What We Heard

When they came for us, no one said a word.

We heard they were looking for us. Not us in particular, but anyone like us. We heard they were going from town to town, rounding us up. Pounding on doors in the middle of the night, looking in cupboards, under floorboards, determined to root us out. Assembling us in the streets - cold, trembling, scared - before packing us onto trains and deporting us to the camps. And we all knew what happened in the camps. Maybe not the specific details - those we wouldn’t learn until much, much later - but we understood the intent. No one came back from the camps.

The violence started with broken glass. Or so we heard. An epidemic of shattered windows, glass fragments lining the streets of almost every town in the country. Homes, businesses, temples, all destroyed because they belonged to people like us. It was the first time they rounded up our men and shipped them off to the camps. For nothing more than the crime of being us.

Our town didn’t see the Crystal Night. We were lucky, or so we thought. That kind of hatred didn’t exist in our little burg. Or so we thought. Later, we realized our mistake, that it wasn’t necessarily a lack of hatred that kept our windows intact. It was a lack of audacity.

In our town, no one said anything when the badges were decreed. We walked around in a daze, yellow stars on our chests like bulls-eyes, hoping to find some sympathetic outrage, or even just some sympathy, in a shared glance or a shake of the head. But they stopped meeting our gazes, would no longer make eye contact with us. We thought it was pity, maybe even shame. We didn’t realize it was fear.

We heard stories after that. Stories of people like us, trying to survive. Hiding in attics, basements, crawl spaces. Fleeing the country, or trying to. The ones that didn’t make it, shot in the back while running through groves of trees that had lost all their leaves - naked branches grasping at coats and scarves, slowing them down as they ran through piles of snow that clutched at their feet. We didn’t hear about the blood soaking into the snow, staining it crimson under the bodies of the ones like us who couldn’t outrun the bullets. But we could picture it just the same.

We heard stories about resistance, about brave people who weren’t in danger, because they weren’t like us, but who helped the people like us just the same. Hiding us, feeding us, protecting us from the men with the grey coats. Putting their own lives at risk, to save us. We looked around at our neighbors, all of us going about our lives in our sheltered little town, and we felt safe. Secure in the knowledge that these people would help us if it came to it, but why did we think that? Because they hadn’t hurt us yet?

When the grey coats finally came for us, we weren’t surprised. We’d heard the roundups were happening in towns ever closer to ours. It was only a matter of time. What surprised us wasn’t that they came; what surprised us was that our neighbors gave us up so easily.

Somehow, they’d known it was happening, even before the armored trucks arrived. My father had gone out that morning for coffee and found every cafe shuttered. My mother had gone to buy bread, but the bakery was closed. Perplexed, feeling a sense of dread that we couldn’t name, we huddled at home with our curtains drawn, as though if we couldn’t see it, it couldn’t be happening.

We heard the trucks roll in. The clomp of hard-soled boots on the cobbled street. The powerful blows of self-righteous fists on our neighbors’ doors. We heard those doors open, heard questions barked and answers murmured. We heard the doors close again.

When the knock on our door finally came, we stared at each other with a mix of emotions I couldn’t begin to parse. Terror. Horror. Sadness. Anger. Resignation. But was there also, underneath all the others, hope? Did we dare to hope that our neighbors, our townspeople, would fight for us, would find a way to help? Would show themselves to be just like the brave people in the stories we’d heard about resistance?

Were we that naive?

My father didn’t open the door. I won’t make it any easier for them. It didn’t matter. They broke it down. One by one, they dragged us out into the street. Screaming, crying, pleading. We saw faces in the windows of our neighbors’ homes, called out to them in voices hoarse with fear. We were afraid, of course we were afraid. It didn’t occur to us that they were, too. They weren’t being hunted; what did they have to be afraid of?

One by one, the faces in the windows turned away. Curtains fell over the glass, blocking the sight of us from their cowardly eyes. When we finally stopped screaming, the street was silent. No one spoke up for us. No one said a word.

I never saw my parents again. My siblings and I were briefly reunited, decades after the war, when my granddaughter went on a mission to find herself and understand where we came from. My siblings were living in different countries; like dandelion seeds, we’d been scattered to the winds after liberation, unable to find each other until civilization progressed enough to give our children and our children’s children the internet.

I never returned to my hometown, but my granddaughter went there on her journey of self-discovery. She told me about the monument they’d erected in the town square, dedicated to the ones like us who’d been taken away, and to the fearless townspeople who’d resisted the oppressors and tried valiantly to save us. Yes, she told me this, and asked if I wanted to see a picture of the square. 

I laughed, and said no. What more was there to say?