Tears of Amber

by Sofía Segovia

People need to see and hear the details of what is going on because their imagination is incapable of grasping general facts correctly. When a disaster consumes five million victims, this does not mean anything: the number is empty. However, if I show a single, individual man in his perfection, his faith, his hopes and his difficulties, if I show you how he dies, then you will remember this story forever. Erich Maria Remarque

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. Aldous Huxley

At the first breath, life hurts. How could you not cry, the first time the light hits your eyes, or the first time you feel the dry brush of the air on your skin? How could you not cry when your lungs are filled with cold, unfamiliar oxygen, or when the soft sounds that used to reach your flooded ears arrive hard, unfiltered? How could you not protest when the world turns infinite and does nothing to contain the body that, until that day, had been so tightly held, so closely hugged in the dark softness of your mother’s interior?

you are, but you’re not; you belong, but I’ve almost forgotten you.

in the decades to come, the world would strive to understand the order of events, the importance of the variables; it would call upon great minds to assign blame and establish how cruel the culprits had been. Sometimes it would fall silent, hoping to make people forget how intolerable the crime had been. Other times it would promise what happened would never happen again. Rarely would it be mentioned that this promise had already been made once, then broken when the aggressor, the loser, was punished.

Ilse was already a little bundle of acquired knowledge, because children never learn as much as in the first three years of life. They learn, they live, but they never remember having learned or lived.

She also learned not to cry, because tears only annoyed her mother, who always said to her, Ilse, we don’t cry. She discovered what it was to desire something that wasn’t hers—she thought her sister’s doll more beautiful than her own—but also how to let go and to make do without complaint.

Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators. An entire people cried out in joy.

What destination could there be with no one waiting for him? If nobody had ever showed him the way?

You have a warrior’s name, her father would say. Take pride; you have the heart of a warrior who defends her land.

But it was a time when one did what one was ordered to do, and he was no exception.

If at the age of four Ilse was only beginning to understand a family’s love, how could Wanda explain the hatred between enemies to her daughter’s young soul?

But he’d learned to be glad for life for its own sake; glad to live another day, and another, and another. Hungry, but alive to enjoy food another day. Cold, but alive to enjoy warmth when it came.

Alone, but alive to enjoy company when it found him.

He heard because he had no choice. He didn’t listen, because he didn’t want to.

And the message that Karl heard that day was one of peace, of love of country, and it was as if it came from the German god that the Führer himself invoked, almost as if God were whispering in Hitler’s ear. And Karl believed it, because how could he not when each word throbbed with the conviction of truth?

He’d forever regret the naivety that had led him to hear only a message of peace and love that March 25. He’d understood its true meaning one evening in Königsberg when he witnessed a violent raid in which soldiers threw entire families into canvas-covered trucks. This was how Jews were disappearing: against their will.

What was more, asking questions was dangerous.

Even if Karl wanted to do something, it was too late. Germany had swallowed them up. And he himself had helped pave the way, because he had believed; he’d raised his voice and his arm, intoxicated by the Führer’s vision. He’d handed over everything, even his free will, even his peace of mind. It was too late. Now, to speak in support of any persona non grata was to declare oneself an enemy of the Reich. It was dangerous not to raise one’s arm in salute whenever the occasion demanded; it was dangerous to utter words or sing songs other than those decreed.

All Karl knew for certain was that he wouldn’t see his family again, that he’d drown in the violent current of the river that he’d initially thought so beautiful.

But be proud: he’s gone to defend the fatherland so you can grow up and we can be happy. What? Hadn’t they been happy with their father at home?

when things are said half in jest, they’re also said half in seriousness.

because nothing, not even the Führer, could make them forget the golden rule: to treat others as you’d like others to treat you.

Nobody was going to force her to hate.

The war still existed somewhere else:

With the keen knowledge that, a few paces away, just out of sight, there was always someone who wanted to kill him despite not knowing his name.

He would walk, they told him. Eastward. And he walked. They’d all advance to victory. And he walked. He learned to sleep outdoors without letting his guard down. He learned to keep watch despite having marched all day. He learned to fall asleep the moment he laid his head on the hard pillow of the ground, despite the snoring and the sobs of a fellow soldier who, even in his dreams, was gripped by the horror of battle. And after each night’s sleep, he learned to face the next morning, the new orders, the new directions in which they had to walk and shoot.

