During World War II, my mother saw children being handed out of train windows to strangers [View all]

[tavernier]

because they didn’t know where they were being sent and what kind of hell awaited them. When she was sent to Germany from her native country of Latvia, she met my father in a displaced person’s camp where I was born in 1946. Because she had seen these dreadful things, they stayed in her mind and her heart. She told me that she was fearful of nurturing me, holding me too long, showing me too much love, because she feared that the closeness would only hurt me if she ever had to hand me off to strangers from a train window.

So it appears that the monsters that ruled in those days have not died away as we feared, but only moved to a different continent to look for more fertile soil.