Alicia by Alicia Appleman-Jurman

Author:Alicia Appleman-Jurman [Appleman-Jurman, Alicia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, History, Holocaust, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781473525658
Google: D7eBBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Struggle to Survive

In the relative safety of the forest I now began to feel the effects of the events of the last two weeks. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw the two Gestapo men and the gun with which they’d killed my mother; I heard the sound it made when it pointed at me and misfired. I relived my escape from the massacre at the Fador, and mixed with the other images in my nightmares, I saw the faces of the German on the horse and the Jewish boy with haunted eyes.

Night after night these dreams kept returning. The sleep that had served me so well in the past, that had always restored my fighting spirit and my physical strength, was now denied me.

I spent most of my days walking aimlessly around the edges of the forest, feeling completely lost. Even though no bullet had pierced my body, I felt a raw wound inside of me, and an unending pain.

Then one night, exhausted from a day of aimless wandering, I finally fell into a deep sleep. Again I dreamed about my mother, but this time she was not being killed. She was alive, standing near me and holding out both hands as though trying to pull me up from the ground.

“Get up, Alicia!” she was calling to me. “Get up from the ground. You must not lie there and grieve. You must go on living; you must live! You must live, Alicia! Take my hands, sweetheart. Get up and go away from here.”

I wanted to ask her why I should leave there and where I should go, to tell her that I had nowhere to go; but as suddenly as she had appeared, she disappeared again. I woke up with a start. It took me some time to realize that I had been dreaming. I looked at my hands. I saw only the pattern of light coming through the trees, but I still felt my mother’s touch on them. Then I felt the pain inside me expanding until it became unbearable. I leaned my head against the tree, and my body shook with choking sobs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.