Whose children

Stop crying and listen to me, says the uncle. Stop crying, you scare the baby. Listen, I’ll finish telling the story, there’s little more left.

When I finally got out of the house on the third day after the massacre and released the dog from the chain, it rushed to the barn and started whining and scratching the door. I armed myself with a bread knife and opened the heavy lock. The dog rushed in, I followed. In the barn, under a heap of last year’s straw, four eyes shone in the dark. Two little human beings. A tiny girl, completely naked, dirty with clotted blood and earth, and another one, a bit older, hugging her.

Hanna, maybe six years old, and Rivka, eight. Hanna’s mother pushed her off the pit from the bridge just before the shots started and covered the girl with her own body. That’s how a little gap of air formed.

It was evening, the shooters and limescale spreaders were already tired and thirsty again, so they hurried to finish their bloody work as quickly as possible and headed to the town’s canteen, where heaps of vodka and snacks were waiting for them every time as a reward. At night, when the shots had been silent for quite a long time, Hanna dug herself out from the pit, with a huge effort emerged from a pile of heavy dead bodies, then found a locked barn and crept inside through a hole made by two broken boards. There, buried under the straw, Rivka was already squatting - it was she who broke that hole in the barn wall.

Rivka was the local doctor’s daughter. When the column of people on the way to death was already struggling through the forest, the father pushed his daughter into the bushes. One of the white-armbands who led the column saw it but turned away and pretended not to notice. In the past life - the years of peace - the doctor had saved that white-armband’s sick child from the clutches of death.

The uncle brought the two trembling and starving girls home, heated some water to wash the little one. In the morning, he cycled all the way to Vaškai, found his niece’s husband, and persuaded him to come back with a horse. The horse is still harnessed, maybe the maid could take care of it? Maybe the brother’s wife would agree to go out into the yard as well?

It was already dark outside, a light of a kerosene lamp dancing through the cracks in the wall of the barn. There were bags of flour in the carriage. The uncle lifted up one bag, and there they were: two little girls wrapped in a blanket hiding behind it.

“Daughter, please save me, the old fool I am. I can’t keep them, it’s not safe in my forest, the white-armbands may come back, rumors are spreading that there may be survivors. The white-armbands would come back with dogs, and that’s the end for me. Your farmstead is quite remote, you already have a baby that no one is talking about yet, please hide these two little ones, at least for a while, until we find a better solution.”

Will you hide the girls?

yes no