Exodus, Revisited by Deborah Feldman

Author:Deborah Feldman [Feldman, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

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I made my way gingerly down the path to the side door of the main building. Once inside, however, I immediately regretted my decision. The house was extremely dirty and reeked of human waste. I couldn’t imagine my scrupulously tidy grandmother in a house like that. I emerged a moment later, trying to cling to some of the nicer details. There had been one large room in the front and one in the back. The ceilings were high and beamed; old, cumbersome chandeliers had dangled from between the shallow rafters, dusty crystals catching the faint rays of sunlight that weakly illuminated the darkened interior. I imagine they had all slept there, in one bedroom, the parents and their ten children. No wonder my grandmother had been sent to live in Nyíregyháza as an adolescent. There had been no room for her.

That was why she wasn’t gassed, my grandmother had once told me. Because she had been deported separately from her family and hadn’t been holding a younger sibling when she faced Dr. Mengele at selection. Anyone holding a child was automatically sent to their death. Her whole family had been murdered on the same day. She was the only one who made it past selection and was deemed qualified for labor. But she had never told me anything else, except that she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen. The time in between her arrival at Auschwitz and her liberation from Bergen-Belsen was a question mark in my mind. How would I ever delve into the secret of her courage and endurance if I didn’t know what had sustained her through that blank period? But I reminded myself that, after all, I was just at the beginning of my journey, and the answers, if they came, would be arrived at in time, if I was brave enough to keep going until then.

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