The Attic

Welcome!!! So, this is officially my hundredth blog. This really is awesome. Someone ought to get me an award, but just the satisfaction of this really is fine. I really don't like to use my name, mainly because I hate it, and I just go by random pseudonyms I happen upon. So, here is my hundredth blog, and I will prepare you, it contains a special surprise that I think many will find touching. Enjoy!

I adore my meddlesome brain as my hand scrapes the ancient walls of my lonesome attic. One would never need to ask irrelevant questions such as how I had got up here, or what I was doing here in the first place. So what if I had stolen a key from my watchful mother’s cabinet the one time she wasn’t nagging me about something or the other? Did it actually matter that I had come up here to hide from someone or something i.e. an irritating little sister who won’t leave you alone and two badgering parents who you absolutely cannot stand? And don’t forget the neighbor’s two depressing, creepy adolescents who always are trying to get me to tell them how I think I am going to die. No one would even need to so much as think about this, so I decided I wouldn’t.

How I sometimes imagined my attic: creepy yet interesting

Or maybe if one were to mention any of this, I might tell them that the attic is and has always been a fascinating aspect of my life. Ever since I can remember, my parents always told me attic was off limits. Yet, of course, a child with an active imagination such as myself could always wonder: what could possibly be in this uncanny, secretive area? Perhaps a monster, a piece of gold, or maybe even a caveman who has been frozen in a crypto-thingy for thousands of centuries! For years, my life was like a mystery/drama television show mashed together containing thousands of questions about the essence of the universe, all because of a single attic. And as I pace into the dank, dim-lit room, I realize that the season finale of my life’s soap opera is not as exciting as I had thought.

The room was musty, nasty, and smelled like old people. The atrocious smell burned my nostrils and sent alarming signals to my brain telling me to leave this rotten place. However, my feet stay firmly planted in the dust and I do my best to take in the contents of the room. The first thing that catches my eye is an old gun stationed on a shelf just below chin level. I shiver. It was a good choice on my mom’s behalf to keep me out of the attic, as my curious, young, inexperienced hands most likely would have taken the gun off the shelf and shot myself with it.

Observing the rest of the room, my eyes fall on a few maps of old Europe, like when Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was still Yugoslavia and that kind of thing. Also, there are some pictures of old people behind flags and bunch of medallions and award things.

I groan in frustration. This was pathetic. Had I really waited what seemed like thousands of years to see old things and smell old stuff? I could not take no for an answer. Angry, I kick the wall, and brace for pain, as it is definitely more exciting than this garbage. Instead, my foot bounces back. I glance down.

It is a box, with some kind of rubbery packaging. Hungry for something interesting, I tear open the packaging. Inside is a parcel of papers, only about 10 or so, with rough-textured paper and beautiful ink-written handwriting. The date signed is about 1942, and it looks kind of intriguing. Since I like reading, I delve right in:

 

March 15^TH, 1942

 

A person could never imagine what claustrophobia really is until you have really experienced it. And by experience it, I mean be torn from your parents, who you personally watched get shot by some S.S. soldiers, and thrown on to a train crowded with thousands who won’t stop looking at you, because it is obvious that you are young, scared, and clearly innocent in correspondence to the cruelty of the real world. And after you have been ripped (and literally ripped, the bottom of my pant leg is torn and I’m cold) from the hot, muggy area of the place one calls a train, you are thrown into a small room with about 10 other people who also have Star of Davids sewn to their shirts. Though it is human nature to think that you have been through worse than all these people, I know that deep down, all of our minds are at a consensus. And through all of it, I held tight to Dalia’s hand.

Long red hair, large sparkling pure ocean blue eyes, a giant white smile, freckles dusted on her button nose, and a large, outgoing personality is my five-year-old little sister, Dalia, who’s hand I could not let go of no matter what. And it wasn’t because that would have my parents’ dying wish.

“Joshua, let go!!!” Dalia slaps me and tentatively sniffs and bites my hand.

“Ow,” I take my hand away and inspect it, “What did you do that for?”

“BeCAUSE I know you hate germs,” she sasses me, “Dirty, dirty!”

