Written @ 8:31 p.m. on 2007-06-14
Nightmare
Melissa fixed all of my links! Yay! She is useful as well as ornamental, as my father used to say. Thankyou, Melissa!
I had the most lifelike and horrible dream the other night. I dreamt that I was in Poland, and there was a blizzard that dropped ten feet of snow on the train tracks. The train was stopped, and it was full of women and children. The passengers ran from the train and hid, burying themselves in the snowbanks in order to hide from the soldiers pursuing them. It was night, and the soldiers searched with bright spotlights out over the frozen darkness. There was a lot of running, screaming and shouting in the darkness. Families tried to stay together, but many were separated, killed, or put back on the train. People were digging as fast as they could with bare hands to create a place to hide. It was a great plain, with no trees in sight, only one small, cinderblock building which I believe was supposed to serve as a train depot. It sounds a lot like Nazis, but all of the women and children involved were fair, and traditionally "Polish" looking.
The soldiers left the passengers that they could not find, figuring that they would soon be frozen in that desolate place. The sun came up, and the children came up out of their hiding places. The women broke into the train station and found some food, and tried to distribute it fairly, but their were so many hungry children, and not nearly enough to go around. One woman commented," I don't know why we bother feeding them. We are only prolonging their agony."
Children wandered in circles in the deep snow, traumatized, their faces chapped and red from exposure. One little boy, who's face I can see so clearly-hood pulled tight around his head, sandy hair sticking out in spikes on his forehead, blue eyes and tanned skin, maybe five years old....this boy was stopped by one of the women, a large, pleasant looking woman with long, wavy hair that hung about her shoulders. She recognized him from her old neighborhood.
"I know you and your sister!" she said."Where is your sister?"
The boy just looked at her, and she understood that the sister she knew from a happier situation had been separated from her little brother. The woman knew that the little girl was probably dead.
"Don't worry,"she said with a forced cheerfulness. "All of the families will soon be reunited!"
At this, I awoke, crying hysterically and shaking like a leaf. I couldn't calm down and I couldn't breathe. I staggered to the phone and called B., sobbing into the receiver. It turns out that just minutes before he had been wrestling, took a bad turn, fell out of the ring, and had knocked himself out cold. He had regained consciousness, and his friends had delivered him back home to rest. He came over and found me in a pile on the floor, not awake but not asleep, crying about the children, but unable to get anything more out.
It took two hours of him consoling me about my unbelievably lifelike nightmare, and me consoling him about his bad bump, before we could get back to sleep, and by that time it was nearly 3am. We held each other all night, and I felt lucky, as I always do, to have him. I decided to do some research. I opened a map of Poland, and looked for a northern region that was quite isolated. I was attracted to an ancient city called Olsztyn. I put into google, Olsztyn World War II, and it brought me a Wikipedia article. There was a timeline of the city, and there I found this- "1939 deportation of some pro-Slavic activists of the Polish-speaking minority to concentration camps (see Union of Poles in Germany)". There it is! Fairhaired, non-jewish, Polish people going to concentration camps, in the location just as I had dreamed. God bless their souls.