We Were the Lucky Ones

by Georgia Hunter

Nechuma refuses to contemplate a return to a life in hiding, a life without sunlight, without rain, without music and art and philosophical debate, the simple, nourishing riches she’s grown to cherish.

for her children Nechuma chose a path she hoped would steer them toward opportunity—and away from persecution. It is a path she stands by,

He’s Jakob. He isn’t cut out for war; there isn’t a drop of hostile blood in his body. The only trigger he’s meant to press is the one on his camera.

when everything was easy, motherhood was hard for Mila—and now that everything is hard, it’s a role that seems to come to her more naturally. It’s as if some sort of sixth sense has set in.

even in the darkness, I see your love. Inside, you are full, and through your eyes, it shines.”

picking through boxes of drawings and assignments she’d saved from her children’s school days. Though they wouldn’t do them any good in the new flat, these were the things that mattered, Nechuma realized as she turned them over in her hands. These were the things that defined them.

Now, to think about the responsibility he assumes every time he points his rifle makes his head spin.

Most of the Alsina’s European refugees refused, in fact, to converse with the West Africans, a behavior Addy found absurd. Racism, after all—the very root of Nazi ideology—was the reason most of them had fled Europe.

“the people are everything—they’re how you come to know a place.”

for to be in love means to be able to share everything—your dreams, your faults, your deepest fears. Without these truths, a relationship will collapse.

Her kisses have a way of stopping time. When her lips brush his, his thinking mind melts away.

Addy wishes sometimes that he could disconnect, as the locals seem to be able to do—to immerse himself in his surroundings and forget about the war completely, the intangible world of death and destruction that lies, crumbling, 9,000 kilometers away.

The day he disconnects—the day he lets go—is the day he resigns himself to a life without a family. To do so would mean writing them off as dead.

Addy is Eliska’s anchor, and Eliska, Addy’s thread to the world he left behind. In her eyes, he sees Europe. He sees a reminder of his old life.

As the weeks and months and years tick by, the torment inside her builds and burns, a crescendo of misery threatening to crack her open. She’s begun to wonder how much longer she can bear the pain.

She’d been mourning so deeply she’d forgotten what it meant to love the man who, before her world came crashing down, was her everything. She

There will always be reminders, she thinks. There will be days that are not so bad, and others that are unbearable. What matters, she tells herself, is that even on the hardest days, when the grief is so heavy she can barely breathe, she must carry on. She must get up, get dressed, and go to work. She will take each day as it comes. She will keep moving.

Friendship means nothing anymore.

Perhaps they are woven from the same thread, he decides.

What does it mean, she wonders, to live a day of her life without worry? Without a plan? Every minute of every day has been orchestrated, to the best of her ability, since the start of the war. Is she even capable, Mila wonders, of letting things unfold on their own?

She’s spent so many years thinking ahead that her brain has forgotten how to look back in time.

Just because I always wear a smile Like to dress up in the latest style ’Cause I’m glad I’m livin’ I take these troubles all with a smile