Arrowhead 2016

Greetings.
I'm alive. I've been writing lots of poetry. Awkward, random poems. I have also been writing other things, some of which I found out today, have been chosen and published in my school's literary journal The Arrowhead. 
I feel very honored and blessed, and excited that I get the opportunity to share some of writing with people. That's what I love about writing. Not only do I get a voice, but sometimes I get heard. And I want that hearing to help people, to connect, to challenge, to confirm truth, to make you fall in love with living. To know what grief is. To know you're not alone. To learn. To realize. All of those things.
So I decided to share the three pieces that were chosen to be in the magazine: a short story and two poems.
I also submitted another poem, a creative essay, and another short story. If there is interest I would very much be willing to share the essay and short story. Heck, I may share them just for kicks.
I hope today was beautiful for you and that tomorrow is too.
Here we go.

Pennies

What if the words falling out of my mouth

were like pennies

heads-up on the pavement

copper glinting in the sun

your grandmother, no matter how old she got,

stooping down to pick them up

some were shining, some covered in a thin layer of green

what if pennies are what it means to be free?

Existing wherever they happen to be

all over the world around you

under the glinting stems of stop signs on street corners

squeezed between your bedroom and it’s wall’s border

under stained, under-stuffed waiting room chairs

Existing in their own simple state, unconcerned by your stares

some people skip over pennies

like cracks in the sidewalk

some people collect them in jars

old people give them to toddlers who tumble

and mothers who mumble, prying pennies out of jam-stained little hands

slipping them into the pocket of tired jeans

where they wait patiently for fate to come upon them

Whether they are kept, whether they are treasured

flipped, tossed over your shoulder

splashing and sinking down into the fountain

pressed flat on the rails of an old train track

melted and stamped, strung up along.

The pennies are still pennies

doesn’t matter what you do with them

sometimes you see them, but a lot of times you don’t

either way they are still there

waiting patiently, unconcerned

until someone, maybe, glances at them

and at one glance

decides that they’re valuable

maybe even lucky

I think pennies

know what it means to truly be free

_______________

Angel Grace Sloan

The ground is cold

under my booted feet

Hard, frosted, brittle grass

Coaxing the chill into me

through too skinny jeans

The world lacks color

and the sun has no shine

The white gray of winter composes the sky

and everything in between

Including the frost itching its way

up the sides of my sister’s grave

like ivy

crawling up and through, into

a house on the verge of collapsing

It's just me this time

with a world that is cold and quiet

Winter in Illinois

advises: stay inside

It's so still here

with trees laid bare,

roots splitting at the seams,

branches knitted against the sky,

not even noticing me

It is a sharp contrast

to the first time I found her 

when the sun and summer

both neared their end

It was twilight,

light quickly fading

violet spreading, the color of Easter egg dye

sweet and beautiful and alive

springtime was when she died

The air was warm

summer tanned bare-skinned legs sticking out from frayed jean shorts

Legs with too much space in-between them

Petra was with me.

As we drove

tires crunching over gravel

older than us, eating the sound up

the windows stayed down until

finally flipping the engine off

for a moment we listened

to a fading summer song

Bugs crying out for one another, grass growing, cars driving

flying by, gray road stretching against corn fields, empty

humid air weighing us down, warming soles of bare feet

We had moments, minutes,

less than an hour

to find a grave I had never found

Wordlessly, we slipped out

Car doors gaping in our wake

Starting a somber game of hide and seek

One I wished I didn’t have to play

Eyes flickered over names and dates

mind twirling back through time,

tumbling with thoughts of other lives 

Scanning to find hers - mine

at the very same time praying I wouldn't

Luckily, I didn't

Petra did

Her voice was soft and kind

calling out to me across time,

over stones firmly embedded

down a daintily rolling hillside

I don't remember walking

I think I might have ran

I just remember seeing

her name cut into the stone

Angel Grace Sloan

A little paper windmill

pressed into the ground at the grave’s side

where marble met grass

a cherubim engraved into stone

I sat there, leaning back onto the soles of bare feet

When I met my sister for that first time

I think I sung a song, but those memories

faded faster than the dying summer sun

Now, though,

I sit here alone

It's just a stone.

