Paper Stars

Chapter 5

5

Letters From the Sky

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-Part One-

Forgetting an Absence

 

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(A note from the narrator:

            The following is a translated excerpt from a small portion of Benjamin’s journal that I discovered in our attic in 1947. The first section as well as the date it was written was nowhere to be found. Besides these pages and a few others, which will make their cameo appearances in this narrative soon enough, the rest of his writings, including the first section of this entry, were lost during a turn of events that has yet to be told.)

(Between June 19th –21st, 1944)

            …and looking at myself now, it seems as though I am always sad. It’s not anything overpowering or profound, really; just this repetitive kind of feeling that tugs at the back of my mind and makes me so unhappy. It reminds me of every time I’ve stood back and watched in silence as bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. My silence is my sin, and yet I can’t seem to change because I am too afraid and too young and confused to understand anything. But I’m trying to change. I want to fill up the empty place where my courage ought to be. If anything, I just want to forget. But trying to forget an absence is harder than you’d think.

The problem is that I spend too much time in my head because I am often alone, and this makes me wonder if something really is wrong with me. I have so much trouble simply getting through each day, and sometimes I wonder whether everyone else has it easier or they’re simply better at pretending than I am. But I pray and I pray for the world to get better and I pray to get better, myself, and yet it feels as though I get nothing in answer to my prayers but silence. And that’s the worst part, I think. Silence can be a lot of things. Silence can be comforting: a safe place in which to take shelter when the world won’t stop talking. But lately, silence has become the sound of no-one caring. It’s loneliness, it’s feeling trapped, and I often find myself too frightened to break through this silence on my own.

            Please, please don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to be sad—God, no! And I am happy sometimes. Honestly. But I’m so tired, and no matter how many hours I sleep I still feel this aching inside me, like ‘tired’ is no longer a simple feeling—like it’s an emotion or a permanent state of being. I’m stuck, and I am so scared that this will be my life from here on out. Yet I cannot sleep! I can’t, because when I sleep I see my parents’ faces as they herd Daniel and I into the cupboard and close us in. I hear the front door being kicked down and I see shiny black boots through the line between the cabinet doors. And then there are shots and my mother is screaming and my brother is crying into my arm and they’re looking for us but they never find us—they never think that there are Jews in the cupboard, but there are and we’re terified terrified because our parents are five feet away, dead and bleeding into the carpet on which I and my brothers learnt to walk. And then I wake up strangled in my sheets—suffocating in a sea of air and dust and trapped inside my own skin. I’m crying, begging Mum to stop screaming, telling Danny to hush and clasping his fingers. But he’s miles and miles away and I can’t hold his hand even though I want to so desperately, because perhaps if I could comfort someone else, I would feel as though I matter.