Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Zöe Beck was

transferred to another school. They said he was now somewhere close to Hanover, but nobody wanted to say exactly where. The border opened that fall, and people poured through our city. We had always thought they had to be as different from us as Martians, and that the only place we’d ever see them was in some future museum exhibit. We gradually forgot about Silvana and her mother and Herr Schneider. And after a few years, Silvana’s mother was nothing more than an anecdote, just like the ones our grandparents told us about how after the war everyone had thrown their copies of Mein Kampf into the Judenteich. Or about how the Judenteich had gotten its name from the

fact that Jewish women had washed their clothes there many years ago. Nothing remained except the memories we didn’t wish to have.

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