Going Home

It was a miracle, they said. Resting on railroad tracks with a forest of trees on one side and rolling farmland on the other, was a long chain of open freight cars. Some bore damage from the fighter planes that had flown over and fired on what was perceived as an enemy threat. Several cars had been completely obliterated, while three others were engulfed in flames. How fortunate I was to be in one of the few cars that was untouched. Strangely, I have no recollection of the train cars being violently jarred by explosions just a few feet away, or how I came to be on the train in the first place.

The soldiers found me lying inside a car with only the bodies of the dead to keep me company. Of the hundreds of people that must have been crammed into each of the twenty freight cars, I was the only soul still breathing. I have been told by many people that God must have special plans for me. I think of a cynical response, but say nothing.

The liberators ask me daily where I come from. I couldn’t remember. Each time I felt my mind reaching back, probing for memory, haunted by familiar voices and images that dart through my mind, and then vanish. So today I tell them the name of the concentration camp I last remembered. “But what is the name of your hometown?” I give a blank stare in response. The Red Cross doctor makes some notation on his sheet, and goes on to ask my name. I show him the tattoo on my arm. “No,” he said, “Your real name, the one you were born with.” I shrug. I don’t remember this either.

Day after day I sit in the big dirt yard, my scabby legs stretched out before me like two long sticks. I try to think of places I had heard of and wondered if that was where I was from. Sometimes I imagined I was from romantic, cosmopolitan places like Paris, France or Rome. But of course, I wasn’t, I couldn’t speak anything but Polish. When I tired of this, I watched the doctors and nurses scurrying about, moving between and around the wilting, drooping bodies walking listlessly among them, like it was an obstacle course. But the walking dead take no notice. They just continue to shuffle back and forth, back and forth every day with seemingly no purpose. I am like them. I am lost.

Then one day, as I sit in the yard, my eyes closed, enjoying the cool breeze blowing through my wisps of hair, memories from my childhood gushed to the forefront of my mind. Everything I see and feel and smell is as crisp as if I was actually there in that time and place. I walk down the main street, feeling my feet hit the pavement. Everything was just as it used to be, before it happened. The creamery and general store are still there, the school and temple too. I walk past the rabbi’s home. His son Asher is there in the yard. He hasn’t changed a bit in all these years- still young and handsome. This time he notices me. “Hello Hannah, so nice to see you again,” he says with a smile. I exchange pleasantries with him. He would like me to stay longer, but I am anxious to be reunited with my family. I continue on toward my home, and soon it is within sight.