He aimed and fired as he’d been trained but never—not even once—paused to notice the destruction, or how his bullet hit its target. He did his part for Germany, but he didn’t have to enjoy the death he caused.

Perhaps this was the secret of those who loved war, he thought: all that fighting and loss in exchange for the satisfaction of changing the world. That day, it seemed worthwhile. That day, he almost understood the Führer’s motives for taking on the whole world; he almost believed that Germany had regained its former glory.

But it was men who waged wars, and while many wouldn’t have chosen to fight, at least they had some understanding of the purpose and risk.

He tells me that what they want here is freedom; for the wars to end forever. He’s glad that he’s old so he doesn’t have to fight, because all he wants is to stay in the home he’s always known. I don’t understand his words, either, but I sense their meaning.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, whatever our language, we have more things in common with each other than things that divide us. And all I want is for those who are promising that this war will end soon to speak the truth, because my only wish is to return to you, to our family dinners, and to tread only on my land, German land.

because weather is never interested in war and never takes sides. And time doesn’t stop even when ordered or threatened: one season ends and another begins; time neither listens to reason, nor obeys orders, nor forgives carelessness.

he was hungry for bread, but hungrier for home.

The war was like that: one step forward one day, another step back the next.

A dream of which the things one remembers best are the things that mattered least:

She’d learned as a little girl to keep her screams inside, and nothing could make her unlearn that lesson.

She liked going to school even in the middle of winter, because good workers live, and if they stop working so hard, the war takes them away to die.

In winter, son, sometimes you have to half die so you can live.

And while his skin may have grown thicker from age, loneliness, and years of exposure, he was never fooled now: no skin, no matter how thick, could keep out the cold, and there was nothing better than a good overcoat, a good hat, some good gloves, and heavy boots.

He tried tossing tales into the air, but without her by his side to receive them, the words became wild, deranged, and the wind carried them deep into the forest.

he’d never seen a word that could survive alone, without anyone welcoming it into the warmth of an ear; without being threaded into a chain of sisters preceding and following it, giving it meaning, and with meaning, life.

“No one is free in winter,”

She was tired of wanting the madness to end; tired of life in a country that could feel so much repulsion for a human being, for a child, for her child. She was exhausted from so much fear of the war—fear of losing it, fear of winning it. She knew that her little family wouldn’t win under any circumstances.

Did you know that Heine wrote that where books are burned, it always ends in people being burned?”

Work is work, and it’s food on the table, he said as he urged on the horse. Work is work and it’s flour for our bread. He hesitated before ringing the doorbell. Work is work and it’s sugar in our tea. Work is work, even if it means destroying instead of creating.

“You shouldn’t tell me these things, Fräulein. You shouldn’t tell anybody,” he said to her, unhappy to be the owner of more dangerous information. Hunger and cold had driven Fräulein Stieglitz to lose her love for her books and her things—and to lose her good sense, it appeared—but those things would drive others to lose all decency, to steal, to kill. Even Karl felt tiny tendrils of envy and temptation: what he could do with a few of those tasteless knickknacks . . . His breath caught in his throat. He didn’t recognize himself: How had such thoughts invaded him? He’d always lived by the Commandments, but it was easy to do when his character wasn’t put to the test. He realized that he didn’t know how many of those divine rules he’d be capable of breaking to protect his family from hunger or cold. So that his wife would look at him like she used to. Every man had his breaking point.

Germany would be victorious this time, but he’d already lost: his father had returned, and how lucky that he was in one piece, everyone said. But Arno knew it was a lie: he’d returned, true, but not in one piece. Maybe the bullet had hit him right where he kept his joy and had smashed it to bits.

In the middle of the night, a soldier doesn’t scream if he wants to live. In total darkness, a soldier doesn’t scream if he wants to return home. A soldier cries oceans, but he learns to do it in silence if he wants to survive the war. Karl had managed it: he’d left the war, but the war refused to leave him.

Birthdays—and other big celebrations—should never go unobserved, and each one should be memorable,