In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 SHOCKWAVES The roads are full of trucks, moving slowly. In the late afternoon we stop and go into a small building. People are there to ladle out food and we sleep in bunks. The next morning back into the truck. There is no end to this life on the back of a truck. We move, we stop, we get off, some others get on, we move again. Looking out I see trucks travel before us and some way behind us, and to the side trucks travel the opposite direction. We do not talk and no one sings anymore. We come into a city. Mama knows of it. It is in the Russian zone and it is called Leipzig. For a few days we stay in a little room, sleep on regular cots. The room is in a huge building and there are people here from everywhere in Europe. All these people somehow have to get home to their own countries. Here Mama talks to a lot of other people and she tries to learn what happened to Oma. I talk with other kids. I hear the name "Auschwitz." Unbelievably, I learn that there were many, many camps like BergenBelsen . I begin to hear names: Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbriick, and Auschwitz. Mama learns that Oma died in Auschwitz. There is something unbearably strange about the stories from Auschwitz. I hear as if in a dream. It is not a dream. Just like the butter story, what I hear now makes me feel crazy. Because I hear that there were camps even worse than Bergen-Belsen, I get a wave of crazy feeling washing over me. I've never before had the feeling of "crazy" but now I have to try hard, really hard, to know that I'm not crazy. I am not crazy! Mama is upset all the time now. Sometimes I have to go away from her. Today Mama has gotten a cigarette. Cigarettes are just about the 83 CHAPTER 11 most valuable things the grownups can get. She smokes and lets me have a puff. I feel the magic. I want to feel the magic a cigarette has! A second later I'm coughing and choking to get my breath. What is this? Bah! The grownups can have it. I give the cigarette back to Mama without regret. Some time later, she gets angry at me and scolds, "You shameless little bitch!" But she says it in German and I feel doubly insulted. I have no idea why she is so angry with me. I go away from her, back outside. Now we are on a train that is going to Holland. It is a real train, not freight cars. There are bunks on one wall to sleep on and seats and you can walk through the railroad car and you can look out of the windows! The people running the train are English. There is a doctor with a Red Cross armband. He looks at my arm. My arm has a big infected bulb in the crook and there are red streaks coming down my arm toward my hand. It hurts very much, but not as much as it did. The doctor says he will make my arm better. He cleans it and does things to it and wraps it up with clean new bandages. But now it hurts much more than it did before, as if there is a little pump that cascades wave after wave of throbbing through my arm. I look at this doctor and try to hear and know that he is English. Part of my mind thinks maybe he is really an enemy and this is another way of killing me. Part of my mind watches and knows that that really is not so. There are new things to eat on this train. There is soup from America. It is wonderful and awful at the same time. To have the soup is wonderful but it is so salty that my mouth and gums burn while I eat it. All the people in our section say how the soup burns their mouths. When our train stands still and the train next to ours begins to move, I feel a moment of terror. It is only a little better when our train moves first, really moves, instead of only seeming to move. Every starting of the train makes my body remember the moving train, truck, or barrack move when I was desperate not to...

Share