"India Edghill - We Are the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edghill India)

day. Then she too would be gone, like Hannah, and Mama and Papa and her little
brothers. David had been a big boy of six. But Saul had only just learned to walk.
Only a baby.

Judith shifted on the narrow bunk and pried her only remaining treasure from
its hiding place between the wooden slats. She mustn’t think; she wouldn’t think, or
she would go mad. She would use her talisman; she would fly beyond this place of
cold and filth and the stench of long-unwashed female bodies. She would use her
star.

The metal star filled her hand with memories. Papa had brought the simple
ornament home from his war, the Great One. “I found it when we took a trench from
the enemy — that was not an easy thing, you know, to take a trench — so I claimed
it as a souvenir.”

She had always demanded to know what the star had been doing half-buried
in bloody mud, what it was for. Papa had looked at her strangely, then. “It is what
stars are always for, Judith. It is for hope.” The star had waited in the velvet-lined
box with Papa’s medal for valiant service as a German infantryman. When the family
had been told to pack — only one suitcase each, and be sure to label it neatly —
Judith had remembered the medal, and the star. And when they had been told to
leave their suitcases, she had hastily taken out both medal and star and tucked them
securely into her coat pocket.

She no longer owned her father’s medal for valorous service to the
Fatherland. It had been silver; it had been confiscated by the first guard who had
pawed her. But the star —

“Nothing but an old piece of tin.” The guard had tried to toss away the star,
but she had been unable to let it go. When he couldn’t easily pull the star out of her
rigid fingers, he had looked at her again, and then glanced around the crowded
station platform, canny as a fox. “A kiss, and you can keep it.”

Unable to lose the star when she had already lost so much, Judith had lifted
her mouth, mute and frozen, and paid for the old tin star with a rapine kiss.

“You can’t be a real Jew,” the guard had said afterwards, staring covetously
at the golden hair that had saved her for the iron mercy of a work camp. Such a little
thing, to save a life. Had her hair been brown, like her sister’s, she too would have
climbed into a crowded boxcar, and been gone. Sent to one of the
konzentrationslager ....

Her hair did not shine so brightly now; the gold was tarnished with grease and
filth. She could not remember when last she had been clean. “But you LIVE,
liebchen. Live.” Her mother’s voice echoed silent in her ears. Mama, who had
grabbed Hannah away and held her fast in that other line, and called “Go, Judith. Go
—”

Now Judith turned the little tin star over and over in her hands. The star
flashed in the dimming light from the bare bulb far overhead. If she stared far enough