~ Light the Candle ~
My name, Emilia, means “rebel” in Latin. I never thought of myself as a rebel. I was always the girl who hid behind her older brother when strangers came to visit. The “teacher’s pet”. The strange girl who tucked herself in a book on rainy afternoons in the library. I didn’t become a rebel because I always thought you had to be a problem to rebel. And I was never a problem.
But as I tucked my journal into my coat pocket and hurried into the nearly empty train station, I felt very much like a problem. I was a problem with brown hair and a hidden journal.
“Excuse me, can I get one ticket to Berlin?”
The register lady looked up at me. She blinked for a moment, before realizing that she needed to do her job, and nodded at me, accepting my rusty coins and pressing a tiny piece of paper into my palm.
I had to get to the resistance movement in Berlin, since I didn’t trust the movement in Munich. They often did their job simply for the money, and never sought through to the end of their job.
I jumped onto the first train headed to Berlin, not bothering to choose a comfortable seat. I felt the urge to grab my journal and flip through it, just to make sure that everything was in order – after all, this was happening – but resisted. If Nazis somehow decided to raid the train, I would be in for a death sentence.
The train was empty, except for me, and as I scanned the empty rows upon rows of seats, I wondered how many people would have been on this train before the war. Laughing, happy husbands and wives. Giggling children sitting on their mother’s laps, fidgeting with the seat buckles. Grumbling old men and women, frowning and knitting. And now, all of them are dead. Stupid Hitler.
When my self control finally wore out, I opened the cover to the first page. Since I had started the journal originally as a scrapbook, the first page was a collection of photographs featuring me and my family, gathered around our kitchen table, the menorah glowing in front of us. The pictures took me back to before the war, when we were happy.
🟌 🟌 🟌
“Light the candle, Emilia,” Mama urged, her eyes glinting in the warmth offered by the other seven candles, already lit, offered. Papa handed me the burning candle, his hand brushing my fingers as I grasped the wavy stick, poking it into the silver candlestick.
Gunter cheered, and Peter clapped his three-year-old hands together, squealing, “Emi did it! Emi did it!” I grinned, and Papa clapped me on the back, his hair less gray-streaked than I remembered.
I was nine that year, and proud of it. For my birthday, I had received flowers from Mama, a brand new pencil from Papa, and a little carving of a sparrow from Gunter, who claimed it had taken him “forever and a half” to get the talons just right. We celebrated with Gunter’s friends and our neighbors, and Mama baked all the guests little cakes decorated with pretty little swirls of pink frosting. There was no question of war. Germany was safe, and we all lived a normal, joyous life.
Mama dished out supper on china plates that had been scrubbed to shining, and steam wafted from each dish. Gunter and I picked the corners off of the latkes and sufganiyot when Mama wasn’t looking, though she always caught us licking the sugar off our fingers.
Papa would sneak us little squares of chocolate under the table during dinner, which we would eat by popping them into our mouths and sucking on them in between bites of jelly doughnut and potato. When Mama caught us, she would lean over the table – being careful to avoid the burning menorah – and tickle our tummies until we squealed – and confessed.
This was my first Hanukkah I ever remember celebrating. What I didn’t know was that it would also be my last.
🟌 🟌 🟌
I jumped when the train suddenly lurched to a stop. We were in Berlin already? Impossible. Berlin was on the other side of Germany. Munich was southwest, and Berlin was northeast. Everyone knew that. No matter how stupid they were.
I gathered my stuff, which wasn’t much. Just my journal and a tiny pail of food and a change of clothes. In a moment’s time, the world burst into flames. Flames and shiny splinters of light and burning metal.
I shielded my face instinctively, curling into a protective ball under my seat as alarms went off inside my head. I felt as though I was flying through the air, and then a loud thud! announced our arrival to the ground. Metal rained down on my neck, crawling down my back under my shirt.
Some twenty minutes later, once I was absolutely sure that the train wasn’t moving anymore, I lifted my head and looked around.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. Then, as I sat up, I noticed that I was no longer with the train. Well, unless you counted the jagged chunk of metal that stretched about a foot one every side of me before dropping off to the twisted train tracks below. I carefully extracted my backpack and exited the train, stepping cautiously around the sharp spiky edges of metal to get to the ground.
When I was safely standing a couple yards away from the wreckage, I tried to process what had happened. From the looks – and the damage – of it, some idiot army force – Germans or Allies, I couldn’t tell – had dropped a bomb on the train. The conductor was dead, no doubt, and I was lucky to be alive.
Why it was stupid of the Germans – I assumed it was them when I saw the bright red swastika shining on a thick piece of black metal that had to be part of the bomb – to throw a bomb at me was because (1) there was absolutely no one on this train but me and ol’ conductor, (2) there was never anything valuable on this train, anyway, and (3) because there was no one is sight that might be able to collect anything valuable in that mess of tangled metal.
I surveyed my surroundings. I had no idea where I was, or how close I was to Berlin, but as I had only been on that train for maybe two hours, we had most likely only reached Nuremberg, though there was no town in sight. From Nuremberg to Berlin was roughly 235 miles, which was a seven day trip on foot, and that was if I walked day and night. It would take me maybe two weeks to reach Berlin on foot, which was too long, though I felt I had no choice in the matter. This was the path God had chosen for me, and I was going to take it. He would make a way if I needed it.