Dear Stranger,
Not much has happened in the past few week. Being in the old cellar is almost a greater punishment than living in the ghetto. All of us live in fear that one day we'll be found and sent away for good.
Benyamin, a 59-year old man, who lost his wife and son to the early deportations, and was once our neighbor, has become crazy. I wonder why he didn't end up in one. He's so thin, the clothes hang on him like a clothing rack.
Sometimes all he does is rock back and forth on his knees. Sometimes he quietly shouts their names, eyes bulging out of his head. Other times, he just sits there, staring at the cement wall with his back to us for hours, maybe days. I can't say I blame him, but he drives me crazy.
Then there's Johanna, who just finished her studies at the university of Prague, right when the war began. I don't know much about her. She's not much of a beauty—straw hair and jagged bangs, and colorless grey eyes. She looks awfully old, compared to her few school pictures. I don't know if she has family. Papa told me she was queer. Or maybe she still is. Even then, she doesn't say.
Apparently, it's a crime to be queer. Mama doesn't like when I speak of it. I don't see what's wrong with it. People should be allowed to love who they want, so why is it such a bad thing to love the same sex? Maybe it's not my place to say. Papa said we shouldn't make uneducated guesses. I think he's right.
Papa also said they put communists in those camps. But I haven't heard much about them.
I think that's all for today.
—Your Esther
YOU ARE READING
The Sound of Silence
Fiksi Sejarah"God had given us a miracle, and I wasn't sure there would be one next." Winter 1942, one of the coldest years in history. Hans Steiner, a man of his late thirties, looks through the iron fence, through the hollow eyes that follow him, and to the as...
