The Choice

prisoners on top of the trains, the British send the hiss and crash of
bombs at us. Smoke. Shouts. e train stops and I jump. I’m the ĕrst
one down. I run straight up the snowy hillside that hugs the tracks
toward a stand of thin trees, where I stop to scan the snow for my
sister, catch my breath. Magda isn’t there among the trees. I don’t see
her running from the train. Bombs hiss and erupt on the tracks. I can
see a heap of bodies by the side of the train. Magda.
I have to choose. I can run. Escape into the forest. Scavenge a life.
Freedom is that close, a matter of footsteps. But if Magda’s alive and I
abandon her, who will give her bread? And if she’s dead? It’s a second
like a shutter’s Ęap. Click: forest. Click: tracks. I run back down the
hill.
Magda sits in the ditch, a dead girl in her lap. It’s Hava. Blood
streams from Magda’s chin. In a nearby train car, men are eating.
ey’re prisoners, too, but not like us. ey’re dressed in civilian
clothes, not in uniforms. And they have food. German political
prisoners, we guess. In any case, they are more privileged than we are.
They’re eating. Hava is dead and my sister lives and all I can think of is
food. Magda, the beautiful one, is bleeding.
“Now that there’s a chance to ask for some food, you look like this,”
I scold her. “You’re too cut up to Ęirt.” As long as I can be angry with
her, I am spared from feeling fear, or the inverted, inside-out pain of
what almost was. Instead of rejoicing, giving thanks that we are both
alive, that we have survived another fatal moment, I am furious at my
sister. I am furious at God, at fate, but I direct my confusion and hurt
onto my sister’s bleeding face.
Magda doesn’t respond to my insult. She doesn’t wipe away the
blood. e guards circle in, shouting at us, prodding bodies with their
guns to make sure that those who aren’t moving are really dead. We
leave Hava in the dirty snow and stand with the other survivors.
“You could have run,” Magda says. She says it like I’m an idiot.