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?

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.

“Do you remember when you skinned your knee? Do you remember how much it hurt? Well, your mother’s heart hurts just like that,” his father explained to him more than once.

For the rest of his life, that day remained a painful and almost forbidden subject. In any case, what was there to say about such a dim memory?

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.

“Then who should I believe? Old people like you who keep us plunged in misery? The ones who gave away the country? Men who, in losing the war, also lost their dignity?”

Their children would live without fear, without hunger. With the freedom to determine their future.

This was how Jews were disappearing: against their will.

Germany—joyful, credulous, reckless—was following its leader in search of promised glory.

“Let this war end before I have to go,” he repeated until he slept.

What would his children think that Sunday when he never arrived?

From that day on, Karl prayed that the war would end before his sons were of fighting age.

Would he come next Sunday? No. When? I don’t know. But be proud: he’s gone to defend the fatherland so you can grow up and we can be happy.

How empty the house felt without the girls, and how empty life was.

To rock her, he rocked himself; to calm her down, he calmed himself; to console her, he hummed the only tune he could remember of his mother’s.

Poor Frau Hahlbrock: to stop herself dying of anguish, she was showing the floor no mercy.

She didn’t know that, in her dreams, the night had been cruel and creative, showing her not just violent memories, but also new and inventive images in which, over and over, she saw an entire building fall on her sister.

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

He decided that he preferred the truths hidden among words as simple and as everyday as pass me the salt, sure, thanks.

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.

Those poor other people, but us, we’re all right.

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

“We don’t cry, Irmgard. Look at me,” Wanda insisted, though her voice trembled. “We don’t cry.”

Winter is not a good time to die.

And they told each other their stories. And they cried.

No matter how one pleads for peace, war never dies, Karl thought, certain that he was right. Wars leave wounds that can be reopened at any moment.