The Children’s Train

Later that day, Victor, a beefy, pompous policeman, and Michael, an ugly big-eared man with close-set eyes, came and wrapped Oma Greta in a blanket, so they wouldn’t have to touch her.

Jacob, Nora, Anna, and Eddie watched them remove the pale, lifeless body of the woman who had left Poland for what she thought would be a better life, only to be returned by Hitler, and in the end died in poverty and bigotry, imprisoned in a filthy apartment.

“Typhus?” Victor asked.

Michael nodded. He shivered and made a wrinkled face of disgust. “Look at the way they live. What do you expect? They’re filthy!” Michael grabbed the edge of the blanket with his dirty fingernails.

Jacob took a deep breath and drew himself up. “We don’t choose to live this way. I’m a doctor, and it’s almost medically impossible to stay alive in a place this overcrowded and unsanitary. Typhus is impossible to avoid when we’re forced to live like filthy rats in a hole.”

“You are rats. Foul, scroungy vermin, and if you keep complaining, I’ll make you work double hours digging ditches,” Victor said angrily. He lost his grip and dropped his side of the bundle. Oma Greta’s head hit the floor, making a horrifying thud.

Anna gasped and bit her lip to stop herself from crying out, but Eddie didn’t have the same restraint. His face contorted in anger. “Don’t drop her! She’s my Oma! She’s a very nice lady.”

“Shut up, you deformed clown!” Victor yelled. He would have hit Eddie, but his hands were occupied with carrying one more dead Dinsdorf inhabitant.

Nora hugged Anna. Jacob put his arm around Eddie. Victor and Michael picked Oma up from the ground and carried her out still wrapped in the blanket, but they knocked her against the doorjamb as they left, as if she were an old couch instead of a beloved grandmother.

Eddie’s arms reached out for his oma, as her small blistered feet, sticking out of the blanket, disappeared from the room.

“Come back, Oma!” He looked up at his mother. “I wish people would stop dying. There’s not going to be anybody left.”

Victor and Michael carried Eddie’s grandmother down the steps and outside. They shuffled over to the curb and, on the count of three, flung Oma Greta into the Dinsdorf street like unwanted trash.