Angel Grace Sloan

is not here

because this is never where she belonged

That I know

But the peace that comes 

by the idea of being near

isn't wrong

I am fine sitting beside her stone

in these moments I am delicately

yet firmly grounded

Reminded who is alive

and who isn’t

Reminded that one day 

I will meet my sister again

in a place where there are no gravestones

__________

And finally, my short story.

Es ist Alles

We are on a train.

That’s where and how this story begins. Because where else could it begin? On September 1^st, 1939? Then we would have to go back the First World War, which left Europe a pot brewing. To the first mention of the word “Nazi?” To the day Hitler was born? To when Eve bit the apple?  

            How to begin.  

            "Simply start with a truth. Begin with something you know, without a doubt, to be true.” Dr. Dössler told me that my first semester of university. When you begin a story, write something true. Write truth.

            Something true? Here’s one. Dr. Dössler was a Jew. He’s probably dead. They killed him for it.

            Another one: they tried to kill me, too.  

            First Auschwitz-Birkenau; later Dachau.  

            There are countless truths I could tell you, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to say them aloud, or write them, but mostly: I wish they had never, ever had to become true. So I shall start with the truest sentence I know, like Dr. Dössler said, brown eyes shining and a golden star stitched onto the label of his jacket.  It will be my beginning to this story and it will be true.

            I was on a train.  

The window was dirty.

Outside on the platform, three German officers towered over my mother and, my sister, Josie. Their dull khaki uniforms were a harsh contrast to my mother’s navy-knitted jacket and her skirt, which was the color of scarlet, the same color of the fall leaves that tumbled over her feet. My mother was a simple, elegant kind of beautiful. From the clothes she wore, to the way she spoke, the French lovely from her pale pink, heart-shaped lips. She was still the same, even on the platform, I remember – the same woman who had raised and loved me. The same elegant, lovely, kind creature even though those guns were pointed at her. Everything except her shoes, which had been lost in the scuffle, somewhere between the time the officers burst through our front door, fluidly shot my father in the face, and pulled my mother, little sister, and I from our home.

            My father was French. My mother, with her delicate skin and blue eyes, was French. My sister, Josie, and I are French. Not Jewish. Not even German, but my father taught French at the International school in Berlin. They called him a filthy Jew-lover, after they shot him.

            Wrong order, I wanted to tell them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t say anything.  

            My mother, on the platform, stood tall, holding Josie’s little hand. I couldn’t hear the harsh words the officers were saying to her in their cutting language. We hadn’t been in Berlin long enough to fully learn German yet, my sister and I. Our parents did, of course.  I don’t know what my said or what she didn’t say. What her last words were. I don’t know if she even knew I was watching.

            They shot my little sister first; then they shot my mother.

            Thank God.  Thank God they shot my sister first, but also, thank all that is holy that they killed my mother.

            Why? How can I be thankful my mother was killed that day? Because she wouldn’t have had to go through life in un camp de concentration? No, it’s more than that. I still am thankful she died even if she hadn’t been taken to Auschwitz with me that day. If she had survived outside and only I had been taken, I am still thankful she died. 

            She wouldn’t have loved me any less, you know. This skeleton, a ghost, a paper doll of what a girl ought to be. My hair will grow back. Once I can eat again, I will gain weight and shape. Clothes will cover my scars, most of them. My rashes and the sores will be healed. I shall be deloused. But I will never be the same. Not mentally or spiritually or emotionally. The haunted look in my eyes, eyes that are the color of the smoke that rose from the crematorium against blue sky, will never go away. I will never be able to unseen the horrors that I have seen.