She reaches for my hand, snickering, and I pull it away. She trips over my foot, and a man nearby backs into a wall just in time for her to fall flat on her face.

“Dalia, are you okay?” I lean down to check if she’s fine, and right then she looks up and licks my face.

“Eww!” I sit up. Dalia laughs her chime-like laugh and pumps her fist in triumph.

“Gotcha!” she chuckles and stands up to help me up, despite her awkwardness occurring seconds before.

Dalia was a mischievous little girl, who literally bounced off walls and sucked up to adults. But she was still my favourite person in the world and I could never, ever lose her, or I would be nothing. That is why I hold her hand.

 

*        *        *

Before long, time was moving fast and I had landed a job within the Warsaw ghetto in about a week as one who repairs shoes. The work place was terrible; it provides my coworkers and me with stale flimsy soup and the roof has holes in it that allow rain through. Germans flank our sides and watch our every move. I work carefully and efficiently, hoping not to find out what they will do with us if we do otherwise.

I manage to get a miniscule amount of money to spend on some bread. The line is long and people are shoving and budging in and out of the line-up. By the time I reach the front, it has been three hours and there are few pieces of bread left. Many of these others waiting in line will have to wait until tomorrow, because, frankly, I knew these cruel people, and knew they weren’t going to make any more bread until tomorrow.

I bring a piece home to Dalia. My friend from when I went to school, Adina, and a few of her friends offered to babysit Dalia and a bunch of other children as she couldn’t get a job. She had parents that could work anyway. I hand Dalia a piece of bread and we eat in a corner. It tastes sour and barely fills me up.

“This is pukey,” Dalia complains to me and throws a bit on the ground.

“Dalia… I waited a while for that. Please just eat it as you might not get anything else to eat in a while.”

“Soooory,” Dalia says in her cute, five-year-old speech and picks up the bread, “Is this what the poo-cweatures eat? Are we poo-cweatures Jwoshua?”

“No, Dalia, we aren’t,” I assured her, confused at the meaning. She smiles and pops a piece into her mouth, “Good, ’cas that’s what the scwary pweople cwalled us, except they used bad languwage that Daddy and Mommy say are bwad. I thwought that they were confwused.”

I widen my eyes at her comment, and as she blabbles on happily, Adina comes and sits beside me.

We talk for a while, but there is only so much we can talk about without arising traumatic memories of our lives before and during the war. Most of our talk is just nods, sighs, and talk how our day was.

As I’m looking away, she pulls me close and whispers, “Joshua, they are taking people away.”

I give her a puzzled look, “Where to?”

She shrugs, “I’m not sure, but I’ve heard rumors and they aren’t good ones. My da says he heard they burn people in pits there and tell them they are to have showers and then gas them. Others who don’t meet that fate have to work long, hard hours. It sounds worse than here. And we’ve only deported here a few days ago”

I widen my eyes and try to take it in. I suddenly feel Dalia tugging on my sleeve, “Jwoshua, it hurts my chest when I breathe in. Jwoshua, Jwoshua!”

I, still shocked, tell her that it’s probably just because she had talked too much and needed sleep. Adina sees that I should handle her on my own and wishes me farewell.

Just as she is settling in the corner to sleep, she doubles over in an intense coughing fit, and eventually vomits on the hard floor. Suddenly realizing the situation is more complicated than it seemed, I shield her from the others in the room, as they could kick us out if they found out that Dalia was sick. I guide her gently to another part of the room and find her skin hot and feverish. Frightened, I convince Dalia, quickly short of breath to lie down and try her best to sleep. I cannot believe how quickly she became sick. She falls asleep very quickly, and looks almost unconscious in the quick onset of her illness symptoms. I am now extremely worried for her safety but do my best to keep calm and massage her back. She sometimes drifts off, but sometimes wakes up very confused and complains of chest and abdominal pain.

“She’s sick.” A deep voice comes from behind me and I whirl around to find a rather short man staring at Dalia and me. I was nervous, but he had kind eyes.

