Haunted

I have stayed up half the night reading - something I haven't done in a very long time - and I can't sleep yet for fear that what I've read will manifest itself in my dreams. So I will write it down, even though the tears aren't yet dry on my cheeks, and hope that this keeps it from haunting me tonight.

This book was not easy to read and yet I couldn't force myself to put it down. I usually read before bed, but I found myself thinking about the story throughout the day. The story is "fictional," but is one of those stories that rocks you to the core because you know it is an echo of someone's reality - lived long ago, buried deep, but not forgotten. Never forgotten.

It was a novel that followed an 81 year old woman as she slowly - painfully - told her daughters the story of her survival through the Great Terror of the 1930s in Russia and World War II. Did you know that more than 1 million Russians died there? Murdered. 70% of them starved to death. The horrors of mothers placing their children on evacuation trains, not knowing that the trains were heading into the heart of the German invasion. The horrors of mothers watching their children waste away from lack of food and knowing there was nothing they could do to stop it. The horrors.

There are thousands of stories like the "fictional" one I just finished reading. My grandparents and great-grandparents had these stories, maybe not these exact stories, but versions of it from elsewhere in Europe during that awful time. I know they do because I have heard murmurs of the handicapped brother and son who was left behind all those years ago - a memory so locked away that I have heard mention of it only once and even then only after my grandparents had passed away. This history is also my history. That knowledge is heavy and so is the thankfulness that I was not the one who had to survive it; but the fact that someone DID survive it is why I am here today.

What an amazing, and terrible, terrible book. The kind that makes you keep turning the pages, that changes you, but that you never want to pick up again.