            Let’s say this train was taking me home to my mother and Josie. Not my father, because that’s entirely unrealistic. But let’s say I got off this train right now, and I walked to my front door and my mother saw what I’ve become: she would not cry. Maybe she would, but only out of relief. It would not have broken her, seeing me. She would have been proud of me, fiercely, and loved me in such a way that made my scars seem beautiful. She would have survived the concentration camps. Birkenau and Dachau. Yes, even Dachau. My mother was a survivor. She was also beautiful, which helped. Really, it did. I’m not going to lie. I am not nearly as beautiful as my mother was, but I have her blue eyes.

            That little ounce of beauty helped me. I used it. I used it for the soldiers, who liked my blue eyes. I used it for their pity. Their warmth, at times. For food. One time, for a scrap of newspaper so I knew what day it was. I used my blue eyes and my figure, before I was just a skeleton, to get things from them. You would think it would have made me feel nauseous, but it didn’t. It’s all about perspective. What you will do in order to survive.

            But my mother – she would have been able to survive the camps, because that’s the kind of person she was. The people who survived were either the most pure fighters, who clung to hope fiercely in a way I’ll never know how. Or they are people like me, who numbly endured it all. Who somehow moved through it all and got through. Who thanked God their mothers and sisters died.

            They shot my mother before my train left that station. She never had to get on this train. She never had to see what I have seen, to witness the atrocities I never knew mankind would be able to do. I am thankful my mother died, untouched by the sinister sights I have seen. She died with her beauty pure, in a way. For that I am thankful.

I’m on a train now, you now. But it’s an entirely different kind of train than I was on when I first saw the Nazis slaughter. It’s plush, this train, which is surprising. Because from what I’ve seen so far Europe has been ripped apart by this war. Germany itself, which this train has been taking me through, has been decimated. Whole towns and cities a churned mass of rubble and rock and stone. You would think, after what the Germans put me through, this would make me pleased. But it doesn’t. Not this kind of destruction. Not this kind of killing, this bombing of cities and towns, whole homes full of women and children and maybe Nazis. All of this killing, the fall out of a world at war, is terrible. Everything has been stretched thin. This train has seats made of plush velvet. The red is so bright is hurts my eyes. And a carpet, also red. A soldier across from me has a mug full of wine. It sloshes as the train moves, running down the white sides.

It reminds me of blood.

My father’s blood, which was flecked on the pale skin of my legs that day on the train platform. It was dried.

The train I was on the day my mother died was a box. They crammed people in it. There was only room to stand, but there was none, because then they just shoved more of us in. The sides were made of slats of wood, which let in the cool Autumn wind. I shivered, and I thought I was cold. Now I know what truly being cold is.

            I was the last one in, pressed against the door, a stranger’s body against the length of my behind. Through the dirty window, I watched my mother die.

            There are some truths I have, but I’m not going to tell you. Maybe because I can’t. I don’t know the words to describe what it’s like watching your father die at your dinner table, or your five-year-old little sister, or your mother cease. There are truths I can’t fully remember. Getting naked in front of the soldiers for the first time, modesty ceasing to matter in camp life. What it felt like to be beaten or the first time I was so hungry I was sure I was going to die.

            Those truths will remain mine for some time.

It was all too much, at first, for me to feel anything at all. Or maybe I was feeling everything in a way I shall never be able to describe. I mean, I know I was devastated then. I was. My mother and my sister and my father had died. But now I am thankful. I am a lot of things. A mixture of emotions, a catalyst ready to combust, but most of all: I am thankful. Thankful, because this train I am on now is one of liberation, unlike the one I was on that day that took me to straight to hell.

Or, as the French soldiers call it, le camp d'extermination.

            My first camp was Auschwitz. It, I know now, is a death camp. I saw the showers and the crematorium. I breathed in that ash. I know the sheer impossible number of human beings that they brought through, sheep headed straight for slaughter.