He told me that he was a doctor, and that he could help me. His two kids and wife were shot in his last ghetto as they were being deported, and he was born in Poland. We agreed upon diagnosis the next morning. I settle down to sleep now, as I’m writing and I hope that he can help Dalia, because I don’t know what I’d do without her.

 

-Joshua

 

Whoa, who knew what you could find in an attic… haha… I don’t know if I should keep reading this… really. I know about World War II and I know that it will end in a depressing way for somebody, but I can’t help but have a serious infatuation with Joshua and Dalia’s story and I do want to read more. I guess we shall see.

Well, as Adina expressed to Joshua, a sincere farewell shall do for today I guess.

The Descent

Okay, so I couldn’t resist, despite my now extensive knowledge of World War II (I researched, and though I’m lazy I couldn’t help it). I know that almost 6 million Jewish people were killed throughout the impact of the war, and it looks like Joshua and Dalia’s survival odds are terrible… but I don’t care.

 

March 16^TH, 1942,

 

I wake early to find Dalia taking deep shaky pained breaths. In her hand is a small bird. Dead as could be. Dalia is crying.

“Wy did yoo have to go do that birdy, wy?” she cradles the bird like a child and speaks to it softly despite her raspy voice and the fact that she can barely speak.

“Dalia, put it away, it might carry a bad disease.”

She looks up and shakes her head, “No, it just fwew in here and swammed itself into the wall a lot of twimes. Wover and wover…” she continues but I can’t hear her because of her limited voice.

“Dalia, there isn’t any point crying over it now. Everything has to die at one point and there isn’t anything we can do about it.”

She dries her tears, “Even Mommy and Daddy?”

I froze, how on Earth could she know?

“I knew they war killed on the gway day when yoo twold me to hwide in the cwupboard. I heard a scary sound and Mommy scwream. I’ve never hwrad anyone scwrem like that bwefore.” I can barely hear her talk but her words were so deep I couldn’t have understood them more clearly.

“Well…” I tell her, “Mommy and Daddy died for a reason, for us, so we could live. And maybe this bird died for a reason too. Whatever happened, it was for and because of something.”

Dalia nods and stares up at me with huge, tear-glazed blue eyes. Her pupils are gigantic. Slowly, she nods, and then coughs a bit. I go to the back to lay the bird on the street and cry for a bit. I missed my parents. And it was possible Dalia could die. She needed to get over this.

When I come back, the doctor is waiting for me.

“I need to ask you some questions. I need to get a list of her recent symptoms and I need to know where you have been lately.”

I tell him the symptoms and try to think of a place she’d caught the sickness. It may have been here, or it may been from some of the other kids Adina babysits. After all, they did come from other places in the ghetto.

The doctor nods, “It appears her disease is spread much like the flu. Perhaps she inhaled a pathogen into her lungs when she was in contact with someone else. I might know what she carries….”

The doctor leans next to Dalia and takes her pulse, “She carries an extremely high heart rate, which is a symptom.…”

He also taps her chest and presses his ear to it as Dalia struggles to breathe.

He stands up, “In a person who carries what I think she has, they exhibit audible crinkling sounds in their chest and create a sound in their lungs when I tap it to tell me if the lungs are filled with fluid. Also, they often have a high heart rate…”

I was so nervous, “So what does she have?”

The doctor gives me an ominous stare, “It is a sickness caused by a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumonia. It is where the lungs become inflamed and the air sacs of the lungs become filled with fluid. It is called pneumonia.”

“Is there a cure?” I ask shakily.

“Yes,” the doctor informs me, and I sigh in relief. He isn’t finished, “But… I’m not sure we can get it.”

I can’t write anymore. This is just too hard. I’m going to sleep.

 

-Joshua

 

This is atrocious. Dalia, the cutest and most adorable character in the letters, might die? I can’t believe this!

I looked up pneumonia. Turns out, the actual diagnosis today is a chest x-ray that shows the fluid, which is actually white blood cells. Blood/urine tests can also determine whether one has pneumonia.

I think that my next few days will consist of research regarding this illness. Dalia has to survive this, she has too!

Until tomorrow, I got to get researching.