I am an old woman now. I live in a small town in America. I was able to tell this story because I carried it with me in my journal, all the way from Belgium into my future. People remember Anne Frank. Perhaps they will also remember Hava Daniels.
Each 4 July I go to bed early, but I do not sleep right away. As the sun sets, after I’ve read a bit, I lie on my pillow and wait for the fireworks. The first explosion is the hardest. It always makes me think of that first bomb in Belgium, the black planes overhead, and I think of Hava and me climbing a silo to reach for the stars.
I sometimes think of that carousel in the park, and the children riding the painted horses, and how my father rode Charlotte sitting high in his uniform and white gloves.
I lie back on my pillow and my room is illuminated with a fountain of light from the fireworks. I think of Hava pretending that she is Juliet, dead on the table in my father’s cellar; how we laughed after my father took us upstairs and she and I had our tea and biscuits. I remember how the steam of the hot tea curled up towards Hava’s lovely face as she smiled at me across the table. I remember the lipstick we made and the lilacs we placed in our hair.
Each time a firework explodes, another image of Hava seems to appear in the flash of the red and blue lights that illuminate my room: Hava dancing with the lamp-post; Hava riding the bronze horse in the city square; Hava holding the dead soldier in her arms.
I rest my head on my pillow and still hear the screams and echoes of people calling out, pointing at the sky, watching the approaching planes. I remember a man sitting on the cobblestone as the bombs dropped, his knees pulled up to his chest as he rocked forwards and backwards. What was moving? The earth or the man?
With each new explosion of the fireworks I close my eyes and see myself at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, scanning a list of those who perished at Auschwitz: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, intellectuals . . . Sister Bernadette, Joff, Yaakov Yosef Daniels, Avital Daniels, Benjamin Daniels, Hava Daniels.