Auschwitz may have been bad; Dachau, the second camp I was sent to, was worse. Dachau was for men. I was transported there with a unit of women, narrowly escaping the rush of killing the Nazis did as the Allies drew nearer and nearer to Birkenau. I was lucky. I missed the mars de mort.

The soldier across from me didn’t intend for me to hear that. But I did. That my fellow prisoners, my friends, my family from Auschwitz-Birkenau were forced to march until they died. He glanced sideways at me, regret in his eyes. It’s not like I was surprised. I’ve seen and done and heard worse.

I wasn’t sure, then, though, if I was lucky on my way to Dachau. They didn’t tell us where we were going. When my blocklova called my number, I stepped forward. It was cold, as always, but I remember that there was snow. A few inches of it. White, impossibly fluffy stuff. My feet were bare; my toes baby blue.

            At that point, you didn’t wonder. Wondering disappeared quickly, soon after losing the ability to cry, but long before you stopped being cold. Hunger never went away, but it stopped hurting as much. It became a gnawing instead of a monster that consumed. Cold didn’t really either. You got used to it and checked every night to make sure your fingers and toes were just blue. Black was bad.

I don’t remember thinking anything when I stepped into that train, which was just another dim car reeking of human misery and dirt. It could have been an improvised gas chamber for all we knew. We’d seen it before. They could have been taking us to a factory to build bombs for the German troops. Or into the forest, a mile or two from the barbed-wire gates – far enough so the other prisoners wouldn’t see. But you’d hear the gunshots. You’d see the birds fly from the trees. The Nazi calling our numbers for roll call wouldn’t miss a beat.

            Wondering what they were going to do to you would not help anything at all.

            We arrived at Dachau some days later. They gave us bread to gnaw on during the train ride. I slept standing up, I remember, swaying as the metal wheels clacked over the track. One of the women died during the trip. We stopped and a petite Roma girl and I drug the body off the side of our train car and into a field of snow.

It looked like Christmas morning, that snow. It was pure and white and seemed to stretch on until the hills became sky. Her bread was still clutched in her hand, even though she was dead.

            I don’t remember what it felt like to pry her fingers off. I couldn’t tell you. But I can remember trying to tear the bread in two. It was almost impossible, because it was so hard, like stone – from being old or the cold, I don’t know. But I managed. I gave half to the Roma girl with her big, beautiful brown eyes. They reminded me of a deer’s.

We saw deer through the diamonds in the fence sometimes. They were sacred, in a way. Gentle, full of grace. Existing in the woods even though there was a camp of death cut out in the heart of them.

            I hope she survived. My Roma girl.

And the deer.

I’m not sure why they chose me when we got to Dachau. That’s not true. I mostly know why. I was taller than most of the other girls. I was also one of the oldest, and I had just turned nineteen. Not that I knew the date. My birthday was in the winter and there was snow, so I assumed. Health-wise, I faired well. I was emaciated, yes, but we all were. It hadn’t killed me yet. I had been inoculated by the Red Cross before the war even began, so I escaped the typhoid that blazed through the blocks. I hadn’t lost any fingers or toes, and my scars weren’t running or red. I had even had a tetanus shot.

For a camp prisoner, I was prime. I also didn’t speak German that well, which meant they didn’t have to understand me when I cried (not that I did). I wanted to. Dear God, how I should have.

I eventually learned German. And Polish. I could have spoken to the officers who ordered me around, but why? It’s not like they deserved it. Or cared. Plus, it was a weapon. My own little secret weapon I could open and untie. But I played dumb, mute, my French blue eyes keeping me safe.

I can call a Nazi six-dozen foul names in a dozen different languages from my months at Birkenau. Fun fact.

Back to Dachau. We were filing off the train. I remember that I didn’t even look at the camp. That would have been the smart thing to do. Maybe, in case there was ever a chance to escape. There was only ever one escape, truly.

