The Girl Who Escaped by Angela Petch

Author:Angela Petch [Petch, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837901289
Published: 2023-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Devora hurried through the rest of her rounds, tending to a woman with pre-eclampsia, changing dressings on a burnt toddler’s legs. He had fallen into a campfire his mother had lit in the ruins of their bombed house and he screamed as Devora worked on him. Afterwards, she found him an apple from the kitchen and sat with him, telling him one of her brothers’ favourite childhood stories about the hare and the tortoise. She stroked his damp little head as his eyes drooped and his face became the faces of Alfredo and Arturo as he drifted off. She couldn’t bear to imagine what they were doing. To stop herself from going crazy, she squeezed her eyes tight and told herself that worrying would do no good. Bury yourself in your work, Devora. Work, work, work.

Later, she sat by the bedside of an elderly man with dementia, listening to his same accounts of the past over and over until he too eventually fell asleep. And although she desperately tried not to, she thought of her own family and what Lisa had said: you need to prepare yourself for the worst. What did she mean? Where was her family? Where had the train taken them?

At nine o’clock, at the end of a long, difficult day, Suor Chiara sent her with a tray of food to feed to Lisa.

‘I’m cold. Close the bloody window.’

‘Buonasera, Lisa. Nice welcome you always give me! How was your day? Mine was pretty shit, dragging myself round with your comments earlier of doom and gloom. I haven’t been able to concentrate on work.’

Lisa was quiet, her eyes following Devora all the while as she set down the tray of food, straightened her sheets and finally closed the window.

‘You need to wise up,’ Lisa said eventually.

Devora dropped the spoon that she had picked up to feed her patient, splashing soup onto the sheets. She set the tray down with a thump on the bedside table.

‘Don’t you tell me I need to wise up. Just don’t,’ she said. A medical professional should stay calm and dispassionate. Devora knew that. Her patient should come first and her own feelings be put to one side. But Lisa’s last comment had tipped her. How dare she?

‘Do you actually know what we Jews have had to endure these last years in this country that welcomed us once upon a time? How slowly our rights have been peeled away, one by one? Do you know what it is like to be looked at in disgust? To see that people think you are dirty, evil and infectious? To be refused access to shops and places overnight that you frequented all your life? What it is like when your father loses his job, his dignity and sense of worth? To have to stop your studies and all the things you loved doing? Fencing, athletics, going to the theatre, walking freely with your friends? Having to hide away like a terrified animal expecting a beating for something

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