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so he told me to sell everything. Word spread quickly and the people of Bielitz came to our house and to others to buy. They brought carts to our door, dragged the furniture out, and loaded it. Our home was being torn apart and all I could do was to stand by and watch.
    One man gathered all our silver and flatware into a bushel basket, added a few crystal bowls, and handed me a couple of dirty, crumpled notes in exchange. I wondered where he had gotten them. Another person picked up a glass from the set which Arthur and I had given our parents on their twentieth wedding anniversary the previous April. It was a liqueur and wine set, beautifully engraved. He held the glass by its slender stem for a moment, then let it fall to the floor. It broke into a hundred pieces.
    “I want that set,” he said to me, “but I can’t offer you much since a glass is missing,” and he pointed to the pieces on the floor.
    I watched the shelves of the library emptied. Someone took the owl from a bookcase. It was a ceramic bird, claws resting on two books, the Bible and Aristotle. Its eyes were electric bulbs. Arthur had often read by its light. To me the bird had always seemed alive. As a man carried it away, its eyes were glassy and cold.
    Someone whisked away the dining-room tablecloth, the one Mama had worked on for over a year. It was all handwork, with a silver fringe.
    In place of the familiar paintings, there were light-colored patches on the wall.
    The sanctity of our home was gone, the chain of tradition broken, the shrine built by love and affection desecrated … and there I stood with a few pieces of paper money–dirty, crumpled, greasy bills–and a handful of coins. Shame burned in my hand. I closed my eyes and turned to go upstairs and give the money to Papa.
    Papa’s arm was heavy in its sling. Mama’s breakdown was
complete; finally she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. The day after tomorrow we were to leave our home. What could we do for Mama? She was constantly calling for Arthur.
    I had terrible visions of what might have happened to him. Had he died of hunger and thirst in the cattle car? Had they beaten him, or had he run into the forest, only to die of cold? Did a bullet hit him and kill him instantly, or did he have to suffer? Is he in the forest of the East, or in the waters of the San? His clothes are surely cold and wet. Are his eyes open or closed? These pictures kept haunting my mind. Did it really happen to him? If not, why did he not write or send a message? He must be alive, I kept saying to myself, and then I saw his face in the dark, motionless, surrounded by icy water. Mama was calling him again and again. That night I felt so close to death that I wanted it desperately. It seemed an easy solution, a quick way out. We had heard of a family who committed suicide together. I half-wished my parents had suggested it.
    I was standing at my window, my forehead against the cold glass. It was late and I hadn’t gone to bed. It seemed almost a luxury to die, to go to sleep and never wake up again. Then I felt Papa’s hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn. He put his hand on the nape of my neck and turned me forcibly toward him. He looked steadily at me and then answered my thoughts.
    “Whatever you are thinking now is wrong. It is cowardly.”
    I couldn’t deny it. He lifted my chin up and looked at me firmly again.
    “Promise me that no matter what happens you will never do it.”
    I couldn’t speak.
    “I want your promise now,” he said.
    “I promise you, Papa,” and in the years to come, when death seemed the only solution, I remembered that promise as my most sacred vow.
    The next morning good news came. We would not have to go to the armory. The transport was postponed. We could stay in our home. But Mama was no better. She slept most of that day and the next.

Chapter 6
    SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS IT SNOWED HARD FOR SEVERAL days. Normally, I would have been out on my skis, sliding over the hills;