I do remember the doctor who picked me, though. Mostly because she had hair. I mean, most of us had peach fuzz growing in chunks on our scalp, but she had real hair. It was perfect German blond, and slicked back into a bun. She also had a cigarette, I remember, and a long white coat instead of the standard soldier’s uniform. She flicked her cigarette at me, the ash sizzling into the snow, and that was it.

Chosen. Done.

I followed her out of the main fence, past blocks and thick walls. We walked through hallways and finally into what I first assumed was an infirmary. I must have looked bewildered, because the doctor cocked an eyebrow at me. I wasn’t sick. The infirmary was usually for the strongest typhoid victim, for a worker who could get sick and come back. But most of the time they couldn’t control it. It got bad, and then it got worse. The typhoid was a fire that never ceased to burn. When a flame hit a whole block, they locked it down. Contained the blaze.

It took less than a week, usually, for it to become totally quiet inside.

            I remember walking past those blocks in a silent, uniform line. Some of the newer girls cried. I counted the clouds in the sky, because looking at those barred doors made me want to die.

Focus. Back on the blonde doctor. She actually spoke to me, helped me realize. In English, no less. It wasn’t an infirmary. It was a lab. She told me that, simply, and then gave me shoes. To be sanitary. I remember that. I was covered in a layer of human excrement, dried blood, and mud. But I had to be sanitary.

I traded those shoes the very next day for two potatoes and a cigarette. She didn’t notice.

I also remember hearing her, later, much later, tell a solider who walked in and saw one of the experiments – I still remember the look on his face. He went white. He looked like he wanted to vomit. He didn’t. He must have been new. She explained to him in her rough, gravely voice, that the research they were doing in the lab was “for the furthering of German medicine. To help the troops. For the advancement of the German race.”

Not once did anyone ever say that to the patients who went through it. Not once. Never, not even before they put them under the freezing water.

The first few were designed for aviation, I think. For pilots whom had crash-landed into seawater. The experiments were performed to answer questions, they said. How long could a pilot last in freezing temperatures? Could they be thawed? How quickly could they be thawed without dying? Did the cold send them into shock? Would they still feel say, their leg being ripped off, when they were in shock?

And then, I remember, one day, on a whim she – the head scientist – wanted to see how long a Jew could last submerged in seawater with only their head exposed. So they could breathe, of course. She said that, too.

“Of course.”  

Do you want to know how long?

Of course not.

The Nazis did not want to know either.

They could and can call it whatever they want. German advancement. Medical research. To help pilots. To help end the war. Maybe there could have been an ounce of that. But the other millions of ounces to that pound were evil. I wish there was a world in my language, or any language, deeper than “evil” to describe what they did simply to do. Because they decided someone was a Jew and, therefore, not a person.

Working at the lab in Dachau I saw first-hand what they do. I mean, I saw it in the soldiers who shot us in lines, from behind so our blood would not get on their boots. From the way they laughed, watching us lick up soup that spilled in the dirt. Or the hungry look in their eyes when they could forget that a beautiful girl was a Jew for a few minutes, or hours, or weeks, but then kill her all the same. 

Dachau was where I really lost it. Where I knew what evil was. Seeing those experiments and what they did to the Jews changed me forever. It’s what made me believe in God, because it made me believe in evil.

“Voulez-vous du vin, mademoiselle?”

I glance up from the red carpet. It’s the young nurse from the Red Cross. She’s not French, most definitely, because her tone is far too formal, and not even the least bit nasal. She’s young, brunette, and clean. So clean it is hard to look at, or believe. She is also nervous, I can tell, very much unsettled. Probably by the sight of me. But her hands are firm and she holds the wine out to me steadily. I can see the determination in her eyes. They are blue.

“Oui, merci.”

