German-Jewish

Chapter 14

Robert's Point of View

"Hey, Charlie," I called and knocked on his bedroom door.

"Yeah, come in," he responded.

I walked in and saw him reading a book. "Shit, you read?"

"Yeah, you miss a lot when you're in Europe."

I sighed and sat at the foot of his bed where he was laying. "I'm sorry I was gone for so long," I apologized. "Wanna go throw a football in the back yard?"

"Not really," he said and looked at me over the top of the book.

"Come on, I wanna talk to you. I missed a good part of your life and I want to make up for it."

He sighed, slammed the book shut and stood up. "Come on, let's go."

"You have a girlfriend yet?"

"No," he said and threw a football toward me. "I'm more focused on school."

I nodded. "That's good. Have you been getting along well with mom and dad? Marta?"

"Yeah, Marta and I talked for a while last night while everyone else was gone."

"Oh, yeah? What about?" I asked curiously as we kept throwing the ball back and forth.

"About why everyone babies me."

"It's because we care—"

"I know, she told me. She was kinda weird last night, though." I raised an eyebrow in question. "Like, she yelled at me in German, then in English not to throw spoiled food away. Then she ate it! She ate a whole plate of bad food!"

"Did she explain why?"

"No, I had left."

"Come here, come sit down with me," I said and led him to the small porch in front of the patio door. "We went through some shit in Europe, you get that right?" He nodded. "We both were starved for months on end—"

"Don't be dramatic, it was the Army."

I sighed. "Stop cutting me off, I'm trying to explain it." He muttered a 'sorry' and let me continue. "At one point, I was taken by Germans. Have you learned about the labor camps they had in school yet?" He shook his head. I sighed again. "So I was taken by Germans, and she was a little later than me. I was taken to a labor camp as a POW. I worked at least probably 14 hours a day, me and other men slept shoulder-to-shoulder on wooden bunks with no mattress, no pillow, and a very thin blanket. They basically fed us gray water and called it soup once or twice a day. That was at least five months of my life before I came home." He looked away for a second then looked back at me.

"Marta is a whole other story. She was taken to a camp and was forced to serve the highest officer there and even many of the officers. They made her do anything and everything; she slept on a floor, I'm pretty sure, ate scraps once a day, and did a bunch of different chores for the Nazi's. It's hard to watch people throw away food—even bad food—because we were taught to literally fight other people for food. There was one point when I was a prisoner that they brought bread into the camp for a few people. They made us and watched us fight for it. It was awful. So, yeah, we're going to yell at you for wasting food."