“Are you in pain?” I ask, but she does not respond. She points at the dark wall of the wagon. “Look there! Do you see it? What a beautiful meadow! Beautiful! Do you see it? There! There!” She is talking about her family now, her hometown in Czechoslovakia, her mother, her father. Irene no longer describes the carnage caused by the strafing attack. Martha attempts to quiet her, to no avail. But she talks on, incessantly, feverishly. Her sentences crumble into phrases, disjointed, confused. With each repetition her voice grows more hoarse. the blinding flash which hurled her to the ground and caused her to bleed profusely, the pain, the noise, the blood, the blood. She launches into a low-pitched monologue describing every detail of the machine-gun barrage on the wagon. Finally Irene quiets down and all sink again into lethargic silence.īut Irene does not rest. Your face and eyelids are swollen, blocking your sight. You lost too much blood your lack of vision is a sign of weakness. Your blindness may be temporary, caused by the sudden flash you saw.
Words of comfort emerge from every corner. “But I can’t see! The bandage is off and I can’t see anything! I’m blind! Martha, I’m blind! My God, I’m blind! I’m blind! I’m blind!” She sits up abruptly and shrieks, “Martha! I can’t see! I can’t see anything!” She lifts her head and rips the scarf off her face. The scarf was Martha’s talisman, and now it is a blood-stained wrapping on her cousin’s face. Irene was injured in the face and Martha bandaged her wound with the cherished scarf she had received from her father across the barbwire fence in Dachau. The two cousins, Irene and Martha, are lying near me, asleep. Sometimes she gasps for air, and then Mommy trembles in her sleep, raises her head and opens her eyes for a second, then closes them and lets her head fall to one side again. She wheezes very loudly, the only human sound in the wagon. Judy, the girl from Budapest with the injured shoulder, also sits upright, and seems wide awake. The two remaining sisters from the small Hungarian village huddle together, asleep. Her eyes seem enormous in the shadowy darkness of the car.
She leans against the wall quite upright, staring ahead. Mommy sits propped against the wall in the corner, her head hanging to one side, her eyes half closed, her mouth wide open. My brother is lying with closed eyes, his head in Mommy’s lap.
We have been in the cattle car a whole week, without food, without water.
We roll with a steady, loud clatter amid high mountains and deep forests. Perhaps our guards no longer care whether we escape or not.
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