I watch as she carefully pours the wine into an actual glass instead of a mug. She hands it to me, and our fingers touch. Her eyes, the color of a spring sky, flicker to mine expectantly, like she expects me to jerk away. You would think, after almost a year of being abused the way I have. But I am not afraid of touch. I spent a lot of the past fourteen months being touched in ways that left scars. Scars of the worst kind. I grew to expect pain to the point where I no longer flinch.

But I also have been saved by touch. A fellow worker’s hand pressing against mine, keeping me up on the nights they made us stand until the sun rose and then set and rose again. Holding ma petite Roma up with another girl during roll call, even though she was dying, so they wouldn’t haul her away to a quicker death. I slept pressed against human beings, sometimes seven of us in one narrow, wooden bunk, using each other’s warmth not only to survive the night’s cold and horror, but also to survive.

I smile at her and am rewarded by light in her eyes. “C’est rein,” she tells me in an accent so unlike the nasal French I know. She is not French. She turns and begins to walk away, but, before she can, my fingers brush her elbow, and she glances down at me.

“Danke,” I tell her, in her own language. Which is German.

Her eyes well up with tears, but my words make her stand straighter. As they should. “Es ist alles,” she tells me. “It’s everything.”

I think it would be easy to hate the German people as a whole. As a race. But really, isn’t that what started this all, when they did it to first the Jews, then the gypsies, or the unwell? To the French, or the Poles, or even the German Political prisoners.

I do not hate all German people. I do not hate Germany itself. I cannot, even as this train gentle jostles me as we wind through the countryside toward Paris. I can’t hate it because I look out my window and see it’s been ravaged. It’s more than that.

Can I hate all the Nazis? At first I did. I kind of do; I’m still not sure on that one. I know some of them didn’t know what was going on in the camps, especially the ones on the front. I know some of them were probably scared, so they did what they had to do.

But that’s no excuse. I know what it’s like to be scared. To be dying. To be almost dying all the time, purely by being alive. I know what it feels like to desperately be trying to survive. But I also know, now, that you and I have a choice on what we are going to stand for when we are alive, and when have died.

That soldier who wanted to vomit when he saw the medical experiments was not the one who had to hold the Jews in the freezing water or hear their cries. He wasn’t the one who decided that Jews were an undesirable race or thought up the idea of concentration camps. Maybe he never even killed a Jew. That’s not likely at all, but we could say that. Maybe he never had to fire a gun.

But I think.

You know, the crematorium burned all night and all day long, sometimes for weeks on end. The smoke rose from its chimney stack steadily, a stream of black into a beautiful summer sky.

We all breathed in that ash.

He knew. The nurse girl who gave me wine – she knows now, too. Maybe she recently learned, or maybe she learned months ago. I don’t know when she joined the Allies or what caused her to, but she is doing what all people should do when they have to face evil.

You are given a choice and you always choose.

She chose to stand against it, this evil, even if it meant dying to a people group. She would be killed for treason. Probably spat at by her family, even if they didn’t support the idea of killing millions of Jews.

Just because the evil isn’t being inflicted on you personally doesn’t mean that you don’t have a duty to fight it. I think back on the worst of days and the things I had to do.

The things I would do for some soup.

The things I would do even if I knew they would burn me for. Slipping medicine to the freezing Jew who had been exposed to copious amounts of seawater, who could not move anything besides his eyes, which were angry. I helped him swallow pills and I promised to keep that anger alive and to make it mean something.

Holding all those dying people up. Lifting bodies. Breaking bread. Hiding girls during roll call, even if they meant they would only survive another day. Somehow you found a way to stand for 72 hours straight. That kind of strength, resolution, it doesn’t come of your own. It comes from something deeper.

That is why I could never hate all Germans. I could never hate all Jews. But I do hate evil, and the evil the Nazis do. I hate what they allowed, even if they didn’t do it themselves. I hate what they stood for or what they allowed to become part of their ideology. In the end, though, I hate evil.

Really, everything comes down to perspective. Dr. Dössler would hit me (gently) over the head with a rolled up newspaper because that’s a ridiculously huge blanket statement.  But he will not, because he is dead. Yes, we come back to that again.

