Pen and Sword

The cries reach a deafening leve

I have to launch myself into this emptiness

In light of what you’d suffered, my needs were paltry

Why? What right did they have to come between us, the three of us first, then the two of us later, after your divorce? Why did they have an opinion on us, and why did you allow them to have one?

Others, therefore, took care of me when you were too busy…

Drawn in red chalk and pastel on craft paper, the portrait was of a 3-year-old child, Lydia

She has the roundness of those little girls approaching the end of infancy

had been stored in the back of a wooden cabinet that occupied an entire wall of the kitchen. These were “Aunt Lydia’s books”. I read them greedily, and treated them like relics. They were relics, but I didn’t know it at the time

Your departure to Germany scattered what was left of me to the four winds

I encountered the notion of the Second World War for the first time. It was also the first time that I found myself alone