Your Eyes Told Me

“KOMM, KOMM Fraulein”. He turned around looking at her from the top stair. She hesitated with apprehension into following him up the stairs to a strange house in Central Warsaw.

They had met less than an hour ago as she wandered about the train station looking confused among the confusion of people, animal, and traffic.   Everyone in the mess of humanity or should she say inhumanity appeared to be confused except for those who were herded from the cattle cars onto the waiting trucks with huge swastikas on the doors.  She had always seen the trucks and motorized vehicles, mostly motorcycles, with side cars embossed with swastikas speed past her for well over a year, but seeing them up close gave her shivers for they presented to her the might and power of which she had heard much of before she began her journey.

So on this early autumn day while the sun was shining bright in the midst of confusion in the busy train station in the late afternoon, she looked at the people who were being herded from closed containers as well as open cars with high wooden fence-like sides and a metal grate on top almost like the wagons she saw once in her home four or five years ago, when the circus arrived.  Only then these wagons held fierce animals such as lions and other exotic animals that only her schoolbooks previously described.

Whole families, women with babies, old men and women all scrambled out of these cars some had cardboard like suitcases while others had bundles and rucksacks. They looked like travelers but who would travel nowadays in the fall of 1941 with the war raging on or so she had been told for although she could read German, Russian and an assortment of Slavic languages, she had never seen a newspaper in her two years of travel.  She was mesmerized by the number of people being expunged by these rail cars and the efficiency of those directing them to various old busses or open trucks as if there was a purpose in their directions.  Could they be refugees like herself, being driven out of their homeland but she herself already knew that the trains of Poland and those of Russia were incompatible in that the tracks were of different widths and that it took almost a month to transform the wheels from one form of track to another.  She wondered if this was just some engineering mistake or was there a purpose to this apparent blunder.  So involved was she in her thoughts that she did not respond immediately to the gray uniform that looked much to warm for this time of year shouting at her.

Of course she had noticed the various types and colors of uniformed people shouting orders and giving commands to the people of the trains but what did that have to do with her.  She had noted that most of the men being unloaded had gray or white beards some even wore funny cylinder type hats that she had seen before as a girl when the elite of her city arrived with their horse drawn sleds at the Opera.  Others had a funny looking cap that just covered the center of their head almost made to cover the bald spot on many older men’s heads.  The women and even little girls were also somewhat different in that their skin color was slightly darker than hers but all of them except for the older women of gray their hair was pitch black.  Again one of them was waving at her frantically.  He looked sort of funny a round figure in a black uniform with pants that exposed socks to the knees and being pulled by a German Shepard who had other ideas than its visitor.