Terezin
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The winter wind roared around me as I kept walking. I had to get back to my home, but I knew it was hopeless. It was hopeless because I was stuck, stuck in a place I could never leave.
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I glanced around, seeing the bleak, hopeless people that passed me by, also wishing to return home to their families. I was almost sure that I could see that one question in their eyes.
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Will there even be a family to return to? Will we even make it out of here alive?
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I gulped hard. I didn't want his image to come into my mind, but it did. And it hurt me. It was more than I could bear. My knees have put and before I knew it, I was on the ground, realizing that my knees were bleeding but not caring enough to react to it.
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I thought of his family. I thought of the way we left things before I came to this awful hell. We were supposed to get married. Would we have had children by now? How many would we have had? Was he thinking about me at that moment? Did he miss me at all?
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I wished that we never parted ways, I wished that he would have let me explain before calling off our wedding. I wished that our engagement was never a secret. He was Jewish. And I a Catholic. His mother would never have approved.
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I thought of my imaginary child. My daughter. The one that could have been. I closed my eyes and brought myself to the one place that I needed to bring myself to. My old home.
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There, in the recesses of my mind, I saw the girl that could have been my daughter. I saw him, the man whom I would have called husband, playing piano while our child was dancing in the center of the room, not caring what anyone thought of her. The dog would have been nestled warmly on his blanket, listening to my husband's languid playing. I would have been sitting there, relishing in my contentment.
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But it wasn't meant to be. None of it was.
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The reality of it all was almost unbearable, every time I thought of him, but time had made me numb. Everything hurt so badly that it all became numb.
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I looked up and in front of me, a group of women were huddled close together. Naturally, I was led to walk closer to join them.
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One of the women in the group was standing there, her eyes were gray, clouded over. It was his mother. She was here. I hadn't known that the Gestapo had taken her here. There was no emotion, but in the depths, there was a voice. It was crying out in pain. I could tell in a moment, she was going to give us her story.
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"What happened?" One of the women asked.
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"They killed him. My son... Gas..."
She broke down, her frail body, almost a skeleton, fell on the ground. She wailed, and the other women put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, letting her know that everything would be fine.
The news pierced through me. I felt like I was bleeding on the inside. She never knew me. How could I have told her that I loved her son? How did she know that he was dead? Did she hear from someone else?
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But why did I feel like he was still alive?
No. It couldn't have been.
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This flash fiction is deeply inspired by a story of mine that is in progress. I didn't want to go too much into the historical detail in the narrative but it is the story of a woman in a concentration camp. I had set out to write something completely different and not even this story at all but it just came to me and I went with it. Hope you enjoy!
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