The Light in Hidden Places

by Sharon Cameron

The world is beautiful, but people make it ugly.

I’d heard rumors in the street. Whispers that while we were in the cellar a hundred Jews, old men and little boys, had been run all over Przemyśl, right up Mickiewicza Street, German soldiers beating them if they fell. And when no one could run anymore, they’d been taken to the cemetery and shot. But I didn’t listen to rumors. I didn’t believe them. No one would do that. And the bombs had left plenty of fresh graves in the cemetery. I didn’t want to believe, and that made the lying easy.

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.

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. Even when it feels like it.

Mr. and Mrs. Diamant. They were dead. All those men, women, and children I had seen being put on the trains. They were dead. We were still living. But we must have been living in hell.

Przemyśl had given me an education since that cart ride when I was twelve. 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.

This fear, I think, is Hitler’s best weapon.

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

“When you watch little children being murdered while you hide in a hole in the ground, too afraid to come out, you know that you are nothing. When whole countries want you dead, when thousands cheer for speeches about your destruction, when the dogs of the guards are treated better than you are, then it’s not a question, Stefania. You know you are nothing.”

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to balance Max’s life—and six others—against the life of my sister. I ask God. But the sky is silent above me.

“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.” I wish I could give them to him. Wrapped in paper and tied with a ribbon. “We’re always living days we can never get back,” I say. “So we make new ones. That’s all.”