What are we now? Our bones look obscene, our eyes are caverns,
blank, dark, empty. Hollow faces. Blue-black ĕngernails. We are
trauma in motion. We are a slow-moving parade of ghouls. We stagger
as we walk, our carts roll over the cobblestones. Row on row, we ĕll
the square in Wels, Austria. Townspeople stare at us from windows.
We are frightening. No one speaks. We choke the square with our
silence. Townspeople run into their homes. Children cover their eyes.
We have lived through hell only to become someone else’s nightmare.
e important thing is to eat and drink. But not too much, not too
fast. It is possible to overdose on food. Some of us can’t help it.
Restraint has dissolved along with our muscle mass, our Ęesh. We
have starved for so long. Later I will learn that a girl from my
hometown, the sister of my sister Klara’s friend, was liberated from
Auschwitz only to die from eating too much. It’s deadly both to sustain
and to end a hunger. A blessing, then, that the strength I need to
chew returns to me only intermittently. A blessing that the GIs have
little food to offer, mostly candy, those little beads of color, M&M’s,
we learn.
* * *No one wants to house us. Hitler has been dead for less than a week,
Germany is still days away from official surrender. e violence is
waning across Europe, but it is still wartime. Food and hope are scarce
for everyone. And we survivors, we former captives, are still the enemy
to some. Parasites. Vermin. e war does not end anti-Semitism. e
GIs bring Magda and me to a house where a German family lives, a
mother, father, grandmother, three children. is is where we will live
until we are strong enough to travel. Be careful, the Americans warn
us in broken German. There’s no peace yet. Anything could happen.
e parents move all of the family’s possessions into a bedroom,
and the father makes a show of locking the door. e children take