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“We’re going to a beautiful green valley surrounded by mountains and forests. And snow up high on the peaks. And below, there will be a winding river and fields of grain for bread, and gardens with vegetables to feed us, and Papa will build us a house where we’ll all live together forever and ever, and we’ll never be apart.”
She got emotional at the thought of a better place. Somewhere she and her family could lead a better life than the unfair and cruel one they’d been given.
If you want things, hurry to it. If you want things done, hurry to it.
Lydia had never stopped believing Karl would return.
Is that what it takes to feel like this? To come so close to death, you want to burst for joy because you feel so glad to be alive?
But then a weaselly voice inside him said, Trust in no power but your own, Emil. If you want to be saved, save yourself.
he had learned lessons and had come to recognize that where you hit a man was far more important than how hard you hit him.
No matter their size or shape, Emil had noticed that the toughest men completely lost their humanity once they decided to fight, completely lost their basic compassion for fellow human beings. They seemed to turn calm, cold, animal, able to shut out everything except thoughts of crashing into one of those critical targets on the human body that will take a man to his knees or leave him sprawled and unconscious; with a weapon, preferably, but if not, then with the heels of the hands, or the outer forearm, or the shins leading, because these bones were unlikely to break easily. Emil had also
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How badly do you want to survive?
I will do anything to survive.
Can happiness be that easy? Finding little joys in the worst moments?
Maybe that’s all I really need in life, he thought. Adeline’s love. My boys’ love.
our job in life is to endure, to be kind, and to constantly put the past behind us and not dwell too much on the future. If you must look back, try to find the beauty and the benefit in every cruelty done to you. If you must think about the future, try to have no expectations about it. Trust in God to guide you through. You understand?”
“Dreams are nonsense, Corporal Gheorghe. They don’t come true.”
He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.”
“Sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to in order to stay alive,”
She had never stopped believing that God had a greater plan for her and for her family.
She closed her eyes and prayed that her husband still had his faith. We can’t do this alone, she thought. There’s no way to do this without help.
“This is the beautiful green valley where you get to live today, Will. So be happy and thankful for it.”
That’s how it always was and always will be, he thought a little bitterly. We come in with nothing, and we go out with nothing.
What possesses men to do such evil? Are they even human? Can’t they see that when you kill someone or destroy a holy place, the faith always goes on? Don’t they see that in broken hearts and ruins, something always glows?
The Nazis were still killing Jews, and he and his family were evidently supposed to replace them.
The only thing a man can rely on is himself,
You’re all safe, he thought. You’ll never know what I just had to do for you or what I’ve done for you before. But for now, you’re safe.
you know freedom when you see it.
some things were not worth knowing.
“You will,” Emil replied. “At some point, you’ll have to decide where you want to spend your life—in slavery or in freedom—and if you choose freedom, you’ll have to run through a no-man’s-land with bullets zinging around your head to get there. I don’t think there’s any way around it. If we want that life, we’ll have to risk death for it.”
This kind of brute labor suited him. It felt honest.
He looked at the night sky and dreamed of the West, not as some fictional green paradise in Adeline’s imagination, but as a place where he’d be left alone by governments to forge a new life through his own best efforts.
“Why do you believe a radio?” she said dismissively. “I thought we learned to ignore anything said on the radio by a government.”
The men smelled unnaturally foul to Emil, as if their hearts and souls had been so corrupted by mass murder that the invisible, evil pus of it was seeping out of their skin and pouring from their lungs.
“Please, help me, Lord,” she whispered. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. Please, we’ve come so far. We’ve been through so much. It cannot have been for nothing. We cannot have been people who were supposed to come this far, only to die. I don’t even have grass to give my sons!”
“She told me once that she believed that life does not happen to you; it happens for you, and that your whole life is a blessed journey of discovery. But you can only see life clearly and relish it when the journey is almost at an end.”
Never bet against me. I’ve gotten out of tougher situations than this.
Most of them seemed resigned to their fate now, going to slaughter like animals. Only they were not animals.
She’d be praying for their souls, and I can’t see
the sense of that anymore. Dead or alive, no one’s listening.
his father’s number one rule of survival in a Soviet prison camp had been to attract as little attention as possible.
The worse it was, the less you thought. You had to figure out a way to go down inside yourself, find a place no one could get to, and just be. Like a bear hibernating.
“Maybe people can change. Maybe people can surprise you if they live long enough.”
I can survive this, he told himself over and over again those first few days. I will survive this place, but only if I rely on myself alone. No allies means no betrayals.
‘This is the green valley we are in today, and we should enjoy it.’”
They’ll ruin this place and the hearts of these good people, take their lands, cast them out, sow hate, and turn them against each other. It’s guaranteed. It’s what Stalin does. It’s what tyrants do.
Doomed the moment we took the gun and decided to pull the trigger . . . This is just one step down into the deep hell that awaits us . . .
“Soon there will be secret police.”
She thought of Emil again, how he would never know moments like this, and despite the wonderful food filling her belly, she felt robbed of love and time.
“If you can’t, you must. It is always so.
She’d known that people high up in the Communist system lived differently than the ordinary people they claimed to support. She just had not understood how well they lived while others like her had suffered for decades.
“What you seek is what you will find, but only if you hunt it with all your heart and mind.”
“Whatever emotions you carry in your heart, Martel, especially love. God listens loud and clear if you feel love. The Almighty also knows if you are feeling good. The Universal Intelligence responds when you are happy or courageous or even if you are just calm. It understands when you are grateful for the miracle of your existence and rushes to help you when you have a dream that helps other people. The Divine hears all the languages of the heart and beauty.”
