I remember that afternoon in the vineyard. I was just a little boy, maybe ten years old, but my memory might be betraying me. You know, especially when you were a kid and you want to be older than you were. So I don't know. Anyway, I was among the big green leaves and the vines and that little girl was. The sun was shining happily onto the even happier grapes that were just waiting to be harvested and join a massive incarnation of wine. But I didn't care about the vine. It was cooler being in the shades under the vines. The giggle of that girl drove me crazy and I found myself giggling too.
When I caught sight of her I shouted out, "I got you!" and ran towards her. She just kept running faster. Soon we were out in the open and I saw her again. We were supposed to be with our families at a picnic, but just the two of us we were just having fun. I caught up closer to her and by then we had reached the foot of the old castle. I didn't know who that castle belonged to. Probably no one. I knew it existed but we never got so close. We just fell onto the soft bed of grass and held hands. It was so nice, I remember, holding her little hand and we were just giggling and smiling.
She smelled good, I remember. Some sort of shampoo. Her hair was still golden blond, and her smiles were better than the sun for me. She was wearing a white dress with cute red shoes. There was a bonnet on her head, also red. Her eyes were ocean blue. We were neighbors and we had known each other for a few years now. They moved in from a distant village and our family became friends. We made our own wine and every picnic we shared it with our neighbors. It was very fun.
The castle was formidable. I can remember it clearly. It had transformed somehow when they turned it into a prison during the war. But that day it was like a fairy tale castle for us. We imagined there were flags fluttering above. She said she was Rapunzel waiting for me to climb up her long blond hair. That was when I touched her hair, and her smile disappeared, her face grew a little serious, but then she giggled again and tightened her grip on my hand.
We didn't get in trouble with the picnic. Not really. But I remember I felt that we did something wrong. Because soon after the picnic was over, things started changing. The war had arrived at our doorstep. Young men were sent away and many didn't return. I was still a child and our family was very scared. I remember Dad worrying and praying for the first time I could remember. My sister was talking about how the Germans were rounding up Jews all over Europe and it was a matter of time they did the same. I didn't understand. I couldn't understand why anyone would do that.
But what I understood least of all was our neighbors. They stopped talking to us. They looked away when bumping into us. There were no more picnics. One afternoon people started throwing things at our house, breaking our windows. I was crying but no one in the house did anything. We just all hunched down. I saw the blond girl once, who looked sad, as her mother grabbed her right arm and pulled her away from me. That time she was wearing a blue dress, I remember, almost like her eyes. By then our vineyard had been destroyed by vandals, and soon confiscated, or, as I had understood then, taken away by someone, the new people. And one night, I still remember, I was woken up from my deep sleep by my Mother. We were on the move. Someone was leading us somewhere. I could only take my little bag. We were in a hurry, and I was quite flustered, but I remembered distinctly approaching the house of the blond girl. I imagined, suddenly, that she opened the door and said good bye. Or maybe even we were going into her house. Or at least, in my wildest imagination, she would at least leave me with something because I understood that we were leaving, going somewhere far. I was old enough to understand the dire situation we were in.
But she didn't open the door. No one did, and we were trying to be as quiet as possible. We got on a horse-pulled cart. And from there I bid farewell to the blond girl who was behind the walls of that house I had gotten so familiar with.
I said good bye again when we were leaving our hideout in a barn within view of the castle. That day I remembered the feel of her little hand, the luster of her hair, the blue in her eyes, the smile that surpassed the sun. And that was the first time during this whole ordeal that I cried. Everyone cried, but no one cried for my reasons. I saw the castle, which, like I said, had been converted to a prison by then. Funny how we were hiding so close to a prison. The Germans had already occupied the city, but the prison was still at that point run by the local police. I heard later that it was used to torture people, resistance fighters, communists, though the Jews were lucky enough to be sent to death camps somewhere far away.
I am joking, of course. I have gone through enough painful nights to make such jokes. We were the luckiest ones, having left the country and come to America before getting rounded up. We were the tiny minority. But I still sometimes think about the blond girl. There were times I missed, then for some reason hated her, then wondered about her. Then I forgot about her for a while. Sometimes someone with her name or look reminded me of her. But I tried to get past it. Somehow I felt guilty seeing that I was lucky to have escaped certain torment, if not certain death. Somehow I just couldn't understand why things had to happen this way. I am telling you this now because you asked me about the Holocaust and I just want to say that I didn't get sent to those death camps, and that the hardest thing for me was not understand why that blond girl suddenly was torn away from my life when the only thing we did wrong was my touching her blond hair.
