The Light in Hidden Places

by Sharon Cameron

“Di velt iz sheyn nor di mentshn makhn zi mies,” he said. “The world is beautiful, but people make it ugly.”

And that night, for the first time, I understood what I was facing. Before, it had been easy to imagine that all these terrible things were some kind of mistake. The misguided ideas of a misguided leader who in turn was misguiding his army and his people. Hadn’t there always been people who were poor and hungry? People who were hated and despised? Hadn’t there always been wars where the young men fought and the innocent died? It was horrible, and it was the world. But that was not what I saw in that officer’s face. What I saw was the joy of hate. The happiness of causing another person’s death and pain. What I saw was evil. And every part of me defied it.

I learned three things from Emilika that day: First, walk as if you have important business, and most people will assume you do. Second, always have your hair curled. And third, help can come when it’s least expected, and that’s good to remember, because it means you’re never really alone.

Fear comes with the dark when you’re lying still, waiting for the knock on the door. And fear is not always reasonable.

It had taught me that people like to divvy up one another with names. Jew. Catholic. German. Pole. But these were the wrong names. They were the wrong dividing lines. Kindness. Cruelty. Love and hate. These were the borders that mattered.

in a world where death is a shadow at the edge of every light, I discover that I have to smile.

He chose life. And that makes him nothing like them at all.

“We’ll never get them back,” he says. “Even if the war ends. I didn’t know I was living in days that I could never get back.”

“We’re always living days we can never get back,” I say. “So we make new ones. That’s all.”