Tears of Amber

by Sofía Segovia

The Wehrmacht is like a virus that ends up killing the thing that keeps it alive. They’re like a plague of locusts. Next year, they’ll polish off everything. They’ll take the last goose and the last seed.

Life is a mystery: that was the conclusion he’d reached during his long hours of plowing stories into the wheat. It lets you know where you are in the present, but never where you’ll end up. A single step is enough to change everything, he thought.

Sometimes, not taking a step could also change a person’s destiny.

In the trance of chopping firewood, it had become clear to him that love could overcome all obstacles, even war.

Hartwig was right: some celebrations can’t be missed. That day, they’d celebrated a birthday and a goodbye.

Why do I insist on imagining things are up to me? Nothing is. Nothing. Not even the fate of my children, it seems. Not even where we’ll sleep tonight.

The important thing was not where they were but that they were alive, and together. After years of relative peace in the war, in the blink of an eye, her life had been reduced to that: to understanding that the only treasure worth anything is life.

There was nothing left to do except worry. Nothing else. Nothing important. And yet Wanda felt as if she was forgetting something. She counted her children: five. Her husband was there. They were all there. If anything was missing, it couldn’t be vital. So there was nothing left to do except worry . . . and say goodbye.

Perhaps this was how a broken heart felt: like a stone.

War transformed everything: a country into pieces, a village into a nucleus, a nucleus into a family, the family into the entire universe. Their universe couldn’t save anyone,

Their universe couldn’t offer so much as a crumb of bread, because a crumb given away yesterday would be the one they needed tomorrow. He couldn’t afford a single minute of quiet sadness for the misery of others. He kept going to save himself and those he fought for. For that, he needed all his energy and concentration.

Janusz wanted to run into the forest; he wanted to run to his youth, when the worst thing he’d known was loneliness. Now he knew something worse. How many hearts were stopping each second, how many for every one of his own heartbeats? How many deaths all at once?

Curiosity and misery belonged to living beings. They seemed to have dismissed themselves as dead.

He didn’t stop the cart to declare himself a Pole at the top of his voice in a show of solidarity. All he did was keep going, because living was more important. The people behind them were already dead.

Was this what being a grown man meant? Having to make decisions for others? But what choice did they have?

Ilse had never imagined that a person had to be strong in order to laugh.

How was it possible that they didn’t understand that the fate of one was the fate of all?

Pride, like a beloved dinner set or inherited mirror, loses its value when you’re fighting for your life.

while there was darkness, there were always faint rays of light for those ready to see.

Someone has to keep praying, she said.”

“Remember this: wars are lost or won, but they never disappear.

Because, no matter how much his mother told him, if we die, we’ll die together, Arno was afraid. Son, bombs are like lightning; they never strike the same place twice.

I’m not afraid of being killed by a bomb. What frightens me is living and knowing that I’ve lost everything.

Winter is not a good time to die, but in that winter that was so dark, so long that it clawed back any promise of spring, nor was it a good time to live.

They were living in a bubble of time, an in-between when insignificant things like sins couldn’t stand in the way of survival.

Goodness was for before, and it would be for afterward, too.

Moments like that one are never recorded in history books. Or in family histories. That recurring moment, full of sorrows and regrets, full of phantom feelings in her hands, which will attack her with identical force every morning for the rest of her life, was one that this mother with the weight of the world on her would keep silent forever.

Remember when Ilse was little, when she said that her friends’ fathers were fools for going to war? Well, it’s true: war is for idiots. Gullible idiots dying for honor. And then, what’s left? Women without husbands, orphaned children. A country in ruins. A debt to pay.”

There’s no life without death.

He made her promises and poured out all the words that the living never say because they think they’ll live forever and because it hurts to look at each other when they say them.

Nor did her sorrow. Sorrow was what had drained her vitality more than anything. Some heartbreak installs itself in the body to feed on the soul: it was sucking her dry from the inside like the vampire in Nosferatu, a film that had terrified her as a young woman.

The war was over, but for them, it was as if they were still on the road, in permanent flight, in permanent hunger and cold. The locals didn’t look kindly on outsiders with strange accents, even if they spoke German. They were trespassers in their own country.

Russians, Poles, Germans, British: they all had blood on their hands; they had all become wolves.

If you can read, you can do anything, my girl.

We don’t cry. That was why she wrote, so that I don’t cry. And so her letters were never really for her mother. They were for no one, they were for vanishing into the air, so that the tears dried before they formed.

No matter how one pleads for peace, war never dies,

Wars leave wounds that can be reopened at any moment.

As far and as near as chance, which, despite sending them in different directions, had led them to each other. At last, they were there, where they were meant to be.

Tears of Amber is a fictional novel inspired by real events. Not only by official texts, but also by the accounts of two children and their families who had to travel enormous distances to survive one of the biggest and most terrible exoduses in human history, before coming together in exile.

They instilled all five with a love for their old country, but also for their new one. They all know themselves to be children of amber, but also children of maize.

Rudyard Kipling said that if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Literature transmits an incontrovertible, condensed experience from generation to generation. Thus, literature becomes the living memory of a nation. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fidelity to historical reality is a secondary matter as regards the value of the novel. The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence. —Milan Kundera

In his years in the gulag, he created a poem (he would commit it to paper later, from memory) entitled “Prussian Nights.” In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work. “The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,” Solzhenitsyn went on to say after he was freed.

I believe that the history of any place belongs to us all, and the lessons inherent in it are for everyone. We must learn the lessons. We mustn’t be blind to what has happened or is happening in other places or to other peoples, regardless of the distance in time, geography, or language.