I’m depending on them.
If there are bees, we have a chance of surviving. It’s all I can do now.
Once my arms give out for the night, I return the tools to the trunk and take off the protective gear, closing it all back up tightly. I take the lantern and hold it out toward the path home, but my heart aches and the grief weighing me down returns. The only place I find any semblance of peace is here in the woods.
I turn back toward the opening between the trees, making my way over to the knotted stump responsible for Danner’s scar. I promised myself I’d stop spending nights alone in the woods, but I can’t get myself to go home yet.
I lower myself onto the moss-covered ground and lean against an old oak—my memory tree. I can still remember the first time Danner showed me how to extract the honey. It feels like it was yesterday, the day that was supposed to be perfect per my fortune. Except, Danner fell and ended up needing sutures. He always referred to that day as one of his all-time favorites, and it made me laugh, knowing it ended in the hospital. It was also the same day he told me he was sure I would become a nurse. It was a pivotal day, I suppose, but neither of us should have been trying to predict the future.
FIFTY
DANNER
MAY 1945
Dachau, Germany
The world around me is a blur of people coming and going, some dressed like me, others in ordinary clothing, and soldiers in various uniforms, all here to help. It’s been two weeks, or so I’ve been told. Bits and pieces of jagged memories flicker through my mind, but I only remember staring at an American soldier from the ground before waking up sometime later, being carried and then transported to another location. Today is the first day I’m awake in time to see the sun rise. The pinks, purples, and oranges all clashing together like a fire in the sky.
In recent days, I recall being fed, bathed, and given clean clothes. Nurses have said we need nourishment to refuel our bodies. I asked if there was a nurse named Emilie. There was.
She wasn’t my Emilie. The Emilie who kept my mind alive.
“There is aid…” I keep hearing the announcement. “We will help you…”
I want to go home.I don’t have a home.
“We can assist with relocation and help you find your families.”
There are tents set up all over and the one offering to help find other living family members is the first place I’m walking to after being bedridden ever since the Americans arrived. I’m finally on my feet.
There are many people assisting, trying to avoid long lines. I only wait a few minutes before a woman with a book of papers approaches me. “Who can I help you find, sweetheart?” she asks. Before the name forms on my tongue, I wonder if she’s someone’s mother—if she knows where her children are, and if she knows how terrified I am to ask about my parents and brother.
“Alesky,” I say. “I’m searching for Abraham, Sarah, and David Alesky from Munich.”
A tight-lipped smile edges the woman’s mouth as she flips through the pages. “Certainly,” she says, drawing a line down the center of the alphabetized page. “And your name?”
“Danner, Danner Alesky, son of Sarah and Abraham. David is my younger brother.”
The smile fades, her chest rises, and she looks directly into my eyes. My heart swells, or maybe it stops beating. My stomach, which has been feeling much better, twists and turns, moaning loudly in pain.
“Your father,” she says, “Abraham Alesky…he perished in Auschwitz two years ago.”
I couldn’t convince myself the four of us had survived somehow, not after what the police told me upon my arrest. But now I know for sure, and the pain seeps out like blood from a wound that has only just closed.
“My mother and my brother?” I choke out.
“They also perished in Auschwitz, last spring. Other family members in connection to them are listed as Igor and Eunika Alesky.” The woman closes the book slowly and she pulls it in against her silver-daisy brooch pinned over her heart butcontinues to hold her stare against mine. “I’m sorry for your losses. We have displacement services to aid you if need be.”
Frozen in time, in this spot on the ground somewhere far away from my family, I turn away from the woman as if pushed by the wind.
“Danner. From my heart—from one person to another, I’m truly sorry.”
I tap my chest and walk away. I walk toward the sun—the only thing I know how to follow now. I didn’t get a light like the three of them did. Why didn’t I get a light?
After circling the small area of Dachau, I step onto a bus, unsure of what I’ll find at the next stop. Every step I take seems mindless and without a sense of direction. Nothing is familiar. Nothing is the same.
Life as anyone knew it is gone and I need something new to make me feel alive.
