, the lower locks nearly reaching my waist.

“Gute Länge.”

I snuck a glance at Renia once more and wiggled my brows carefully, so this madam did not see my disrespect. What a relief the length of my hair had passed her inspection. I fought the giggle building in my throat. Such an odd thing for her to find so satisfactory.

A tall, reedy woman shadowed the ill-tempered one. She clutched a sim- ple clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Macht Notizen.” The demanding one pointed for her to take notes, then turned back to me.“What is your name?”

I recognized my good fortune of having learned German years ago, even before they arrived in my city.

While my fellow classmates struggled with the foreign demands, I understood her well enough.

“Aleksandra,” I answered proudly, named after my oma, my mother’s mama, who died before my birth.

“Family name?” “Jaworski.” “Age?” “Sixteen.” “Kennkarte?”

I pulled the small, beige paper book from my pocket. I rarely went any- where without it since its issuance from the Generalne Gubernatorstwo at the beginning of the year.

She reached for it and scanned its contents care- fully, focusing her attention on the black and white photograph with my thumbprint and signature above the official seal. She turned the page for my family lineage.

“Schmidt?” she grunted.“Maternal?”

“Yes, Frau, my oma came from East Prussia.”

“Hmmm.” She handed it to the other woman and faced me again. “Turn around.”

I rotated my back towards her. Why is she inspecting my person so closely?

My brother, Ivan, who had been enlisted through conscript eighteen months before had not been scrutinized so closely when the German soldiers came to our home.

My breath hitched at a wayward thought.

A faint recollection emerged from an event I tried hard to forget…a collection of people—people with a unified belief—seized from their homes, lined up in the street, and marched away…but I am not Jewish!

And as my papers just proved, I am not entirely Polish either, I justified, quite aware of the hostility direct- ed towards Poles.

When my grandmother, Aleksandra Schmidt, came to Łódź to attend art school, she met and married my grandfather, choosing never to return to Prussia.

The woman pinched my side. The movement made me jump. I was tick- lish there.

“Stand still,” she snapped. Though she had a solid grip on my waist there wasn’t much to grasp and the tighter she held on the more it hurt.

She spoke to her scribe.“Tall, but skinny. Good posture and hips. Send her to Medical.”