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?

Just by touch he could feel the new angles of his face, the unwanted angles sculpted with the sharp chisels of hardship and anguish. 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.

But the German Army was also feeling the cold, 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.

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

In Ethel’s smile there was mockery, yes, but also pain. At that moment, Karl understood that, much like him, his wife was possessed by a demon, her own demon, her own war nightmare. The demon that made him silent drove her to bitterness.

He would have liked to ask: Do you cry in silence when no one’s looking? Where do you

keep your screams? Then he would h...