The Last Green Valley, Mark Sullivan [most read books in the world of all time .txt] 📗

Thor on the shoulder. Walt, Will, and Adeline stroked Oden’s flanks as the pair began to walk after the soldier. Too quickly, the horses, the big wagon, and the rest of their belongings were gone.

The Martels all stood there in the daze of yet another catastrophic loss.

Emil made peace with it first. “Adeline and Malia are on the push bar. I am pulling the handle. I want Will on the left side of the cart and Walt on the right. Oma Lydia follows. Get in position!”

Emil looked over at his father, who had brought along a small cart that was used in their farmyard. Johann was at the push bar with Karoline and Rese pulling on the handle.

They moved slowly toward the waiting train and the crowd trying to find refuge on it. Others had small carts or wagons like themselves. The less fortunate had crafted packs from their wagon covers and staggered forward under impossibly heavy loads. Too many went to the train with nothing but the ragged clothes on their backs.

Emil led them away from those in the crowd fighting to be in the freight cars closest to the engine. They went instead to the far rear of the train. The last car’s doors were slid back, and it was fairly empty yet. They used ropes and brute strength to hoist the loaded carts into the hold, which smelled of straw and unbathed humans. Then they lashed the two carts together and to the wooden wall in the rear corner of the boxcar.

Will and Walt climbed up and sat on the resulting platform like proud princes. Their aunt Rese flopped back across the top of her parents’ cart, folding her hands across her stomach, and closing her eyes while more and more refugees began climbing into the boxcar with the last of their belongings.

The space was soon uncomfortably full. The SS left open the sliding doors on both sides of the car and hung lengths of heavy chain across the openings. Adeline understood why. They’d need the air. As people had crammed into the car, the air had gotten thicker with stale human sweat and fear of the unknown. She herself began to feel closed in, cornered, claustrophobic.

“I’m going to try to stand by the door for a minute,” she told Emil.

“I’ll go with you,” Malia said.

“I’ll go, too!” Will said.

“You’ll stay with Papa,” Adeline said firmly, fighting the panic growing in her.

She began to slip and to slide forward through the crowd, excusing herself, but insistently stepping over someone’s feet or around their backs and between their belongings. She had to get to fresh air or she’d scream. Finally, she reached the open door and held on to the door frame, gulping the fresh air. Malia did the same beside her.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Malia said. “I wanted to fight to get out.”

“I did, too,” Adeline said, and laughed softly, putting her hand to her chest and her still-thumping heart. “I thought—”

The train lurched and almost threw them off their feet. Adeline had to grab her sister to keep her from falling even as everyone in the car shouted in surprise. The train wheels creaked slowly forward over the rails amid nervous laughter, and quickly chatter of what was to come replaced concern over what they’d left behind. Within one hundred and fifty meters after rolling from the rail yard, the train slowed to a stop again.

Both Adeline and Malia gasped at the scene before them. They gazed out across a still and placid backwater of the Crisul Repede River, which perfectly reflected the purple bruised sky, and the roiling thunderclouds and the shafts of golden last light pouring down on the pool beside the gorgeous pale ruins of a large building on the far side.

“It’s like a painting,” Malia said.

“It is,” Adeline said, entranced by the scene. “The roof, the dome is all caved in, and yet it’s so . . . beautiful. I wonder what that building was? The way it glows like that.”

A woman behind her said, “It was a Jewish synagogue. The Germans blew it up last year.”

The train started to roll again, picking up momentum, leaving the haunting, beautiful scars of Oradea and Romania behind them. Adeline still did not understand why Hitler hated the Jews as much as he did, no more than she understood why Stalin would starve his own people after killing the ministers and priests and burning down the houses of God.

What possesses men to do such evil? Are they even human? Can’t they see that when you kill someone or destroy a holy place, the faith always goes on? Don’t they see that in broken hearts and ruins, something always glows?

Feeling the wind building against her face as the train gathered speed, Adeline tried to put all that out of her mind, tried to enjoy the warm wind and the smell of oncoming rain and night. But she thought of Mrs. Kantor’s friend, Esther, and wondered where she’d ended up, whether she’d made it to Argentina or Palestine. She could only imagine. Those places sounded so far off, so exciting, so scary, so good, she shivered.

A whole new life somewhere. Free to do whatever we want. In peace.

Try as Adeline might, however, she could not dream up another vision for herself beyond the memory of that painting of that mythical green valley in Mrs. Kantor’s book.

“Does it scare you?” Malia asked, breaking her thoughts. “Not knowing?”

They were traveling through farm country in the twilight with lightning and thunder rumbling in the distance. She looked at her older sister. “Not knowing what?”

“Where we’ll be when this journey’s over.”

For a beat, she stared at Malia with great curiosity. It wasn’t the first time her sister seemed to know her thoughts or at least mirrored them.

“Not really,” Adeline said. “I have faith we will end up where we’re supposed to be.”

“But where is that?”

“Emil says we’ll know freedom when we see it.”

“Everything else is just a stop