            He is one of the millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, individuals who died in a concentration camp. They can’t confirm a number yet, even though the war is officially over.

            Let me tell you: they will never be able to confirm a number. We burned so many. Many walked into the woods never to reappear again. People died everywhere. It was a sea of the dead with thousands drowning quietly. You will never be able to know how many slipped under the waves. Then there are the ones like my mother and little sister, who were killed right when it began, not in a shower or chamber, or from typhoid. Or, thank God, in a tank under water.

            There will never be a number. And even if there was it wouldn’t change anything because the world will never be the same.

            Even in a hundred years. When I’m dead, when all the people who saw the inside of a concentration camp are gone. In five hundred years, maybe, when people stop telling our stories or stop believing them. Maybe the memory will fade, the fire will fizz out, but the facts will always remain unchanged. Bones will still be buried. My scars will never fade in my lifetime. The world has changed. It has been changed because all the people in it have been changed.

            Take me. I will never be the same again. Not mentally, or physically, or emotionally, or spiritually. I will never be able to go back. We can’t go back. We are not meant to.

            Honestly, I don’t want to. That seems odd to say, because this was a terrible experience. That is another newspaper swipe for the biggest understatement I could ever write. I know, after everything, how ridiculous it is to even dream or want to go back to that girl I used to be. I know what I know now. Maybe I will learn eventually how to handle or cope with what I’ve seen. How to talk about it. Maybe the look I see in my own eyes and all the others will fade a bit with time. But we had to fight to survive, and it changed every single thing I could ever think regarding what it means to be alive, from the smallest to the largest thing.

            Everything.

            Like what it means to be thin. Deciding to skip a meal because you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see. I want to yell and scream at that girl I used to be. To laugh hysterically. But, at the same time, I won’t. I can’t.

            Perspective. How could she ever know?

            To family. When it’s not the people who raised you or birthed you. When family becomes the people you sleep next to on a piece of wood or a girl you stand next to every morning for roll call in silence and it takes six months for you to hear her whisper her name. When you hold her up, when you bury her, when you wonder if she survived.

            To what it means to fight. Sometimes fighting is silent and requires taking it. Sometimes to fight is merely to remember, to refuse to forget.

            I think, for me, it will be to not let what has happened destroy me. It has defined me and it will continue to every heartbeat for the rest of my life. And eternity, if you think about it, now that I believe in God.

            To what revenge is. Of how badly I want it. How badly some of the other girls did, too. Who fantasized about shooting the soldiers who quarantined us or beat our skin. Who would probably blow them up in a heartbeat and would never let anyone say that they were wrong. It’s about how you look at it and what it becomes in your being. Me, for example: I don’t ever want to hurt anyone again.

            After all the pain I have witnessed and received: I never want to cause pain again. I want to be kind. I will be kind. To Germans, to those who can’t even understand what I went through, to those who will lie. To myself. I will be kind.

            The train is slowing down now, stopping to refuel. Or maybe pick up more passengers. My glass is empty, but my mouth is full of a sweet taste, sweeter than anything I’ve tasted in what feels like a lifetime. It has been a lifetime. The soldier across from me meets my eyes, and I see ghosts in them.

            I want to know how they got there. I want to hear it all, from the girl in the same camp as me, to the man at Dachau, to the woman being a nurse on the frontlines.

            Because we are all on this train. I’m on it. The 200,000 survivors liberated so far from concentration camps are on it with me. All the people who died in the camps, in the bombings, on the front, in the sea and air.  My mother. Josie is on it, too. I carry her with me. I carry them, too. I will never be alone.

            We are on a train.

The journey itself may not be pleasant. It may not be anything we ever imagined, or anything we ever wanted for ourselves, but we move forward. We must move forward; we will. The ride may not make sense at times; it may be terrifying or devastating or beautiful, but we ride all the same.