Blog Post #5 – FINAL POST!
This is the final account of Joshua’s life in World
War II. I have thought about it a lot and have decided that it is time to stop
locking myself in my room and reconnect with my family. I have seen how Joshua
has had to live on his own, with only his sister, and realize how important it
is to have them around. So, I have decided that this is my last blog. I hope
that anyone who has read this will shed as many tears as I have.
March 22ND, 1942,
I’m so damn scared. Every day people are being taken away (it could be
us any day), and even though Adina told me that he would bring the penicillin
today, I’m worried that Dalia might not even make it anyway. She and I were
starved, especially her. She can’t talk anymore, and makes pained raspy grunts as she tries to breathe.
I flinch every time I hear her breathe. Also, she barely ever opens her eyes
anymore, and if she didn’t have such pained breathing, I’d think she was dead. The
poor girl is always fatigued
and often falls unconscious
due to the fact that the oxygen
is having trouble getting into her blood because of her fluid-filled air
sacs.
I force myself up that morning so that I can get the penicillin early
before anyone notices. Also, the S.S. may not catch me in this darkness of
dawn.
I approach Adina’s agreed meeting place. I wait about two minutes, and
just as I was starting to worry that she forgot, she shows up, her wispy blond
hair ruffled and her green eyes tired yet still alert somehow.
“Follow me,’ she hurriedly pulls me down an alley and whips me back and
forth through the dark passages through the night. Our speedy footsteps echo in
our quickness and pound like a thundering heartbeat in every bit of my body. My
breath matches Adina’s as we reach a fence – the edge of the ghetto. There he
stands. With the package. Oh thank god.
He smiles at me, a kind smile, one that I would never expect from a
Nazi.
“Good luck with your sister.” Friedrich says. His voice is smooth, and
he is very good looking, “And the food is fresh. Keep it for yourself and make
use of it wisely. I put as much in there as possible.”
“Th-thank you so much. How can I ever thank you enough?” I ask him,
filling up my stomach primarily on the scent.
He smiles his flawless smile, “You don’t need to. We owe you enough
already after all this….” His eyes are dark now in the moonlight as it reflects
off of the sparkling snow.
Adina tugs my hand, “We need to go now.”
I nod and thank him again.
“Beware of the selections,” he bids me farewell, “The places they are
taking people aren’t good news, no matter what they tell you.”
I nod, committing his warning to memory and run off with Adina in the
snow. We are halfway to Dalia when lights flash on us.
“Halt!” The familiar German accent stirs unpleasant memories in my mind.
People calling us names in the street, my parents getting shot, that same
accent that ordered myself and my sister around for years… I froze, blind in
the lights. Confused, helpless, and defeated was I in the blinding light belonging to my imprisoner.
“Move! Joshua, run!” Adina is dragging me down passages and corners
until she yanks me into a small backstreet where we hide in silence, in the
cold, in the lightly falling snow. There is noise and yelling close, but far
enough away for us to be safe. Adina gives me a what-the-hell-was-that look,
and I shrug, still shocked as ever and out of breath.
And then it suddenly strikes me. After everything I had been through,
Dalia had seen it all. Yet I had lived in the better, more peaceful world
before, but she had been neglected of the pleasant experiences life had to
offer due to the barrier of her age and experience. If I didn’t get to her, her purple, tired face in which her soul was held captive, she
might never feel that happiness. Ever.
“Adina, I have to go. Now,” I pull away but find her hand clutched
tightly on my clothes.
“No,” she says, “I can’t let you just go and die.”
She holds me firmly and I tug harder, “Look, either way, someone could
die. It’s either Dalia or myself. And I have to at least try to get her through
this even if it means the end of myself.”
Her eyes soften and we stare at each other for a while. The wind blows
by tensely by and lifts small strands of hair off of her face. For a second,
she looks like an angel, and then her eyes fill with tears.
“Be careful,” she tells me in barely a whisper and I smile in thanks
before running off between the unsympathetic walls of the ghetto buildings… and
into my uncertain fate.
I dart past the voices and always go for the darker side of the
neighborhood. I feel almost claustrophobic in the overwhelming scenario and my
head whirls with thousands of possibilities which could take place any time
within the next few seconds. And, out of those thousand, what happened next was
not a part of them.
I am sprinting for my life, the black of the white, the white of the
snow and moon, and the grey of the ghetto zooms past my vision in a big blur.
And then a sliver of color catches my eye. A rusty color, somewhat red in the
glow of the moon. Her big blue eyes are wide, confused and dazed and her
breathing is croaky and tired. She walks, rather stumbles, slowly in the
sparkling snow and looks… dead.
She stares at me as I run to her.
“Dalia, what on Earth are you doing out here?” My voice cracks in my
fright and confusion.
She glares up and falls into my arms, but not in the way she did just
last week. This way is slow, swaying, and unbelievably sudden. Not my spirited
Dalia… not in the slightest bit.
“Looking… looking… Mommy… Daddy,” her pupils dilate hugely as she coughs through her speech
and I realize she’s hallucinating.
Between the hunger and pneumonia. The doctor had said a week, but her whole
body was a skeleton and even if she ridded the pneumonia, there was always the
hunger, the depression, a continuous cycle of pain and sorrow until the bitter
end.
“Here Dalia, I brought you medicine, and food.”
I give her the medicine and took off a piece of bread for her to eat.
She chews it slowly and then coughs it up, but eventually manages to swallow
the piece gingerly.
“Jos…hu… find… life… me… mine… find… please… sing….” Her teeth chatter in not only the cold but her sickness. I wrap my arms tighter around her to keep her warm.
I place her on my lap and lie back on the snow and sing her a lullaby
Dad used to sing to her as a child. I feel her breathing slow, for a second to
normal, and then very shallow and quiet, to the point to its final moment
before ceasing into silence. Dead silence. Only with myself. And her dead
lifeless eyes. Those eyes, containing that spirit that had kept me going so
many months. Those eyes, the color of the open, free sky before all of this
ever happened. The beautiful sea in which confined so many wonders that kept me
up at night as a child. That color completely disappeared in my life that day.
But, somehow, somewhere, I would find it again. For her.
Forever, my sister, in the sky, the bluest sky, your spirit lingers
forever.
-Joshua
I rise shakily from my seat and walk into my family
room. There, my father sits, reading a newspaper peacefully. I go to him and
place the letters on the table. He looks up at me with raised eyebrows.
“Should have known you’d come across my father’s, your
grandfather’s accounts. You know, he loved your blue eyes, you reminded him of
her. That’s where you got your name from.”
I nod, still trembling. He continues, “Of course, the
actual prognosis of pneumonia
today is that a person just lives gets over pneumonia and moves on with their
lives like it never happened. In the worst cases, here in Canada, the person is hospitalized but still fully
recovers with scarred lung tissues. Of course, a lot of people still die from pneumonia in
third-world countries.”
I don’t really have anything to say, so he gets up and
looks into the crystal blue eyes before him. My blue eyes.
“Have a good day at school Dalia.” He kisses me on the
forehead and leaves to go to work. I stand there in the kitchen, thinking
nothing, and saying nothing.
This whole time, I never cared for my name, but now, I
have become proud of it. For, in carries the freedom of life and sickness that
Dalia never got when she was younger.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to enjoy my life as
Dalia should have then, and should today.
-Dalia
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