The Descent

Okay, so I couldn’t resist, despite my now extensive knowledge of World War II (I researched, and though I’m lazy I couldn’t help it). I know that almost 6 million Jewish people were killed throughout the impact of the war, and it looks like Joshua and Dalia’s survival odds are terrible… but I don’t care.

 

March 16^TH, 1942,

 

I wake early to find Dalia taking deep shaky pained breaths. In her hand is a small bird. Dead as could be. Dalia is crying.

“Wy did yoo have to go do that birdy, wy?” she cradles the bird like a child and speaks to it softly despite her raspy voice and the fact that she can barely speak.

“Dalia, put it away, it might carry a bad disease.”

She looks up and shakes her head, “No, it just fwew in here and swammed itself into the wall a lot of twimes. Wover and wover…” she continues but I can’t hear her because of her limited voice.

“Dalia, there isn’t any point crying over it now. Everything has to die at one point and there isn’t anything we can do about it.”

She dries her tears, “Even Mommy and Daddy?”

I froze, how on Earth could she know?

“I knew they war killed on the gway day when yoo twold me to hwide in the cwupboard. I heard a scary sound and Mommy scwream. I’ve never hwrad anyone scwrem like that bwefore.” I can barely hear her talk but her words were so deep I couldn’t have understood them more clearly.

“Well…” I tell her, “Mommy and Daddy died for a reason, for us, so we could live. And maybe this bird died for a reason too. Whatever happened, it was for and because of something.”

Dalia nods and stares up at me with huge, tear-glazed blue eyes. Her pupils are gigantic. Slowly, she nods, and then coughs a bit. I go to the back to lay the bird on the street and cry for a bit. I missed my parents. And it was possible Dalia could die. She needed to get over this.

When I come back, the doctor is waiting for me.

“I need to ask you some questions. I need to get a list of her recent symptoms and I need to know where you have been lately.”

I tell him the symptoms and try to think of a place she’d caught the sickness. It may have been here, or it may been from some of the other kids Adina babysits. After all, they did come from other places in the ghetto.

The doctor nods, “It appears her disease is spread much like the flu. Perhaps she inhaled a pathogen into her lungs when she was in contact with someone else. I might know what she carries….”

The doctor leans next to Dalia and takes her pulse, “She carries an extremely high heart rate, which is a symptom.…”

He also taps her chest and presses his ear to it as Dalia struggles to breathe.

He stands up, “In a person who carries what I think she has, they exhibit audible crinkling sounds in their chest and create a sound in their lungs when I tap it to tell me if the lungs are filled with fluid. Also, they often have a high heart rate…”

I was so nervous, “So what does she have?”

The doctor gives me an ominous stare, “It is a sickness caused by a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumonia. It is where the lungs become inflamed and the air sacs of the lungs become filled with fluid. It is called pneumonia.”

“Is there a cure?” I ask shakily.

“Yes,” the doctor informs me, and I sigh in relief. He isn’t finished, “But… I’m not sure we can get it.”

I can’t write anymore. This is just too hard. I’m going to sleep.

 

-Joshua

 

This is atrocious. Dalia, the cutest and most adorable character in the letters, might die? I can’t believe this!

I looked up pneumonia. Turns out, the actual diagnosis today is a chest x-ray that shows the fluid, which is actually white blood cells. Blood/urine tests can also determine whether one has pneumonia.

I think that my next few days will consist of research regarding this illness. Dalia has to survive this, she has too!

Until tomorrow, I got to get researching.