we will learn that their father was shot in the back as he walked
between them on the Death March. Soon we will understand that out
of more than ĕeen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are
among the only seventy who have survived the war.
“We have one another,” they say now. “We are lucky, lucky.”
Lester and Imre, Magda and me. We are the anomalies. e Nazis
didn’t just murder millions of people. ey murdered families. And
now, beside the incomprehensible roster of the missing and the dead,
our lives go on. Later we will hear stories from the displaced persons
camps all over Europe. Reunions. Weddings. Births. We will hear of
the special rations tickets issued to couples to obtain wedding clothes.
We, too, will scour the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration newspapers and hold our breath, hoping to see
familiar names among the list of survivors scattered over the
Continent. But for now we do nothing but stare out the windows of
the train, looking at empty ĕelds, broken bridges, and, in some places,
the fragile beginnings of crops. e Allied occupation of Austria will
last another ten years. e mood in the towns we pass through isn’t of
relief or celebration—it’s a teeth-clenched atmosphere of uncertainty
and hunger. The war is over, but it’s not over.
* * *“Do I have ugly lips?” Magda asks as we near the outskirts of Vienna.
She is studying her reĘection in the window glass, superimposed over
the landscape.
“Why, are you planning to use them?” I joke with her, I try to coax
out that relentlessly teasing part of her. I try to tamp my own
impossible fantasies, that Eric is alive somewhere, that soon I will be a
postwar bride under a makeshi veil. at I will be together with my
beloved forever, never alone.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Tell me the truth.”