Paris; five years after the liberation:
The nightmares still come but they were becoming less frequent and less violent. I no longer sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat.
I was now walking along the large river that split the city. I had been sitting in a small cafe sipping my coffee, enjoying the silent peace that always seemed to hang about the city at this time of the morning when I had happened to look up at the man sitting across from me. He had been reading a newspaper and my eyes skimmed over the headlines, my broken French managing to understand every third word. When I had seen a photograph whose language spoke easily to me, it was one of the many that now appeared freely and easily in every newspaper of the world, of a time and a life hat I had tried desperately to forget. The breath was seized from me and I was forced to abandon my coffee, throwing a few coins on the table and with shaky legs I manage to walk instead of run from the too terrifying image.
I had been walking for an hour now and only the distance had brought my breath back to me. I looked around and noticed that I was in a part of the city that I did not recognise but still I was spurred on by the fear of that image. Running from it as I had been running from all that had been my life, my religion, my family from the day that I had ceased to be a prisoner and was returned once more to the human race.
Pulling my thin coat around me and turning its collar up against the wind, wishing that I had had the presence of mind to pick up my scarf, blood red of colour so like that which had been split on the endless snow covered banks. It was the only colour other than black that I allowed myself to wear. Colour could not be a part of my life yet, I hoped one day that it would.
Today the scarf at least would have offered a little warmth from the encroaching wind that whipped about me and warned that winter would again be upon the beautiful city of Paris and my nightmares would change from being those of smoke, to those of frost.
"Eliezer!"
My name; my old Jewish name, the name I had abandoned long after I had abandoned my God. I gripped my coat tighter about me as if it could offer some kind of protection against the terror that welled within. I feared to look at the face of the man that called, feared it would be the face of one of the many that littered my nightmares; that caused me to avoid people, to avoid life, to avoid the terrors that each man held within.
And yet I turned, turned to a name that only existed in the recess of my mind.
No words could be found to share both the rush of pleasure and thoughts of horror that mingled within my mind. Before me stood the face of one I thought was long dead. The face of a corpse I looked upon a thousand years ago within the wired walls of death.
He too looked upon me and I wondered for a moment, only a moment if he could see the child that I had been or only the frozen adult I was now.
He pulled me to him, in a grip of fear, of relief, of terror, of long dead souls crying out to be heard and that of a joyous reunion of two who could briefly share the guilt of life where so many had embraced death.
And then we stood, apart but united. After such atrocities what could we say? So instead we let the silence speak.
